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Many popular subreddits are quietly operated by moderators with industry connections. Some of this occurs naturally. People who were deep enough into a niche to become moderators of a subreddit in the late 2000s and early 2010s are also likely to end up working in that industry or starting business in that industry. However, many companies have realized that being in the good graces of subreddit moderators can be ver…
I went through an unbundling process in my business that turned out to be extremely successful and a wise move. I own and operate RadioReference.com, which is a reference database source and community mainly for those who own and listen to police scanners (and other radios). I acquired a small startup that was broadcasting police scanners online with the intent to supplement RadioReference.com's community and content…
I ... "coined a new term" ... having grown up on usenet, mailing lists and IRC channels, the idea that reddit coined the term "lurkers" doesn't make me mad at the author, it just makes me feel really old.
The "me too" features, like the TikTok clone and the chat rooms, are either derided or ignored entirely by the community.
I suppose it's difficult for them to attract dollars and media attention as "just" a message board -- despite seemingly being the world's largest. But that's what their actual users want it to be: the world's best message board. But their product changes keep making it a worse message board in the hope of being more like Facebook.
> Reddit content ranks really well on Google The most public contribution I made to reddit's codebase when I was there was the SEO features. I did all the usual stuff like cleaning up title and meta tags, and adding a sitemap. But the change that had the largest effect, by far, was adding the title of the story into the URL. As soon as we launched that, our Google traffic shot up. The way you know you have truly mast…
Fascinating stuff! Any other simple tweaks that made a surprisingly big difference?
> As the name implies, Reddit is designed to be read. People who only read along, but never participate are so integral to the platform that users coined a new term for them: “lurkers.” I ... "coined a new term" ... having grown up on usenet, mailing lists and IRC channels, the idea that reddit coined the term "lurkers" doesn't make me mad at the author, it just makes me feel really old.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lucky for them, the reddit implementation is as-of-now still pretty awful.
Yeah but that's the sad part. People still use reddit's built in system because it's there, despite the inferiority.
(1) You HAVE to kill the original community. Otherwise momentum will keep your users using the old community. Our first launch saw a successful small website take off initially after it was launched only to have traffic slowly die down over the next several months. What finally got it off the ground and growing again was killing the original reddit community. There's no way around this.
(2) There WILL be resistance and/or a drop-off in users. The good news is now there are a lot more opportunities to grow your community: Advertising, cross-site collaborations, guest blog posts, etc.
(3) Do not strive for feature parity with reddit. Instead, strive to deliver MORE value. For instance changemyview could add categorization features. Maybe a search function that lets you search for posts that have been tagged as "view changed successfully!" or "view not changed".
(4) You have to have a business model. Selling advertising or taking donations are NOT business models. There was a time when it made sense but many online communities - reddit particularly - are averse to viewing ads. If you're not creating something, selling something, or taking a commission then you haven't got a business model. One model which can be successful for larger communities: Premium membership subscriptions. You just have to make sure the premium features provide sufficient value that people want to subscribe without making non-subscribers feel like you're just limiting features to be greedy.
(5) If you have multiple moderators - incorporate.
Many popular subreddits are quietly operated by moderators with industry connections. Some of this occurs naturally. People who were deep enough into a niche to become moderators of a subreddit in the late 2000s and early 2010s are also likely to end up working in that industry or starting business in that industry. However, many companies have realized that being in the good graces of subreddit moderators can be ver…
You had the above quote when I was commenting on your post, but may have edited it out. But I think this line right here is also why reddit is becoming unusable and going downhill fast.
Basically, moderators are given way too much power and users have no recourse against mod abuse really. Users can't vote a moderator out for example. Many times, mod abuse is also hidden, so you can't see a log of what they have been removing and hiding. Both of these things would show clear mod abuse in the open, but reddit seems to want to hide this.
Moderators should really only have the power to remove illegal stuff or have clear rules linked for each removal or ban.
Mods should not be able to turn on "filter" features that auto hide or auto delete posts, as they regularly just use it to target posters or topics they don't like, even if it is still on topic and popular in the subreddit.
Also, mods are more and more removing or locking posts mainly because they politically disagree with them. They use excuses or hide this corrupting behavior all the time. Many times a lock posts will be done with a claim "its too hard to keep moderating this post", when reality is they were just removing posts that didn't break rules and were posts the mod simply disagreed with.
Add all the above and more and combine it with clear corrupt interests, and you basically ruin what reddit once was. Which was a place to go to free discussion on many topics. It is not longer that. It is just a place where mods basically abuse their power on most subreddits and astroturfing is more and more the norm.
Its almost like people forgot their was a an upvote and downvote button. The mods really have no reason removing posts, outside of clear violating posts that may break laws, since the users can choose what they want to see with the upvote and downvote button.
Many popular subreddits are quietly operated by moderators with industry connections. Some of this occurs naturally. People who were deep enough into a niche to become moderators of a subreddit in the late 2000s and early 2010s are also likely to end up working in that industry or starting business in that industry. However, many companies have realized that being in the good graces of subreddit moderators can be ver…
Gave up on reddit a long time ago because of the moderation problems.