31–40 of 162 posts
> 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.
> 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…
Reddit archives (making them read only) threads after a year I believe. Why would Google re-visit archived threads? Did you see Google's crawler throttle crawl rate by response times?
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…
It wasn't even thinly veiled, but of course you got downvoted to oblivion if you even mentioned dropping a named platform from the title.
"Social network envy" will eventually be Reddit's undoing. The fact that they have been trying to position themselves as a social network, unsuccessfully, for several years and they still haven't given up on it is alarming. If Google can't even pull it off with all of their resources and properties (including giants like YouTube and Gmail), I don't see how Reddit will either. The "me too" features, like the TikTok cl…
I can't imagine people use the chat function either. It seems like they are prioritizing features for the sake of ad revenue or product team egos over making much needed infra updates. General latency and error rates while browsing reddit.com are almost unbearable now. And search always was and still is a mess. And don't get me started on the mobile apps..
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.
Astroturfing is common as aged reddit accounts are easily obtainable and Reddit algorithm isn't sophisticated enough to detect this.
/u/maxwellhill is also the biggest mystery of all. Even pinging the username results in a ban. This single account has been responsible for almost 70% of what you read on r/worldnews and its not far fetched to suggest that a small group of people actively dictate the world landscape.
Majority of people on reddit do not read beyond the headlines much like other social networks. People simply do not care to objectively ask for truth and are punished for doing so on Reddit.
Viral content is recycled over and over for hoarding karma points. Some users were caught fabricating heart wrenching stories for virtual internet points. I believe that these are farmers, creating thousands of accounts to be sold to people with commercial interest.
Very different than what HN does and it is the right way to maintain meaningful discussions. Too much of Reddit is just trolls and maladjusted individuals creating their own pseudo-realities like r/aznidentity or other Red-Pill subreddits.
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.
It's difficult to find a thread that isn't politicized in some way, or does not have at least some toxic elements to it. I've been told sometimes that it's 'just the mainstream communities', however the most toxic encounters I have had were always in the more niche threads. It devolves into downright vitriolic flame wars if you disagree with someone, and generally "agree to disagree" just inspires more wrath.
I've lead two successful community "unbundling" efforts from reddit. Here are a few tips if you're thinking of doing the same: (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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reddit archives (making them read only) threads after a year I believe. Why would Google re-visit archived threads? Did you see Google's crawler throttle crawl rate by response times?
I'm not certain, but doesn't a 'read only' reddit page still get changed when a user who was in it deletes their account and posts? Often when a search engine sends me to reddit, the comments that probably contained the relevant information are long gone.
Failing that, there are browser extensions for both Chrome and Firefox that enable this functionality.
There's a fast growing ecosystem of Reddit-adjacent sites and services out there, which I think is a much more interesting business model than direct replacement.