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Storming Reddit's Moat

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Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#51

Post by cblconfederate »

I don't think reddit is that unique. The main problem is that forums are no longer monetizable, so people don't have an interest in maintaining and moderating separate websites, so not unbundling.

My use of reddit, and what i observe in general (by looking at other people's post history) is to visit a few specific subreddits often, not the homepage, not r/all. It seems there used to be a time when everyone was there for the giggles, r/pics, r/politics etc, when the content was very viral and entertaining. Nowadays all the major generic subs are filled with so much spam (i mean politics) that they're barely useful other than as a place to blow off some steam against the other team.

Topical subreddits could fork off reddit if they wanted to put the effort in it. HN is nothing other than r/technology or r/programming without the politics, and it exists because YC has an interest in maintaining it. Nomadlist exists despite r/digitalnomad/ etc.

Reddit is aging, and it shows. There are subs with the same moderators for more than 10 years, who often end up removing the interesting parts in order to maintain an imaginary "culture" in their heads. And there are a lot of shady moderators too.

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#52

Post by hehehaha »

If anyone is looking for a reddit unbundling idea, it has to be a secondary market place that’s integrated with Reddit. There are a couple of half baked ones but the opportunity is there. Solving the scam issue alone is going to be a big feature. I would also like to see “blind” mailing labels.

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#53

Post by BitwiseFool »

ballenf wrote: post #11
tlianza wrote: post #7

> and “for sale” became Facebook Marketplace. Ummmm... 1. Does the data suggest that is true? 2. If it were true, would it support the "unbundling" narrative given that it would be a case of something being part of another bundle?

FB marketplace is literally the only thing I fb for anymore. It's pretty much the only decent place to buy and sell furniture, lawn equipment, etc. I valiantly tried to stick with craigslist, but it's just become a wasteland of scams and spam where I live.

The fact that Craigslist hasn't done anything to cut down on spam, scams, and duplicate posts is maddening to me. Whenever I do a search I see dozens of phone repair advertisements and completely unrelated posts for cars and trucks. And those posts have the same title and thumbnail!

I simply do not understand why Craigslist refuses to improve in this regard. Look, I get why Craig doesn't want to change the design of his site, but how in the hell do they justify such crap not being removed?

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#54

Post by r00fus »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #15

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…

The proper metric is not "authentic" but "useful". If a channel's usefulness is outweighed by it's cooption, then it deserves to be ignored.

Take for example some of the Apple related blogs & ecosystem. I don't doubt for one second that Apple monitors them and may even feed them leaks.

Why would a subreddit be somehow immune from this corruptive pressure? Better to know the system is corruptible rather than look at reddit as somehow above the fray.

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#55

Post by orange_tee »

nostromo wrote: post #24

"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 agree. Reddit should have kept their "niche" of being the only large only community (besides 4chan) that is pseudo anonymous.

The profiles bullshit really ruins it. But it's probably profitable in the short term. It's what advertisers want.

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#56

Post by markdown »

nostromo wrote: post #24

"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…

> the chat rooms, are either derided or ignored entirely by the community.

The chat rooms were/are ignored because the sub mods can't moderate them at all. They end up being filled with spam/self-promotion.

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#57

Post by orange_tee »

paxys wrote: post #40

pcpartpicker.com spun off from /r/buildapc and seems to be doing really well. Of course it isn't a direct competitor, and they are still very heavily involved with the subreddit, so maybe there's some learning there. 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.

I remember that. When I first saw it, I thought, surely this won't last, surely, there will be a 101 competitors in no time. Cause it is such a seemingly easy concept to replicate.

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#58

Post by detaro »

abcdjdjd wrote: post #29
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #15

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…

>Moderators have a lot of power to influence conversations on Reddit in non-obvious ways. 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 exa…

Plenty of high-quality subreddits are high-quality because they do moderate and don't succumb to the lowest common denominator of more mainstream subs. You'd be killing the IMHO most valuable parts of reddit with that rule.

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#59

Post by afavour »

abcdjdjd wrote: post #29
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #15

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…

>Moderators have a lot of power to influence conversations on Reddit in non-obvious ways. 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 exa…

> 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.

I have to disagree. My counterpoint would be the AskHistorians subreddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/

Admittedly, I'm a history nerd, but it's probably the most interesting subreddit I've found yet. And it's full of deleted comments, because they have a very strict criteria about what can and cannot be posted. The system absolutely works for them. I'm not saying every subreddit should be organised the way theirs is, but I'm glad they are able to do what they do.

IMO, transparency is good. By all means make a public log showing what admins have done. But don't limit what they can do.

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#60

Post by konschubert »

cblconfederate wrote: post #47
jedberg wrote: post #9

> 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…

I never understood why google gives juice to this kind of URLs. It makes URLs longer and is barely useful anymroe but google keeps demanding it.

Because these urls are effectively "locked" to the content and the website can't play a switcheroo on site visitors (and google), maybe?
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