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Reddit files to go public

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Re: Reddit files to go public

#331

Post by discardable_dan »

silisili wrote: post #324
AussieWog93 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I've learned a lot from hobby communities that are hard to find elsewhere (like for pizzamaking). I wish that was my experience too. Generally I'll avoid the subreddits for anything I'm interested in, as they're frequented by "experts" who feel the need to ruin everyone's fun. It's great for things I'm not interested in, though, as it's a quick way to get genuine information on what is considered a good brand of bik…

Genuinely confused by this statement. You don't visit things you know about, because fake experts ruin it. Then you visit things you don't know about, because you believe the information to be genuine. Not trying to be a dick here, but this line of reasoning just isn't clicking so asking.

This is the Gell-Mann amnesia effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...

Re: Reddit files to go public

#332

Post by [deleted] »

joconde wrote: post #254
systemvoltage wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These things are subjective but I find old HN substantially and irrefutably different (and better) for the reasons I said earlier. It is so obvious to me. I wonder why so many people disagree. Something wrong with me? I feel pretty strong about this. Usually, if I’m not convinced, I wouldn’t put it in such strong terms.

Yeah, I’ve been here a few months only and there is a very different attitude than on better-known websites like Reddit. HN is the only forum I’ve seen where anyone who argues in obviously bad faith will get downvoted to invisibility, and most well-made arguments get upvoted, no matter which side they’re on. A few years ago, trying to have the same conversations on reddit, everything degraded into personal attacks ev…

[deleted]

Re: Reddit files to go public

#333

Post by nonbirithm »

bogota wrote: post #270
ferdowsi wrote: post #33

Congratulations folks! I'll say that Reddit has become one of my favorite sites to visit occasionally and I feel they've earned their success. I honestly feel it is a positive factor in my life, for the little I use it. There's really excellent content to be had, like well moderated educational content at subreddits like r/AskHistorians and r/COVID. I've learned a lot from hobby communities that are hard to find else…

Reddit is now a rage generating machine outside of the small niche subreddits. The business is built on rage and some stupid investors in WSB who are enjoying a long bull market. Doesn’t mean it won’t do well but its just another flavor of facebook.

In general, this is what bothers me with a lot of modern online services. Some people might use the same platforms harmlessly to watch cooking videos or share family photos while remaining relatively free from neurosis, or they might be trapped in a rut of entirely different algorithmic content. The only unifying factor is that they both happen to be hosted on the same platform, and it is becoming harder to detach the content on the platform from the mechanisms driving viewership that come with the platform. The platforms encompass both the best and worst of us, attracting both the susceptible users and relatively ordinary persons, and that's why they have staying power.

Because these services are so all-encompassing, they are bound to have some amount of well-curated content, or at the very least content that holds one's interest. By virtue of that minuscule amount of content being hosted on the massive aggregate site, that predisposes some people to affirm or at least ignore the idea of the overarching site as a whole, along with the SEO mechanisms, influencers, etc. that always get so much flak in certain circles.

In other words, because the site is so massive there will always be a population of consumers in their own niches that never encounter any outrage or issues. There will also be a population exposed to the "rage generating" content. The subset of people aware of the toxicity and how it relates to the workings of the platform itself may or may not overlap with these groups. But in the end, because the site has become so massive that content creators have caused it to encompass literally everything that can be thought of as a topic of interest to general humanity, all of these groups, whether harmful or harmless, contribute to the site's continued growth and prosperity, and more and more people participate as a result.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#334

Post by nunez »

Good! I‘ll go long on them.

Reddit is the ONLY place on the Internet where you can simultaneously watch garbage recycled content from TikTok and visit extremely-niche and highly knowledgeable communities in the same session. Heck, I get my HN updates from Reddit now.

Facebook/Instagram/TikTok are nothing like this in that the info you get is wholly dependent on your social graph. Twitter has very high quality content, but it’s a firehose that is very difficult to curate and keep up with. Reddit is democratizing in a sense, like riding the NYC subway.

An even wilder bet: Reddit can fit nicely into the metaverse (as a news outlet of sorts, on steroids) and even potentially minimize the need for Google Search.

Anecdotally, a VERY LARGE percentage of my Google searches end in “site:reddit.com” these days. Reddit posts, especially from smaller subs, tend to be higher quality and don’t have ulterior motives (ad revenue). If Reddit’s Lucene cluster were better, between that and SO, I’d use Google a handful of times a week. Maybe this IPO can help fund that.

If the ad revenue from the whale subs allow me to continue learning about interior design, supply chain logistics, the inner workings of car sales, finance and tax strategies if I become high net worth, and more, I’m here for it.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#335

Post by pithon »

anyfactor wrote: post #258
henning wrote: post #200

The Reddit of 2006 where tutorials on generating HTML in Lisp rocket to the top of the homepage is long gone. I can't imagine investing in an ad company that is fueled by clickbait and outrage the way Reddit is. Plus, some percentage of the userbase will always run aggressive ad blockers and be impossible to effectvely monetize. However, my brain works very differently from other people's, so I could be wrong.

My personal last strands of hope for Reddit are - their API which is still available to public without hoops to jump through. The downvote button. And the usabillity of old.reddit. Some communities that are still well moderated and strikes a good balance between open to questions and not open to stupid questions. Beyond that I stopped using mainstream reddit as a value source.

I only last as long there as old.reddit.com does.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#336

Post by Semaphor »

nunez wrote: post #309
anyfactor wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal last strands of hope for Reddit are - their API which is still available to public without hoops to jump through. The downvote button. And the usabillity of old.reddit. Some communities that are still well moderated and strikes a good balance between open to questions and not open to stupid questions. Beyond that I stopped using mainstream reddit as a value source.

if facebook can maintain mbasic, then reddit can maintain old. the onboarding funnel is towards new reddit anyway, old is mature and _appears_ stable, and most folks new to the platform will use their official app. i can see the API becoming more restrictive in the coming years, like Facebook and Twitter’s before it.

The fabricated issues with old are starting to appear, though.

Slow reddit now supports markdown code blocks with 3 `’s instead of 4 spaces, which gets rendered as normal inline-text on old.

Using the editor to insert links with _ in them on slow, will escape the underscores (…/this_is/ => …/this\_is/), breaking the links for users of the fast version.

The worst part (for me) is, that I actually like the new reddit. In compact mode it’s cleaner than old while not wasting any space compared to old. But sadly their performance targets were something like "Uh, I guess pages should probably load in under 500ms" which is in no way acceptable for me.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#337

Post by discardable_dan »

bogota wrote: post #270
ferdowsi wrote: post #33

Congratulations folks! I'll say that Reddit has become one of my favorite sites to visit occasionally and I feel they've earned their success. I honestly feel it is a positive factor in my life, for the little I use it. There's really excellent content to be had, like well moderated educational content at subreddits like r/AskHistorians and r/COVID. I've learned a lot from hobby communities that are hard to find else…

Reddit is now a rage generating machine outside of the small niche subreddits. The business is built on rage and some stupid investors in WSB who are enjoying a long bull market. Doesn’t mean it won’t do well but its just another flavor of facebook.

It is, frankly, _weaponized_ facebook. It literally shows you content that is the most-engaging and most-interacted, across the entire site (not just your friend group). Which is ironic, given how often users there was philosophical about the evils of facebook.

If you don't believe me, go browse /r/popular or some such and see how long it takes to see right-wing posts. The right-wing posts are usually heavily downvoted, so you'll see one with 100 upvotes between two posts with 20k upvotes; that's by design.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#338

Post by dagurp »

Freskis wrote: post #308
henning wrote: post #200

The Reddit of 2006 where tutorials on generating HTML in Lisp rocket to the top of the homepage is long gone. I can't imagine investing in an ad company that is fueled by clickbait and outrage the way Reddit is. Plus, some percentage of the userbase will always run aggressive ad blockers and be impossible to effectvely monetize. However, my brain works very differently from other people's, so I could be wrong.

Reddit a grotesque toxic website, that makes money by creating conflict, divisiveness, fake news and the deliberate degradation of society. Like Facebook, but so so much worse. I hope that going public gives it the scrutiny it needs. In a few years time you won't be able to find anyone admitting to have ever worked for this company (in fact it's almost impossible to find people admitting it today). Some of the smalle…

I think that's a very unfair assessment. Reddit is as diverse as the internet itself. There are plenty of good subreddits there and the toxic stuff is easy to avoid.

Do yourself a favour and unsubscribe to any subreddit that deals with the news or politics. Some subreddits have become too big to properly moderate, unsubscribe to them too.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#339

Post by clavicat »

discardable_dan wrote: post #311
throwaway1777 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking shots at the engineers is too far. Reddit is about a million times more stable than it used to be a few years ago. Also I don’t think Reddit or the Internet needs “saving”. They’re both more successful than ever by any common metric whether we like the direction they’re going or not.

I have a 10-year-old reddit account. When it was static pages served out of lisp, it was rock-solid. Their rewrite got to the instability you're describing, and it never really recovered.

The Twitter account named Reddit Status was started in 2010 to track Reddit’s downtime. It has always been unstable. I’ve always thought it was strange how often Reddit was crashing or going down for scheduled maintenance when no other websites ever seemed to do so.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#340

Post by silisili »

discardable_dan wrote: post #331
silisili wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely confused by this statement. You don't visit things you know about, because fake experts ruin it. Then you visit things you don't know about, because you believe the information to be genuine. Not trying to be a dick here, but this line of reasoning just isn't clicking so asking.

This is the Gell-Mann amnesia effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...

Fascinating, thanks!

This got me to thinking though...almost every news outlet flubs covering deeply technical things folks here would be familiar with, and we all have a laugh. But we get our news from them and generally believe it, so do we all suffer from it to some extent?

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