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Reddit files to go public

reuters.com

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Re: Reddit files to go public

#451

Post by raxxorrax »

bgro wrote: post #394
mightyquacks wrote: post #210

Reddit used to be amazing Now it's like a red flag in your resume if you worked for reddit Then they made a whole mess on the homepage. This is what happens when you hire mediocre engineers. Its like junior engineers who cant write code. Reddit mobile is not bad, but stop trying to make me install it. There are people who only wants to use web. But your web engineers are garbage their ads is incredibly bad. there are…

Reddit has possibly the worst mobile experience I've ever seen. I've never seen a company try to force its (awful, slow, buggy) app down people's throats harder if you try to use the mobile web version. The entire mod culture needs to be reworked too. They need mods because more people brings more trolls, but aggressive banning and simultaneous muting so people can't ask why just leads to more trolling. Not to mentio…

Removing downvotes is largely something advertisers demand. Advertising is still stuck in some old ways. I know some in corporate ad departments that feel the need to respond to every negative comment on the internet. That is implementing hell for anybody that has that task.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#452

Post by kristjank »

I can't imagine this change making Reddit any better. Things have been going downhill ever since Swartz's unfortunate demise. Maybe it will take some of the control away from the chinese investors, but that's about it. Problems like powermodding, censorship and curated approach to their public image (r/undelete). Whatever is needed to please the investors and advertisers.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#453

Post by AussieWog93 »

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.

Fair enough statement!

Essentially, whenever I look into communities of things that I'm interested in, I'll see a dedicated core of people insisting that it must be experienced a specific way, and any other way is wrong. Basically wine snobs, but for everything.

However, if I'm an outsider looking to get information for a gift or something I have a passing interest in, this can be quite often useful. If the snobs acknowledge something as legit, then I know that it's likely to be good.

Edit: Karrot_Kream put it perfectly with their use of the phrase "gatekeeping". Special interest groups have this problem, and Reddit fails to solve it.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#454

Post by AussieWog93 »

chx wrote: post #373
silisili wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, this effect is, to quote itself, baloney. The underlying presumption of it is every person working at a paper is equally wrong about the topic they write. However, most newspapers are focused on politics and so those might be better. I would not expect a good analysis on the Palestinian conflict from Linus Tech Tips nor a good analysis on the latest graphics cards from Foreign Affairs.

>I would not expect a good analysis on the Palestinian conflict from Linus Tech Tips

I know you were just making an extreme comparison, but I genuinely think they'd do a good job of it if push came to shove. Linus and the people who work for him are beyond professional.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#455

Post by iosonofuturista »

raxxorrax wrote: post #438
nunez wrote: post #334

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…

> Anecdotally, a VERY LARGE percentage of my Google searches end in “site:reddit.com” these days. Compared to platforms like Discord they have the advantage that their content is actually discoverable by search engines. I hate the push to Discord since that basically makes you invisible. I get that it is convenient, but it has a lot of negative side effects that aren't obvious at first.

Which also one of the reasons I loathe the move from open BB forums to Facebook on the niche/ hobby communities.

That we are repeating the mistake with discord, is very unfortunate.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#456

Post by mdp2021 »

discardable_dan wrote: post #299
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 said, not six months ago, that they weren't going to ban anti-vaccine rhetoric. The lead admin stated: "We appreciate that not everyone agrees with the current approach to getting us all through the pandemic, and some are still wary of vaccinations. Dissent is a part of Reddit and the foundation of democracy." [0] When you combine this with the fact that moderation on the site is unpaid, it's literally a land…

About your example, some points are not clear, with relevance to the outcome of litigation land mine.

First of all, the part about the "right to dissent" I think was later retracted; and importantly, a witch hunt was in fact carried out - starting from r/aww ("the cute pets" or similar).

I have just red on The Coversation the article "Shaming unvaccinated people has to stop. We've turned into an angry mob and it's getting ugly" (Julian Savulescu, MCRI, Uni Melbourne and Oxford), https://theconversation.com/shaming-unvaccinated-people-has-... , which reports that

> a whole Reddit channel is devoted to mocking people who die after refusing the vaccine

Does "going to public" increase the liability for legal action?

Re: Reddit files to go public

#457

Post by Gareth321 »

INTPenis wrote: post #435
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.

Those tutorials can still rocket to the top of YOUR homepage. That's the power of reddit. That everyone can craft their own experience by subscribing to subreddits. So subscribe to the lisp subreddit and you'll see the content you want.

This concept is not long for this world. I've been a daily user for for than a decade.

* [Your default sort and filter list no longer only contains content you are subscribed to.](https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/m1pb9u/comment/gqgh82...)

* They continually "improve" the default (and Hot, New, Top, and Rising) sort and filter algorithm(s). Every day it contains less relevant content for you, and more content peppered with ads and outrage. All of these options are slowly morphing into the same sort and filter set.

* They are aggressively shutting down interesting communities which don't fit their advertiser profile, and using the above algorithms to ensure no one ever sees them. These include, for example, discussion of covid or vaccines from a critical perspective; assisted suicide; Donald Trump; guns; trans controversies; etc.

* They are aggressively policing language. There is a growing list of words which, if used, will earn the user a ban.

* They stopped work on old.reddit.com, which gave users more transparent control over sort and filter. I predict they will kill it soon.

* They currently allow API access for third party aps. These aps don't serve ads and can employ their own sorting and filtering. I predict open APIs will be shut down, just like all the other major platforms have done.

Long story short, Reddit is going to turn into Facebook. They've made that intention clear. It's only a matter of time before they demand Facebook-like verification for users.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#458

Post by mdp2021 »

emodendroket wrote: post #344
silisili wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people already don't want to admit to working there, but not for moral reasons, but for how awful the stability and product actually is. I can't say I'd blame them.

I very much doubt they do not want to admit to working on one of the world's most popular Web sites.

You seem to imply that "popular" entails "pride". Normally, "good" entails "pride".

Re: Reddit files to go public

#459

Post by ItsMonkk »

IgorPartola wrote: post #217
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.

Ok I’ll bite. How would you fix Reddit? I have been using online forums for the past 20+ years and I know what you mean about communities like Reddit going from nerd heavy topics to primarily being the free advertising platform for onlyfans accounts and political hacks. But how would Reddit at this point stuff the genie back into the bottle? For that matter, if you don’t believe in Reddit’s long term success, there a…

They messed up when they made sub-reddits. Sub-reddits are a harmful combination of community and content. Popular content becomes a huge community, and all of the issues based on Dunbar's number happen as a result, which includes abuse of powers from the admins. Instead of using sub-reddits for content you should have tags. Communities should never be bigger than 150 people, and should not be limited to a single idea, in much the same way that Hacker News is aligned generally towards hackers. You would then build up communities of communities, where you would be beholden to your own community and the communities could only moderate outside of their community at the community level.

From there you only have to do a decent job like TikTok has done of content discovery to allow new content to thrive, and from comments on that content allow people to find better communities.

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