was getting tired of digg in the past, esp when its boss sometimes was shown as the headline there for no reason...
nice to see reddit is making it.
Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews
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Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews
#42It would be really cool to see an architecture update post from them regarding where they are now and where they want to go. Pretty please? :)
It's still in shambles and probably serves as an example of how not to host your site. Amazon is causing me all kinds of grief lately and their AWS customer support is the worst in the industry, useless to the point of comedy.
Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Former and active NASA engineers hang out in r/space sometimes. r/askscience is full of incredible questions and smart answers. r/science recently started enforcing stricter standards and now has plenty of amazing discussion and knowledge moving around. r/physics is the same. It all depends on where you go, and I strongly disagree that finding those places is difficult.
This is a good point, you just have to leave the mainpageish universe completely. /r/linguistics has interesting stuff. Similarly the subreddit for creating your own language is also neat, but these are niche, small reddits. The big reddits have been taken over by group think and are difficult to read and often boring.
everybody who's been on usenet for a nontrivial amount of time has experienced exactly what you describe, several times. expecting reddit to be different is like hoping for world peace. you should instead assume that degradation of quality will naturally happen as a community forum becomes more popular and either introduce moderation or fork off a smaller forum... and both of those happen, as you noticed.
this comment may be misplaced, but i've finally entered rant mode after reading the 5th or so comment saying "reddit is popular hence degrades" and misses (or stops short of) the point that all communities degrade with increase of their popularity - every now and then somebody writes that hacker news is not what it used to be.
Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews
#44Congrats to our local HN'er kn0thing and everybody else at Reddit. 2B is quite an achievement.
Regarding below questions about the business side of Reddit, see the previous conversation here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2966628
Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, how many of those eyeball visits produce revenue, and does the company have actual earnings (profits)?
Reddit has sponsored links paid by CPM so all eyeballs account for some revenue. I don't have any info on profit but between the ads, reddit gold and schwag i'd guess they're in the black.
i guess so too, but not by a huge margin. reddit must be on the very top of visitors/sysadmins ranking.
Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
The alternatives often seem to come in the form of communities splintering. e.g. /r/gaming, /r/gamingnews /r/games, /r/truegaming etc. The expansion and decline in quality (i.e. rage comic spam) is usually followed quite rapidly by new sub-reddits being created and communities forming with stricter areas of moderation.
Still that is a suboptimal divide, and leaves a discovery problem. Someone will solve it and replace reddit in at least some profound ways.
Someone will solve it and replace reddit in at least some profound ways.
Doubtful. These are deep-seated patterns that have been playing out in online communities for decades, and every "oh we'll just build a new thing that won't have that problem" attempt has... had the same problems.
For examples, and some interesting thoughts on the issue, start here:
Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews
#47Condé Nast had no idea what they were buying. The best decision they made, one I'm sure that was the result of the Reddit team making the case for it, was relatively hands off mgmt. I suspect CN still doesn't really know what to do with it other than sit back and not screw it up.
If you don't actively unscrew it up, it will screw itself up. Reddit is already in steep decline even though page-views are up. It's attracting a different crowd now. They're just one Digg-bar moment away from disaster.
Yeah, I wasn't referring to the quality problem (I'm in full agreement with you on that). I think they are in a better position that Digg at the Digg-bar point (even with low qual participation, engagement still seems deeper than Digg at that time), but the quality is decidedly Eternal September (lower, really).
This is a movie plot. Seriously. Condé Nast is the government. They are largely incompetent and mostly concerned about political infighting and palace intrigues.
The reddit team is the hodge podge group of geeks that happened to be (insert constrained environment here):
* on a cruise ship with the worlds top nuclear scientists (and a bomb!)
* touring an underground viral research facility on a school outing during which there is a "containment breach!"
* orbiting earth in an experimental space plane they built in their barn when the entire GPS sat system FAILS!
The government (condé nast) can do nothing to assist them other than sit uncomfortably on the edge of their chairs, wrinkling their expensive suits, waiting to see if our intrepid developers succeed.
Unlike a Hollywood production, however, we don't know if this plot has a happy ending. I'm rooting for our plucky team, but the clock is ticking.
Tick.
Tock.
(I'll leave the rest of you to imagine the movie poster)
Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews
#48Condé Nast had no idea what they were buying. The best decision they made, one I'm sure that was the result of the Reddit team making the case for it, was relatively hands off mgmt. I suspect CN still doesn't really know what to do with it other than sit back and not screw it up.
If you don't actively unscrew it up, it will screw itself up. Reddit is already in steep decline even though page-views are up. It's attracting a different crowd now. They're just one Digg-bar moment away from disaster.
I thought that too until I got an account recently. There are really some excellent subreddits hidden beneath all the memes and reposts. Places like TwoXChromosomes, Seddit, DepthHub, TheoryOfReddit, and TrueReddit really have a great deal of value and sharp minds in them. As soon as you venture off the beaten front page path of pics and funny, you get to places that approach Hacker News level of comment quality.
The challenge I see is keeping the good subreddits good. The mods spend a good deal of time beating the new redditors to each subreddit into shape. Read this for more: http://www.reddit.com/r/Psychonaut/comments/o1zjo/ban_memes_...
Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regarding the "decline" of Reddit: any site that gets 2 billion monthly page views is going to be wholly different from its incipient form of several years ago. Surely the users of Reddit who pine for its past have many alternatives today.
The alternatives often seem to come in the form of communities splintering. e.g. /r/gaming, /r/gamingnews /r/games, /r/truegaming etc. The expansion and decline in quality (i.e. rage comic spam) is usually followed quite rapidly by new sub-reddits being created and communities forming with stricter areas of moderation.
I browse Reddit but don't have an account or post. I think a lot if it is trash though I love AskScience and occasionally find value in the AMA and TIL stuff. But your note on the rage comic spam made me want to post that it seems they've made some adjustments in the last year or so that prevented that 'spam' from killing the site in the same way that Digg seemed to lose relevance.
I wonder if the next challenge for them is the strong representation from r/atheism on their frontdoor? I say that as a very irreligious person who guesses that discovering their new selves is exciting for (I imagine, predominantly) American youth. But some pretty bland ra-ra makes it through and I can see that being off-putting for religious types and "this again?!" for those for whom a lack of belief is the default rather than something new and outrageous within their community.
Yes, I know people can create an account to customise their experience, but some fair percentage of their traffic is going to come from people not interested in taking their involvement to that level.
Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm guessing they are making money (ads & reddit gold) since they have been able to make a few hires recently. Unfortunately the overall quality of content on reddit has really gone downhill. Even after unsubscribing to the subreddits that were the worst offenders, it's really hard to find interesting stuff with meaningful discussions. These days I'm almost embarrassed to tell people I use reddit.
Reddit is the new Digg. Groupthink on an epic scale, linkbait headlines, and hordes of people that want to feel angry about things so they can at least feel something . (Just like old media!) Now, there is some good content on there, but there's way too much crap to wade through in order to find it.
Is there a way to create a customised frontdoor without having an account? I remember reading something about chaining subreddits in a URL, but never gave it a shot.
I'm also in the "embarrassed mentioning Reddit" camp, but I do like AskScience and anything like that.