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Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews

blog.reddit.com

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Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews

#61

Post by mattgreenrocks »

baq wrote: post #43
27182818284 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 commen…

A lot of the quality degradation stems from the mistaken idea that everyone has something of value to contribute. They don't. Discussion often involves a handful of quality posts, and then a bunch of "I agree"'s clogging it up. Posts that don't add to the discussion should be moderated, or, at the very least, targeted for downvotes.

Of course, it'd be tough to gain traction with users who believe their karma score matters. Better to hide it from them completely and indicate scores in another way.

Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews

#62

Post by dekz »

bad_user wrote: post #56
danso wrote: post #21

Whatever you think of @reddit's march towards decline...this was my favorite part of the blog post...and something I hope rings with other popular sites: Here’s a list of things we don’t (and won’t) do for traffic: We don't get traffic through ads. We don’t participate in any traffic trading. We don’t email our users (unless they choose to enter an email and then forget their password). We don’t harass users to sign…

As with any user-generated content website, it has a problem: amongst those many users Reddit has there are also lots of dicks that spoil the conversations for everybody. I don't think Reddit wants to go on the path of Youtube - useful for finding out links, but with useless and rude conversations that make you mad at waisting time reading them. I think Reddit got popular because in addition to links, users had meani…

Unfortunately proggit has become a cesspool, a complete juxtaposition of what reddit once was. I'm not familiar nor certain of a case where this has been turned around? Is it even advantageous for Reddit to attempt to remove the dregs from their site?

Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews

#63

Post by amitparikh »

127 wrote: post #59
danso wrote: post #21

Whatever you think of @reddit's march towards decline...this was my favorite part of the blog post...and something I hope rings with other popular sites: Here’s a list of things we don’t (and won’t) do for traffic: We don't get traffic through ads. We don’t participate in any traffic trading. We don’t email our users (unless they choose to enter an email and then forget their password). We don’t harass users to sign…

They do show stupid pictures ("Instead of an ad, here's...") instead of ads that steal my attention for no reason what so ever. The sole reason I'm using adblock. I do not want to, but those damn pictures are so damn annoying that I have no choice. How about not show anything if you are not going to show an ad? Why steal my attention and bother me for no reason at all?

Because reddit sometimes does show real ads in that space. And I think this feature was designed with 'fun' in mind -- it's lighthearted!

References: http://blog.reddit.com/2010/10/fun-in-sidebar.html and http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/dqse4/fun_in_the_sideb...

Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews

#64

Post by giberson »

I'll admit to being one of the latecomers to reddit in the last year. I use to avoid reddit like the plague, because I thought reddit was just www.reddit.com (the main page) which the few times I visited was filled with random assortment of stuff I didn't care about.

Later, I discovered the true essence of reddit, sub-reddits. Things like r/loseit, r/fitness, r/gamedev, r/. Now I'm hooked--I visit the sub reddits multiple times every day. I no longer subscribe to the main reddit feed.

So, for things in store for 2012, you absolutely must focus on "help new users better understand the way reddit works".

In addition, if I were in charge of reddit for a day, I'd get rid of the reddit main page aggregation and instead replace it with a word cloud and the heading "Pick a topic that interests you to visit that sub-reddit for valuable discussion and content". Because, on the whole, the main reddit feed devalues the entire site with slop.

edit: removed misleading line.

Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews

#65

Post by vecter »

127 wrote: post #59
danso wrote: post #21

Whatever you think of @reddit's march towards decline...this was my favorite part of the blog post...and something I hope rings with other popular sites: Here’s a list of things we don’t (and won’t) do for traffic: We don't get traffic through ads. We don’t participate in any traffic trading. We don’t email our users (unless they choose to enter an email and then forget their password). We don’t harass users to sign…

They do show stupid pictures ("Instead of an ad, here's...") instead of ads that steal my attention for no reason what so ever. The sole reason I'm using adblock. I do not want to, but those damn pictures are so damn annoying that I have no choice. How about not show anything if you are not going to show an ad? Why steal my attention and bother me for no reason at all?

Their revenue comes from ads. They've never claimed otherwise, what makes you think they did?

Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews

#66

Post by wisty »

giberson wrote: post #64

I'll admit to being one of the latecomers to reddit in the last year. I use to avoid reddit like the plague, because I thought reddit was just www.reddit.com (the main page) which the few times I visited was filled with random assortment of stuff I didn't care about. Later, I discovered the true essence of reddit, sub-reddits. Things like r/loseit, r/fitness, r/gamedev, r/ . Now I'm hooked--I visit the sub reddits mu…

You do know you can unsubscribe to the main page, and the other default subscriptions, so your main page is entirely business, world news, programming, and Doctor Who, right?

Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews

#67

Post by lukasb »

baq wrote: post #43
27182818284 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 commen…

Metafilter is an interesting counter-example to the rule that communities degrade over time: it was a total shitshow for a while in the early 2000s, and then repaired itself.

Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews

#68

Post by bad_user »

dekz wrote: post #62
bad_user wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As with any user-generated content website, it has a problem: amongst those many users Reddit has there are also lots of dicks that spoil the conversations for everybody. I don't think Reddit wants to go on the path of Youtube - useful for finding out links, but with useless and rude conversations that make you mad at waisting time reading them. I think Reddit got popular because in addition to links, users had meani…

Unfortunately proggit has become a cesspool, a complete juxtaposition of what reddit once was. I'm not familiar nor certain of a case where this has been turned around? Is it even advantageous for Reddit to attempt to remove the dregs from their site?

It is my belief (and from personal observation) that the bad apples constitute a very loud minority. Punishing just a couple and clearly promoting your values makes a big difference.

Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews

#69

Post by giberson »

wisty wrote: post #66
giberson wrote: post #64

I'll admit to being one of the latecomers to reddit in the last year. I use to avoid reddit like the plague, because I thought reddit was just www.reddit.com (the main page) which the few times I visited was filled with random assortment of stuff I didn't care about. Later, I discovered the true essence of reddit, sub-reddits. Things like r/loseit, r/fitness, r/gamedev, r/ . Now I'm hooked--I visit the sub reddits mu…

You do know you can unsubscribe to the main page, and the other default subscriptions, so your main page is entirely business, world news, programming, and Doctor Who, right?

I know that now. I'm saying I didn't know that then, I didn't know then, that there were even sub-reddits. It wasn't until I did discover those facts that I became a reddit frequenter.

Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews

#70

Post by Tuckerism »

wisty wrote: post #66
giberson wrote: post #64

I'll admit to being one of the latecomers to reddit in the last year. I use to avoid reddit like the plague, because I thought reddit was just www.reddit.com (the main page) which the few times I visited was filled with random assortment of stuff I didn't care about. Later, I discovered the true essence of reddit, sub-reddits. Things like r/loseit, r/fitness, r/gamedev, r/ . Now I'm hooked--I visit the sub reddits mu…

You do know you can unsubscribe to the main page, and the other default subscriptions, so your main page is entirely business, world news, programming, and Doctor Who, right?

I think the parent is referring to encouraging lurkers/first-time viewers to creating an account to do just that. Reddit is something that can push a lot of people away right at the get go with it's default subs (/r/atheism & /r/politics are polarizing, /r/pics can make the site look childish, etc)
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