I guess this answers my question to how badly reddit crushed digg.
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
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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: http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
Well, fundamentally, we've been designing online communities in the same (flawed) manner for decades. This is basically the recipe for reversion to the mean:
1. Allow any user to add themselves into the community; and then,
2. allow the course of discussion to be set by majority rule.
The site (or subreddit, or newsgroup, or whatever)'s focus and usefulness will gradually disintegrate as people in secondary demographics join (e.g. for programming, people interested in web design) and then tertiary demographics join who are only interested in things the secondary demographics like, and actually don't care about the original, primary focus of the community at all.
For examples of tertiary-demographic takeover, see Reddit's /r/music and /r/movies. The primary demographic wanted media discussion; the secondary demographic wanted to discuss specific pieces of media; and the tertiary demographic just wanted links to new media they hadn't heard of. (Which—for /r/music at least—when combined with the average new-Internet-user's set of "music they've heard of", the way people have a more positive association with music they've heard before, and the way democratic interest floats up the most agreeable items, the front page becomes basically "Reddit's Top-40 chart.")
Any community that avoids this will fundamentally have to avoid doing either #1 or #2.
Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews
#93I'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…
I am a long time reddit user and am of the opinion that the "mainstream" subreddits serve as honeypots to attract disrespectful juvenile users and should be kept for that purpose. Making it easier to find the most interesting subreddits will only attract the wrong kind of people.
Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews
#94Condé 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.
Nitpick: Reddit isn't owned by CN anymore, they "moved up" and are now a direct subsidiary of their parent company, Advance Publications.
Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews
#95Reddit's growth has been amazing. It gets a lot of hate because of users reposting content without giving credit, but it really is an amazing site. I used to search Google endlessly for sites to get, for example, help on video games or services for video games, but now I think, "Well, I'll just check out their subreddit and see if anyone else has this problem." It's great for news and breaking stories. Sometimes I see it on reddit before I even see it breaking on Twitter.
I think Conde Nast did a good job as well in not fucking it up for the site. They let the owners do their own thing and let the site grow (an action I really wish other large companies would take when acquiring startups) instead of forcing them to put annoying ads all over or other stupid things.
However, I wish reddit would make it easier for users to find features and generally understand the site. I'm still finding useful features that have been hidden in the software.
I thank the reddit staff for their amazing work and hope that they keep it up. :)
Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews
#96I'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…
I am a long time reddit user and am of the opinion that the "mainstream" subreddits serve as honeypots to attract disrespectful juvenile users and should be kept for that purpose. Making it easier to find the most interesting subreddits will only attract the wrong kind of people.
I'm a long time redditor as well (4 years or so) and I've found that the subreddits are really not nearly as good as they used to be. /r/programming used to feel a lot more like HN, where you'd have a lot more researchers and well known experts in various areas chiming in. Things like /r/compsci seem to be mostly cs undergrads with a fairly underdeveloped sense of what the field entails. All of more niche subreddits I subscribe to tend to be so small there's almost no conversation going on.
What reddit has become is my guilty pleasure/trashy magazine. I find I still enjoy it but not for any of the reasons I used to.
Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think reddit is really trying so hard to monitize. (And given the nature of their user base, maybe it's the smartest thing to do.) The banner ad unit on the right of reddit is almost never running a real ad. It's always an ad for a subreddit or a pretty picture. That one single spot at $1 cpm at 2b pageviews could net reddit $2mm a month. That's a lot of money to be left on the table.
$1CPM for the whole page (all the spots) would be very tough for a social news site, doubly so for one with porn and triply so for one with porn and reddit's demographic. To put that in perspective, if Facebook were to get $1CPM they would be bringing in over $1B a month from just advertising. Facebook's revenue is about a third of that and doesn't all come from advertising (Facebook Credits and what not). It's even…
>Facebook has the ability to target advertising much better than reddit.
I'm not sure I buy that. Reddit knows your interests due to your subreddit subscriptions, and if they wanted to scrape your comments they could easily find out a whole lot more. The fact that they don't is likely due more to their limited engineering team and a general distaste for that kind of invasiveness than due to its inherent difficulty.
Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
r/pics did a pretty good job of fixing itself up, as well. It used to be total crap, but now is actually mostly cool pictures.
Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews
#99Earlier 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.
The reddit admins have made a policy out of basically never intervening on the site - how ever egregious the transgressions are - so the inmates have slowly taken over the asylum. There's also something to be learnt about this on HN. :) I think reddit as more of a platform than a community at this point aside from the hivemind and reddit memes going on there. I'm sure it's still an interesting place to create your ow…
Well, they did shutdown r/jailbait for "threatening the structural integrity of the greater reddit community."
Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews
#100I'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…
The front page truly is trash. It is filled with the repost and circlejerk subreddits that thrive on sensationalist post titles. Once you find your niches though, you will discover some solid communities.