Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by feor » Fri, Jan 06, 2012, 6:35 AM UTC

ArcticCelt wrote: post #93

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…

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.

You mean like /b/ was, by the end, supposed to act as a buffer on 4chan to keep out the new posters from the other boards while they were still adjusting to the local "etiquette"? That worked for a while, and then when that board became so bad that even new users wouldn't find any enjoyment in posting in it, they simply stopped lurking and carried over their bad habits to other boards. It spread through the whole site at an alarming rate. You can't try to separate the good content from the bad, or at least not for a long time because the bad always finds ways to spread, and I doubt the separation into "sub-reddits" instead of boards has any meaning in this case.

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

#122

Post by mahyarm » Fri, Jan 06, 2012, 6:36 AM UTC

ugh wrote: post #105

mahyarm wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your going find that anywhere where there is a general audience, HN has it's -isms too. How is it very reddity? Not being exposed and thus made aware of such attitudes can leave you in a bubble and not realize how good you have it. I didn't really realize how many people in the world have attitudes that belong to a 150 years ago in the developed world until I traveled to such places and saw and interacted with it wit…

The problem is that it’s everywhere and at the top. I don’t mind racism that is filtered out (i.e. either heavily downvoted or deleted by mods) all that much. That’s exactly what makes Reddit attractive: It gets filtered in a good way. It just seems that Reddit’s filtering mechanisms are not really adept at dealing with it anymore. And Reddit’s demography (white, cis male, hetero†) adds a very special and unique slan…

Comments I read from reddit have a lot more gays and transgendered people than I encounter in most places in my life.

In any english website, your going to mostly encounter english (which means probably white) cis hetero people. Gays and transgendered people are %10 of the population at most, and a lot of times, they're not talking about things related to their sexuality.

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

#123

Post by mahyarm » Fri, Jan 06, 2012, 6:36 AM UTC

ugh wrote: post #105

mahyarm wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your going find that anywhere where there is a general audience, HN has it's -isms too. How is it very reddity? Not being exposed and thus made aware of such attitudes can leave you in a bubble and not realize how good you have it. I didn't really realize how many people in the world have attitudes that belong to a 150 years ago in the developed world until I traveled to such places and saw and interacted with it wit…

The problem is that it’s everywhere and at the top. I don’t mind racism that is filtered out (i.e. either heavily downvoted or deleted by mods) all that much. That’s exactly what makes Reddit attractive: It gets filtered in a good way. It just seems that Reddit’s filtering mechanisms are not really adept at dealing with it anymore. And Reddit’s demography (white, cis male, hetero†) adds a very special and unique slan…

Comments I read from reddit have a lot more gays and transgendered people than I encounter in most places in my life.

In any english website, your going to mostly encounter english (which means probably white) cis hetero people. Gays and transgendered people are %10 of the population at most, and a lot of times, they're not talking about things related to their sexuality.

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

#124

Post by flomo » Fri, Jan 06, 2012, 6:49 AM UTC

astrodust wrote: post #111

Adaptive wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 con…

If you don't weed out your counter-productive citizens you end up with Digg. If you do, if you keep it tight, you might be lucky enough to have a metafilter.com which after a decade is still an amazing place. Strangely, Something Awful is actually a great model for a community. A great case-study in how to keep a community from imploding.

Hah really? Something Awful is site where everyone rehashes five-year-old in-jokes, has a weird cult-like mentality towards the rest of the internet, and makes money by repeatedly banning a small number of people over and over again. I'm a member there, and the place is clearly dying out.

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

#125

Post by ugh » Fri, Jan 06, 2012, 7:19 AM UTC

mahyarm wrote: post #122

ugh wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that it’s everywhere and at the top. I don’t mind racism that is filtered out (i.e. either heavily downvoted or deleted by mods) all that much. That’s exactly what makes Reddit attractive: It gets filtered in a good way. It just seems that Reddit’s filtering mechanisms are not really adept at dealing with it anymore. And Reddit’s demography (white, cis male, hetero†) adds a very special and unique slan…

Comments I read from reddit have a lot more gays and transgendered people than I encounter in most places in my life. In any english website, your going to mostly encounter english (which means probably white) cis hetero people. Gays and transgendered people are %10 of the population at most, and a lot of times, they're not talking about things related to their sexuality.

That’s not really the problem. The problem is much rather that there isn’t any awareness when those people actually do talk about those topics (or feel the need to for some stupid reason or other).

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

#126

Post by rickmb » Fri, Jan 06, 2012, 7:29 AM UTC

ugh wrote: post #85

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…

One huge problem, though, is that shit (specifically racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, fat shaming, ableism – oh, I guess that list really isn’t all that specific) tends to crop up everywhere. It’s a very reddity kind of shit. Encountering blatant (and highly visible because upvoted) sexism (for example) in such harmless sounding subreddits as /r/soccer or /r/minecraft really kills all my fun. There are a few…

I don't really recognize that picture. Besides the sexism, which is an issue (but by far not exclusive to Reddit), all the rest of that shit gets downvoted into oblivion by the community at large.

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

#127

Post by rickmb » Fri, Jan 06, 2012, 7:32 AM UTC

Homunculiheaded wrote: post #96

ArcticCelt wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Basically Reddit is like hanging out in a bar. There may be some good, serious conversations, but most of the time it's just having fun and talking bullshit. And I'm fine with that.

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

#128

Post by marvin » Fri, Jan 06, 2012, 7:34 AM UTC

I love the reddit community, and I've been an active member for almost 6 years now. Congratulations to the reddit team for building a huge, diverse and successful community. However, I think that this latest stage of growth brings a lot of problems. The entire tone of reddit (in general) has become a lot more hostile during the last 1.5 years. It's what someone said about groupthink - downvoting or posting a quick, hostile reply to something you disagree with is much easier than actually articulating why you disagree. There is a lot of hating and lots of personal attacks instead of honest discussion.

I've been thinking about this for a bit. As an outsider it seems a lot like an up-scaled version of American society. Reddit used to be a relatively homogenuous group of people, but is now _very_ heterogenous, in the same way the US is. The problem is that reddit doesn't have the custom of politely avoiding contentious topics in the public space. So you end up getting mens' rights activists and militant feminists yelling at each other, Christians and atheists, racists and minorities etc.

I think this problem is only going to keep growing. Reddit has survived a long time, but this is a fundamental issue which is more about keeping an open mind and being tolerant of differences of opinion. It has more to do with societal conditioning than technology. It's a great example of what happens when you put radically different people within shouting distance of each other without traditional common courtesy to moderate things.

Like I said, I've been on Reddit for almost 6 years, but things are getting pretty bad. Almost every single time something that is considered controversial by any group is posted, there are multiple aggressive comments...which are upvoted if they are formulated in a sufficiently assertive way. The community is moving away from rational discourse, to a more traditional extroverts-first system where being loud and assuming that your opponent is wrong gets more recognition.

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

#129

Post by gonehome » Fri, Jan 06, 2012, 7:39 AM UTC

marvin wrote: post #128

I love the reddit community, and I've been an active member for almost 6 years now. Congratulations to the reddit team for building a huge, diverse and successful community. However, I think that this latest stage of growth brings a lot of problems. The entire tone of reddit (in general) has become a lot more hostile during the last 1.5 years. It's what someone said about groupthink - downvoting or posting a quick, h…

I feel like that move happened a few years ago. I thought the people who still frequent reddit primarily visit the smaller higher quality subreddits that are more reminiscent of how the site used to be.

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

#130

Post by ugh » Fri, Jan 06, 2012, 8:26 AM UTC

rickmb wrote: post #126

ugh wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One huge problem, though, is that shit (specifically racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, fat shaming, ableism – oh, I guess that list really isn’t all that specific) tends to crop up everywhere. It’s a very reddity kind of shit. Encountering blatant (and highly visible because upvoted) sexism (for example) in such harmless sounding subreddits as /r/soccer or /r/minecraft really kills all my fun. There are a few…

I don't really recognize that picture. Besides the sexism, which is an issue (but by far not exclusive to Reddit), all the rest of that shit gets downvoted into oblivion by the community at large.

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/o4q5l/policemen_o...

I don’t think I have to expand on that.