nice article
How Alexis Ohanian Built a Front Page of the Internet
71–80 of 116 posts
Re: How Alexis Ohanian Built a Front Page of the Internet
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's funny, because your "Announce your vote to the world" comment (ostensibly) wouldn't be welcome on Reddit: http://code.reddit.com/wiki/help/reddiquette (No offense intended, I just thought it was hilarious in the context of this conversation. Maybe you meant it as a joke...)
Nor would it be welcome on HN. It's courtesy not to post about your votes, rather letting them speak for themselves.
I've since added a bonus explanation for just why I concurred with the parent.
Re: How Alexis Ohanian Built a Front Page of the Internet
#73What the front page of the internet looks like today: * Image with overlayed snarky text * Another image * Another image... * The Daily Show clip * Another image * Another image * News article about Julian Assange * Another image * News article about guy doing something strange (which is actually really old) * Reddit question thread about Tarantino films * Youtube clip * "Ask Me Anything" request thread * Story on mo…
I find it depressing when holier than thou hipsters pop up to whine about how depressing popular things are... which seems to occur with increasing frequency on HN nowadays.
I'm 27. I stopped getting mad at popular things around 22, when I realized popularity is just a side-effect of the target market appeal of a thing and does not in itself constitute something negative.
However, when you have a site with completely user-generated and user-upvoted content, the product is made by the people. So if the product is crap, it's actually because the people are crap. Combine this with the idea that this website was supposed to be a 'front page' for anyone on the internet to land on and peruse and I get a little sad. Not because someone might enjoy this crap - if you enjoy something, do it and be happy.
But the idea that a 10 year old kid might land on this site and dedicate a huge chunk of the rest of his or her childhood to generating new memes and learning to troll, when instead they could have been developing a skill, learning new exciting things or having fun with their friends... that's kind of depressing to me. But i'm probably just projecting.
Re: How Alexis Ohanian Built a Front Page of the Internet
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. Just like in the story. Steve built reddit, I doodled the logo and did the non-tech stuff.
What did that entail in the early days? I only showed up a month or two before comments did and the community was already rolling at that point.
http://spencerfry.com/whats-a-non-programmer-to-do
http://generalassemb.ly/start/fundamentals-of-entrepreneursh...
Oh, and ordering groceries and mocking up all kinds of zany product ideas.
Re: How Alexis Ohanian Built a Front Page of the Internet
#75What the front page of the internet looks like today: * Image with overlayed snarky text * Another image * Another image... * The Daily Show clip * Another image * Another image * News article about Julian Assange * Another image * News article about guy doing something strange (which is actually really old) * Reddit question thread about Tarantino films * Youtube clip * "Ask Me Anything" request thread * Story on mo…
You can log in and customize it. The default set of subreddits is bound to be low-quality.
Use RES and filter all these subs:
fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu, pics, gaming, funny, gifs, wtf, AdviceAnimals, trees, aww, atheism, skyrim, starcraft, Minecraft, pokemon, doctorwho, circlejerk, nba, lolcats, gameofthrones, reactiongifs, humor, community, gonewild, shittyaskscience, TheLastAirbender, cats, dogs, StarWars, PrettyGirls, diablo3, mylittlepony, leagueoflegends, dota2, Boobies, Diablo, 4chan, gentlemanboners, realgirls .
You'd be surprised by the change.
Re: How Alexis Ohanian Built a Front Page of the Internet
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea that any single default can possibly be considered high quality for tens of millions of users is unrealistic. That's like going to a grocery store, asking for a "default shopping cart," and hoping its contents will be suitable for you.
The default shopping cart is probably much closer to my taste than default reading material would be. Although, now I come to think of it, for years we did have default reading material, it was called a mass-market newspaper, and it wasn't all that bad. Newspapers are very readable and fairly sensible, content-wise, compared to something like reddit, because they're carefully designed by a small group of people to ap…
> it was called a mass-market newspaper, and it wasn't all that bad.
I actually doubt that. Sure, there were social advantages to having a smaller body of reading material that most literate people had read. But the Internet allows us to do two different but important things: truly democratize editorship (like reddit), and enable niche editors to easily distribute their content (like slashdot, slashfilm, or techcrunch).
Re: How Alexis Ohanian Built a Front Page of the Internet
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
agreed - while I occasionally enjoy /r/funny, I default to technical subreddits, and it's a very high-quality newsfeed.
An old reporter adage: news is something someone doesn't want to hear. In that regard, I don't think reddit is really news in a hardcore sense. It has cool shit, fun articles, hilarious threads, party facts for days. But news? News, and obviously this is a big generalization, is inherently uncomfortable to read. Reddit is a feature factory, not a newsfeed. You can learn a lot from it, but I'll politely disagree about…
The subreddits I read have plenty of news, about fields I am interested in - both serious technical fields and leisure related activities. Sure, r/pics is full of memes and funny stuff, but I get real information and commentary from the subreddits I follow. I certainly consider it news, even in the sense you present.
Re: How Alexis Ohanian Built a Front Page of the Internet
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can log in and customize it. The default set of subreddits is bound to be low-quality.
I cannot upvote this enough. Thanks. edit, with bonus explanation! We need to do a better job helping new(and old) redditors realize the thousands of communities they could be joining for a diverse blend of content that interests them. When Steve and I started reddit, we had no categories because it was simple -- and Steve loves simple. Now that we've got scores of vibrant communities discussing links about things ra…
> We need to do a better job helping new(and old) redditors realize the thousands of communities they could be joining for a diverse blend of content that interests them.
As a long-time redditor and sometimes-user of "the other guys" (Fark, Slashdot, Digg), I do have some suggestions. I'm fully aware that none of these could "just happen" and the team may have discussed and discounted these ideas many times, but for the purpose of starting a discussion here on HN:
- Some subreddits seem more like "tags" than communities. /r/pics is a perfect example. So is /r/nsfw. These seem more like attributes of a post. I think reddit could be a little more orthogonal with these types of things. It would be nice to create a post and check (or have reddit detect automatically) the "pic" checkbox. Then you'd still need to pick a subreddit for the post to go, but hopefully things would be more targeted than just to say it's a picture. This is already in place for NSFW, and I know people have been asking for NSFL as well. Making this attribute system more generic and allowing "virtual" or "filtered" subreddits to be generated from them would be cool. The main point of this suggestion isn't to help users discover new communities, but to modify the signal-to-noise ratio of existing ones (given that what counts as "signal" is subjective).
- Crossposting is common and the [X-Post from /r/foo] notation has become de facto. It might be nice if posts could belong to more than one subreddit. You could add new subreddits to an existing post if someone from that subreddit saw a post it thought might be a good fit for it. Additionally, if someone found the post while "in" a particular subreddit, an additional type of comment flair could indicate which subreddit he or she was commenting from in a "multi-homed" post. This would help people in larger subreddits discover smaller ones.
- Many people have made "reddit guide" sites that attempt to list subreddits and help people find new ones. It would be nice if there was an official reddit guide that used, as much as possible, the metadata for each subreddit.
- Building on the previous idea, you could "tag" subreddits with optional but standardized metadata. I can see things like "appropriate age range", "predominant gender", "political affiliation", "religious affiliation", "special interest topic", and so forth. If subreddits filled these in, you could actually offer a "questionnaire" that users could fill out. The output of this would be a list of subreddits the user might like (and ones they might hate!). EDIT: Or just use it to make a recommendation system based on the subreddits they already have subscribed, the ones they visit most, the ones with posts they comment on most, and so on.
Re: How Alexis Ohanian Built a Front Page of the Internet
#79What the front page of the internet looks like today: * Image with overlayed snarky text * Another image * Another image... * The Daily Show clip * Another image * Another image * News article about Julian Assange * Another image * News article about guy doing something strange (which is actually really old) * Reddit question thread about Tarantino films * Youtube clip * "Ask Me Anything" request thread * Story on mo…
Personally, I use RES and block a ton of /r/ and keywords and content.
I think the best test is to put all these blocks in place, then add a block to imgur - then you get a lot of good content.
Also, stay off the main page.
Re: How Alexis Ohanian Built a Front Page of the Internet
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
The default shopping cart is probably much closer to my taste than default reading material would be. Although, now I come to think of it, for years we did have default reading material, it was called a mass-market newspaper, and it wasn't all that bad. Newspapers are very readable and fairly sensible, content-wise, compared to something like reddit, because they're carefully designed by a small group of people to ap…
> it was called a mass-market newspaper, and it wasn't all that bad. I actually doubt that. Sure, there were social advantages to having a smaller body of reading material that most literate people had read. But the Internet allows us to do two different but important things: truly democratize editorship (like reddit), and enable niche editors to easily distribute their content (like slashdot, slashfilm, or techcrunc…
Doesn't stop the fact that I'd get more satisfaction out of reading the New York Times (or even the New York Post) than browsing the front page of reddit.
Oh look, a picture of a velociraptor with a caption. And someone's cat. A terribly-drawn cartoon about why console gaming is better than PC gaming. Someone else's cat. Another cat. I'VE SEEN CATS BEFORE, PEOPLE!