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Happy 10th birthday to us

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Re: Happy 10th birthday to us

#101
post #98
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most political subreddits don't garner upvotes on the basis of "I'm glad I was shown this" but rather, "YOU need to read this". And so you get a front page full of angry crap nobody wants to read but everyone thinks everyone else needs to see. It doesn't make for a pleasant user experience.

Just because you (and the rest of the staff) don't want to read it doesn't mean the community doesn't. Parent comment is very much right, Reddit got disappointingly neutered.

Not only that, they should recognize that yes one use pattern of reddit was to get the word out of things you think other people ought to here. This attracts users that have something to say; and that attracts users who want something to read/hear etc...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc

This too can drive growth. If the community gets the impression that they don't drive the content then reddit loses all the magic.

The truth is, the users haven't driven the content of the front-page since the fall of /r/reddit.com following Occupy Wall Street.

Re: Happy 10th birthday to us

#102

I always feel strange being nostalgic about a website. Like I don't feel weird being nostalgic about a classic episode of The Simpsons or a rock concert, but for YouTube or Newgrounds or now Reddit, I do. I've used reddit for like 7 years. Gleamed helpful info from it. Even won a contest off that site (still got that postcard of all the admin's autographs). Yet my continuing theme with that site was their social expe…

I think a lot of people feel the same way about Reddit as they do about The Simpsons : It used to be good. Like so many mega-scale communities before it, Reddit is a case study in what happens if you let your user base grow faster than your cultural core can assimilate it. To get the good content you need to dig deeper and deeper now, hide yourself away from the deluge of garbage that is the top-level groups. /r/prog…

I'm a week away from the reddit 8 year club, and I couldn't disagree more (about reddit—I haven't watched The Simpsons). I think reddit has navigated their massive popularity better than any other similar services. Subreddits are brilliant. Of course, individual subreddits go through the same transition when they get too big, but you just can't be sentimental. Unsubscribe from a subreddit if it annoys or disappoints you a few days in a row, and never look back. Once I did that (and, of course, unsubscribe from the vast majority of the default subs), reddit has been an amazing hub for all my widely varying hobbies and interests.

Re: Happy 10th birthday to us

#103

I always feel strange being nostalgic about a website. Like I don't feel weird being nostalgic about a classic episode of The Simpsons or a rock concert, but for YouTube or Newgrounds or now Reddit, I do. I've used reddit for like 7 years. Gleamed helpful info from it. Even won a contest off that site (still got that postcard of all the admin's autographs). Yet my continuing theme with that site was their social expe…

I think a lot of people feel the same way about Reddit as they do about The Simpsons : It used to be good. Like so many mega-scale communities before it, Reddit is a case study in what happens if you let your user base grow faster than your cultural core can assimilate it. To get the good content you need to dig deeper and deeper now, hide yourself away from the deluge of garbage that is the top-level groups. /r/prog…

Reddit's low point was right before they separated out political posts into their own section (this was about seven years ago, before subreddits). The front page was full of "vote up if" self-posts and overly-hysterical articles about the upcoming elections. It's much better now that you can pick what kinds of articles you want to see.

Re: Happy 10th birthday to us

#104
post #31
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reddit, who was struggling at the time. This is totally incorrect, BTW. Our traffic was already double Digg's at that point. Their v4 failure caused a noticeable but small bump in traffic.

That's actually really surprising. I was part of the Digg exodus and I'd barely heard about Reddit at the time of the v4 debacle, while Digg was a pretty big brand in tech circles. Was it just better marketing while Reddit actually had a larger-but-quieter userbase at the time?

yeah my view is coming from just my experience, those around me, and general perceived vibe on the 'tech net' at the time. Digg was the spot where links broke. Then in the backlash due to the botched design launch etc, we all started giving reddit a chance, submitting there first/checking there first. It had always been around, but was more for maybe community/comments on links...not where they broke. Then that started to reverse very rapidly until well.....

Re: Happy 10th birthday to us

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of people feel the same way about Reddit as they do about The Simpsons : It used to be good. Like so many mega-scale communities before it, Reddit is a case study in what happens if you let your user base grow faster than your cultural core can assimilate it. To get the good content you need to dig deeper and deeper now, hide yourself away from the deluge of garbage that is the top-level groups. /r/prog…

I agree with the other replies in that I don't think the quality of Reddit has necessarily gone down, you just have to look in the right places. You probably can't get the deep discussions that you initially could, but on the other side of the coin you also can't get the vast amount of new content that you might've never come across. You certainly do need to hide away from the top level stuff and find the sub-reddits…

> 2. The people you invite you are stuck with forever

What happens when people stop using the site? You're stuck without content... and then you leave the site?

Re: Happy 10th birthday to us

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CDNs don't host the files, your servers do. They cache copies of the files across their CDN network and serve the files from their cache until the cache expires, then they go and get the file from you again to rebuild their cache. As a practical example, you might have an image on your webserver. When it goes viral on reddit, the request for the image hits the CDN first, not your servers (that's why they call it reve…

Yes I say "host" as a shorthand for "cache so I don't have to serve much". Just saying that when I contacted them, they were clear that we shouldn't use them for images or media, and their general ToS agrees. Their enterprise pricing starts cheap so if they throw in "unlimited bandwidth for everything" then it'd be quite a good deal.

There must have been some misunderstanding/miscommunication, if not then Cloudflare has pivoted their business significantly from what my understanding of it was (granted I haven't researched them in over a year).

Media is the primary purpose for CDNs. The performance boost comes from a global network caching the media files so when requests are made for the resources, the end user downloads the media from the nearest CDN node instead of your server that is potentially on the other side of the world. It doesn't matter quite so much to have non-media (such as the page html) served locally because the size of an html page is generally significantly smaller than the media embedded in the page.

From the small amount of research I've done on the Cloudflare service just now, it doesn't seem very transparent how exactly it works. I've found information on 4chan and imgur using them to serve billions of CDN requests, but others saying don't rely on their CDN. So who knows, maybe it's on a case by case basis.

Re: Happy 10th birthday to us

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I say "host" as a shorthand for "cache so I don't have to serve much". Just saying that when I contacted them, they were clear that we shouldn't use them for images or media, and their general ToS agrees. Their enterprise pricing starts cheap so if they throw in "unlimited bandwidth for everything" then it'd be quite a good deal.

There must have been some misunderstanding/miscommunication, if not then Cloudflare has pivoted their business significantly from what my understanding of it was (granted I haven't researched them in over a year). Media is the primary purpose for CDNs. The performance boost comes from a global network caching the media files so when requests are made for the resources, the end user downloads the media from the neares…

https://www.cloudflare.com/terms Section 10:

...Additionally, the purpose of CloudFlare's Service is to proxy web content, not store data. Using an account primarily as an online storage space, including the storage or caching of a disproportionate percentage of pictures, movies, audio files, or other non-HTML content, is prohibited...

Re: Happy 10th birthday to us

#108
post #97

Most people don't know this, but it was PG who gave Alexis and Steve the idea to make something like reddit, and also gave them the tagline "the front page of the internet".[0] PG had vetoed their initial idea to create a food-delivery app and then called them back and asked them to come up with something new. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rZ8f3Bx6Po

Food delivery app idea looking pretty OK about now :)
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