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What Reddit Got Wrong

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101–110 of 284 posts

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#101

I think the idea put out by some people here that Reddit might be in the process of radically changing tracks is plausible. Reddit was always very hands-off. They had lots of very unpleasant and controversial content until their hand was forced. Overall they seem to want a site that runs itself as much as possible and over time content that required interaction and management (eg, AMAs, Secret Santa) got de-prioritiz…

The main problem is a lot of those sites started as web 2.0 platforms which should never be about deciding the content. only user generated content, but provide the platform

then the last 3-5 years, they are slowly creeping towards a curated model, and with that disrespecitng their userbase

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#102

I think the idea put out by some people here that Reddit might be in the process of radically changing tracks is plausible. Reddit was always very hands-off. They had lots of very unpleasant and controversial content until their hand was forced. Overall they seem to want a site that runs itself as much as possible and over time content that required interaction and management (eg, AMAs, Secret Santa) got de-prioritiz…

> Put those together and it's plausible that Reddit wants to go from a discussion site with cats to a cats feed site with meaningless discussion, and a bunch of ads mixed in. Based off of my personal experience with many subreddits that have a four digit plus subscriber count, I think reddit has largely already achieved the above goal. The amount of mindless "me too!" and "here's how that works /confidentlyincorrect"…

People are going to go somewhere. I just can't see Lemmy, Kbin, or Mastadon gaining much traction.

For those old enough to remember Napster, it worked because it was centralized.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, the fact that Apollo can use the API for free then turn around and charge users for a premium version all while giving nothing back to Reddit is simply insane, you would never see Facebook, Instagram or other services allowing the same thing. And before one says that third party app users drive user driven content, what kind of content do you think Facebook and Instagram have?

Umm, isn't that exactly what Facebook apps like FarmVille were? I don't think Facebook charges app developers to publish apps on their platform, and the app was monetized.

Farmville is ancillary to Facebook as a whole. Those users might play Farmville but also read up on their feed or click through their friends' posts, thereby allowing Facebook the chance to show ads.

Apollo et al are different in that they are packaging up the entire experience wholesale, they are not ancillary. There is no way for Reddit the company to show ads through third party clients (the client could simply block ad posts if they wanted to).

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#104
post #8

I never understand why Reddit is credited to the "free community based moderation" idea Facebook does this at much larger scale (2B users active in FB Groups), with way more spam, and some FB groups are much larger than most big subreddits Its not about Facebook or Reddit, its about people being so power hungry they do these things for free. When subreddits post about bringing in more mods, thousands apply, maybe 2 g…

Or you're wrong and there's an actual reason that 90% of the subreddits went on strike such that any new mods wouldn't accept these conditions either. Like you really think people are so power hungry they'd sign up to do this for free while being restricted to using only one finger to do all of the work or something absurd like that? No, there are limits.

> Like you really think people are so power hungry they'd sign up to do this for free while being restricted to using only one finger to do all of the work or something absurd like that?

Isn't that exactly what people have been doing for well over a decade?

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#105
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve seen entire (dozen reply long) comment chains on a repost (or similar content) that were re-created verbatim from an older post. Each one garnered the same hundreds of upvotes as the original, and each bot seemed to be part of a network that was farming karma through this process. Eerie was an understatement.

> Each one garnered the same hundreds of upvotes as the original What's sad is how many of those aren't bots. It's not uncommon for karma farmers to have their bots upvote each other, but it isn't cost effective to have hundreds (a 1 year old reddit account can run you approx $10 for 1000 post karma). The sad reality is that of those hundreds of upvotes, almost all represent a person who fell for it. As the saying go…

> (a 1 year old reddit account can run you approx $10 for 1000 post karma).

Someone who bought a reddit account here, I bought a 2 year old aged account with around 3000 post karma for $10. The karma has lost its value.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#106
post #14
post #8

I never understand why Reddit is credited to the "free community based moderation" idea Facebook does this at much larger scale (2B users active in FB Groups), with way more spam, and some FB groups are much larger than most big subreddits Its not about Facebook or Reddit, its about people being so power hungry they do these things for free. When subreddits post about bringing in more mods, thousands apply, maybe 2 g…

> The last thing that bugs me is peoples claims the new mods (if chosen by reddit employees) wont be as high quality as the previous ones. No one has ever proven the current moderation teams are any good. There is some competition between subreddits for attention, and a bad mod team can cause a subreddit to lose that competition (including to subreddits on different subjects), so there is some amount of successful co…

> There is some competition between subreddits for attention

The existing sub-subreddits organically evolved from disputes between more primary subreddits about the type of content users wanted to see; e.g. r/atheism decides they don't want low-quality meme posts, so r/atheismmemes is created. If reddit were to simply remove the mods from thousands of subreddits, it could easily sour those communities.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#107

It's not clear to me the Reddit users will be permanently gone either, unless there's some place like Reddit taking in a lot more users right now. But I haven't heard of any place like that so far. No real competitor for users to jump ship towards.

Or maybe people will realize they were not happy with the amount of time they were spending on Reddit and go habituate themselves to something completely different with that time.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#108
post #25
post #8

I never understand why Reddit is credited to the "free community based moderation" idea Facebook does this at much larger scale (2B users active in FB Groups), with way more spam, and some FB groups are much larger than most big subreddits Its not about Facebook or Reddit, its about people being so power hungry they do these things for free. When subreddits post about bringing in more mods, thousands apply, maybe 2 g…

I could make a huge list of what Reddit design gets wrong, or at least outdated or suboptimal. But the land grab for names turned into one of its biggest, fixable weaknesses. Reddit should boot up another letter, /d/ or something, and give the communities numbers or hex identifiers, (which they already sort of do with the short urls) and make the names irrelevant. Communities can choose to port over and redirect. Ove…

>/d/ or something

But not /d/, you don't want that implication.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#109
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you're wrong and there's an actual reason that 90% of the subreddits went on strike such that any new mods wouldn't accept these conditions either. Like you really think people are so power hungry they'd sign up to do this for free while being restricted to using only one finger to do all of the work or something absurd like that? No, there are limits.

> Like you really think people are so power hungry they'd sign up to do this for free while being restricted to using only one finger to do all of the work or something absurd like that? Isn't that exactly what people have been doing for well over a decade?

No, third parties made tools for them (and some automated things themselves.) Now those tools are being taken away from them. They would basically have to pay to be mods to continue doing things the way they were being done. That's my understanding of the situation anyway.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#110
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not reddit data, users data.

Doesn't Reddit own the data now? That's the unfortunate truth of these platforms. They offer your a platform and pay for hosting and you give them your attention and content.

Legally, they don't own the data, but they do have a perpetual license to the data and can do basically whatever they want it with it. Not much of a difference but it's one of these things where the details might be crucial.
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