Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What Reddit Got Wrong

eff.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 284 posts

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#121

Post by spencerhakim »

jarcoal wrote: post #73

What went wrong is that after being divested from Condé Nast, reddit went and raised a huge round that ensured they would have to go down the route of synthetic growth tactics. This whole operation could be wildly profitable with a team of 50-100 people and no major investors to appease. Instead they read the room wrong, or just didn't care, and now we're here.

Reddit should have stuck to the Craigslist model of simply just existing as-is, selling a reasonable amount of ads and premium subscriptions, and only having the minimum number of employees required to keep the site up. It never needed to be and shouldn't have been anything more than that.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#122

Post by CapstanRoller »

nicce wrote: post #24
willis936 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't have numbers, but if it hadn't blown up in their face then we wouldn't be talking about it. What is reddit's product? The users. What happens IPO valuation when the users leave?

Reddit, like any other social media platform is worthless without users. We will see in few months what is the situation and if someone manages to advertise an alternative for millions of people. Then, Reddit IPO is doomed. If there is no new significant alternative where people will go, then IPO will probably continue as planned and API change went well from the Reddit’s perspective.

>Reddit, like any other social media platform is worthless without users.

Worthless under their current model. What if their new model is to simulate other users with ChatGPT? Many users don't engage with comments beyond voting/reading. How long would it take them to notice, and if they notice would they care?

Can Huffman coast to IPO, grab the money, then bail?

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#123

Post by mattstir »

incomingpain wrote: post #11

There are a dozen better reasons to quit reddit. The only reason people are protesting api pricing is because they want to protest. The actual concern here isn't what they are protesting. They want to quit but they can't. They likely even realize they are addicted. They likely even realize the content they view is censored and curated to manipulate them. Just quit reddit already and be happy.

> The only reason people are protesting api pricing is because they want to protest. The actual concern here isn't what they are protesting.

No...? It's a decision that impacts millions of people that rely solely on third-party apps to have any decent experience on Reddit at all. The "official" app is a hot dumpster fire and lacks incredibly basic accessibility features, among other shortcomings. The official app is a joke but instead of making it better to entice more users onto it (and thus see more ads), they just exploded the entire community.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#124

Post by MostlyStable »

mvdtnz wrote: post #87
nullindividual wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"…

> The amount of mindless "me too!" and "here's how that works /confidentlyincorrect" This is what gets me about all the people lately claiming that the only way to get good Google results is to append site:reddit.com - I have spent enough time looking at Reddit threads to know I would never trust them for important information. People who post on Reddit are very often just completely wrong, and often that wrongness b…

1) Compared to what? It's really important to compare those reddit results to elsewhere and not the hypothetical "best" answer. Yeah, reddit answers are often not great, but in my experience, the rest of google search has, over the past 10 years, gone to complete and utter shit. If I don't already know where to look (and just want google to get me there faster), 99% of my results are going to be useless blogspam.

2) It's even more important to have an understanding of the _kinds_ of things reddit is good at answering, and which communities provide good answers to those questions. Reddit is so big that there are good and bad versions of almost everything.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#125

Post by lstamour »

neilv wrote: post #96

> What Reddit Got Wrong If you saw that title a month ago, you might read "Reddit" there as "the people talking on Reddit". Whether it was people's emerging consensus/behavior on a noteworthy incident, a more general zeitgeist or Reddit Hive Mind exhibited over time there, or whatever. Reading "Reddit" in the title instead as "Reddit, the company" is less familiar to me.

Highlights how hands off Reddit generally was until now that while we say “Twitter” vs “on Twitter” or “YouTube” vs “YouTuber”, until now we rarely distinguished between “Reddit” and “on Reddit”. Reddit was an invisible benefactor until it wasn’t…

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#126

Post by karmakurtisaani »

jarcoal wrote: post #73

What went wrong is that after being divested from Condé Nast, reddit went and raised a huge round that ensured they would have to go down the route of synthetic growth tactics. This whole operation could be wildly profitable with a team of 50-100 people and no major investors to appease. Instead they read the room wrong, or just didn't care, and now we're here.

In hindsight it's easy to say, but I bet they would be extremely profitable if they had taken less VC funding and kept self-hosting of content to the minimum. Serve a few ads here and there, let companies do their guerilla marketing for a "small donation" and have people pay for their Reddit gold.

But that probably wouldn't put them on track for a few billion dollar IPO, so of course you can't do it.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#127

Post by chaosjevil »

dale_glass wrote: post #72
chaosjevil wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I doubt the likes of Google and Microsoft care in the slightest about the API. Both already run search engines that index all of Reddit. They don't need any API. And Reddit can't block their crawler if it wants to remain relevant. And OpenAI is a company with $10B investment and 375 employees. I'm sure they can figure out web scraping.

I think that they do.

Third party apps need to do a lot of API calls, every time that the user sees content, upvote content, comment content. If you're just retrieving it though? We can simplify it to one API call = one comment.

With that in mind, $0.24 for every 1,000 API calls is damn cheap. It means just $2,400 for 10M comments. It's pocket money, and likely cheaper than to hire a codemonkey to sort web-crawled stuff.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#128

Post by MostlyStable »

joshstrange wrote: post #68
evouga wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the endgame here? Who is buying ripened accounts with lots of karma and why?

People who want to astroturf, from everything from products to politics (though honestly probably more for "products"). Reddit is well known for being one of the few places you can "trust" product reviews (that hasn't been fully true for a while now but it's still valuable). If a near-0 karma and/or new account says "I love X product" then they can sometimes be downvoted/called a shill but an account that's a couple…

Once you cross the extremely small karma barrier needed to get your comments allowed/not be rate limited...whats the point? I use reddit for a lot of recommendations/research and I have _never_ checked the karma of a user after reading their comment.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#129

Post by trts »

mvdtnz wrote: post #87
nullindividual wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"…

> The amount of mindless "me too!" and "here's how that works /confidentlyincorrect" This is what gets me about all the people lately claiming that the only way to get good Google results is to append site:reddit.com - I have spent enough time looking at Reddit threads to know I would never trust them for important information. People who post on Reddit are very often just completely wrong, and often that wrongness b…

it's a fairly common and incredible experience for me to see people on reddit assert the most inane drivel that collect hundreds or thousands of upvotes and enthusiastic agreement.

It makes me feel some combination of

1. Reddit is flooded with bots or brigades that seem to have cryptic agendas

2. My own reality is really far afield and the internet is bursting that bubble OR

3. The present young adult generation exists in a seriously orthogonal reality and absolutely sweeping societal changes are on the horizon (as may already be becoming evident)

I still find a lot of pleasant discourse on the smaller subreddits. But it's an absolute shock to visit some of the larger communities sometimes.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#130

Post by kyriakos »

e4e5 wrote: post #95
hirako2000 wrote: post #59

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.

I haven't tested it but if as a user you were to ask for your days to be deleted they'd have to comply, at least in EU. So if there was a mass walkout a lot of comments and post would disappear.
Post reply on HN