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What Reddit Got Wrong

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Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#131

Post by zwily »

satvikpendem wrote: post #76
ilyt wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could just charge $2 for "API access with enough limits for power users" and pay both for missing ads and for API usage

That's exactly what they are doing with the API lol, but people still got outraged at that. The Apollo dev said that he would have to charge every user $2.50 a month to cover costs of the API, so even if the Apollo dev is exaggerating, $2.50 is not that high if people really want to user third party apps.

He was even open to doing that. Just not in 30 days.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#132

Post by renewiltord »

chaosjevil wrote: post #33

The main problem with this article is that it's only handling the current events, without taking into account that Reddit has a long-standing history of user-hostile decisions. For example... let's talk about The_Donald, shall we? (inb4: I'm not from USA, "Trump" and "Biden" for me are just "some leaders from some tacoland", so I'm not emotionally attached into this matter.) Some users were protesting that The_Donald…

> Why doesn't Reddit outright tell its users its values? Why is it always lying? Why does it put a CEO to disdain the community, with a "we snoos" (something redditors never use)?

The real answer is that everyone asking this question is just revving up for a fight. It's like apologizing for something that you said as a teenager that was found on social media: the only people asking for the apology don't really care whether or not you apologize.

The right approach in this situation is always to walk the path where no one can tell what's up. Do not define the situation. You're going to get raked over the coals anyway, so get the best you can out of it.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#133

Post by sieabahlpark »

MostlyStable wrote: post #124
mvdtnz wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)…

[dead]

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#134

Post by TylerE »

MostlyStable wrote: post #128
joshstrange wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To appear trustworthy.

Account says buy bitcoin - user checks history and sees 7 year old account with thousands of posts, many highly upvoted, so assumes source is sane and not astroturf.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#135

Post by mvdtnz »

MostlyStable wrote: post #124
mvdtnz wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)…

1) As always it depends on the query. For categories like cars/engines, gardening/landscaping and DIY stuff I've found that a Bing search often outperforms Google because it returns a dedicated section for internet discussions that isn't focused completely on Reddit. Here's an example of that section from a search about manifolds for an old engine[0].

There is a TON of (actually good) community discussion on such topics on "the old internet" as long as it doesn't need to be timely.

For topics that need more timeliness, I don't have a good answer. The internet in general is so enshittified that maybe Reddit is the only good answer when the alternative is AI-generated garbage.

2) In my experience, for factual information, it's just too much of a minefield. Try finding actually accurate information on Reddit about Roundup/glyphosate, for example. Compare what you find to the actual published research on the topic. It is very hard to find correct information on this topic on Reddit, and where you do see it, it will be downvoted to invisibility. [0] https://imgur.com/a/8NNcwTJ

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#136

Post by ravenstine »

dale_glass wrote: post #3

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…

All you have to do is look at what every other social media platform has done, which is devolve into an infinite scroll of the following:

- Kitty/puppy videos

- Exotic street food

- girls with shorts/leggings showing buttcrack or cameltoe acting oblivious or holding a product (i.e. using ambiguous sexuality to sell something)

- Someone doing some kind of weird elaborate craft as a form of spectacle

- Twerking or faux-twerking dances

- A person being kind to the homeless

- "you won't believe" compilations of various things like near car accidents

- Crazy/dangerous parkour

- Some green smoothie brand targeted at young people doing yoga

It's no wonder Reddit has been moving in this direction as well. People eat this shit up, they're more profitable as advertisements, require way less moderation, and are overall less of a hassle than hosting discussions.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#137

Post by SoftTalker »

soperj wrote: post #112
tmaly wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Napster worked because it was free and easy and that didn't exist before (FTP servers were not easy). If it were because it was centralized then bit-torrent would have never taken off.

Hm. FTP servers are pretty easy. "ls" to see files. "get" to get them. What wasn't easy was finding them, and then preventing them falling over when too many people tried to access them at the same time. Napster solved that with distributed file serving and consolidated listings of what was available.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#138

Post by skeaker »

cm2012 wrote: post #23

At this point I hope Reddit kicks out mods from all major subreddits still set to private and places their own people. I'm tired of drama from 3% of the Reddit population (or less) impacting the other 97% negatively. I just don't think either side has the moral high ground. The mods like the convenience of 3rd party apps. I get it. It's not a real moral issue.

Regardless of your thoughts on the actual changes made, I think most would agree that Reddit is distinctly in the wrong thanks to the bald-faced lies that the CEO has tried to use to pin the blame for his decisions on innocent parties. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36245435

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#139

Post by MostlyStable »

TylerE wrote: post #134
MostlyStable wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To appear trustworthy. Account says buy bitcoin - user checks history and sees 7 year old account with thousands of posts, many highly upvoted, so assumes source is sane and not astroturf.

That's my point though: how often do people do that check? I don't think I personally ever have. Maybe I'm just weird though? I tend to not just go with a single user/comment/thread, but rather try to find multiple different answers and gestalt from there, so individual trustworthiness is less important.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#140

Post by ndiddy »

scythe wrote: post #108
basch wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm sure a lot of the Reddit users wouldn't mind
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