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What Reddit Got Wrong

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Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#151

Post by kibwen »

WalterBright wrote: post #21

> Reddit is transparent about the fact that the company is not profitable. There's the fundamental problem. The bills need to be paid.

Absolutely, though this ignores the fact that Reddit's own actions determine its expenses. Reddit's expenses would decrease dramatically if it didn't support image or video uploading and focused only on being a text-based forum. Of course, this would drive away a lot of people who want to consume image and video content, which is unacceptable to the investors who want to maximize user growth now and figure out profitability later.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#153

Post by dmichulke »

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…

I use reddit to search for a diverse set of options (= many possible solutions), not for facts (wikipedia), code (stackoverflow) or how-tos (YouTube).

Google only gives you a million times the same top n solutions iff your keywords are unique enough.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#154

Post by GartzenDeHaes »

cratermoon wrote: post #111
b112 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, you're saying openai was trained on reddit posts?! No wonder people are scared of AI.

Reddit and StackOverflow notably. Most use https://commoncrawl.org/ or a derivative of it.

You can often google Copilot output and find the source StackOverflow post. Saves a step I guess.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#156

Post by nostrfanboi »

Nice article, but too much focus on federation as a potential solution.

The problem with federated networks ("Fediverse"?) like Mastodon and Matrix is that you still rely on a (sub)domain and someone running a server. That someone could be yourself, but that's just an option for a small minority. That domain could be shut down.

Nostr may solve this: instead of usernames the user has a private/public key. And instead of relying on a specific server your data can flow through many servers (relays).

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#157

Post by wvenable »

mattstir wrote: post #93
willis936 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does an alternative need to exist? The attention economy is saturated and users are likely happy to have one less feed.

> Why does an alternative need to exist? Because there are a great many people that have legitimately used Reddit as their "frontpage of the internet" for years and don't enjoy the form factor that other websites / apps provide. Places like Twitter and TikTok aren't everyone's cup of tea, especially if you're not the type of person that just mindlessly ingests content.

I spend 5 minutes today with some user CSS to reskin Lemmy to be more like Reddit with RES. Another half-hour of effort and at least the form-factor will be pretty similar.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#158

Post by xapata »

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…

> People who post on Reddit are very often just completely wrong, and often that wrongness becomes a meme (in the original sense of the word) that propagates through the site for literally years.

Isn't that just a microcosm of the internet and society in general?

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#159

Post by cityhall »

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…

One thing it's still useful for is getting user reviews that actually tell you if a product is junk or has recently been replaced with an inferior version. Store sites and review pages make it too easy for companies to get negative reviews hidden.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#160

Post by andybak »

willis936 wrote: post #115
mattstir wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why does an alternative need to exist? Because there are a great many people that have legitimately used Reddit as their "frontpage of the internet" for years and don't enjoy the form factor that other websites / apps provide. Places like Twitter and TikTok aren't everyone's cup of tea, especially if you're not the type of person that just mindlessly ingests content.

>if you're not the type of person that just mindlessly ingests content My take is that this type of person is more likely to not need to replace their feed fix with another feed and is more likely to pursue fulfillment in other areas of life.

I think several subreddit in my life would be irreplaceable. I don’t know another platform that would generate those kind of communities.
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