An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads? • Hacker News Board

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#161

Post by ghostpepper » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 3:40 PM UTC

u801e wrote: post #116

harimau777 wrote: post #31

It feels to me like social media has been imploding recently. It seems like I am seeing more and more efforts to overtly force people use an app, associate browsing with an account, and link their account with a real world identity (e.g. via phone number). This in turn makes the platforms less useful and more hostile to users and presumably at some point that will cause users to leave the system. It also feels like s…

> but I'm not sure what people could move to if Reddit becomes non-viable. but I'm not sure what people could move to if Reddit becomes non-viable. In the past, a lot of non-technical people posted to usenet newsgroups and connected to IRC for online chat.

How non-technical are we talking here, though?

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#162

Post by officeplant » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 3:40 PM UTC

Pigo wrote: post #102

m0ck wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have thick skin, anonymous imageboards have been here forever, altough the quality of discussion varies.

The board that shall not be named was very interesting back in the day. There was always garbage, but even a simple battle toads thread could be a lot of fun to follow. I never knew if the interesting people found a new home, or disbanded, but I sure miss when fun stuff happened there.

lainchan used to be a decent way to avoid the big chans once they got vile, but still find decent people outside of meatspace. A well curated set of subreddits used to be find, but I'm feeling less and less motivated to continue on with keeping it organized. Private discord servers have taken over as the default hangout space for most of my friend groups with telegram and small forums starting to take root now as well.

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#163

Post by jandrese » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 3:41 PM UTC

mietek wrote: post #65

aloisdg wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

7y with around ~40k karma. I am already leaving a bit more everyday. old.reddit.com is a blessing from the past.

12 year club; charter member; already gone.

The thing about leaving is that I don't know where I would go. As much as I much preferred the way Usenet clients worked the weak moderation made it untenable. Most of the competing sites are overrun with the neo-nazis that were kicked out of Reddit or topics are limited to whatever the news story of the day is. The ability to create long term communities around extremely niche topics is the strength of Reddit. Despite its slogan about being the front page of the Internet, Reddit's front page is almost completely worthless, and the people who chase after the front page are a detriment to the site.

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#164

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 3:41 PM UTC

coldpie wrote: post #99

Glyptodon wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd caveat this very slightly, as sometimes a business model turns out to be existentially viable, but lacks the kind of scale, revenue, or exponential growth that VCs want to see.

If your business model doesn't include paying back your investors, it's not viable. If your business model does pay back investors, or doesn't require them, then congrats! You've avoided the dismal equilibrium and have a successful business that serves its users instead of abuses them :)

[deleted]

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#165

Post by criddell » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 3:42 PM UTC

harimau777 wrote: post #31

It feels to me like social media has been imploding recently. It seems like I am seeing more and more efforts to overtly force people use an app, associate browsing with an account, and link their account with a real world identity (e.g. via phone number). This in turn makes the platforms less useful and more hostile to users and presumably at some point that will cause users to leave the system. It also feels like s…

Is Reddit social media? Are usenet newsgroups and IRC channels social media?

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#166

Post by saiya-jin » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 3:44 PM UTC

MentallyRetired wrote: post #121

jermaustin1 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying staff? Hosting costs? Recouping money for the time they spent on it?

Right? It's almost as if they have expenses to pay for. They provide value and they're entitled to earn a profit off of it. As a small business owner myself, I'm surprised by the amount of people who expect everything to be free.

Nah, on place like reddit you can easily cover costs by ads. Almost nothing is really free online these days. But greed is never too far away and who doesn't want to have latest yacht, mcmansion etc.

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#167

Post by jandrese » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 3:45 PM UTC

BlueTemplar wrote: post #125

imglorp wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar, 65k, but still hanging on. I mod a couple small subs. My observation is the worst aspect of monetization is on the communities themselves. For the first half, say, it was standard spectrum: some trolls and schmucks but for the most part regular folks with something to say. April Fools projects from the admins wowed us year after year at the creativity and cordiality. Then came the ads and the apps, no picnic…

There are some things on Reddit that I thankfully rarely experience, but that drive me absolutely mad when I do : automatic thread locking after some time and shadow bans. Both of these violate netiquette! As a reminder, proper netiquette is to necropost instead of creating a duplicate thread. And shadow banning is not a tool that most moderators should even have, and should only be used against the most horrible tro…

I'm not sure I agree about necroposting. I find it tends to increase the noise level more than simply creating a new thread about the topic in some cases, as people see a post with tons of comments and don't realize that many of those comments are out of date and no longer accurate/relevant.

There's obviously a line to draw somewhere. You don't want 50 posts on the same topic clogging the top of the feed, but zombie threads where the first 90% is out of date or irrelevant are also bad. Locking a thread after it has been idle for a week or two seems like a reasonable compromise to me.

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#168

Post by arkades » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 3:48 PM UTC

coldpie wrote: post #148

stefan_ wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

reddit was once a small business in 2016 that turned plenty profit. Then someone got it into their head to turn it into a VC company, quintupled the headcount, took $150M investment from China, you know how it goes. So now you have a whole bunch of people doing a reenactment of Silicon Valley, only the actual site experience for users has basically not changed since 10 years now (except "corporate innovations" like n…

> Look to Patreon God, this one baffles me. I feel like you could write that website and app with 5-10 skilled employees and a handful more for support and administrative overhead, skim your 10% of a good chunk of all Internet microtransactions, and retire early. Then they go and nuke all their goodwill trying to milk every cent they can out of the process[1]. What the fuck? Just make a product people want to use and…

There are an awful lot of Patreon users waiting for an alternative. If it’s so easy...

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#169

Post by patcon » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 3:49 PM UTC

grep_name wrote: post #91

harimau777 wrote: post #31

It feels to me like social media has been imploding recently. It seems like I am seeing more and more efforts to overtly force people use an app, associate browsing with an account, and link their account with a real world identity (e.g. via phone number). This in turn makes the platforms less useful and more hostile to users and presumably at some point that will cause users to leave the system. It also feels like s…

> This in turn makes the platforms less useful and more hostile to users and presumably at some point that will cause users to leave the system. People always seem to brush off this kind of comment when I see it discussed, usually the argument is "well, you're a software developer / superuser, normal people don't care about these things." It will be interesting to see where the breaking point actually is; I've always…

> It will be interesting to see where the breaking point actually is; I've always felt that platform users deserve a little more respect than that.

I read your comment as a really strong case for platform co-operativism -- multi-stakeholder democracy for online platforms: not just owners making decisions, but users and maybe employees together with owners. Generally, democratic currents (whether government or corporate) only emerge through changes in our collective sense of "how things should be".

I'm hoping we all start to realize we're serfs on all these platforms, and start wondering "hey, we're generating most of this wealth... why aren't we given a say in decision-making?"

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#170

Post by Chirael » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 3:50 PM UTC

Cephalopterus wrote: post #124

jackcosgrove wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing lasts forever. Reddit is 14 years old. They've had a good run. I think there is a general trend away from user-generated content as a business model, because that content can be a bit salty. Reddit might just be cashing out because the wave they rode has already crested.

> because that content can be a bit salty. AKA the fate of every site that is a collection of usergenerated content with an ad based business model. If you want to get serious about monetization then you need to actively curtail any content that is not "advertiser friendly" which in most cases means alienating your core content generators, case in point, Tumblr.

YouTube is starting to do this as well. For example they've made it so that accounts with less than 1000 subscribers can't do live streams any more. Not coincidentally, 1000 subscribers is the threshold for monetization (i.e., when ads start getting shown on all the account's videos).

A lot of smaller channels are upset about it, since live streams were one of the ways they were /getting/ to 1000 subscribers in the first place, but you can't fight the platform :(