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What Reddit Got Wrong

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Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#161

Post by soundsgoodtome »

trts wrote: post #129
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…

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 exis…

4. Most people are idiots.

The older I get, the more I go with #4

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#162

Post by wvenable »

INGSOCIALITE wrote: post #83
ProAm wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple fix, if you use a third party app you need to have Reddit Gold. Problem solved.

But then they don’t get the sweet sweet tracking metrics from their app. Once you pay for Reddit , you don’t see ads in the OEM app either, they can squeeze more value out of people by forcing their app and sucking as much data and analytics about you as possible. They’ve already begun A/B trials of disallowing mobile browsers to access their website, and forcing the app download. This is less about ad revenue than i…

What tracking metrics do you get from the app that wouldn't get by logging API calls? It can't be the valuable to track metrics when you aren't serving ads (since if you have Reddit Premium you don't get ads).

I don't see the point.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#163

Post by TheNewsIsHere »

trts wrote: post #129
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…

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 exis…

I think #3 is closest to the mark, but I don’t think it’s caged to young adults.

For example, if you were to look anywhere on Reddit and found yourself in a thread that just barely, tangentially, almost-not-in-this-plane-of-reality touches on something related to law, a hundred people will show up to give you all sorts of the most inane and dangerous legal advice.

Granted, for something like legal advice you: 1) shouldn’t go Reddit; and 2) should search for an attorney. That said, there are (were?) some places on Reddit where you could find advice or discussion attached to the reality shared by the rest of us. But that isn’t the current draw of the site to the masses.

I’m one of the people who (until this past week) used Reddit in a technical capacity.

That shouldn’t be taken as “I get my solutions from Reddit.” Rather, I posted and consumed niche technical information for unusual problems. There were (are?) a boatload of smaller, vendor specific, etc subreddits that _did_ (do?) have smart people who collaborate or rubber ducky tricky issues.

Most of Reddit is not and was not that.

And as I type that, I realize I must apologize for sort of hijacking your reply with a response to the parent comment. I’ll leave this and have prepended a direct response to the points you raise and added a reasonable segue.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#164

Post by pbae »

shmatt wrote: 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…

Reddit should allow shadow moderation teams to fork a subreddit--easily findable on the subreddit's page rather than through the grapevine about the alt's existence, which users can opt into--to address the issue of name squatting and overbearing moderation. If a critical mass of users vote with their feet, they can flip the subreddit. It would also let users be aware of what the issue in contention are and choose what they want to read, whereas currently the mod teams are pretty quick to squelch all dissent so that their captive audience isn't even aware of the drama.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#165

Post by sedev »

satvikpendem wrote: post #34
tomstockmail wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively: https://www.adweek.com/social-marketing/ripples-through-redd... Of course the CEO during an IPO year is going to downplay the shutdown. That said, there's no way the shutdown is going to change reddit in this case. They will replace the mods on the bigger subs.

They may downplay it but it is likely true. On the Google Play Store alone, the Reddit app has 100 million+ downloads, third party apps have And yes, due to these kinds of numbers, the shutdown will do nothing. Hell, many subs opened up today and r/all is back to normal.

What immediately comes to mind for me is the comparison to third-party Twitter clients mentioned here: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-tweetbot-de...

> Amir Shevat, Twitter’s former head of product for the developer platform, who

> lives in Round Rock, was responsible for ensuring that the tools Twitter

> provided independent software developers using the platform met their needs.

> He said about 17 percent of engagement on Twitter, historically, was through

> third-party apps, which played a vital role in defining Twitter’s identity.

That's 17% of _engagement._ I strongly expect that with both Twitter and Reddit there's a sort of double Pareto distribution going on: the majority of _users_ go through the first-party site/tools/clients, but the majority of _valuable_ users go through the third-party site/tools/clients. The users who are invested enough in the platform to have strong opinions about how things should be done and who use the platform enough that they seek out tools that actively meet their needs rather than just taking the default tools, are also users who are worth, at the very least, _placating_ because those are also the users most able to cause problems if the platform stabs them in the face the way Reddit and Twitter have done.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#166

Post by xapata »

MostlyStable wrote: post #139
TylerE wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You have to remember that with spam, they're looking for gullible people, and the marginal cost of the spam activity is extremely low. To some extent, the Nigerian prince scam works not in spite of, but because it's nonsense.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#167

Post by mvdtnz »

xapata wrote: post #158
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…

> 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?

The internet I came from (in the days of discussion forums) didn't suffer this problem because there were no internet points attached to posts, and posts were ordered oldest to newest. Incorrect information was called out. On Reddit, the "right kind" of incorrect information is upvoted and boosted to the top, and anyone calling out this misinformation is downvoted.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#168

Post by waboremo »

evouga wrote: post #61
transcriptase wrote: post #35

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.

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

Outside of buying accounts, some people literally just want control. For the same reason that people will spend countless hours moderating large subs for free. They want to push certain narratives on subs, so you'll see large accounts where all they post are generic filler distractions or inciteful links. It's not all super nefarious or political, often it's things like mindless fanboy wars, where they only post things that make their favorite companies look good.

For others, they do it because getting upvotes and reddit awards makes them feel good. They see themselves as community pillars. I suppose this kind of feeds into the above reason in some ways.

If you check /r/games today, you'll see one user is responsible for over half of the submissions. Such accounts are what I mean, where unless they have fine tuned a bot to such a degree, they're really just someone with a little bit too much time on their hands.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#169

Post by ProAm »

wvenable wrote: post #162
INGSOCIALITE wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then they don’t get the sweet sweet tracking metrics from their app. Once you pay for Reddit , you don’t see ads in the OEM app either, they can squeeze more value out of people by forcing their app and sucking as much data and analytics about you as possible. They’ve already begun A/B trials of disallowing mobile browsers to access their website, and forcing the app download. This is less about ad revenue than i…

What tracking metrics do you get from the app that wouldn't get by logging API calls? It can't be the valuable to track metrics when you aren't serving ads (since if you have Reddit Premium you don't get ads). I don't see the point.

I think things like time spent looking at an ad, time spent in comments, time spent replying. Capturing all entered data even if its deleted prior to send, etc.....

Everything you can do on the web I guess.

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