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

An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 376 posts

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

#211

Post by CM30 »

lghh wrote: post #98
AJ007 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you using now? I’ve been an active member of various communities and forums over the years (excluding reddit), and I never actively left one. It was always just a realization I hadn’t been to the site (or really aging myself, BBS) in a year. Most of them where daily habits at one point.

I wonder if there is a market for a Reddit alternative that is somehow treads the line between being a cesspool like that one site that tried to replace Reddit when they banned a lot of fascist stuff was and that other site that infantilized everyone. Is there a middle ground? I feel like treading it would be useful.

There is a market for this, and I believe at some point a site like this will probably replace Reddit... but it can't be started on that basis. It'll have to be set up independently of Reddit, grow organically with its own community, then get successful enough that people move over when there's already an established userbase.

That's how communities get big without becoming cesspools or going over the top on the moderation. See recent examples of Discord and Twitch, which started out targeted to gamers, and have gone mainstream from there.

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

#212

Post by golergka »

Someone1234 wrote: post #45

This is classic shortermism. Reddit is, in the short term, driving more external users towards creating user accounts while in the long term removing one of the major value funnels for why they would (i.e. the quality of comments, particularly in certain niche communities/about niche topics). This will give them a short term "bump" at the cost of the site's long term relevance (as it falls down Google's search result…

What else could you get when these decisions are made by employees who don't own significant amount of stock? The whole incentive model of employmen in modern world isn't built towards long-term thinking. The company you're working for is too big for you to make any impact on the long-term, but your own career depends entirely on the short-term.

I don't think that a co-founder would ever make such a short-sighted decision.

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

#213

Post by echelon »

saiya-jin wrote: post #166
MentallyRetired wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They could have covered costs with stupid Reddit Gold and spared us the ads altogether.

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

#214

Post by gnome_chomsky »

coldpie wrote: post #138
bovermyer wrote: post #127

So, who's up for going back to forums with small but active communities?

(Psst, come try the Something Awful Forums :-) )

Truth, I remember reddit cratering the active user base there ten years ago, but I've found myself going back again over the past few years again, craving the type of community there vs the lowest common denominator and ad filled garbage that is reddit.

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

#215

Post by DataGata »

eric_cc wrote: post #147

Are there any good alternatives to the reddit platform? I've been a user since 2006. When reddit blew up in popularity, many subs massively declined in quality as is to be expected. Niche subs, however, remained pretty great. But reddit as an organization is beyond repair at this point. Changes like this are now par for the course. Worse even, reddit is now engaged in censoring subs. The most obvious and possibly mos…

One solution might be a "federated reddit". Hacker News is essentially just a subreddit run by YC, so getting people/organizations/interest groups to run their own reddit forums is probably a good idea. It would let each community figure out its own income stream and not worry about advertisers running wild or the entire thing being bought out by the Chinese.

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

#217

Post by foobiekr »

davidmurdoch wrote: post #89
AJ007 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they going to get away with keeping all of their google volume by cloaking the google bot and hiding the content from everyone else? Comments make up the vast majority of Reddit’s unique content. I would guess on a word basis it’s over 99%?

Google will figure the higher bounce rate of the page (the user quickly went back to the SERP) means it's not as relevant as they thought, so they'll move it down in the search rankings.

The Pinterest issue has been there for 4+ years. When does Google figure it out?

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

#218

Post by jopsen »

cytzol wrote: post #7
Havoc wrote: post #3

They've been making increasingly more user hostile choice lately. Digg lessons weren't apparently not learned

Learning lessons? They're making their website worse on purpose! They don't want people to use the Reddit website — they want people to use the app, because that's where all the ads and tracking is.

Pushing the app is why I never managed to use reddit for anything.

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

#219

Post by slothtrop »

jackcosgrove wrote: post #113
Someone1234 wrote: post #45

This is classic shortermism. Reddit is, in the short term, driving more external users towards creating user accounts while in the long term removing one of the major value funnels for why they would (i.e. the quality of comments, particularly in certain niche communities/about niche topics). This will give them a short term "bump" at the cost of the site's long term relevance (as it falls down Google's search result…

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.

What comes next? Don't say Discord.

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

#220

Post by Scoundreller »

Karunamon wrote: post #192
Flozzin wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much it costs to get a thousand bot accounts to subscribe to your account.

About $90ish after some cursory searching. I wouldn't do it, though, seems like a great way to get a nasty surprise in the future when the bots get terminated.

There’s also an hours of viewing requirement.

The sad part about the sub requirement is that many forms of content are valuable but not sub-worthy.

If you create a video on how to fix a ‘93 Hyundai’s brakes and next week how to fix your vintage garage door, I’m not going to sub. It’s not « feedable » content

Maybe I would if it was entertaining in a time-wasting way, but that shouldn’t be a requirement.

ChrisFix isn’t going to make a brake-change video for every car out there.

Post reply on HN