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Reddit needs help

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Re: Reddit needs help

#221

Post by commandar »

petdog wrote: post #189
blhack wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't mind my answering this... Above here, I said that I would pay you $5 a month, and I would...but the only reason for that is that you I've talked to you on here (hacker news) before. To me the people runnign reddit are real . To me, you're a friend and I'm throwing $5 into the can that is duct-taped to your kegerator because you let me drink it for free... ...but for most people? What does reddit offer me…

> /r/pics? /r/askreddit? /r/iama? What? /r/iama is one of the best things that happened to reddit. Sure, most of the submissions are shit, but some are golden. > What does reddit offer me that I can't get elsewhere The community. Most of the value is in the comments. --- About usenet, you could try http://www.astraweb.com/ I bought the once-off 180gb plan. Text isn't even counted. It's going to last me years.

>What? /r/iama is one of the best things that happened to reddit. Sure, most of the submissions are shit, but some are golden.

Well, and there's the problem. The SNR on most of the larger subreddits has gotten absolutely terrible lately. I went through a couple of weeks ago and unsubbed from most of the larger reddits and nearly all the self-post only reddits because I simply don't have the time or inclination to dig through 100 garbage headlines for the one golden post.

>The community. Most of the value is in the comments.

The "community" on reddit is incredibly forced in nature. It's almost entirely based around memes that have been coopted from elsewhere and feel-good circle jerking.

Oh, and let's not forget when the community decides to rage about something, jumps to conclusions, and often as not ends up being completely wrong about it, but only after a significant portion of the users have taken to harassing or otherwise disrupting some innocent person's life.

There's still value to be had on reddit, I just increasingly feel like it's being pushed out more and more to the smaller subreddits.

Re: Reddit needs help

#222

Post by c1sc0 »

Open up self-serve ads for the rest of the world? I wanted to buy ads but I couldn't because reddit is not processing non-US credit cards.

Re: Reddit needs help

#223

Post by scorpion032 »

Move to AppEngine. Seriously. I know the pain these guys are going thro sys-admin-ing the system.

The memcache clears out, The cassandra's fail, the fault reporting system breaks. The new twitter fail whale. Let the pros do the sys admin thing.

Like Ted Zuiba says it, it not that they are not intelligent, the kind of problems that occur at large scales, they just don't have enough experience to know, anticipate and have preventive measures in place.

They should really talk to Google, to move their data on to the Bigtable and work on adding features.

Re: Reddit needs help

#224

Post by code_duck »

megablahblah wrote: post #217
code_duck wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You appear to be claiming to know more than 'shit'. A such, your suggestions are undoubtedly welcome.

Sorry for the tone, but I explained this to them in one of their Reddit announcement posts about their sponsored links, and their response was such that they had no concept of how advertising worked and acted like I was the one that was wrong. Now a few months later, they're begging their users for donations. il lays out exactly what they need to do, so there isn't much else to suggest. Simply set up some ad placemen…

Great tips. You're right, they do need someone besides engineers thinking about this.

Re: Reddit needs help

#225

Post by Conservationist »

Quantity over quality.

Reddit expanded rapidly and exchanged its audience of programmers, writers and creators for the 4chan crowd, who are working entry-level jobs and specialize in buying nothing.

It's great for SEO, but useless for advertising revenue.

Re: Reddit needs help

#226

Post by nphase »

lambda wrote: post #197
nphase wrote: post #194

Here's a silly/naive suggestion from someone who only casually visits reddit (read: not often to know exactly what is causing the downtime): why not make the source code behind the more problematic functions available and let us make suggestions? If not source code, then detailed descriptions? I'd be interested in helping optimize your pain points, as I'm sure many here and on reddit are. Yes, you'll get quite a ton…

You do realize the Reddit source code is available, right? http://code.reddit.com/

Ha! I do now. Awesome.

Re: Reddit needs help

#227

Post by Conservationist »

tomjen3 wrote: post #185
bballbackus wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to give you the reason why I decided just the other day that I want to leave reddit pretty much for good. I have been a fairly active user for the past 2 years or so, both commenting on and submitting content to reddit. When I joined I was fleeing digg's transformation into a 4chan wannabe. Over the past 6-9 months, I've been noticing the same virus, if you will, infecting reddit. The users became more and m…

I have to agree with you about the general reddit.com, but some of the subreddits are still good or even great. However I doubt HN will follow, because unlike digg, slashdot and reddit, PG has shown no interest in gaining traffic at the expense of quality (indeed, he has called for the front page to be splashed with Erlang links, precisely so as to get those who wouldn't fit with the site to go elsewhere).

Some of the subreddits are excellent, but you miss out on what made the community viable: people encountering things they didn't otherwise know to look for.

I'm a mod at:

http://www.reddit.com/r/new_right

There's no way for people to come from the /r/conservative or /r/politics unless we constantly hit them with spam for our subreddit.

Subreddits are like taking your toys and going home.

Re: Reddit needs help

#228

Post by lazyjeff »

jedberg wrote: post #178
silverlake wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't you find interns to help you with stability? Even I would help for free just to get some experience with a very large site.

Each time we've had a new programmer come on board, it takes about 6 months for them to become familiar enough with the code to make a solid contribution. In the mean time, it actually slows us down a bit. That was the main reason we didn't seek programming interns this summer -- it's a great thought, but would probably take too long to ramp them up.

Could you filter for interns with more experience? i.e. ones that have done a couple of internships before at Microsoft, Google, etc. Or since reddit is mostly open source, hire interns that are already familiar with the code base? Or hire interns that can work for 6-9 months rather than 12 weeks?

Just some thoughts...

Re: Reddit needs help

#229

Post by Jd »

risotto wrote: post #210
jedberg wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I can't really see paying for reddit now. If I may ask, what did we do to lose you?

I can't participate in reddit any more! No submission I make gets any traction. Any story I find interesting already has 500+ comments. If I add a comment, nobody replies or votes on it. It's just lost in the noise. I'm not looking to be an karma superstar, I just want a place to actively engage with some other Internet folks from time to time. Reddit got too big. Perhaps HN will one day too. I still browse reddit al…

Actually, I feel just the same way about HN. You have to spend a lot of time on HN to follow the development of conversations and have to get in early to accumulate karma. I'm happy with HN as a somewhat glorified newsfeed with interesting topical commentary from coders but as a place to actually engage with people the pace is too fast (i.e. like a newsfeed) and the subject matter too limited in scope, at least given my interests.

Re: Reddit needs help

#230

Post by scorpion032 »

city41 wrote: post #12

I think if any site could pull this off, Reddit could. Somehow, somewhere, someway, Reddit became a social news site that has a strong sense of community to it. Redditors feel good being "Redditors", and feel an affinity towards the site. My prediction is this actually works.

I love the community. Would love to pay for it. But a charity by me, to a huge corporate; really? THERE HAS GOT TO BE A BETTER WAY.
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