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

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

#231

Post by jahlove » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 4:54 PM UTC

vorpalhex wrote: post #159

dmix wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do believe Reddit admins heavily influence the culture of the hyper-modding but at the same time tons of subreddits go way beyond just moderating out the bad stuff and act like full blown newspaper editors who delete 75%+ of organically upvoted submitted content because it doesn't fit their view of what the subreddit should be. They really aren't legitimately user-generated subreddits anymore and there's always thi…

I still am very upset about /r/politics becoming super partisan. Reddit as a whole has always had biases, but there was a time when /r/politics was fairly centrist and genuinely useful as an aggregator with intelligent commentary. It's now a reposting of vox/buzzfeed more or less.

agreed. I have voted Democrat for a long time, but I can't stand how partisan it's become. The comments are always so low-effort too. The top voted comment in almost any thread will be something like, "fuck trump".

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

#232

Post by trianglem » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 4:54 PM UTC

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…

r/the_donald has many many posts advocating for violence against certain groups in clear violation of policy. These posts would stay up for days or weeks. In my opinion quarantining them was basically a slap on the wrist.

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

#233

Post by 0xffff2 » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 4:55 PM UTC

slothtrop wrote: post #219

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.

What comes next? Don't say Discord.

Does anyone give Discord as a serious answer to that question? I'm really struggling to figure out how a glorified IRC replacement is going to fill the same niche as Reddit.

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

#234

Post by kordlessagain » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 5:00 PM UTC

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #201

ken wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible to migrate software without driving off all your users. It's soft , after all. When the 8-bit wave crested, that didn't mean Apple was done as a company. Why do we accept that such a short-lived company (less than one human generation) is "a good run", just because it's software? If Tesla turned into a "classic pump and dump scheme", nobody would say "Well, Tesla is 16 years old. They've had a good run.…

It makes sense to think of Reddit as an application rather than a company. Reddit the application depends on network effects to grow, and without growth, decay will be inevitable. Facebook the company has been able to create other applications that grow, even while Facebook the application is starting a network effect-triggered death spiral. Reddit Inc. has not created any other growth applications like the Reddit ap…

> It makes sense to think of Reddit as an application rather than a company.

Saying something makes sense doesn't make it make sense. Reddit is not just an application. Reddit is millions of like-minded users exchanging thoughts on a wide variety of subjects. The software or application may affect how those users interact with the other users, but it is the users at the end of the day that define what Reddit (or this site) is.

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

#235

Post by conradfr » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 5:01 PM UTC

coldpie wrote: post #176

arkades wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I tried one, called GameWisp, when a creator I support moved over there, but they skipped the "skilled employee" part. My subscription start date was rendered in their web app as "(null)", which doesn't inspire confidence in a payment processor. The creator shortly moved back to Patreon. Sigh.

Well https://blog.gamewisp.com/gamewisp-is-saying-goodbye-2933df9...

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

#236

Post by q3k » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 5:04 PM UTC

arkades wrote: post #168

coldpie wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Unfortunately this suffers from the 'Effective Target Audience: Assholes' effect.

It's basically impossible to start a YT or Patreon or Twitter alternative without either accidentally or actively pandering to people who have been kicked out of the main competitor, which mostly happen to be neonazis and/or fascists.

As such, most alternatives will immediately have their main pages full of hate speech and nazi propaganda. Even if there is a part of the user base that just wants an alternative to the Big Thing for other reasons, it quickly gets taken over and drowned out. Finally, after some time, the site just gets labeled as 'The Nazi {Patreon, Twitter, ..}' and every member becomes guilty by association, the community is just pure fash, and sometimes even gets dropped by advertisers/payment processors after public outcry.

See: voat (full of hate speech, basically a shelter for all banned reddit communities), gab (actively pandering to alt-right), subscribestar (paypal dropped them after public outrage), ...

I think the only 'alternative' I've seen not evolve into this is Mastodon, and that's probably because of how openly anti-fascist the first adopters (and developers) were, and because they didn't need to turn any profit.

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

#237

Post by nbrempel » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 5:10 PM UTC

For those who enjoy the Reddit format but don’t enjoy Reddit itself, I recommend taking a look at Tildes. It’s a much smaller community, of course, but the discourse is decent and it’s open source and not for profit.

https://tildes.net/

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

#238

Post by CydeWeys » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 5:10 PM UTC

dmix wrote: post #144

Cephalopterus wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I do believe Reddit admins heavily influence the culture of the hyper-modding but at the same time tons of subreddits go way beyond just moderating out the bad stuff and act like full blown newspaper editors who delete 75%+ of organically upvoted submitted content because it doesn't fit their view of what the subreddit should be. They really aren't legitimately user-generated subreddits anymore and there's always thi…

The moderators are just users though, oftentimes ones who just got there first. If you don't like the vision for any given subreddit you can create your own with more lax moderation. There's plenty of stories where subs split off because of moderation differences and ended up becoming bigger than their parent. See /r/gameofthrones vs /r/freefolk for an example.

Personally I find that the more strictly a subreddit is moderated, the better it tends to be.

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

#239

Post by CydeWeys » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 5:14 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…

You're underestimating the abuse, moderation, support, and fraud burden that results from doing so much sheer volume. So that's a lot of support people right there, and those support people will need a fair number of engineers writing the tools they use to do their job.

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

#240

Post by TurkishPoptart » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 5:16 PM UTC

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.

Yes, but they don't _need_ to do this to stay afloat and relevant. How's their ad revenue? They could keep the stupid app, keep the dumb messages trying to convince me to switch to the app, and I'd still use it. But this is just a slap in the face to the average user.