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What Reddit Got Wrong

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Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#251

Post by m463 »

dale_glass wrote: post #3

I think the idea put out by some people here that Reddit might be in the process of radically changing tracks is plausible. Reddit was always very hands-off. They had lots of very unpleasant and controversial content until their hand was forced. Overall they seem to want a site that runs itself as much as possible and over time content that required interaction and management (eg, AMAs, Secret Santa) got de-prioritiz…

Make a site where nobody cares as much, by eliminating the "righteous fringe", and then settle in to make money.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#252

Post by m463 »

spencerhakim wrote: post #121
jarcoal wrote: post #73

What went wrong is that after being divested from Condé Nast, reddit went and raised a huge round that ensured they would have to go down the route of synthetic growth tactics. This whole operation could be wildly profitable with a team of 50-100 people and no major investors to appease. Instead they read the room wrong, or just didn't care, and now we're here.

Reddit should have stuck to the Craigslist model of simply just existing as-is, selling a reasonable amount of ads and premium subscriptions, and only having the minimum number of employees required to keep the site up. It never needed to be and shouldn't have been anything more than that.

I was thinking of craigslist too. They resisted ebay, and change for change's sake, and ... well lots of things:

  People tell us what they like about craigslist including:

  - Giving people a voice
  - A sense of trust and even intimacy
  - Consistency of down-to-earth values
  - Simplicity
  - No charges, except for job postings
  - Freshness of the material
  - No ads, particularly no banner ads
https://www.craigslist.org/about/mission_and_history

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#253

Post by tacocataco »

somethingreen wrote: post #191
nullindividual wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Put those together and it's plausible that Reddit wants to go from a discussion site with cats to a cats feed site with meaningless discussion, and a bunch of ads mixed in. Based off of my personal experience with many subreddits that have a four digit plus subscriber count, I think reddit has largely already achieved the above goal. The amount of mindless "me too!" and "here's how that works /confidentlyincorrect"…

Which is why I don't think that moderator strike will have much effect. All these popular trash filled subreddits are moderated. Moderators just don't do that good of a job. Managing a community is hard and I sympathize with people doing it for free and failing. But as result, the number of subreddits that will actually be destroyed by their mods leaving is too small to affect company balance sheet. Vast majority of…

I don't think the strike will have much of an effect because there is a end date.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#254

Post by cma »

chaosjevil wrote: post #33

The main problem with this article is that it's only handling the current events, without taking into account that Reddit has a long-standing history of user-hostile decisions. For example... let's talk about The_Donald, shall we? (inb4: I'm not from USA, "Trump" and "Biden" for me are just "some leaders from some tacoland", so I'm not emotionally attached into this matter.) Some users were protesting that The_Donald…

> And using a bullshit reason to do so (a single post encouraging people to beat cops, or crap like that.)

the_donald also promoted the white supremacist Unite the Right rally (the tiki torch KKK one) in an official manner with a stickied post from mods.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#255

Post by FeetYeet »

ProAm wrote: post #169
wvenable wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Damn, living in the future is wild.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#256

Post by tracerbulletx »

willis936 wrote: post #58
nicce wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit, like any other social media platform is worthless without users. We will see in few months what is the situation and if someone manages to advertise an alternative for millions of people. Then, Reddit IPO is doomed. If there is no new significant alternative where people will go, then IPO will probably continue as planned and API change went well from the Reddit’s perspective.

Why does an alternative need to exist? The attention economy is saturated and users are likely happy to have one less feed.

The main thing Reddit has that is not available elsewhere is a massive relatively unbiased backlog of discussions and community wikis covering topics like what are the best delis/restaurants/bars in city X or car recommendations, or how to find good deals on menswear, or almost any other thing imaginable, this is truly valuable and worth having in society.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#257

Post by BudaDude »

chimeracoder wrote: post #86
Gloomily3819 wrote: post #29

"Reddit has an admirable record when it comes to defending an open and free internet." Had*. Ever since Aaron died, it's become a censorious bubble.

> Had*. Ever since Aaron died, it's become a censorious bubble. Aaron Swartz had very little involvement with Reddit for several years before his death, and also some of Reddit's most notorious (at least at the time) "censorship" actions took place before his death. It's a little unfair to his memory to conflate the two things, especially given that he spent the last five years of his life doing things he deeply care…

I agree with this. SOPA, PIPA, Net Neutrality (RIP), Bernie Sanders gaining national recognition, and so many other positive Reddit things happened after his death.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#258

Post by raverbashing »

clnq wrote: post #215
ben_w wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, dumb question incoming: How hard would it be to make a thing with the same API as Reddit so the apps that are currently about to shut down can instead change base domain and keep going? Including existing OSS servers, assuming there already is some (complete!) open source one somewhere — I can google for the attempts ("plebbit" was submitted here for discussion only last week) but I can't trivially tell if they'r…

Probably not hard to write an adapter at all. But it's not the API that made these apps popular and appealing. It's the Reddit community. The apps would write their own adapters if there was an alternative social media website with this community.

If you flipped the switch on the apps, you'd have your community in no time

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#259

Post by monnok »

transcriptase wrote: post #35
greenpresident wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is already a large population of bots reposting formerly popular content, including the comments from the original thread. It’s eerie once you notice it.

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.

Lately, I’ve seen comments copied verbatim from lower in the very same comment section.

They’ll find a comment with upvotes rising above its thread neighbors, but with the entire thread neighborhood buried at the bottom of the comment section. Then they’ll just staple that low comment as a response to some visible comment in a thread much higher up the comment section.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#260

Post by oska »

pbae wrote: post #164
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 wh…

I've had thoughts along similar lines. My idea was that users should have the ability to select their favoured mod team from a range of teams. So all moderating the same namespace but swapping out different mod teams would give you a different view of the content in that namespace.
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