Reddit just passed Facebook as #3 most popular website in US • Hacker News Board

Re: Reddit just passed Facebook as #3 most popular website in US

#281

Post by usmannk » Wed, May 30, 2018, 9:13 PM UTC

RandallBrown wrote: post #236

_seemethere wrote: post #161

Why doesn't reddit try to roll out an enterprise product? I'm sure a lot of companies would be willing to pay to have an interface like reddit internally. Most current solutions for this problem aren't very good and I feel like reddit could be a good alternative. (not the redesign though, loading times on that would make it basically unusable)

About 6 years ago we had a self hosted reddit that someone hacked to hook in to our ActiveDirectory. It's the best QA/Wiki/Group communication tool I've ever used at a company. I've thought a few times that you could build a startup on selling a modified version of open source reddit to enterprises. (Not sure how much of reddit is open source anymore though.)

How does this solution compare to, say, Slack in your experience?

Re: Reddit just passed Facebook as #3 most popular website in US

#282

Post by thanatropism » Wed, May 30, 2018, 9:17 PM UTC

makecheck wrote: post #213

exelius wrote: post #15

Reddit works because it’s anonymous, information-dense and relatively ad-free. Change any one of those three and the user base will abandon you. It’s been Reddit’s dilemma since the beginning: you can’t monetize a toxic user base that has total freedom. Sure you can try to drive away the toxic users, but it turns out that those toxic users are also pretty influential in non-toxic aspects. I’m still skeptical of Reddi…

Yeah and right now they’re trying to change more than one to fail faster. Has Reddit tried “periodic fundraisers” like public TV and Wikipedia?

Yeah.

Reddit Gold used to go into funding infrastructure. Gold buyers used to be able to name servers and all.

Re: Reddit just passed Facebook as #3 most popular website in US

#283

Post by yurishimo » Wed, May 30, 2018, 9:17 PM UTC

bastijn wrote: post #233

Shank wrote: post #94

The biggest value gain from Reddit, to me, is the ability to centralize effectively around different hobbies and activities. In the past, if you wanted to find an online community for a movie or a game, you had to find a forum for that community. Finding forums that are well managed and capture a good segment of the community is hard -- and Reddit just becomes a default place to look now. Let's say a new TV show star…

This is an interesting observation. In a podcast [0], Mark Zuckerberg states that his vision behind Facebook has always been to connect people. To make them part of a group as he stresses that every individual has a need for that at some point in life. He stresses that he wants to make this possible even for those with rare conditions that would require a group spread throughout the world. So enable them as they woul…

Personally, I have a hard time believing that Zuckerberg actually believes that vision. Recent events also suggest otherwise, that Facebook is a pure profit machine under the guise of social media, even to it's own detriment, which we've seen pick up steam over the past few months.

Reddit's founder however, despite sometimes holding some controversial views compared to their dominant user base, kept on fostering a community of largely uncensored free speech and allowing people to connect. There are a few exceptions (obvious hate subs, rogue mods, etc) but for the most part, everyone can find a niche and join a community without fearing the platform will change so much to squeeze an extra buck out them.

Reddit and FB are both in the ad revenue game, but Reddit's largely anonymous user model lends itself to those ads feeling less intrusive. If I can live with giving up my fake internet points, I can effectively reset the data Reddit has on me by creating a new account. There could be some residual leftover data depending on IP addresses, but since most houses have multiple occupants, it's not an easy one to one pairing process between an IP address and an particular user.

Not sure where I was going with this. Just spewing nonsense I suppose :)

Re: Reddit just passed Facebook as #3 most popular website in US

#284

Post by ajryan » Wed, May 30, 2018, 9:20 PM UTC

rsync wrote: post #166

hoffbrau99 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like a reddit-like site that is more exclusive, it filters out the non-serious users with a yearly subscription fee of say $100.

"I'd like a reddit-like site that is more exclusive, it filters out the non-serious users with a yearly subscription fee of say $100." This exists: https://www.metafilter.com/ The fee is $5 which turns out to be an insurmountable barrier for just about everyone. I personally like the site very much.

Metafilter has just about the highest groupthink quotient of any site I know of. Every single post ends up being about social justice, even when it isn't.

Re: Reddit just passed Facebook as #3 most popular website in US

#285

Post by AsyncAwait » Wed, May 30, 2018, 9:22 PM UTC

CM30 wrote: post #167

Shank wrote: post #94

The biggest value gain from Reddit, to me, is the ability to centralize effectively around different hobbies and activities. In the past, if you wanted to find an online community for a movie or a game, you had to find a forum for that community. Finding forums that are well managed and capture a good segment of the community is hard -- and Reddit just becomes a default place to look now. Let's say a new TV show star…

Unfortunately, those two things are also Reddit's problems. For starters, everything being centralised means one party now has control over multiple communities, which allows for censorship that wasn't there in the days of separate forums. And tying identities together... well that's probably why there's so much drama online now. Because everyone presents themselves differently to different groups in the real world,…

> everything being centralised means one party now has control over multiple communities

Which is precisely why I started working on a federated alternative that uses ActivityPub to let users essentially build cross-server homepages of their own.

Re: Reddit just passed Facebook as #3 most popular website in US

#286

Post by eXpl0it3r » Wed, May 30, 2018, 9:23 PM UTC

hokkos wrote: post #268

bradlys wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's okay to some extent but I find that forums definitely are a much better resource and controversial threads or posts in forums don't get buried or hidden by a downvote. Some of the most humorous threads you'll read would have had a -inf rating and thus never seen on reddit. To me, reddit seems a great way for a community to reinforce groupthink. Instances I can think of are forums for motorcycles, cars, p…

Subreddits and forums are fundamentally different. Forums are linear and your are expected to have read all the post to post in one thread. There is also the old members who nag you into not creating a new thread but use the search tool to comment on an old one. There is forum local stars that control the discourse far more than on subreddits, and the photo + footer customization make them more prone starification an…

You must be frequenting very specific sub-reddits then. There are plenty that are similarly moderated than forums. And yes, if you ask the same question that has been answered 50 times before, you should accept the fact that it's your job to spend some amount of time to search, instead of just waiting till someone delivers you answers.

Re: Reddit just passed Facebook as #3 most popular website in US

#287

Post by wuliwong » Wed, May 30, 2018, 9:23 PM UTC

exelius wrote: post #15

Reddit works because it’s anonymous, information-dense and relatively ad-free. Change any one of those three and the user base will abandon you. It’s been Reddit’s dilemma since the beginning: you can’t monetize a toxic user base that has total freedom. Sure you can try to drive away the toxic users, but it turns out that those toxic users are also pretty influential in non-toxic aspects. I’m still skeptical of Reddi…

Do you believe that the majority of reddit users are "toxic"? I wouldn't describe myself as a heavy user of reddit but I almost never come across "toxic" behavior. I follow sub-reddits like personal finance, VR and phillips hue lighting. There just isn't much "toxicity" in there as far as I can tell.

Re: Reddit just passed Facebook as #3 most popular website in US

#288

Post by 6cd6beb » Wed, May 30, 2018, 9:24 PM UTC

vatueil wrote: post #176

fein wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And for the majority of the large subs for a specific interest, they are astroturfed to hell and back. Much of the content you see on /r/all is likely corporate shilling with sock puppets controlling the promotion of the item and the comments within. There should be Moore's/ Poe's law for the correlation of the size and influence of a site to the amount of corporate influence on said site. As the natural user base gr…

> And for the majority of the large subs for a specific interest, they are astroturfed to hell and back. Much of the content you see on /r/all is likely corporate shilling with sock puppets controlling the promotion of the item and the comments within. And even more common than actual shilling is unsubstantiated accusations of shilling. You could be right, I grant you, but anecdotally more cases of the latter stick o…

Good shilling (or "guerilla marketing") is hardly detectable, whereas people that complain about it are trying to draw attention. That could explain why cases of one are more visible (regardless of the actual frequency of either).

Good shilling is hardly detectable. Front the logo on a can of coke and leave it in frame (next to a ring maybe) while a couple kisses, post it with the title "happiest moment of my life".

It's subtle, you can use photoshop to make it, and anyone who would call you out on it can easily be framed as whiny and paranoid. They don't have the funds to buy influence on the thread anyway, so you could just slide their posts and avoid dealing with them if you wanted.

I'm not saying anything about how often this stuff actually happens (because no one will tell you they've done it so metrics aren't possible), but I will say only the most obvious plays can get caught. But enough about that, let's just talk about Rampart (joking there, I think AMAs are basically stated to be promotion, it just popped into my head)

Re: Reddit just passed Facebook as #3 most popular website in US

#289

Post by yurishimo » Wed, May 30, 2018, 9:25 PM UTC

bulldoa wrote: post #260

exelius wrote: post #15

Reddit works because it’s anonymous, information-dense and relatively ad-free. Change any one of those three and the user base will abandon you. It’s been Reddit’s dilemma since the beginning: you can’t monetize a toxic user base that has total freedom. Sure you can try to drive away the toxic users, but it turns out that those toxic users are also pretty influential in non-toxic aspects. I’m still skeptical of Reddi…

I have always been wondering, would people choose to pay reddit instead of getting ads, like 1$ or 10$ a month?

This is effectively what Reddit Gold is. In a perfect world, Reddit would be completely funded through Gold, therefore eliminating the pressure on higher ups to increase revenue through ads or other less than ideal revenue streams.

Unfortunately, Gold has not been enough to fund the site (if the sidebar on the front page is to be believed) for a long time.

Re: Reddit just passed Facebook as #3 most popular website in US

#290

Post by jgh » Wed, May 30, 2018, 9:26 PM UTC

wuliwong wrote: post #287

exelius wrote: post #15

Reddit works because it’s anonymous, information-dense and relatively ad-free. Change any one of those three and the user base will abandon you. It’s been Reddit’s dilemma since the beginning: you can’t monetize a toxic user base that has total freedom. Sure you can try to drive away the toxic users, but it turns out that those toxic users are also pretty influential in non-toxic aspects. I’m still skeptical of Reddi…

Do you believe that the majority of reddit users are "toxic"? I wouldn't describe myself as a heavy user of reddit but I almost never come across "toxic" behavior. I follow sub-reddits like personal finance, VR and phillips hue lighting. There just isn't much "toxicity" in there as far as I can tell.

I think you're being a little bit disingenuous here. Not everybody only subscribes to a bunch of niche subreddits with good moderation. A lot of the larger / less strictly moderated subreddits are filled with toxicity, bots, and other nonsense.