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

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

#331

Post by Nasrudith »

jaypeg25 wrote: post #302
fhood wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't assume forums are somehow freer of group-think because they are less accessible. Once they get established, the existing user base tends to push out anyone that doesn't agree with their views. Some subreddits are awesome, and some are way less awesome. And much of the best, most informative and technical information out there lives on subreddits. Many people pine for the days when only the most savvy users knew…

Getting rid of anonymity would probably help.

The funny thing is that appears to makes it even worse - even with the attendent "fired for sparking controversy and making the company look bad" risk.

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

#332

Post by BadassFractal »

Reddit is super valuable from the perspective of being able to poll a "hive mind" specialized in a certain thing about best practices and ideas. e.g. I want to learn more about making EDM, more about photography, more about shibari etc. Usually the advice is pretty decent between beginner and intermediate level, for the high end super-custom guidance usually it falls flat.

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

#333

Post by varrock »

bradlys wrote: post #195
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…

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…

> I also dislike reddit because it's hard to remember a name constantly. It's easier when there's a little profile picture next to the name. You go, "oh yeah, that guy. He's helpful." You remember those posters more often.

To me, personally, I like Reddit because this kind of association is more difficult. I like reading a comment and not having any bias towards the user.

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

#334

Post by epicalex »

tomc1985 wrote: post #301
hokkos wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Reddittors' frequent insistence on no reposts and original content seems to contradict your assertions I have a bunch of old folders full of funny images that I would love to post but I'm quite sure I will get accused of karma whoring, even though I just want to share funny pictures that are more funny than the current crop of memes

In my experience that tends to only be true in the larger subreddits. The (potentially) more niche subreddits I use don't have that same problem outside of maybe a 'read the FAQs before posting'

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

#335

Post by echelon »

lightyrs wrote: post #261
echelon wrote: post #171

Anyone interested in building an open source, add-free, Creative Commons-licensed (perhaps not the posts as these belong to users, but the posts in aggregate) copy of Reddit? My ideal "Reddit" more closely follows the freedoms of Wikipedia / FOSS. Reddit currently allows 3rd party clients to have access, but I envision more - an analytics API, ML tools to train your own consumption / discovery agent about what you li…

The federation aspect is very interesting to me. Can you describe in more detail?

I imagine it would be similar to Mastodon, but instead of people being on a node, you'd have communities on a node.

One server might focus on the southeast, eg. /r/atlanta, /r/georgia, /r/falcons, etc. Another might focus on gaming, hosting subtopics such as /r/nintendo, /r/minecraft, /r/ps4, etc.

If you're on one machine, you can have it pull in discussions from other nodes. Or your client software might do that automatically for you.

Nodes might agree on a common short form namespace to refer to different communities, and we might even be able to bolt this on to existing systems, eg. /r/me_irl is Reddit, whereas /hn/show is "Show Hacker News". It doesn't necessarily have to be backwards-compatible with non-fedarated systems, but it could be.

I imagine single sign on, and good APIs for ingesting another community's or user's content. Ranking metadata can also be supplied by the host community, but local communities or individuals can apply their own transformative equations on top of them.

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

#336

Post by splonk »

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…

A few years ago my boss (in his mid-40s) said he had no idea what Reddit was, and my explanation to him was that it was the 2nd-10th best place to look for information on things, but it was the 2nd-10th best place to look for information on a whole lot of things. If you already have domain knowledge about a particular subject, then you might know of a better forum for that subject, but just going to /r/[whatever] would at least get you started.

These days it seems like it's more the 1st-10th, especially for new topics. I feel like a lot of middle sized gaming communities have settled on Reddit as the default forum. Larger ones can support multiple external sites, and smaller ones may never have their heavy supporters reach Reddit, but there seems to be a sweet spot where there's enough different contributors that want to congregate somewhere, and unless one of the early ones also has the skills to set up their own forum elsewhere and gets people to adopt it early, Reddit will end up being that place.

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

#337

Post by rhacker »

cm2012 wrote: post #59

Keep in mind: 1) Most Facebook users use the app, not the website, which Alexa doesn't track (Which is also why Facebook doesn't fear commonly used ad blockers). 2) Alexa uses a number of metrics to rank sites, including pages visited. Reddit users load many more individual pages than FB users. In reality, Reddit is nowhere near close to the traffic and engagement leviathan that is Facebook.

Thanks for noting this, as I am not a reddit or facebook user, the headline and alexa page said nothing of actual usage trends.

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

#338

Post by epicalex »

toweringgoat wrote: post #205
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…

Yup. Any hobby or interest I've had has a subreddit, but the quality of discussion and advice is terrible. There's so much that's plain wrong. Forums have plenty of misinformed people, but the density is lower.

Worth recognising that each subreddit is its own community, and like individual forums, will likely vary wildly by subject. My experience of subreddits for my interests and hobbies is the opposite to yours; information is correct and discussion useful.

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

#339

Post by HiroshiSan »

domakidis wrote: post #83
HiroshiSan wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true anymore. You need an email just to sign up now.

At the time I'm posting this message, email is still not required. Just click 'Next' with an empty email value to skip that step during registration. That's dark patterns 101, but technically it's not required.

Sneaky. Ty for this, I had no idea.

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

#340

Post by falcon620 »

duderific wrote: post #330
CM30 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, it should be possible to run MANY internet services at a profit if you keep your costs low and stop throwing money at every little irrelevant thing. Reddit, Medium, Twitter... all of them probably could have been profitable businesses if their founders ran them out of a normal office, with normal staff salaries (not in the hundreds of thousands of dollars), with less staff and with less money spent on offic…

Well kind of...if you're in the Bay Area, you need to be able to compete for engineers with the likes of Apple, Google, Facebook etc. No perks == no employees. Why should I go work at your crappy startup when I could live the life of luxury at one of the FANGS.

Surprise: You don't need to be in the Bay Area to build/run world class companies/products. Maybe sometimes to build, but definitely not to run.
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