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An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

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

#341

Post by wool_gather »

OnlineGladiator wrote: post #188
jimbokun wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could have followed the Craig's List model of monetizing just enough to cover all the costs and keep the site running, without overly focusing on revenue growth sacrificing what made the site great in the first place.

I admit this source isn't very reliable, but craigslist does more than just "get by," in fact if you're comparing it to any company besides FAANG it is extremely successful. It does so well the investors didn't even push for an IPO, they happily accept dividends. https://www.businessinsider.com/craig-newmark-craigslist-fou...

Interesting; and if this true, that makes it an even better example of how a site can be successful while following its original intentions.

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

#342

Post by rurp »

justincredible wrote: post #210
Cephalopterus wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quora is arguably worse, it actively incentivized people to post inane and unproductive questions reducing the overall quantity of the content. Language topics are littered which questions such as "What is the colour red in the language X" while topics like Math has stuff like "What is 1+1". I wish I was kidding about that last one, it's an actual question on Quora with 1,078 answers as of this comment. It's insane

Most of the answers to that last question are inane and unproductive. The first answer is funny though: https://www.quora.com/What-is-1+1

That was pretty great! I especially liked "We’ve now reduce the problem to a subproblem we can easily solve!"

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

#343

Post by wool_gather »

noelsusman wrote: post #207
WhompingWindows wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish Reddit had gone the way of VLC -- keep your core product, the thing people liked, and stop chasing profits. Why do so many of these companies fall to the profit motive and lose their "soul"?

It's a for-profit company. Chasing profits is the entire point. If that wasn't the point then they would have an alternative organizational structure and enjoy the various tax benefits that come with it, like VLC does.

The pursuit of profit is not an absolute, though. If you choose a route to profit that ends with the company getting sued out of existence, then you didn't really do a good job. Judiciousness is implicit, by necessity, in the goal; the argument then comes down to what the best sustainable route to profit is.

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

#344

Post by rurp »

msluyter wrote: post #59
coldpie wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same thing that happens to all "free"/ad-sponsored/VC-backed services. Unless you're FB or Twitter or YouTube, your ads aren't profitable enough to run your business. The business model is unviable unless you get that big. So you lose a bunch of money until you find a way to monetize or close. This always takes the form of user-hostile anti-features. Currently that's forcing users into your special apps, whe…

I call this the dismal equilibrium . Anything free that provides value is, in brute economic terms, mis-priced. Thus, it tends to degrade due to attempts at monetization until a balance is reached between its inherent value and the pain one must endure to use/access it.

That's a great term that really captures the dynamic. It's sad to see it taking effect on so many previously useful platforms.

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

#345

Post by wool_gather »

coldpie wrote: post #44
harimau777 wrote: post #31

It feels to me like social media has been imploding recently. It seems like I am seeing more and more efforts to overtly force people use an app, associate browsing with an account, and link their account with a real world identity (e.g. via phone number). This in turn makes the platforms less useful and more hostile to users and presumably at some point that will cause users to leave the system. It also feels like s…

It's the same thing that happens to all "free"/ad-sponsored/VC-backed services. Unless you're FB or Twitter or YouTube, your ads aren't profitable enough to run your business. The business model is unviable unless you get that big. So you lose a bunch of money until you find a way to monetize or close. This always takes the form of user-hostile anti-features. Currently that's forcing users into your special apps, whe…

> increasingly scummy ad behavior [...] It's happening to imgur and Reddit now

And Stack Overflow: [Why is StackOverflow trying to start audio?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20288768) [Ads on Stack Overflow are increasingly \[terrible\]](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/329547/ads-on-se-si...)

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

#346

Post by u801e »

ghostpepper wrote: post #161
u801e wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I'm not sure what people could move to if Reddit becomes non-viable. but I'm not sure what people could move to if Reddit becomes non-viable. In the past, a lot of non-technical people posted to usenet newsgroups and connected to IRC for online chat.

How non-technical are we talking here, though?

Based on my experience, people who were in university level classes and people in high school. Back then, one could download mIRC and connect to IRC or use any mail/news client like Outlook Express or Netscape Mail & News to connect to usenet and check their email.

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

#347

Post by mtVessel »

DocG wrote: post #182
paganel wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the way things are going I can see them getting rid of old.reddit.com and i.reddit.com, at which point I think I'll also stop visiting the website (the mobile website is atrocious and I'm not going to install a dedicated app in order to read a forum).

That will be sad day. If old.reddit.com goes, so do I. I use Reddit mainly on phone, via browser because I use tabs and old.reddit.com because its the most content dense view and and is the fastest view (no stupid js loading icon thankyou). I'm not there, like I'm not here, for the design. I'm visiting for the content. Reddit.com front page takes about three seconds to load with stupid blocking js, old takes about se…

"And my axe", as PTG used to say. The redesign did nothing positive and the site has less and less interesting content every day. They say the action is in the subs, but I still can't find a decent way to discover which ones are worthwhile. I find I'm just hanging on to the few I settled on years ago, and as my interest wanes, I visit less frequently. The day they pull old.reddit.com, I won't bother with the site at all.

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

#348

Post by retsibsi »

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.

I wouldn't necessarily mind it being partisan, if not for the extremely low quality commenting standard. I'm sure there's a causal link: most of us are less likely to call out bullshit from our own team, and when there's nobody to call you out on your bullshit (so long as it's directed at the correct targets), it's tempting to go ever cheaper and ever dumber in search of easy approval. But it would at least be possible to have a forum where people had a lot of opinions in common, but still cared about truth and intellectual integrity and basic logic.

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

#349

Post by retsibsi »

jahlove wrote: post #231
vorpalhex wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

It almost gives me an uncanny valley feeling. There's a certain pattern to every comments thread that makes me feel like I'm watching a 'conversation' between lazy teenagers, vote-manipulation bots and a handful of (paid?) adult political activists. (I know that sounds paranoid, but fwiw if I were an American I would vote Democrat, and if you applied a hundred randomly-chosen negative adjectives to Trump I would strongly agree with most of them. So this isn't a shocked reaction to seeing an echo chamber populated by the wrong team.)

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

#350

Post by thewelder »

thomascgalvin wrote: post #172
BlueTemplar wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, like I stopped visiting Slashdot after the new website was implemented. And it wasn't even like I was especially annoyed at the new interface, I just gradually used it less and less until completely stopping...

Reddit has completely replaced Slashdot for me. I wonder what's going to replace Reddit...

for me it went:

slashdot-->digg-->reddit-->[?]

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