Reddit banned me for developing Geddit • Hacker News Board

Re: Reddit banned me for developing Geddit

#51

Post by TeMPOraL » Sat, Aug 24, 2024, 9:37 AM UTC

silisili wrote: post #30

Iulioh wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

--- Also, why pay to advertise when you can just make a shill account for free? --- Because it does not guarantee visibility. "Why pay for advertising on Facebook when you can have a Facebook page?"

Because the advertising model is very weak on Reddit, it's just a sponsored post with no differentiation most people skip past. No video or image to catch interest. Plus, the users are self segregated, what a dream. Imagine you wanted to sell drop shipped backpacks. All you'd need to do is create and prime, or buy, a dozen or so accounts, and start recommending your own brand subtly in every recommendation thread in…

> People trust Reddit because they assume they're other real users. Many advertisers already know and take advantage of this. It's nearly impossible at this point to know who or what is authentic.

That's what advertisers would like their customers to believe.

The truth is closer to: advertisers are lazy, Reddit users aren't complete idiots, subreddits are moderated, and spammers are (rightfully) despised. Effective shilling takes more effort in actively moderated environment so I wouldn't be surprise if sponsored posts had a better ROI than the much more dishonest plays.

Re: Reddit banned me for developing Geddit

#52

Post by ben_w » Sat, Aug 24, 2024, 9:38 AM UTC

Etheryte wrote: post #34

maipen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but now it feels like a bot fest and propaganda machine. Pretty much sums up every popular social media platform these days. HN is still a good place to learn about whats going on in the tech world and what not because it's simple and filters out alot of "brainrot", although there is an increasing number of comments that soley react at the headline. Reddit has become like meta, you either have an account or your us…

I feel like this is another example of a problem that could be easily solved if we had integrated, anonymous and frictionless payments on the web. For example, imagine a Reddit clone, but every comment you want to post costs one cent. For a regular user it takes a while to build up even a hundred comments, meanwhile for a spammer, this could quickly become costly. The hurdle of course is that no one wants to put thei…

I doubt that payments of any kind will help much.

From a purely theoretical level, there's a very broad range of incomes worldwide, so any price point you use to keep spammers out makes it unaffordable to the average person in many nations, and varying pricing by nation just means the spammers pretend to be from the cheapest nation(s).

We also have a demonstration of payment-based messaging systems in that price range with SMS and voice calls, which still get junk. (Nation-specific: my German SIM gets none while my UK SIM gets a lot… but only when I actually visit the UK).

For subscription-based payment filtering, similar — while it's hard for me to determine which of Musks's statements I should take seriously or literally, twitter premium pricing it's still a test of this idea even if it wasn't the true intent behind Musk's assertion.

Re: Reddit banned me for developing Geddit

#53

Post by amiga386 » Sat, Aug 24, 2024, 9:39 AM UTC

hi-v-rocknroll wrote: post #23

maipen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but now it feels like a bot fest and propaganda machine. Pretty much sums up every popular social media platform these days. HN is still a good place to learn about whats going on in the tech world and what not because it's simple and filters out alot of "brainrot", although there is an increasing number of comments that soley react at the headline. Reddit has become like meta, you either have an account or your us…

Well, reddit became worse than that ~10 years ago because of the inconsistent, absurd, immature unreasonableness of a sizable fraction of mods who added suck and subtracted cool from the world. Maybe this is a pattern common to most all group-oriented social media platforms where community mods skew towards being drama-oriented, elitist, and/or crazy because no one else wants the job and so, like policing, it attract…

Not only do the jannies do it for free, I bet Reddit could get them to pay to be moderators, in the same way that free-to-play games exist so that the "whales" (big spenders) can pay the game operator real money to have an unfair advantage over the regular player base.

Re: Reddit banned me for developing Geddit

#54

Post by surgical_fire » Sat, Aug 24, 2024, 9:40 AM UTC

Iulioh wrote: post #4

Man, i just hate the new reddit, but in a way i appreciate the fact that the update literally stopped me from continuing to use it. It was my togo app, i spent hours browsing and reading random comments and articles, my English got surprisingly better than most of my peers and all it took was a mild internet addiction. Now it's short form content for me. YouTube mainly (premium helps a lot, tiktok enshittified a litt…

My last day on Reddit was when RiF died.

It was surprisingly easy to abandon it.

Re: Reddit banned me for developing Geddit

#55

Post by latexr » Sat, Aug 24, 2024, 9:46 AM UTC

Etheryte wrote: post #34

maipen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but now it feels like a bot fest and propaganda machine. Pretty much sums up every popular social media platform these days. HN is still a good place to learn about whats going on in the tech world and what not because it's simple and filters out alot of "brainrot", although there is an increasing number of comments that soley react at the headline. Reddit has become like meta, you either have an account or your us…

I feel like this is another example of a problem that could be easily solved if we had integrated, anonymous and frictionless payments on the web. For example, imagine a Reddit clone, but every comment you want to post costs one cent. For a regular user it takes a while to build up even a hundred comments, meanwhile for a spammer, this could quickly become costly. The hurdle of course is that no one wants to put thei…

> imagine a Reddit clone, but every comment you want to post costs one cent. For a regular user it takes a while to build up even a hundred comments, meanwhile for a spammer, this could quickly become costly.

That site wouldn’t have any spam, true. Though not because of the cost, but because it wouldn’t have any users to make it worth spamming. No one wants to pay per message. Everybody would be too nervous and quadruple-thinking “is this message worth a cent?” Once in a blue moon someone would post, get no reply, and be even more unlikely to post next.

And yes, yes, not literally everyone, but enough that it becomes a rounding error.

Re: Reddit banned me for developing Geddit

#56

Post by creesch » Sat, Aug 24, 2024, 9:46 AM UTC

mubu wrote: post #12

Reddit was my favorite website growing up. I'd discover new interesting subs, read random posts and comments. The frontpage was somewhat interesting too, but now it feels like a bot fest and propaganda machine. I still use Reddit but way less than I used to before, and I no longer use it for fun but just to read niche tech subs. I refuse to use the official mobile app. I've always used Baconreader and then Relay on A…

That's what you get when a company spends years neglecting and sometimes actively working against the users and content that give unique value to the platform. The final straw being the API debacle of course. But even before, you could see people who really cared for various communities on reddit just give up and leave because it became too much of a struggle to deal with all the antics or apathy from the company itself.

To be clear, amidst this, reddit was still growing. So from an Excel sheet management perspective, nothing seems wrong. But most of that growth could be found in low effort content that honestly can be found on any social media platform. Where the sort of unique content that did set reddit apart slowly started to decrease in both quantity and quality over the years.

Re: Reddit banned me for developing Geddit

#57

Post by theanonymousone » Sat, Aug 24, 2024, 9:47 AM UTC

You can also add .rss to subreddit urls and get rss feeds.

Given that rss is _designed_ to be read by "bots" i.e. computer programs, what is Reddit's stance there? Do they also consider it "bypassing API restrictions"?

Re: Reddit banned me for developing Geddit

#58

Post by anal_reactor » Sat, Aug 24, 2024, 9:47 AM UTC

hi-v-rocknroll wrote: post #23

maipen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but now it feels like a bot fest and propaganda machine. Pretty much sums up every popular social media platform these days. HN is still a good place to learn about whats going on in the tech world and what not because it's simple and filters out alot of "brainrot", although there is an increasing number of comments that soley react at the headline. Reddit has become like meta, you either have an account or your us…

Well, reddit became worse than that ~10 years ago because of the inconsistent, absurd, immature unreasonableness of a sizable fraction of mods who added suck and subtracted cool from the world. Maybe this is a pattern common to most all group-oriented social media platforms where community mods skew towards being drama-oriented, elitist, and/or crazy because no one else wants the job and so, like policing, it attract…

> because of the inconsistent, absurd, immature unreasonableness of a sizable fraction of

human population. Most people are stupid and the only way to have something nice is to gatekeep. Every single time any community grows too large it becomes shit.

Re: Reddit banned me for developing Geddit

#59

Post by 7373737373 » Sat, Aug 24, 2024, 9:48 AM UTC

The problem with Reddit is that it was founded by people who care more about money than their users

Re: Reddit banned me for developing Geddit

#60

Post by ben_w » Sat, Aug 24, 2024, 9:49 AM UTC

mulmen wrote: post #25

maipen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but now it feels like a bot fest and propaganda machine. Pretty much sums up every popular social media platform these days. HN is still a good place to learn about whats going on in the tech world and what not because it's simple and filters out alot of "brainrot", although there is an increasing number of comments that soley react at the headline. Reddit has become like meta, you either have an account or your us…

> I think we need more simple websites again, but I am not sure about the incentive structure. Then go make one. It’s easier now than ever. The social media mistake was trying to make one site everything to everyone but the web is still there.

This.

I miss the old web, the old browser based games. So I'm digging out my old code from shareware I made 15 years ago and turning some of them into free games.

Likewise my blog, converted it from Wordpress into plain HTML. I have more control, at the "expense" of not having a visitor counter system that might go up to 100 if I post a link here but otherwise only goes up to 1-4 views.

This means no need for ads, which is a better user experience directly.

It also means no built-in tracking cookies that I can't remove, and by extension no need for a popup that parrots "we value your privacy" like it's a magic phrase to keep demons at bay even though they "value" the privacy in the same way that a pirate values the cargo of the ship they're taking from at cannon-point.