Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reddit Traffic has Exploded in 12 Months

soshable.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 108 posts

Re: Reddit Traffic has Exploded in 12 Months

#61

Post by jedberg »

Legion wrote: post #49
blhack wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit still has a fantastic set of communities on it. Think of it more as a service , not one singular website. Like usenet. (These are some of the subs that I like, they might not be your thing, but they're examples of solid communities) http://reddit.com/r/truereddit http://reddit.com/r/longtext http://reddit.com/r/depthhub http://reddit.com/r/askscience http://reddit.com/r/neuro http://reddit.com/r/burningman htt…

Comparing Reddit to USENET is probably one of the most insightful descriptions of Reddit I've seen anyone make. It is indeed a big loosely-related collection of communities, from which users choose a la carte their areas of participation. The Reddit my wife sees when she logs in is very different from the one I see, which is very different from the one fans of meme participation (rage comics, etc) see.

People have been calling reddit "Usenet 2.0" for a long time. In fact, usenet was something that often came up in discussions of how certain features should work and what features we should work on.

Re: Reddit Traffic has Exploded in 12 Months

#62

Post by jedberg »

4ad wrote: post #52
myhf wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TIL you can use + to combine subreddits

Sort them alphabetically as when one reddit dies, the URL won't work and you need to debug which reddit is at fault. If you sort them alphabetically you can easily do binary sorting.

I think they actually fixed that bug last week. It'll ignore broken subreddits now.

Re: Reddit Traffic has Exploded in 12 Months

#63

Post by shinratdr »

sc00ter wrote: post #57
tomerico wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for this site, I never knew Google publish analytic traffic and their estimated traffic. Something interesting I have noticed, if you are looking at Hacker News' traffic data, there seems to be a steep decline somewhere around April [1]. I wonder what whether it is correct, and whether there was a fundamental change in this site / ycombinator around that time. [1] https://www.google.com/adplanner/planning/site…

(Sarcasm noted :-) For the uninitiated, this was around the time comment scores were hidden. Only PG knows whether this had any real effect on traffic; and even if so, whether that's a good or bad thing is subjective (less poor quality traffic / comments is good, and since HN is not directly commercial, lower traffic is not necessarily a bad thing). Loss of value to everyone else from lack of comment scores is anothe…

If we have that much evidence that having no visible comment scores reduces poor quality traffic, I think I may have just switched sides in that particular debate.

I'm not saying that is the case, but it could be a very interesting revelation.

Re: Reddit Traffic has Exploded in 12 Months

#64

Post by maurits »

I deleted my account yesterday. As a community it has given me nothing back, except pictures of funny cats (ok slight exaggeration)

It seems as if every single comment that hints to insight fulness, knowledge or that comes accompanied with a (scientific) source is ridiculed or downvoted into oblivion. And top comments increasingly are inside jokes. That is all ok, but I am not putting energy in it anymore.

Compare that to HN, where I comment very little, yet nearly every interaction sparked an email or two with people who do cool stuff.

Reddit commenters seems to take some pride that they are not as worse as their cousins at 4chan or youtube. To me they seem to be the internet white noise, and if they don't deviate into the tail, they will be fine. The usenet comparison by blhack is spot on I feel, so new communities will spring to live where others slip.

edit:typo

Re: Reddit Traffic has Exploded in 12 Months

#66

Post by ohashi »

maurits wrote: post #64

I deleted my account yesterday. As a community it has given me nothing back, except pictures of funny cats (ok slight exaggeration) It seems as if every single comment that hints to insight fulness, knowledge or that comes accompanied with a (scientific) source is ridiculed or downvoted into oblivion. And top comments increasingly are inside jokes. That is all ok, but I am not putting energy in it anymore. Compare th…

If you got no value out of the place, I think you were doing it wrong. My city (DC) has a thriving subreddit that meets up probably 2-3 times a week officially to do things - zombie invasion simulations, drinking, board games, go karting, etc. It's been a fantastic way to just get out and do stuff with people. There is a whole subreddit dedicated to 'Barcraft' which brings watching pro starcraft live to bars (like you would watch any other sport). People are spending their time to put on these live events with help from companies like Justin.tv/Twitch. Those are two examples that hit home close to me, but I am sure you can find stuff for you as well, you just have to look and engage with the proper communities.

Re: Reddit Traffic has Exploded in 12 Months

#67

Post by paganel »

Unfortunately, reddit has started to hit new and new lows. See this recent highly-voted post for example (http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/jvhot/i_found_a_girl_...), where they're making fun of a poor girl's badly photoshopped photos that she dared to publish on Flickr.

I've been on reddit since its very beginnings, back when its being rewritten in Python was causing huge discussions or when programming.reddit was still a sub-domain. I've lived through the 2008 elections stealing the front page from geeky-related articles, or when making fun at digg was actually considered cool (back in 2009 or so). Anyway, I never thought that making fun and hurting actual innocent people would really hit the front-page, I'm ashamed of having supported this website for so long. There are still some pockets of common-sense left, starting with TrueReddit which I think is more like an animal preserve for those who can still remember how cool and exciting reddit used to be. I'll also want to add /r/history to the list of sub-reddits worth following.

Re: Reddit Traffic has Exploded in 12 Months

#68

Post by timcederman »

raldi wrote: post #24

Speaking as a former reddit admin who had direct access to the server logs (and "wc -l"): Quantcast (and Alexa, and Comscore, and all the others) are terrible at estimating traffic. They make wildly inaccurate guesses using low-quality source data and all the ad execs just gobble up their results as if they're fresh off God's own LaserJet. It's very frustrating to watch. The most accurate results are visible at Googl…

Any thoughts on why such a difference in the search volume graph which you posted, and Google's estimate of actual traffic? http://trends.google.com/websites?q=reddit.com%2C+digg.com&#...

Re: Reddit Traffic has Exploded in 12 Months

#69

Post by raldi »

tokenadult wrote: post #60

I searched this thread to see if monetization has been mentioned. I see that it has been. Monetization was mentioned as a reason that Digg failed. What way does Reddit have to make money? Does it make any difference to Reddit, if Reddit has no way to make money, how much traffic Reddit has?

Reddit has many revenue streams. In no particular order: sidebar ads, sponsored links, reddit gold (a for-pay set of premium features), sponsorships, merchandise...

Re: Reddit Traffic has Exploded in 12 Months

#70

Post by Florin_Andrei »

blhack wrote: post #4
parfe wrote: post #3

Too bad. The voting system isn't as robust as it needs to be for me to use the site on a regular basis anymore. Too many of the top rated threads are jokes, puns, or stupid questions. Moderating by category made slashdot comments useful. In the user profile, setting all "Funny" moderated comments to -5 eliminated all the "In Soviet Russia" jokes. Repeated comments were marked redundant etc. Reddit has become quite po…

Reddit still has a fantastic set of communities on it. Think of it more as a service , not one singular website. Like usenet. (These are some of the subs that I like, they might not be your thing, but they're examples of solid communities) http://reddit.com/r/truereddit http://reddit.com/r/longtext http://reddit.com/r/depthhub http://reddit.com/r/askscience http://reddit.com/r/neuro http://reddit.com/r/burningman htt…

/r/askscience is full of narrow-minded hardliners.

/r/movies is full of spoilers.

/r/philosophy is shallow.

If by "maturing" you mean "attracting the fat middle and the tail end of the IQ bell curve" then yea, you're right.

I'm finding fewer and fewer reasons to stay on Reddit. If I had exactly zero time to waste, I'd spend exactly zero time on Reddit.

Post reply on HN