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What Reddit Got Wrong

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Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#61

Post by evouga »

transcriptase wrote: post #35
greenpresident wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is already a large population of bots reposting formerly popular content, including the comments from the original thread. It’s eerie once you notice it.

I’ve seen entire (dozen reply long) comment chains on a repost (or similar content) that were re-created verbatim from an older post. Each one garnered the same hundreds of upvotes as the original, and each bot seemed to be part of a network that was farming karma through this process. Eerie was an understatement.

What’s the endgame here? Who is buying ripened accounts with lots of karma and why?

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#62

Post by ilyt »

satvikpendem wrote: post #32
willsmith72 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We have not seen any significant revenue impact so far and we will continue to monitor. This is the funniest because it shows how little they're actually able to generate from people using their product

Yeah users on Reddit are worth on average around 30 cents each. But this is also why they're pushing the official Reddit app, to increase their ARPU.

They could just charge $2 for "API access with enough limits for power users" and pay both for missing ads and for API usage

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#63

Post by Macha »

ilyt wrote: post #54
Macha wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The last thing that bugs me is peoples claims the new mods (if chosen by reddit employees) wont be as high quality as the previous ones. No one has ever proven the current moderation teams are any good. There is some competition between subreddits for attention, and a bad mod team can cause a subreddit to lose that competition (including to subreddits on different subjects), so there is some amount of successful co…

>There is some competition between subreddits for attention, and a bad mod team can cause a subreddit to lose that competition (including to subreddits on different subjects), so there is some amount of successful community building that must have happened. Yeah but they need to be BAD. "Mediocre enough that users don't want to migrate elsewhere" (like /r/games) seems to be enough to keep it running and gaining subs…

r/games was once the upstart and had to gain enough users who wanted something more moderated/curated than r/gaming to get to its current position.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#64

Post by ilyt »

ProAm wrote: post #31
WalterBright wrote: post #21

> Reddit is transparent about the fact that the company is not profitable. There's the fundamental problem. The bills need to be paid.

Simple fix, if you use a third party app you need to have Reddit Gold. Problem solved.

I'm really perplexed why that wasn't their go-to. Then they could just add bulk tier for data-sucking apps

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#65

Post by sdwr »

cwkoss wrote: post #41

Posted this a while back, but maybe someone will want to pick this up and run with it now: I specced out a decentralized spam-resistant reddit alternative a while ago, and posted it here a few months ago. Please build this, happy to sign away non-exclusive IP rights if you have an idea of how to monetize. --- I've specced out a decentralized reddit alternative a little bit, but have too many side projects. Someone pl…

That's beautiful! Inverts the whole process, flips the script. I can see it splitting bi-modal in a bad way though. Friends are one thing, but most following will probably be of aggregators / known figures, and they're going to be either lowest-common-denominator, or highly specialized. Basically gonna look like old reddit, where your options are AskScience or rage comics.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#66

Post by chaosjevil »

dale_glass wrote: post #55
chaosjevil wrote: post #33

The main problem with this article is that it's only handling the current events, without taking into account that Reddit has a long-standing history of user-hostile decisions. For example... let's talk about The_Donald, shall we? (inb4: I'm not from USA, "Trump" and "Biden" for me are just "some leaders from some tacoland", so I'm not emotionally attached into this matter.) Some users were protesting that The_Donald…

Reddit Inc in my perception is amoral, tending towards immoral. In general they want to do as little policing as possible, and only do the least amount they can when their hand is forced. But there's also some signs of the higher ups actually being okay with things that are icky and of very doubtful appeal to advertisers, like r/jailbait I'd say overall the leadership is just not good. It neither has any sort of mora…

[flagged]

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#67

Post by z3c0 »

transcriptase wrote: post #35
greenpresident wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is already a large population of bots reposting formerly popular content, including the comments from the original thread. It’s eerie once you notice it.

I’ve seen entire (dozen reply long) comment chains on a repost (or similar content) that were re-created verbatim from an older post. Each one garnered the same hundreds of upvotes as the original, and each bot seemed to be part of a network that was farming karma through this process. Eerie was an understatement.

> Each one garnered the same hundreds of upvotes as the original

What's sad is how many of those aren't bots. It's not uncommon for karma farmers to have their bots upvote each other, but it isn't cost effective to have hundreds (a 1 year old reddit account can run you approx $10 for 1000 post karma). The sad reality is that of those hundreds of upvotes, almost all represent a person who fell for it.

As the saying goes "a lie can be halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on".

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#68

Post by joshstrange »

evouga wrote: post #61
transcriptase wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve seen entire (dozen reply long) comment chains on a repost (or similar content) that were re-created verbatim from an older post. Each one garnered the same hundreds of upvotes as the original, and each bot seemed to be part of a network that was farming karma through this process. Eerie was an understatement.

What’s the endgame here? Who is buying ripened accounts with lots of karma and why?

People who want to astroturf, from everything from products to politics (though honestly probably more for "products"). Reddit is well known for being one of the few places you can "trust" product reviews (that hasn't been fully true for a while now but it's still valuable). If a near-0 karma and/or new account says "I love X product" then they can sometimes be downvoted/called a shill but an account that's a couple years old and has decent karma? Looks like a real person.

That's at least the explanation I've heard many times.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#69

Post by ilyt »

cwkoss wrote: post #41

Posted this a while back, but maybe someone will want to pick this up and run with it now: I specced out a decentralized spam-resistant reddit alternative a while ago, and posted it here a few months ago. Please build this, happy to sign away non-exclusive IP rights if you have an idea of how to monetize. --- I've specced out a decentralized reddit alternative a little bit, but have too many side projects. Someone pl…

So RSS aggregators with friends list. I think it could be interesting but on top of being probably a bitch to tune in a way that makes people happy, still someone needs to host at least the aggregates and the per user info, even if the aggregation was done entirely client-side.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#70

Post by MisterBastahrd »

cwkoss wrote: post #41

Posted this a while back, but maybe someone will want to pick this up and run with it now: I specced out a decentralized spam-resistant reddit alternative a while ago, and posted it here a few months ago. Please build this, happy to sign away non-exclusive IP rights if you have an idea of how to monetize. --- I've specced out a decentralized reddit alternative a little bit, but have too many side projects. Someone pl…

You just described twitter.
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