reddit has always been dying to people who have been using reddit for a long time, but don't see how that's even remotely true
as someone who has used reddit for 7+ years now, the culture is definitely very different (not necessarily good) - but it has only continued to grow in terms of users
For example r/linux has "679169 readers", but if you go to the /new page you'll see it has only had 16 submissions in the past day.
New users are automoderated and shadowbanned to hell. There are subreddits where the experienced users with new accounts go and users upvote each other until they have enough karma to post where they want.
> but it has only continued to grow in terms of users
That's because I make a new account everytime I'm doxxed, banned, or censored.
Now that you mention it, I realize that the reddit blocking, censoring and quarantining system basically is a free way to drive up their 'new user' count.
What a joke of a website and a company. Cannot wait til it dies.
The gems on Reddit are almost all small subreddits with a community feel. I'd be virtually certain that its high user engagement is primarily driven by users who've matched into smaller subreddits that closely align with their interests. The big, default subreddits are largely wastelands.
But Reddit the platform seems to entirely ignore this dynamic. New users are dropped into the default subreddits, and there's very little tooling or onramps to help them find small interest-matching subs.
I hear this a lot but I've never found a good small subreddit either. Perhaps there's a discoverability problem but I'll be damned if I can find one of these mythical small subreddits with a great community I keep hearing about.
For example I love Formula 1. But the /r/formula1 subreddit (1.6 million subscribers) is absolute unmitigated trash. There are decent articles posted there, but the comments are a total wasteland of low-effort memes, regurgitated jokes and total morons with zero understanding of the sport. So where do I go for F1 content? How do I find one of these supposed small subs with good communities?
Discord lol. If you want quality discussion you're not going to find it on reddit. Mostly the same regurgitated ideas said a thousand times on every post.
As a reddit user for more than a decade: Reddit has always been dying (for me personally, it was the digg exodus). Everything you describe has been around for at least 5 years.
Reddit will die when there is something better (for the user experience) available. Right now, I do not see a better general-purpose forum alternative.
I feel the choice of Ellen Pao as interim CEO revealed what direction reddit was headed. Moves towards a more sanitised, advertiser friendly Reddit - but with slap-dash choice of how to apply the new era of censorship.
2014 Nov - Pao became interim CEO
2015 July 2nd - large sections of Reddit were set to private to protest the dismissal of Victoria Taylor, Reddit's director of talent, known for co-ordinating the Ask Me Anything interviews
2015 Jun/July - Pao was the subject of criticism and harassment by Reddit users after five Reddit communities (subreddits) were banned for harassment and Reddit's director of talent was fired
2015 Aug 13th - "Watch reddit Die" was Created
I can't help feel that there is a trend of selling of online communities as "assets" to commercial buyers that have opposite incentive to the members of that community - just look at StackOverflow. The problem is that websites come to own the "commons" they inspire, and then sell it off as if the community are happy to work for free. We need stronger community data-rights; like a GPL for website content.
reddit should just be killed off at this point. The only good thing about it are the smaller subreddits. The self-proclaimed "front page of the internet" has become the "cesspool of the internet" catering to the lowest common denominator of people out there. Tiktoks, tweets, fabricated AITA posts and more of the low brow variety abound.
reddit (in general) has a clear and obvious political/social agenda apparent to anybody with a functioning brain.
Every website or internet community that I've used for over a year feels to me like it's dying, including HN.
It's a natural reaction to change.
I've been on Reddit for 11 years, and all your comments could apply to 2010 Reddit as well as they apply to 2021 Reddit. At least edgy memes on /r/atheism aren't a core part of the site anymore.
> The company will use the new funds to improve product features, focusing on how to make it easier for newcomers to explore and quickly understand the site, Mr. Huffman said. Reddit is also enhancing its video products with an eye toward more advertising. And the company is building its self-service advertising system, which could help appeal to small and medium-size business marketers.
> Reddit is also focused on expanding internationally. Most of the site is U.S.-centric, Mr. Huffman said — something he hopes to change.
When it comes to advertising, other platforms offer a much more lucrative user base. Reddit users aren’t worth very much to advertisers. International users will probably be worth even less. And there is no guarantee that Reddit would hit it off with an international audience.
In short, I just don’t see them doing well if they go public.
no guarantee? look at r/de biggest community of german people I've ever heard.
r/europe gigantic subreddit, all national subreddits r/italy r/polska r/belarus (known for international protests) r/hongkong also
oh look at: r/norway and their users are even more wealthy than average us redditors
The biggest problem is that their revenue per user is atrociously low compared to other social platforms. That money should be thrown at poaching as much ads talent as possible from Facebook or Twitter.
The problem is that throwing money rarely leads to the outcome desired.
I would know how to run a high-quality reddit on $5M/year, and perhaps as much as $20M. I would not know how to run a high-quality reddit on $100M/year.
The term is 'overcapitalized.'
At some scale, people focus on climbing corporate ladders over the core business, on pet projects, and communications becomes a bottleneck (and the number of potential links grows as a square law with the number of people).
The right scale depends on the complexity of the product. A car requires an army to engineer and produce.
Reddit? That benefits from a small team, where people can holistically understand the whole system, and everyone involved. That's at most 20 SWEs.
They need more than that for the sole purpose of making the mobile website experience as horrible as possible (and constantly iterating to make it worse and worse)
I'm 60% you're joking, but on the chance you're not.
You couldn't keep Reddit going with 10x that team. Just the tooling around keeping up with GDPR regulations and Trust & Safety alone could easily eat $10m a year.
Employees cost more than just their salary, but I see your point. So far, their attempts to make reddit more profitable have made the user experience terrible. "New" reddit is way worse than old, and is full of nagging you to use the app on mobile, to the point where you can't even view the content. I've never used the official reddit app because I've heard it's terrible, and there are many great alternatives.
I really don't know what they should do with the money other than make reddit more reliable. It was down last night. The value of reddit is the users/community. Technically, it's a modern message board/link aggregator. There are already many clones.
Instagram and Whatsapp had very small teams even with hundreds of millions of users. Reddit has more features but honestly the amount of money pumped in is crazy given that it's well, basically a collection of web forums.
Remember the point of a company is to make money for the people that invest in it, being in the top 25 globally doesn't mean that much if you need to take half a billion in cash 15 years into your existence. it's a weird narrative for a tech company.
Free food to keep people in the office and a giant building in the tenderloin with just enough security gaurds to keep your developers safe inside but unable to safely leave.
You need a mobile team, you need a spam team (or 10), you need people working on a portal for advertisers and the analytics they need, need more than 3 devops for full 24/7 coverage, etc.
Maybe they finally upgrade the 486sx based server everything runs on?
But seriously they could invest in some content discovery/recommendation features. There are probably a lot of small subreddits that go unnoticed by people that just check /all or /popular.
Their video player needs some major work.
They could decentralize the site. Shard off subreddits by some category system. The homepage would then be an aggregation of the shards. If the main site is down you can potentially still reach some shards.
Of course they would still have a ton of money left over. With a stack this high they could convert the office heater to run directly off cash for a few years.
As an amateur you probably don't have enough context to know, but what you see on a superficial level of the product is probably about < 10% of the total engineering effort.
Reddit awards, payments, ad analytics, SRE is probably 100+ engineers right there without even talking about the core experience, mobile app and security folks.
The platforms that run 8 figure companies need tons of redundancy in both application code/infrastructure and people.
Maybe a Reddit coin? Use that money to mine it and then seed the Reddit ecosystem at first with coin upvotes/awards, build a merch market for subreddit specific merch, allow advertisers to list items on the marketplace funneling sales there from Reddit ads/promoted posts, original content -> NFT…
I don’t know the details but I think the core base of Reddit would be into a project like that.
I would invest in B2B. Reddit should have just as much of an easy-to-use marketing suite like Facebook or Google have. A team of 10 engineers can do that in a year, then the rest of the money goes to sales.
Build an integrated market, initially aimed at competing with Craigslist, and maybe expanded to target other markets later (Ebay, etsy, etc). Craigslist first because its similarly simple UI and design is the easiest to recreate within Reddit.
There's tons of subreddits for connecting buyers and sellers of niche goods, but the actual buying and selling has to happen elsewhere. It's stupid that Reddit hasn't capitalized on that yet.
No, gruez was talking about how to take the new cash infusion and turn it into market cap. Literally just price of new share times share outstanding. You wanted to know how they decided on the market cap to accept money for. It's a totally different, complex, and non-public process.
The cost is fascinating. Is the value of a single place for all these conversations that much higher than having a bunch of independent forums scattered across the web? For users, there's a high discovery value... but at the cost of apparently far more expense running the site than has been able to be recouped yet.
Curious to see that even where centralization hasn't financially paid off, people are willing to keep tossing money at the dream of it paying off one day after 16 years.
> Is the value of a single place for all these conversations that much higher than having a bunch of independent forums scattered across the web?
The problem with "independent forums scattered across the web" is that they make discovery (of users and service instances) harder. There are ways around this, like the Fediverse and SOLID standards, but most bulletin-board-like forums do not support them as of yet out of the box.
Reddit should just shift to a paid model where there are no adds across the entire site and the subs you sub to get a portion of your revenue to manage the sub.
It is strange. The obvious solution to Reddit's revenue problem was to build a marketplace into the foundation of the network, and they should have done that more than a decade ago.
Etsy, eBay, FB Market, Craigslist, Fiverr, OnlyFans (which was built-up by riding on social media propagation, taking advantage of services like Reddit), and 400 other various types of online markets. There's no reason Reddit could not have have built something substantial in the ecommerce platform space over the years. Taking a small cut from transactions would have eliminated their advertising dependency. Reddit's karma also lends itself easily to forming an ecommerce trust network via transaction feedback, which would form the backbone of buying and selling products or services on there. Reddit figured out to absorb image hosting away from eg Imgur (which also piggybacked off of Reddit to then form a competing social network), and they didn't figure out to do the same thing in the ecommerce space, despite how obvious it was.
Reddit even has communities where sales are made like r/MechanicalKeyboards and those communities use karma and transaction tracking to rank sellers - the communities have done the proof of concept for them.
Reddit seems to me like a very hard product to monetize. As a daily user I get a ton of milage out of Reddit Enhancement Suite (desktop) and Apollo (iOS), in combination with typical ad-blockers. Combine that with the low friction of sign up (disposable e-mails allowed, no confirmation needed, sitewide bans rare) and the tacit allowance of "objectionable" content (porn, gore, hate speech, harassment, etc.)... you don't really have fertile ground for meaningful engagement from an advertiser perspective.
Not only that, but if Reddit were to strongly disallow any or all of the above we have seen how EASY it is to simply clone the tech and re-host. There have been stories about certain communities being exiled from Reddit only to spring up just as quickly elsewhere with more or less the same exact user experience...
> As a daily user I get a ton of milage out of Reddit Enhancement Suite (desktop) and Apollo (iOS), in combination with typical ad-blockers.
Most users aren't going to do this. Really, the reddit folks should just go all-in on tailoring their official apps towards the most casual, highly "engaged" content consumers, and target most of their monetization towards that kind of user. As a bonus, make it trivially easy to post casual content directly from the app. Who cares about "objectionable" content when they'll have so many cat pictures and cute/funny memes to run their ads next to.
> if Reddit were to strongly disallow any or all of the above we have seen how EASY it is to simply clone the tech and re-host
this seems doubtful to me. Reddit has tons of legendary threads, AMAs and is its own library of content at this point, similar to YouTube. Sure the tech could be replicated but the value is all in the content it generated.
Maybe that points to a way they could make $: curate and make anthologies of the actually valuable content. /r/askhistorians content could be turned into a few history books.
Of course, then people might start looking at the fact that they are giving away valuable property to Reddit in return for access to a simple forum site...
There are plenty of Reddit archiving and mirroring services. Pay one of those for a database dump and you’re off to the races (copyright issues be damned)
But every time you take more money you have to make more money. It’s like they’re trying to give themselves permission to do things they haven’t dared to do so far.
FYI you can actually still create a new reddit account without giving any email address (not even a disposable or fake one). Just leave the email text box blank and click "next".
Reddit's user base is poor and disaffected young men. Those might be valuable eyeballs to a warlord or a revolutionary but corporate America isn't buying.
I used to have a similar impression. Gradually my view has changed. I now see it as one of the best sources of information on the internet on specific topics.
All you need is an imagination. Paid only-fans links for example would be a huge winner when targeted at virgin men in their 20s with no real life friends (AKA Reddit userbase). These subtle advertisements are already happening all over Reddit through user posts, it's just Reddit stupidly does not charge for it.
Now that they are setting up Cryptocurrencies in some subreddits (donuts in r/ethtrader and a couple of others that I don't recall right now) they should experiment with reddits where you initially "pay" for posting, commenting, up/down voting. Then somehow if your post gets upvoted or is heavily commented on, you get some of those tokens (shared revenue) as well as moderators in the subreddits that adopt that dynamic.
It's akin to the "payment per Email" (hashcash as spam prevention) idea that a lot of us have yearned for a long time, which would deter spammers and make people think twice before commenting, so maybe it would increase the content quality.
You do realise that TWO THOUSAND YEARS worth of server time just from six (of about 138,000 active subreddits) pays for more than just a handful of employees?
Reddit is a 9 figure company. Soon to be 11 figures.
> We will raise up to $700 million in Series F funding, led by Fidelity Management and Research Company LLC. and including other existing investors, at a post-money valuation of over $10 billion.
Well it's been multiple years and hn still needs multiple pages, ironic considering they claim to deal with the best people in tech. So I guess things take time?
On a visitor perspective, this seems undervalued. This is a 50% or more discount to the market-cap/unique visitor ratio of Twitter, Snap, and Facebook.[1] And all the stats I've seen indicate much higher user engagement and time on site for Reddit compared to the other social platforms.
The biggest issue is of course that their monetization is horrible. Like 95% lower per user than the other socials.[2] So the real question an investor should ask is whether this is fixable? Or is there something intrinsic to Reddit traffic that makes it difficult to monetize? Either way, Reddit should be throwing an insane amount of money and equity to get a Sheryl Sandberg like executive with a track record of juicing monetization.
Tracking and driving engagement via notifications are some of the most important reasons why app users can be monetized better than anonymous web users (user sees more ads if they're spending more time, and tracking allows better targeted and thus higher paying ads)
Frustratingly they do this while continuing to not invest into their app - they might have an easier time attracting users if their app didn't break half of their site functions.
Perhaps traffic has a reciprocal relationship with monetization and until Reddits management are ready to bite the bullet there is a tendency to focus on vanity metrics such as traffic rather than $.
It's already happening with the profile pages being implemented.
I liked it around 2008 because it did not have profile pages and a fairly simple, straightforward interface and did not attempt to couple one's real life identity to one's post and encouraged throwaway accounts by allowing users to sign up without providing an email address.
Much of that is changing, and I also find that websites that encourage a link with one's real life identity tend to have an ever more annoying culture.
It also feels like more excessive Americana as time goes on. It did not seem like idiosyncractic U.S.A. social issues were as common in 2008, as well as the typical user that assumes every other user is from the U.S.A..
Reddit is one of the sites I use the most. I hope they can figure out a financially sustainable model without becoming obnoxious or, eventually, being bought up by a private equity firm.
This already happened, Condé Nast bought and then spun off reddit when they failed to monetize it. Reddit has to thread a needle to monetize and not kill its user base. I wager it’s impossible.
That wasn't a scientific statement. Just a theory about Reddit. I personally like Reddit because it's not shoving ad's in your face constantly and I think others do as well. Apologies for presenting it without labelling it as a theory. I would edit it now if I could.
I would say, given a static audience of 1 million people, that user engagement goes down the more you advertise (if 1/4 of my feed is ads, that's 25% less actual content to interact with).
TikTok and Instagram have been able to grow larger and larger audiences despite the pressure of ads (and honestly I know when I tried TikTok last there weren't any ads yet, I wonder what portion of an hour is taken up by ads and how long is it til it reaches television levels of ~25%) - as long as audience growth outpaces users losing interest, you can keep introducing ads, but you can't do it forever.
digg died fifteen years ago. clearly a lot has changed, and the mistakes that killed digg have not been made.
and i think reddit is beyond the point at which a digg-style fuckup could kill them. at worst you might see cadres of ideological users depart for something like lemmy, which is already happening to an extent, but there is a lot of space to flee internally, so most users don't feel the pressure. and diffusion to federated media is in the future for every mass audience. reddit has such a huge and active userbase it will dominate for the foreseeable future.
The new HTML layout and the obnoxious mobile website are worse than what killed Digg, IMO.
The difference is that when Digg made their mistakes, Reddit was there for the taking.
Nowadays, there's no alternative to Reddit. All the new sites appear to be focused on hateful communities banned from Reddit, and that will never attract the mainstream.
Digg closed before it was defeated really. I can't remember if it was the v3 or v4 that caused the migration but they didn't even try to roll back... or just stick with their new plan. They just gave up it seems.
Reddit userbase is way more hostile to ads on average, more block ads, a lot of the content is non-advertiser friendly, they have less information on their audience for targeting, etc.
Reddit is more forum than social network, they'll need to get creative to make more revenue from users. Winning strategy for them might be to try and get more older users who don't care about ads so much and have lots of money
>Winning strategy for them might be to try and get more older users who don't care about ads so much and have lots of money
Isn't the most sought-after demographic 18-35 because they have the most disposable income? Afterwards disposable income drops off because of kids and/or retirement.
Not by a long shot. Boomers are still the highest in spending[1]. I was a broke college student forever and somewhat broke for the years or so after (no loans I worked through college). I’m in the 30-40 range with kids and I spend much more than my twenties.
Lots of college students are spending their parents money for these kinds of things.
While older consumers do have more money to spend, most advertisers prefer to target younger consumers. The thinking is that boomers already have established brand preferences and spending patterns so it's much harder to convert them into new customers.
Is it actually true that online ads work better (more conversions?) on that demographic? How do you separate the confounding factor of the effect of age and income on preferences?
Product-Market fit is of course important. No point in marketing Red Bull to older demographics; the product was not designed for them. Aside from products targeted at one demographic or the other, older audiences are more skeptical, and have seen all of the ad gambits in earlier forms before.
Imagine the person saying "don't believe everything you read in the news" Is that an older person talking to a younger one, or vice-versa?
I'm not sure I understand your taxonomy. In my mind, an image board is a type of forum (generally anonymous and ephemeral). Reddit is more like a forum than a typical forum than popular imageboards, since users have long-lived identities and posts are permanent by default.
As far as "most cat pictures and memes", maybe it is, by volume. But that doesn't diminish the substantial corpus of more substantive, forum-like, discussion hosted on the site.
I've started to add +Reddit in Google searches to obtain useful information when I need to know something. With all those fake top 10 list sites and paid reviews showing up in searches, Reddit is pretty much the only place left for getting reliable product information, for example. There are friendly and knowledgeable subreddits about all kinds of topics.
The number of pictures that are actually just ads upvoted to the front page was absolutely astonishing when I used reddit. I didn't understand how people could see a Coke can with a funny name on it and not realize that was an advertisement.
You asked if there was "something intrinsic to Reddit traffic that makes it difficult to monetize?" and the answer is: Yes, they're far less invasive than the other platforms you mentioned.
Just at a very high level:
- no offsite tracking (so no retargeting - the follow you around the internet ads)
- no separate ad network (you can't buy ads on Reddit that show up on 3rd party sites)
- limits on how granular targeting can be (it's by sub-reddit but they exclude many based on size+sensitivity)
- no demographic targeting (you can't pitch your product to males 18-35)
- no fine grained geographic targeting (lowest they go is major metro areas of millions of people)
And now they're taking huge amounts of money, which means they need to succeed as an advertising company, which means they'll start doing many of those things.
Reddit has had off site tracking for quite some time.
Remember those little snooheads where you could 'reblog' about something? or vote on a site while on it?
Seeing the reddit bugs/icons/badges was about when the site started engaging in data collection. You bet your ass they do everything they can to determine a general profile of each user now based on visited subs and patterns.
They cannot manage a little chat widget on their website, you think they'll be able to trackbusers? You're right that they are trying but they are definitely not capable.
>Either way, Reddit should be throwing an insane amount of money and equity to get a Sheryl Sandberg like executive with a track record of juicing monetization.
You mean that they should spend as much money as they can on ruining Reddit.
Reddit currently supports many third party freemium clients ( Ala Twitter 2012). These third party apps offer a no ad experience too. Unsure how much revenue reddit shares with these apps though.
It helps with growth(more options for users to be on reddit) , but definitely hurts ad inventory, ad targeting insights etc.
I think this is likely why Reddit has heavily pushed direct revenue with an expansion of awards available (cheapest ones are 50 coins now), in addition to the continued ad-free option with a premium subscription.
And of course the site will just get worse and worse, but continue onward, because its value is in the audience, and it takes a lot to screw up that momentum.
(What a blessing that HN isn't run to make a profit.)
I don't think Reddit will ever scale as well as something like Facebook . The bigger Reddit gets, the less usable it becomes due to subs becoming too crowded.
The whole point of reddit is that the crowding issue is self-correcting -- you just move to a new sub. I like to envision it as a malthusian catastrophe -- as the population starts reaching capacity limits, people start grumbling more and more.. until suddenly they far overshoot the capacity, and leave en-masse to new subs. In one fell swoop, the original sub is left near-empty, and out of the many new subs created in that instant, a few survive with healthy populations.
I have been on reddit a long time and I have never seen a popular sub ever die unless it gets banned by admins. Splinter subs emerge but the original one remains popular too
The long-tail subs will never get too crowded. If you have found a niche where like-minded people hang out, there will never be a whole lot more of them, and however many more there are, it's a positive.
>Or is there something intrinsic to Reddit traffic that makes it difficult to monetize?
Reddit is also home to an enormous amount of porn and nsfw content in general which probably hurts this. They only just started preventing sexually explicit subreddits/content from appearing on r/all six months ago[0]
I wonder if their problem is that the majority of their traffic is unregistered users looking at NSFW subreddits. So they may not actually have that many users they could monetize in the first place.
Simple fix: allow users to save video only if logged in (could prime with a CTA). Right now you cant save any video from reddit, not just nsfw, not even from the app. This would incentivize people to create an account since its easier and less shady than content grabbing sites. If they want they can even limit to the app which would at least have an impact on boosting app users
Reply to a video with a comment mentioning u/savevideo and you'll get a response in a few minutes with a link. I think Reddit Enhancement Suite might also have an option for adding a download link.
As for an official paid feature: as soon as they start collecting money for video related features, the video creators will start circling for their cut of the revenue.
No they haven't. It voluntarily and temporarily shut down. Someone was pretending to represent Reddit threatened to sue u/savevideo, but Reddit admins stepped in and confirmed it wasn't them and that they don't have anything against u/savevideo
to me, this seems like an opportunity for new advertisers that don't care about "their brand showing up next to porn"
is there a market rational reason why this hasn't occurred, or are the primary places that happen to also have adult content just assuming advertisers won't use their platform
sure, big fortune 500 ad spends are lucrative, but so is the aggregate of every single half baked idea that has to test the waters with targeted ads
It made headlines not long ago when Just-Eat I believe was advertising on porn sites, so it's not an impossible ask... but marketers will want to play those campaigns very carefully. It wouldn't take much to accidentally end up next to revenge porn that makes the news or something.
> but marketers will want to play those campaigns very carefully. It wouldn't take much to accidentally end up next to revenge porn that makes the news or something.
Can you elaborate further? why is this the marketer's problem?
why isn't the ad campaigner completely agnostic on where the ad network sends it?
to me, it seems like widespread conjecture. out of the things I've seen people talk about boycotting a brand for, showing up in a banner on a porn site hasn't been one of them. People know how targeting works, their session and the ad networks.
is there a case study supporting marketer's skittishness?
The only situations I'm aware of of general brand contamination are the @stopfundinghate ones, and that's very different - pointing out to brands when their stuff is appearing next to far right content.
Not the original commenter but it's because the marketer doesn't want to be associated with the content. It may devalue the product, be the wrong target audience, cause some social media backlash, etc. (e.g. Disney wouldn't want to advertise Disney+ on a revenge porn page since it would ruin their family-friendly image).
> People know how targeting works, their session and the ad networks.
People in your network maybe. If that were widely true you wouldn't see people swearing that FB is listening to you for showing a mattress ad after you spent an hour searching for it on your computer. The average American has no idea what the hell is going on.
That was when I left Reddit. I felt like censoring from r/all is not what I want from r/all. To me that means every subreddit except quarantined subreddits. Once they started down that road I took off and haven’t been back.
I suspect (without proof) that Reddit's unique user count is far smaller than its actual user count. People proudly use multiple alts and such behaviour is tacitly encouraged by the platform. It's not at all unusual for a user to have alts for gaming, porn and other things. Obvious this phenomenon exists on other platforms but my gut tells me it's far more prevalent on Reddit.
One thing that they do not seem to be taking advantage of is how specialized many of their communities are. It seems primed for letting advertisers target to specific audiences, but as a user I don't really feel like the ads I get are targeted to what I read at all? Maybe I am uninformed but it seems like an advertising goldmine that hasn't been taken advantage of.
If you are a PC components retailer, users of /r/buildapc seems like an ideal audience to target for advertising. Camera retailer, where better than /r/photography? Cookware - advertise in /r/cooking. Repeat ad infinitum across every niche interest on the site.
They should be able to enable advertisers to do really effective targeting of campaigns. Is this not possible with their current ad tools, or are they not selling the capabilities to advertisers well enough? Or is there not actually that much money in targeted ads, is all the money in generic ads like Coca-Cola & cars?
Eh, I'd say most of the hardcore Reddit users have both old.reddit as well as an Ad Blocker, so I'm guessing that slightly better ad configuration tools wouldn't adversely impact the longtime users too much.
As for other users, they are already seeing incredibly random and irrelevant ads. Seeing actual photography themed ads on a photography themed forum doesn't seem that bad IMO (provided that they are clearly marked as ads, of course.)
Naw. The new Reddit design is much nicer than the old. There, I said it. It is much easier to use. It took them a while to iron out the bugs but it is way better.
> Naw. The new Reddit design is much nicer than the old. There, I said it. It is much easier to use. It took them a while to iron out the bugs but it is way better.
I'm curious what you like better in the new design? I personally find the floating bar at the top annoying. Not to mention the fact you have to click another button to actually see all the comments. Not to mention my biggest annoyance, clicking on the empty space on the sides when viewing a post will navigate to the subreddit?? Why?
1. Images open by default on my feed and videos and gifs autoplay as I scroll. It's a massive distraction. I'm trying to find content I might be interested in, but here I'm forced to scan pretty much every post out there.
2. On similar lines, showing a (cropped) summary for text posts. Again a distraction when you're trying to find content. The cropping makes it worse since you have to change the page after reading halfway through.
3. Having to click on view discussion to open the comments each time. This is a forum. The only reason I go there is to discuss.
4. Lack of borders for comments. It looks like one continuous feed and reduces grouping between individual comments.
5. Large avatars, icons on the reply bar compete for attention on every single comment. The reply bar on old reddit is so nicely blended away into the background. You don't see it unless you want to reply.
6. Hover popups on the large icons trigger unintentionally all the time. Very rarely do I need to see somebody's karma. What's the point of this feature even?
This is basis design considerations for a discussion forum. I completely understand where they are coming from though. They are not interested in this being a discussion forum. They want to optimize for post views. The more views a post gets, the more they will be able to monetize. Engaging in discussion is time consuming and that time could be better spent in viewing more posts.
>People are going to those specialized communities to get real information from real users, not lies and misinformation (ads and marketing).
Those specialized communities will cease to exist without something funding them.
Either users get ready to get out their wallets or get used to ads and marketing (which are not wholly lies and misinformation). And more importantly remember it's Reddit's choice how users pay, not the end users.
I'm not sure that's true. No one is paying the moderators currently. It's not like hosting costs of a forum are that high. Not that difficult to migrate all your users to a competing service if the community is un happy with the monetization scheme.
Migrating might not be that hard. Retaining existing users and attracting new users is much harder.
For niche topics I tend to add "reddit" to google search queries, because there's a high likelihood of finding actual information. If those subreddits move to other services, they may not even show up in the sea of blogspam results.
I tried to advertise a product to a very niche group on reddit. I just wanted to select 4 specific sub-reddits and advertise to anyone that was a member or viewed that reddit.
For some reason, reddit wouldn't let me advertise to 3 of the 4, and the 1 that they did let me advertise was very low volume (less than 100 members). I couldn't even get reddit to show a single ad, let alone have anyone click on it.
Facebook brought in way more traffic, and some of it did convert, but I feel like my advertising costs were too high there, since you can only specify more general interests. It seems like reddit, had their advertising platform actually worked, would have been the perfect place for me.
Yes, this. Google and Facebook make it super easy to advertise. Whenever I've tried to advertise on Reddit, nothing shows up, I have no idea why, and the advertising UI gives me no clues.
Well, they are kind of failing at their job in a big way, likely costing the company billions of dollars in the process. I don’t feel that bad for them. 5% of other socials in revenue per user is comically bad.
Taking in $400M at this stage is already a pretty sure sign of failure and that they don't know how to run a business. Probably too many MBAs busy optimizing their career ascendancy to be concerned with pesky details like competently securing revenue streams. It's not that hard to show ads to self-selecting niche audiences.
For years they delegated their advertising platform to a third party. Last I heard they were trying to build one in house, and I am not sure if they succeeded.
Ultimately it’s the board and the CEO that’s responsible for such an important issue. So if they are not already aware of it then I’m not really sure they are in a position to blame someone under them in the org chart.
They are probably too busy fighting against their own users and subreddits that keep them afloat. Too much ideology in there to make sense, business wise.
Or not. More adverts and it becomes gross. Paying to avoid adverts might be an option, and while this makes it a protection racket, I’d take it over adverts.
I wouldn’t call it a racket though since it’s entirely voluntarily to use Reddit, or not use it. And there’s also the possibility to set up other competing forums, with or without ads.
Reddit has gross adverts already: Huel, some self-help thing, naff Adobe ads endorsed by some Reddit superuser from a corner of the site I never read. I’d far rather they were relevant to the subs I do read.
I’d probably pay for a “premium” service that let me generically block stuff on Reddit - /r/popular is infested with a lot of stuff I’ll never be interested in.
That is truly bizzare. I’m having trouble understanding the motivations of the board, after a Series E and a clearly useful business, they didn’t bother with making more money?
I just checked /r/linux, which I browse on occasion, and the three sponsored posts I saw on the front page were for Intel vPro, Adobe Creative Cloud, and Google Chromebooks. Those all seem at least reasonably relevant.
Really? I'd say they are closer to unreasonably irrelevant. Maybe I could stretch myself to see a Chomebook being interesting and relevant. To me seeing the other two would make me look negatively on the brands/products. If those who sees an add get nothing out of it except wasted time I'd say they are spam. Those sound like 100% spam to me in /r/linux.
Adobe and Chromebook ads are all over Reddit. I don't read any tech or design subreddits yet I get them all the time. I doubt what you're seeing is targetted at all.
Reddit should charge for all commercial posts. It would clean up spam and generate revenue.
Make a special class of commercial account, include some 'verification' badge thingy. Let subreddits ban all commercial content, unpaid commercial content, or leave open (for commercial-specific subs).
Let mods profit share in commercial posts. (And fix the moderator system so "first to register controls the sub" is no longer the case)
"the top 20 most upvoted comments in the subreddit within the last year, with the user having more than X posts per year in the subreddit, Y karma per post and more than 1000 characters per post, are invited to become moderators"
Only really works for the in-depth subreddits, I guess it's not going to get you far on image or other media-based subreddits...
That seems non obvious, the most upvoted comments are just as likely to be memes or jokes than in-depth research, and even if they are that may not correlate to a good mod very much at all.
You can see this in action on ANY subreddit by sorting by "Top of all time". Almost every post is either some in-joke or meme, some random brigade that happened from a sudden temporary influx of users, etc. for at least the first 10 posts.
Do you think having all the members of the subreddit (or the entire site) vote on who the mod should be? I think there are many ways to make this efficient by statistical sampling, proxy votes, and detecting when statistical errors occur. To restrict people to one account you'd need to verify phone numbers.
I'm currently trying to build this but I'm not a programmer so it's slow going. I'm interested in your thoughts as I'm sure I'm missing something obvious.
There is nothing to stop people or groups of people from making thousands of accounts and joining the sub, and then eventually taking control. Even if these user accounts have to be X years old, or subbed for Y months, none of that matters in the long term.
Yes. With this system it would be important to verify identities on sign up. I think verifying phone number would largely resolve the issue (SMS short codes don't work on VOIP phones). There many other levels to reduce fake accounts that can be added if problems begin to occur.
The main issue is the more difficult sign up is, the less people sign up. It's a balancing act.
With any voting system you have to detect the validity of the votes, even upvotes.
My experience is mostly with Google Voice, but I've not found that to be true. Years ago that was the case, but these days, I've encountered by few that don't work.
I think it probably needs to not be fully automatic, but users should be able to vote to nominate a moderator for removal or addition, subject to admin discretion. Ideally, any user of the sub should be able to see the 'case' and contribute why they think the mod would/is doing a good/bad job, and people can upvote and downvote reasons. Maybe kind of use AITA's style of comment voting (but with admins finalizing decisions as a check valve against gaming).
Not fully automating, means humans for each reddit big enough. (What is big enough?)
That is expensive. So this probably means lots of decisions in short time for those administrators ... means lots of wrong decision and lots of drama.
Voting? Who has the right to vote? Anyone? Any socketpuppet account? Only verified real people? (would be a different reddit)
I think eligibility should be based on a minimum karma-within-subreddit (comments and submissions) threshold.
And yeah, this would cost Reddit some in admin labor, but they should be able to use some of this revenue stream towards those few hires. I'd imagine a team of 6 would be plenty for this purpose, maybe could get away with 2 or 3.
This is an absolutely bizarre proposal. You want moderators to willingly pollute their subreddit with ads in exchange for personally getting a kickback from reddit? Users would either migrate en masse to competing subreddits with decent mods, or they'd stay due the same old problems with moderator inertia...
> And fix the moderator system so "first to register controls the sub" is no longer the case
Why do you consider that a problem? As a heavy user of reddit, I don't consider that a problem at all. I would be interested to hear what problems you think exist with that system and what other solutions exist.
I'd be pretty pissed if I created a subreddit, put effort into growing it, and someone could just come along and steal it.
I think the problem is that reddit culture is virulently anti-consumerist and throw a fit every time they see an ad. I'll bet they get terrible conversion rates.
Thing is, I see a reasonable number of ads on Reddit, they're just rarely relevant to the subreddit I'm on. I think they could keep the same number of ads and target them better, and the results would improve.
This is true. I can easily burn through all my daily ad spend on Reddit at rates of between $0.50 and $1.00 CPMs. And the click through rates are awful.
On Facebook or Google, you've often got to spend at least $5-$10 per mille to be competitive in most verticals. $25 to $50 in some verticals like insurance. And it converts.
There's a lot of redditors who sense a corporate conspiracy anytime a brand name is mentioned, but there's tons of subreddits entirely about consumption. Media, food, hobbies. I was active on r/homebrewing for years and people talk about products they want to buy all the time.
The trouble with those types is they all have very strong opinions and think most products are crap. They're not opposed to buying things, just shitty things.
If you will suffer a brief crash course on ad terminology, you are describing "placements".
A placement with an ad in it shown to a user is called an "impression".
I agree that advertisers would pay reddit more for better ad space (also called "inventory") but that doesn't just happen automatically.
Right now, I would assume they are integrating with some third party ad network and probably use fairly generic targeting information.
The cost in time and money to either deepen that integration or rip it out and make a custom ad network is probably significant.
I wanted to run Reddit ads after to target users of a certain game after a big expansion launch. My site had a bunch of time-sensitive information that 1) was useful to the users of a specific subreddit, 2) would be useful for a week or so after the launch, 3) while it had a successful submission, I wanted to promote that submission for about a week afterwards to more people could see it.
I put up a reddit ad for that submission and Reddit took 4 weeks to approve it. At that point, there was no point running the ad anymore.
Another time I wanted to advertise to a new game that had a brand new subreddit to match but it was huge - 100k plus users in a week. Reddit simply wouldn't permit me to advertise to it because it was new.
In my (limited) experience it feels like Reddit isn't making the money it could be because it doesn't want to.
> One thing that they do not seem to be taking advantage of is how specialized many of their communities are.
Their default subs are utter crap and full of influence campaigns accounts; in addition to being nearly impossible to post to without punished in some way.
bundle that with a profile that easily identifies cross markets by other interests too. you get to double dip.
millions of targetable demographic profiles all self sorted and prepackaged for whomever.
Unfortunately I think the core audience of Reddit is probably somewhat well informed and probably running an ad block. I’d love to see the percentages.
It makes total sense to be able to target communities and I think they need to just stick a banner on the right hand side and be done with it. Let moderators maybe even take a small cut in exchange for providing info and meta data on their community.
Can't tailor ads? Loose concept of user identity? I would think having a list of every subreddit a user subscribes to would give you a good indication of what interests they have! But from reading this thread it sounds like Reddit makes it difficult to choose which subreddits you want to advertise to.
The thing is, which works against intuition, is that when an addict works a little more for the hit, they "deserve" it more.
Most of the data I have is about heroin and cocaine. And folks are very reluctant to like physically addictive things to these technologic addiction things.
But human nature is very consistent regarding these dopamine releases. We're all fienders.
It's "slot machine" psychology, sometimes it doesn't work so you have to pull it again. Being unpredictable makes the dopamine rush stronger when it works and gives you what you want. search for "slot machine social media" and you'll find a good deal of coverage.
This usually applies to what posts are in an algorithmic feed, but I guess not having the feed show up at all is a fresh innovation. Twitter and Reddit both do a lot of just giving up and saying "woops, couldn't load that link you just clicked" as if that was a real problem. Really? what, the database wasn't there when you looked? Try again yourself, why make me click refresh?
Another anecdata - search on facebook doesn't work for finding stuff in someone's timeline, so I've spent many minutes scrolling down someone's page trying to find a post. It's frustrating but I don't quit, and I'm sure metrics and impressions look great (no click through tho)
Your comments make perfect sense in light of the fact that Reddit is the world's largest free porn site, with just enough "social" sprinkled on top to keep you engaged between wanks.
The only information I could find claims that about 22% of reddit is NSFW. They calculated the percentage of NSFW subreddits with >100k subscribers. [1]
That's far from a perfect way to measure this, but it's around the statistic that 30% of the internet is porn. My intuition tells me Reddit probably reflects the internet as a whole pretty well.
Well, just for the record, that doesn't invalidate what I said. I'm not concerned with what PERCENTAGE is porn. It still is the largest, most-easily-accessible, most searchable, free porn site. And also for the record, yes, I HATE that Reddit (and Twitter, et. al.) allow full-on NSFW content along with all the rest.
Doesn't matter the percentage of subreddits (i.e. counting every qualifying subreddit equally), what is the percentage of eyeballs? And don't you think lots of people view porn subreddits without subscribing?
> This is a 50% or more discount to the market-cap/unique visitor ratio of Twitter, Snap, and Facebook.[1] And all the stats I've seen indicate much higher user engagement and time on site for Reddit compared to the other social platforms.
Most people have one Snap / FB account and one, maximum two Twitter accounts... but throwaways are the norm on Reddit (as well as HN), which means Reddit's user count is inflated by quite a bit. Additionally, Reddit has large nsfw communities that draw lots of members and visitors (again, most with separate accounts!), and these can't be reasonably monetized at all.
> On a visitor perspective, this seems undervalued.
Cause they’re always one drama away from losing tons of people. The platform seems to attract drama involving the platform and decisions made more than say Twitter does
One of the main reasons their monetization is so bad is that their mobile app is terrible.
Mobile Apps are important for monetization because they are much less vulnerable to ad blockers, people are used to ads taking up more of the screen in scrollable content and in most cases carry more traffic than desktop versions.
I think the disastrous experience buying and targeting ads is bad too, but the lack of a decent mobile app is a huge factor.
Not sure how Reddit is worth that much... Are the 50 power mods in charge of 90% of the top subs selling access to state propaganda departments? Actually don't answer that, its painfully obvious.
$ per user revenue is pathetic compared to most social media platforms.
The reddit outage yesterday was the worst one I have seen in years. Reddit used to go down multiple times a day 3+ years ago but it seems pretty solid now.
They also used to shut the site down for hours at a time to run updates.
I would imagine most of these investments will go to three places:
* Sales - start generating revenue from all these eyeballs, leveraging your interest graph for targeting. this requires way more headcount than you'd expect, especially to chase enough revenue to justify a $10b valuation
* Safety - beyond all the well-discussed dangers of large-scale user forums, this also impacts monetization. you don't want to subject the average new user to extreme/alt/adult content (though you can still offer space for those communities) or else you may scare them off. major advertisers want "brand safety" and want to avoid being associated with upsetting or even mildly profane content
* Regulatory - dozens of countries and states are rolling out unique regulations around privacy, data usage, and user rights. this is a nightmare to navigate from both a product and legal sense
Reddit is a marketeers dream. Every corporation, product, game, movie studio and consumer device has a big team dedicated to using Reddit for free. Submissions memes and comments are posted by the teams, often out in the open. Reddit gets no income from this advertising.
If Reddit were to start looking at charging for these, the platform might change drastically. I'm not sure how, however.
Reddit is already packed to the brim with product shilling and yet it keeps getting bigger. I doubt the majority of users will be turned off from this. The reddit user base has changed as well. Most users of reddit probably never used the old design at this point.
As someone who tried to advertise on reddit (though it was > 1-2 years ago, so things may have changed)-- Reddit, along with Twitter, is very advertiser unfriendly. And Im not just talking about the users.
I literally couldnt give them my money. I wanted to target a specific subreddit, but couldnt buy any impressions on it for 3 months. The app kept forcing me to advertise on /all, or all technology reddits, which wasnt what I wanted. I did buy $10 of ads, got zero clicks, surprise surprise.
The thing was hard to setup, hard to run, hard to measure, not to mention, advertisers get treated like any other account. I was shadow banned because I was linking to one domain, and reddit considered me a spammer. But I was like, that *is* the whole purpose of advertising. I was forced to post a few cat pictures, just so I could run my ads.
Never again.
I note they have since revamped their ad site-- now there is a new site, but you have to reregister to run ads, and I dont want the hassle.
Yes, everyone hates ads, but thats how free sites make money.
Some redditors were hostile to ads, but the number isnt that big. Most users were indifferent.
Such an ad-hostile company, I wonder how they make money.
I tried it recently (< 2 months ago) and the experience wasn't too bad. This was the first real ad "campaign" I had ever set up. The targeted group was pretty niche and while Reddit suggested going broader, I was able to stick with the subreddits that I considered relevant.
The most annoying part was the rather opaque period between launching, approving, and actually running the ad. The first real confirmation I had that things were working was a bill.
>Yes, everyone hates ads, but thats how free sites make money.
Maybe a simple user forum site doesn't need to make mega valuation levels of money. Maybe it, and other low effort sites like Facecrook and Twatter, should be run as public benefit corps. These companies aren't selling state of the art tech here - why do they need to be such money makers??
> These companies aren't selling state of the art tech here - why do they need to be such money makers??
You’re thinking of the user facing element as being the thing they’re selling. That’s not what they’re selling. They give that away for free so they can sell extremely sophisticated data and targeting. You’re the product they’re selling. And the access is definitely cutting edge.
Yes, I get that the industry is leveraging its "best and brightest" on stalkertech and the users are getting pennies worth of value in trade for large dollars of value extracted from them in the form of data. The tradeoff is so ridiculous that it is essentially theft. Its like trading trinkets to native populations for land.
Side note: the whole trinkets for land thing is exaggerated. Native populations didn’t have any concept of land “ownership” similar to what the Europeans did. There is a strong argument that they perceived the trinkets as more of a friendly gesture, like a diplomatic gift. Then the settlers proclaimed they owned the land and ran the native populations off. Not so dissimilar than how you’re using the analogy, because users don’t really have a good concept of owning their data or metadata, while the social media empires expropriate it for their own immense gain after confusing the users into thinking they were getting something for free, all the while giving themselves the excuse that it was a fair trade because the users/natives accepted the pittance offered to them.
Similar with me. Also like you this was over 2 years ago.
I looked to advertise on Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit.
Facebook didn't seem interested in SMBs and I didn't even advertise on them, it seemed very complex just to run a simple ad.
Twitter didn't deliver good value per click etc., but I did get good demographic information on who was and wasn't interested.
Google was the best value, especially if you look for bargains where one group of customers is cheap.
Reddit had no offerings in the way Google had, or even Twitter had. IIRC I bailed on advertising with them at all. With Facebook it was just too complex for a simple ad, with Reddit it didn't even seem they were offering anything near what I wanted.
It's been going downhill. There's not enough talk about its decline of original content. That's what it was known for in its earlier days. Now it's mostly recycled old memes, reposts of Tiktoks, and reposts of tweets.
the mods are even worse than admins in many respects. mods for popular subs have considerable control over what is allowed or not. Many subs have enormous blacklists of users,domains,and even words. As well as stupid, arbitrary content guidelines pertaining to length, the title, the body, and other stuff. Reddit admins have the most power but they tend to not get involved unless a sitewide rule is broken.
Ironically, your comment itself also lacks any detail of countering or clarifying information, and is itself just a content-free slam on the person you replied to.
Is your point that the mods don't have all these blacklists (including of words), or that the mods do have the blacklists but they're allowed and expected to? Is the mod system working well, in your opinion?
> Is your point that the mods don't have all these blacklists (including of words),
Of course moderators have blacklists. For words / phrases / domains, they are site sanctioned through the (now) built in function called "Automoderator".
User blacklists are done through the built in ban function.
In fact, one would call these blacklists... moderation. Something a moderator would be expected to do.
> the mods do have the blacklists but they're allowed and expected to?
They are built into the site. It would logically follow that it is both allowed and expected.
Stepping back, I'm not sure how you can expect a forum, any forum, to survive without moderation.
> Is the mod system working well, in your opinion?
This is really impossible to answer.
From the bird's eye view, users and impressions are growing while reddit doesn't have to pay for moderation. A stunning success.
From a lurker perspective, they never interact with moderators and generally get content that has been reviewed and determined to be within the rules, though this may vary by subreddit.
From an active user perspective, the system may work well, or not well, depending on which subreddit(s) you frequent and how you use the platform. There are many subreddits, and moderators on some may certainly make your life unpleasant. So... don't be active on those subreddits.
However, the number of active users, according to the 90-9-1 principle is quite small, and the number of those that ever meaningfully interact with a moderator, or even a bot moderator, are probably a magnitude smaller than that.
So yes, IMO, the mod system seems to work well overall.
I get where you're coming from, as I created /r/relationship_advice. The existence of such blacklists, even "enormous" ones, isn't inherently bad; it's just a reality of dealing with an enormous flood of spam on a $0 budget.
That being said, blacklists on strings have 100% been abused by both the mods and the admins. Blacklists should be used for mitigating spam — e.g. we'll often block a specific attacker by blacklisting certain phrases or regexes and then deal with the inevitable edge case false positives by hand — not generally for censoring ideas or "offensive" words.
Sure, by all means block phrases like "kill yourself" in /r/SuicideWatch and maybe /r/relationship_advice. If a sub is inciting violence or posting CP, there's probably a case for banning it. But when people have to self-censor common curse words and even the word "fart" in a general forum like /r/tifu, clearly something is wrong.
> Sure, by all means block phrases like "kill yourself"
Even that will often lead to the scunthorpe problem.
I remember well once scouring through a post that was rejected on a forum to finally realize it was because it contained the phrase “tardive dyskinesia” which contained “tard” which alone was enough to deny the post, apparently.
FWIW, I think it's silly that reddit has banned the term "retard" site-wide, although I also acknowledge that the term may be becoming broader and more offensive than I personally understand it to be.
In the case of "kill yourself" in /r/SuicideWatch, though, it's such an extreme case with potentially disastrous results that I wouldn't find it particularly problematic. The occasional false positive is arguably a small price to pay.
> FWIW, I think it's silly that reddit has banned the term "retard" site-wide, although I also acknowledge that the term may be becoming broader and more offensive than I personally understand it to be.
Do you have any source of this? As far as I know Reddit bans no words site-wide, and I see the term used now and then.
On the very same website a post could not come through because I described someone as having “retarded pubertal development”, in any case.
> In the case of "kill yourself" in /r/SuicideWatch, though, it's such an extreme case with potentially disastrous results that I wouldn't find it particularly problematic. The occasional false positive is arguably a small price to pay.
It's also completely useless because people that want to get through the censor will et through it by other means that will still make their message easily understood.
Word censors are window politics and people that want to get around them will get around them and I assume it's already against the rules on that subreddit to encourage suicide so they would be quite willing to also break a rule to evade word censors.
Not offhand, but I've heard of users getting temporary suspensions for using the word, although I don't believe there's an automated rule site-wide.
It's also completely useless
Not entirely. Sure, if you're a dedicated attacker trying to tell a specific target to kill themselves, there's not much I can do about it; you'll acquire an aged account with decent karma and find a way to do it.
If you're just a regular person going about your day and say something stupid, an automod removal with a warning that circumventing the rule will result in a permanent ban is probably sufficient to make you give up and move on with your life. And of course bots that aren't specifically designed to circumvent my subreddit's rules would be trivially blocked.
> Not offhand, but I've heard of users getting temporary suspensions for using the word, although I don't believe there's an automated rule site-wide.
Merely for using the word? this seems like a myth to me. Various subreddits would obviously ban for it if used as a direct insult, but banning any use of it side-wide seems unlikely.
> If you're just a regular person going about your day and say something stupid, an automod removal with a warning that circumventing the rule will result in a permanent ban is probably sufficient to make you give up and move on with your life. And of course bots that aren't specifically designed to circumvent my subreddit's rules would be trivially blocked.
In which case it would be just as effective to simply give a warning based on detected words that various conduct with it will not be tolerated and that a moderator will be automatically informed of the post, and to remind users to make use that their usage of the word falls within the guidelines.
This would eliminate scuntorpe false positives, and have about the same effect of stopping the intended behavior.
This is actually what makes reddit great, that anyone can start their own subreddit, mod it however they want, and compete with all the others based on the merits of its own content, community and moderation style.
It is impossible to compete with the first one that claims the obvious name for the subject, such as, say r/startrek
The competing ones also censor heavily, so all it does is that one can now choose what particular opinions one can't express.
Competing on the merits of moderation style is insignificant compared to having the most straightforward name that everyone will try first; the subreddit with such name will always be the largest.
Disagree - most city subreddits are pretty hands off and they get overrun by people coming from alt-right subs who don't even live in the city talking about crime.
Moderation often improves quality. It can also be bad, but is not universally so.
I think the worst part is how things are silently removed. On many sites you get a message saying 'your content has been removed for violating rule x'. On reddit you almost always get nothing. Often you don't even get a ban message and will just be added to a shadow ban list so you end up wasting your time commenting but no one can see it.
There is a site that shows you your deleted comments[1] and its pretty shocking. I found out every single one of my comments in one sub had been auto deleted with the reason being I did not have any link karma (because I only comment). What a waste of time and it turns me off from the platform.
Offhand, /r/legaladvice, /r/AskHistorians, and /r/AskScience stand out as being heavily moderated to the benefit of overall content quality. I don't see how any of those would be political propaganda (left-wing or otherwise).
I have never tried the latter two, but the first one is a very good example of a notoriously bad advice subreddit that almost all lawyers dislike for spreading constant misinformation, and often even seeing people that say the correct thing be banned by the moderators.
There are almost no actual lawyers on that subreddit for two reasons: A) actual lawyers would like to see compensation for their expertise; B) in many jurisdictions, lawyers are not allowed to give legal advice without establishing a formal attorney–client relationship.
The latter two subreddits really do have excellent content, they are worth checking out.
/r/legaladvice is so bad there is actually a subreddit dedicated to discussing what's posted there, /r/bestoflegaladvice. There's more attorneys in that sub than the actual legal advice sub, where a surprising amount of advice is either blatantly wrong or essentially "just tell the police everything, they'll help."
/r/audiophile and /r/wine are two other well moderated subreddits, where the discussion has remained relatively focused and high quality even as the communities have grown, because the moderators aggressively prune low-effort and unrelated content. There was big drama, once upon a time, when /r/audiophile banned anything headphone related.
Interesting, this is the first I'm hearing about that. Typically users will state whether or not they're lawyers, and if so the degree to which they're familiar with the OP's jurisdiction, and threads will often be locked and/or littered with removed comments for the reason "bad advice". Often, the only advice users will receive is to go see a lawyer.
Based on all that, it seemed pretty solid to me. I'm not saying you're wrong, but if I had to guess it's probably more a case of being hit-or-miss than entirely bad. Even a minority of bad advice would stand out to a lawyer in the same way that >=1% of wrong information in a tech publication would stand out to most of us here, particularly if the victims of said bad advice were in serious situations.
(IANAL or an active user of /r/legaladvice. I just pop in every so often when an interesting thread hits my front page, so whatever I'm exposed to is presumably better quality and more actively moderated than what's average for the sub.)
I stopped going to /r/AskHistorians because often the only allowed answers were badly sourced.
This is especially prevalent on events that are still relatively recent (last 40-50 years).
Second, it really is /r/AskHistorians ONLY, you are not allowed to mention any personal anecdata (ie participating in the fall of Berlin Wall etc.)
Even worse you are not allowed to attempt to provide official primary sources.
There was a question on WW2 Soviet tank production and German preparedness. I was not allowed to link in secondary comment Hitler-Mannerheim talks where they talked about this very issue!
I'm not going to shed any tears over them shutting down communities devoted to hate speech because the site has become noticeably more pleasant to read and participate in as those users went elsewhere.
I think that once a sub attracts a large amount of readers, it's unethical to block certain conversations.
For large subs like /r/politics, a select few people get to control what's fed into the eyeballs of millions of people. And we don't even know what content wasn't allowed to be posted, how can we trust they're unbiased?
>I think that once a sub attracts a large amount of readers, it's unethical to block certain conversations.
Why? You're free to make your own subreddit with a different bias or no bias. No one really assumes it's unbiased and they go there because of the bias that they agree with. People like communities of like minded people.
By that logic any large scale media (tv, newspapers, magazines, etc.) should not be allowed to have bias even if the only reason people went there was for the bias.
This is quite true too. If you don't feel like politics is conservative enough for your tastes, worldnews is right there for you. And there are countless smaller communities catering to nearly any perspective imaginable.
It's shown time and time again that the alternative, with a radical free-speech approach to content moderation, is that the community attracts users who post trash content (e.g., white nationalism, screwball conspiracy, glorification of violence, misogyny), who then gradually drive away everyone else. That's why they never attract much of a following and end up withering and dying.
As a former mod of /r/politics the reality is quite mundane. The bias you see on the front page of that subreddit is pretty much entirely due to the users upvoting. The mod team is really careful to ensure nothing gets removed simply due to political differences and is internally transparent, and includes mods from a wide spectrum of political beliefs and backgrounds. Interestingly the mod team is simultaneously accused of being biased towards left and right wing politics at once!
I don't totally agree with this argument when applied to something like Twitter, but I can at least see the logic in it. When we're talking about something like a subreddit, I find the notion that you have to let anyone come and post whatever they want in your community because it's popular rather hard to swallow.
I've been permanently banned from almost all of the top COVID related subs for daring to discuss disallowed topics, like the Wuhan lab, as well as expressing anti-lockdown sentiments. My appeals have been instantly denied as well.
I understand the idea that subreddits are user-run communities and should be able to self-moderate, but there are a couple problems with this:
1. Reddit claims to be the "front page of the internet" and promotes many of these top subreddits with front-page rankings, user suggestions, and push notifications. Therefore, reddit mods have immense power in controlling the flow of information to those who believe they're interacting with a reputable source, and Reddit corporate has washed their hands of any responsibility to have a say in this, despite the profit they receive from it.
2. Reddit corporate certainly is willing to get involved with subreddits, by banning or quarantining certain subs for spreading "misinformation", but this seems selectively applied to one particular side of these issues. Anti-lockdown subreddits are banned for downplaying Covid, but major Covid subreddits openly feature fear-mongering posts that overplay, say, the risk of the virus to kids. Both are misinformation, but one is allowed and and the other is banned.
This seems more like a Silicon Valley issue than a Reddit one. And Silicon Valley generally doesn’t have much motivation to get people doing actual stuff, people sitting at home is where the cash is.
The nice thing is as alternative tech platforms rise up (communities.win, ovarit.com, ruqqus, rumble, etc) we will see a more decentralized web and these tech giants will soon be forgotten. Hopefully, they'll take their toxic VCs with them, but I think that may be a pipe dream.
Theres a difference between curating the best recipes or cutest cat pics, and censoring certain ideas about pressing global health crises because they don't fit a certain narrative.
I wrote my suicide note on my own subreddit and got banned (site wide) for threatening violence. Err, OK, gotta find a safer place for that.
Sadly, as you might be able to tell, I wasn't able to do it. It's terrifying. Also why should I die while worse people live? Gotta do something about them before going myself, d'uh.
I understand how alarming it is when people post on such an extremely painful topic, but probably this is a place to recall the site guideline that says "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." I can think of other things bserge might have meant.
It would be stupid of me to do that. Besides, death is easy, living in suffering is where the real hell is. And it's much easier to achieve, would you look at that.
I'm glad you're here. If there's any chance that connecting would be helpful, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and I'll send you my personal email.
Giving fringe viewpoints a megaphone and that kind of validation is a terrible idea. We have seen it be abused and fail us consistently over the last decade in both mainstream and social media.
I don't trust large corporations to decide what is fringe and what is not, because not only is it a slippery slope, it has been abused consistently especially over the last few years.
Look no further than Facebook's handling of COVID "misinformation". From the start of the pandemic, they have enshrined the current statements of the CDC as "information" and everything else as "misinformation". For example, when the supposed "scientific consensus" was that COVID-19 100% came from nature, anyone who suggested it could have been manmade was called a conspiracy theorist and banned from the platform. Now, a year later, those scientists are backtracking, and some are even admitting that they took the natural-origin stance simply to not be associated with Trump, who was taking the other side. That's not science.
It was never a crazy idea. Anyone who could think for themselves knew that. But Facebook declared themselves the arbiter of truth, and decided that anything that wasn't said by the CDC needed to be censored.
When reasonable, logical ideas about important global health challenges are considered "fringe" simply because the authorities have declared them to be fringe, we have a serious problem.
Because the "man made" conspiracy was not based on any evidence or research. They were promoted by media personalities with no scientific backgrounds spreading a false narrative deeply rooted in white nationalism and helped to promote anti-Chinese hate crimes.
Obviously real scientists and social media platforms didn't want to be associated with or help to promote that at the time.
Reddit was a bastion of free speech but it's suffered a steep decline in quality and content. It's a toxic place with heavy handed dark UI patterns: they've lost their minds over there.
I was going to say, there are plenty of subs for pedaling that kind of content, but looks like the major one, r/NoNewNormal was just quarantined (ironic) today, which is often the first step towards a total ban. Reddit's a private company, and if they don't want that kind of content on their site, shouldn't that be their choice?
The problem with the "private company" line that, yes, they're a private company, but censorship is definitely still bad!
Free speech is a fundamentally protected right in the US. From the Founder's perspective, the greatest threat to that right was clearly and obviously government, because what other entity could possibly have that much reach into one's life? Up until the internet age, no one could imagine a private company or a private individual having the capacity to infringe upon free speech at scale.
So, we have a Constitutional right to free speech, protected against infringement by the government, which is great, but there is another threat to the free flow of information and ideas, and that is private corporations who can now infringe upon this right at scale. And we don't have the tools or framework to defend it, because private companies can do what they want? Thats not good enough for me. The situation is dire when private companies appoint themselves to be the arbiters of truth, because even with the best intentions, there are bound to be mistakes, as we've already seen. And they don't all have the best intentions.
You post about free speech but appear to be quite ignorant about the topic. Example why is it considered a crime to yell “fire” in a crowded theater? Educate yourself and stop posting annoying banal rhetoric.
That’s all you have to say? The fire in a theater example (and you call me banal)? You really can’t think of any other form of speech that has been unfairly censored by social media sites?
Your reading comprehension seems a bit lacking, casting doubt on your other statements. To be clear I am asserting that your claim censorship by private companies is unjust; that is banal, annoying, and ignorant.
Do or do you not think it’s a good thing for private individuals to be able to unilaterally censor what can be said in what really is the new public square?
The fact you perceive any particular message posted to any particular for profit social media site as being a “public square” is more the result of successful marketing and ignorance than reality.
Hacker news, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit etc. are private properties surrounding the public square.
You can do what you like (within the bounds of the law, because even public squares have rules) with your own property on the web, but you also have to follow the rules of any other establishment if you enter.
I’m not sure why this is so hard for pageandrew to grasp. I assume they think since anyone can register and use these sites, they think that makes them “public” when in fact people who register with and use these sites are paying for the privilege; with their personal data, their attention, their clicks, and their manufactured outrage that drive engagement, precisely what pageandrew is trying to do here.
User pageandrew can set up their own stall by the web public area and publish whatever they wish, discuss whatever they wish with whomever they wish, also censor whoever they wish. It’s their stall, their property. Just as twitter etc are the property of others. Pageandrew.com will most likely not have the views or clicks though, and that’s what they need to peddle their outrage.
I'm not calling pageandrew out personally - it seems like many people on this site can't seem to see the forest for the trees in this regard. The narrative that a few FAANG sites have completely centralized and commoditized the web to the point that they have de facto become the web is necessary for the fear narrative of a vast leftist conspiracy controlling the media and persecuting free thinkers, but also completely wrong.
Look at Youtube. The platform has been demonetizing and deplatforming accounts for obscure and opaque reasons for years, and not just Conservatives and gun videos. The result has been people advertising their non YT content on alternative platforms. If enough people are upset with the way a platform does business, they go elsewhere.
People get kicked off of 4chan, they move to 8chan. They get kicked off of Reddit, they go to Voat. Plenty of platforms serving the persecution complex of modern Conservatives, Trump supporters, incels and the alt-right have shown up on Hacker News. Gab and Parler still exist, and are still cesspools of free speech. And that's just on the open web.
Censorship at the platform level is not a problem, because there can always be alternative platforms. Censorship at the network level is a problem. That's why I'm vehemently opposed to arguments that the government should step in and regulate all social media platforms, or force them to publish content against the will, or require a judge to sign off on any moderation action. I'd rather have parts of the web play by rules I don't agree with than have the whole thing play by one set of rules at the point of a gun.
Funny enough paying for professional moderation will actually help Reddit. The quality of almost every major subreddit is trash due to mods on a power trip (or paid by a third party to push an agenda).
in 10 years time reddit will barely exist if at all.
people forget myspace and other garbage like it.
reddit's financial structure is a giant black hole that exists to push stealth advertising that gets less and less competitive with youtube and facebook every hour.
In the hn tiktok thread, I saw a salient comment that said: "When I visit reddit I just leave angry".
Tiktok doesn't have this problem. I always have fun on that app, and leave feeling like it was a good time. Reddit is the total opposite. Nothing but people screaming and mods power-tripping, forever.
Never experienced a website that objectively has such terrible impact on peoples lives. Are they going to use this money to turn it around?
That's all dependent on the subs you visit. I have learned so much on reddit. News and leaks before it breaks anywhere else. How to 3D print stuff. Extremely complicated laws and how to avoid going to prison for stuff I knew nothing about.
Reddit is the ultimate "it is what you make of it" website. If you spend your time in the subs that make you angry then yeah, but if you narrow it down to only things you like you'll have a great time.
That has not been my experience, and I've browsed some _really_ niche subreddits for a "famous" group of bodybuilders in Delray beach if you catch my drift.
It's not easy to run a company with as many users as they have.
As a mod, they've put a lot of work recently into flagging trolls and astroturf accounts, and still have a lot of work to do. I run r/sanfrancisco, and wow there's a ton of bots and trolls flooding our sub about the Newsom recall.
They also seem to really want to find a way to monetize content in a new way. They've flirted with crypto and awards, but I imagine they have strong ambitions around how they can reward creators and moderators in a healthy, non-ad-based-way. (Their ads are the worst of all the big social networks, given how anonymous their base is. So they're forced to innovate, which I think is good for everyone.)
Plus the usual suspects (infrastructure, traditional demand gen marketing, paid moderation, etc).
>Their ads are the worst of all the big social networks, given how anonymous their base is. So they're forced to innovate, which I think is good for everyone
The oddity is that their user's aren't that anonymous -- in fact, they very directly tell reddit what their interests are. Like a trade magazine, reddit really doesn't have to do any analysis at all to figure out how to map ads to the right target audience.
It confounds me how they haven't managed to do a much better job of targeted advertising -- just showing woodworking tool ads on the woodworking sub would be a dramatic improvement over the current setup.
My quick Google-ing shows that they make about $100M/year on ads. So they do this and it works decently well.
However, ads at other social networks have evolved way past this level of targeting (which is a bad thing, in my opinion, but alas). Social networks like Facebook know so much about not just your likes but the people you're friends with and how much your income is and what stores you've been to and what you do on Instagram and what your age is and what state you're in and... the list goes on.
I think most subreddits are tough to monetize. What do you sell to r/funny or r/politics or r/sanfrancisco? What does r/choosingbeggars want to buy? There's a few obvious ones (diets, hobbies), but I think eeking out $100M from that is already impressive.
Plus, Reddit's audience is way more against ads than Instgram/Facebook/etc.
Reddit knows all the subs you subscribe to though. They don't have to give all users of a sub the same ad, just give everyone ads based off their most valuable interests.
So let's say their annual revenue is 3-4x since ad spend is usually weighted heavily towards Q4. At 300-400M per year and growing that's actually pretty solid.
Reddit is the only website in the Alexa top 15 (US) that runs completely on the cloud. Everyone else has figured out datacenters save a bucket load of money.
Reddit is such an amazing platform. It is the practice of freedom made real. Don’t like the mods? Make your own subreddit. Don’t like someone? Block them and you’ll never see them. Universal SSO across thousands of communities makes it a trusted source for reviews.
It is akin to social networking what Craigslist is to marketplaces.
A magical magical place.
I would have liked if it was easy to federate, I.e. make a new subreddit that is just like this other subreddit and posts show up in both. You can make multireddits with plus signs but you can’t create a new one that is just like the old one except you don’t censor the word “pumpkin” or whatever.
Would be interesting but maybe a bad idea since it fragments the user base.
Reddit is simultaneously the most usable and most incompetently run (now that tumblr is dead) social media website on the internet. My hunch is that both phenomena are connected.
___________
The incompetent UI rehaul has meant that most users continue staying on old.reddit.com, which makes it impossible to sunset. This means that old.reddit.com works in the most familiar manner of early-2000s forums without much in its way. The incredibly late and terrible 1st party app, has meant that significantly superior 3rd party apps (without the same large scale profit motives) have gained prominence and cannot be pushed out. The ads are bad enough, that they don't have a large variety of advertisers to specifically target compatible subreddits. Imagine having simultaneously the most most engaged users and the worst ads. The censorship is amateurish, and gets beaten by a motivated bunch of idiots on a regular basis. The fear of a competitor being just around the corner (due to their own digg origin story) makes them too scared to censor beyond an unperceivable breaking point, lest they face mass exodus. Good teams are analytically user obsessed. They know their target audience very well. To be fair, worse teams ban users for what used to be the central purpose of their platform cough tumblr cough.
Its public perception is tied to the Boston marathon, pedophile-defending employees and the rise of Trump. So, there isn't sufficient adoption among 'normies'. While that's bad for monetization it slows down the rate of decline in content quality and keeps it far away enough from the public eye, that you can get away with 'better' content.
Every feature they attempt to release (Chat, live stream, video hosting) is done so badly that users refuse to bulge on previous user flows. Thus, it maintains a certain purity.
_________
Reddit is the most ironic victor due to the 'don't fix what's not broken' rule.
Reddit in 2015 was a pretty good website. The devs have been unable to get adoption for any new feature past 2015. Thus, they never fixed what was not broken.
Facebook frequently messes with user flows to maximize earnings. Most successful social media websites have figured out how to guide their users down an 'intended' user flow such that they can maximally profit without losing any users. Reddit doesn't know how to do either.
With that, I hope that Reddit's leaders never wisen up and start making real money. The day reddit figures out monetization, will be the day that I set forth looking for a new badly-monetized platform.
I think it's a common misconception that old.reddit.com is still extremely popular. As a mod of a medium-large sub which should skew highly towards old.reddit.com (developer-focussed content, created at around the beginning of reddit itself), the percent of pageviews on old.reddit.com is right now around 8%.
Is it just me, or is Reddit broken in some way about 10% of the time now?
Overall, the site just seems janky. It used to be reliable and fast, say 3 years ago, but now it seems to choke on the higher load. I frequently encounter issues with comments not loading, karma not displaying, etc.
Something that hasn’t been brought up in this thread is the massive problem Reddit has regarding large scale bot networks.
Reddit allows for unlimited account creation and has extremely poor, if any, detection algorithms. Additionally, its trivial to stream and analyze the entirety of Reddit comments and posts in real time (check out PRAW if you like Python).
Networks pushing COVID narratives and crypto frauds are probably the worst offenders. Here’s an example I just came across in /r/miami: https://reddit.com/r/Miami/comments/p1z6a7/have_you_guys_see.... The networks pushing certain COVID narratives are evening more troubling as, unlike crypto, im not sure what the end game is or who is controlling those networks.
> Reddit allows for unlimited account creation and has extremely poor, if any, detection algorithms.
Why don't they put some CAPTCHAs? They have no CAPTCHAs anywhere in account creation + post first time comment + first time thread + first time direct message?
I wouldn't say this isn't a problem at all but the fact that subs have mods which have a lot of power seems to be very effective.
I don't spend that much time on reddit as a whole - but frequent about 5-7 subs every single day. These are mostly medium sized subs and none of them have a problem of spam. And I'm on them enough that it is by far the social media/news site I interact with the most.
> Something that hasn’t been brought up in this thread is the massive problem Reddit has regarding large scale bot networks.
Well rest assured, Reddit administration does not see this as a problem at all. It's one of the ways marketing companies advertise on Reddit. There's a reason the moderators of /r/all subreddits tend to all moderate the same group of subreddits, and that they all often have super human posting frequencies. These are shared accounts for ad firms. This was discussed on HN before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173018
I've come across crypto pumps on Reddit, but might not be on the right subs to have come across the network posts (or just haven't noticed yet). Do you have some links to those posts?
Reddit is 16 years old. It's one of the largest sites on the internet by views, users, time on site, any metric you would care about. They have something like 500 FTE's, which is tiny compared to lots of other sites with far less traffic.
It's basically the perfect combination of high traffic and low costs, and they have raised close to a billion dollars in funding. If they aren't profitable now, they are very unlikely to ever be profitable. I think it's likely they will sell to one of the big players (I would guess FB) in the next 5 years or so. If that goes the 'usual way', whoever acquires them will immediately let the site fall apart and eventually shut it down, and in the meantime a new hot reddit/digg/slashdot like site will emerge to take it's place almost overnight.
My instinct is that Reddit as an organization and as a set of employees are B players, and for that reason a place like Facebook would not want to acquire them. We’ve seen Reddit “execute” a new site design, we see people complaining about being unable to buy ads, and we’ve seen the board’s competence level in finding CEO’s. For the acquisition to break even, you would have to burn down the organization you just acquired, and fix it with your own people. It’s like a bar of gold wrapped in poop. Do you really want to clean off the poop? It might be fool’s gold.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 319 ms ] threadnon-political subs with very obvious political agendas.
The illusion of popularity-based ranking of articles when in reality it is mostly curated
Zero transparency on the moderators the big news and political subs
Control freak moderators on special interest subs.
Some big investors don't seem to be able to accurately gauge what an internet property is worth. Look at Verizon buying tumblr for $1 billion
as someone who has used reddit for 7+ years now, the culture is definitely very different (not necessarily good) - but it has only continued to grow in terms of users
For example r/linux has "679169 readers", but if you go to the /new page you'll see it has only had 16 submissions in the past day.
New users are automoderated and shadowbanned to hell. There are subreddits where the experienced users with new accounts go and users upvote each other until they have enough karma to post where they want.
accounts, yes - but how many of those are users? versus bots and marketeers?
That's because I make a new account everytime I'm doxxed, banned, or censored.
Now that you mention it, I realize that the reddit blocking, censoring and quarantining system basically is a free way to drive up their 'new user' count.
What a joke of a website and a company. Cannot wait til it dies.
But Reddit the platform seems to entirely ignore this dynamic. New users are dropped into the default subreddits, and there's very little tooling or onramps to help them find small interest-matching subs.
For example I love Formula 1. But the /r/formula1 subreddit (1.6 million subscribers) is absolute unmitigated trash. There are decent articles posted there, but the comments are a total wasteland of low-effort memes, regurgitated jokes and total morons with zero understanding of the sport. So where do I go for F1 content? How do I find one of these supposed small subs with good communities?
Reddit will die when there is something better (for the user experience) available. Right now, I do not see a better general-purpose forum alternative.
I feel the choice of Ellen Pao as interim CEO revealed what direction reddit was headed. Moves towards a more sanitised, advertiser friendly Reddit - but with slap-dash choice of how to apply the new era of censorship.
2014 Nov - Pao became interim CEO
2015 July 2nd - large sections of Reddit were set to private to protest the dismissal of Victoria Taylor, Reddit's director of talent, known for co-ordinating the Ask Me Anything interviews
2015 Jun/July - Pao was the subject of criticism and harassment by Reddit users after five Reddit communities (subreddits) were banned for harassment and Reddit's director of talent was fired
2015 Aug 13th - "Watch reddit Die" was Created
I can't help feel that there is a trend of selling of online communities as "assets" to commercial buyers that have opposite incentive to the members of that community - just look at StackOverflow. The problem is that websites come to own the "commons" they inspire, and then sell it off as if the community are happy to work for free. We need stronger community data-rights; like a GPL for website content.
reddit (in general) has a clear and obvious political/social agenda apparent to anybody with a functioning brain.
It's a natural reaction to change.
I've been on Reddit for 11 years, and all your comments could apply to 2010 Reddit as well as they apply to 2021 Reddit. At least edgy memes on /r/atheism aren't a core part of the site anymore.
> Reddit is also focused on expanding internationally. Most of the site is U.S.-centric, Mr. Huffman said — something he hopes to change.
When it comes to advertising, other platforms offer a much more lucrative user base. Reddit users aren’t worth very much to advertisers. International users will probably be worth even less. And there is no guarantee that Reddit would hit it off with an international audience.
In short, I just don’t see them doing well if they go public.
oh look at: r/norway and their users are even more wealthy than average us redditors
From my amateur perspective I've got,
2 web devs, 1 backend engineer, 3 devops. Pay them very generously and that's $1.2 million spent.
I have no idea what I would do with the rest..
I would know how to run a high-quality reddit on $5M/year, and perhaps as much as $20M. I would not know how to run a high-quality reddit on $100M/year.
The term is 'overcapitalized.'
At some scale, people focus on climbing corporate ladders over the core business, on pet projects, and communications becomes a bottleneck (and the number of potential links grows as a square law with the number of people).
The right scale depends on the complexity of the product. A car requires an army to engineer and produce.
Reddit? That benefits from a small team, where people can holistically understand the whole system, and everyone involved. That's at most 20 SWEs.
You couldn't keep Reddit going with 10x that team. Just the tooling around keeping up with GDPR regulations and Trust & Safety alone could easily eat $10m a year.
I really don't know what they should do with the money other than make reddit more reliable. It was down last night. The value of reddit is the users/community. Technically, it's a modern message board/link aggregator. There are already many clones.
Remember the point of a company is to make money for the people that invest in it, being in the top 25 globally doesn't mean that much if you need to take half a billion in cash 15 years into your existence. it's a weird narrative for a tech company.
also money for rubber ducks
But seriously they could invest in some content discovery/recommendation features. There are probably a lot of small subreddits that go unnoticed by people that just check /all or /popular.
Their video player needs some major work.
They could decentralize the site. Shard off subreddits by some category system. The homepage would then be an aggregation of the shards. If the main site is down you can potentially still reach some shards.
Of course they would still have a ton of money left over. With a stack this high they could convert the office heater to run directly off cash for a few years.
Reddit awards, payments, ad analytics, SRE is probably 100+ engineers right there without even talking about the core experience, mobile app and security folks.
The platforms that run 8 figure companies need tons of redundancy in both application code/infrastructure and people.
For sure, hence my question!
I don’t know the details but I think the core base of Reddit would be into a project like that.
See the post by the reddit admin below.
https://www.reddit.com/community-points
https://reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/opi5rg/scaling_reddit...
Most of it probably goes straight to AWS.
Build an integrated market, initially aimed at competing with Craigslist, and maybe expanded to target other markets later (Ebay, etsy, etc). Craigslist first because its similarly simple UI and design is the easiest to recreate within Reddit.
There's tons of subreddits for connecting buyers and sellers of niche goods, but the actual buying and selling has to happen elsewhere. It's stupid that Reddit hasn't capitalized on that yet.
Data Scientist who can use seasonal and news virality patterns to predict hourly load and load balancing
Data Scientist for Ads targeting by subreddit
CDN person to improve content delivery and caching
A person to build a half-decent video player and native integration of widgets/content from commonly linked websites
Data Scientist that provides a more curated experience to first time visitors. Shadow profiles exist. Or just a 1st visit 10 sec poll.
Is the long death of reddit, really the TikTok-isation of reddit into yet another vapid commercial meh-space?
Will this actually succeed, or is this the pump before the dump?
You mean the valuation? It's a simple formula of ([money raised] / [shares issued]) * [total shares outstanding]
Ok, fair enough. feels overvalued though.
Seems strange to me that a 16 year old company still isn't self sustaining.
Curious to see that even where centralization hasn't financially paid off, people are willing to keep tossing money at the dream of it paying off one day after 16 years.
The problem with "independent forums scattered across the web" is that they make discovery (of users and service instances) harder. There are ways around this, like the Fediverse and SOLID standards, but most bulletin-board-like forums do not support them as of yet out of the box.
Etsy, eBay, FB Market, Craigslist, Fiverr, OnlyFans (which was built-up by riding on social media propagation, taking advantage of services like Reddit), and 400 other various types of online markets. There's no reason Reddit could not have have built something substantial in the ecommerce platform space over the years. Taking a small cut from transactions would have eliminated their advertising dependency. Reddit's karma also lends itself easily to forming an ecommerce trust network via transaction feedback, which would form the backbone of buying and selling products or services on there. Reddit figured out to absorb image hosting away from eg Imgur (which also piggybacked off of Reddit to then form a competing social network), and they didn't figure out to do the same thing in the ecommerce space, despite how obvious it was.
I love this.
Not only that, but if Reddit were to strongly disallow any or all of the above we have seen how EASY it is to simply clone the tech and re-host. There have been stories about certain communities being exiled from Reddit only to spring up just as quickly elsewhere with more or less the same exact user experience...
Most users aren't going to do this. Really, the reddit folks should just go all-in on tailoring their official apps towards the most casual, highly "engaged" content consumers, and target most of their monetization towards that kind of user. As a bonus, make it trivially easy to post casual content directly from the app. Who cares about "objectionable" content when they'll have so many cat pictures and cute/funny memes to run their ads next to.
this seems doubtful to me. Reddit has tons of legendary threads, AMAs and is its own library of content at this point, similar to YouTube. Sure the tech could be replicated but the value is all in the content it generated.
Of course, then people might start looking at the fact that they are giving away valuable property to Reddit in return for access to a simple forum site...
It's akin to the "payment per Email" (hashcash as spam prevention) idea that a lot of us have yearned for a long time, which would deter spammers and make people think twice before commenting, so maybe it would increase the content quality.
It would be an interesting experiment.
Based on Reddit's own information, it would appear that they are.
Picking just one frontpage sub, /r/News, you can check the guilded page and see:
> gildings in this subreddit have paid for 142.83 years of server time
pics? 291.80 years.
funny? 364.09 years.
aww? 624.43 years.
askreddit? 724.03 years.
politics? 314.93 years.
That's 6 subs.
According to Reddit's own guildings report, 6 subs on Reddit have paid for a combined 2461.21 years worth of server time.
They're self sustaining. Reddit has bitten the 'growth at all costs' bug.
You're making a huge leap about profitability based on a fraction of their running costs.
And this is before ad sales.
Hell, when it comes to ad sales...
They hit > $100 mil this QUARTER.
https://redditblog.com/2021/08/12/reddit-secures-funding-to-...
Reddit is a 9 figure company. Soon to be 11 figures.
> We will raise up to $700 million in Series F funding, led by Fidelity Management and Research Company LLC. and including other existing investors, at a post-money valuation of over $10 billion.
They're not hurting.
The biggest issue is of course that their monetization is horrible. Like 95% lower per user than the other socials.[2] So the real question an investor should ask is whether this is fixable? Or is there something intrinsic to Reddit traffic that makes it difficult to monetize? Either way, Reddit should be throwing an insane amount of money and equity to get a Sheryl Sandberg like executive with a track record of juicing monetization.
[1]https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754984/reddit-dau-daily... [2]https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/reddit-users-are-the-least-v...
I liked it around 2008 because it did not have profile pages and a fairly simple, straightforward interface and did not attempt to couple one's real life identity to one's post and encouraged throwaway accounts by allowing users to sign up without providing an email address.
Much of that is changing, and I also find that websites that encourage a link with one's real life identity tend to have an ever more annoying culture.
It also feels like more excessive Americana as time goes on. It did not seem like idiosyncractic U.S.A. social issues were as common in 2008, as well as the typical user that assumes every other user is from the U.S.A..
TikTok and Instagram have been able to grow larger and larger audiences despite the pressure of ads (and honestly I know when I tried TikTok last there weren't any ads yet, I wonder what portion of an hour is taken up by ads and how long is it til it reaches television levels of ~25%) - as long as audience growth outpaces users losing interest, you can keep introducing ads, but you can't do it forever.
and i think reddit is beyond the point at which a digg-style fuckup could kill them. at worst you might see cadres of ideological users depart for something like lemmy, which is already happening to an extent, but there is a lot of space to flee internally, so most users don't feel the pressure. and diffusion to federated media is in the future for every mass audience. reddit has such a huge and active userbase it will dominate for the foreseeable future.
The difference is that when Digg made their mistakes, Reddit was there for the taking.
Nowadays, there's no alternative to Reddit. All the new sites appear to be focused on hateful communities banned from Reddit, and that will never attract the mainstream.
Reddit is more forum than social network, they'll need to get creative to make more revenue from users. Winning strategy for them might be to try and get more older users who don't care about ads so much and have lots of money
Won't be easy getting older users on a site where "boomer" is a slur.
Isn't the most sought-after demographic 18-35 because they have the most disposable income? Afterwards disposable income drops off because of kids and/or retirement.
Lots of college students are spending their parents money for these kinds of things.
[1] https://resources.datadrivenmarketing.equifax.com/dyks-equif...
For whatever reason, maybe just because they've seen more ads, older demographics are harder to reach.
Fascinating - in my experience older generations are much, much easier to beguile online.
My guess would be the Reddit demographic is much less receptive to ads than the average, say, FB user.
Imagine the person saying "don't believe everything you read in the news" Is that an older person talking to a younger one, or vice-versa?
Reddit is mostly cat pictures and funny memes at scale, even calling it a "forum" is a stretch. More like a glorified image board.
There are a lot of good niche communities that have deep, meaningful conversation on Reddit.
As far as "most cat pictures and memes", maybe it is, by volume. But that doesn't diminish the substantial corpus of more substantive, forum-like, discussion hosted on the site.
Almost every subreddit I see bans any kind of promotion and even posting of links.
Just at a very high level:
- no offsite tracking (so no retargeting - the follow you around the internet ads)
- no separate ad network (you can't buy ads on Reddit that show up on 3rd party sites)
- limits on how granular targeting can be (it's by sub-reddit but they exclude many based on size+sensitivity)
- no demographic targeting (you can't pitch your product to males 18-35)
- no fine grained geographic targeting (lowest they go is major metro areas of millions of people)
Remember those little snooheads where you could 'reblog' about something? or vote on a site while on it?
Seeing the reddit bugs/icons/badges was about when the site started engaging in data collection. You bet your ass they do everything they can to determine a general profile of each user now based on visited subs and patterns.
1) Valuing the company in the hopes of making a profit on the IPO 2) More conservative than public markets
You mean that they should spend as much money as they can on ruining Reddit.
It helps with growth(more options for users to be on reddit) , but definitely hurts ad inventory, ad targeting insights etc.
(What a blessing that HN isn't run to make a profit.)
I'm thinking vintageaudio, lv426, subs like that.
Reddit is also home to an enormous amount of porn and nsfw content in general which probably hurts this. They only just started preventing sexually explicit subreddits/content from appearing on r/all six months ago[0]
https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/lhnvok/removing_...
As for an official paid feature: as soon as they start collecting money for video related features, the video creators will start circling for their cut of the revenue.
Not anymore, they've banned it.
NSFW content can work perfectly fine to get users on the platform, even if it can't be monetized.
is there a market rational reason why this hasn't occurred, or are the primary places that happen to also have adult content just assuming advertisers won't use their platform
sure, big fortune 500 ad spends are lucrative, but so is the aggregate of every single half baked idea that has to test the waters with targeted ads
Can you elaborate further? why is this the marketer's problem?
why isn't the ad campaigner completely agnostic on where the ad network sends it?
to me, it seems like widespread conjecture. out of the things I've seen people talk about boycotting a brand for, showing up in a banner on a porn site hasn't been one of them. People know how targeting works, their session and the ad networks.
is there a case study supporting marketer's skittishness?
> People know how targeting works, their session and the ad networks.
People in your network maybe. If that were widely true you wouldn't see people swearing that FB is listening to you for showing a mattress ad after you spent an hour searching for it on your computer. The average American has no idea what the hell is going on.
I mean, the town hasn't banned the strip club, and you can still visit it any time you want.
Why do you care what's on r/all?
If you are a PC components retailer, users of /r/buildapc seems like an ideal audience to target for advertising. Camera retailer, where better than /r/photography? Cookware - advertise in /r/cooking. Repeat ad infinitum across every niche interest on the site.
They should be able to enable advertisers to do really effective targeting of campaigns. Is this not possible with their current ad tools, or are they not selling the capabilities to advertisers well enough? Or is there not actually that much money in targeted ads, is all the money in generic ads like Coca-Cola & cars?
People are going to those specialized communities to get real information from real users, not lies and misinformation (ads and marketing).
As for other users, they are already seeing incredibly random and irrelevant ads. Seeing actual photography themed ads on a photography themed forum doesn't seem that bad IMO (provided that they are clearly marked as ads, of course.)
Now their new mobile app video player… ho boy…..
I'm curious what you like better in the new design? I personally find the floating bar at the top annoying. Not to mention the fact you have to click another button to actually see all the comments. Not to mention my biggest annoyance, clicking on the empty space on the sides when viewing a post will navigate to the subreddit?? Why?
A/B testing shows it generates more engagement
/s
1. Images open by default on my feed and videos and gifs autoplay as I scroll. It's a massive distraction. I'm trying to find content I might be interested in, but here I'm forced to scan pretty much every post out there.
2. On similar lines, showing a (cropped) summary for text posts. Again a distraction when you're trying to find content. The cropping makes it worse since you have to change the page after reading halfway through.
3. Having to click on view discussion to open the comments each time. This is a forum. The only reason I go there is to discuss.
4. Lack of borders for comments. It looks like one continuous feed and reduces grouping between individual comments.
5. Large avatars, icons on the reply bar compete for attention on every single comment. The reply bar on old reddit is so nicely blended away into the background. You don't see it unless you want to reply.
6. Hover popups on the large icons trigger unintentionally all the time. Very rarely do I need to see somebody's karma. What's the point of this feature even?
This is basis design considerations for a discussion forum. I completely understand where they are coming from though. They are not interested in this being a discussion forum. They want to optimize for post views. The more views a post gets, the more they will be able to monetize. Engaging in discussion is time consuming and that time could be better spent in viewing more posts.
I use Reddit Enhancement Suite and the old design and I find it far superior. It feels more compact and efficient, like HN.
Those specialized communities will cease to exist without something funding them.
Either users get ready to get out their wallets or get used to ads and marketing (which are not wholly lies and misinformation). And more importantly remember it's Reddit's choice how users pay, not the end users.
For niche topics I tend to add "reddit" to google search queries, because there's a high likelihood of finding actual information. If those subreddits move to other services, they may not even show up in the sea of blogspam results.
Advertising is diametrically opposed to information sharing.
And this very article embarassingly shows that after 16 years it is still investors who are funding those specialized communities.
For some reason, reddit wouldn't let me advertise to 3 of the 4, and the 1 that they did let me advertise was very low volume (less than 100 members). I couldn't even get reddit to show a single ad, let alone have anyone click on it.
Facebook brought in way more traffic, and some of it did convert, but I feel like my advertising costs were too high there, since you can only specify more general interests. It seems like reddit, had their advertising platform actually worked, would have been the perfect place for me.
Perhaps not. Honest question though: Have you tried, at scale?
Why pay when you can get the same for free?
[1] https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps/linux
Make a special class of commercial account, include some 'verification' badge thingy. Let subreddits ban all commercial content, unpaid commercial content, or leave open (for commercial-specific subs).
Let mods profit share in commercial posts. (And fix the moderator system so "first to register controls the sub" is no longer the case)
Suggestions?
This is a complex proplem.
Only really works for the in-depth subreddits, I guess it's not going to get you far on image or other media-based subreddits...
I'm currently trying to build this but I'm not a programmer so it's slow going. I'm interested in your thoughts as I'm sure I'm missing something obvious.
The main issue is the more difficult sign up is, the less people sign up. It's a balancing act.
With any voting system you have to detect the validity of the votes, even upvotes.
Imo, moderation logs should all be public. Lobsters does it well:
https://lobste.rs/moderations
It's even open source!
My experience is mostly with Google Voice, but I've not found that to be true. Years ago that was the case, but these days, I've encountered by few that don't work.
https://support.google.com/voice/thread/1592118/wellsfargo-s...
Voting? Who has the right to vote? Anyone? Any socketpuppet account? Only verified real people? (would be a different reddit)
The base problem is called politics.
And yeah, this would cost Reddit some in admin labor, but they should be able to use some of this revenue stream towards those few hires. I'd imagine a team of 6 would be plenty for this purpose, maybe could get away with 2 or 3.
A million little HNs.
Why do you consider that a problem? As a heavy user of reddit, I don't consider that a problem at all. I would be interested to hear what problems you think exist with that system and what other solutions exist.
I'd be pretty pissed if I created a subreddit, put effort into growing it, and someone could just come along and steal it.
On Facebook or Google, you've often got to spend at least $5-$10 per mille to be competitive in most verticals. $25 to $50 in some verticals like insurance. And it converts.
The reddit userbase just isn't as monetizable.
The trouble with those types is they all have very strong opinions and think most products are crap. They're not opposed to buying things, just shitty things.
I agree that advertisers would pay reddit more for better ad space (also called "inventory") but that doesn't just happen automatically.
Right now, I would assume they are integrating with some third party ad network and probably use fairly generic targeting information. The cost in time and money to either deepen that integration or rip it out and make a custom ad network is probably significant.
I put up a reddit ad for that submission and Reddit took 4 weeks to approve it. At that point, there was no point running the ad anymore.
Another time I wanted to advertise to a new game that had a brand new subreddit to match but it was huge - 100k plus users in a week. Reddit simply wouldn't permit me to advertise to it because it was new.
In my (limited) experience it feels like Reddit isn't making the money it could be because it doesn't want to.
Their default subs are utter crap and full of influence campaigns accounts; in addition to being nearly impossible to post to without punished in some way.
It makes total sense to be able to target communities and I think they need to just stick a banner on the right hand side and be done with it. Let moderators maybe even take a small cut in exchange for providing info and meta data on their community.
It does seem like a huge missed opportunity.
- younger user base (so less disposable income)
- loose concept of user identity, so can't tailor ads
- more corpoarate and mainstream advertisers tend to stay away due to the nature of the community and content shared
- primary usage is on web rather than mobile apps
All of these are fixable, but the question is can they do so without alienating their use base.
By most, I mean the vast majority (hence my perplexion and need to comment and confirm my understanding)
It's the dark patterns and having to reload pages multiple times to finally see the content.
> and time on site
Again, break your site so addicts have to try harder to get their dopamine hit
The reddit "engagement" numbers are false.
Results: longer time and the user will now actually engage, because they had to "work" to get there.
Complete dark-pattern to "juke the stats". And it's too complicated for their stupid investors to understand why the numbers are bullshit.
Most of the data I have is about heroin and cocaine. And folks are very reluctant to like physically addictive things to these technologic addiction things.
But human nature is very consistent regarding these dopamine releases. We're all fienders.
This usually applies to what posts are in an algorithmic feed, but I guess not having the feed show up at all is a fresh innovation. Twitter and Reddit both do a lot of just giving up and saying "woops, couldn't load that link you just clicked" as if that was a real problem. Really? what, the database wasn't there when you looked? Try again yourself, why make me click refresh?
Another anecdata - search on facebook doesn't work for finding stuff in someone's timeline, so I've spent many minutes scrolling down someone's page trying to find a post. It's frustrating but I don't quit, and I'm sure metrics and impressions look great (no click through tho)
That's far from a perfect way to measure this, but it's around the statistic that 30% of the internet is porn. My intuition tells me Reddit probably reflects the internet as a whole pretty well.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/f94j0y/oc_...
>The biggest issue is of course that their monetization is horrible.
It's possible that these two things are pretty tightly linked.
Most people have one Snap / FB account and one, maximum two Twitter accounts... but throwaways are the norm on Reddit (as well as HN), which means Reddit's user count is inflated by quite a bit. Additionally, Reddit has large nsfw communities that draw lots of members and visitors (again, most with separate accounts!), and these can't be reasonably monetized at all.
Cause they’re always one drama away from losing tons of people. The platform seems to attract drama involving the platform and decisions made more than say Twitter does
This is correct but also bittersweet.
Mobile Apps are important for monetization because they are much less vulnerable to ad blockers, people are used to ads taking up more of the screen in scrollable content and in most cases carry more traffic than desktop versions.
I think the disastrous experience buying and targeting ads is bad too, but the lack of a decent mobile app is a huge factor.
$ per user revenue is pathetic compared to most social media platforms.
Crazy.
They also used to shut the site down for hours at a time to run updates.
* Sales - start generating revenue from all these eyeballs, leveraging your interest graph for targeting. this requires way more headcount than you'd expect, especially to chase enough revenue to justify a $10b valuation
* Safety - beyond all the well-discussed dangers of large-scale user forums, this also impacts monetization. you don't want to subject the average new user to extreme/alt/adult content (though you can still offer space for those communities) or else you may scare them off. major advertisers want "brand safety" and want to avoid being associated with upsetting or even mildly profane content
* Regulatory - dozens of countries and states are rolling out unique regulations around privacy, data usage, and user rights. this is a nightmare to navigate from both a product and legal sense
If Reddit were to start looking at charging for these, the platform might change drastically. I'm not sure how, however.
I literally couldnt give them my money. I wanted to target a specific subreddit, but couldnt buy any impressions on it for 3 months. The app kept forcing me to advertise on /all, or all technology reddits, which wasnt what I wanted. I did buy $10 of ads, got zero clicks, surprise surprise.
The thing was hard to setup, hard to run, hard to measure, not to mention, advertisers get treated like any other account. I was shadow banned because I was linking to one domain, and reddit considered me a spammer. But I was like, that *is* the whole purpose of advertising. I was forced to post a few cat pictures, just so I could run my ads.
Never again.
I note they have since revamped their ad site-- now there is a new site, but you have to reregister to run ads, and I dont want the hassle.
Yes, everyone hates ads, but thats how free sites make money.
Some redditors were hostile to ads, but the number isnt that big. Most users were indifferent.
Such an ad-hostile company, I wonder how they make money.
The most annoying part was the rather opaque period between launching, approving, and actually running the ad. The first real confirmation I had that things were working was a bill.
Maybe a simple user forum site doesn't need to make mega valuation levels of money. Maybe it, and other low effort sites like Facecrook and Twatter, should be run as public benefit corps. These companies aren't selling state of the art tech here - why do they need to be such money makers??
You’re thinking of the user facing element as being the thing they’re selling. That’s not what they’re selling. They give that away for free so they can sell extremely sophisticated data and targeting. You’re the product they’re selling. And the access is definitely cutting edge.
I love the idea and I love what you are saying.
Because that's capitalism. Investors want "growth".
This leads me to wonder if the stock market goes down and VC dries up how long will Reddit be around?
I looked to advertise on Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit.
Facebook didn't seem interested in SMBs and I didn't even advertise on them, it seemed very complex just to run a simple ad.
Twitter didn't deliver good value per click etc., but I did get good demographic information on who was and wasn't interested.
Google was the best value, especially if you look for bargains where one group of customers is cheap.
Reddit had no offerings in the way Google had, or even Twitter had. IIRC I bailed on advertising with them at all. With Facebook it was just too complex for a simple ad, with Reddit it didn't even seem they were offering anything near what I wanted.
This is the most pathetic slam against mods I have ever seen and shows that you haven't spent two seconds considering what you're criticizing.
Is your point that the mods don't have all these blacklists (including of words), or that the mods do have the blacklists but they're allowed and expected to? Is the mod system working well, in your opinion?
Of course moderators have blacklists. For words / phrases / domains, they are site sanctioned through the (now) built in function called "Automoderator".
User blacklists are done through the built in ban function.
In fact, one would call these blacklists... moderation. Something a moderator would be expected to do.
> the mods do have the blacklists but they're allowed and expected to?
They are built into the site. It would logically follow that it is both allowed and expected.
Stepping back, I'm not sure how you can expect a forum, any forum, to survive without moderation.
> Is the mod system working well, in your opinion?
This is really impossible to answer.
From the bird's eye view, users and impressions are growing while reddit doesn't have to pay for moderation. A stunning success.
From a lurker perspective, they never interact with moderators and generally get content that has been reviewed and determined to be within the rules, though this may vary by subreddit.
From an active user perspective, the system may work well, or not well, depending on which subreddit(s) you frequent and how you use the platform. There are many subreddits, and moderators on some may certainly make your life unpleasant. So... don't be active on those subreddits.
However, the number of active users, according to the 90-9-1 principle is quite small, and the number of those that ever meaningfully interact with a moderator, or even a bot moderator, are probably a magnitude smaller than that.
So yes, IMO, the mod system seems to work well overall.
That being said, blacklists on strings have 100% been abused by both the mods and the admins. Blacklists should be used for mitigating spam — e.g. we'll often block a specific attacker by blacklisting certain phrases or regexes and then deal with the inevitable edge case false positives by hand — not generally for censoring ideas or "offensive" words.
Sure, by all means block phrases like "kill yourself" in /r/SuicideWatch and maybe /r/relationship_advice. If a sub is inciting violence or posting CP, there's probably a case for banning it. But when people have to self-censor common curse words and even the word "fart" in a general forum like /r/tifu, clearly something is wrong.
Even that will often lead to the scunthorpe problem.
I remember well once scouring through a post that was rejected on a forum to finally realize it was because it contained the phrase “tardive dyskinesia” which contained “tard” which alone was enough to deny the post, apparently.
In the case of "kill yourself" in /r/SuicideWatch, though, it's such an extreme case with potentially disastrous results that I wouldn't find it particularly problematic. The occasional false positive is arguably a small price to pay.
Do you have any source of this? As far as I know Reddit bans no words site-wide, and I see the term used now and then.
On the very same website a post could not come through because I described someone as having “retarded pubertal development”, in any case.
> In the case of "kill yourself" in /r/SuicideWatch, though, it's such an extreme case with potentially disastrous results that I wouldn't find it particularly problematic. The occasional false positive is arguably a small price to pay.
It's also completely useless because people that want to get through the censor will et through it by other means that will still make their message easily understood.
Word censors are window politics and people that want to get around them will get around them and I assume it's already against the rules on that subreddit to encourage suicide so they would be quite willing to also break a rule to evade word censors.
Not offhand, but I've heard of users getting temporary suspensions for using the word, although I don't believe there's an automated rule site-wide.
It's also completely useless
Not entirely. Sure, if you're a dedicated attacker trying to tell a specific target to kill themselves, there's not much I can do about it; you'll acquire an aged account with decent karma and find a way to do it.
If you're just a regular person going about your day and say something stupid, an automod removal with a warning that circumventing the rule will result in a permanent ban is probably sufficient to make you give up and move on with your life. And of course bots that aren't specifically designed to circumvent my subreddit's rules would be trivially blocked.
Merely for using the word? this seems like a myth to me. Various subreddits would obviously ban for it if used as a direct insult, but banning any use of it side-wide seems unlikely.
> If you're just a regular person going about your day and say something stupid, an automod removal with a warning that circumventing the rule will result in a permanent ban is probably sufficient to make you give up and move on with your life. And of course bots that aren't specifically designed to circumvent my subreddit's rules would be trivially blocked.
In which case it would be just as effective to simply give a warning based on detected words that various conduct with it will not be tolerated and that a moderator will be automatically informed of the post, and to remind users to make use that their usage of the word falls within the guidelines.
This would eliminate scuntorpe false positives, and have about the same effect of stopping the intended behavior.
It does seem possible they may have banned an individual user for using that word.
If you don't like how moderation done, go start your own reddit.
This is actually what makes reddit great, that anyone can start their own subreddit, mod it however they want, and compete with all the others based on the merits of its own content, community and moderation style.
It is impossible to compete with the first one that claims the obvious name for the subject, such as, say r/startrek
The competing ones also censor heavily, so all it does is that one can now choose what particular opinions one can't express.
Competing on the merits of moderation style is insignificant compared to having the most straightforward name that everyone will try first; the subreddit with such name will always be the largest.
Moderation often improves quality. It can also be bad, but is not universally so.
There is a site that shows you your deleted comments[1] and its pretty shocking. I found out every single one of my comments in one sub had been auto deleted with the reason being I did not have any link karma (because I only comment). What a waste of time and it turns me off from the platform.
[1] www.reveddit.com
There are almost no actual lawyers on that subreddit for two reasons: A) actual lawyers would like to see compensation for their expertise; B) in many jurisdictions, lawyers are not allowed to give legal advice without establishing a formal attorney–client relationship.
/r/legaladvice is so bad there is actually a subreddit dedicated to discussing what's posted there, /r/bestoflegaladvice. There's more attorneys in that sub than the actual legal advice sub, where a surprising amount of advice is either blatantly wrong or essentially "just tell the police everything, they'll help."
/r/audiophile and /r/wine are two other well moderated subreddits, where the discussion has remained relatively focused and high quality even as the communities have grown, because the moderators aggressively prune low-effort and unrelated content. There was big drama, once upon a time, when /r/audiophile banned anything headphone related.
Based on all that, it seemed pretty solid to me. I'm not saying you're wrong, but if I had to guess it's probably more a case of being hit-or-miss than entirely bad. Even a minority of bad advice would stand out to a lawyer in the same way that >=1% of wrong information in a tech publication would stand out to most of us here, particularly if the victims of said bad advice were in serious situations.
(IANAL or an active user of /r/legaladvice. I just pop in every so often when an interesting thread hits my front page, so whatever I'm exposed to is presumably better quality and more actively moderated than what's average for the sub.)
This is especially prevalent on events that are still relatively recent (last 40-50 years).
Second, it really is /r/AskHistorians ONLY, you are not allowed to mention any personal anecdata (ie participating in the fall of Berlin Wall etc.)
Even worse you are not allowed to attempt to provide official primary sources.
There was a question on WW2 Soviet tank production and German preparedness. I was not allowed to link in secondary comment Hitler-Mannerheim talks where they talked about this very issue!
Mod reasoning: not enough context...
For large subs like /r/politics, a select few people get to control what's fed into the eyeballs of millions of people. And we don't even know what content wasn't allowed to be posted, how can we trust they're unbiased?
Why? You're free to make your own subreddit with a different bias or no bias. No one really assumes it's unbiased and they go there because of the bias that they agree with. People like communities of like minded people.
By that logic any large scale media (tv, newspapers, magazines, etc.) should not be allowed to have bias even if the only reason people went there was for the bias.
I understand the idea that subreddits are user-run communities and should be able to self-moderate, but there are a couple problems with this:
1. Reddit claims to be the "front page of the internet" and promotes many of these top subreddits with front-page rankings, user suggestions, and push notifications. Therefore, reddit mods have immense power in controlling the flow of information to those who believe they're interacting with a reputable source, and Reddit corporate has washed their hands of any responsibility to have a say in this, despite the profit they receive from it.
2. Reddit corporate certainly is willing to get involved with subreddits, by banning or quarantining certain subs for spreading "misinformation", but this seems selectively applied to one particular side of these issues. Anti-lockdown subreddits are banned for downplaying Covid, but major Covid subreddits openly feature fear-mongering posts that overplay, say, the risk of the virus to kids. Both are misinformation, but one is allowed and and the other is banned.
Sadly, as you might be able to tell, I wasn't able to do it. It's terrifying. Also why should I die while worse people live? Gotta do something about them before going myself, d'uh.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
p.s. @dang is a no-op, so if you want to alert me/us to something, please email hn@ycombinator.com. I just happened to run across your comment.
Look no further than Facebook's handling of COVID "misinformation". From the start of the pandemic, they have enshrined the current statements of the CDC as "information" and everything else as "misinformation". For example, when the supposed "scientific consensus" was that COVID-19 100% came from nature, anyone who suggested it could have been manmade was called a conspiracy theorist and banned from the platform. Now, a year later, those scientists are backtracking, and some are even admitting that they took the natural-origin stance simply to not be associated with Trump, who was taking the other side. That's not science.
It was never a crazy idea. Anyone who could think for themselves knew that. But Facebook declared themselves the arbiter of truth, and decided that anything that wasn't said by the CDC needed to be censored.
When reasonable, logical ideas about important global health challenges are considered "fringe" simply because the authorities have declared them to be fringe, we have a serious problem.
Obviously real scientists and social media platforms didn't want to be associated with or help to promote that at the time.
Big emphasis on "was".
Free speech is a fundamentally protected right in the US. From the Founder's perspective, the greatest threat to that right was clearly and obviously government, because what other entity could possibly have that much reach into one's life? Up until the internet age, no one could imagine a private company or a private individual having the capacity to infringe upon free speech at scale.
So, we have a Constitutional right to free speech, protected against infringement by the government, which is great, but there is another threat to the free flow of information and ideas, and that is private corporations who can now infringe upon this right at scale. And we don't have the tools or framework to defend it, because private companies can do what they want? Thats not good enough for me. The situation is dire when private companies appoint themselves to be the arbiters of truth, because even with the best intentions, there are bound to be mistakes, as we've already seen. And they don't all have the best intentions.
Are you just not paying attention?
Your reading comprehension seems a bit lacking, casting doubt on your other statements. To be clear I am asserting that your claim censorship by private companies is unjust; that is banal, annoying, and ignorant.
Do or do you not think it’s a good thing for private individuals to be able to unilaterally censor what can be said in what really is the new public square?
Its where people go to get news and share ideas.
Hacker news, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit etc. are private properties surrounding the public square.
You can do what you like (within the bounds of the law, because even public squares have rules) with your own property on the web, but you also have to follow the rules of any other establishment if you enter.
User pageandrew can set up their own stall by the web public area and publish whatever they wish, discuss whatever they wish with whomever they wish, also censor whoever they wish. It’s their stall, their property. Just as twitter etc are the property of others. Pageandrew.com will most likely not have the views or clicks though, and that’s what they need to peddle their outrage.
Look at Youtube. The platform has been demonetizing and deplatforming accounts for obscure and opaque reasons for years, and not just Conservatives and gun videos. The result has been people advertising their non YT content on alternative platforms. If enough people are upset with the way a platform does business, they go elsewhere.
People get kicked off of 4chan, they move to 8chan. They get kicked off of Reddit, they go to Voat. Plenty of platforms serving the persecution complex of modern Conservatives, Trump supporters, incels and the alt-right have shown up on Hacker News. Gab and Parler still exist, and are still cesspools of free speech. And that's just on the open web.
Censorship at the platform level is not a problem, because there can always be alternative platforms. Censorship at the network level is a problem. That's why I'm vehemently opposed to arguments that the government should step in and regulate all social media platforms, or force them to publish content against the will, or require a judge to sign off on any moderation action. I'd rather have parts of the web play by rules I don't agree with than have the whole thing play by one set of rules at the point of a gun.
Is it?
https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha...
reddit's financial structure is a giant black hole that exists to push stealth advertising that gets less and less competitive with youtube and facebook every hour.
Tiktok doesn't have this problem. I always have fun on that app, and leave feeling like it was a good time. Reddit is the total opposite. Nothing but people screaming and mods power-tripping, forever.
Never experienced a website that objectively has such terrible impact on peoples lives. Are they going to use this money to turn it around?
Reddit is the ultimate "it is what you make of it" website. If you spend your time in the subs that make you angry then yeah, but if you narrow it down to only things you like you'll have a great time.
As a mod, they've put a lot of work recently into flagging trolls and astroturf accounts, and still have a lot of work to do. I run r/sanfrancisco, and wow there's a ton of bots and trolls flooding our sub about the Newsom recall.
They also seem to really want to find a way to monetize content in a new way. They've flirted with crypto and awards, but I imagine they have strong ambitions around how they can reward creators and moderators in a healthy, non-ad-based-way. (Their ads are the worst of all the big social networks, given how anonymous their base is. So they're forced to innovate, which I think is good for everyone.)
Plus the usual suspects (infrastructure, traditional demand gen marketing, paid moderation, etc).
The oddity is that their user's aren't that anonymous -- in fact, they very directly tell reddit what their interests are. Like a trade magazine, reddit really doesn't have to do any analysis at all to figure out how to map ads to the right target audience.
It confounds me how they haven't managed to do a much better job of targeted advertising -- just showing woodworking tool ads on the woodworking sub would be a dramatic improvement over the current setup.
However, ads at other social networks have evolved way past this level of targeting (which is a bad thing, in my opinion, but alas). Social networks like Facebook know so much about not just your likes but the people you're friends with and how much your income is and what stores you've been to and what you do on Instagram and what your age is and what state you're in and... the list goes on.
I think most subreddits are tough to monetize. What do you sell to r/funny or r/politics or r/sanfrancisco? What does r/choosingbeggars want to buy? There's a few obvious ones (diets, hobbies), but I think eeking out $100M from that is already impressive.
Plus, Reddit's audience is way more against ads than Instgram/Facebook/etc.
So let's say their annual revenue is 3-4x since ad spend is usually weighted heavily towards Q4. At 300-400M per year and growing that's actually pretty solid.
The endless crime-posting is exhausting, it is rapidly turning into nextdoor.
Reddit is the only website in the Alexa top 15 (US) that runs completely on the cloud. Everyone else has figured out datacenters save a bucket load of money.
It is akin to social networking what Craigslist is to marketplaces.
A magical magical place.
I would have liked if it was easy to federate, I.e. make a new subreddit that is just like this other subreddit and posts show up in both. You can make multireddits with plus signs but you can’t create a new one that is just like the old one except you don’t censor the word “pumpkin” or whatever.
Would be interesting but maybe a bad idea since it fragments the user base.
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The incompetent UI rehaul has meant that most users continue staying on old.reddit.com, which makes it impossible to sunset. This means that old.reddit.com works in the most familiar manner of early-2000s forums without much in its way. The incredibly late and terrible 1st party app, has meant that significantly superior 3rd party apps (without the same large scale profit motives) have gained prominence and cannot be pushed out. The ads are bad enough, that they don't have a large variety of advertisers to specifically target compatible subreddits. Imagine having simultaneously the most most engaged users and the worst ads. The censorship is amateurish, and gets beaten by a motivated bunch of idiots on a regular basis. The fear of a competitor being just around the corner (due to their own digg origin story) makes them too scared to censor beyond an unperceivable breaking point, lest they face mass exodus. Good teams are analytically user obsessed. They know their target audience very well. To be fair, worse teams ban users for what used to be the central purpose of their platform cough tumblr cough.
Its public perception is tied to the Boston marathon, pedophile-defending employees and the rise of Trump. So, there isn't sufficient adoption among 'normies'. While that's bad for monetization it slows down the rate of decline in content quality and keeps it far away enough from the public eye, that you can get away with 'better' content.
Every feature they attempt to release (Chat, live stream, video hosting) is done so badly that users refuse to bulge on previous user flows. Thus, it maintains a certain purity.
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Reddit is the most ironic victor due to the 'don't fix what's not broken' rule.
Reddit in 2015 was a pretty good website. The devs have been unable to get adoption for any new feature past 2015. Thus, they never fixed what was not broken.
Facebook frequently messes with user flows to maximize earnings. Most successful social media websites have figured out how to guide their users down an 'intended' user flow such that they can maximally profit without losing any users. Reddit doesn't know how to do either.
With that, I hope that Reddit's leaders never wisen up and start making real money. The day reddit figures out monetization, will be the day that I set forth looking for a new badly-monetized platform.
Is it 8% of all users, or 8% of PC users ?
I personally use the reddit.com address, but have opted out of the redesign. I wonder if you can track that with reddit.
Overall, the site just seems janky. It used to be reliable and fast, say 3 years ago, but now it seems to choke on the higher load. I frequently encounter issues with comments not loading, karma not displaying, etc.
Reddit allows for unlimited account creation and has extremely poor, if any, detection algorithms. Additionally, its trivial to stream and analyze the entirety of Reddit comments and posts in real time (check out PRAW if you like Python).
Networks pushing COVID narratives and crypto frauds are probably the worst offenders. Here’s an example I just came across in /r/miami: https://reddit.com/r/Miami/comments/p1z6a7/have_you_guys_see.... The networks pushing certain COVID narratives are evening more troubling as, unlike crypto, im not sure what the end game is or who is controlling those networks.
Why don't they put some CAPTCHAs? They have no CAPTCHAs anywhere in account creation + post first time comment + first time thread + first time direct message?
I don't spend that much time on reddit as a whole - but frequent about 5-7 subs every single day. These are mostly medium sized subs and none of them have a problem of spam. And I'm on them enough that it is by far the social media/news site I interact with the most.
Chunks of it. Don’t think praw and the api can do all live
Well rest assured, Reddit administration does not see this as a problem at all. It's one of the ways marketing companies advertise on Reddit. There's a reason the moderators of /r/all subreddits tend to all moderate the same group of subreddits, and that they all often have super human posting frequencies. These are shared accounts for ad firms. This was discussed on HN before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173018
It's basically the perfect combination of high traffic and low costs, and they have raised close to a billion dollars in funding. If they aren't profitable now, they are very unlikely to ever be profitable. I think it's likely they will sell to one of the big players (I would guess FB) in the next 5 years or so. If that goes the 'usual way', whoever acquires them will immediately let the site fall apart and eventually shut it down, and in the meantime a new hot reddit/digg/slashdot like site will emerge to take it's place almost overnight.