6 ms·

Fixing Reddit

34 points by whack 11y ago

swagv 11y ago
Digg 2.0 was a fail from the beginning
ghosttie 11y ago
If there are no ads and no corporate sponsorships then how do they make money?
- Mithaldu 11y ago
  Gotta love how "remove the vast majority of the cash flow" is a "micro" improvement.
  - kiba 11y ago
    Basically nobody wants ads. But if nobody wants to pay for a service, then maybe it isn't as useful as we thought.
  - the_watcher 11y ago
    Also, Reddit ads are among some of the least intrusive on the web. Every sub is filled with posts not everyone cares about, the ability to ignore the ads if you aren't interested in is built into Redditing
- s_m_t 11y ago
  My cynical/conspiratorial side says that the reason the voting system is 'fuzzed' isn't because it makes it harder for bots to game the system (this explanation doesn't make sense to me because you will always know how well a post is doing by its place on the page, who cares how many upvotes it has if you know you botted your post to rank #4?) but because it allows the admins to more easily manipulate votes. Instead of selling advertisements on the sides of the page they could just boost certain posts and it would be extremely hard to tell from the outside that they are doing this because the votes are kept obfuscated. Even better, instead of naively just giving posts upvotes you could apply a secret upvote multiplier to certain posts. This way only secret advertisements that people are already mildly receptive to would make it to the front page lest you alienate your audience too much.
natrius 11y ago
Reddit only succeeded because Digg wasn't good enough: it changed in undesirable ways, so users left. How are you going to convince enough redditors that Reddit isn't good enough that a critical mass moves to your platform? I think it's prohibitively difficult, and only a decentralized system will succeed.
6stringmerc 11y ago
>Hearing only the things that you agree with might be easy and comfortable. But the idea of a community where everyone only agrees with one another, and dissenting voices are promptly silenced, sounds more like dystopia to us. I'm genuinely interested to see if this works out. Not kidding. However, with a straight face, I can also say I'm not optimistic, because 'echo chamber' tendencies are kind of why those "communities" tend to flourish, at least in my perspective.
- jonlucc 11y ago
  I actually think the problem is sort of the opposite. People who agree are (usually) civil to each other. Online, where privacy or pseudonymity is the norm, people who disagree with each other tend to do so in ways they wouldn't imagine doing in person. Environments of disagreement seem to often devolve into aggression and rude personal attacks.
- flashman 11y ago
  They're proposing to fix circlejerks by showing controversial content among popular content. But I think they're directly supporting circlejerks in another way: "By prioritizing the content and votes cast by highly reputed users, as opposed to anonymous new arrivals whom no one knows or trusts, Caucus is better able to figure out which content is most trustworthy." This seems to literally mean circlejerking users will be rewarded with algorithmic trust.
CM30 11y ago
I think the simplest fixes for Reddit would be just to make sure anyone who works for the site actually agrees with its goals. That's what caused most of the reason issues, they hired people who didn't really like the challenges that being pro freedom of speech brings, and who favoured doing well with companies and celebrities over being a place for communities of like minded people to discuss things they enjoy. The other improvements they mention sound good, but Reddit's issues are more down to leadership problems than community/cultural/technical ones.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Sadly any VC backed internet "service" seems to turn into some kind of soapbox or megaphone for corporate marketing. And when that happens, all the "objectionable" stuff gets cleared out. Can't have them associated with those "wholesome" corporate brands after all.
- cLeEOGPw 11y ago
  > challenges that being pro freedom of speech brings Well, the thing is, reddit is a private company and so the classic "freedom of speech" definition does not apply to it. And while their goal was unrestricted discussion a few years back, in attempt to pave road for profitability they have abandoned that goal. The goal of reddit right now it to become as attractive to advertisers as possible. What that entails is up to them to decide. One of the effects is heavy moderation of anything controversial. They seem to be attempting to "play it safe". We'll see if it will pay off.
  - knorker 11y ago
    > reddit is a private company and so the classic "freedom of speech" definition does not apply to it. I think you completely missed the point of the comment and instead answered in the lines of "why you can't tell your boss to fuck off without getting fired, despite the first amendment".
  - CM30 11y ago
    Well, to some degree, that's their problem. They made their bed and they have to lie in it. A key community manager rule is 'don't promise freedom of speech on your site, because you likely don't have it and you will get absolutely eviscorated the minute you try and censor anything': http://www.managingcommunities.com/2010/01/24/when-talking-about-what-you-allow-on-your-community-dont-say-freedom-of-speech/ http://www.managingcommunities.com/2010/01/24/when-talking-a... http://www.managingcommunities.com/2015/07/16/your-online-community-does-not-allow-free-speech/ http://www.managingcommunities.com/2015/07/16/your-online-co... If you say your community is pro freedom of speech or allows freeom of speech, you pretty much make yourself obliged to allow anything that's not literally illegal. That will include an awful lot of stuff that you personally don't like, that your corporate backers don't like, that other members on the site don't like... And hence you have to make the awful decision; do you allow anything (like Voat or certain chan boards) and accept the consequences? Or do you start censoring and immediately lose the right to say you allow freedom of speech? Making comments like this is a great way to cause a site or business to self destruct spectacularly. Reddit may be a private company, but their community was founded on a freedom of speech stance. They've turned against those ideals, so now they're going to struggle a lot more since people feel they've been betrayed. That's a situation Reddit is going to have a lot of trouble escaping. And they could have at least delayed it by not hiring people who dislike the principles the company and site was founded on.
minimaxir 11y ago
One of the things Reddit failed at was miscommunication and low transparency between the admins and the users. In that case, why are the vote scores on Caucus submissions blatantly inflated? There is zero probability scores are in the hundreds for completely random content. (glancing at the number of unique accounts who have made submissions, I question if 100+ active accounts even exist.)
- Grue3 11y ago
  Yeah, that's what I thought, no way this post got 2000+ upvotes. Even on Reddit such scores were relatively uncommon until recently.
  - minimaxir 11y ago
    This post is extra-blatantly fixed because the left-hand side shows 344 upvotes. You are incorrect about the timing of the 2000 point threshold on Reddit though. Those have been regularly hit since the Digg migration in 2010.
  - plorkyeran 11y ago
    Reddit has a soft cap on scores, and without that popular submissions would have scores in the tens of thousands: https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/3g6ghn/reddit_change_the_scores_of_extremelypopular/ https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/3g6ghn/reddit_ch...
- knd775 11y ago
  Well, reddit itself actually inflates vote counts so that shadow banned spam accounts couldn't tell if they were shadow banned or not.
  - minimaxir 11y ago
    Vote fuzzing accounts for maybe a +/- 10 point spread at most, not a 100 point difference. And vote fuzzing is directly proportional to the true score anyways.
- 11y ago
fiftyacorn 11y ago
I always thought autgenerated tags would be good on posts - I could filter on keywords
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Smudge 11y ago
> By prioritizing the content and votes cast by highly reputed users, as opposed to anonymous new arrivals whom no one knows or trusts, Caucus is better able to figure out which content is most trustworthy. How do you avoid the "Power User" effect that Digg (and arguably Reddit) ran into? If your most reputable users keep getting more and more reputable, eventually you have only a handful of very active users who have a majority of the voting power.
- sien 11y ago
  Cap it. Don't display numbers. Once someone is useful and helps the community on a regular basis just leave it at that. Ironically Slashdot actually did this. Of course it had lots of other problems.
  - jonlucc 11y ago
    This was my first thought. The influence ought to follow a 4PL fit curve (not sure what the function is called). You're only trying to make sure the user is not terrible, you don't care once they've proven themselves worthy.
- whack 11y ago
  Great observation. This is a core issue addressed by our reputation-system as well. All reputations are community-specific. Ie, your reputation-score on the politics community will have no impact on your posts/votes in other communities. This ensures that if anyone is ever dis-satisfied with the way the highly-reputed-users in a particular community are using/abusing their voting-power, they can simply create/migrate to a different community where those individuals will have no voting power at all. In the equilibrium, people will self-select into communities that match the tone/character that they are looking for.
Huhty 11y ago
A lot of sites have tried to "fix" reddit. I even worked with one of them (snapzu) on some of their back-end stuff. One thing I did was research what else was out there to see what stuff was/wasn't being innovated on. Here's what reddit is competing with today (other than caucus): 1. http://snapzu.com http://snapzu.com (worked with this one about a year ago) 2. http://getaether.net http://getaether.net 3. https://stacksity.com https://stacksity.com 4. https://frizbee.co https://frizbee.co 5. http://hubski.com http://hubski.com 6. http://empeopled.com http://empeopled.com 7. http://voat.co http://voat.co 8. https://piroot.com https://piroot.com 9. http://www.linkibl.com http://www.linkibl.com 10. http://criticl.me http://criticl.me That being said, I just want to wish you good luck on your endeavor... the social network game is a really tough nut to crack because community is 99% of the value.
- spinlock 11y ago
  Why are there so many reddit clones? Reddit doesn't make money. Imgur, on the other hand, is printing cash by selling ad space. But, no one is trying to move into their market. I just don't understand why people are going after a market that seems to be unprofitable. Am I missing something?
  - alexkavon 11y ago
    Welcome to the tech bubble!
  - redthrowaway 11y ago
    I suspect they're being launched by people who love reddit, but hate x about it. Fix x, and boom! Your very own reddit that actually works.
  - fweespeech 11y ago
    1) Most of the Reddit competitors are hobbies while Imgur was built as a business. Similarly, their competition with Reddit is largely ideological rather than practical values people care about en mass. 2) Everyone who tried to move into Imgur's position found image hosting was very expensive and impractical as a hobby. The problem is they've largely been ideological and cut off from Reddit's ecosystem due to Imgur's incumbency. 3) Ultimately, until Reddit or Imgur stumbles in a substantial way that pisses off users none of them will be viable even with VC money. For instance: https://www.reddit.com/r/MediaCrush https://www.reddit.com/r/MediaCrush https://www.reddit.com/r/MediaCrush/comments/2tzuv0/mediacrush_is_shutting_down/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MediaCrush/comments/2tzuv0/mediacru... https://www.reddit.com/r/MediaCrush/comments/2v8ume/why_didnt_admins_sell_mediacrush/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MediaCrush/comments/2v8ume/why_didn... which was followed by: https://www.reddit.com/r/MediaCrush/comments/2vpfwe/imgrushcom_is_live_standing_on_the_shoulders_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MediaCrush/comments/2vpfwe/imgrushc... Currently the only really one I know of is: https://voat.co/v/veuwer https://voat.co/v/veuwer aka http://www.veuwer.com/ http://www.veuwer.com/ Slimgur http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/11/03/imgur-alternative-slimgur-taken-offline-by-targeted-child-porn-uploads/ http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/11/03/imgur-alternative-s... which became: https://voat.co/v/slimg https://voat.co/v/slimg https://sli.mg/ https://sli.mg/
KVFinn 11y ago
Every reddit seems to trend towards either 100% upvotes based on agreeing with the title of posts, or 100% image memes (sometimes both!) as it gets popular. The only exceptions being communities with extremely strict moderators like /r/askhistorians.
dkarapetyan 11y ago
I just have a chrome extension that I call "add enemy!". When an enemy appears in a discussion their comment is automatically removed. It does wonders for my mental health. When some people consistently troll or have some kind of axe to grind it's much easier to provide people with personalized bubbles. Unsurprisingly the value I get out of discussions where the trolls are silent is way higher.
- redthrowaway 11y ago
  You know RES just lets you ignore people, right?
  - dkarapetyan 11y ago
    Oh nice. I didn't know that was a thing.
mjevans 11y ago
I didn't read the link BECAUSE it requires scripts to view. Having said that, as someone that uses some subreddits for forums there is exactly one thing that I'd like to see done for Reddit (and any other site with a downvote/dislike button). If you click the downvote button it should instead prompt you to create a reply denoted as a dissenting viewpoint. You will then explain your rebuttal. Separately, a 'Report Abuse' button would flag a post for moderation attention (but also include who's reporting the abuse). A moderator should be able to see the full edit-history of a post (within the last day, maybe week).
knorker 11y ago
> Give the Quiet Ones a Chance Sounds like commie bullshit to me.[1] It also sounds counter-productive to "building engagement". If I only have so many "points" to give out, I won't upvote much, will I? [1] I'm being funny, but I do have a point.
seanalltogether 11y ago
One trend I've noticed across lots of reddit clones is none of them match the information density of reddit. Everyone seems to think that good design = more padding
- dang 11y ago
  Man oh man I enjoyed running across this comment. Massively true of the HN clones as well.
miguelrochefort 11y ago
Make contribution like a free market. The more you pay (with some kind of credit), the more visibility your post/comment will get. If people like your contributions, you earn credits. If they don't, you lose them. I'm sure the gambling aspect (big gains if you invest a lot and wisely) would hook a ton of people. Quality, hopefully, would follow.
shostack 11y ago
One big issue that could impact Reddit if not addressed is Imgur. Recently Imgur appears to have started redirecting some people from direct image links to their full site (some claim this happens even on submissions linking directly to an image/gif). I've noticed this quite a bit on mobile or in the Alien Blue app. Others have also reported this behavior. My guess is Imgur is doing this not to display ads right away, but to drive people to their own app for later monetization and growing their own brand/community. Imgur has taken $40M in funding, and so is presumably needing to find an exit at some point. Reddit sending tons of traffic directly to images was great for establishing themselves deep in the Reddit ecosystem early on, but if people are going directly to images vs. to the HTML page, that's a lot of lost impressions beyond just those who visit it directly or go to upload photos. The load times for their site vs. just direct image/gif files are pretty painful on mobile, and this ultimately impacts the Reddit experience. I'm really curious if Reddit would ever roll out their own image host as a result, and it will be very interesting to watch this.
- markdown 11y ago
  > Recently Imgur appears to have started redirecting some people from direct image links to their full site This has always been true for traffic from FB and Twitter, but are you saying this is now also true when the referrer is reddit.com?
  - minimaxir 11y ago
    I am the one who broke that story: http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/moved-temporarily/ http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/moved-temporarily/ I double-checked today and count not find any indication that Imgur redirects images on Reddit referrers. (Although some Reddit submissions incorrectly submit the ad-page itself which is why people get confused) If anyone has reproducable evidence of a redirect, let me know.
- rezashirazian 11y ago
  A post (https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/46c2v5/90_of_my_mobile_reddit_experience/ https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/46c2v5/90_of_my_mobi...) regarding this issue made it to the top of reddit yesterday. I figured I'd use the occasion to highlight a project I worked in a few months ago. And although the comment(https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/46c2v5/90_of_my_mobile_reddit_experience/d03yado https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/46c2v5/90_of_my_mobi...) was met with positive feedback from the community it was deleted by the mods without an explanation. The article should also highlight overzealous mods that paint every outgoing link as spam.
miguelrochefort 11y ago
The discussion thread must die. - Nobody wants to read a bunch of different ways to say the same things. - Nobody cares about the person that happens to be the first to say something. - Nobody wants to read through a tree of indented comments. - Nobody has the time to read a wall of text when all they care about is the TL;DR. Ain't nobody got time for this. I want a clear visual representation of the community's reaction to a post: - Why I should care about this post. - Why I should ignore this post, which doesn't deserve any of my attention. - Why I should have a positive reaction to what the post is about. - Why I should have a negative reaction to what the post is about. - How accurate and representative of reality is this post? - What actionable items I can take from this post. - What related content/posts should I seek if I want more of this. The pyramid of why-should-i-care-ness should be presented to me in the right orientation, or time is wasted.
- PhasmaFelis 11y ago
  > The discussion thread must die. What alternative is there?
  - miguelrochefort 11y ago
    Semantics.

Fixing Reddit

34 points by whack 11y ago

swagv 11y ago

Digg 2.0 was a fail from the beginning

ghosttie 11y ago

If there are no ads and no corporate sponsorships then how do they make money?

Mithaldu 11y ago
Gotta love how "remove the vast majority of the cash flow" is a "micro" improvement.
- kiba 11y ago
  Basically nobody wants ads. But if nobody wants to pay for a service, then maybe it isn't as useful as we thought.
- the_watcher 11y ago
  Also, Reddit ads are among some of the least intrusive on the web. Every sub is filled with posts not everyone cares about, the ability to ignore the ads if you aren't interested in is built into Redditing
s_m_t 11y ago
My cynical/conspiratorial side says that the reason the voting system is 'fuzzed' isn't because it makes it harder for bots to game the system (this explanation doesn't make sense to me because you will always know how well a post is doing by its place on the page, who cares how many upvotes it has if you know you botted your post to rank #4?) but because it allows the admins to more easily manipulate votes. Instead of selling advertisements on the sides of the page they could just boost certain posts and it would be extremely hard to tell from the outside that they are doing this because the votes are kept obfuscated. Even better, instead of naively just giving posts upvotes you could apply a secret upvote multiplier to certain posts. This way only secret advertisements that people are already mildly receptive to would make it to the front page lest you alienate your audience too much.

natrius 11y ago

Reddit only succeeded because Digg wasn't good enough: it changed in undesirable ways, so users left. How are you going to convince enough redditors that Reddit isn't good enough that a critical mass moves to your platform? I think it's prohibitively difficult, and only a decentralized system will succeed.

6stringmerc 11y ago

>Hearing only the things that you agree with might be easy and comfortable. But the idea of a community where everyone only agrees with one another, and dissenting voices are promptly silenced, sounds more like dystopia to us. I'm genuinely interested to see if this works out. Not kidding. However, with a straight face, I can also say I'm not optimistic, because 'echo chamber' tendencies are kind of why those "communities" tend to flourish, at least in my perspective.

jonlucc 11y ago
I actually think the problem is sort of the opposite. People who agree are (usually) civil to each other. Online, where privacy or pseudonymity is the norm, people who disagree with each other tend to do so in ways they wouldn't imagine doing in person. Environments of disagreement seem to often devolve into aggression and rude personal attacks.
flashman 11y ago
They're proposing to fix circlejerks by showing controversial content among popular content. But I think they're directly supporting circlejerks in another way: "By prioritizing the content and votes cast by highly reputed users, as opposed to anonymous new arrivals whom no one knows or trusts, Caucus is better able to figure out which content is most trustworthy." This seems to literally mean circlejerking users will be rewarded with algorithmic trust.

CM30 11y ago

I think the simplest fixes for Reddit would be just to make sure anyone who works for the site actually agrees with its goals. That's what caused most of the reason issues, they hired people who didn't really like the challenges that being pro freedom of speech brings, and who favoured doing well with companies and celebrities over being a place for communities of like minded people to discuss things they enjoy. The other improvements they mention sound good, but Reddit's issues are more down to leadership problems than community/cultural/technical ones.

digi_owl 11y ago
Sadly any VC backed internet "service" seems to turn into some kind of soapbox or megaphone for corporate marketing. And when that happens, all the "objectionable" stuff gets cleared out. Can't have them associated with those "wholesome" corporate brands after all.
cLeEOGPw 11y ago
> challenges that being pro freedom of speech brings Well, the thing is, reddit is a private company and so the classic "freedom of speech" definition does not apply to it. And while their goal was unrestricted discussion a few years back, in attempt to pave road for profitability they have abandoned that goal. The goal of reddit right now it to become as attractive to advertisers as possible. What that entails is up to them to decide. One of the effects is heavy moderation of anything controversial. They seem to be attempting to "play it safe". We'll see if it will pay off.
- knorker 11y ago
  > reddit is a private company and so the classic "freedom of speech" definition does not apply to it. I think you completely missed the point of the comment and instead answered in the lines of "why you can't tell your boss to fuck off without getting fired, despite the first amendment".
- CM30 11y ago
  Well, to some degree, that's their problem. They made their bed and they have to lie in it. A key community manager rule is 'don't promise freedom of speech on your site, because you likely don't have it and you will get absolutely eviscorated the minute you try and censor anything': http://www.managingcommunities.com/2010/01/24/when-talking-about-what-you-allow-on-your-community-dont-say-freedom-of-speech/ http://www.managingcommunities.com/2010/01/24/when-talking-a... http://www.managingcommunities.com/2015/07/16/your-online-community-does-not-allow-free-speech/ http://www.managingcommunities.com/2015/07/16/your-online-co... If you say your community is pro freedom of speech or allows freeom of speech, you pretty much make yourself obliged to allow anything that's not literally illegal. That will include an awful lot of stuff that you personally don't like, that your corporate backers don't like, that other members on the site don't like... And hence you have to make the awful decision; do you allow anything (like Voat or certain chan boards) and accept the consequences? Or do you start censoring and immediately lose the right to say you allow freedom of speech? Making comments like this is a great way to cause a site or business to self destruct spectacularly. Reddit may be a private company, but their community was founded on a freedom of speech stance. They've turned against those ideals, so now they're going to struggle a lot more since people feel they've been betrayed. That's a situation Reddit is going to have a lot of trouble escaping. And they could have at least delayed it by not hiring people who dislike the principles the company and site was founded on.

minimaxir 11y ago

One of the things Reddit failed at was miscommunication and low transparency between the admins and the users. In that case, why are the vote scores on Caucus submissions blatantly inflated? There is zero probability scores are in the hundreds for completely random content. (glancing at the number of unique accounts who have made submissions, I question if 100+ active accounts even exist.)

Grue3 11y ago
Yeah, that's what I thought, no way this post got 2000+ upvotes. Even on Reddit such scores were relatively uncommon until recently.
- minimaxir 11y ago
  This post is extra-blatantly fixed because the left-hand side shows 344 upvotes. You are incorrect about the timing of the 2000 point threshold on Reddit though. Those have been regularly hit since the Digg migration in 2010.
- plorkyeran 11y ago
  Reddit has a soft cap on scores, and without that popular submissions would have scores in the tens of thousands: https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/3g6ghn/reddit_change_the_scores_of_extremelypopular/ https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/3g6ghn/reddit_ch...
knd775 11y ago
Well, reddit itself actually inflates vote counts so that shadow banned spam accounts couldn't tell if they were shadow banned or not.
- minimaxir 11y ago
  Vote fuzzing accounts for maybe a +/- 10 point spread at most, not a 100 point difference. And vote fuzzing is directly proportional to the true score anyways.
11y ago

fiftyacorn 11y ago

I always thought autgenerated tags would be good on posts - I could filter on keywords

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Smudge 11y ago

> By prioritizing the content and votes cast by highly reputed users, as opposed to anonymous new arrivals whom no one knows or trusts, Caucus is better able to figure out which content is most trustworthy. How do you avoid the "Power User" effect that Digg (and arguably Reddit) ran into? If your most reputable users keep getting more and more reputable, eventually you have only a handful of very active users who have a majority of the voting power.

sien 11y ago
Cap it. Don't display numbers. Once someone is useful and helps the community on a regular basis just leave it at that. Ironically Slashdot actually did this. Of course it had lots of other problems.
- jonlucc 11y ago
  This was my first thought. The influence ought to follow a 4PL fit curve (not sure what the function is called). You're only trying to make sure the user is not terrible, you don't care once they've proven themselves worthy.
whack 11y ago
Great observation. This is a core issue addressed by our reputation-system as well. All reputations are community-specific. Ie, your reputation-score on the politics community will have no impact on your posts/votes in other communities. This ensures that if anyone is ever dis-satisfied with the way the highly-reputed-users in a particular community are using/abusing their voting-power, they can simply create/migrate to a different community where those individuals will have no voting power at all. In the equilibrium, people will self-select into communities that match the tone/character that they are looking for.

Huhty 11y ago

A lot of sites have tried to "fix" reddit. I even worked with one of them (snapzu) on some of their back-end stuff. One thing I did was research what else was out there to see what stuff was/wasn't being innovated on. Here's what reddit is competing with today (other than caucus): 1. http://snapzu.com http://snapzu.com (worked with this one about a year ago) 2. http://getaether.net http://getaether.net 3. https://stacksity.com https://stacksity.com 4. https://frizbee.co https://frizbee.co 5. http://hubski.com http://hubski.com 6. http://empeopled.com http://empeopled.com 7. http://voat.co http://voat.co 8. https://piroot.com https://piroot.com 9. http://www.linkibl.com http://www.linkibl.com 10. http://criticl.me http://criticl.me That being said, I just want to wish you good luck on your endeavor... the social network game is a really tough nut to crack because community is 99% of the value.

spinlock 11y ago
Why are there so many reddit clones? Reddit doesn't make money. Imgur, on the other hand, is printing cash by selling ad space. But, no one is trying to move into their market. I just don't understand why people are going after a market that seems to be unprofitable. Am I missing something?
- alexkavon 11y ago
  Welcome to the tech bubble!
- redthrowaway 11y ago
  I suspect they're being launched by people who love reddit, but hate x about it. Fix x, and boom! Your very own reddit that actually works.
- fweespeech 11y ago
  1) Most of the Reddit competitors are hobbies while Imgur was built as a business. Similarly, their competition with Reddit is largely ideological rather than practical values people care about en mass. 2) Everyone who tried to move into Imgur's position found image hosting was very expensive and impractical as a hobby. The problem is they've largely been ideological and cut off from Reddit's ecosystem due to Imgur's incumbency. 3) Ultimately, until Reddit or Imgur stumbles in a substantial way that pisses off users none of them will be viable even with VC money. For instance: https://www.reddit.com/r/MediaCrush https://www.reddit.com/r/MediaCrush https://www.reddit.com/r/MediaCrush/comments/2tzuv0/mediacrush_is_shutting_down/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MediaCrush/comments/2tzuv0/mediacru... https://www.reddit.com/r/MediaCrush/comments/2v8ume/why_didnt_admins_sell_mediacrush/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MediaCrush/comments/2v8ume/why_didn... which was followed by: https://www.reddit.com/r/MediaCrush/comments/2vpfwe/imgrushcom_is_live_standing_on_the_shoulders_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MediaCrush/comments/2vpfwe/imgrushc... Currently the only really one I know of is: https://voat.co/v/veuwer https://voat.co/v/veuwer aka http://www.veuwer.com/ http://www.veuwer.com/ Slimgur http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/11/03/imgur-alternative-slimgur-taken-offline-by-targeted-child-porn-uploads/ http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/11/03/imgur-alternative-s... which became: https://voat.co/v/slimg https://voat.co/v/slimg https://sli.mg/ https://sli.mg/

KVFinn 11y ago

Every reddit seems to trend towards either 100% upvotes based on agreeing with the title of posts, or 100% image memes (sometimes both!) as it gets popular. The only exceptions being communities with extremely strict moderators like /r/askhistorians.

dkarapetyan 11y ago

I just have a chrome extension that I call "add enemy!". When an enemy appears in a discussion their comment is automatically removed. It does wonders for my mental health. When some people consistently troll or have some kind of axe to grind it's much easier to provide people with personalized bubbles. Unsurprisingly the value I get out of discussions where the trolls are silent is way higher.

redthrowaway 11y ago
You know RES just lets you ignore people, right?
- dkarapetyan 11y ago
  Oh nice. I didn't know that was a thing.

mjevans 11y ago

I didn't read the link BECAUSE it requires scripts to view. Having said that, as someone that uses some subreddits for forums there is exactly one thing that I'd like to see done for Reddit (and any other site with a downvote/dislike button). If you click the downvote button it should instead prompt you to create a reply denoted as a dissenting viewpoint. You will then explain your rebuttal. Separately, a 'Report Abuse' button would flag a post for moderation attention (but also include who's reporting the abuse). A moderator should be able to see the full edit-history of a post (within the last day, maybe week).

knorker 11y ago

> Give the Quiet Ones a Chance Sounds like commie bullshit to me.[1] It also sounds counter-productive to "building engagement". If I only have so many "points" to give out, I won't upvote much, will I? [1] I'm being funny, but I do have a point.

seanalltogether 11y ago

One trend I've noticed across lots of reddit clones is none of them match the information density of reddit. Everyone seems to think that good design = more padding

dang 11y ago
Man oh man I enjoyed running across this comment. Massively true of the HN clones as well.

miguelrochefort 11y ago

Make contribution like a free market. The more you pay (with some kind of credit), the more visibility your post/comment will get. If people like your contributions, you earn credits. If they don't, you lose them. I'm sure the gambling aspect (big gains if you invest a lot and wisely) would hook a ton of people. Quality, hopefully, would follow.

shostack 11y ago

One big issue that could impact Reddit if not addressed is Imgur. Recently Imgur appears to have started redirecting some people from direct image links to their full site (some claim this happens even on submissions linking directly to an image/gif). I've noticed this quite a bit on mobile or in the Alien Blue app. Others have also reported this behavior. My guess is Imgur is doing this not to display ads right away, but to drive people to their own app for later monetization and growing their own brand/community. Imgur has taken $40M in funding, and so is presumably needing to find an exit at some point. Reddit sending tons of traffic directly to images was great for establishing themselves deep in the Reddit ecosystem early on, but if people are going directly to images vs. to the HTML page, that's a lot of lost impressions beyond just those who visit it directly or go to upload photos. The load times for their site vs. just direct image/gif files are pretty painful on mobile, and this ultimately impacts the Reddit experience. I'm really curious if Reddit would ever roll out their own image host as a result, and it will be very interesting to watch this.

markdown 11y ago
> Recently Imgur appears to have started redirecting some people from direct image links to their full site This has always been true for traffic from FB and Twitter, but are you saying this is now also true when the referrer is reddit.com?
- minimaxir 11y ago
  I am the one who broke that story: http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/moved-temporarily/ http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/moved-temporarily/ I double-checked today and count not find any indication that Imgur redirects images on Reddit referrers. (Although some Reddit submissions incorrectly submit the ad-page itself which is why people get confused) If anyone has reproducable evidence of a redirect, let me know.
rezashirazian 11y ago
A post (https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/46c2v5/90_of_my_mobile_reddit_experience/ https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/46c2v5/90_of_my_mobi...) regarding this issue made it to the top of reddit yesterday. I figured I'd use the occasion to highlight a project I worked in a few months ago. And although the comment(https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/46c2v5/90_of_my_mobile_reddit_experience/d03yado https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/46c2v5/90_of_my_mobi...) was met with positive feedback from the community it was deleted by the mods without an explanation. The article should also highlight overzealous mods that paint every outgoing link as spam.

miguelrochefort 11y ago

The discussion thread must die. - Nobody wants to read a bunch of different ways to say the same things. - Nobody cares about the person that happens to be the first to say something. - Nobody wants to read through a tree of indented comments. - Nobody has the time to read a wall of text when all they care about is the TL;DR. Ain't nobody got time for this. I want a clear visual representation of the community's reaction to a post: - Why I should care about this post. - Why I should ignore this post, which doesn't deserve any of my attention. - Why I should have a positive reaction to what the post is about. - Why I should have a negative reaction to what the post is about. - How accurate and representative of reality is this post? - What actionable items I can take from this post. - What related content/posts should I seek if I want more of this. The pyramid of why-should-i-care-ness should be presented to me in the right orientation, or time is wasted.

PhasmaFelis 11y ago
> The discussion thread must die. What alternative is there?
- miguelrochefort 11y ago
  Semantics.