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What is the end game for Reddit? Control of the videos so they can sell ads, right? Does the benefit redditors? No. Based on the testing so far the mobile pla

by pgrote 9y ago

What is the end game for Reddit? Control of the videos so they can sell ads, right? Does the benefit redditors? No. Based on the testing so far the mobile player is not ready for prime time nor is the backend video infrastructure. Videos lag horribly and spin sometimes forever .. as if the connection was broken.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
- csours 9y ago
  Tell me which video site has a rich and persistent community? Some youtube channels are less terrible than others, but none of them feel like community to me.
  - cyphar 9y ago
    YouTube channels definitely have communities, but that doesn't mean that the community interacts purely through the YouTube comment section -- mainly because Google has managed to make said comment system worse and worse over time. Often the community itself communicates over Reddit or some similar platform that is much better for communication, but the community itself was created around a particular video site (and channels on said video site). If YouTube had a better way of having discussions, it would likely be much a much better service.
slumberlust 9y ago
None of the videos loaded for me on Chrome with Ublock and privacybadger.
- marrone12 9y ago
  Worked with just Chrome and uBlock.
barumrho 9y ago
Video playback experience sucks right now for their mobile apps. I think they can aim for a much better viewing and uploading experience.
- dave5104 9y ago
  Video playback has actually worked quite well for me on the official reddit app, along with Alien Blue. What have you seen?
slackoverflower 9y ago
Sure as hell benefits Reddit. Ads are their business and main priority, users come second.
niftich 9y ago
Definitely control of videos so they can sell ads, but also an effort to cultivate a captive ecosystem and reduce reliance on outside sites. These largely circle back to 'sell ads', but it's too drastic to suggest that it doesn't benefit the community. It, however, does continue the process of changing its character. Captive content ecosystems, despite their widely-recognized drawbacks, aren't devoid of engagement. Vine was a captive content ecosystem whose attributes resulted in many creative works; Snapchat and its Facebook-run clones -- most notably the Stories inside Instagram -- are another, where the content is made and consumed by the official app and never escapes out onto the public web. As an extreme example, Hulu is a captive content ecosystem where all the content happens to be professionally produced. Captive content ecosystems are excellent places to sell ads, because you track the user's content consumption habits, and control the client such that they can't easily avoid the ads using technical means.
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  How long until, like Twitter, reddit puts the bulk of its content behind a login? It's transforming itself into another walled garden like everything else, because that's the way to get paid.
mulmen 9y ago
Video playback is hard. Does Reddit have the technical resources to make this work? Only a handful of companies have pulled it off. Other than YouTube are there any web video players that are ready for prime time? Facebook's player is as much of a nightmare of usability as would be expected from the rest of their site, it's unusable for me on both an iPhone 6s in their native app and on the web. Netflix does a good job in their apps but I haven't used their web player in years, is it any good? News sites seem to love auto-playing videos that don't actually play but still follow the visitor through the page. If the videos do play I can look forward to my laptop fans ('14 RMBP) immediately kicking into high gear. Is this the experience I can look forward to on Reddit?
- symlinkk 9y ago
  I don't understand why it's so hard, you can just use the HTML5 <video> tag and then bam, you've got a polished and bug-free video player.
  - mulmen 9y ago
    You're kidding right? What about the CDN? Does anyone actually use a plain html5 <video> tag for playback? Is that what Facebook and news sites like NYT and CNN are using? Is that what Reddit will use? Outside Youtube I can't think of a single video player I would even call usable, forget polished.
  - wolfgang42 9y ago
    It's nowhere near that simple. I wrote a video player which only had to support three clients (Win7+IE, Win7+Chrome, and iPad Safari) and it still took me weeks to get it working right. Here's a whole post I wrote about the transcoding settings alone: http://www.linestarve.com/blog/post/rendering-html5-video-with-handbrake/ http://www.linestarve.com/blog/post/rendering-html5-video-wi...
- aeorgnoieang 9y ago
  The Netflix web player is good. I use it regularly. Some other good web video players: - Vimeo - Hulu HBO Now's web player is pretty good, tho not great. They definitely seem to have a hard time with their backend some times (e.g. around season premieres of Game of Thrones). In general tho, video playback is just the latest spiritual incarnation of popup ads.

by pgrote 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

csours 9y ago
Tell me which video site has a rich and persistent community? Some youtube channels are less terrible than others, but none of them feel like community to me.
- cyphar 9y ago
  YouTube channels definitely have communities, but that doesn't mean that the community interacts purely through the YouTube comment section -- mainly because Google has managed to make said comment system worse and worse over time. Often the community itself communicates over Reddit or some similar platform that is much better for communication, but the community itself was created around a particular video site (and channels on said video site). If YouTube had a better way of having discussions, it would likely be much a much better service.

slumberlust 9y ago

None of the videos loaded for me on Chrome with Ublock and privacybadger.

marrone12 9y ago
Worked with just Chrome and uBlock.

barumrho 9y ago

Video playback experience sucks right now for their mobile apps. I think they can aim for a much better viewing and uploading experience.

dave5104 9y ago
Video playback has actually worked quite well for me on the official reddit app, along with Alien Blue. What have you seen?

slackoverflower 9y ago

Sure as hell benefits Reddit. Ads are their business and main priority, users come second.

niftich 9y ago

Definitely control of videos so they can sell ads, but also an effort to cultivate a captive ecosystem and reduce reliance on outside sites. These largely circle back to 'sell ads', but it's too drastic to suggest that it doesn't benefit the community. It, however, does continue the process of changing its character. Captive content ecosystems, despite their widely-recognized drawbacks, aren't devoid of engagement. Vine was a captive content ecosystem whose attributes resulted in many creative works; Snapchat and its Facebook-run clones -- most notably the Stories inside Instagram -- are another, where the content is made and consumed by the official app and never escapes out onto the public web. As an extreme example, Hulu is a captive content ecosystem where all the content happens to be professionally produced. Captive content ecosystems are excellent places to sell ads, because you track the user's content consumption habits, and control the client such that they can't easily avoid the ads using technical means.

cookiecaper 9y ago
How long until, like Twitter, reddit puts the bulk of its content behind a login? It's transforming itself into another walled garden like everything else, because that's the way to get paid.

mulmen 9y ago

Video playback is hard. Does Reddit have the technical resources to make this work? Only a handful of companies have pulled it off. Other than YouTube are there any web video players that are ready for prime time? Facebook's player is as much of a nightmare of usability as would be expected from the rest of their site, it's unusable for me on both an iPhone 6s in their native app and on the web. Netflix does a good job in their apps but I haven't used their web player in years, is it any good? News sites seem to love auto-playing videos that don't actually play but still follow the visitor through the page. If the videos do play I can look forward to my laptop fans ('14 RMBP) immediately kicking into high gear. Is this the experience I can look forward to on Reddit?

symlinkk 9y ago
I don't understand why it's so hard, you can just use the HTML5 <video> tag and then bam, you've got a polished and bug-free video player.
- mulmen 9y ago
  You're kidding right? What about the CDN? Does anyone actually use a plain html5 <video> tag for playback? Is that what Facebook and news sites like NYT and CNN are using? Is that what Reddit will use? Outside Youtube I can't think of a single video player I would even call usable, forget polished.
- wolfgang42 9y ago
  It's nowhere near that simple. I wrote a video player which only had to support three clients (Win7+IE, Win7+Chrome, and iPad Safari) and it still took me weeks to get it working right. Here's a whole post I wrote about the transcoding settings alone: http://www.linestarve.com/blog/post/rendering-html5-video-with-handbrake/ http://www.linestarve.com/blog/post/rendering-html5-video-wi...
aeorgnoieang 9y ago
The Netflix web player is good. I use it regularly. Some other good web video players: - Vimeo - Hulu HBO Now's web player is pretty good, tho not great. They definitely seem to have a hard time with their backend some times (e.g. around season premieres of Game of Thrones). In general tho, video playback is just the latest spiritual incarnation of popup ads.