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Reddit works because it’s anonymous, information-dense and relatively ad-free. Change any one of those three and the user base will abandon you. It’s been Redd
by exelius 8y ago
Reddit works because it’s anonymous, information-dense and relatively ad-free. Change any one of those three and the user base will abandon you.
It’s been Reddit’s dilemma since the beginning: you can’t monetize a toxic user base that has total freedom. Sure you can try to drive away the toxic users, but it turns out that those toxic users are also pretty influential in non-toxic aspects.
I’m still skeptical of Reddit’s ability to turn a profit. But as a community platform it’s the best out there IMO.
- falcon620 8y agoSurely it should be possible to run something like Reddit at a profit? Run it with like 50 people. And not necessarily in SF. I think that's doable if you're happy with where the site is, product-wise. Just googled quickly and found a figure of 250 employees from last year.
- exelius 8y agoRight; if you run the Craigslist model. Reddit has been more interventionist with content, which means they need more people to manage the community. I would guess they have all the developers they need...
- falcon620 8y agoI don't get the impression they are spending a whole lot on community management. In a way, that's a big part of what I see as their largest problem - they are relying on the zeal of the subreddit moderators to work for free. (They should have a model which allows moderators for large subreddits to get paid. And for the subscribers to vote for moderators.) This is why the large subreddits are so incredibly polarized in either left or right directions - the moderators are not paid to deal with things fairly, they are there spending their time working free - the only benefit they get is that they get to enforce their particular political choice onto others in their subreddit. Look at e.g. r/politics and r/the_donald as extreme examples of what I'm talking about.
- exelius 8y agoI would go so far as to say that while the moderators of most major subs may have started as volunteers, they are almost certainly on someone’s payroll now as “social influencers”. This includes the political subreddits (actually especially the political subreddits). It’s legitimate user posts and discussions filtered by whoever has the coin to rent access to those moderators.
- falcon620 8y agoThere's also been a few accusations of r/tesla moderators being on payroll (can be read at r/realtesla).
- exelius 8y agoI know someone who is a mod for a couple major subs and he absolutely does paid placements (he has his own bot network for everything, but being a mod his shill posts don’t get deleted). Mods don’t necessarily use their mod power itself for profit, but knowing how the sub works and what users like is very powerful. So is ignoring obvious upvote botnets because they belong to you or another mod.
- falcon620 8y agoThe inevitable conclusion I come to: Something like reddit2 should be run by a minimalist apolitical company. They should work on building some kind of democracy in each sub-reddit, based on some factors (where "participation quality" is one important factor). If the users are unhappy, they should be able to call for an election, etc. The reddit2 company should focus primarily on keeping the platform alive and on fighting bots. And on tuning the scoring model. They should be financed in some way that doesn't depend on the content. Be it individual contributments, random, anomymized advertisments etc. The company should try to hire apolitical engineers and managers. People who just care about solving an engineering problem.
- 8y ago
- CM30 8y agoNot sure about the second one. Isn't Reddit's whole point that volunteer moderators and community founders moderate the content, not a centralised moderation team? Honestly, I'd expect them to spend less on that stuff than something like Facebook or Twitter, since the users do a decent enough job of removing the truly objectionable posts anyway.
- CM30 8y agoHonestly, it should be possible to run MANY internet services at a profit if you keep your costs low and stop throwing money at every little irrelevant thing. Reddit, Medium, Twitter... all of them probably could have been profitable businesses if their founders ran them out of a normal office, with normal staff salaries (not in the hundreds of thousands of dollars), with less staff and with less money spent on office perks and what not. Does every business need to be some huge deal with thousands of staff and huge offices and tons of perks and a staff cafe now?
- cookiecaper 8y agoThe problem is not the salaries or the perks that drives the unprofitability, it's simply the investment model. If you're backed by venture capital, you're goal is to get to an exit 500x larger than the investment ($2M round; VCs don't invest unless they think they may make $1B+). That requires people to focus on growth and world-eating more than any respectable-in-the-moment profitability numbers.
- falcon620 8y agoGenerall that's the case, but not for reddit though, right?
- duderific 8y agoWell kind of...if you're in the Bay Area, you need to be able to compete for engineers with the likes of Apple, Google, Facebook etc. No perks == no employees. Why should I go work at your crappy startup when I could live the life of luxury at one of the FANGS.
- falcon620 8y agoSurprise: You don't need to be in the Bay Area to build/run world class companies/products. Maybe sometimes to build, but definitely not to run.
- 6cd6beb 8y agoI think a lot of people would be very interested in a job posting with a tagline like: "We don't have ping pong or topo chico; we have eight hour workdays". If I saw that, saw a clear description of the thing they're building and reasoned that it provides value to someone, I'd be over the moon.
- GAPAT 8y ago>Sure you can try to drive away the toxic users, but it turns out that those toxic users are also pretty influential in non-toxic aspects Almost as if toxicity of a person is an integral part of their nature and politically correct spaces are detrimental to the discourse.
- mwfunk 8y agoToxicity is detrimental by definition, so not sure what you're getting at.
- white-flame 8y agoDetriment is wholly subjective here. When it comes to politics or social issues, people have different views on how society "should be", and those differences are offensive and considered toxic to the other side. In that sense, everybody is toxic and the label is meaningless and unactionable. Obviously, most people hold beliefs of some form, and those beliefs will clash with others. Bandying around "toxic" as an absolute in those situations is narrow-minded and prejudiced. Reasonable people with contributions in one neutral area and one controversial area are lumped with this same label as trolls, doxers, and inciters of violence. Specificity of labels is very important, especially when they are tied to consequences. Where "toxic" can certainly be used is in relation to a certain goal, like reasonable level-headed discussion, or subscription to a certain worldview; instead of as absolute. Even actions like deliberate trolling aren't considered toxic on sites like 4chan, because that's part of their accepted and promoted culture.
- manfredo 8y agoI think the point is, much like offensiveness toxicity is something that is percieved and not objectively determined. Some users and groups may be perceived to be toxic, while much of the user base may consider it positive. Two examples would be the_Donald and /r/late_stage_capitalism. Lot of people think those subreddits are toxic, but lots of users also like and participate in those subreddits.
- swebs 8y agoIs there even a definition to "toxicity"? I've just seen it used as a buzzword for "thing I don't like".
- potatote 8y agoAs an immigrant with no family to rely on in the US, I always give credit to Reddit for helping me learn so many things from buying old/used car, applying to grad school, to looking for an apartment. Just like you said, its diverse user base means it has almost all the information one needs. I hope it never changes (although with the recent re-design, I'm afraid it might have unintended repercussions...)
- tyrust 8y agoAs a native-born American with all of my family in the US, I use Reddit for the same category of things too :)
- xarball 8y agoAs a dead animal carcass whos insides are torn out and spewed out along the side of the road, I wish I could use reddit for similar, yet somewhat more distant categories too ^.^
- exelius 8y agoThat’s a strange fursona...
- silentsea90 8y agoThis made me lol at work. Don't know why this is getting downvoted
- icebraining 8y agoYour first phrase answers the second. Humor is only upvoted in HN if it provokes a wry smile.
- jacquesm 8y agoToo busy changing the world for the better to smile.
- gitgacutils 8y ago> Reddit works because it’s anonymous, information-dense and relatively ad-free. Reddit is none of those now. It's not anonymous ( they track your identity and feed it to the government ). You may be "anonymous" to fellow users, but not anonymous to authorities. It isn't information dense. It's propaganda dense. Almost all the content there now is government, media, ngo, etc propaganda. As for ads, check out the videos, movies, music, etc subs when a particular movie, album, etc comes out. The frontpage will be littered with ad-like submissions ( aka ads ). Reddit is 80% government, politics and news propaganda and 20% ads ( movies, music, etc ). I think you are confusing the reddit of 2011 with today's reddit. > It’s been Reddit’s dilemma since the beginning: you can’t monetize a toxic user base that has total freedom. Actually reddit could and did monetize "toxic content". How do you think reddit has been around for nearly 13 years? And once again, you are confusing reddit of 2011 to reddit of 2018. Today, reddit isn't any more "toxic" than twitter, youtube, facebook, etc. Reddit is heavily censored. Besides, on social media, you don't monetize content, you monetize eyeballs/clicks/data points. > I’m still skeptical of Reddit’s ability to turn a profit. Do you really think reddit is unprofitable? Let me guess, you think that youtube is not profitable right? You think these companies have been around for more than a decade because they are not "profitable"? Their "hollywood" style accounting may make it seem like they are not profitable, but these companies are incredibly profitable. It's why youtube has a valuation over $100 billion and reddit's valuation is in the billions. > But as a community platform it’s the best out there IMO. Have to disagree with you there. Any garden variety forum is better than reddit. Also, reddit stopped being a community a long time ago. I've stopped using it because it's all political nonsense or advertisements.
- Analemma_ 8y ago> Reddit is 80% government, politics and news propaganda and 20% ads ( movies, music, etc ). I am a heavy Reddit user and I don't notice any of these things, except when I specifically go looking for them. Curate your subreddit list and unsubscribe from all the default subs - they are all garbage, and that isn't even Reddit's fault, it's just inevitable once they reach a certain size.
- gitgacutils 8y ago
- cuddlypsycho 8y ago> Reddit works because it’s anonymous Are you sure there? Anonymity doesn't really exist anymore on the internet for the average person. Reddit has the illusion of anonymity which gives its users a false sense of privacy so they can act the way they truly are (parallels to Westworld if you watch the show). It would be incredibly easy for Reddit to de-anonymize its user base, the same way Facebook was trying to do with medical metadata, and sell that info (at least for the US users, given GDPR in EU now)
- nicky0 8y agoPseudonymous then. P.s. Facebook doesn't sell data. It sells ads, targeted using the data it holds.
- emn13 8y agoFacebook effectively sells data. It simply doesn't sell raw dumps. The distinction isn't a minor one, but in this context it doesn't much matter. Reddit is unlikely to have the kind of quality data that facebook has to sell - directly, or indirectly.
- cm2012 8y agoI would say there are huge privacy differences between selling data and selling the right to advertise to their private data. The latter is quite a bit more privacy secure. (Note, the Cambridge Analytica stuff happened in 2013 when Facebook was much more open with APIs using their data, since popular demand at the time was for FB to be less of a walled garden)
- Retric 8y agoEven just targeted advertising is enough. Setup a campaign landing page for each campaign and anyone that clicks the link just exposed their gender or any other criteria you set up when defining the campaign.
- cryptoz 8y ago
- fabatka 8y agoI imagine useful-but-not-inherently-profitable stuff like this would be supported voluntarily by its userbase. And if you're as popular as Reddit, I guess there must be a couple of big patrons whose support alone is bigger than the upkeep costs.
- fullshark 8y agoModerators volunteer hours of labor at least
- HiroshiSan 8y agoNot true anymore. You need an email just to sign up now.
- sjm-lbm 8y agoIf an email is all they require, that seems almost like an intentionally low bar.
- anchpop 8y agoThey don't even require that
- domakidis 8y agoAt the time I'm posting this message, email is still not required. Just click 'Next' with an empty email value to skip that step during registration. That's dark patterns 101, but technically it's not required.
- HiroshiSan 8y agoSneaky. Ty for this, I had no idea.
- narrator 8y agoI think the focus on the toxic user base is an artifact of the idea of one-dimensionally categorizing people based on their political ideology. That is such a hot button right now that it completely overshadows all other contributions to society in most forums. Reddit, by allowing some bad behavior and anonymity diffuses that ever present political aspect of modern life.
- slg 8y agoThe kind of toxic people we are talking about on Reddit are not toxic for their politics. Racism, bigotry, and misogyny are not political topics. It isn't like tax policy or any other topic that can be debated. There is one clear side that is wrong.
- B0btheBuilder 8y agoOn top of that, said toxic people usually start harassing other users.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- narrator 8y agoRacism, bigotry and misogyny are politics. You perfectly demonstrate my point in that you hold the political aspects above all other aspects in determining the validity of an entire persons life and contribution to society because of the ideas they express. For example, Roseanne making one tweet and ruining her whole career. Reddit doesn't force that sort of political conformity on people.
- ryneandal 8y agoIf you think Roseanne's sins were limited to a single tweet, you're woefully uninformed on the matter. It was the sum of all of her past transgressions, the tweet was merely the straw breaking the camel's back, surprisingly. I would have thought it was the Nazi cookie photoshoot.
- OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago"Reddit is ... relatively ad-free." Um, no. Not even close.
- djsumdog 8y agoThey've banned so many of the toxic people that Voat, Gab, phuks et. al. have pretty much become toxic cesspools of ostracized communities.
- nabla9 8y agoTechnology allows high productivity and efficiency. Ads have cognitive cost that users pay for the service. Price competition in free service means annoying users less with ads. If there is competition and innovation in social media works, it has the potential to become the lowest profit margin business sector ever existed once it matures. Wast volumes and very thin profit margins.
- trisimix 8y agoReddit is now adding profile info and friends and such. Unfortunately.
- shabda 8y agoSmall reddit communities are drama free and non toxic and also anonymous, information-dense and relatively ad-free. I think at 100K+ subreddits start breaking apart and toxic voices and groupthink take over.
- CM30 8y agoYeah. And this is why Reddit's slow change to a more Facebook type setup is so risky for them right now. What the administration seems to want and what the users want are odds here, and the former seems to be on the verge of driving away the latter because of it.
- exelius 8y agoIt’s going to blow back on them. The user experience is significantly worse. The entire goal is to reduce information density to cram in more ads. Guess they didn’t get the memo that this transformation is exactly what drove users away from Facebook.
- city41 8y ago> and relatively ad-free The redesign that's currently in beta seems to mostly be driven by the desire to embed more ads. Instead of just one ad at the top of the page, there's new several spread throughout the feed, very similar to Twitter's promoted tweets.
- neuralRiot 8y agoI didn't visit the site in while since the last "sub cleanse" made really obvious the direction they where steering to, today i saw it due to a google search and the new "Facebook-esque" layout made me throw up a bit in my mouth.
- shostack 8y agoThe move in general is to shift from a fixed impression number when you hit a page, to a constantly increasing impression number as you scroll, with other changes made to increase scroll depth (and thus more impressions). I'm just waiting for them to add auto-play muted videos to the feed so they can charge those higher video CPMs.
- ConcernedCoder 8y agoI think the uptick in visits is just people clicking "back to old reddit" on every page... why isn't there a global setting to disable this "new" reddit abomination...?
- makecheck 8y agoYeah and right now they’re trying to change more than one to fail faster. Has Reddit tried “periodic fundraisers” like public TV and Wikipedia?
- thanatropism 8y agoYeah. Reddit Gold used to go into funding infrastructure. Gold buyers used to be able to name servers and all.
- std_throwaway 8y agoWhat does "toxic user" mean in this context? How do they differ from a "non-toxic" user?
- neolefty 8y agoIt's vague but real. Maybe someone who makes the experience miserable for other users? Or is destructive / harassing / mean-spirited?
- std_throwaway 8y agoIt strikes me as a term where everybody thinks they know what it means but if you drill down most people just made up their own definition and there's no agreed-upon definition. While everybody agrees that toxic users are bad and you probably should get rid of them, many would really disagree on who the toxic users actually are. My made-up-on-the-spot definition would be: "Everybody who hinders business interests." May it be by hindering user growth or even causing user loss. For example making large groups of users feeling uneasy in some way. For example using bad words or posting bad ideas or even purposefully provoking users or user groups. Or by hindering revenue streams for example by advocating ad-blockers or making the advertisers or other money sources feeling uneasy. Or other reasons.
- Double_a_92 8y agoSometimes it's just people that don't participate in the echo chamber.
- bulldoa 8y agoI have always been wondering, would people choose to pay reddit instead of getting ads, like 1$ or 10$ a month?
- yurishimo 8y agoThis is effectively what Reddit Gold is. In a perfect world, Reddit would be completely funded through Gold, therefore eliminating the pressure on higher ups to increase revenue through ads or other less than ideal revenue streams. Unfortunately, Gold has not been enough to fund the site (if the sidebar on the front page is to be believed) for a long time.
- beedogs 8y agoWhy would people do either of those things when ad-blockers exist?
- bitL 8y ago> Reddit’s ability to turn a profit Maybe our society should recognize that some platforms should be treated as utilities, impose a small tax ($5? 0.05%?) which individuals can dedicate to a platform of their choice, and keep these vital forums away from crushing forces of market?
- neolefty 8y agoWikipedia does well with a periodic fundraiser. Hi Jimbo! Could Reddit do similarly? Style itself as mostly a service and not especially profit-driven? Hi, I'm @spez. By Creddits this week to help Reddit meet its quarterly fundraising goal! We've gamified it a little ...
- bitL 8y agoIn EU many governments force you to fund state TVs you never watch; instead giving portion of that to a site (or sites) of your choice could be preferable.
- wuliwong 8y agoDo you believe that the majority of reddit users are "toxic"? I wouldn't describe myself as a heavy user of reddit but I almost never come across "toxic" behavior. I follow sub-reddits like personal finance, VR and phillips hue lighting. There just isn't much "toxicity" in there as far as I can tell.
- jgh 8y agoI think you're being a little bit disingenuous here. Not everybody only subscribes to a bunch of niche subreddits with good moderation. A lot of the larger / less strictly moderated subreddits are filled with toxicity, bots, and other nonsense.
- konschubert 8y agoI think that the industry has not yet solved the question of how to keep a social network interesting when it becomes mass-market. The problem is that the kind of content and discussion which appeals to everyone also appeals to noone. The biggest common denominator is small. Networks like Reddit and Facebook are born in a niche and this niche audience is what keeps the quality of content high. Once the niche gets bigger and bigger, the quality of the content goes down. And the network suffocates.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago>Reddit works because it’s anonymous // Yet I presume the majority of the drive to make users use the app is in order to deanonymise them and associate their input with a real person? >I’m still skeptical of Reddit’s ability to turn a profit. // The reason it fits in with a media conglomerates portfolio must be influencing and profiling, no? Such profits aren't direct, they're through things like tax regimes tailored to the overlords, political systems that serve your needs, etc.. That's the media tycoon game isn't it?
- DaveWalk 8y agoPossibly naive question: how does reddit make money, and how's it going for them? Ads, promoted content, reddit gold... Is that it? I knew they were purchased by Conde Nast, then spun off at some point? Are they owned by VC now, or something?
- est 8y ago> drive away the toxic users I am surprised there isn't some kind of NLP based solution for that. I think labeling of slashdot-like informative/funny would be useful.
- fortythirteen 8y ago> Sure you can try to drive away the toxic users, but it turns out that those toxic users are also pretty influential in non-toxic aspects. The problem with Reddit's toxic user base is that they're only concerned with blocking bad actors on one side of a subject. They've repeatedly turned a blind eye to the open doxxing and brigading from SRS, and the complete takeover of the politics subreddit by CTR.