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Reddit Hits 1B Views per Month 1 Year After Launching Native Video Player
- akuji1993 8y ago> Reddit says it’s now averaging one billion “native” video views per month I think that's important to emphasize. Reddit itself has way way more views than this per month.
- yobrien 8y agoAnd it's horribly buggy, slow, and terrible all-around.
- dchest 8y agoIt looks like many of videos on Reddit are re-uploads from YouTube or other websites. It would be interesting to see how they'll deal with copyright laws.
- ForHackernews 8y agoThe same way YouTube and those other websites did: Ignore copyright laws as long as they possibly can.
- slezyr 8y agoWell they don't ignore them. They constantly remove videos.
- ForHackernews 8y agoNow they do, more than a decade after they started hosting videos.
- chatmasta 8y agoHalf of those views are probably people trying to reload the video because it isn't playing.
- hilyen 8y agoMy biggest gripe is the total inability to copy and paste or download a direct video URL for sharing.
- ikornaselur 8y agoThat's so incredibly annoying. At least, as a workaround, you can replace `reddit` in the link with `vrddit` and it'll link to a third party player https://www.reddit.com/r/MadeMeSmile/comments/9l3jdc/when_you_let_your_dad_fix_your_car/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MadeMeSmile/comments/9l3jdc/when_yo... becomes https://www.vrddit.com/r/MadeMeSmile/comments/9l3jdc/when_you_let_your_dad_fix_your_car/ https://www.vrddit.com/r/MadeMeSmile/comments/9l3jdc/when_yo...
- swebs 8y ago>Error: Video request failed (Possibly blocked by Firefox's Tracking Protection) I fucking hate reddit
- krelian 8y agoObviously done on purpose so that sharing requires you to send a link to the reddit page instead of just sharing the video.
- readhn 8y agoIts only a beginning. Reddit is where most people of certain demographics spend their time during day. It will only grow from here. Just like there is a youtube generation (grew up on youtube) there is a reddit generation in the works.
- sillyquiet 8y agoCertainly makes it convenient for astroturfers, marketers, and social opinion manipulators - one-stop shopping!
- compcoffee 8y ago>Just like there is a youtube generation (grew up on youtube) there is a reddit generation in the works. I'm not sure "in the works" is correct. Although they were founded around the same time, reddit is older as a social media platform than YouTube. I'd say the reddit demographic is those around ~30 years old, give or take a few years. I don't think young people/teenagers use it as a "go to" (like I do). All this is to say, I'm not sure if there's a growth story here. My bet would be on stagnation.
- bionoid 8y ago> I don't think young people/teenagers use it as a "go to" (like I do). I was a bit surprised to hear advertising for "reddit the site" towards a younger audience.. but there was plenty of it during the recent counter-strike major league event in London. Many times throughout the programme they "organically" discussed how everyone wants to be at the top of reddit, how it is the place you wanna be, etc. They obviously took money for it. I'd link videos, but the faceittv twitch channel is subscribers only. I would not be surprised if they are marketing in similar ways for other e-sports. Aside, but another counter-strike event (eleague iirc) recently had an actual uniformed army officer handing out trophy to the winners. That I found truly distasteful. That said, my bet for reddit is also on stagnation.
- manishsharan 8y agoWiht the new user interface, Reddit is trying really hard to go the way of Digg. I used to browse it on my phone but the popups asking me to install their app block my screen. And no-- no fucking way I am going to install an app to view a webpage.
- drb91 8y agoWasn’t digg’s issue power users or something? Reddit was and can never be that bad simply due to subreddits. I think a more apt comparison is simply facebook and twitter and instagram: make the UX shitty to promote ads.
- nickysielicki 8y ago> Reddit was and can never be that bad simply due to subreddits. Vote manipulation on reddit in 2018 is way worse than vote manipulation on Digg ever was. Due to the centralized categories of Digg, the userbase was unable to hide away from content they didn't like and that brought the community together to collectively take part in rejecting the influencers. On reddit, there isn't that same sense of a cohesive single community. In the past, there might have been a sort of collective identity of "redditors", but that's gone away as the site has grown. Nobody says, "Oh yeah, I go on reddit" anymore, they say that they are are active on a particular sub. I wonder if reddit could have done anything differently to maintain that "redditor" identity among their userbase, is it just a function of their growth? I think it's mostly just their growth, but they accelerated it by not being more careful with what subreddits were defaults and their responsibility to curate them. I remember when the frontpage of reddit transitioned from generally being longform content, to generally being shitty image-macro memes. I also remember when /r/politics used to be a relatively balanced source of news. If you do something that makes your happy and heavy users rescind from being globally active to just being active in their tiny niche subreddit, you can't expect your global sense of community to be maintained.
- drb91 8y agoI guess in the subreddits I visit, the prospect of vote manipulation doesn’t really matter because the content is evidently good. The shared subreddits are indeed trash. I wonder if banning commonly astroturfed topics would help and directing people to moderated subreddits for that content. As a long time redditor (since 2007 or so), the identity has been decohering (or transforming) since the beginning and at this point I don’t see much of value left to lose. The culture centers around memes (I don’t mean this in a pejorative sense), not shared values or interests. A common joke used to be: reddit’s been going downhill since they added comments. Now I doubt most remember at one point it lacked them. At this point I just view comments bemoanings its fresh demise as reactionary: reddit’s not going anywhere, and you can’t change its direction at all. It’s just not easy accepting the direction it is going.
- morrbo 8y agoThe marketing on reddit is what gets me. Aside from the fact that reddit video is terrible.. if you spend enough time on reddit (which, sadly, I do) you start to see patterns emerging. These have gotten more and more blatant over the past few years to the point where it is ruining a lot of the larger subs. The particular case i'm thinking of is when the movie "IT" came out recently. There was so much guerrilla marketing everywhere it was just a real pain in the ass to browse around. In general though it goes like this: "TIL XXX did YYY" - fairly innocuous postings about a movie, game, product, or company seemingly out of the blue, a few weeks/months before anything happens (in the case of IT there was a load of stuff about Tim Curry or Stephen King a long time before any real announcement the movie would be releasing soon) "XXX has rumoured to release a YYY v2" - sparked discussion about the possible launch of something, be it a movie, game, etc. *maybe a few more TILs/related content/memes digging up old screenshots of said movie, game, etc.* "XXX has released YYY" - a hugely voted post which gains a lot of visibility very quickly (depending on the level of marketing) *Floods of memes relating directly to XXX or YYY which don't usually look like fan content* maybe i'm being overly paranoid, but there seems to be a definite trait in my head. Other than the occasional self-congratulatory Medium post, HN luckily doesn't seem to be falling to the same fate (HN funded incubators aside, which is fine). I guess thanks largely in part to the mods here. Gj dang!
- yawgmoth 8y agoThese days the marketing game includes faking organic growth. Music artists do it all the time. Here's an example: https://dimelovi.com/# https://dimelovi.com/# From the page: > We at Dimelo VI offer a complete set of marketing product and creative services focus on you, the artist as a brand and your fans. You the artist, take care of the stage and your music and we take care of the rest. > Not only we work on the artist development, we also work directly with fans to create a big impact on the social engagement of the artist. Making the Fans Closer to the artist is the key to make a hit go viral and make the best ROI. Translation: We have the means to increase exposure for you, the product, through popular channels. Tangibly that means shill accounts on Reddit, YouTube, probably HN, Instagram, etc. Before I deleted my reddit account (10 years old), I would regularly get private messages about getting paid for shilling. It's a real problem and it's totally affecting how I interact with the internet. Is this really a group of people excited about something? Or am I being fooled? And it's fair to ask what the difference is, but regardless of the answer it's also fair to have a stance on the principle. For me, don't lie to me to get me into your music/movie/game/whatever. I will actively avoid things being marketed like that.
- sschueller 8y agoThe video player is the worst. They are preventing you from downloading the video and it's not like the own the content. If you upload to reddit, please use imgur or another service!
- huhtenberg 8y agoNot being able to link to just video is a bigger issue.
- firic 8y agoimgur is terrible for mobile users
- dbbk 8y agoHow is that any different than YouTube?
- scottyelich 8y agonative video player has... issues.
- doctorsher 8y agoI'm actually baffled at how bad reddit's native video player is. For a core part of the browsing experience, it is truly an embarrassment. Here are the behaviors that I deal with on a regular basis: (i) On mobile, I simply cannot view a native reddit video in landscape. When I turn my phone to landscape, it plays ~3 seconds of the video and then pauses. I hit the play button to continue, and it plays ~3 seconds of the video then pauses. Repeat ad infinitum. To clarify, this is not a buffering issue, as the video always plays when I hit the play button again. (ii) On my mobile and laptop, their video buffering experiences holes in the buffer. It will be buffering, and after a certain point a gap is created between two buffered sections of video. When the video player reaches this gap, it is legitimately not buffered and stops playing. (iii) Moving forward with the previous scenario, once it reaches this hole in the buffered video and stops playing, the playback stalls. I can sit there for minutes and it will not continue. I have to drag the slider backwards a few seconds, which will restart the playback/buffering process and then it works fine.
- agumonkey 8y agotheir own media hosting is none of the reasons I keep using it :)
- screye 8y agoI never understood why Reddit didn't simply acqui-hire one of the good 3rd party Reddit apps. All of them are significantly better than their proprietary app. Since most of these apps are single person efforts, a few million should be good enough right ? I can't see that putting a big dent into Reddit's pockets.