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Not really. Reddit infrastructure and product development has been subsidized by hundreds of millions in VC funding for almost a decade. At this point they don'

by tmpz22 6y ago

Not really. Reddit infrastructure and product development has been subsidized by hundreds of millions in VC funding for almost a decade. At this point they don't even need a good product to stay at the table. Meanwhile to compete you need moderation tools, highly performant and reliable caching infrastructure for media rich content, enough of an ad network the investors believe you can eventually build an ad network, and to sell you soul to investors to buy marketing to keep people around long enough to gain critical mass. Social Media isn't about innovation anymore. It's about buying a stake and rent seeking. And guess what nobody is going to sell you an acre to get started just because you feel like giving it the college try.

mynameishere 6y ago
I've been on reddit for 14 years (14 years club!) and I can honestly say in that time it hasn't changed in any fundamental way. (It has however changed for the worse in many small ways.) I'm sure they put a lot of effort into serving their own images and video and placing ads in just the right place for maximal accidental clickage but why would the user care?
- unclekev 6y ago
  14 year club here as well. I'd argue that the following are fundamental changes that have impacted the community in a big way: - Selling 10% of the business to Tencent/Chinese investors - Firing their community managers in 2015 and not replacing them - When I first joined Reddit it was more technology focused, now it's all pop culture and memes. Although Tech subs are still plentiful so it can still be that site. (With some effort) - Banning any Sub-Reddit's that go against whatever the admins mood is on a particular day, or content that no longer fits with their "We have shareholders and need to keep them happy" mantra. Reddit is absolutely not a place for free speech/uncensored discussions these days. Because of both toxic mods and horrible admins. - Huge increase of censorship across the site in Sub-Reddit's, Posts and Comments - Users care about the video stuff because Reddit's video hosting is fundamentally broken and hardly works, but they would rather keep it broken because it makes it harder to download videos (DASH) - The whole new design is anti-user, the site is just masses of white space, super slow, JS heavy and pretty much unusable outside a third party mobile client. The day old.reddit.com gets shut down will be a sad day. None of this stuff was a problem 14 years ago Although some of the above comes with the toxicity that tends to come with huge community growth. You can argue the above isn't significant, but as someone who's been on the site for 14 years, it sure ain't the same place I signed up for all those years ago.
  - com2kid 6y ago
    > The whole new design is anti-user, the site is just masses of white space, super slow, JS heavy and pretty much unusable outside a third party mobile client. The day old.reddit.com gets shut down will be a sad day. On desktop the new design is much easier to use, it took me awhile to realize, but being able to hit esc and be right back where you were in the story feed is super nice.
    - benhurmarcel 6y ago
      Also to collapse threads from anywhere; that's very nice to scan through comment threads rapidly. But still it's way too heavy for what it does.
    - hhjinks 6y ago
      What are you even talking about. All modern browsers will bring you back to the spot you were in when you go back to the previous page, and have for years.
      - com2kid 6y ago
        Which works questionable well in an infinite scrolling situation. Previously you'd get a token in the URL that was some type of state that hopefully let you resume, but it didn't work if you spent too long reading comments and then pressed the back button. The new reddit UI solved this problem by simply not having users ever "leave" the home page.
- millstone 6y ago
  14 year club high five! The default subreddits are as bad as you'd expect, but there's many awesome smaller ones. Pray your niche subreddit never becomes default. IMO this is why they keep old reddit around. Some use reddit for bite-sized entertainment; others use it for serious advice and discussion. It makes sense for the site to have two modes.
fiblye 6y ago
>subsidized by hundreds of millions in VC funding for almost a decade That hasn't stopped any company from total collapse before and it won't now. Other social media sites have people somewhat locked in since it's all about staying in contact with friends and following certain people. You need to push the entire crowd at once to have a good replacement, but those sites still die when they screw up enough. Reddit's a place where people mostly read comments, see some funny pictures or news, and then go about their day. There's a lot less keeping people from dropping it and moving on.
neurostimulant 6y ago
Or maybe you shouldn't care about those infra stuff for now and just bootstrap it and let the community grow organically. Also, when reddit started more than a decade ago, scaling infra was hard, but in 2020 we have a lot of off-the-shelf tech that allows you to build "web-scale" app relatively easily, but all of that is moot if you can't grow the community, so why bother at this early stage?

by tmpz22 6y ago

mynameishere 6y ago

I've been on reddit for 14 years (14 years club!) and I can honestly say in that time it hasn't changed in any fundamental way. (It has however changed for the worse in many small ways.) I'm sure they put a lot of effort into serving their own images and video and placing ads in just the right place for maximal accidental clickage but why would the user care?

unclekev 6y ago
14 year club here as well. I'd argue that the following are fundamental changes that have impacted the community in a big way: - Selling 10% of the business to Tencent/Chinese investors - Firing their community managers in 2015 and not replacing them - When I first joined Reddit it was more technology focused, now it's all pop culture and memes. Although Tech subs are still plentiful so it can still be that site. (With some effort) - Banning any Sub-Reddit's that go against whatever the admins mood is on a particular day, or content that no longer fits with their "We have shareholders and need to keep them happy" mantra. Reddit is absolutely not a place for free speech/uncensored discussions these days. Because of both toxic mods and horrible admins. - Huge increase of censorship across the site in Sub-Reddit's, Posts and Comments - Users care about the video stuff because Reddit's video hosting is fundamentally broken and hardly works, but they would rather keep it broken because it makes it harder to download videos (DASH) - The whole new design is anti-user, the site is just masses of white space, super slow, JS heavy and pretty much unusable outside a third party mobile client. The day old.reddit.com gets shut down will be a sad day. None of this stuff was a problem 14 years ago Although some of the above comes with the toxicity that tends to come with huge community growth. You can argue the above isn't significant, but as someone who's been on the site for 14 years, it sure ain't the same place I signed up for all those years ago.
- com2kid 6y ago
  > The whole new design is anti-user, the site is just masses of white space, super slow, JS heavy and pretty much unusable outside a third party mobile client. The day old.reddit.com gets shut down will be a sad day. On desktop the new design is much easier to use, it took me awhile to realize, but being able to hit esc and be right back where you were in the story feed is super nice.
  - benhurmarcel 6y ago
    Also to collapse threads from anywhere; that's very nice to scan through comment threads rapidly. But still it's way too heavy for what it does.
  - hhjinks 6y ago
    What are you even talking about. All modern browsers will bring you back to the spot you were in when you go back to the previous page, and have for years.
    - com2kid 6y ago
      Which works questionable well in an infinite scrolling situation. Previously you'd get a token in the URL that was some type of state that hopefully let you resume, but it didn't work if you spent too long reading comments and then pressed the back button. The new reddit UI solved this problem by simply not having users ever "leave" the home page.
millstone 6y ago
14 year club high five! The default subreddits are as bad as you'd expect, but there's many awesome smaller ones. Pray your niche subreddit never becomes default. IMO this is why they keep old reddit around. Some use reddit for bite-sized entertainment; others use it for serious advice and discussion. It makes sense for the site to have two modes.

fiblye 6y ago

>subsidized by hundreds of millions in VC funding for almost a decade That hasn't stopped any company from total collapse before and it won't now. Other social media sites have people somewhat locked in since it's all about staying in contact with friends and following certain people. You need to push the entire crowd at once to have a good replacement, but those sites still die when they screw up enough. Reddit's a place where people mostly read comments, see some funny pictures or news, and then go about their day. There's a lot less keeping people from dropping it and moving on.

neurostimulant 6y ago

Or maybe you shouldn't care about those infra stuff for now and just bootstrap it and let the community grow organically. Also, when reddit started more than a decade ago, scaling infra was hard, but in 2020 we have a lot of off-the-shelf tech that allows you to build "web-scale" app relatively easily, but all of that is moot if you can't grow the community, so why bother at this early stage?