11 ms·

Storming Reddit's Moat

151 points by mjmayank 6y ago

sjg007 6y ago
Imgur seems like an interesting case study.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  Does Imgur make money and is it profitable? As far as I know their "business model" (which actually isn't one, or at least not a profitable one) is "growth and engagement". Their core product isn't something people want to pay for (image hosting itself can be obtained anywhere, including from cloud storage subscriptions people already pay for), and their social side is at odds with the advertising business model - you need ads to survive, but ads revenue is forever decreasing and people will leave if you put too much ads.
  - cfors 6y ago
    They were profitable for a while, and then got a round of funding from Andreessen-Horowitz. [0] I don't know if they are still profitable, but I recently for some reason was on the founder's (Alan Schaaf) wikipedia page. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Schaaf#cite_note-3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Schaaf#cite_note-3
- jedberg 6y ago
  Sort of. The provided a functionality that reddit did not, so they weren't really unbundling anything. They smartly realized that reddit would probably eventually provide that same functionality (which they did) so they started down the path of building their own community before that happened.
  - RankingMember 6y ago
    Lucky for them, the reddit implementation is as-of-now still pretty awful.
    - jedberg 6y ago
      Yeah but that's the sad part. People still use reddit's built in system because it's there, despite the inferiority.
      - RankingMember 6y ago
        True, it's the path of least resistance, particularly if you're a new user.
      - markdown 6y ago
        On the contrary, the sad part is that people still use imgur. Going off-site to be bombarded with off-topic pics (all imgur pics are surrounded by random other (sometimes NSFW) pics isn't a great experience.
      - dageshi 6y ago
        I dunno, what really do you need to do other than have your pictures uploaded and displayed on the post? I kinda figure that's all 90% of the userbase actually wants from the feature?
rednerrus 6y ago
Didn't creditkarma peel off of reddit? The key is to build a service that redditors use and become the default service for a huge sub. Like YNAB has done for r/personalfinance.
- mjmayank 6y ago
  Totally agree! This is something I want to talk about in my next post. CreditKarma and YNAB are great examples.
tlianza 6y ago
> and “for sale” became Facebook Marketplace. Ummmm... 1. Does the data suggest that is true? 2. If it were true, would it support the "unbundling" narrative given that it would be a case of something being part of another bundle?
- ballenf 6y ago
  FB marketplace is literally the only thing I fb for anymore. It's pretty much the only decent place to buy and sell furniture, lawn equipment, etc. I valiantly tried to stick with craigslist, but it's just become a wasteland of scams and spam where I live.
  - BitwiseFool 6y ago
    The fact that Craigslist hasn't done anything to cut down on spam, scams, and duplicate posts is maddening to me. Whenever I do a search I see dozens of phone repair advertisements and completely unrelated posts for cars and trucks. And those posts have the same title and thumbnail! I simply do not understand why Craigslist refuses to improve in this regard. Look, I get why Craig doesn't want to change the design of his site, but how in the hell do they justify such crap not being removed?
- paxys 6y ago
  Craigslist's unchecked spam, moderation and safety problems have slowly made it unusable. And yes the data does show exactly this. FB Marketplace had 800 million users in 2018 (https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-marketplace-is-used-in-70-countries-by-800-million-people-monthly/ https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-marketplace-is-used-in-70...) while Craigslist's revenue has been falling year over year (https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/craigslist-revenue-fell-analysts-ok https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/craigslist-revenue-fe...).
  - asdff 6y ago
    I don't see how fb marketplace avoids these issues
jedberg 6y ago
> Reddit content ranks really well on Google The most public contribution I made to reddit's codebase when I was there was the SEO features. I did all the usual stuff like cleaning up title and meta tags, and adding a sitemap. But the change that had the largest effect, by far, was adding the title of the story into the URL. As soon as we launched that, our Google traffic shot up. The way you know you have truly mastered SEO is when Google takes away your control of the crawl rate on your SEO control panel. Soon after that we had lunch a special set of servers that just serve requests for Google, because they were killing us by crawling years of old posts.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  Reddit archives (making them read only) threads after a year I believe. Why would Google re-visit archived threads? Did you see Google's crawler throttle crawl rate by response times?
  - jedberg 6y ago
    Six months, and not back then. Back then you could comment on old threads. I wasn't there when they implement the thread lock, but I suspect it was related. The reddit codebase is designed for recency. Interacting with old threads really trashed the databases, at least back then.
  - stretchcat 6y ago
    I'm not certain, but doesn't a 'read only' reddit page still get changed when a user who was in it deletes their account and posts? Often when a search engine sends me to reddit, the comments that probably contained the relevant information are long gone.
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      You might be right, in which case Google should offer a link to the corresponding Internet Archive wayback page (where the deleted content should still exist). Failing that, there are browser extensions for both Chrome and Firefox that enable this functionality.
paganel 6y ago
Another community that successfully peeled off reddit is /r/soccerstreams. It's now of course banned on the website but a quick web search gets one to the new dedicated website which even has "reddit" as a sub-domain. The same goes for /r/nbastreams.
- jedberg 6y ago
  Does it really count as unbundling if reddit stops providing the same functionality?
  - Miner49er 6y ago
    Some banned political subs have spun up their own sites as well. I wouldn't call it unbundling. I guess maybe forced unbundling?
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
Many popular subreddits are quietly operated by moderators with industry connections. Some of this occurs naturally. People who were deep enough into a niche to become moderators of a subreddit in the late 2000s and early 2010s are also likely to end up working in that industry or starting business in that industry. However, many companies have realized that being in the good graces of subreddit moderators can be very good for their business. It's becoming common for brands to reach out to subreddit moderators with offers of free products or even paid job offers to bring them onto the company's side. I know of several companies that routinely send free gear to relevant subreddit moderators. The arrangement is "no strings attached" but it usually results in a favorable moderation outcomes for the company. Moderators have a lot of power to influence conversations on Reddit in non-obvious ways. In some ways, having a subreddit that champions your products while maintaining an appearance of being impartial is better than explicitly spinning out of Reddit. People know not to trust positive Amazon reviews, but Reddit conversations are generally assumed to be authentic.
- brodouevencode 6y ago
  Gave up on reddit a long time ago because of the moderation problems.
  - jefurii 6y ago
    How is this different from other media? It's already common practice with magazines that contain product reviews. There's nothing stopping companies from doing this with bulletin boards and blogs.
    - brodouevencode 6y ago
      Yes, this is true. The problem lies in that they've historically waved the free speech flag in one hand while throwing the banhammer with the other.
    - abcdjdjd 6y ago
      Ahhh, yes, and you literally just described Section 230 exemptions vs. being a publisher. Yes, publishers are able to act as publishers and also get held responsible for what they publish. Social media sites are exempt from this under Section 230 rules, but that assumes they are not unfairly moderating their sites and turning into publishers. Yes, you literally just described what is a publisher and why their abuse of Section 230 law is not ok. You all who are supporting this overmoderation of Reddit seem to want Reddit to be a publisher. Well, with becoming a publisher and unfairly moderating the site, you lose Section 230 protections. You can't have your cake and eat it too, but that is what Reddit and many of the supporters of overmoderation want to do.
blantonl 6y ago
I went through an unbundling process in my business that turned out to be extremely successful and a wise move. I own and operate RadioReference.com, which is a reference database source and community mainly for those who own and listen to police scanners (and other radios). I acquired a small startup that was broadcasting police scanners online with the intent to supplement RadioReference.com's community and content with online scanners that you could listen to. At the time, the startup I acquired had about 400 radios online, and when the acquisition closed and we folded the content into RadioReference.com it quickly took off and doubled the amount of feeds within a few months. At that point, I decided to spin the online feeds off to a separate Web site and business by registering "Broadcastify" (the verb-ify domains were just becoming popular) and the rest was history. Broadcastify has over 7000+ online scanner feeds and has been wildly successful with partnerships with mobile app developers etc.
- LeoPanthera 6y ago
  I'm a regular user of RR, and an occasional user of B-ify, and I just wanted to say thank you. Both services are incredibly useful.
mst 6y ago
> As the name implies, Reddit is designed to be read. People who only read along, but never participate are so integral to the platform that users coined a new term for them: “lurkers.” I ... "coined a new term" ... having grown up on usenet, mailing lists and IRC channels, the idea that reddit coined the term "lurkers" doesn't make me mad at the author, it just makes me feel really old.
- Miner49er 6y ago
  Wikipedia says the word has been used online with that definition since the 1980's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lurker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lurker
- mjmayank 6y ago
  Haha whoops... I will add a correction for this.
  - mst 6y ago
    Good correction, and no worries, once I recovered from feeling old it was honestly hilarious :D
- intended 6y ago
  Yeah, reading that bit was a bit odd.
nostromo 6y ago
"Social network envy" will eventually be Reddit's undoing. The fact that they have been trying to position themselves as a social network, unsuccessfully, for several years and they still haven't given up on it is alarming. If Google can't even pull it off with all of their resources and properties (including giants like YouTube and Gmail), I don't see how Reddit will either. The "me too" features, like the TikTok clone and the chat rooms, are either derided or ignored entirely by the community. I suppose it's difficult for them to attract dollars and media attention as "just" a message board -- despite seemingly being the world's largest. But that's what their actual users want it to be: the world's best message board. But their product changes keep making it a worse message board in the hope of being more like Facebook.
- paxys 6y ago
  I noticed this recently when they redesigned the comments view to make the user's profile picture a prominent part of the design. Except after the last few weeks of scrolling through comments, I have come across less than 10 users sitewide who have actually set a picture. It's now just a sea of default icons and a ton of wasted space. I can't imagine people use the chat function either. It seems like they are prioritizing features for the sake of ad revenue or product team egos over making much needed infra updates. General latency and error rates while browsing reddit.com are almost unbearable now. And search always was and still is a mess. And don't get me started on the mobile apps..
  - frenchy 6y ago
    > I can't imagine people use the chat function either. Spammers do.
- orange_tee 6y ago
  I agree. Reddit should have kept their "niche" of being the only large only community (besides 4chan) that is pseudo anonymous. The profiles bullshit really ruins it. But it's probably profitable in the short term. It's what advertisers want.
- markdown 6y ago
maxk42 6y ago
I've lead two successful community "unbundling" efforts from reddit. Here are a few tips if you're thinking of doing the same: (1) You HAVE to kill the original community. Otherwise momentum will keep your users using the old community. Our first launch saw a successful small website take off initially after it was launched only to have traffic slowly die down over the next several months. What finally got it off the ground and growing again was killing the original reddit community. There's no way around this. (2) There WILL be resistance and/or a drop-off in users. The good news is now there are a lot more opportunities to grow your community: Advertising, cross-site collaborations, guest blog posts, etc. (3) Do not strive for feature parity with reddit. Instead, strive to deliver MORE value. For instance changemyview could add categorization features. Maybe a search function that lets you search for posts that have been tagged as "view changed successfully!" or "view not changed". (4) You have to have a business model. Selling advertising or taking donations are NOT business models. There was a time when it made sense but many online communities - reddit particularly - are averse to viewing ads. If you're not creating something, selling something, or taking a commission then you haven't got a business model. One model which can be successful for larger communities: Premium membership subscriptions. You just have to make sure the premium features provide sufficient value that people want to subscribe without making non-subscribers feel like you're just limiting features to be greedy. (5) If you have multiple moderators - incorporate.
- mjmayank 6y ago
  This is really interesting to hear about. Were you the creator of both communities that you unbundled from Reddit? Or did you bring the moderators on board with your business plan? Also how did the users react when you killed the community?
  - maxk42 6y ago
    > Were you the creator of both communities that you unbundled from Reddit? In both cases I was not the original creator but was a longstanding moderator who inherited an active community. > did you bring the moderators on board with your business plan? They brought me on board with theirs. > how did the users react when you killed the community? Positively. Reddit as a corporation isn't actually well-liked by the majority of the community. Poor administration policies, poor design changes, slow UI - there's a lot to complain about. There were, of course, a few who loudly complained. But there will be a few who loudly complain about any change or no change at all.
mbgerring 6y ago
The funny thing about using Craigslist as the example for unbundling is that Craigslist, to this day, works better than anything that's attempted to replace or unbundle it. Craigslist remains a stable, profitable company that provides an enormous amount of value.
- bredren 6y ago
  I dispute this. Craigslist may appear to work better however: - Many unbundled categories have far better products available now. AirBnB and Trulia are great examples. - In areas Craigslist still has a hold, such as in rental housing, what we don't see is the cost of Craigslist's failure to provide advanced features. This includes people getting scammed, and bad landlords continuing on without record just like bad taxi drivers prior to Uber/Lyft.
  - presentation 6y ago
    I’d also add that despite the hatred Facebook deservedly gets, I find Facebook Marketplace way better than Craigslist for everything besides the actual product discovery (since it lacks clean-cut categories, but it’s still pretty alright). Since it’s actually moderated either by FB or by buy/sell groups, and people have their identities tied to the things they’re selling there’s way less scams and it makes recognizing people when you meet much more possible. Feels way safer than Craigslist ever did.
  - asdff 6y ago
    There are probably just as many scams on other public sites like facebook marketplace
paxys 6y ago
pcpartpicker.com spun off from /r/buildapc and seems to be doing really well. Of course it isn't a direct competitor, and they are still very heavily involved with the subreddit, so maybe there's some learning there. There's a fast growing ecosystem of Reddit-adjacent sites and services out there, which I think is a much more interesting business model than direct replacement.
- orange_tee 6y ago
  I remember that. When I first saw it, I thought, surely this won't last, surely, there will be a 101 competitors in no time. Cause it is such a seemingly easy concept to replicate.
ah27182 6y ago
>Reddit is great for lurkers I disagree with this, at least for non-account users. Slowly the mobile website has gotten more and more closed for newcomers. It is not always possible to just read a quick reddit thread that comes up on google because of the "Sign-in to read more" that bombards your screen.
- klank 6y ago
  Generally, I've not encountered the term "lurker" to mean account-less. Only that these people don't actively contribute to content or discussion.
INTPenis 6y ago
This author goes on a for a long time but I'm a member of cmv and I can tell you exactly what went wrong in one sentence. Nobody saw the content. I vaguely knew about the website when it happened but ignored it. I'm on cmv for one reason, it shows up in my reddit feed. It's not interesting enough to spend time on a separate website/app. What's good about reddit is the diversity of content you can get.
cblconfederate 6y ago
I don't think reddit is that unique. The main problem is that forums are no longer monetizable, so people don't have an interest in maintaining and moderating separate websites, so not unbundling. My use of reddit, and what i observe in general (by looking at other people's post history) is to visit a few specific subreddits often, not the homepage, not r/all. It seems there used to be a time when everyone was there for the giggles, r/pics, r/politics etc, when the content was very viral and entertaining. Nowadays all the major generic subs are filled with so much spam (i mean politics) that they're barely useful other than as a place to blow off some steam against the other team. Topical subreddits could fork off reddit if they wanted to put the effort in it. HN is nothing other than r/technology or r/programming without the politics, and it exists because YC has an interest in maintaining it. Nomadlist exists despite r/digitalnomad/ etc. Reddit is aging, and it shows. There are subs with the same moderators for more than 10 years, who often end up removing the interesting parts in order to maintain an imaginary "culture" in their heads. And there are a lot of shady moderators too.
- rozab 6y ago
  Reddit is unique in that it allows you to find and connect to a community with very little friction. The other day I was thinking about buying a mini PC. I googled 'mini PC reddit' and immediately find r/MiniPCs and r/sffpc. Now I can sort by top all time and see the lay of the land in the community, see which devices are popular, etc. I can ask questions and get a quick response. If these communities were on traditional forums, I wouldn't be able to do any of this. I would never bother to make an account specifically for that forum. Some communities benefit from keeping out tourists like me, but not commercially.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  If you were old enough (:) everything you've written above could be rewritten by just substituting "[rR]eddit" with "[uU]senet". plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
  - cblconfederate 6y ago
    usenet died out because it did not have moderators. Reddit will do the same because of moderators
hehehaha 6y ago
If anyone is looking for a reddit unbundling idea, it has to be a secondary market place that’s integrated with Reddit. There are a couple of half baked ones but the opportunity is there. Solving the scam issue alone is going to be a big feature. I would also like to see “blind” mailing labels.
cylde_frog 6y ago
>Reddit is great for lurkers Their mobile site is now completely unusable unless I sign in.
buro9 6y ago
> Because Reddit’s social graph is based on interest rather than friends, it can’t be recreated anywhere else in exactly the same way This is the recipe for taking on Reddit... interest first.
madrox 6y ago
I have a lot of admiration for Reddit. They're the only place I can still go to in 2021 that doesn't feel like getting a window into the dumpster fire that is other social networks like Twitter. The author is also quite right that they shut down viral pathways, which prevents the worst offenders. If I don't want to see politics on Reddit, I'll never see politics on Reddit. That said, I kinda scoff at the author's casual diss of Craigslist and assessment of their advantages. Craigslist has 50 total employees, nearly a billion in revenue, and a strong mission. It's not like people haven't tried to take them on before. Reddit will not be the next Craigslist any more than r/CMV will be the next Reddit. People go to Reddit because it's easy to see good content and not see bad content. I 100% attribute that to the ability to mod, downvote, and have community-based subscriptions. The author has a pretty good sense of what makes Reddit good, but has a horrible sense of what makes Craigslist bad.
ndiddy 6y ago
The only successful examples I've seen of Reddit "unbundling" come from communities that were banned from Reddit. This is because of a quirk of how Reddit handles subreddit bans, where if a subreddit is banned and a new one is created with a completely different moderation team, different rules, etc. it will still get banned for being a "ban evasion" subreddit. This means that banning a subreddit effectively bans any hypothetical future subreddit dedicated to the same topic. Because of this, if the community cares enough to start a new website for the topic it's highly likely that most of the users will move over there.
betwixthewires 6y ago
One thing I think ignored in the article is the rise of FOSS federated servers. There are a few prominent examples to those who follow these sorts of developments, but there are two in particular that I find interesting: Lemmy and Littr.me. Lemmy is basically a clone of reddit's functionality that federates over ActivityPub. It is a very high quality piece of software. A single server can host multiple communities and users, just like reddit. You can follow and comment on posts and communities on external servers using your account on whichever server you call home. Littr.me is more like hackernews, a single community server, but one that will federate with other servers using the ActivityPub protocol, like Lemmy. The development is slower, but it is still interesting and the maintainer seems to be committed to building it out. Something like this allows what the author of this article talks about, single community sites for different niche communities, but also allows for intercommunity interaction. With either of these, a user can tailor their feed to subscribe to any number of communities on any number of servers, and lurk, or interact if they like. With tools like this, the compromise of eliminating friction by centralizing communities is no longer necessary. I personally believe federating protocols rather than central servers are the future of online social interaction, and I am very excited about it. One thing I think needs to exist is a message board/forum server that federates. The link aggregator UX paradigm is not optimal for all online communities. Forums are very useful and as of right now I know of no effort to implement federation in an existing FOSS forum server or build one with federation in mind.
- howlgarnish 6y ago
  Is this meaningfully different from the user's point of view than just subscribing to a set of different subreddits? What does the user or the host get out of using federated servers? From my POV this seems to be the same issue that has prevented federated social networks or chat services from taking off: there's no meaningful, concrete advantage to it.
  - mariusor 6y ago
    I'm the developer behind littr.me. In my mind, the best reasons for migrating to your own service as a reddit community is the fact that you get ownership of it. You can monetize, you can enforce rules that are different to reddit's, you can focus your interface more specifically towards custom UI, etc. The main downside of moving off reddit would be that you lose access to the larger pool of reddit users and communities. That however is mitigated by the fact that federated communities can still interact with each other despite being independent services. Personally this would be my main goal for the project: managing to get one of the cool subreddits to leave reddit in favour of starting their own independent community using my code. However some of the things that are made easier by the centralized model of reddit are quite more difficult in the federated case (moderation as an example), and I don't feel confident (yet) to push for this.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
enkienki 6y ago
The only thing I see reddit as being useful for is its oddly specific questions. The mentality on that site is "support everything as long as it follows our values as a whole" so you'll see a bunch of a random questions being answered relatively well, personally helping me with those random things I know nothing about. As a normal place to be though? It's brainwashing. Most people don't spend enough time on these sites to realize but I've worked a job where I had a solid 3 hours out of every day to browse. It's quite literally the same opinions being held at the top of the comment section. If your opinion isn't in line with the standard, it's downvoted, regardless of your fact behind it. For example, I've had an argument with someone about anxiety and they described their issue as mentally debilitating. They really couldn't handle chatting with someone online, let alone talking with people. I have no issue with that but I did point out that we've been arguing back and forth for maybe 5-6 posts now and they have been growing with aggressiveness. Over this argument, I received close to 100 downvotes, then got banned from the community. The initial post? It was about a drug to treat anxiety and how groundbreaking it was going to be. I mentioned in my post that, coming from a family of pharmacists and seeing effects firsthand, I know of a lot of people who get significantly worse because of drugs like this. Specifically mentioning that you need to get tested in multiple ways before something like this should be considered (talking about the effects of a similar drug for depression). Socially it's a terrible place to be. Factually, quite interesting if you ignore karma (but they make it really hard to ignore karma).
petercooper 6y ago
Notably Reddit have trademarked AMA (and appear to be in a fight with another US organization in the UK to trademark it there too) and I wonder if it's to stop this happening there.
tomcam 6y ago
> Really good SEO is one of the truest moats that exist today. Or not. Every time Google changes its algorithm small businesses get slaughtered. I don’t know if it’s a low or high number, but you see posts about it on SCO or marketing forums every time there’s a change.

151 points by mjmayank 6y ago

sjg007 6y ago

Imgur seems like an interesting case study.

Nextgrid 6y ago
Does Imgur make money and is it profitable? As far as I know their "business model" (which actually isn't one, or at least not a profitable one) is "growth and engagement". Their core product isn't something people want to pay for (image hosting itself can be obtained anywhere, including from cloud storage subscriptions people already pay for), and their social side is at odds with the advertising business model - you need ads to survive, but ads revenue is forever decreasing and people will leave if you put too much ads.
- cfors 6y ago
  They were profitable for a while, and then got a round of funding from Andreessen-Horowitz. [0] I don't know if they are still profitable, but I recently for some reason was on the founder's (Alan Schaaf) wikipedia page. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Schaaf#cite_note-3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Schaaf#cite_note-3
jedberg 6y ago
Sort of. The provided a functionality that reddit did not, so they weren't really unbundling anything. They smartly realized that reddit would probably eventually provide that same functionality (which they did) so they started down the path of building their own community before that happened.
- RankingMember 6y ago
  Lucky for them, the reddit implementation is as-of-now still pretty awful.
  - jedberg 6y ago
    Yeah but that's the sad part. People still use reddit's built in system because it's there, despite the inferiority.
    - RankingMember 6y ago
      True, it's the path of least resistance, particularly if you're a new user.
    - markdown 6y ago
      On the contrary, the sad part is that people still use imgur. Going off-site to be bombarded with off-topic pics (all imgur pics are surrounded by random other (sometimes NSFW) pics isn't a great experience.
    - dageshi 6y ago
      I dunno, what really do you need to do other than have your pictures uploaded and displayed on the post? I kinda figure that's all 90% of the userbase actually wants from the feature?

rednerrus 6y ago

Didn't creditkarma peel off of reddit? The key is to build a service that redditors use and become the default service for a huge sub. Like YNAB has done for r/personalfinance.

mjmayank 6y ago
Totally agree! This is something I want to talk about in my next post. CreditKarma and YNAB are great examples.

tlianza 6y ago

> and “for sale” became Facebook Marketplace. Ummmm... 1. Does the data suggest that is true? 2. If it were true, would it support the "unbundling" narrative given that it would be a case of something being part of another bundle?

ballenf 6y ago
FB marketplace is literally the only thing I fb for anymore. It's pretty much the only decent place to buy and sell furniture, lawn equipment, etc. I valiantly tried to stick with craigslist, but it's just become a wasteland of scams and spam where I live.
- BitwiseFool 6y ago
  The fact that Craigslist hasn't done anything to cut down on spam, scams, and duplicate posts is maddening to me. Whenever I do a search I see dozens of phone repair advertisements and completely unrelated posts for cars and trucks. And those posts have the same title and thumbnail! I simply do not understand why Craigslist refuses to improve in this regard. Look, I get why Craig doesn't want to change the design of his site, but how in the hell do they justify such crap not being removed?
paxys 6y ago
Craigslist's unchecked spam, moderation and safety problems have slowly made it unusable. And yes the data does show exactly this. FB Marketplace had 800 million users in 2018 (https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-marketplace-is-used-in-70-countries-by-800-million-people-monthly/ https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-marketplace-is-used-in-70...) while Craigslist's revenue has been falling year over year (https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/craigslist-revenue-fell-analysts-ok https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/craigslist-revenue-fe...).
- asdff 6y ago
  I don't see how fb marketplace avoids these issues

jedberg 6y ago

> Reddit content ranks really well on Google The most public contribution I made to reddit's codebase when I was there was the SEO features. I did all the usual stuff like cleaning up title and meta tags, and adding a sitemap. But the change that had the largest effect, by far, was adding the title of the story into the URL. As soon as we launched that, our Google traffic shot up. The way you know you have truly mastered SEO is when Google takes away your control of the crawl rate on your SEO control panel. Soon after that we had lunch a special set of servers that just serve requests for Google, because they were killing us by crawling years of old posts.

toomuchtodo 6y ago
Reddit archives (making them read only) threads after a year I believe. Why would Google re-visit archived threads? Did you see Google's crawler throttle crawl rate by response times?
- jedberg 6y ago
  Six months, and not back then. Back then you could comment on old threads. I wasn't there when they implement the thread lock, but I suspect it was related. The reddit codebase is designed for recency. Interacting with old threads really trashed the databases, at least back then.
- stretchcat 6y ago
  I'm not certain, but doesn't a 'read only' reddit page still get changed when a user who was in it deletes their account and posts? Often when a search engine sends me to reddit, the comments that probably contained the relevant information are long gone.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    You might be right, in which case Google should offer a link to the corresponding Internet Archive wayback page (where the deleted content should still exist). Failing that, there are browser extensions for both Chrome and Firefox that enable this functionality.

paganel 6y ago

Another community that successfully peeled off reddit is /r/soccerstreams. It's now of course banned on the website but a quick web search gets one to the new dedicated website which even has "reddit" as a sub-domain. The same goes for /r/nbastreams.

jedberg 6y ago
Does it really count as unbundling if reddit stops providing the same functionality?
- Miner49er 6y ago
  Some banned political subs have spun up their own sites as well. I wouldn't call it unbundling. I guess maybe forced unbundling?

PragmaticPulp 6y ago

Many popular subreddits are quietly operated by moderators with industry connections. Some of this occurs naturally. People who were deep enough into a niche to become moderators of a subreddit in the late 2000s and early 2010s are also likely to end up working in that industry or starting business in that industry. However, many companies have realized that being in the good graces of subreddit moderators can be very good for their business. It's becoming common for brands to reach out to subreddit moderators with offers of free products or even paid job offers to bring them onto the company's side. I know of several companies that routinely send free gear to relevant subreddit moderators. The arrangement is "no strings attached" but it usually results in a favorable moderation outcomes for the company. Moderators have a lot of power to influence conversations on Reddit in non-obvious ways. In some ways, having a subreddit that champions your products while maintaining an appearance of being impartial is better than explicitly spinning out of Reddit. People know not to trust positive Amazon reviews, but Reddit conversations are generally assumed to be authentic.

brodouevencode 6y ago
Gave up on reddit a long time ago because of the moderation problems.
- jefurii 6y ago
  How is this different from other media? It's already common practice with magazines that contain product reviews. There's nothing stopping companies from doing this with bulletin boards and blogs.
  - brodouevencode 6y ago
    Yes, this is true. The problem lies in that they've historically waved the free speech flag in one hand while throwing the banhammer with the other.
  - abcdjdjd 6y ago
    Ahhh, yes, and you literally just described Section 230 exemptions vs. being a publisher. Yes, publishers are able to act as publishers and also get held responsible for what they publish. Social media sites are exempt from this under Section 230 rules, but that assumes they are not unfairly moderating their sites and turning into publishers. Yes, you literally just described what is a publisher and why their abuse of Section 230 law is not ok. You all who are supporting this overmoderation of Reddit seem to want Reddit to be a publisher. Well, with becoming a publisher and unfairly moderating the site, you lose Section 230 protections. You can't have your cake and eat it too, but that is what Reddit and many of the supporters of overmoderation want to do.

blantonl 6y ago

I went through an unbundling process in my business that turned out to be extremely successful and a wise move. I own and operate RadioReference.com, which is a reference database source and community mainly for those who own and listen to police scanners (and other radios). I acquired a small startup that was broadcasting police scanners online with the intent to supplement RadioReference.com's community and content with online scanners that you could listen to. At the time, the startup I acquired had about 400 radios online, and when the acquisition closed and we folded the content into RadioReference.com it quickly took off and doubled the amount of feeds within a few months. At that point, I decided to spin the online feeds off to a separate Web site and business by registering "Broadcastify" (the verb-ify domains were just becoming popular) and the rest was history. Broadcastify has over 7000+ online scanner feeds and has been wildly successful with partnerships with mobile app developers etc.

LeoPanthera 6y ago
I'm a regular user of RR, and an occasional user of B-ify, and I just wanted to say thank you. Both services are incredibly useful.

mst 6y ago

> As the name implies, Reddit is designed to be read. People who only read along, but never participate are so integral to the platform that users coined a new term for them: “lurkers.” I ... "coined a new term" ... having grown up on usenet, mailing lists and IRC channels, the idea that reddit coined the term "lurkers" doesn't make me mad at the author, it just makes me feel really old.

Miner49er 6y ago
Wikipedia says the word has been used online with that definition since the 1980's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lurker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lurker
mjmayank 6y ago
Haha whoops... I will add a correction for this.
- mst 6y ago
  Good correction, and no worries, once I recovered from feeling old it was honestly hilarious :D
intended 6y ago
Yeah, reading that bit was a bit odd.

nostromo 6y ago

"Social network envy" will eventually be Reddit's undoing. The fact that they have been trying to position themselves as a social network, unsuccessfully, for several years and they still haven't given up on it is alarming. If Google can't even pull it off with all of their resources and properties (including giants like YouTube and Gmail), I don't see how Reddit will either. The "me too" features, like the TikTok clone and the chat rooms, are either derided or ignored entirely by the community. I suppose it's difficult for them to attract dollars and media attention as "just" a message board -- despite seemingly being the world's largest. But that's what their actual users want it to be: the world's best message board. But their product changes keep making it a worse message board in the hope of being more like Facebook.

paxys 6y ago
I noticed this recently when they redesigned the comments view to make the user's profile picture a prominent part of the design. Except after the last few weeks of scrolling through comments, I have come across less than 10 users sitewide who have actually set a picture. It's now just a sea of default icons and a ton of wasted space. I can't imagine people use the chat function either. It seems like they are prioritizing features for the sake of ad revenue or product team egos over making much needed infra updates. General latency and error rates while browsing reddit.com are almost unbearable now. And search always was and still is a mess. And don't get me started on the mobile apps..
- frenchy 6y ago
  > I can't imagine people use the chat function either. Spammers do.
orange_tee 6y ago
I agree. Reddit should have kept their "niche" of being the only large only community (besides 4chan) that is pseudo anonymous. The profiles bullshit really ruins it. But it's probably profitable in the short term. It's what advertisers want.
markdown 6y ago

maxk42 6y ago

I've lead two successful community "unbundling" efforts from reddit. Here are a few tips if you're thinking of doing the same: (1) You HAVE to kill the original community. Otherwise momentum will keep your users using the old community. Our first launch saw a successful small website take off initially after it was launched only to have traffic slowly die down over the next several months. What finally got it off the ground and growing again was killing the original reddit community. There's no way around this. (2) There WILL be resistance and/or a drop-off in users. The good news is now there are a lot more opportunities to grow your community: Advertising, cross-site collaborations, guest blog posts, etc. (3) Do not strive for feature parity with reddit. Instead, strive to deliver MORE value. For instance changemyview could add categorization features. Maybe a search function that lets you search for posts that have been tagged as "view changed successfully!" or "view not changed". (4) You have to have a business model. Selling advertising or taking donations are NOT business models. There was a time when it made sense but many online communities - reddit particularly - are averse to viewing ads. If you're not creating something, selling something, or taking a commission then you haven't got a business model. One model which can be successful for larger communities: Premium membership subscriptions. You just have to make sure the premium features provide sufficient value that people want to subscribe without making non-subscribers feel like you're just limiting features to be greedy. (5) If you have multiple moderators - incorporate.

mjmayank 6y ago
This is really interesting to hear about. Were you the creator of both communities that you unbundled from Reddit? Or did you bring the moderators on board with your business plan? Also how did the users react when you killed the community?
- maxk42 6y ago
  > Were you the creator of both communities that you unbundled from Reddit? In both cases I was not the original creator but was a longstanding moderator who inherited an active community. > did you bring the moderators on board with your business plan? They brought me on board with theirs. > how did the users react when you killed the community? Positively. Reddit as a corporation isn't actually well-liked by the majority of the community. Poor administration policies, poor design changes, slow UI - there's a lot to complain about. There were, of course, a few who loudly complained. But there will be a few who loudly complain about any change or no change at all.

mbgerring 6y ago

The funny thing about using Craigslist as the example for unbundling is that Craigslist, to this day, works better than anything that's attempted to replace or unbundle it. Craigslist remains a stable, profitable company that provides an enormous amount of value.

bredren 6y ago
I dispute this. Craigslist may appear to work better however: - Many unbundled categories have far better products available now. AirBnB and Trulia are great examples. - In areas Craigslist still has a hold, such as in rental housing, what we don't see is the cost of Craigslist's failure to provide advanced features. This includes people getting scammed, and bad landlords continuing on without record just like bad taxi drivers prior to Uber/Lyft.
- presentation 6y ago
  I’d also add that despite the hatred Facebook deservedly gets, I find Facebook Marketplace way better than Craigslist for everything besides the actual product discovery (since it lacks clean-cut categories, but it’s still pretty alright). Since it’s actually moderated either by FB or by buy/sell groups, and people have their identities tied to the things they’re selling there’s way less scams and it makes recognizing people when you meet much more possible. Feels way safer than Craigslist ever did.
- asdff 6y ago
  There are probably just as many scams on other public sites like facebook marketplace

paxys 6y ago

pcpartpicker.com spun off from /r/buildapc and seems to be doing really well. Of course it isn't a direct competitor, and they are still very heavily involved with the subreddit, so maybe there's some learning there. There's a fast growing ecosystem of Reddit-adjacent sites and services out there, which I think is a much more interesting business model than direct replacement.

orange_tee 6y ago
I remember that. When I first saw it, I thought, surely this won't last, surely, there will be a 101 competitors in no time. Cause it is such a seemingly easy concept to replicate.

ah27182 6y ago

>Reddit is great for lurkers I disagree with this, at least for non-account users. Slowly the mobile website has gotten more and more closed for newcomers. It is not always possible to just read a quick reddit thread that comes up on google because of the "Sign-in to read more" that bombards your screen.

klank 6y ago
Generally, I've not encountered the term "lurker" to mean account-less. Only that these people don't actively contribute to content or discussion.

INTPenis 6y ago

This author goes on a for a long time but I'm a member of cmv and I can tell you exactly what went wrong in one sentence. Nobody saw the content. I vaguely knew about the website when it happened but ignored it. I'm on cmv for one reason, it shows up in my reddit feed. It's not interesting enough to spend time on a separate website/app. What's good about reddit is the diversity of content you can get.

cblconfederate 6y ago

I don't think reddit is that unique. The main problem is that forums are no longer monetizable, so people don't have an interest in maintaining and moderating separate websites, so not unbundling. My use of reddit, and what i observe in general (by looking at other people's post history) is to visit a few specific subreddits often, not the homepage, not r/all. It seems there used to be a time when everyone was there for the giggles, r/pics, r/politics etc, when the content was very viral and entertaining. Nowadays all the major generic subs are filled with so much spam (i mean politics) that they're barely useful other than as a place to blow off some steam against the other team. Topical subreddits could fork off reddit if they wanted to put the effort in it. HN is nothing other than r/technology or r/programming without the politics, and it exists because YC has an interest in maintaining it. Nomadlist exists despite r/digitalnomad/ etc. Reddit is aging, and it shows. There are subs with the same moderators for more than 10 years, who often end up removing the interesting parts in order to maintain an imaginary "culture" in their heads. And there are a lot of shady moderators too.

rozab 6y ago
Reddit is unique in that it allows you to find and connect to a community with very little friction. The other day I was thinking about buying a mini PC. I googled 'mini PC reddit' and immediately find r/MiniPCs and r/sffpc. Now I can sort by top all time and see the lay of the land in the community, see which devices are popular, etc. I can ask questions and get a quick response. If these communities were on traditional forums, I wouldn't be able to do any of this. I would never bother to make an account specifically for that forum. Some communities benefit from keeping out tourists like me, but not commercially.
PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
If you were old enough (:) everything you've written above could be rewritten by just substituting "[rR]eddit" with "[uU]senet". plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  usenet died out because it did not have moderators. Reddit will do the same because of moderators

hehehaha 6y ago

If anyone is looking for a reddit unbundling idea, it has to be a secondary market place that’s integrated with Reddit. There are a couple of half baked ones but the opportunity is there. Solving the scam issue alone is going to be a big feature. I would also like to see “blind” mailing labels.

cylde_frog 6y ago

>Reddit is great for lurkers Their mobile site is now completely unusable unless I sign in.

buro9 6y ago

> Because Reddit’s social graph is based on interest rather than friends, it can’t be recreated anywhere else in exactly the same way This is the recipe for taking on Reddit... interest first.

madrox 6y ago

I have a lot of admiration for Reddit. They're the only place I can still go to in 2021 that doesn't feel like getting a window into the dumpster fire that is other social networks like Twitter. The author is also quite right that they shut down viral pathways, which prevents the worst offenders. If I don't want to see politics on Reddit, I'll never see politics on Reddit. That said, I kinda scoff at the author's casual diss of Craigslist and assessment of their advantages. Craigslist has 50 total employees, nearly a billion in revenue, and a strong mission. It's not like people haven't tried to take them on before. Reddit will not be the next Craigslist any more than r/CMV will be the next Reddit. People go to Reddit because it's easy to see good content and not see bad content. I 100% attribute that to the ability to mod, downvote, and have community-based subscriptions. The author has a pretty good sense of what makes Reddit good, but has a horrible sense of what makes Craigslist bad.

ndiddy 6y ago

The only successful examples I've seen of Reddit "unbundling" come from communities that were banned from Reddit. This is because of a quirk of how Reddit handles subreddit bans, where if a subreddit is banned and a new one is created with a completely different moderation team, different rules, etc. it will still get banned for being a "ban evasion" subreddit. This means that banning a subreddit effectively bans any hypothetical future subreddit dedicated to the same topic. Because of this, if the community cares enough to start a new website for the topic it's highly likely that most of the users will move over there.

betwixthewires 6y ago

One thing I think ignored in the article is the rise of FOSS federated servers. There are a few prominent examples to those who follow these sorts of developments, but there are two in particular that I find interesting: Lemmy and Littr.me. Lemmy is basically a clone of reddit's functionality that federates over ActivityPub. It is a very high quality piece of software. A single server can host multiple communities and users, just like reddit. You can follow and comment on posts and communities on external servers using your account on whichever server you call home. Littr.me is more like hackernews, a single community server, but one that will federate with other servers using the ActivityPub protocol, like Lemmy. The development is slower, but it is still interesting and the maintainer seems to be committed to building it out. Something like this allows what the author of this article talks about, single community sites for different niche communities, but also allows for intercommunity interaction. With either of these, a user can tailor their feed to subscribe to any number of communities on any number of servers, and lurk, or interact if they like. With tools like this, the compromise of eliminating friction by centralizing communities is no longer necessary. I personally believe federating protocols rather than central servers are the future of online social interaction, and I am very excited about it. One thing I think needs to exist is a message board/forum server that federates. The link aggregator UX paradigm is not optimal for all online communities. Forums are very useful and as of right now I know of no effort to implement federation in an existing FOSS forum server or build one with federation in mind.

howlgarnish 6y ago
Is this meaningfully different from the user's point of view than just subscribing to a set of different subreddits? What does the user or the host get out of using federated servers? From my POV this seems to be the same issue that has prevented federated social networks or chat services from taking off: there's no meaningful, concrete advantage to it.
- mariusor 6y ago
  I'm the developer behind littr.me. In my mind, the best reasons for migrating to your own service as a reddit community is the fact that you get ownership of it. You can monetize, you can enforce rules that are different to reddit's, you can focus your interface more specifically towards custom UI, etc. The main downside of moving off reddit would be that you lose access to the larger pool of reddit users and communities. That however is mitigated by the fact that federated communities can still interact with each other despite being independent services. Personally this would be my main goal for the project: managing to get one of the cool subreddits to leave reddit in favour of starting their own independent community using my code. However some of the things that are made easier by the centralized model of reddit are quite more difficult in the federated case (moderation as an example), and I don't feel confident (yet) to push for this.

deleted 6y ago

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enkienki 6y ago

The only thing I see reddit as being useful for is its oddly specific questions. The mentality on that site is "support everything as long as it follows our values as a whole" so you'll see a bunch of a random questions being answered relatively well, personally helping me with those random things I know nothing about. As a normal place to be though? It's brainwashing. Most people don't spend enough time on these sites to realize but I've worked a job where I had a solid 3 hours out of every day to browse. It's quite literally the same opinions being held at the top of the comment section. If your opinion isn't in line with the standard, it's downvoted, regardless of your fact behind it. For example, I've had an argument with someone about anxiety and they described their issue as mentally debilitating. They really couldn't handle chatting with someone online, let alone talking with people. I have no issue with that but I did point out that we've been arguing back and forth for maybe 5-6 posts now and they have been growing with aggressiveness. Over this argument, I received close to 100 downvotes, then got banned from the community. The initial post? It was about a drug to treat anxiety and how groundbreaking it was going to be. I mentioned in my post that, coming from a family of pharmacists and seeing effects firsthand, I know of a lot of people who get significantly worse because of drugs like this. Specifically mentioning that you need to get tested in multiple ways before something like this should be considered (talking about the effects of a similar drug for depression). Socially it's a terrible place to be. Factually, quite interesting if you ignore karma (but they make it really hard to ignore karma).

petercooper 6y ago

Notably Reddit have trademarked AMA (and appear to be in a fight with another US organization in the UK to trademark it there too) and I wonder if it's to stop this happening there.

tomcam 6y ago

> Really good SEO is one of the truest moats that exist today. Or not. Every time Google changes its algorithm small businesses get slaughtered. I don’t know if it’s a low or high number, but you see posts about it on SCO or marketing forums every time there’s a change.