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I feel like reddit used to be used to be an amazing social media platform where you could connect with strangers and learn so much, find tons of interesting dis

I feel like reddit used to be used to be an amazing social media platform where you could connect with strangers and learn so much, find tons of interesting discussions where people acted fairly civilized. It was basically the complete opposite of twitter. Many online/worldwide trends also seemed to be born there. If you went on reddit, you were ahead of the curve. You knew what was going to become trendy months before anybody else had even heard of it. However, the management has shown a ridiculous lack of transparency, and they've just kept making the user experience worse and worse. It makes me sad. Reddit is an amazing resource, and the people who run it are basically shitting on a goldmine. It's like they're hell bent on destroying their asset. Is it because they fundamentally misunderstand what they have? Because they don't care? Because they're greedy, or just plain incompetent?

parasubvert 6y ago
It won’t matter unless there’s a better alternative. Reddit wasn’t the first popular forum online, and won’t be the last.
- tjr225 6y ago
  I think of Reddit the platform that tried to make hosting a forum as easy as possible. Within that scope it’s awesome but it’s also so easy that it is just another cesspool.
  - parasubvert 6y ago
    Decentralized servers with mods are probably the best way to manage s/n ratio. But even then... scale eventually ruins everything.
- chii 6y ago
  just like how digg.com fell (to reddit), so will reddit fall to the next thing. But the central problem remains - how do people who currently use reddit migrate but not nose their communities built up over the years?
  - parasubvert 6y ago
    If their community stays, they will stay. It’s the reason Facebook won’t die either. There are plenty of still good communities on Reddit, so I don’t expect a Digg-like exodus, which was due to a terrible redesign - you couldn’t even the use the site, so there was almost no choice but to leave. But also there are lots of ways for communities to setup their own decentralized server like Discourse (and some have). You only need a couple of motivated community members. Ultimately Reddit may just devolve into USEnet... flamewars and pornography. But that could take years, and the management will actively try to keep it humming.
- smaryjerry 6y ago
  Ruqqus is one of the better Reddit clones in functionality and features and the thing is with community based pages people actually enjoy have less comments because your comment may be one of five, not just one in ten thousand.
afavour 6y ago
Eh, to me Reddit is just another example of Eternal September syndrome. Reddit took a nosedive in quality shortly after the Digg implosion. > Is it because they fundamentally misunderstand what they have? Because they don't care? Because they're greedy, or just plain incompetent? Another possibility: because it doesn't make (enough) money. I say (enough) because simply turning a profit isn't good enough when you have investors expecting large returns.
- smaryjerry 6y ago
  It still offers the basic features that people want. A community website that can be managed extremely easily in a format people like. Like many people now, I almost never visit all or popular to see the latest viral video and political hot take. It usually reposts from 10 years ago anyways. I go to the pages that interest me. It’s odd that places like square space, wix, and Wordpress have completely focused on shopping or blogs and basically ignored forums and community pages. I guess they aren’t selling ads, which is probably a huge missed opportunity for them.
skohan 6y ago
I wonder if it's an example of "MBA capture" of the organization. I agree with you, the thing that made Reddit interesting to me is that it stands apart from most social media platforms. Most social media platforms thrive on "look at me" cultures, and drive engagement by making the user themself feel like the object of attention. Due to pseudo-anonymity, Reddit has always lived and died by the quality of the content itself. Based on that understanding of the platform, adding features like following users, or having profile pictures, don't make a lot of sense in terms of Reddit's USPs. But I can imagine how a shift like this might happen. Reddit has a board of directors, and they might look at KPI's like revenue per user, and notice that Reddit is underperforming by a wide margin compared to other players in the space like Facebook, Instagram and twitter. Then managers get tasked with improving this KPI, and through a lack of creativity, they end up copying features from more well monetized social networks. I think this type of thinking - that all businesses can essentially be treated as black boxes and optimized in the same way - is essentially what led to Dig's emulation of Facebook and eventual downfall.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  > Reddit has a board of directors, and they might look at KPI's like revenue per user, and notice that Reddit is underperforming by a wide margin compared to other players in the space like Facebook, Instagram and twitter. Ironically it's often a business opportunity to do the opposite of this, i.e. incumbents are implementing user-hostile features that increase some KPI but that users actually hate, so if you do the opposite then you get the users. Attracting and retaining users is the most important thing, because without that you're out of business. It's far more profitable to make a dollar each from a billion people than a thousand dollars each from a hundred.
  - skohan 6y ago
    > It's far more profitable to make a dollar each from a billion people than a thousand dollars each from a hundred. While this is true, it's also a hard to make this argument in product discussions, especially when similar products like Facebook and Instagram also have much larger user-bases. I can imagine the logic would probably be: - Reddit has X users who produce Y revenue per user - Facebook has 100*X users who produce 21*Y revenue per user -> therefore Reddit can potentially increase revenue by a factor of 21 with its current user base! Probably the argument should be that Reddit has X users, and not 1/100 X users because it operates in a different niche than Facebook, but this type of nuance can be very difficult to sell, especially if you have already used Facebook as a point of comparison when discussing future potential when convincing investors to give you millions of dollars. It's very hard to quantify how much something you are not doing is contributing to user acquisition and retention. It might come out of qualitative research, but users doing an interview or a survey might not even be aware how the lack of a certain feature is contributing to their enjoyment of the site. Probably you would also be measuring user-acquisition and retention as KPI's, and if a single feature caused a dip, the organization would certainly take notice, but if the introduction of new features gradually slows the growth rate from 8% to 6.5% over the course of months, this is much harder to attribute to a specific strategic decision.
redisman 6y ago
I think it’s mostly just due to scale. Adding more humans to a platform almost certainly starts to make the platform worse at some order of magnitude. Subreddits were a great idea and they are kind of fighting against it but eventually all subreddits succumb to their own popularity and become groupthink meme trash.

parasubvert 6y ago

It won’t matter unless there’s a better alternative. Reddit wasn’t the first popular forum online, and won’t be the last.

tjr225 6y ago
I think of Reddit the platform that tried to make hosting a forum as easy as possible. Within that scope it’s awesome but it’s also so easy that it is just another cesspool.
- parasubvert 6y ago
  Decentralized servers with mods are probably the best way to manage s/n ratio. But even then... scale eventually ruins everything.
chii 6y ago
just like how digg.com fell (to reddit), so will reddit fall to the next thing. But the central problem remains - how do people who currently use reddit migrate but not nose their communities built up over the years?
- parasubvert 6y ago
  If their community stays, they will stay. It’s the reason Facebook won’t die either. There are plenty of still good communities on Reddit, so I don’t expect a Digg-like exodus, which was due to a terrible redesign - you couldn’t even the use the site, so there was almost no choice but to leave. But also there are lots of ways for communities to setup their own decentralized server like Discourse (and some have). You only need a couple of motivated community members. Ultimately Reddit may just devolve into USEnet... flamewars and pornography. But that could take years, and the management will actively try to keep it humming.
smaryjerry 6y ago
Ruqqus is one of the better Reddit clones in functionality and features and the thing is with community based pages people actually enjoy have less comments because your comment may be one of five, not just one in ten thousand.

afavour 6y ago

Eh, to me Reddit is just another example of Eternal September syndrome. Reddit took a nosedive in quality shortly after the Digg implosion. > Is it because they fundamentally misunderstand what they have? Because they don't care? Because they're greedy, or just plain incompetent? Another possibility: because it doesn't make (enough) money. I say (enough) because simply turning a profit isn't good enough when you have investors expecting large returns.

smaryjerry 6y ago
It still offers the basic features that people want. A community website that can be managed extremely easily in a format people like. Like many people now, I almost never visit all or popular to see the latest viral video and political hot take. It usually reposts from 10 years ago anyways. I go to the pages that interest me. It’s odd that places like square space, wix, and Wordpress have completely focused on shopping or blogs and basically ignored forums and community pages. I guess they aren’t selling ads, which is probably a huge missed opportunity for them.

skohan 6y ago

I wonder if it's an example of "MBA capture" of the organization. I agree with you, the thing that made Reddit interesting to me is that it stands apart from most social media platforms. Most social media platforms thrive on "look at me" cultures, and drive engagement by making the user themself feel like the object of attention. Due to pseudo-anonymity, Reddit has always lived and died by the quality of the content itself. Based on that understanding of the platform, adding features like following users, or having profile pictures, don't make a lot of sense in terms of Reddit's USPs. But I can imagine how a shift like this might happen. Reddit has a board of directors, and they might look at KPI's like revenue per user, and notice that Reddit is underperforming by a wide margin compared to other players in the space like Facebook, Instagram and twitter. Then managers get tasked with improving this KPI, and through a lack of creativity, they end up copying features from more well monetized social networks. I think this type of thinking - that all businesses can essentially be treated as black boxes and optimized in the same way - is essentially what led to Dig's emulation of Facebook and eventual downfall.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> Reddit has a board of directors, and they might look at KPI's like revenue per user, and notice that Reddit is underperforming by a wide margin compared to other players in the space like Facebook, Instagram and twitter. Ironically it's often a business opportunity to do the opposite of this, i.e. incumbents are implementing user-hostile features that increase some KPI but that users actually hate, so if you do the opposite then you get the users. Attracting and retaining users is the most important thing, because without that you're out of business. It's far more profitable to make a dollar each from a billion people than a thousand dollars each from a hundred.
- skohan 6y ago
  > It's far more profitable to make a dollar each from a billion people than a thousand dollars each from a hundred. While this is true, it's also a hard to make this argument in product discussions, especially when similar products like Facebook and Instagram also have much larger user-bases. I can imagine the logic would probably be: - Reddit has X users who produce Y revenue per user - Facebook has 100*X users who produce 21*Y revenue per user -> therefore Reddit can potentially increase revenue by a factor of 21 with its current user base! Probably the argument should be that Reddit has X users, and not 1/100 X users because it operates in a different niche than Facebook, but this type of nuance can be very difficult to sell, especially if you have already used Facebook as a point of comparison when discussing future potential when convincing investors to give you millions of dollars. It's very hard to quantify how much something you are not doing is contributing to user acquisition and retention. It might come out of qualitative research, but users doing an interview or a survey might not even be aware how the lack of a certain feature is contributing to their enjoyment of the site. Probably you would also be measuring user-acquisition and retention as KPI's, and if a single feature caused a dip, the organization would certainly take notice, but if the introduction of new features gradually slows the growth rate from 8% to 6.5% over the course of months, this is much harder to attribute to a specific strategic decision.

redisman 6y ago

I think it’s mostly just due to scale. Adding more humans to a platform almost certainly starts to make the platform worse at some order of magnitude. Subreddits were a great idea and they are kind of fighting against it but eventually all subreddits succumb to their own popularity and become groupthink meme trash.