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Sunsetting Secret Santa and Reddit Gifts
- julietteeb 5y agoLooks like its being recreated by the first three employees at r/newsecretsanta (https://old.reddit.com/r/newsecretsanta/ https://old.reddit.com/r/newsecretsanta/)
- skizm 5y agoI'm going to make a sub /r/nonewsecretsanta and claim the original secret santa was a hoax. This is the hill I die on.
- erezyehuda 5y agoI can't help but notice that your link to New Secret Santa is under the "old" subdomain.
- ehsankia 5y agoAny real redditor still uses old.reddit.com, the day they get rid of that, I'm guessing the same thing that happened to digg will happen.
- KitDuncan 5y agoGive libreddit a shot. I recently switched from old.reddit.com and much prefer it.
- ehsankia 5y agoIt looks like a worse version of new reddit? Why would I want that?
- kgwxd 5y agoThe only reason I have a reddit account is so I can disable all the junk in preferances and not have to worry about the subdomain. My reddit basically looks like HN. Old is good, but not as good as what you can get with customization for now.
- sneak 5y agoThe new Reddit web UI is literally unusable: many links simply pop a modal where the options are "go back" or "install the app".
- ThePowerOfFuet 5y ago98% of my reddit consumption is via Apollo on iOS, which is still an excellent experience.
- sneak 5y agoSadly, Apollo is spyware. :(
- ThePowerOfFuet 5y ago>Sadly, Apollo is spyware. :( Their App Store privacy report, as well as the app developer's explicit privacy policy, directly contradicts you. Could you kindly back that up with some evidence, or is this more FUD from you?
- sneak 5y agoIt uploads your usage data and identifiers (presumably username) without consent, and does so via IP, leaking your city-level location to the developers. My information is coming directly from its app store privacy label.
- ThePowerOfFuet 5y agoYour reddit username is not your identity, and it's data which reddit already has. In fact, you can use it to browse reddit without being signed in, and reddit will glean much less data from you by the use of Apollo in either case. The developer specifically states that they perform no user-linked tracking with their app. Their monetization model also supports this conclusion.
- smnscu 5y agoTop comment nails it: > So you took over someone elses project years ago, made some money off of it and then killed it. Yikes.
- tester34 5y agohow they made money off it?
- prepend 5y agoThey had corporate sponsors. They had ads.
- mustacheemperor 5y agoIn addition to the other comment, they also sold an "elves" subscription program.
- MattIPv4 5y agoHopefully, maybe, the community might come together and crowdsource a new Reddit Secret Santa that's run by the Reddit community rather than the Reddit admins.
- ProAm 5y agoThat's literally how it started until they stole it. Same with reddit coins/reddit silver.
- ALittleLight 5y agoEverything of value related to reddit comes from the users. The users create the content, they organize by voting on it and creating subreddits, the users even moderate the content. Even good ideas come from the users. Reddit, meanwhile, just adds on more and more bizarre features. They have avatars now? How about a chat system that nobody uses? Want us to email you a hundred times a day? etc.
- maxwelljoslyn 5y ago> Everything of value related to reddit comes from the users. Truth. It's amazing how much goodwill Reddit had as just a "dumb host" for forumlike communities, before things like the comically bad single-page-app redesign and the stupid decision in the OP article.
- kevinmchugh 5y agoI'm pretty sure they expect subreddit mods to also moderate the chatrooms, despite the fact that we never asked for them and don't have any tooling for that.
- MattIPv4 5y agoYeah -- this might act as a reminder to keep it for the community, run by the community this time, instead of handing it over to Reddit who are becoming increasingly profit-driven at the expense of anything else, including their users.
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- LeoPanthera 5y agoIt lost any charm it had as soon as it started having sponsors, maybe 5 years ago? I don't remember exactly. Before that it was the community doing something fun together. After that it was just yet another advertising opportunity and I noped right out.
- brink 5y agoYears ago I participated in this. Someone sent me a beautiful programming book, but I failed to purchase and send a gift for my recipient because I was a stupid, selfish kid. I still feel horrible about it to this day.
- justinjlynn 5y agoThat alone is why people sign up for Secret Santa rematching. Your gift giver probably didn't go without because someone else was kind and stepped in. Even so, given that you feel horrible about skipping out on that obligation but can't apologise to the person you wronged, you should take that energy forward in your life and use it as a reason to do good things for others also anonymously - maybe someday, as a result, you'll be able to forgive your past self for letting that person down. I don't like to give advice, and especially not to strangers online, because it's impossible to know people and their situation well enough to give good advice. Still, in this circumstance, I think it fits - I could be completely wrong though, and I don't mean to be impertinent so please feel free to disregard if inapplicable.
- totetsu 5y agoI'm sure enough people will read this that it will be good advice for someone of them.
- koheripbal 5y agoI think they're highlighting the fact that the average age of Redditors has dropped very significantly, and the upcoming Reddit gift exchange would have been a disaster of no-gifts.
- emodendroket 5y agoA succinct explanation of why I've never participated in any online secret Santa type of thing.
- xtracto 5y agoMy wife participated for several years. Sometimes she got good gifts, other times they were not that good. Nevertheless most of the joy we had was in giving our gifts. We tried to go out of our way and it was exciting reading the reaction of people who received them. The best gift my wife got (she is an avid dead tree book reader) was a book she had on her list. But the secret santa bought the book and illustrated it magnificently (using the book's empty pages) before sending it to her. That's the type of gifts you just cant price.
- boomboomsubban 5y agoDidn't the idea start on Something Awful or another site like it? Do they still run their secret Santa?
- emodendroket 5y agoI don't think any one forum can claim to own the concept but it was certainly common on more traditional forums too.
- legostormtroopr 5y agoI don't think I'd want a goon from Something Awful sending me anything - or knowing my physical address.
- boomboomsubban 5y agoBetween the entry fee and the liberal use of banning, I'd rather they know my address than most internet sites. I don't remember thinking the users had a particularly bad reputation either.
- Rebelgecko 5y agoMaybe I'm not the typical user, but to me reddit seems to be losing sight of why people use the site. They're killing aspects of the community that people actually care about. In the meantime, most of the site's new features seem to be centered around avatars and selling cosmetic microtransactions. I can't blame them too much for trying to monetize, but I wish their strategies were more inclusive of the way I use reddit
- xanaxagoras 5y agoFor me reddit lost sight of why I used the site about 3 years ago, or maybe that's just when it got bad enough that I no longer felt unsubscribing from all defaults was a suitable solution. There's really nowhere left to hide from the rigorous enforcement of orthodox leftist thought. It's mostly a mutual admiration society where the boundaries of allowed disagreement and interesting discussion may touch here and there but are mostly disjoint sets. Even tech-adjacent subreddits have frequent fits of posturing for the in-crowd. Some of that could be said about HN, but somehow it's different here. Probably because low effort posting is pretty well policed. I'm happy to leave reddit to the adult children stuck in time to talk about superheroes and congratulate each other on being a good person™. Every now and then I miss what it was. Edit: said liberal, meant leftist
- cyanydeez 5y agothey were giving up when in 2015 they allowed bots to push the_donald to the front page consistenly leading to a steady diet of propaganda subs and hate fueled subs. they were and still sre just as myopic is their tainting public discourse in pursuit of social media
- esyir 5y agoThis sounds like "other side politics bad", more than anything else. Reddit's top subs are basically a firehose of propaganda whenever politics are concerned. They've been polluting public discourse for some time, it's just that you only noticed when you didn't agree with said propaganda. For an example, take a look at the murderedbyAOC subreddit. It's literally posts from one guy and used to regularly top /all.
- chiph 5y agoMaybe I don't understand - other than hosting the subreddit, what was Reddit Inc.'s involvement?
- imroot 5y agoThey hired the staff/volunteers from the original reddit gift exchange app to work on integrating it into reddit core, then (assuming here), laid them off and killed the project.
- CPLX 5y agoI realize that it’s not the most important issue given the current state of the world but I really wish the tech community would stop using the word “sunset” to replace the universally understood word “end”
- gremlinsinc 5y agoTerminate, close, or shut down seems more apt than "end".
- skytreader 5y agoOhhh Silicon Valley and your corporate euphemisms. What does it achieve now? Does it soften the blow for those who loved the service? Is this some kind of cover-your-ass thing legal advises them to practice? I think I first saw the usage of this term either from Yahoo (wrt either GeoCities or Flickr) or Google (wrt Reader). Definitely around that era. IIRC it was on some company roadmap presentation that basically say "These services are scheduled to be sunset by <date>". Heck I even think those slides were leaked and not officially presented. I like to think the first audience to encounter this usage of the word was similarly perplexed. "When you say 'sunset' you mean 'termination', right? What about the teams assigned to them?" "'Termination'? Oh goodness, no. When we say 'sunset' we mean we leave them alone to naturally drive into a beautiful sunset." No less perplexed, they put emphasis on their second question. "What about the teams then?" With the cadence of a well-rehearsed actor, the facilitator responds, "Hey, sunsets. Very peaceful, very relaxing---who doesn't want those? You won't get that from staring at your computer screen all day!"
- Angostura 5y agoI think sunset is potentially useful in that it denotes a gradual change, rather than an immediate or abrupt cut-off. Only makes sense in that context though.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoWe use the term archive at our company. Mostly because there have been many cases where we take things out of the archive and continued support then commercialization.
- Axien 5y agoWe should do a secret Hacker News Santa.
- saalweachter 5y agoSsshhhhh, you're breaking the first two rules of secret HN Santa.
- Y_Y 5y agoWe exchange startup pitches for condescending dismissals.
- agilob 5y agoand stickers!
- astrange 5y agoI hope sama buys me a McLaren.
- drawfloat 5y agoI appreciate it’s a very different time, so not saying they’re comparable 1 to 1, but back in the waning days of Digg you saw Reddit suddenly growing and growing as this new and actually interesting competitor. Is there an equivalent today? I enjoyed using Reddit for years, then used it without (tbh) enjoying it much for probably a couple of years, and finally have almost fully disconnected. There’s no denying it has many more years worth of genuinely useful information on it, so I’ll still use it as a resource for community recommendations when searching. However, the actual _news_/curated feed mechanic I’ve long sworn off. Is there anything new coming up atm that isn’t just a Reddit knock off? Edit: side note, thinking about how long ago the Digg —> Reddit shift was has actually filled me with a bit of existential dread. When you stop and think, Reddit has had an incredible run as a popular platform so far.
- uDontKnowMe 5y agoThere is a subreddit about this: r/RedditAlternatives. Trouble is, most of them end up being dominated by the alt-right/hate mobs. Interesting that you want something that is specifically not just a reddit knock off. I actually think that a Reddit knock off focussed on discussion (say, like hacker news, but with subreddits) would do well.
- junon 5y agoThis comment doesn't deserve downvotes. I've spent a considerable amount of time trying to find a good alternative without much success. This comment isn't using these labels incorrectly - the people on most of the alternatives post blatantly anti-Semitic and/or legitimately racist content (not ambiguously or twitter-classified racism, but full-on, hard-R et al, good old fashioned racism), anti-vaxxer mobs, doxxing, calls to violence, etc. And yes, much of the time this sort of content is the majority.
- Y_Y 5y agoCan't someone take one for the team and set up a place to absorb all of this? It's no fun trying to hang out with someone who's grinding the same old axe every day, especially if it's some lame anti-whoever diatribe. I don't mind people having whatever views or even irrational and harmful biases, as long as they don't shoehorn them into everything they say. I'm happy to have an interesting discussion with someone who stays on topic and says interesting things, it doesn't matter to me (right then) if I wouldn't think much of other aspects of their life. You don't have to "bring your whole self" to hn or new-reddit or wherever else.
- myrandomcomment 5y agoDropped Reddit in general a few years ago. Much happier. I sometimes read the tech stuff that friends link but otherwise done.
- woutr_be 5y agoI just see Reddit as a directory/RSS feed, it's great to quickly go through news articles and see what's happening. However once I get into the comments or user generated content, I quickly get annoyed and close it again.
- canada_dry 5y agoI participated a couple times, years ago, as a novelty when I first joined. I suspect reddit simply discovered that most users drop off after just 1 or 2 exchanges for various reasons so there isn't much of a retention bonus.
- Sebine35 5y agoLegal all networks websites search informations private video photo azeri,search information private video azeri open original video.
- Aardwolf 5y ago"We made the difficult decision to shut down Reddit Gifts and put more focus on enhancing the user experience on Reddit" Oh, enhancing user experience sounds good: so they'll reinstate the old reddit UI back as the default, the one that doesn't block viewing threads in a mobile browser half the time?
- bob1029 5y agoStories like reddit are why I keep telling our executive staff that I am completely against a buyout. We have one angel investor and all the control we could ever hope for. Our customers love us. Why the fuck do people screw these things up? Are they that hooked on other people's money? I feel like reddit was managing to pay the bills before the series of sellouts and poor product choices...
- mattalex 5y agoYou can only do that if you can afford it: I'm pretty sure reddit never made money and was bleeding it quite profusely. At some point you have to start making money, but reddit (and most other internet/digital companies) valued growth at all cost. Now they are probably billions in the hole and they have to look for outside investment. You also make the strong assumption that executive staff/founders actually care about the survival of the company or the product: If they cash out at some point, they still win in the transaction. The cycle is always predictably the same: 1. Found the company 2. Get an initial round of investment 3. make it seem valuable (i.e. growth at all cost) 4. Second investment round (people now have FOMO "this could be the next Facebook!") 5. Continue growing (by now initial investors and founders have cashed out with profit) 6. Another investment round/sell/go public. 7. After going public, people notice that you don't make any money and have no way of ever making money (think WeWork) 8. Company's stock tanks/Company goes bankrupt. At no point in that process has the product or the company ever mattered: As long as you can make it seem like it works, you can make a profit. This is why venture capital is almost always a red flag: The investors make money not through quality product, but through growth. They can sell a great product that nobody knows about or they can sell well marketed crap that grows fast and makes them billions. By chance one or two of these companies will survive despite this and have a lasting impact, which breeds even more hype for the next round.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- felipemesquita 5y agoReplace www with old in Reddit links to bring back the old layout, as in https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/nw2hs6/sunsetting_secret_santa_and_reddit_gifts/ https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/nw2hs6/sunse...
- im3w1l 5y agoIt makes sense. Reddit is too big for something like that.
- yalogin 5y agoWorst part is they don’t give any reason. Looks like it’s purely a cost cutting measure. It probably doesn’t meet their ad percentages for a sub and it probably throws a wrench into their load balancing plans as the sub only gets active in December and after that it’s dormant. It’s a shame because this was what endeared me to Reddit among other things a long time ago. They should think of this as an investment just like Netflix throws money at content to get users. Someone over there is not making good decisions, first the new UI, definitely takes away user experience and now this.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- JohnBooty 5y agoI get it. On a much smaller scale, I was in a similar position once. Ran a very active online community. Each year we had a big (well, for us) in-person meetup. Everybody loved it, looked forward to it, etc. In retrospect I'm not sure it was the best use of our extremely limited people-hours. On the plus side, the gathering/convention was great the 0.1% of our active users that made the trek each year and I believe there was a harder-to-measure positive "halo effect" from it that benefitted the community in general. On the downside, the "staff" for this site was basically "me working part time, plus community volunteers." The site's infrastructure needed major work and I lacked time to properly market the site, etc. TL;DR -- Given our limited resources, a LOT of necessary work went undone, in favor of this yearly event that directly benefitted only a tiny fraction of our users. I suspect Reddit just came to the same conclusion.