13 ms·

The Reddit of 2006 where tutorials on generating HTML in Lisp rocket to the top of the homepage is long gone. I can't imagine investing in an ad company that is

The Reddit of 2006 where tutorials on generating HTML in Lisp rocket to the top of the homepage is long gone. I can't imagine investing in an ad company that is fueled by clickbait and outrage the way Reddit is. Plus, some percentage of the userbase will always run aggressive ad blockers and be impossible to effectvely monetize. However, my brain works very differently from other people's, so I could be wrong.

emodendroket 5y ago
It's not really gone though. There are plenty of subreddits you can subscribe to if that's your interest. Or there are others to subscribe to for almost any interest you may have.
INTPenis 5y ago
Those tutorials can still rocket to the top of YOUR homepage. That's the power of reddit. That everyone can craft their own experience by subscribing to subreddits. So subscribe to the lisp subreddit and you'll see the content you want.
- Gareth321 5y ago
  This concept is not long for this world. I've been a daily user for for than a decade. * [Your default sort and filter list no longer only contains content you are subscribed to.](https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/m1pb9u/comment/gqgh821/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/m1pb9u/comment/gqgh82...) * They continually "improve" the default (and Hot, New, Top, and Rising) sort and filter algorithm(s). Every day it contains less relevant content for you, and more content peppered with ads and outrage. All of these options are slowly morphing into the same sort and filter set. * They are aggressively shutting down interesting communities which don't fit their advertiser profile, and using the above algorithms to ensure no one ever sees them. These include, for example, discussion of covid or vaccines from a critical perspective; assisted suicide; Donald Trump; guns; trans controversies; etc. * They are aggressively policing language. There is a growing list of words which, if used, will earn the user a ban. * They stopped work on old.reddit.com, which gave users more transparent control over sort and filter. I predict they will kill it soon. * They currently allow API access for third party aps. These aps don't serve ads and can employ their own sorting and filtering. I predict open APIs will be shut down, just like all the other major platforms have done. Long story short, Reddit is going to turn into Facebook. They've made that intention clear. It's only a matter of time before they demand Facebook-like verification for users.
  - unionpivo 5y ago
    Just disable all the subreddits but the few that you follow. And also disable the trending option in your preferences Its the (show trending subreddits on the home feed (a list of popular and notable subreddits to check out)) in your preferences. And then your home page is normal, sure that should be the default, but it's not hard to do
    - jl6 5y ago
      You can’t disable the banning of a community.
      - unionpivo 5y ago
        > You can’t disable the banning of a community. Anything popular will have this problem. Even the most notorious "chans" banned some things/topics. If you are dealing with controversial topics you best bet is to own your own platform, and don't grow to big. That's just how this world works, and its not even limited to online. Look at silk road. There are tones of dark web places like it, but once things get too popular, people will go to extraordinary lengths to shut it down. The only controversial site that somehow still tags along is the pirate bay. And it's more shadow of its former self.
  - PickledHotdog 5y ago
    > * There is a growing list of words which, if used, will earn the user a ban. This is news to me - any examples?
    - justsomehnguy 5y ago
      'whitelist' in r/powershell would get your post shadowbanned
niij 5y ago
Which indexes? If they include US Large Cap then you already invest in FB and Twitter.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
paxys 5y ago
You are forgetting this other ad company fueled by clickbait and outrage that has a trillion dollar market cap. It is a winning business model.
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  All the reason to give the people who don’t want that another place instead of being a crappier version of that site.
IgorPartola 5y ago
Ok I’ll bite. How would you fix Reddit? I have been using online forums for the past 20+ years and I know what you mean about communities like Reddit going from nerd heavy topics to primarily being the free advertising platform for onlyfans accounts and political hacks. But how would Reddit at this point stuff the genie back into the bottle? For that matter, if you don’t believe in Reddit’s long term success, there are both investment opportunities and opportunities to build something better.
- hammock 5y ago
  I didn't see where he said it could be fixed. You are right when you draw comparison to the genie out of the bottle. Online communities evolve and it's one way. You can't "fix" them, you can only move to new and different ones. Just like real life social scenes, or city neighborhoods, too, now that I think about it.
- perth 5y ago
  When Reddit became a sanitized social media platform rather than a free speech platform, it brought in a swathe of users who liked the sanitized social media platform, so you can't undo it.
  - rchaud 5y ago
    What evidence is there for this claim? I'm not aware of instances where people join a community BECAUSE they banned something. There's plenty of evidence for the reverse, such as when the removal of fat people hate and other subs led to an exodus to Voat.
- gibbonsrcool 5y ago
  Get rid of the current moderators and pay professionals. Automate the universal rules and use these folks to steer content back to when it was most meaningful. Also dedicate as many resources as possible to identify and prevent astroturfing and shills.
  - maneesh 5y ago
briga 5y ago
> some percentage of the userbase will always run aggressive ad blockers and be impossible to effectvely monetize Can’t block ads when they’re disguised as user content. Viral marketers have had a heyday hawking their products on Reddit
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  My app does it for me. :) But yes old.reddit.com/r/hailcorporate posts can’t be blocked.
  - 01100011 5y ago
    Your app detects astroturfing?
    - GhettoComputers 5y ago
      > > some percentage of the userbase will always run aggressive ad blockers and be impossible to effectvely monetize No, ad blocking
- Ilverin 5y ago
  But do those marketers pay reddit?
  - nosianu 5y ago
    Who knows what's going on behind the scenes? Example: Last time I read /r/funny for a period I noticed a wave of "look at what funny thing I did with these Coke bottles" posts that were so obviously part of a marketing campaign that surely reddit admins noticed it too. I don't think they would allow that if they weren't in on it. In that case they may have even helped with the upvotes so no external service where you can easily buy votes (easily found through Google, [1]) would have been needed. Some examples for upvote services: - https://www.soar.sh/service/buy-reddit-upvotes/ https://www.soar.sh/service/buy-reddit-upvotes/ - https://boostupvotes.com/ https://boostupvotes.com/ - https://reddit-marketing.pro/ https://reddit-marketing.pro/ (top three search results when I googled "buy reddit votes") Surely, given how visible such services are, monetizing reddit buy selling upvotes would be one of the first things anyone wanting to monetize reddit comes up with. The only difference to the 3rd party vote sellers is that they will have to hide it better and/or find justifications because the company itself doing it causes a bit more outrage. I also don't think the more niche sub reddits will be (are?) safe. Anyone who wants to sell something more specialized has a target audience much better than anything Facebook can create by selecting the right subreddit, because the audience is self-selecting. Same as for the Coke campaign, since it's hard too hide what's going on from the admins they could stop much of that, so paying reddit to have your posts even boosted by them is safest for any marketer.
anyfactor 5y ago
My personal last strands of hope for Reddit are - their API which is still available to public without hoops to jump through. The downvote button. And the usabillity of old.reddit. Some communities that are still well moderated and strikes a good balance between open to questions and not open to stupid questions. Beyond that I stopped using mainstream reddit as a value source.
- molticrystal 5y ago
  The new largest share holders will likely coerce the removal of all three along with any other vestigial remnant that is enjoyable and is still maintained in the name of eventually maximizing their profits. For me the biggest loss will probably be when the board of directors demand that the RSS feeds stop working.
  - tooltower 5y ago
    Do we know who the larger shareholders are? Where do we look this up?
    - hericium 5y ago
      Tencent was/is big on funding Reddit. Around the time they soaked $150m, privacy policy has changed, some functionalities were added that do not work on old.reddit w/o JS, www.reddit started resembling other social media sites and the site became more profit-oriented and - for me - user-hostile.
  - sauntheninja 5y ago
    Just don't remove old reddit and I will be fine
- djrockstar1 5y ago
  Yeah while all the big subreddits are nigh unusable, there's a lot of small/mid-sized communities that are an absolute delight to be a part of.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
camillomiller 5y ago
On top of that: reddit makes tons of traffic with porn or borderline porn subbreddits, like GirlsGoneWild. It’ll be fun to watch the investors-driven purge when that inevitably happens
- gonzo41 5y ago
  Remember Tumblr with yahoo, so funny. Took a month for a bunch a poor spin offs to cash in.
discardable_dan 5y ago
Reddit said, not six months ago, that they weren't going to ban anti-vaccine rhetoric. The lead admin stated: "We appreciate that not everyone agrees with the current approach to getting us all through the pandemic, and some are still wary of vaccinations. Dissent is a part of Reddit and the foundation of democracy." [0] When you combine this with the fact that moderation on the site is unpaid, it's literally a land mine: anything done on it is open to litigation, and all of the counter-measures are "we rely on unpaid volunteers." It's a nightmare for a public offering, really. It'd be like investing in Facebook, except if Facebook's stances were "well, vaccination is a choice" and "we can't pay people to remove inappropriate content; we just rely on unpaid volunteers for that." Reddit has effectively monetized outrage in a way Facebook could only ever hope to: instead of primarily presenting your friend circles, and the outrage there, Reddit presents the outrage of the social media cloud itself, weaponized in the form of upvotes. The worst part of browsing Reddit is the level of smugness you see around its users: they act like Instagram/Facebook is the worst parts of humanity, while actively engaging with a different corporation selling the same thing but more effectively. 0. https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/pbmy5y/debate_dissent_and_protest_on_reddit/ https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/pbmy5y/debat...
- mdp2021 5y ago
  About your example, some points are not clear, with relevance to the outcome of litigation land mine. First of all, the part about the "right to dissent" I think was later retracted; and importantly, a witch hunt was in fact carried out - starting from r/aww ("the cute pets" or similar). I have just red on The Coversation the article "Shaming unvaccinated people has to stop. We've turned into an angry mob and it's getting ugly" (Julian Savulescu, MCRI, Uni Melbourne and Oxford), https://theconversation.com/shaming-unvaccinated-people-has-to-stop-weve-turned-into-an-angry-mob-and-its-getting-ugly-173137 https://theconversation.com/shaming-unvaccinated-people-has-... , which reports that > a whole Reddit channel is devoted to mocking people who die after refusing the vaccine Does "going to public" increase the liability for legal action?
  - PickledHotdog 5y ago
    /r/HermanCainAward for anyone interested
Freskis 5y ago
Reddit a grotesque toxic website, that makes money by creating conflict, divisiveness, fake news and the deliberate degradation of society. Like Facebook, but so so much worse. I hope that going public gives it the scrutiny it needs. In a few years time you won't be able to find anyone admitting to have ever worked for this company (in fact it's almost impossible to find people admitting it today). Some of the smaller sub-reddits are good though, but that's not what the website has been about for years. Reddit divides US society into 2 halves and makes them scream divisive hate at each other, 24 hours a day. What can possibly go wrong?
- silisili 5y ago
  I think people already don't want to admit to working there, but not for moral reasons, but for how awful the stability and product actually is. I can't say I'd blame them.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    I very much doubt they do not want to admit to working on one of the world's most popular Web sites.
    - silisili 5y ago
      Perhaps. But to me it's more an anomaly that such an unreliable product can remain so popular. Can you imagine Google showing you a weird image saying you broke it multiple times a day, or youtube resembling any single thing about the video player? Reddit has immense staying power - it is addictive. I find myself mindlessly scrolling it and putting up with most of its awfulness. But I attribute that to the users and not the product... as Digg showed, once greener pastures appear, there's not much left to brag about.
      - emodendroket 5y ago
        The reliability has grown a lot better than it used to be.
    - 5y ago
bawolff 5y ago
If i was chosing something to invest in (as opposed to read) i would definitely pick clickbait memes over lisp tutorials.
ayngg 5y ago
Reddit to me is the kind of thing where monetization methods feel like they run counter to what I consider the main value of the website is. People visit because of the communities, but advertisements and astroturfing erodes that by making the communities more and more inauthentic. The problem is that advertising is where the money is, they aren't going to survive on reddit golds. So it seems like the path they have been on for the past decade has been to both grow enough and change their demographics such that the majority of their demographic is less discerning to advertisements and astroturfing, and to generate engagement through communities that enable that sort of advertisement. Now I suspect they are trying to transition towards somehow deriving value as a hub for what are now cult like communities that stan and provide PR for powerful groups like various corporations, media conglomerates, sporting leagues and franchises, political ideologies and so on. Those are the communities that feed off drama and hype that social media has learned will drive the most engagement. They sprinkle it in with other innocuous things like cute pets or viral tik tok reposts (and the other subreddits that are actually very good) to make it not seem as egregious as it really is and hope that most people continue to believe that it is the same organic "front page of the internet" that it had become ever since Digg decided to kill itself many years ago. Much like almost everything else from that time, they simply just outgrew and replaced their core demographic with a group that are much easier to exploit.
- pea 5y ago
  I agree with you in the context of ads, but I do wonder if they could monetise these communities in a more high-value way which plays into their primary purpose. For instance, I am a member of /r/synthesizers, but all trading/buying happens on eBay or reverb.com. Can reddit provide the way for this community to transact in a more high-value/trusted way? Maybe I'm missing something and that is a terrible business.
  - Nasrudith 5y ago
    Main downside is this they already have you as a customer. A lot of these efforts are buffoonish and try to sell you shoes/eyeglasses/appliances after you just bought what you wanted from them. High value honest and transparent ads can work, like say "Will it blend" or providing field related instructions good enough to essentially be the canon to say synthesier configuration and maintenance. That is hard and bespoke. Meanwhile crap ads are very easy and adaptable. So long as there is a positive return being a menace or nuisance to the commons can pay. As spam infamously shows.
raffomania 5y ago
I've been following lemmy [0] for a while, a federated reddit alternative in the same spirit as mastodon. It's still very small, but I think as monetization pressure on reddit increases, people will look for other places to post and this might be one of them :) edit: add the link [0] https://join-lemmy.org/ https://join-lemmy.org/
- ephbit 5y ago
  Their website mentions the Fediverse. lemmy is a federated network that is completely separate from the mastodon/diaspora/... network, right? Since I already have an account on a mastodon instance I first thought I can just connect to lemmy instances using that but that is apparently not possible.
  - rapnie 5y ago
    Yes, you can. After their last release you can follow Lemmy communities with Mastodon and add comments to posts. Just enter the URL of a Lemmy community in your search bar to find the account profile. And in case that doesn't work you might try search for @[CommunityName]@[lemmy.instance] (there are some issues to be wrinkled out still).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jiveturkey 5y ago
> I can't imagine investing in an ad company that is fueled by clickbait and outrage the way Reddit is. Because of your own outrage? Or because of financials of the business model. If the former, how different are you than the stubborn anti-vaxxers? I believe the business model is a proven one. I'll withhold my judgement til when I see the first 10Q. Your comment itself is designed to fuel outrage. What a scummy company!
jrootabega 5y ago
I think that's kind of like a cow in the 1800s saying that investing in cattle farming is a bad idea. Morally, you'd be correct...
quitit 5y ago
I personally wouldn't invest in Reddit, those with a memory longer than a few weeks will note that they go from one self-induced crisis to the next. Their upper management is directionless and the result of battlefield promotions and they've demonstrated time and time again that they have no vision for the service. Reddit exists in the same way that digg and slashdot before it has: it's the incumbent, the default choice. It could lose it all in a year and no one would be surprised - because it's happened multiple times already and the userbase is already highly cynical. That wasn't helped by making the site unusable on mobile; a change made to entice (read: force) users to the more lucrative app. However this merely led people to alternatives such as Apollo, which remove the ads, the reddit value-generating nonsense and introduces useful features such as the ability to download video content. Perhaps counter-intuitively these kinds of apps are likely to keep users on reddit. However with an IPO I would not be surprised to see Reddit pull 'an Instagram' and invest efforts in preventing 3rd party apps from functioning correctly.
jayd16 5y ago
>The Reddit of 2006 where tutorials on generating HTML in Lisp rocket to the top of the homepage is long gone. Edit your homepage.
CyanDeparture 5y ago
You can't really ad-block from astroturfed ads, for example a 'viral' video of Amazon delivery driver dancing on a Amazon Ring doorbell get to the top of a video subreddit. That can't be blocked against. I run agressive ad blocks and I'll still get pictures on r/aww/ of a kitten next to a freshely delivery KFC - with a title like "Kittens first every KFC delivery to investigate". What I'd like to know is how Reddit monetizes those ads that make it through to everyone.

emodendroket 5y ago

It's not really gone though. There are plenty of subreddits you can subscribe to if that's your interest. Or there are others to subscribe to for almost any interest you may have.

INTPenis 5y ago

Those tutorials can still rocket to the top of YOUR homepage. That's the power of reddit. That everyone can craft their own experience by subscribing to subreddits. So subscribe to the lisp subreddit and you'll see the content you want.

Gareth321 5y ago
This concept is not long for this world. I've been a daily user for for than a decade. * [Your default sort and filter list no longer only contains content you are subscribed to.](https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/m1pb9u/comment/gqgh821/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/m1pb9u/comment/gqgh82...) * They continually "improve" the default (and Hot, New, Top, and Rising) sort and filter algorithm(s). Every day it contains less relevant content for you, and more content peppered with ads and outrage. All of these options are slowly morphing into the same sort and filter set. * They are aggressively shutting down interesting communities which don't fit their advertiser profile, and using the above algorithms to ensure no one ever sees them. These include, for example, discussion of covid or vaccines from a critical perspective; assisted suicide; Donald Trump; guns; trans controversies; etc. * They are aggressively policing language. There is a growing list of words which, if used, will earn the user a ban. * They stopped work on old.reddit.com, which gave users more transparent control over sort and filter. I predict they will kill it soon. * They currently allow API access for third party aps. These aps don't serve ads and can employ their own sorting and filtering. I predict open APIs will be shut down, just like all the other major platforms have done. Long story short, Reddit is going to turn into Facebook. They've made that intention clear. It's only a matter of time before they demand Facebook-like verification for users.
- unionpivo 5y ago
  Just disable all the subreddits but the few that you follow. And also disable the trending option in your preferences Its the (show trending subreddits on the home feed (a list of popular and notable subreddits to check out)) in your preferences. And then your home page is normal, sure that should be the default, but it's not hard to do
  - jl6 5y ago
    You can’t disable the banning of a community.
    - unionpivo 5y ago
      > You can’t disable the banning of a community. Anything popular will have this problem. Even the most notorious "chans" banned some things/topics. If you are dealing with controversial topics you best bet is to own your own platform, and don't grow to big. That's just how this world works, and its not even limited to online. Look at silk road. There are tones of dark web places like it, but once things get too popular, people will go to extraordinary lengths to shut it down. The only controversial site that somehow still tags along is the pirate bay. And it's more shadow of its former self.
- PickledHotdog 5y ago
  > * There is a growing list of words which, if used, will earn the user a ban. This is news to me - any examples?
  - justsomehnguy 5y ago
    'whitelist' in r/powershell would get your post shadowbanned

niij 5y ago

Which indexes? If they include US Large Cap then you already invest in FB and Twitter.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

paxys 5y ago

You are forgetting this other ad company fueled by clickbait and outrage that has a trillion dollar market cap. It is a winning business model.

GhettoComputers 5y ago
All the reason to give the people who don’t want that another place instead of being a crappier version of that site.

IgorPartola 5y ago

Ok I’ll bite. How would you fix Reddit? I have been using online forums for the past 20+ years and I know what you mean about communities like Reddit going from nerd heavy topics to primarily being the free advertising platform for onlyfans accounts and political hacks. But how would Reddit at this point stuff the genie back into the bottle? For that matter, if you don’t believe in Reddit’s long term success, there are both investment opportunities and opportunities to build something better.

hammock 5y ago
I didn't see where he said it could be fixed. You are right when you draw comparison to the genie out of the bottle. Online communities evolve and it's one way. You can't "fix" them, you can only move to new and different ones. Just like real life social scenes, or city neighborhoods, too, now that I think about it.
perth 5y ago
When Reddit became a sanitized social media platform rather than a free speech platform, it brought in a swathe of users who liked the sanitized social media platform, so you can't undo it.
- rchaud 5y ago
  What evidence is there for this claim? I'm not aware of instances where people join a community BECAUSE they banned something. There's plenty of evidence for the reverse, such as when the removal of fat people hate and other subs led to an exodus to Voat.
gibbonsrcool 5y ago
Get rid of the current moderators and pay professionals. Automate the universal rules and use these folks to steer content back to when it was most meaningful. Also dedicate as many resources as possible to identify and prevent astroturfing and shills.
- maneesh 5y ago

briga 5y ago

> some percentage of the userbase will always run aggressive ad blockers and be impossible to effectvely monetize Can’t block ads when they’re disguised as user content. Viral marketers have had a heyday hawking their products on Reddit

GhettoComputers 5y ago
My app does it for me. :) But yes old.reddit.com/r/hailcorporate posts can’t be blocked.
- 01100011 5y ago
  Your app detects astroturfing?
  - GhettoComputers 5y ago
    > > some percentage of the userbase will always run aggressive ad blockers and be impossible to effectvely monetize No, ad blocking
Ilverin 5y ago
But do those marketers pay reddit?
- nosianu 5y ago
  Who knows what's going on behind the scenes? Example: Last time I read /r/funny for a period I noticed a wave of "look at what funny thing I did with these Coke bottles" posts that were so obviously part of a marketing campaign that surely reddit admins noticed it too. I don't think they would allow that if they weren't in on it. In that case they may have even helped with the upvotes so no external service where you can easily buy votes (easily found through Google, [1]) would have been needed. Some examples for upvote services: - https://www.soar.sh/service/buy-reddit-upvotes/ https://www.soar.sh/service/buy-reddit-upvotes/ - https://boostupvotes.com/ https://boostupvotes.com/ - https://reddit-marketing.pro/ https://reddit-marketing.pro/ (top three search results when I googled "buy reddit votes") Surely, given how visible such services are, monetizing reddit buy selling upvotes would be one of the first things anyone wanting to monetize reddit comes up with. The only difference to the 3rd party vote sellers is that they will have to hide it better and/or find justifications because the company itself doing it causes a bit more outrage. I also don't think the more niche sub reddits will be (are?) safe. Anyone who wants to sell something more specialized has a target audience much better than anything Facebook can create by selecting the right subreddit, because the audience is self-selecting. Same as for the Coke campaign, since it's hard too hide what's going on from the admins they could stop much of that, so paying reddit to have your posts even boosted by them is safest for any marketer.

anyfactor 5y ago

My personal last strands of hope for Reddit are - their API which is still available to public without hoops to jump through. The downvote button. And the usabillity of old.reddit. Some communities that are still well moderated and strikes a good balance between open to questions and not open to stupid questions. Beyond that I stopped using mainstream reddit as a value source.

molticrystal 5y ago
The new largest share holders will likely coerce the removal of all three along with any other vestigial remnant that is enjoyable and is still maintained in the name of eventually maximizing their profits. For me the biggest loss will probably be when the board of directors demand that the RSS feeds stop working.
- tooltower 5y ago
  Do we know who the larger shareholders are? Where do we look this up?
  - hericium 5y ago
    Tencent was/is big on funding Reddit. Around the time they soaked $150m, privacy policy has changed, some functionalities were added that do not work on old.reddit w/o JS, www.reddit started resembling other social media sites and the site became more profit-oriented and - for me - user-hostile.
- sauntheninja 5y ago
  Just don't remove old reddit and I will be fine
djrockstar1 5y ago
Yeah while all the big subreddits are nigh unusable, there's a lot of small/mid-sized communities that are an absolute delight to be a part of.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

camillomiller 5y ago

On top of that: reddit makes tons of traffic with porn or borderline porn subbreddits, like GirlsGoneWild. It’ll be fun to watch the investors-driven purge when that inevitably happens

gonzo41 5y ago
Remember Tumblr with yahoo, so funny. Took a month for a bunch a poor spin offs to cash in.

discardable_dan 5y ago

Reddit said, not six months ago, that they weren't going to ban anti-vaccine rhetoric. The lead admin stated: "We appreciate that not everyone agrees with the current approach to getting us all through the pandemic, and some are still wary of vaccinations. Dissent is a part of Reddit and the foundation of democracy." [0] When you combine this with the fact that moderation on the site is unpaid, it's literally a land mine: anything done on it is open to litigation, and all of the counter-measures are "we rely on unpaid volunteers." It's a nightmare for a public offering, really. It'd be like investing in Facebook, except if Facebook's stances were "well, vaccination is a choice" and "we can't pay people to remove inappropriate content; we just rely on unpaid volunteers for that." Reddit has effectively monetized outrage in a way Facebook could only ever hope to: instead of primarily presenting your friend circles, and the outrage there, Reddit presents the outrage of the social media cloud itself, weaponized in the form of upvotes. The worst part of browsing Reddit is the level of smugness you see around its users: they act like Instagram/Facebook is the worst parts of humanity, while actively engaging with a different corporation selling the same thing but more effectively. 0. https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/pbmy5y/debate_dissent_and_protest_on_reddit/ https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/pbmy5y/debat...

mdp2021 5y ago
About your example, some points are not clear, with relevance to the outcome of litigation land mine. First of all, the part about the "right to dissent" I think was later retracted; and importantly, a witch hunt was in fact carried out - starting from r/aww ("the cute pets" or similar). I have just red on The Coversation the article "Shaming unvaccinated people has to stop. We've turned into an angry mob and it's getting ugly" (Julian Savulescu, MCRI, Uni Melbourne and Oxford), https://theconversation.com/shaming-unvaccinated-people-has-to-stop-weve-turned-into-an-angry-mob-and-its-getting-ugly-173137 https://theconversation.com/shaming-unvaccinated-people-has-... , which reports that > a whole Reddit channel is devoted to mocking people who die after refusing the vaccine Does "going to public" increase the liability for legal action?
- PickledHotdog 5y ago
  /r/HermanCainAward for anyone interested

Freskis 5y ago

Reddit a grotesque toxic website, that makes money by creating conflict, divisiveness, fake news and the deliberate degradation of society. Like Facebook, but so so much worse. I hope that going public gives it the scrutiny it needs. In a few years time you won't be able to find anyone admitting to have ever worked for this company (in fact it's almost impossible to find people admitting it today). Some of the smaller sub-reddits are good though, but that's not what the website has been about for years. Reddit divides US society into 2 halves and makes them scream divisive hate at each other, 24 hours a day. What can possibly go wrong?

silisili 5y ago
I think people already don't want to admit to working there, but not for moral reasons, but for how awful the stability and product actually is. I can't say I'd blame them.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  I very much doubt they do not want to admit to working on one of the world's most popular Web sites.
  - silisili 5y ago
    Perhaps. But to me it's more an anomaly that such an unreliable product can remain so popular. Can you imagine Google showing you a weird image saying you broke it multiple times a day, or youtube resembling any single thing about the video player? Reddit has immense staying power - it is addictive. I find myself mindlessly scrolling it and putting up with most of its awfulness. But I attribute that to the users and not the product... as Digg showed, once greener pastures appear, there's not much left to brag about.
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      The reliability has grown a lot better than it used to be.
  - 5y ago

bawolff 5y ago

If i was chosing something to invest in (as opposed to read) i would definitely pick clickbait memes over lisp tutorials.

ayngg 5y ago

Reddit to me is the kind of thing where monetization methods feel like they run counter to what I consider the main value of the website is. People visit because of the communities, but advertisements and astroturfing erodes that by making the communities more and more inauthentic. The problem is that advertising is where the money is, they aren't going to survive on reddit golds. So it seems like the path they have been on for the past decade has been to both grow enough and change their demographics such that the majority of their demographic is less discerning to advertisements and astroturfing, and to generate engagement through communities that enable that sort of advertisement. Now I suspect they are trying to transition towards somehow deriving value as a hub for what are now cult like communities that stan and provide PR for powerful groups like various corporations, media conglomerates, sporting leagues and franchises, political ideologies and so on. Those are the communities that feed off drama and hype that social media has learned will drive the most engagement. They sprinkle it in with other innocuous things like cute pets or viral tik tok reposts (and the other subreddits that are actually very good) to make it not seem as egregious as it really is and hope that most people continue to believe that it is the same organic "front page of the internet" that it had become ever since Digg decided to kill itself many years ago. Much like almost everything else from that time, they simply just outgrew and replaced their core demographic with a group that are much easier to exploit.

pea 5y ago
I agree with you in the context of ads, but I do wonder if they could monetise these communities in a more high-value way which plays into their primary purpose. For instance, I am a member of /r/synthesizers, but all trading/buying happens on eBay or reverb.com. Can reddit provide the way for this community to transact in a more high-value/trusted way? Maybe I'm missing something and that is a terrible business.
- Nasrudith 5y ago
  Main downside is this they already have you as a customer. A lot of these efforts are buffoonish and try to sell you shoes/eyeglasses/appliances after you just bought what you wanted from them. High value honest and transparent ads can work, like say "Will it blend" or providing field related instructions good enough to essentially be the canon to say synthesier configuration and maintenance. That is hard and bespoke. Meanwhile crap ads are very easy and adaptable. So long as there is a positive return being a menace or nuisance to the commons can pay. As spam infamously shows.

raffomania 5y ago

I've been following lemmy [0] for a while, a federated reddit alternative in the same spirit as mastodon. It's still very small, but I think as monetization pressure on reddit increases, people will look for other places to post and this might be one of them :) edit: add the link [0] https://join-lemmy.org/ https://join-lemmy.org/

ephbit 5y ago
Their website mentions the Fediverse. lemmy is a federated network that is completely separate from the mastodon/diaspora/... network, right? Since I already have an account on a mastodon instance I first thought I can just connect to lemmy instances using that but that is apparently not possible.
- rapnie 5y ago
  Yes, you can. After their last release you can follow Lemmy communities with Mastodon and add comments to posts. Just enter the URL of a Lemmy community in your search bar to find the account profile. And in case that doesn't work you might try search for @[CommunityName]@[lemmy.instance] (there are some issues to be wrinkled out still).
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

jiveturkey 5y ago

> I can't imagine investing in an ad company that is fueled by clickbait and outrage the way Reddit is. Because of your own outrage? Or because of financials of the business model. If the former, how different are you than the stubborn anti-vaxxers? I believe the business model is a proven one. I'll withhold my judgement til when I see the first 10Q. Your comment itself is designed to fuel outrage. What a scummy company!

jrootabega 5y ago

I think that's kind of like a cow in the 1800s saying that investing in cattle farming is a bad idea. Morally, you'd be correct...

quitit 5y ago

I personally wouldn't invest in Reddit, those with a memory longer than a few weeks will note that they go from one self-induced crisis to the next. Their upper management is directionless and the result of battlefield promotions and they've demonstrated time and time again that they have no vision for the service. Reddit exists in the same way that digg and slashdot before it has: it's the incumbent, the default choice. It could lose it all in a year and no one would be surprised - because it's happened multiple times already and the userbase is already highly cynical. That wasn't helped by making the site unusable on mobile; a change made to entice (read: force) users to the more lucrative app. However this merely led people to alternatives such as Apollo, which remove the ads, the reddit value-generating nonsense and introduces useful features such as the ability to download video content. Perhaps counter-intuitively these kinds of apps are likely to keep users on reddit. However with an IPO I would not be surprised to see Reddit pull 'an Instagram' and invest efforts in preventing 3rd party apps from functioning correctly.

jayd16 5y ago

>The Reddit of 2006 where tutorials on generating HTML in Lisp rocket to the top of the homepage is long gone. Edit your homepage.

CyanDeparture 5y ago

You can't really ad-block from astroturfed ads, for example a 'viral' video of Amazon delivery driver dancing on a Amazon Ring doorbell get to the top of a video subreddit. That can't be blocked against. I run agressive ad blocks and I'll still get pictures on r/aww/ of a kitten next to a freshely delivery KFC - with a title like "Kittens first every KFC delivery to investigate". What I'd like to know is how Reddit monetizes those ads that make it through to everyone.