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Reddit is now a rage generating machine outside of the small niche subreddits. The business is built on rage and some stupid investors in WSB who are enjoying a

by bogota 5y ago

Reddit is now a rage generating machine outside of the small niche subreddits. The business is built on rage and some stupid investors in WSB who are enjoying a long bull market. Doesn’t mean it won’t do well but its just another flavor of facebook.

krzyk 5y ago
> Doesn’t mean it won’t do well but its just another flavor of facebook. No, reddit has threads/subjects. Facebook posts organization almost does not exist, it is unusable to read anything there.
- bogota 5y ago
  … i said another flavor and im clearly commenting on the driving factor behind engagement. But yeah it has threads.
  - moffkalast 5y ago
    Frankly Reddit is more like HN if it had feeds for every thing known to man and a few million more users. It started out almost exactly the same way as HN is right now, except for somewhat better site usability. You eventually outgrow the dev community and have to start catering to normal people and the results are predictable. The senseless outrage on this site sometimes measures up completely.
nonbirithm 5y ago
In general, this is what bothers me with a lot of modern online services. Some people might use the same platforms harmlessly to watch cooking videos or share family photos while remaining relatively free from neurosis, or they might be trapped in a rut of entirely different algorithmic content. The only unifying factor is that they both happen to be hosted on the same platform, and it is becoming harder to detach the content on the platform from the mechanisms driving viewership that come with the platform. The platforms encompass both the best and worst of us, attracting both the susceptible users and relatively ordinary persons, and that's why they have staying power. Because these services are so all-encompassing, they are bound to have some amount of well-curated content, or at the very least content that holds one's interest. By virtue of that minuscule amount of content being hosted on the massive aggregate site, that predisposes some people to affirm or at least ignore the idea of the overarching site as a whole, along with the SEO mechanisms, influencers, etc. that always get so much flak in certain circles. In other words, because the site is so massive there will always be a population of consumers in their own niches that never encounter any outrage or issues. There will also be a population exposed to the "rage generating" content. The subset of people aware of the toxicity and how it relates to the workings of the platform itself may or may not overlap with these groups. But in the end, because the site has become so massive that content creators have caused it to encompass literally everything that can be thought of as a topic of interest to general humanity, all of these groups, whether harmful or harmless, contribute to the site's continued growth and prosperity, and more and more people participate as a result.
discardable_dan 5y ago
It is, frankly, _weaponized_ facebook. It literally shows you content that is the most-engaging and most-interacted, across the entire site (not just your friend group). Which is ironic, given how often users there was philosophical about the evils of facebook. If you don't believe me, go browse /r/popular or some such and see how long it takes to see right-wing posts. The right-wing posts are usually heavily downvoted, so you'll see one with 100 upvotes between two posts with 20k upvotes; that's by design.

by bogota 5y ago

krzyk 5y ago

> Doesn’t mean it won’t do well but its just another flavor of facebook. No, reddit has threads/subjects. Facebook posts organization almost does not exist, it is unusable to read anything there.

bogota 5y ago
… i said another flavor and im clearly commenting on the driving factor behind engagement. But yeah it has threads.
- moffkalast 5y ago
  Frankly Reddit is more like HN if it had feeds for every thing known to man and a few million more users. It started out almost exactly the same way as HN is right now, except for somewhat better site usability. You eventually outgrow the dev community and have to start catering to normal people and the results are predictable. The senseless outrage on this site sometimes measures up completely.

nonbirithm 5y ago

In general, this is what bothers me with a lot of modern online services. Some people might use the same platforms harmlessly to watch cooking videos or share family photos while remaining relatively free from neurosis, or they might be trapped in a rut of entirely different algorithmic content. The only unifying factor is that they both happen to be hosted on the same platform, and it is becoming harder to detach the content on the platform from the mechanisms driving viewership that come with the platform. The platforms encompass both the best and worst of us, attracting both the susceptible users and relatively ordinary persons, and that's why they have staying power. Because these services are so all-encompassing, they are bound to have some amount of well-curated content, or at the very least content that holds one's interest. By virtue of that minuscule amount of content being hosted on the massive aggregate site, that predisposes some people to affirm or at least ignore the idea of the overarching site as a whole, along with the SEO mechanisms, influencers, etc. that always get so much flak in certain circles. In other words, because the site is so massive there will always be a population of consumers in their own niches that never encounter any outrage or issues. There will also be a population exposed to the "rage generating" content. The subset of people aware of the toxicity and how it relates to the workings of the platform itself may or may not overlap with these groups. But in the end, because the site has become so massive that content creators have caused it to encompass literally everything that can be thought of as a topic of interest to general humanity, all of these groups, whether harmful or harmless, contribute to the site's continued growth and prosperity, and more and more people participate as a result.

discardable_dan 5y ago

It is, frankly, _weaponized_ facebook. It literally shows you content that is the most-engaging and most-interacted, across the entire site (not just your friend group). Which is ironic, given how often users there was philosophical about the evils of facebook. If you don't believe me, go browse /r/popular or some such and see how long it takes to see right-wing posts. The right-wing posts are usually heavily downvoted, so you'll see one with 100 upvotes between two posts with 20k upvotes; that's by design.