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Reddit is basically successful despite itself. It's wild.
by jcims 3y ago
Reddit is basically successful despite itself. It's wild.
- jimmySixDOF 3y agoReddit is proof of Internet Rule No.51 "the better the content, the worse the User Interface"
- memefrog 3y agoIt's the other way round from a cause & effect perspective: the worse the user interface, the more off-putting it is to the casual users that create and promote low-quality content.
- oska 3y agoThe old reddit user interface was/is remarkably good. Threaded, collapsible discussions with markdown for comments in a non-distracting (i.e. sparse) layout.
- devnullbrain 3y agoOnce you found the comments it was but the comment link was/is marginalised in favour of the link itself, making it easy to miss that they're 'the point'. Even before new.reddit it was a common complaint that it's confusing to new users. Obviously this is relative, it's a huge site! And there may even be value to gatekeeping users who can't figure it out.
- wpietri 3y agoTwitter too! When I worked there they jokingly referred to the head of product as the defense against the dark arts teacher, in that every year or so they'd disappear mysteriously and there'd be a new one. Most of Twitter's successes came from watching what users were actually doing and supporting that (e.g., at mentions, retweets, quote tweets). Many of their failures have been trying to graft on something irrelevant or actively contradictory to user needs. Or just flat out ignoring things users liked, as with them closing down Vine and letting TikTok come in to win as the short, fun video platform. But network effects businesses are really hard to kill. Sure, Musk has set $20-30 billion on fire and Twitter is rapidly decaying. But imagine taking a resilient business like a McDonald's franchise and subjecting it to Musk levels of chaos. It would have been out of business long before, instead of merely shrinking significantly.
- TX81Z 3y agoVine shutting down may be one of the top ten stupid decisions in business history.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- GolfPopper 3y agoI think there's a fundamental conflict, in that these network effect businesses are terrible as for-profit businesses. They're of great value to those who use them, and indirectly to society as a whole. Yet there's no good way to monetize them (nor does there need to be monetization), and trying to do so damages the functionality of the network. Both Twitter and Reddit would likely be better off (from the POV of the users and the network as a whole) as something more along the lines of non-profit foundations.
- civilitty 3y agoIs Facebook not a network effect business? It’s not only wildly profitable but bigger than those two combined. Twitter and Reddit are just run by incompetents who can’t figure out how to advertise anything relevant.
- unreal37 3y agoTwitter and Reddit are messageboards. Like Hacker News. Every time they do something controversial, someone thinks Usenet needs to be reincarnated. Trying to monetize that at scale is hardddd. Facebook has got groups, yes. But they have instagram. Messenger. Whatsapp. They have my friends and family. They have my photos going back 10 years. Facebook is personal to many people. I don't see Twitter and Facebook being interchangeable.
- Hary06 3y agoAgree.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jachee 3y agoIt’s popular despite itself… but It’s not successful. One of the things Spez is whining about is that they’re not profitable.
- littlestymaar 3y agoWikipedia manages to be extremely profitable, maybe reddit execs just suck at their job and should be fired…
- nomel 3y agoMostly through deception, and full pages ads, though. https://m.slashdot.org/story/275835 https://m.slashdot.org/story/275835
- littlestymaar 3y agoYes, but that's still orders of magnitude less bad that what Reddit has been doing.
- wpietri 3y agoI'm sure it isn't profitable the way he's running it. And honestly, I don't care about Reddit being profitable. I care about it being sustainable. A VC-driven push for profitability doesn't mean breaking even. It means making a shit-ton of money, yielding a very large return on their very large investment. And they are perfectly willing to destroy an adequate business if that means they are getting a chance at something larger and much more profitable. Without a lot of internal data, we'll never know the truth of it. But I suspect that there is a sustainable version of Reddit-the-company that would do everything Reddit-the-community needs without this sort of aggressive destruction of value in pursuit of high revenue numbers.
- rafark 3y agoOf course you as a user don’t care that is profitable. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not picking sides, but if you were the ceo/owner, you’d probably care about its profitability. If you were the owner of such a big site, wouldn’t you be thinking of ways to get yourself a -very comfortable- early retirement?
- HKH2 3y agoReddit is not going to change. It seems quite a few people don't mind being abused a bit to get the convenience they want. Nothing's going to happen.
- uw_rob 3y agoI am not so sure that I agree here. What's interesting about reddit is that it is one site with very different UIs. The official reddit app has a focus on video/images and looks to be in competition with TikTok. old.reddit.com and Apollo are very much text centric apps. From my understand, reddit has a traffic breakdown of 50/50 on the text centric vs. visual centric UIs. With the UIs like Apollo being killed, and old.reddit.com eventually going away as well[0], I think users will genuinely leave as they have killed the text based UIs. [0] Despite any promises, the writing is on the wall.
- skinnymuch 3y agoIs desktop new Reddit counting as text centric? From what others have said, 3rd party apps and old reddit have relatively low usage.
- Rebelgecko 3y agoOn the sub I mod, old and new reddit are basically neck and neck with ~10% of traffic. The bulk of traffic comes from apps, but I don't think there's a breakdown in the modtools of 1p vs 3p apps
- paradox460 3y agoThey killed compact a few months ago, in light of recent events probably to drive people to the "official" apps
- Somdubai 3y agoCompact was perfect for me and its death really has curtailed my usage of Reddit
- mattkevan 3y agoI have a theory, after working for one of the UK’s largest social networks, that no-one who runs a social network understands what made it work or why it continues to work. Therefore they are extremely reluctant to make changes in case they break it (e.g. old twitter), and because they don’t understand it, any large changes they do make are generally negative (new twitter, Reddit). Plus, in my experience , users will bitterly resist any changes at all because the site doesn’t belong to management, it belongs to them. It’s their space. Changing anything is like someone’s snuck into their house at night and remodelled their lounge. It’ll be interesting to see whether this is Reddit’s Digg moment or it’s more like the Facebook newsfeed where everyone kicked up a fuss for a bit and then carried on as before.
- AmericanOP 3y agoThey wasted half a decade not building promised moderation tools for the people who create value on Reddit. Instead they were busy running cost/benefit analyses on how aggressive the dark patterns to drive users to the maligned mobile app should be.
- wpietri 3y agoI still feel bad for whatever web developer had to check in the "this page looks better in the app" banner.
- Lapsa 3y agogreat levels of empathy. and I'm not sarcastic
- sdenton4 3y agoPull request description: "Does it really, though?"
- vkou 3y agoIt's a job. Some people are paid to shoot rockets into cities, some people are paid to deny healthcare coverage, some people are paid to lie on television, and some people are paid to lie on dark pattern banners.
- nologic01 3y agoWhat are the alternatives exactly? Until we get interoperating platforms where people can easily migrate and reward the places that treat them the best we are stuck with the few platforms that managed to create network lock-in. The social media as a prison operating model.
- Tao3300 3y agoI'm apparently in limbo waiting for beehaw to figure out I'm not Hitler.
- O1111OOO 3y agoI find myself spreading out. I created accounts with lemmy (app: jerboa) and mastodon (app: trunks). HN and RSS remain in the mix. Also using my mobile browser's option to create a shortcut/browserApp for a few news sites. There really is an awful lot out there - I'm just beginning to look (again). Interestingly... last year - with no effort on my part - reddit became an also-ran when I dived into TikTok. When I left TikTok, reddit re-entered the picture.
- oska 3y agoI'm waiting for big rooms support to be implemented in keet (which is already amazing)
- bookofjoe 3y agoMark Zuckerberg described Twitter as "A clown car that fell into a gold mine."
- throw_a_grenade 3y agoNow let us remember how Zuckerberg descibed his first batch of users...
- accoil 3y agoRight on both accounts?
- smeagull 3y agoThey lasted long enough for there to be no real competitors.
- 762236 3y agoI stopped visiting reddit after too many mods censored me and others that don't conform to the left's ideology. Twitter is where I get content now. And I'm a liberal.
- skinnymuch 3y agoI doubt the veracity of your story. As a liberal you’re complaining about how one of the most liberal capitalist sites has too much left ideology. What is left ideology to you?
- Gareth321 3y agoI’ve been banned on multiple subreddits because I wrote that I don’t think children should be medically altered for “sexual transition.” I’m fine with adults making that decision, but not kids. I was respectful, but firm. This is one of those “left ideology” issues, compounded by a new left ideology issue: authoritarian censorship.
- noelherrick 3y agoI would push back on this, because left ideology hasn't really changed since the term was invented, and they weren't talking about transition surgery in the 1700s. It's always about removing current power structures and institutions that harm the weak to enrich and empower the few. It started with the monarchy, and today it's about corporations and the rich buying politicians, academics, reporters, artists, and religious leaders to allow and promote the subjugation of workers and the destruction of the environment for profit. The reason the trans people are an issue is that conservatives lost big on trying to suppress homosexuals, which in turn is just a distraction from the economic inequality and general disempowerment that regular Americans face. There is a vast right-wing conspiracy that wants to keep the conversation around culture war issues instead of, you know, making sure all people have food, clean water, shelter, healthcare, and education regardless of their economic value to the market. Claiming authoritarian censorship displays a kind of persecution complex, especially considering you're able to claim censorship and I, a rando, am able to read it. The top articles shared on Facebook feature mostly conservative voices. Reddit is different in that it has a downvote option, available to users without HN's karma threshold. You're not getting censored, you're just espousing unpopular views. Just like with abortion, for trans kids, the doctor's office is not big enough for the kid, the doctor, and the government. People know themselves better than we think. Kara Swisher, the tech reporter, has said she knew she was a lesbian when she was 4 (or 5). Guess what, she's still a lesbian. No kid is going to choose the difficult, scary prospect of surgery or invasive meds without a strong motivation. And kids are not getting surgery that often - it's mostly puberty blockers which are not permanent. And to be clear, I couldn't find any story about a person younger than 17 getting a surgery done. These are folks just about to leave minority age. Also, no child is getting this without parental or guardian's consent. The idea that some liberal parent is twiddling their fingers, Mr. Burn's style, to get their child to believe they are trans is ludicrous. You have to believe there's a large group of parents who are cartoon villains attacking their own kids for clout. But deeper than that, I know that conservatives don't actually care about children because so many of them won't have a conversation around guns which actually kill children, often mutilating their bodies so much an open casket funeral is out of the question unless it's for shock value. It is the leading cause of death for kids in the US. The Utah law against trans athletes applied to 4 people. Malnutrition deaths in Utah were 1,044 for 2022. WTF.
- courseofaction 3y agoIt rode that beautiful wave of techno-optimism. An undeserving beneficiary of Aaron Swartz's work.
- andrewfelix 3y agoCapitalism destroys the best.
- roflyear 3y agoHappens all the time, really!
- jacurtis 3y agoThere's a term for this "market effect". See also Twitter and Facebook and many other social networks that are objectively terrible platforms now (they all had periods of greatness that they fell from). Despite continually getting worse, the majority of people (tech and early adopters aside) will continue to use these sites no matter what because that is where their friends are, so they put up with it. There's an app I have on my phone called Marco Polo. I hate every fucking thing about this app, the fact that it asks me to pay them $120 per year basically every morning as a full screen popup, the fact that it completely wrecks my battery life, the fact that they continue to block more (previously free) features behind paywalls, the fact that video records at like 8 fps (and still manages to destroy my battery by some miracle), the fact that they consume all of your friends contact lists and automatically befriends you with ex-girlfriends and people you would rather not talk to, and the worst sin of all, it completely resets your phone's audio now-playing whenever you open it up. So if i am listening to a podcast or music and I get a marco polo and listen to it, I can't just pick up listening to my previous audio when I am done. I have to re-open Spotify or Overcast to start playing again. But why do I use this monstrosity of an app? Because all my friends use it. We bitch about it everyday, but we are all on it and we all use it to talk multiple times a day between eachother. It has market effect. I want nothing more than for this app to die, but market effect keeps it around.
- technick 3y agoIf you build it, they will come...
- PaulHoule 3y agoNot weird at all. This is the problem of the modern internet. There has always been a controversy over the relationship between success and competence. Two-sided markets are so powerful that you can run one very poorly (e.g. craiglist…) or even actively try to run one into the ground (Musk and Twitter) and they will persist anyway, so the good luck of being in the right place at the right time can mask incompetence, particularly when that incompetence develops over time (see the Peter Principle) If there wasn’t a powerful force keeping people into bad platforms there wouldn’t be an “enshittification” problem, because people would vote with their feet and bad platforms would immediately feel the consequences of their actions.