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I think the idea put out by some people here that Reddit might be in the process of radically changing tracks is plausible. Reddit was always very hands-off. T

• vGPU 3y ago
  The problem is that I want “unpleasant and controversial [legal] content”. Even if it isn’t something that I personally want to see, it prevents the creation of the echo chamber that Reddit and most other social media platforms have become. I significantly improved my Reddit experience simply by filtering out the word “Trump”. This also had the effect of hiding a good 20% of Reddit, as there were dozens of stories every day about orange man bad. It’s been 3 years into a different guy’s presidency and Trump still gets more attention on Reddit than Biden does. So when you avoid filtering as much, you end up with something closer to the chans, where you could see a post contemplating bestiality, and the next post proclaiming that pedophiles belong in woodchippers. Not a fan of the former, but you just ignore it and move on. There’s always something fresh and interesting.
• nullindividual 3y ago
  > Put those together and it's plausible that Reddit wants to go from a discussion site with cats to a cats feed site with meaningless discussion, and a bunch of ads mixed in. Based off of my personal experience with many subreddits that have a four digit plus subscriber count, I think reddit has largely already achieved the above goal. The amount of mindless "me too!" and "here's how that works /confidentlyincorrect" has grown significantly within the past few years, though has been a problem for a number of years prior. Reddit won't come back from this stage of may-as-well-be-bots-posting.
  • greenpresident 3y ago
    There is already a large population of bots reposting formerly popular content, including the comments from the original thread. It’s eerie once you notice it.
    • transcriptase 3y ago
      I’ve seen entire (dozen reply long) comment chains on a repost (or similar content) that were re-created verbatim from an older post. Each one garnered the same hundreds of upvotes as the original, and each bot seemed to be part of a network that was farming karma through this process. Eerie was an understatement.
      • evouga 3y ago
        What’s the endgame here? Who is buying ripened accounts with lots of karma and why?
        • joshstrange 3y ago
          People who want to astroturf, from everything from products to politics (though honestly probably more for "products"). Reddit is well known for being one of the few places you can "trust" product reviews (that hasn't been fully true for a while now but it's still valuable). If a near-0 karma and/or new account says "I love X product" then they can sometimes be downvoted/called a shill but an account that's a couple years old and has decent karma? Looks like a real person. That's at least the explanation I've heard many times.
          • MostlyStable 3y ago
            Once you cross the extremely small karma barrier needed to get your comments allowed/not be rate limited...whats the point? I use reddit for a lot of recommendations/research and I have _never_ checked the karma of a user after reading their comment.
• shmatt 3y ago
  My bet is that investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital are pulling their hairs out, seeing Reddit lose money at the end of the month, after Open AI and others are raising trillions by scraping their data
  • b112 3y ago
    Wait, you're saying openai was trained on reddit posts?! No wonder people are scared of AI.
    • dale_glass 3y ago
      It is well known, yes. This was discussed a way back during the whole glitch tokens deal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO2X3oZEJOA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO2X3oZEJOA A bunch of those, like " SolidGoldMagikarp" are Reddit users.
    • paulddraper 3y ago
      Making the "weaponized autism" trope real
    • cratermoon 3y ago
      Reddit and StackOverflow notably. Most use https://commoncrawl.org/ https://commoncrawl.org/ or a derivative of it.
      • GartzenDeHaes 3y ago
        You can often google Copilot output and find the source StackOverflow post. Saves a step I guess.
  • hirako2000 3y ago
    Not reddit data, users data.
    • RosanaAnaDana 3y ago
      This is the key. Reddit owns nothing except a very poorly performant app that no one wants and a very forced and shitty web experience unless you are on old.reddit.com. Its mind boggling how wrong they've been getting it for as long as they've been getting it wrong. Like how can any company/ CEO be that dense?
• chaosjevil 3y ago
  >Put those together and it's plausible that Reddit wants to go from a discussion site with cats to a cats feed site with meaningless discussion, and a bunch of ads mixed in. What the current decision makers within Reddit Inc. want is to make the site look profitable until the IPO, and then they don't care about what happens with it. Be it discussion site with cats, or cats feed with discussion, it doesn't really matter for them, as long as it looks profitable.
• dfxm12 3y ago
  Talking about human brains, issues come up when someone claims their rights are being trampled on when an AI or human (correctly or not) removes their post for not being a cat.
• Euphorbium 3y ago
  Next up, getting rid of comment trees.
  • nomel 3y ago
    What's a good alternative when more than a few people are involved in the conversation?
    • paulmd 3y ago
      multiple threads discussing different topics, or different aspects of a topic. Instead of "HUB 4090 review" where people are discussing everything about the 4090 in a single giant comment tree, you create a thread asking about the 4090's efficiency and people can discuss that one aspect. the reason we do the "one big omnithread" for everything nowadays is because we have moved to a fundamentally reactive model, where youtube opinion leaders or news articles say a thing and people react to it, most people are the metaphorical AIs who don't have any independent thoughts until prompted by an external stimulus. Actually in practice any internally-generated questions tend to be smashed down on reddit. Self-posts end up downvoted heavily. Some of that is that they're often low-quality content asking dumb shit that should have been a comment on some other related post rather than a full thread, so it's the "stupid newbie" downvote. But they also don't have anything to consume, and again, the 90-9-1 model applies. 90% of your users are readers, 10% are commenters. And actually beyond being a reader, they usually are not reading the comments either, they're reading the articles. While in fact the commenters often are the exact opposite, they don't read the article/watch the video because they're there to talk. But the fact that 90% are not there to talk, and actually they don't even care about the comments at all - that's why Reddit is pivoting. Forums discussion is a smaller niche than content drips. -- when you do a single megathread and content is moving super fast within a single thread (eg - politics debate-night threads), you have to resign yourself to not seeing every single comment in a thread, because it's literally going faster than you can read. And that's also true of reddit - you're not seeing every comments, you're seeing the top 50 comments. And if you sort by "new" it's a similarly torrential feed, and you stand no real chance of reading everything let alone replying to everything - but the "top" and "hot" and "best" sorts do a good job of surfacing the content that readers want to see, and it feels stable, so it cures that FOMO. Technically there's no reason that's not a feature you couldn't build into a forum though. Surface me a view of a thread that's only comments above 10 karma, or with more than a certain number of replies, and show me a "top threads" view of a given forum. And reply notifications are not a novel feature. but anyway, your question gets at another tangential point, which is that reddit and reddit-style models have become so dominant over the last 15 years that people literally don't know the ways to interact efficiently on web-1.0 forums anymore. People know how to work reddit, they know how to work twitter, they know how to work discord... does the average user know how to work phpBB anymore? probably not really!
• aphatankha 3y ago
  [flagged]
• newsclues 3y ago
  That future sounds like one where Reddit is just micro TV with professional channels (subreddits) and professional content producers (posters). It sounds terrible and the opposite of what made Reddit great, and therefore I think your prediction is correct.
• swarnie 3y ago
  Reddit hasn't been hands off for about 6-7 years.... A lot of the hate, racism and legally ambiguous stuff left years ago for better or worse. Kind of unhappy they left a lot of the degen fetish stuff though, that's the thing stopping me admitting to using the service in public. Now they have the lowest value user data of any social media company and are firing people from jobs they do for free (lol) to get the site working again.
  • Seattle3503 3y ago
    What degen stuff are you referencing. I found reddit allowed me to explore my sexuality and discover new things about myself. I'm glad it was never very judgemental about people's sexuality.
    • swarnie 3y ago
      I'm not going to rattle off the whole gross list but two which float to the top are all the MAP and Furry subs. Now if children and animals are your bag of chips all power to you, its just not a website ill admit to using or potentially invest in if an IPO happened.
      • Seattle3503 3y ago
        I use to be very judgemental of the furry community until I got to know some of them. I don't think most of them actually want to fuck real animals. One thing popular in those communities is the Harness Test[1]. Basically, sex is okay between indoviduals where consent is possible, which seems reasonable. If that's the case, what purpose does our judgement server? Something interesting about the furry community is that it has been welcoming to LGBTQ+ people and folks who are not neurotypical for decades. It's been a safe space for those peole. The furry community has been "ahead" of the rest of us in that regard. I think we could all learn something from them about tempering our impulse to judge with empathy and tolerance. I had to look up MAP. I'm pretty sure that is against the reddit ToS, and I've never seen it on reddit since jailbait was shut down years ago. [1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/harkness-test https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/harkness-test
• pwb25 3y ago
  The main problem is a lot of those sites started as web 2.0 platforms which should never be about deciding the content. only user generated content, but provide the platform then the last 3-5 years, they are slowly creeping towards a curated model, and with that disrespecitng their userbase
• ravenstine 3y ago
  All you have to do is look at what every other social media platform has done, which is devolve into an infinite scroll of the following: - Kitty/puppy videos - Exotic street food - girls with shorts/leggings showing buttcrack or cameltoe acting oblivious or holding a product (i.e. using ambiguous sexuality to sell something) - Someone doing some kind of weird elaborate craft as a form of spectacle - Twerking or faux-twerking dances - A person being kind to the homeless - "you won't believe" compilations of various things like near car accidents - Crazy/dangerous parkour - Some green smoothie brand targeted at young people doing yoga It's no wonder Reddit has been moving in this direction as well. People eat this shit up, they're more profitable as advertisements, require way less moderation, and are overall less of a hassle than hosting discussions.
  • Delphiza 3y ago
    ...and reviews. The amount that the market pays to inject adverts into youtube product reviews versus 'proper' content is staggering. A good guitarist is better doing a review on headphones, than actually playing a guitar. A runner is better doing a review on the latest Nikes rather than giving training advice.
    • ravenstine 3y ago
      Can't believe I forgot that one!
  • raverbashing 3y ago
    You're right about people eating this shit up of course But the question is if people will willingly remain on a Reddit which is just like Tiktok or YT shorts or Instagram, etc and has no differentiator Especially with their lousy mobile experience
    • ugjka 3y ago
      If there was a clear successor existing with a team that could scale fast, there wouldn't be a Reddit strike but a Reddit exodus. Lemmy and other garbage is not it...
• GravityisaHoax 3y ago
  >Put those together and it's plausible that Reddit wants to go from a discussion site with cats to a cats feed site with meaningless discussion, and a bunch of ads mixed in. That would align with the changes Reddit seemed to have made to their algorithm. They changed something last year that affected what posts were promoted to the top of sub. In the r/movies sub, text posts were frequently getting to the top, which is fine is these were quality posts. Spoiler: they weren't. They'd be dumb questions like "DAE think X movie is underrated" where X movie is highly rated by everyone or a cult classic, or meaningless observations like "Y movie is now 30 years old!!" as if someone just discovered how time works. In the past, most top posts were links to articles, trailers, posters, etc. Discussion naturally happened in those posts. These low effort posts did spur a lot of discussion, but none of it was new or meaningful. I think the mods are now filtering out these type of posts, because the sub is more or less back to how it used to be.
• m463 3y ago
  Make a site where nobody cares as much, by eliminating the "righteous fringe", and then settle in to make money.