41 ms·

The Truth About Reddit

89 points by followmylee 13y ago

Centigonal 13y ago
I think this article may be overstating the point through its use of the term "mainstream media" to refer to sites like the Gawker Media network. Those guys have had the same business model for upward of a decade, and the only change the rise of sites like Reddit has made to that model is that it's now even easier for them to find content to syndicate.* When The Washington Post and the New Yorker and the BBC are sourcing their big stories from Reddit -- that is when I'd be alarmed. *...err, syndicate implies paying the original content owners. Is there a word for credited and monetized reproduction of media without profit sharing?
- cerales 13y ago
  Indeed. Nice little sleight of hand where the article reference "mainstream media" and then switches to "mainstream blog media" before citing any examples.
- mindcrime 13y ago
  When The Washington Post and the New Yorker and the BBC are sourcing their big stories from Reddit -- that is when I'd be alarmed. Just because they aren't grabbing stuff straight from Reddit (or hell, maybe they are, who knows?) doesn't mean Reddit doesn't influence those outlets as well. Look at Ryan Holiday's book[1] where he talks about "trading up the chain" and how lower tier sources influence the ones just above them, who influence the ones above them, etc. It seems like it's fairly possible for something to go from reddit -> minor blog -> major blog -> small local tv station -> AP wire -> Washington Post, or something similar. Throw something on Reddit, buy a few upvotes, selectively support it with some bogus Wikipedia edits (sure, they'll be reverted eventually, but probably not until the damage is done) and submit yourself to "help" some journalists on HARO or Pitchrate and you can wreak all sorts of havoc on the news media. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_Me,_I%27m_Lying http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_Me,_I%27m_Lying
420365247 13y ago
a few years ago Reddit was a totally differant community. I think word got out and more and more people got into it and it evolved into what it has become...i still head over there once in a while, but most of the posts are not any good anyhow...reminds me of the old DIGG
- sofal 13y ago
  Well-moderated subreddits can often rival HN for more niche topics.
  - speg 13y ago
    The local subreddits for your city or sports team are great.
  - prawn 13y ago
    Plus openable and closable comment branches. Would love HN to add that...
- burntsushi 13y ago
  Eh. I absolutely agree with this analysis for the major subreddits. The ecosystem and quality of content has definitely decreased. However, I still find plenty of very high quality content in smaller subreddits. I wasn't a Digg user myself, but I suspect the subreddit aspect of reddit is the difference maker: folks seeking HQ content can stick around in the smaller corners while the more popular corners of reddit become mainstream. And here's an anecdote: over the years, I've noticed more and more of my non-technical friends becoming reddit users. But most of them seem almost oblivious to the fact that there are subreddits outside of the ones you're subscribed to by default. [EDIT] - spelling, thanks sliverstorm
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    * seeking
  - longone 13y ago
    I completely agree. Reddit, for me, would be useless without niche subreddits. There was a time when you could go to the front page and find links to some really interesting articles or videos, but these days its "guess which celebrity I met and look at the funny pose they made." Thats fine and all but just not for me. However, I can still subscribe to smaller subreddits and have good discussions with people. I'm finding the same thing with friends as well. The popularity of that site has jumped so much in the last two years or so. I feel like an old man.
nilved 13y ago
I thought this would be able the misogyny, racism and paedophilia.
- NegativeK 13y ago
  That's just the internet in general.
  - pavel_lishin 13y ago
    Just the internet?
    - wmeredith 13y ago
      People. It's made of people.
  - cerales 13y ago
    And yet reddit is corporate-owned, being hailed ITT as "the mainstream media", and there's plenty of evidence of senior Reddit moderators showing solidarity for the more criminal subreddits. Defending Reddit's dark side by comparing it to the wild world of message boards and comment sections is disingenuous: Reddit has a pervasive culture of "free speech" at all costs, and this is a consequence of it
    - voltagex_ 13y ago
      >showing solidarity for the more criminal subreddits. Like?
      - timpattinson 13y ago
        /r/picsofdeadkids /r/beatingwomen
        prawn 13y ago
        I know the original remark was "more criminal", but are these criminal or tasteless and ugly?
thoughtcriminal 13y ago
The truth about Reddit is that it's a clone of Digg, and Digg was a clone of Slashdot. Hacker News is a clone of Slashdot too. Just giving credit where credit is due.
- wslh 13y ago
  They are technical clones but not social clones. The technical part in some way is irrelevant.
  - jbooth 13y ago
    It's a mix, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message Certain commenting schemes lend themselves to "loudest retard gets most visibility" and some attempt to steer towards the opposite.
    - mtowle 13y ago
      >FIRST
- trustfundbaby 13y ago
  > The truth about Reddit is that it's a clone of Digg Categorically false http://mixergy.com/no-reddit-didnt-copy-digg-heres-how-it-was-built-with-alexis-ohanian/ http://mixergy.com/no-reddit-didnt-copy-digg-heres-how-it-wa...
ultimoo 13y ago
Most of the default subreddits could be classified not only as mainstream but also much diluted from what they were a few years ago. The way I use the site nowadays I entirely unsubscribed from most of the default subreddits. In the smaller subreddits, karma doesn't matter as much as the rest of the site, which is what makes them better IMO. YMMV though.
pavel_lishin 13y ago
> 3. If you regularly read Reddit, it makes the rest of the internet seem stale. This is absolutely true; it's actually very interesting watching a new 'meme' make its way through the internet, and then the personal, pipeline. In the morning you'll see a reddit post, in the afternoon your friends will send you links to it, and your mom will mention it to you when you call her that night. > it's not like Reddit is a major focus of corporate attention, either. And thank $DEITY - the last thing we (it) need(s) is an owner trying to exploit it for another subsidiary's benefit. On the other hand, it's been long speculated that Reddit is constantly being gamed, that corporate voting cabals are responsible for advertising content rising to the front page, and plenty of other news sources lift information without bothering to credit Reddit or its users.
- err_badprocrast 13y ago
  A lot of those memes start off at 4chan or elsewhere before arriving on Reddit. It is also gamed regularly, although I'm not sure how it compares to other popular sites. Upvotes are cheap to buy, and the type of feel-good stories that propagate are easy to mimic. Early up/down votes also have a hugely disproportionate effect, so cheating by getting friends/employees/social group to upvote your content is very effective - and has been abused blatantly enough by some companies to get banned altogether from the site.
- nhm 13y ago
  > In the morning you'll see a reddit post, in the afternoon your friends will send you links to it, and your mom will mention it to you when you call her that night. Increase that timescale to days for friends and weeks for parents, and you'll be about right.
  - jiggy2011 13y ago
    It's interesting how some nerdy phrases/memes have made their way into the mainstream. I was watching the UK Apprentice the other day and during the "boardroom" scene they were showing a group of stylish , upwardly mobile, adult business women arguing about whether or not something was an "epic fail". The term "epic fail" is a reference to an obscure neogeo game called blazing star which I doubt any of these women would ever have played.
zalzane 13y ago
>You know what? Humans, especially during times of crisis and confusion, speculate. They do it offline and, in 2013, they increasingly do it online. The fact of the matter is that one of the Boston suspects (later revealed to be Dzhokhar Tsarnaev) seen in the early grainy surveillance-video stills released by the FBI did resemble Tripathi. I dont really understand this section. Is the author trying to defend reddit's holier art thou attitude towards the world and their tendency to stick their nose in matters they shouldnt in the name of internet justice? >And Reddit actually has much better checks and balances in place -- thanks to a combination of the upvote system and moderator intervention. This is just plain false. Subreddits are not moderated by reddit employees, only by the people who founded the subreddit and whoever they choose to moderate the subreddit with them. This is why hate groups like /r/atheism and fox-news-tier biased news subreddits like /r/poltics can exist. Hell, the only visible admin-intervention I've ever heard of on reddit was when they took down the child porn reddits, and even that required -two- pieces by major news outlets on how reddit was hosting child porn. The upvote/downvote system is literally only useful for propagating viral/interesting content. Far too many people are relying on reddit as a news source nowadays, and thanks to the upvote/downvote system, all it takes is 51% disapproval for an article to virtually disappear. Since everyone uses the downvote button to say "i dont like this content" rather than "this content isnt good/isnt relevant", you get lots of wonderful skews. This is why /r/poltics has such a intense liberal bias - all it takes is a 51% of the users to disapprove of an article that supports republicans in order for the submission to disappear from view of everyone else. Imagine how horrible the news would be if an entire political viewpoint is censored just because the majority believes differently. That's news on reddit.
- lowboy 13y ago
  > Subreddits are not moderated by reddit employees, only by the people who founded the subreddit and whoever they choose to moderate the subreddit with them That's still moderation - the article didn't say that the moderation was from admins or reddit staff. Also, there are reddit-wide rules[0] that apply regardless of sub. Also, r/atheism isn't a hate group. There's plenty of asshats and the occasional hateful post, but it's not a hate group in general. Take a look at the sub[1] on any given day, and most of it isn't hateful [0]: http://www.reddit.com/rules/ http://www.reddit.com/rules/ [1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/ http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/
orangethirty 13y ago
Reddit is also a great tool for marketing and sourcing talent.
sk5t 13y ago
This was not an informative article--quite superficial unless one knows nothing about Reddit.
JoeKM 13y ago
I find subreddits that have disabled image posting to be far more insightful and interesting. Once a subreddit allows image posting it degrades to memes, unless it's properly moderated.
tokenadult 13y ago
From the submission: "Reddit's longtime tagline is 'The front page of the internet,' but it could just as easily be 'The crib sheet for weary bloggers who need to hit page-view quotas.'" Yep. I've learned mostly to tune out any incidental mention I see of such "stories" in the news-seeking methods I use. I'm not a fan of linkbait-style stories wherever they come from. "If you regularly read Reddit, it makes the rest of the internet seem stale." I don't regularly read Reddit, so I don't put the hypothesis of this statement to the test, but I find plenty of interesting things to read online without Reddit, so I think I can live without Reddit. "Simon Dumenco is the 'Media Guy' media columnist for Advertising Age." I was expecting him to explain how Reddit might actually make money to recover the large investment that went into buying out Reddit from its founders, but I see no explanation of that in the article. It's still not clear to me how Reddit can ever become anything other than a community of free-riders.
- jbooth 13y ago
  Eh. My wife reads huffington post, my co-workers read reddit, and they see the viral-of-the-day first, it's just a fact.
- alaskamiller 13y ago
  Maybe I should have wrote the article. I have a 6 year badge on Reddit. In a few more months it'll roll over to be a 7 year badge. Currently the various revenue streams: 1. Reddit Gold. Pay $3 for a month of pure margins for Reddit. In return the user gets account modifications, minor UX tweaks, ability to save links. Within the community it's often used to reward others for their posts or contributions. Often gets handed out in the larger more mainstream subreddits, especially AskReddit where the user generated content worthy of merit earn one or two or sometimes even ten little gold stars. 2. Ads. Self-service model, pay $20 and get crazy CPMs from a group of people that have adblock on. 3. Merchandise. T-shirts out the wazoo. Reddit makes $5 to $8 a shirt from official channels and various other knick knacks from redditgifts.com 4. Exchanges. You buy exchange credits to trade amongst each other in the community, things like socks, shirts, snacks. They keep exploring new verticals, now there are comics and a variety of other things. Reddit has the same problem as Tumblr. They both essentially are feeds that's replaced Facebook for a big demographics that in turn has replaced television with said feeds. Tumblr is embracing native ads, they opened an LA office to better interface with media buyers. They're shooting for the moon on closing 6 figure accounts to sell more native ads. Reddit is going the less glamorous route. We'll see who wins.
purplelobster 13y ago
Reddit's gradual decline has long ago tipped the scales. I was on reddit starting '08 I think, so I didn't see what the initial community was like, it was already fairly big by then, but nowhere near what it is today. Just a few days ago, there was this trailer on the front page, for a movie with mecha robots fighting godzillas or something, and it was just... terrible. For whatever reason, maybe to get some reassurance, I read the comments. 3000 people falling over themselves wanking over it. In disbelief I loaded more and more comments just to try and find at least one negative comment. What are these people, 17 year-olds? And then it hit me. They ARE 17 year-olds. I get it, subreddits blah blah blah, but there's no point. Sticking to subreddits destroys the sense of community which is so important for online forums. When the front page is dominated by teenagers, how long do you think others will stick to the site? Not to mention, having to log in to see your own specialized front page is a hassle when you're on many devices and don't really care enough to have an active account. Subreddit discovery is also too difficult, and then there's the whole filter bubble going on. I'd prefer a general purpose forum with higher quality people than hiding in some corner of a site dominated by teenagers. More and more, HN is filling that purpose for me, with a healthy balance of tech and non-tech. I sort of wish there was a separation between "tech" and "general" though, so that the general discussions could expand without affecting the tech side of things.
- skinnymuch 13y ago
  What movie was it? If it was Pacific Rim as it sounds like, then that reaction could make sense. Guillermo Del Toro (Hellboy, Pan's Labyrinth) is directing it. It might not be that movie though. Still, have you seen the top raved about films on HN (there was a frontpage show hn on this recently)? Pretty obvious, typical choices. And there is nothing wrong with that. I'm cool with your reddit opinions. Just weird to use comments about a movie as an example against reddit and then swing over to endorsing HN.
  - purplelobster 13y ago
    It was Pacific Rim, but regardless of director (loved Pan's Labyrinth), this movie is clearly catering to the Michael Bay mindless action crowd which, while having fans of all ages, generally are targeted at teenagers. Maybe that's disputable? Personally I don't think so... Also, it's not so much that people loved the trailer, more that it was 3000 comments of people explaining how much they "just came", and not a single critical voice. I really doubt that would be the case on HN if it had been submitted/allowed here.
cuillevel3 13y ago
Threads like these show the ongoing decline of hacker news.
- michaelwww 13y ago
  I'm not sure what criteria you are using to form this opinion. I took a look at the front page from 2 years ago and it looks about the same to me. http://web.archive.org/web/20110505135841/http://news.ycombinator.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20110505135841/http://news.ycombi...
6ren 13y ago
> state-of-the-art-circa-1998, text-centric user interface Said like it's a bad thing... reddit works great on less powerful devices, and doesn't crash my browser, unlike mainstream websites usually do (actually, almost always). Dear "Mainstream" "Print" media: 1. if it only runs on later devices, it's not mainstream, it's niche; 2. print can be done with text, it doesn't need to be pictorial, video, audio, interactive, nor assembling 20 webservices and APIs from across the universe.

89 points by followmylee 13y ago

I think this article may be overstating the point through its use of the term "mainstream media" to refer to sites like the Gawker Media network. Those guys have had the same business model for upward of a decade, and the only change the rise of sites like Reddit has made to that model is that it's now even easier for them to find content to syndicate.* When The Washington Post and the New Yorker and the BBC are sourcing their big stories from Reddit -- that is when I'd be alarmed. *...err, syndicate implies paying the original content owners. Is there a word for credited and monetized reproduction of media without profit sharing?

cerales 13y ago
Indeed. Nice little sleight of hand where the article reference "mainstream media" and then switches to "mainstream blog media" before citing any examples.
mindcrime 13y ago
When The Washington Post and the New Yorker and the BBC are sourcing their big stories from Reddit -- that is when I'd be alarmed. Just because they aren't grabbing stuff straight from Reddit (or hell, maybe they are, who knows?) doesn't mean Reddit doesn't influence those outlets as well. Look at Ryan Holiday's book[1] where he talks about "trading up the chain" and how lower tier sources influence the ones just above them, who influence the ones above them, etc. It seems like it's fairly possible for something to go from reddit -> minor blog -> major blog -> small local tv station -> AP wire -> Washington Post, or something similar. Throw something on Reddit, buy a few upvotes, selectively support it with some bogus Wikipedia edits (sure, they'll be reverted eventually, but probably not until the damage is done) and submit yourself to "help" some journalists on HARO or Pitchrate and you can wreak all sorts of havoc on the news media. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_Me,_I%27m_Lying http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_Me,_I%27m_Lying

420365247 13y ago

a few years ago Reddit was a totally differant community. I think word got out and more and more people got into it and it evolved into what it has become...i still head over there once in a while, but most of the posts are not any good anyhow...reminds me of the old DIGG

sofal 13y ago
Well-moderated subreddits can often rival HN for more niche topics.
- speg 13y ago
  The local subreddits for your city or sports team are great.
- prawn 13y ago
  Plus openable and closable comment branches. Would love HN to add that...
burntsushi 13y ago
Eh. I absolutely agree with this analysis for the major subreddits. The ecosystem and quality of content has definitely decreased. However, I still find plenty of very high quality content in smaller subreddits. I wasn't a Digg user myself, but I suspect the subreddit aspect of reddit is the difference maker: folks seeking HQ content can stick around in the smaller corners while the more popular corners of reddit become mainstream. And here's an anecdote: over the years, I've noticed more and more of my non-technical friends becoming reddit users. But most of them seem almost oblivious to the fact that there are subreddits outside of the ones you're subscribed to by default. [EDIT] - spelling, thanks sliverstorm
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  * seeking
- longone 13y ago
  I completely agree. Reddit, for me, would be useless without niche subreddits. There was a time when you could go to the front page and find links to some really interesting articles or videos, but these days its "guess which celebrity I met and look at the funny pose they made." Thats fine and all but just not for me. However, I can still subscribe to smaller subreddits and have good discussions with people. I'm finding the same thing with friends as well. The popularity of that site has jumped so much in the last two years or so. I feel like an old man.

nilved 13y ago

I thought this would be able the misogyny, racism and paedophilia.

NegativeK 13y ago
That's just the internet in general.
- pavel_lishin 13y ago
  Just the internet?
  - wmeredith 13y ago
    People. It's made of people.
- cerales 13y ago
  And yet reddit is corporate-owned, being hailed ITT as "the mainstream media", and there's plenty of evidence of senior Reddit moderators showing solidarity for the more criminal subreddits. Defending Reddit's dark side by comparing it to the wild world of message boards and comment sections is disingenuous: Reddit has a pervasive culture of "free speech" at all costs, and this is a consequence of it
  - voltagex_ 13y ago
    >showing solidarity for the more criminal subreddits. Like?
    - timpattinson 13y ago
      /r/picsofdeadkids /r/beatingwomen
      - prawn 13y ago
        I know the original remark was "more criminal", but are these criminal or tasteless and ugly?

thoughtcriminal 13y ago

The truth about Reddit is that it's a clone of Digg, and Digg was a clone of Slashdot. Hacker News is a clone of Slashdot too. Just giving credit where credit is due.

wslh 13y ago
They are technical clones but not social clones. The technical part in some way is irrelevant.
- jbooth 13y ago
  It's a mix, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message Certain commenting schemes lend themselves to "loudest retard gets most visibility" and some attempt to steer towards the opposite.
  - mtowle 13y ago
    >FIRST
trustfundbaby 13y ago
> The truth about Reddit is that it's a clone of Digg Categorically false http://mixergy.com/no-reddit-didnt-copy-digg-heres-how-it-was-built-with-alexis-ohanian/ http://mixergy.com/no-reddit-didnt-copy-digg-heres-how-it-wa...

ultimoo 13y ago

Most of the default subreddits could be classified not only as mainstream but also much diluted from what they were a few years ago. The way I use the site nowadays I entirely unsubscribed from most of the default subreddits. In the smaller subreddits, karma doesn't matter as much as the rest of the site, which is what makes them better IMO. YMMV though.

pavel_lishin 13y ago

> 3. If you regularly read Reddit, it makes the rest of the internet seem stale. This is absolutely true; it's actually very interesting watching a new 'meme' make its way through the internet, and then the personal, pipeline. In the morning you'll see a reddit post, in the afternoon your friends will send you links to it, and your mom will mention it to you when you call her that night. > it's not like Reddit is a major focus of corporate attention, either. And thank $DEITY - the last thing we (it) need(s) is an owner trying to exploit it for another subsidiary's benefit. On the other hand, it's been long speculated that Reddit is constantly being gamed, that corporate voting cabals are responsible for advertising content rising to the front page, and plenty of other news sources lift information without bothering to credit Reddit or its users.

err_badprocrast 13y ago
A lot of those memes start off at 4chan or elsewhere before arriving on Reddit. It is also gamed regularly, although I'm not sure how it compares to other popular sites. Upvotes are cheap to buy, and the type of feel-good stories that propagate are easy to mimic. Early up/down votes also have a hugely disproportionate effect, so cheating by getting friends/employees/social group to upvote your content is very effective - and has been abused blatantly enough by some companies to get banned altogether from the site.
nhm 13y ago
> In the morning you'll see a reddit post, in the afternoon your friends will send you links to it, and your mom will mention it to you when you call her that night. Increase that timescale to days for friends and weeks for parents, and you'll be about right.
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  It's interesting how some nerdy phrases/memes have made their way into the mainstream. I was watching the UK Apprentice the other day and during the "boardroom" scene they were showing a group of stylish , upwardly mobile, adult business women arguing about whether or not something was an "epic fail". The term "epic fail" is a reference to an obscure neogeo game called blazing star which I doubt any of these women would ever have played.

zalzane 13y ago

>You know what? Humans, especially during times of crisis and confusion, speculate. They do it offline and, in 2013, they increasingly do it online. The fact of the matter is that one of the Boston suspects (later revealed to be Dzhokhar Tsarnaev) seen in the early grainy surveillance-video stills released by the FBI did resemble Tripathi. I dont really understand this section. Is the author trying to defend reddit's holier art thou attitude towards the world and their tendency to stick their nose in matters they shouldnt in the name of internet justice? >And Reddit actually has much better checks and balances in place -- thanks to a combination of the upvote system and moderator intervention. This is just plain false. Subreddits are not moderated by reddit employees, only by the people who founded the subreddit and whoever they choose to moderate the subreddit with them. This is why hate groups like /r/atheism and fox-news-tier biased news subreddits like /r/poltics can exist. Hell, the only visible admin-intervention I've ever heard of on reddit was when they took down the child porn reddits, and even that required -two- pieces by major news outlets on how reddit was hosting child porn. The upvote/downvote system is literally only useful for propagating viral/interesting content. Far too many people are relying on reddit as a news source nowadays, and thanks to the upvote/downvote system, all it takes is 51% disapproval for an article to virtually disappear. Since everyone uses the downvote button to say "i dont like this content" rather than "this content isnt good/isnt relevant", you get lots of wonderful skews. This is why /r/poltics has such a intense liberal bias - all it takes is a 51% of the users to disapprove of an article that supports republicans in order for the submission to disappear from view of everyone else. Imagine how horrible the news would be if an entire political viewpoint is censored just because the majority believes differently. That's news on reddit.

lowboy 13y ago
> Subreddits are not moderated by reddit employees, only by the people who founded the subreddit and whoever they choose to moderate the subreddit with them That's still moderation - the article didn't say that the moderation was from admins or reddit staff. Also, there are reddit-wide rules[0] that apply regardless of sub. Also, r/atheism isn't a hate group. There's plenty of asshats and the occasional hateful post, but it's not a hate group in general. Take a look at the sub[1] on any given day, and most of it isn't hateful [0]: http://www.reddit.com/rules/ http://www.reddit.com/rules/ [1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/ http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/

orangethirty 13y ago

Reddit is also a great tool for marketing and sourcing talent.

sk5t 13y ago

This was not an informative article--quite superficial unless one knows nothing about Reddit.

JoeKM 13y ago

I find subreddits that have disabled image posting to be far more insightful and interesting. Once a subreddit allows image posting it degrades to memes, unless it's properly moderated.

tokenadult 13y ago

From the submission: "Reddit's longtime tagline is 'The front page of the internet,' but it could just as easily be 'The crib sheet for weary bloggers who need to hit page-view quotas.'" Yep. I've learned mostly to tune out any incidental mention I see of such "stories" in the news-seeking methods I use. I'm not a fan of linkbait-style stories wherever they come from. "If you regularly read Reddit, it makes the rest of the internet seem stale." I don't regularly read Reddit, so I don't put the hypothesis of this statement to the test, but I find plenty of interesting things to read online without Reddit, so I think I can live without Reddit. "Simon Dumenco is the 'Media Guy' media columnist for Advertising Age." I was expecting him to explain how Reddit might actually make money to recover the large investment that went into buying out Reddit from its founders, but I see no explanation of that in the article. It's still not clear to me how Reddit can ever become anything other than a community of free-riders.

jbooth 13y ago
Eh. My wife reads huffington post, my co-workers read reddit, and they see the viral-of-the-day first, it's just a fact.
alaskamiller 13y ago
Maybe I should have wrote the article. I have a 6 year badge on Reddit. In a few more months it'll roll over to be a 7 year badge. Currently the various revenue streams: 1. Reddit Gold. Pay $3 for a month of pure margins for Reddit. In return the user gets account modifications, minor UX tweaks, ability to save links. Within the community it's often used to reward others for their posts or contributions. Often gets handed out in the larger more mainstream subreddits, especially AskReddit where the user generated content worthy of merit earn one or two or sometimes even ten little gold stars. 2. Ads. Self-service model, pay $20 and get crazy CPMs from a group of people that have adblock on. 3. Merchandise. T-shirts out the wazoo. Reddit makes $5 to $8 a shirt from official channels and various other knick knacks from redditgifts.com 4. Exchanges. You buy exchange credits to trade amongst each other in the community, things like socks, shirts, snacks. They keep exploring new verticals, now there are comics and a variety of other things. Reddit has the same problem as Tumblr. They both essentially are feeds that's replaced Facebook for a big demographics that in turn has replaced television with said feeds. Tumblr is embracing native ads, they opened an LA office to better interface with media buyers. They're shooting for the moon on closing 6 figure accounts to sell more native ads. Reddit is going the less glamorous route. We'll see who wins.

purplelobster 13y ago

Reddit's gradual decline has long ago tipped the scales. I was on reddit starting '08 I think, so I didn't see what the initial community was like, it was already fairly big by then, but nowhere near what it is today. Just a few days ago, there was this trailer on the front page, for a movie with mecha robots fighting godzillas or something, and it was just... terrible. For whatever reason, maybe to get some reassurance, I read the comments. 3000 people falling over themselves wanking over it. In disbelief I loaded more and more comments just to try and find at least one negative comment. What are these people, 17 year-olds? And then it hit me. They ARE 17 year-olds. I get it, subreddits blah blah blah, but there's no point. Sticking to subreddits destroys the sense of community which is so important for online forums. When the front page is dominated by teenagers, how long do you think others will stick to the site? Not to mention, having to log in to see your own specialized front page is a hassle when you're on many devices and don't really care enough to have an active account. Subreddit discovery is also too difficult, and then there's the whole filter bubble going on. I'd prefer a general purpose forum with higher quality people than hiding in some corner of a site dominated by teenagers. More and more, HN is filling that purpose for me, with a healthy balance of tech and non-tech. I sort of wish there was a separation between "tech" and "general" though, so that the general discussions could expand without affecting the tech side of things.

skinnymuch 13y ago
What movie was it? If it was Pacific Rim as it sounds like, then that reaction could make sense. Guillermo Del Toro (Hellboy, Pan's Labyrinth) is directing it. It might not be that movie though. Still, have you seen the top raved about films on HN (there was a frontpage show hn on this recently)? Pretty obvious, typical choices. And there is nothing wrong with that. I'm cool with your reddit opinions. Just weird to use comments about a movie as an example against reddit and then swing over to endorsing HN.
- purplelobster 13y ago
  It was Pacific Rim, but regardless of director (loved Pan's Labyrinth), this movie is clearly catering to the Michael Bay mindless action crowd which, while having fans of all ages, generally are targeted at teenagers. Maybe that's disputable? Personally I don't think so... Also, it's not so much that people loved the trailer, more that it was 3000 comments of people explaining how much they "just came", and not a single critical voice. I really doubt that would be the case on HN if it had been submitted/allowed here.

cuillevel3 13y ago

Threads like these show the ongoing decline of hacker news.

michaelwww 13y ago
I'm not sure what criteria you are using to form this opinion. I took a look at the front page from 2 years ago and it looks about the same to me. http://web.archive.org/web/20110505135841/http://news.ycombinator.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20110505135841/http://news.ycombi...

6ren 13y ago

> state-of-the-art-circa-1998, text-centric user interface Said like it's a bad thing... reddit works great on less powerful devices, and doesn't crash my browser, unlike mainstream websites usually do (actually, almost always). Dear "Mainstream" "Print" media: 1. if it only runs on later devices, it's not mainstream, it's niche; 2. print can be done with text, it doesn't need to be pictorial, video, audio, interactive, nor assembling 20 webservices and APIs from across the universe.