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Someone said they want Reddit to have 1 billion users. That's nonsense! Just imagine if you wanted to drive HN into high-growth mode. It would kill everythin

by seiji 11y ago

Someone said they want Reddit to have 1 billion users. That's nonsense! Just imagine if you wanted to drive HN into high-growth mode. It would kill everything here. If you take a community site (and Reddit is a community site, not a society site) and add people not in the same community mindset, you end up with twitter trending topic nonsense of six million middle school girls yelling for attention at boy bands. People use Reddit (and HN) to get away from the bulk of the world, not to have the bulk of the world join them on their private anonymous message boards too. Basically, Reddit can't massively grow without fundamentally changing it. At the core, it's just an online message board. Those have limited TAM based on topic+culture of the entire site. If you want a billion users, you don't have Reddit, you have ReddTwitBook+. Source: used to work for a VC-funded niche online message board site that was unable to grow no matter what they tried. same pattern: promises of growth, no growth, management changes, promises of growth, no growth, etc.

dimino 11y ago
Reddit is a community hosting site, according to some recent PR I read, so the idea is that, unlike HN or Twitter, you can create your own "Reddit", where you're part of 15-20 small HN-like communities. HN could be on Reddit, for example (in theory). In fact, that might be a good exercise -- what tools would have to be added to Reddit to emulate the HN experience for any given subreddit? This place is fairly heavily moderated by a vetted and trusted team put in place by PG himself, for example -- how do you emulate that level of quality in a moderator group, and then multiply it by the 10k or so subreddits? Maybe there's a way to get a slightly lower quality moderator that scales better, or something. A Reddit user's "workflow" hasn't significantly changed in the past 8 or 9 years. Maybe that's the problem.
- seiji 11y ago
  where you're part of 15-20 small HN-like communities. That's the problem though, right? The goal is to have one place to go. That's why posts on HN get read by billionaires and people living in homeless shelters—there's one source of "what's hot right now" ranked on the front page. If you bifurcate your topics into 100 narrowly focused interest areas everybody individually subscribes around, you lose the inherent usefulness of being exposed to new topics you wouldn't have otherwise found. (it also provides a common social context around "did you see X today?" — you want to be part of the in crowd, so needs to see the same thing, and the same thing everybody sees has to be marginally useful/relevant) In order to drive that communal "new things we all care about" feeling, you need a (loosely) coherent community, not just being surrounded by everybody who visits the DMV this month.
  - dimino 11y ago
    Well, functionally, that's the experience you get from Reddit via the "front page" -- all your little communities show up together, showing you what's "new". Of course, the problem is now that those "little communities" have 3-4 million people in them, and are basically large cities.
    - seiji 11y ago
      The overall readership size isn't of great concern (the more the merrier), but it breaks down when people start interacting at scale. It breaks down when posts start getting thousands of upvotes or tens of thousands of comments. At that point, why bother? Depending on where you step in Reddit, it's either steeped in a common shock culture (relate everything back to racism, sexism, nazis, 4chan dirty memes, ...) or just friendly nonsense. You never know what will show up where. All this has happened before, all this will happen again. http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html — http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/ http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-... You have to fit your thinking to fit the social masses because you can't manipulate the masses enough to fit your clever business model (unless you can demand monopolistic lock-in to force behavior).
- steveklabnik 11y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews
  - jbob2000 11y ago
    Wow, I might start reading this instead. I can actually comment there (and also submit multiple comments within a reasonable time frame!)
  - dimino 11y ago
    jbob2000 you're shadowbanned and your comments don't show up for most users.
vdnkh 11y ago
>People use Reddit (and HN) to get away from the bulk of the world, not to have the bulk of the world join them on their private anonymous message boards too. Actually, I think of it as the opposite. I go to Reddit to get the bulk, and other, more anonymous message boards to get away from it. Reddit is hardly anonymous (or private) - it's not attached to your real being, but you're definitely a well-documented member of their society. >Basically, Reddit can't massively grow without fundamentally changing it. I honestly do not want to be a part of a "massive-growth" or monetized Reddit. Growth is organic; attempts to inject artificial hormones into the site comes with a sacrifice. I believe that sacrifice is diversity and uniqueness, since knowing how to grow requires you to know what exactly your're growing, and it's hard to understand complex objects. So the leadership creates more rules, more restrictions on freedom in order to get a grasp on it. As a result, content becomes stale, groupthink rules, and the site looses its appeal.

by seiji 11y ago

dimino 11y ago

Reddit is a community hosting site, according to some recent PR I read, so the idea is that, unlike HN or Twitter, you can create your own "Reddit", where you're part of 15-20 small HN-like communities. HN could be on Reddit, for example (in theory). In fact, that might be a good exercise -- what tools would have to be added to Reddit to emulate the HN experience for any given subreddit? This place is fairly heavily moderated by a vetted and trusted team put in place by PG himself, for example -- how do you emulate that level of quality in a moderator group, and then multiply it by the 10k or so subreddits? Maybe there's a way to get a slightly lower quality moderator that scales better, or something. A Reddit user's "workflow" hasn't significantly changed in the past 8 or 9 years. Maybe that's the problem.

seiji 11y ago
where you're part of 15-20 small HN-like communities. That's the problem though, right? The goal is to have one place to go. That's why posts on HN get read by billionaires and people living in homeless shelters—there's one source of "what's hot right now" ranked on the front page. If you bifurcate your topics into 100 narrowly focused interest areas everybody individually subscribes around, you lose the inherent usefulness of being exposed to new topics you wouldn't have otherwise found. (it also provides a common social context around "did you see X today?" — you want to be part of the in crowd, so needs to see the same thing, and the same thing everybody sees has to be marginally useful/relevant) In order to drive that communal "new things we all care about" feeling, you need a (loosely) coherent community, not just being surrounded by everybody who visits the DMV this month.
- dimino 11y ago
  Well, functionally, that's the experience you get from Reddit via the "front page" -- all your little communities show up together, showing you what's "new". Of course, the problem is now that those "little communities" have 3-4 million people in them, and are basically large cities.
  - seiji 11y ago
    The overall readership size isn't of great concern (the more the merrier), but it breaks down when people start interacting at scale. It breaks down when posts start getting thousands of upvotes or tens of thousands of comments. At that point, why bother? Depending on where you step in Reddit, it's either steeped in a common shock culture (relate everything back to racism, sexism, nazis, 4chan dirty memes, ...) or just friendly nonsense. You never know what will show up where. All this has happened before, all this will happen again. http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html — http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/ http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-... You have to fit your thinking to fit the social masses because you can't manipulate the masses enough to fit your clever business model (unless you can demand monopolistic lock-in to force behavior).
steveklabnik 11y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews
- jbob2000 11y ago
  Wow, I might start reading this instead. I can actually comment there (and also submit multiple comments within a reasonable time frame!)
- dimino 11y ago
  jbob2000 you're shadowbanned and your comments don't show up for most users.

vdnkh 11y ago

>People use Reddit (and HN) to get away from the bulk of the world, not to have the bulk of the world join them on their private anonymous message boards too. Actually, I think of it as the opposite. I go to Reddit to get the bulk, and other, more anonymous message boards to get away from it. Reddit is hardly anonymous (or private) - it's not attached to your real being, but you're definitely a well-documented member of their society. >Basically, Reddit can't massively grow without fundamentally changing it. I honestly do not want to be a part of a "massive-growth" or monetized Reddit. Growth is organic; attempts to inject artificial hormones into the site comes with a sacrifice. I believe that sacrifice is diversity and uniqueness, since knowing how to grow requires you to know what exactly your're growing, and it's hard to understand complex objects. So the leadership creates more rules, more restrictions on freedom in order to get a grasp on it. As a result, content becomes stale, groupthink rules, and the site looses its appeal.