The Reddit of 2006 where tutorials on generating HTML in Lisp rocket to the top of the homepage is long gone. I can't imagine investing in an ad company that is fueled by clickbait and outrage the way Reddit is. Plus, some percentage of the userbase will always run aggressive ad blockers and be impossible to effectvely monetize. However, my brain works very differently from other people's, so I could be wrong.
My personal last strands of hope for Reddit are - their API which is still available to public without hoops to jump through. The downvote button. And the usabillity of old.reddit. Some communities that are still well moderated and strikes a good balance between open to questions and not open to stupid questions.
Beyond that I stopped using mainstream reddit as a value source.
This is a moral conundrum. Yes, some of the smaller sub-reddits are good, but by participating, you legitimize the conflict/fakenews/horrorshow that is the main website. It's like saying you enjoy the trains running on time in Nazi Germany whilst ignoring the rest of what the regime is.
Is Snopes having a hard time with money? The article (on mobile) had two huge full-width ads that you had to scroll past, and a persistent banner ad at the bottom, and they're still asking for donations:
But the page isn't covered in user-hostile ads that rely on intensive surveillance and sharing your personal data with dozens of shady companies.
Edit: Your comment really bothers me. At no point did I suggest that websites should not ask their users for money. I was wondering about and criticizing their apparently heavy use of user-abusive ads, while still asking users directly for money. Usually on the Web we see one or the other but not both.
I sorry to disturb you. It was not my intent. I just disagree about the seriousness of the ads displayed in your example. An ad for Whisky and/or Walgreens(a pharmacy) don't seem too bad compared to other ads I have seen.
Snopes probably gets a lot of bandwidth (and probably attacks) just due to them being very mainstream.
Those smaller communities will realize (mostly too late) that they've built themselves on a platform that can't be trusted and one day will probably not be archivable.
It's really too bad that the StackExchange "OpenID" thing never went anywhere. Otherwise we'd get the same kind of "one login, many communities" benefits of Reddit without forcing everyone to use a centralized platform like Reddit (even if authentication is still centralized in OpenID).
It's not a moral conundrum, and reddit is nothing like a genocidal fascist government.
There are times when I argue that "apps" or sites must be thought of differently than the Internet itself, but this is not one of them. Reddit has no monopoly on hobby chat, or on tiktok garbage, or on local communities, or on news commentary. It is not the same kind of network-effect trap as, say, Facebook.
If ever someone asks me about reddit or if it's useful, I say to stay off any community greater than about 100-150k. Use it for discussing specific video games or hobbies, or on tightly moderated subs with focused discussion.
If any sub has posts from "karma farmers", accounts with super high karma like 500k or more, then it's probably a place worth being suspicious of from either a utility OR an astroturfing standpoint. Lots of agenda-pushing.
Are you sure you don't want to veer into /r/popular.
/r/Askwomen: What are 100% effective ways at turning you on?
/r/Teenagers: Every1 who wears their PJs to bed, I'll tell you your favourite band.
/r/ <<literally every subreddit>>: I HAVE A CAT, NAME IT FOR ME.
/r/NoStupidQuestions: If a woman shakes my hand is that code for sex?
/r/Askmen: What's your one perfect way to get a girlfriend?
/r/Pics: Here's 10,000 photos of people being gross on airplanes, what's something passive aggressive that I can do instead of just asking them to stop?
/r/Antiwork: I donated my heart to my boss and he fired me
/r/TooAfraidtoask: How to get girlfriend????
/r/explainlikeimfive: Do girls get horny too? how?
I use reddit all the time and look at none of these things. Despite some obnoxious or downright terrible subs, it's still a useful or entertaining site for folks of many interests.
There’s a lot of kids and teens on Reddit. I’m glad I was a teen on the Internet in the walled garden of AOL, so all the dumb and hormone-driven things I said there are probably lost on a hard drive in a landfill somewhere.
I'm glad to be part of the pre-internet generation where the limit to our cringe is a fleeting feeling of embarrassment while hazily remembering it, rather than having it played back in high definition at some inopportune moment.
I think as adults we should be able to recognize that we all went through this and look at it with a little compassion and understanding instead of holding it up for ridicule. As you say, people will feel embarrassed about it enough in the future.
/r/pics: Blatant political grandstanding mixed in with images meant to be evocative and establish mental association. Here's a smiling photo of Obama. Remember Obama? Picture of rednecks in pickup trucks with Trump flags, next to a photo of Taliban in trucks with flags.
/r/politics: wanton hyperbole, plain and simple.
"Screenshots of Tweets" Subreddits
/r/Antiwork: Literally every problem, shortcoming, or thing you don't like is ultimately because of capitalism.
/r/LateStageCapitalism: Same as above, but we need at least two subreddits about this to really hammer the point home.
/r/WhitePeopleTwitter: Leftist hot-takes du jour, as well as well-trodden reposts.
/r/BlackPeopleTwitter: Leftist hot-takes but posted by 'verified' reddit users.
/r/MurderedByWords: Tomi Lahren and Strawmen being mocked via tweet
/r/MurderedByAOC: Pretty much any AOC tweet posted by u/IrlOurPresident
/r/AOC: Just in case you haven't seen u/IrlOurPresident's post on the front page yet.
The new largest share holders will likely coerce the removal of all three along with any other vestigial remnant that is enjoyable and is still maintained in the name of eventually maximizing their profits. For me the biggest loss will probably be when the board of directors demand that the RSS feeds stop working.
Tencent was/is big on funding Reddit. Around the time they soaked $150m, privacy policy has changed, some functionalities were added that do not work on old.reddit w/o JS, www.reddit started resembling other social media sites and the site became more profit-oriented and - for me - user-hostile.
Reddit Sync is amazing and so is Apollo. The official app feels too much like tiktok. But Reddit doesn't get any ad revenue from the third party apps, so I wonder if they're really going to last that long.
Anyone on an iOS device using Reddit that doesn't have this application is missing out.
I've said it before, but old.reddit.com and Apollo are the only methods I use to browse the site. If either dies or the API becomes private/non-existent then I'm out.
I just checked: the API does not (seem to) allow to retrieve items by date. Which means that a major fault of the site cannot be fixed through the API: reading the post history through random access, e.g. the posts of a specific date in a section.
(Although, one could probably harvest through the API an index of "fullnames" (IDs) and associate them to their dates or use them directly for random access in the queries - "list starting with the newest, fill DB of IDs and give me the last; list from that last, fill DB of IDs and give me the new last; loop until end". Not really the most practical way to use a repository.)
> downvote
The worst attack against civilization after - (I can't think of anything) - is an encouragement to vote according to "how does that make you feel".
if facebook can maintain mbasic, then reddit can maintain old. the onboarding funnel is towards new reddit anyway, old is mature and _appears_ stable, and most folks new to the platform will use their official app.
i can see the API becoming more restrictive in the coming years, like Facebook and Twitter’s before it.
The fabricated issues with old are starting to appear, though.
Slow reddit now supports markdown code blocks with 3 `’s instead of 4 spaces, which gets rendered as normal inline-text on old.
Using the editor to insert links with _ in them on slow, will escape the underscores (…/this_is/ => …/this\_is/), breaking the links for users of the fast version.
The worst part (for me) is, that I actually like the new reddit. In compact mode it’s cleaner than old while not wasting any space compared to old. But sadly their performance targets were something like "Uh, I guess pages should probably load in under 500ms" which is in no way acceptable for me.
I don’t care much about mobile, and even if I didn’t have a gif-animation-blocker extension installed, it wouldn’t be that much of an issue as they barely get used in the subreddits I read in ;)
I honestly don't know how people use new Reddit. On my 2017 laptop with a quadcore i7, SSD, and 16GB RAM, using Ubuntu 16.04 and either Chrome or Firefox, and with a 100Mb/s fiber connection, it just loads glacially slow and causes my fans to come on at full speed. And that's just with a single tab - with Reddit I usually end up scrolling through and opening quite a few tabs.
If they kill off old Reddit, there's no way I'll be able to tolerate using the site. Surely I'm not alone in this, or perhaps 99% of the traffic is mobile users on recent phones?
I personally wouldn't invest in Reddit, those with a memory longer than a few weeks will note that they go from one self-induced crisis to the next.
Their upper management is directionless and the result of battlefield promotions and they've demonstrated time and time again that they have no vision for the service.
Reddit exists in the same way that digg and slashdot before it has: it's the incumbent, the default choice. It could lose it all in a year and no one would be surprised - because it's happened multiple times already and the userbase is already highly cynical.
That wasn't helped by making the site unusable on mobile; a change made to entice (read: force) users to the more lucrative app. However this merely led people to alternatives such as Apollo, which remove the ads, the reddit value-generating nonsense and introduces useful features such as the ability to download video content. Perhaps counter-intuitively these kinds of apps are likely to keep users on reddit. However with an IPO I would not be surprised to see Reddit pull 'an Instagram' and invest efforts in preventing 3rd party apps from functioning correctly.
I recently noticed the same posts popping up and they contained the exact same comments but instead of the comment saying 1month old it would say like 3 hours. I asked and some suggested it is karma farmers and they use the same posts and same comments that generated a lot of likes in the past to get karma and once they have a lot of karma their posts are more likely to hit the front page. I wish I could block posts from reappearing but they just slap a new title and don’t show a proper thumbnail and trick users to watch it again.
Last time I read /r/funny for a period I noticed a wave of "look at what funny thing I did with these Coke bottles" posts that were so obviously part of a marketing campaign that surely reddit admins noticed it too.
I don't think they would allow that if they weren't in on it. In that case they may have even helped with the upvotes so no external service where you can easily buy votes (easily found through Google, [1]) would have been needed.
(top three search results when I googled "buy reddit votes")
Surely, given how visible such services are, monetizing reddit buy selling upvotes would be one of the first things anyone wanting to monetize reddit comes up with. The only difference to the 3rd party vote sellers is that they will have to hide it better and/or find justifications because the company itself doing it causes a bit more outrage.
I also don't think the more niche sub reddits will be (are?) safe. Anyone who wants to sell something more specialized has a target audience much better than anything Facebook can create by selecting the right subreddit, because the audience is self-selecting. Same as for the Coke campaign, since it's hard too hide what's going on from the admins they could stop much of that, so paying reddit to have your posts even boosted by them is safest for any marketer.
There's actually a good incentive for moderators to be in on this, as they aren't paid by reddit for their (in sometimes massive) unpaid labour. If a marketing company comes along and says, 'hey, you've done this so long, don't you think you should deserve some money? just let us run our campaign on your subreddit and we'll pay you!' quite a few moderators would agree. Admins might not notice.
They might not have noticed a few isolated cases, but they sure would have noticed the phenomenon as such by now. The company would have an even bigger incentive now to try to get such monetization for themselves instead of letting others make the money with their site.
Reddit to me is the kind of thing where monetization methods feel like they run counter to what I consider the main value of the website is. People visit because of the communities, but advertisements and astroturfing erodes that by making the communities more and more inauthentic. The problem is that advertising is where the money is, they aren't going to survive on reddit golds. So it seems like the path they have been on for the past decade has been to both grow enough and change their demographics such that the majority of their demographic is less discerning to advertisements and astroturfing, and to generate engagement through communities that enable that sort of advertisement.
Now I suspect they are trying to transition towards somehow deriving value as a hub for what are now cult like communities that stan and provide PR for powerful groups like various corporations, media conglomerates, sporting leagues and franchises, political ideologies and so on. Those are the communities that feed off drama and hype that social media has learned will drive the most engagement. They sprinkle it in with other innocuous things like cute pets or viral tik tok reposts (and the other subreddits that are actually very good) to make it not seem as egregious as it really is and hope that most people continue to believe that it is the same organic "front page of the internet" that it had become ever since Digg decided to kill itself many years ago.
Much like almost everything else from that time, they simply just outgrew and replaced their core demographic with a group that are much easier to exploit.
I agree with you in the context of ads, but I do wonder if they could monetise these communities in a more high-value way which plays into their primary purpose.
For instance, I am a member of /r/synthesizers, but all trading/buying happens on eBay or reverb.com. Can reddit provide the way for this community to transact in a more high-value/trusted way? Maybe I'm missing something and that is a terrible business.
Main downside is this they already have you as a customer. A lot of these efforts are buffoonish and try to sell you shoes/eyeglasses/appliances after you just bought what you wanted from them.
High value honest and transparent ads can work, like say "Will it blend" or providing field related instructions good enough to essentially be the canon to say synthesier configuration and maintenance.
That is hard and bespoke. Meanwhile crap ads are very easy and adaptable. So long as there is a positive return being a menace or nuisance to the commons can pay. As spam infamously shows.
>Much like almost everything else from that time, they simply just outgrew and replaced their core demographic with a group that are much easier to exploit.
I assume they found much more insular communities either in the form of obscure subreddits or other communities (like here for example). It might not be the case of them actually leaving, it is just that for every user like that, there are 10000 new users who came from some place like facebook.
Ok I’ll bite. How would you fix Reddit? I have been using online forums for the past 20+ years and I know what you mean about communities like Reddit going from nerd heavy topics to primarily being the free advertising platform for onlyfans accounts and political hacks. But how would Reddit at this point stuff the genie back into the bottle?
For that matter, if you don’t believe in Reddit’s long term success, there are both investment opportunities and opportunities to build something better.
- Reddit should not be a company to grow 1000x & exit with all employees being millionaires, it should earn enough to pay the staff hefty six fig salaries and that's enough
- Stop being like quora and restricting content if you're not logged in
- fix the video player on the new site
- support the native video player on the old site & polls
- remove the supermod system, where senior mods control half the site, old mods should not be able to invite new mods past a certain point but they'll just create sockpuppet accounts so
- remove more subreddits from the default list
- remove the "influencer" aspects of the site. People don't need a profile with a custom picture, don't need to post to their /u/ board when they should be posting on a subreddit.
- go back to reddit gold, get rid of the 50+ awards
- custom comment backgrounds from certain awards are fine, let people purchase colored borders or something
- go back to showing the progress bar for how close the site is to earning enough to pay for servers that day from gold purchases
- when you end up hiring extremely controversial staff, avoid auto deleting criticism about them
- don't edit other user's comments
- integrate more of RES's features into reddit
- bring back live threads
- RPAN is a fine way to try to introduce more social stuff (imagine r/games hosting a pov stream of blizzcon) but the current users are weird
- bring back AMAs with famous people, not B or C list actors that are promoting their new book (so bring back someone in Victoria's role)
- get rid of the moon currency feature
- encourage mods to delete threads with inaccurate titles / clickbait until a link is submitted with an accurate name
> - remove the "influencer" aspects of the site. People don't need a profile with a custom picture, don't need to post to their /u/ board when they should be posting on a reddit reddit.
I think this was added for the OnlyFans pipeline. There is a massive porn community on Reddit, and the entirety of it thrives on this feature. Whether either of us want that, Reddit's decided it is a good and reliable monetary way forward.
It's rare that Reddit bans nsfw content, the only major porn ban I'm aware of is r/jailbait and that one was banned for very good reasons. r/TheFappening and r/creepshots weren't porn but sexual exploitation.
In any case, these three bans were many years ago.
Reddit has more recently banned NSFW subreddits that were considered excessively violent (/r/struggleporn) or pedophilic (/r/ageplaypenpals, which was just text based).
> Reddit should not be a company to grow 1000x & exit with all employees being millionaires, it should earn enough to pay the staff hefty six fig salaries and that's enough
Investors(which includes VCs/angels,etc. AND employees) should be rewarded, whether that's the risk they take (ex. VCs) or the work they put in (employees). I'm confused where this viewpoint came from, given every business works this way -- a company gets investments (either through money or employee time) and if that business grows, so do the investments...
They don't mean that it should never happen, they mean that given the growth prospects of Reddit they should just become a regular business instead of continuing to try to get a VC return.
VC investors indeed try to get VC returns but sometimes their bets fail and that's part of their portfolio theory.
The early investors have definitely done well already.
I personally think the fix is to let it be separate communities; kill/deemphasize the "all" feed, emphasize separate subreddits, and make it easy for users to curate what they see. The problem, of course, it that this runs counter to maximizing engagement.
You should still have a front page, but there's nothing but the subreddits you opt in to. All I want to kill is the site pushing content at you that you didn't explicitly ask for.
It is very easy to use reddit that way. I use it multiple times a day and only ever visit the subreddits I have subscribed to, and that's all that appears on my main page.
I didn't see where he said it could be fixed. You are right when you draw comparison to the genie out of the bottle. Online communities evolve and it's one way. You can't "fix" them, you can only move to new and different ones.
Just like real life social scenes, or city neighborhoods, too, now that I think about it.
When Reddit became a sanitized social media platform rather than a free speech platform, it brought in a swathe of users who liked the sanitized social media platform, so you can't undo it.
I'm not aware of instances where people join a community BECAUSE they banned something. There's plenty of evidence for the reverse, such as when the removal of fat people hate and other subs led to an exodus to Voat.
Split the site. Forums were good because they had culture. Reddit’s subreddits leak into other ones. They will split it to one that is NSFW and SFW soon for advertising reasons.
Make a minimum requirement of 1000 characters, all spammers evaders are banned.
Make blocking hide the person you blocked’s posts.
Bring back visible downvotes.
Ban politics. It will not actually work and they’ll do it covertly but it would significantly improve the site.
Ban abusive mods. If some no life power tripper is being an asshole or bans you for posting in another sub, fuck them.
Shut it down. It’s toxic and shouldn’t be fixed. It’s perpetuating a echo chamber, slippery slope. All echoed ideas are bad as they discourage critical independent thought.
you know an odd realization I've had lately is that "discoverability" is a two edged sword, communities with their unique flavor built over time are great, however there comes a time when some place (in online or meat space) becomes too "popular" and the stories about the place start taking over the actual environment and behavior of the place, which then draws people expecting the story... basically a feedback loop.
there's a chance I think, that creating more "obscure" spaces might actually be the better option for preserving these kinds of communities, or at least letting them thrive more easily, reddit survived this long I think by being slightly difficult to navigate and having weird communities that could self police and there are still spots on there I enjoy, but none I really socialize in the way I originally did on finding the site.. anyways those are just musings and not really helpful to the question of how to fix it, just more of why I think it's broken...
They messed up when they made sub-reddits. Sub-reddits are a harmful combination of community and content. Popular content becomes a huge community, and all of the issues based on Dunbar's number happen as a result, which includes abuse of powers from the admins. Instead of using sub-reddits for content you should have tags. Communities should never be bigger than 150 people, and should not be limited to a single idea, in much the same way that Hacker News is aligned generally towards hackers. You would then build up communities of communities, where you would be beholden to your own community and the communities could only moderate outside of their community at the community level.
From there you only have to do a decent job like TikTok has done of content discovery to allow new content to thrive, and from comments on that content allow people to find better communities.
If another community is mis-filing tags, your community can apply moderation against their community such that your community does not use their tags.
The other way to do this is to have just as good support for +tags in queries as -tags in queries. When adding a tag for no reason is making it less visible to the people who are filtering out that tag, they stop doing it.
This is a bad take. You are asking for the forum and sub forum/tag approach. A community that small will simply not be engaged with frequently enough to avoid seeming “abandoned”. This is exactly the set of circumstances that led to content aggregation sites like Reddit.
Sub-forums are a usability nightmare, but reddit already solved the sub-forum issue. You would be showed content in a flattened manner, but in the hierarchy where the closest to you is shown first.
My personal opinion is that large, impersonal online communities which use voting systems are doomed to become toxic echo chambers run by people who dedicate the time and resources to do so(and therefore participate less in the "real world"). I may be biased because I'm old and grew up with a large part of my social experience as a kid coming from BBSes.
Get rid of the current moderators and pay professionals. Automate the universal rules and use these folks to steer content back to when it was most meaningful. Also dedicate as many resources as possible to identify and prevent astroturfing and shills.
Ok, one of my favorite subreddits is about an specific American book series based on a modern genre of Chinese fiction. Do you think that Reddit can scale to manage that kind of content without volunteer mods?
It's the same thing as people used to say about Wikipedia. Oh, they shouldn't take volunteers and just pay for encyclopedia editors. But if you want content at scale, you need to provide power to people so they can say what they want, and they are going to abuse it. But the alternative as never worked, and in fact, people get really mad here when people try to implement the alternative.
Those tutorials can still rocket to the top of YOUR homepage. That's the power of reddit. That everyone can craft their own experience by subscribing to subreddits. So subscribe to the lisp subreddit and you'll see the content you want.
* They continually "improve" the default (and Hot, New, Top, and Rising) sort and filter algorithm(s). Every day it contains less relevant content for you, and more content peppered with ads and outrage. All of these options are slowly morphing into the same sort and filter set.
* They are aggressively shutting down interesting communities which don't fit their advertiser profile, and using the above algorithms to ensure no one ever sees them. These include, for example, discussion of covid or vaccines from a critical perspective; assisted suicide; Donald Trump; guns; trans controversies; etc.
* They are aggressively policing language. There is a growing list of words which, if used, will earn the user a ban.
* They stopped work on old.reddit.com, which gave users more transparent control over sort and filter. I predict they will kill it soon.
* They currently allow API access for third party aps. These aps don't serve ads and can employ their own sorting and filtering. I predict open APIs will be shut down, just like all the other major platforms have done.
Long story short, Reddit is going to turn into Facebook. They've made that intention clear. It's only a matter of time before they demand Facebook-like verification for users.
Just disable all the subreddits but the few that you follow.
And also disable the trending option in your preferences
Its the (show trending subreddits on the home feed (a list of popular and notable subreddits to check out)) in your preferences.
And then your home page is normal, sure that should be the default, but it's not hard to do
Even the most notorious "chans" banned some things/topics.
If you are dealing with controversial topics you best bet is to own your own platform, and don't grow to big.
That's just how this world works, and its not even limited to online. Look at silk road. There are tones of dark web places like it, but once things get too popular, people will go to extraordinary lengths to shut it down.
The only controversial site that somehow still tags along is the pirate bay. And it's more shadow of its former self.
Reddit a grotesque toxic website, that makes money by creating conflict, divisiveness, fake news and the deliberate degradation of society. Like Facebook, but so so much worse. I hope that going public gives it the scrutiny it needs. In a few years time you won't be able to find anyone admitting to have ever worked for this company (in fact it's almost impossible to find people admitting it today). Some of the smaller sub-reddits are good though, but that's not what the website has been about for years.
Reddit divides US society into 2 halves and makes them scream divisive hate at each other, 24 hours a day. What can possibly go wrong?
I’m not sure if Reddit is so much worse. With Reddit you see toxic groups out in the open, with Facebook those groups are hidden and only Facebook knows the true size and content of all toxic groups.
I think that's a very unfair assessment. Reddit is as diverse as the internet itself. There are plenty of good subreddits there and the toxic stuff is easy to avoid.
Do yourself a favour and unsubscribe to any subreddit that deals with the news or politics. Some subreddits have become too big to properly moderate, unsubscribe to them too.
Diversity certainly decreased massively in the last years just by content restrictions and overbearing moderators. But true, you have to find the niche subs and pray that they aren't discovered by people that have a moderate to high degree of problems with internet comments.
Reddit may have had a diverse user base in the past but in the last three years they enacted the same heavy censorship we have seen elsewhere and basically have no diversity of thought now in any major subreddit
The vast majority of people browsing reddit do not leave the default subs or filter news and political posts. Individually opting out of the toxicity and astroturfing does not address the problem on the website as a whole.
They've cleaned it up a lot honestly. Kind of feels like the whole Ellen Pao thing was just like, her serving as a scapegoat for changes they wanted to make.
I think people already don't want to admit to working there, but not for moral reasons, but for how awful the stability and product actually is. I can't say I'd blame them.
Perhaps. But to me it's more an anomaly that such an unreliable product can remain so popular. Can you imagine Google showing you a weird image saying you broke it multiple times a day, or youtube resembling any single thing about the video player?
Reddit has immense staying power - it is addictive. I find myself mindlessly scrolling it and putting up with most of its awfulness. But I attribute that to the users and not the product... as Digg showed, once greener pastures appear, there's not much left to brag about.
That is only valid in general, outside "real world application" of that idea... Or, in fact, of the very product. Product quality is a component supposed to override the "value for pride" of widespread adoption.
You can safely assume that many people will not be proud of participating to a dubious product.
You can not even assume that one in general will be especially proud of wide adoption - the weight given to "general/generic approval" is a personal variable.
When original poster silisili states «people already don't want to admit to working there», said poster uses a gross generalization not using a proper quantifier. That use of «people» entails by default describing at least a median, "over 50% of the developers". That's just exaggerating rhetoric.
Normalizing the expression to «some people already don't want to admit to working there», you get a pretty basic truth, that products change and enthusiasm in the project contributors swings accordingly. That is surely not eliminated by the idea they can hold, "Yes but the product is popular": popularity does not fix projectual lacks, it is not necessarily valid as a consolation. Some will try to steer the culture and encourage fixing the fault, some will be just embarassed.
Some members here are noting that this piece of news about going public may exacerbate some of the faults (i.e. toxic hooking) - some presume that this will put more weight on the idea of maximizing revenues, psychopathically ("Whatever it takes").
In fact, gambling has some people «spend hours on a day», and you cannot suppose that "developers of gambling machines will be proud". And this is very relevant to a number of current social networks. Spending time is not a value - investing time is.
Well, sure, no place ever has 100% people who are satisfied or proud of working there. I don't think there's much to be ashamed of though. I certainly would hold my head high if I worked there.
I've been following lemmy [0] for a while, a federated reddit alternative in the same spirit as mastodon. It's still very small, but I think as monetization pressure on reddit increases, people will look for other places to post and this might be one of them :)
Their website mentions the Fediverse. lemmy is a federated network that is completely separate from the mastodon/diaspora/... network, right?
Since I already have an account on a mastodon instance I first thought I can just connect to lemmy instances using that but that is apparently not possible.
Yes, you can. After their last release you can follow Lemmy communities with Mastodon and add comments to posts. Just enter the URL of a Lemmy community in your search bar to find the account profile. And in case that doesn't work you might try search for @[CommunityName]@[lemmy.instance] (there are some issues to be wrinkled out still).
On top of that: reddit makes tons of traffic with porn or borderline porn subbreddits, like GirlsGoneWild.
It’ll be fun to watch the investors-driven purge when that inevitably happens
Reddit said, not six months ago, that they weren't going to ban anti-vaccine rhetoric. The lead admin stated: "We appreciate that not everyone agrees with the current approach to getting us all through the pandemic, and some are still wary of vaccinations. Dissent is a part of Reddit and the foundation of democracy." [0]
When you combine this with the fact that moderation on the site is unpaid, it's literally a land mine: anything done on it is open to litigation, and all of the counter-measures are "we rely on unpaid volunteers." It's a nightmare for a public offering, really. It'd be like investing in Facebook, except if Facebook's stances were "well, vaccination is a choice" and "we can't pay people to remove inappropriate content; we just rely on unpaid volunteers for that."
Reddit has effectively monetized outrage in a way Facebook could only ever hope to: instead of primarily presenting your friend circles, and the outrage there, Reddit presents the outrage of the social media cloud itself, weaponized in the form of upvotes. The worst part of browsing Reddit is the level of smugness you see around its users: they act like Instagram/Facebook is the worst parts of humanity, while actively engaging with a different corporation selling the same thing but more effectively.
About your example, some points are not clear, with relevance to the outcome of litigation land mine.
First of all, the part about the "right to dissent" I think was later retracted; and importantly, a witch hunt was in fact carried out - starting from r/aww ("the cute pets" or similar).
I have just red on The Coversation the article "Shaming unvaccinated people has to stop. We've turned into an angry mob and it's getting ugly" (Julian Savulescu, MCRI, Uni Melbourne and Oxford), https://theconversation.com/shaming-unvaccinated-people-has-... , which reports that
> a whole Reddit channel is devoted to mocking people who die after refusing the vaccine
Does "going to public" increase the liability for legal action?
You can't really ad-block from astroturfed ads, for example a 'viral' video of Amazon delivery driver dancing on a Amazon Ring doorbell get to the top of a video subreddit. That can't be blocked against.
I run agressive ad blocks and I'll still get pictures on r/aww/ of a kitten next to a freshely delivery KFC - with a title like "Kittens first every KFC delivery to investigate".
What I'd like to know is how Reddit monetizes those ads that make it through to everyone.
It's not really gone though. There are plenty of subreddits you can subscribe to if that's your interest. Or there are others to subscribe to for almost any interest you may have.
> I can't imagine investing in an ad company that is fueled by clickbait and outrage the way Reddit is.
Because of your own outrage? Or because of financials of the business model. If the former, how different are you than the stubborn anti-vaxxers? I believe the business model is a proven one. I'll withhold my judgement til when I see the first 10Q.
Your comment itself is designed to fuel outrage. What a scummy company!
