I've been a fan of Reddit for a very long time (as the amount of data science work I've done with their data can attest to), but lately it seems like the incentives between Reddit as a business and Reddit as a community leader are not aligned, and that is a problem.

The increasing amount of dark patterns Reddit has been employing lately is concerning. (recent example: Reddit now gates content in mobile Safari to push users to the app: https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/1086002848926593025 )

That said, it seems like the really bad dark patterns I reported 7 months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17446841) no longer appear to be in place.

2 things about Reddit's "use our app instead!" buttons:

1. They cycle through a couple of different messages, and the buttons get switched around

2. The wording is such that you read it twice and still aren't sure which button will just take you to the damn website

I don't mind them promoting their app, but these dark patterns truely rile me

I do mind them promoting their app, it’s a horrible app and they’ve continually ruined their website. The only way I can stand to use reddit anymore is through Narwhal, at least until they kill their 3rd party apps API.

It’s funny, the web app used to be really good. Much better than the native app. Since then they have been making the web app increasingly worse over time, actively degrading its functionality and pleasantness to use.

The degradation seems to directly correlate with the modern-feel of the page. I'm not sure if that's intentional. It seems that modern front end fashion is a huge step backwards from earlier fashions in web development.

It's completely possible to have a "modern" page that is also nice to use; it's just that with Reddit modernness and horribleness have been conflated together and it seems like they go together.

Can you cite a few? I'm generally of the same opinion to the comment you replied to but I'm always happy to be wrong.

I don't know what exactly "modern" means here, but I think FastMail, Inoreader, and GitHub should count. All three have been fast and responsive. In particular, switching from Gmail to FastMail was a revelation.

Random aside: I've long been very down on web tech, but those 3 have sort of reinvigorated my interest in web stuff.

Do you have any examples of this? Every 'modern' webapp I can think of has been an exercise in making it slower and more confusing than its old-fashioned predecessor. Especially slower. They're _so_ slow.

i.reddit.com. 2010 mobile app feel, blazing fast, light on resources. As it should be.

This is great. Now all I need is a plugin for mobile safari/chrome/firefox that rewrites all reddit URLs to append /.compact

> mobile

Firefox supports addons on mobile.

not on iOS

Blame Apple for that. Not Mozilla.

Apple doesn't allow alternate browser engines in the app store. All browsers have to use WebKit.

Not Mozilla's fault

They are building camouflage for advertising.

You can just permanently set your account to use the old layout/view. I've noticed little to no changes other than user profiles, which are the "old new" ones.

On my phone I use reddit is fun. I have no issues at all with reddit atm in terms of them fucking with my experience.

"permenantly", except for the bug where about 1 pageview in 10 it still redirects you to new reddit. I think it's something related to improperly configured (server-side) caching or something.

I've never seen that happen. I only see it when I'm logged out on computer.

It happens to me frequently. Sometimes they just log me out for no reason.

Its been an accepted 'bug' for a long time but they never seem to properly be able to fix it

https://www.reddit.com/r/redesign/comments/adxv7b

I just use one of the many addons that redirect you to old.reddit.com.

"permanently" for Conde Naste defined values of permanence.

Legacy mode will be phased out as soon as it has served their purpose of smoothing over the transition.

Or, it will be allowed to die of neglect, slowly becoming less and less compatible with the site until fully unusable.

And that's fine. I absolutely can't stand the new layout, so if that happens I'll stop using it. Probably not good for their metrics for a 13 year user of the service to stop using it I'd guess. I don't even block ads on it. And I sometimes click them if they're relevant (which, lets face it, they are these days).

11 for me and what used to be 30-60 minutes a day (I like certain subreddits /r/programming /r/chess /r/<proglang> Etc.) is maybe 15 and not at all for days now.

I miss old reddit, nothing else really fills the niche in a unified way.

So where do you go instead?

Reddit and Facebook both have some hold for me because of niche communities that they both let me aggregate/monitor/interact with easily, without going to a myriad of websites. I really don’t want to have to do that - in some cases, I’m not even sure I can find comparable replacements.

Here are some alternatives to Reddit:

http://voat.co/

http://gab.ai/

http://notabug.io/

http://kr5ddit.com/

I fill that time by deliberately picking tech talks in a domain/language I know nothing about and watching them instead.

It is interesting because it's related to what I do but different enough to be fascinating.

I agree, but it’s jarring going between devices (phone, iPad and computer) and the multiple interfaces. Then the repeated niggling to use the app. If I haven’t after several years, the chances are I don’t want to.

I am never nagged. I use RES on desktop to modify a few things, among others a dark theme. I use the RIF dark theme. Works pretty similarly.

There are many situations where you are presented with the mobile or new desktop designs, such as being logged out. I have to sign in at least twice every time to use the old desktop version.

But for how long is the question. Once they remove that, my use will go way down or maybe stop entirely. I despise the new layout and it isn’t just a “doesn’t want to try something new” phase.

If you're interested in a web app (not downloaded). you could try Redusa. It's still early in development though. It's built in vuejs.

https://github.com/redusa/redusa

Thank you for understanding my needs! I will check that out.

I actually gave up and switched to desktop on my phone - which is barely usable at all - and yet still somehow less infuriating than the shitty mobile site...

If their API is killed I think Reddit's done for. I wouldn't use it if I were forced to use the official app myself, sure many others wouldn't either.

Folk would probably move over to something like voat.co

Voat is appalling and revels in its terribleness. There has to be something better to migrate to.

The most promising general reddit equivalent I've seen so far is tildes.net. It's the first time I've seen a fork of the reddit model with some actually fresh ideas. However, like all of the hundreds of alternatived, this site is far below the critical mass required to make browsing it regularly worthwhile.

All that it needs is for reddit to commit suicide just like digg chose to.

Would you have an invite to send to try the alpha?

Reddit : Usenet :: Slack : IRC

There will be other places for you to migrate to, as there have been for decades, if not an entire generation.

Reddit has always been some new thing that the kids use. Slack will be dying soon enough too.

I expect people would mostly just use the mobile web site. And there would be a lot of noise. But I can't ever see myself going to somewhere like voat.

Voat? Might as well believe that Facebook users are switching to Diaspora

You usually would move over to something better, not worse.

Yeah, Voat's not an appealing alternative. There's an ActivityPub-powered, federated link aggregator in the works[1], that could work out really well as each community could have their own rules and if you don't want to federate with a particular one, just block them.

1 - https://gitlab.com/mbajur/prismo

Off topic but man do I like gitlabs current UI on iPad, not seen it for a while.

There is an alternative made by a previous reddit dev called tildes.net its invite only and quite enjoyable to use. Classic lightweight website and no trolls

I refuse to use the new design with the same contempt as I refuse to pay for picking my seat on an aeroplane (P.S. Ryanair: my girlfriend is not happy about this... but at least I get some peace and quiet right? /s).

I use Boost for Reddit (Android) and the old reddit style, and RES in my browser. I see why they are going towards the Instagram style route - people generally like what they are accustomed to; and I guess more people use Instagram than Reddit.

Yeah, I use their app on android and it's pretty bad. There's currently a bug that seems to get fixed and then reappear where if someone responds to your comment, you get an alert and when you click on the alert it takes you to the comment, but if the comment is too nested, it just takes you to the top of the thread. This makes responding to a comment in any thread with over 100 comments near impossible. Because of that, I'm using the web app currently and it's really annoying to be constantly pushed back toward a broken app.

Hey there, we've got a fix coming for this, so sorry about that. Thanks for the feedback!

They bought the best Reddit iOS app and then scrapped it. Although the 3rd party APIs still exist I imagine they will eventually disappear.

It's already frustrating to view v.reddit content in 3rd party apps.

old.reddit.com or reddit.com/.compact

I use a third party mobile client and am very happy with it, but I know it's only a matter of time (despite what they've said in the past) before they kill/rate limit/price the API in such a way to kill off all the third party clients.

or until they buy out Narwhal.

Their mobile website has also started literally animating the "get the app" button; every minute or so, the button pulses for a bit in a deliberate (and in my case, consistently successful) attempt to make your attention move to the button they want you to click instead of the content you want to read.

The reddit community is great, but the company seems to not care about their users at all.

Reddit has been on a downward spiral for N years (depending on your perspective), yet the data is near-completely crawlable, and no user-friendly sustainable alternative has appeared. Why? The closest is lobste.rs, which is better in some ways and worse in others, and a few (names I forgot) were good but died from lack of content / user interest.

Reddit has been slowly ruining their API for the last couple of years.

I started working on a read only script to grab stuff from reddit years ago and then they changed it so you need to go through the whole register for an api key even for read only requests which didn't work for me because I wanted users to download and run the script themselves

It would be interesting to know how much more a user is worth to them when they install the app; it must be quite significant.

Im wondering if they are able to get more information on user when they use reddit on the app then on the browser

It is about ads. Browsers have adblocks.

I've noticed this as well. Really annoying. Or any website that immediately pops up a "sign up for our email list!" and blocks you from seeing the content.

Isn't there a ton of data that most people don't even use many apps anymore? Or they install them once and then uninstall them or ignore them?

I hope we can move towards a web that stays in the web browser. Apps are becoming really annoying, especially for interactions you only have intermittently (I'm not a daily reddit user, but I go there every now and then, or it pops up on search).

>Isn't there a ton of data that most people don't even use many apps anymore? Or they install them once and then uninstall them or ignore them?

That doesn't mean the app can't exfiltrate data (presumably data useful to advertisers) in the background.

The browser is a client that works for the user (well, Google, Apple, and Microsoft muddy the waters).

The mobile app is a program that works for the developer.

The end result of browsers becoming more adtech-hostile and user-friendly is that more companies turn to mobile apps.

I can understand a developer/company wanting to do the app route to regain control (and not having to deal with the annoying inconsistencies/hacks in different browsers/versions), but is ad / tracker blocking really the major driver of going the app route?

You can see indirect evidence for this by looking at the exponential rise in ad-blocker-blocking efforts from a wide array of sites. 'Hi, we see you're using an ad blocker. Please turn it off.' That literally did not exist several years ago, even though ad blocking has been around for decades. Companies in recent years are getting aggressively desperate as the web becomes increasingly user friendly. At the same time, mobile is still dominated by an OS developed by the the world's largest ad delivery corporation - and it behaves accordingly.

> That literally did not exist several years ago, even though ad blocking has been around for decades.

What is "several years"? This has definitely existed, say, five years ago. Not at this scale, of course, but it's not a recent invention by a long shot.

Yes, Firefox has been consistently blocking nasty advertiser tricks each release and it supports ad blockers on mobile.

The latest Firefox release has a built in list of tracker domains to block and next release blocks auto playing video.

Brave is also making major progress here. It natively includes anti-fingerprinting, ad blocking, tracker blocking, HTTPS everywhere, and one-click in-session TOR windows on demand (similar to how incognito windows work for other browsers). It's also blazing fast.

From a user perspective, now is probably the best time ever to be using the web.

I'd say the worry is not just ad / tracker blocking, but loss of control.

Apple decides to start notifying on cookies or make fingerprinting harder? Poof. There goes a chunk of your ad value per user.

And who knows what any given browser vendor will do tomorrow?

Some would say "So it's like the 90s, where everyone was continually adapting as web specs were negotiated." The difference is that now there are billion+ dollar businesses directly tied to that ad revenue.

Yes. If data can be captured to apply targeted ads, each ad can be worth 2-5x as much to the company. Browser compatibility issues occur sometimes, but mobile device compatibility are always an issue for my apps. It's actually more work keeping an app working smoothly than a website, and the cost must be offset by the ad revenues

I thought modern OSes now pop up notification icons when this happens, so you can detect and punish apps that do that. Doesn't stop them from getting a snapshot of your system on first run, though.

I'm really amazed they still let the old mobile interface work for the most part. Just add ".compact" to any URL and browse almost annoyance free (newer features like video don't work, but that's not too surprising).

I've been switching the "www" in "www.reddit.com" to "old" with good results.

For the lazy, there are browser extensions that do this for you, or you can write a simple user-script in your user-script engine of choice (Greasemonkey, Tampermonkey, etc)

good call!

I find it ironic that their tagline is "The front page of the internet" but they push you to use a proprietary app.

For the record, that tag line was an idea from their users, and chosen hey their users (through upvotes, of course). It wasn't how reddit the company sees itself, it was how its users saw it. I still remember the thread where it happened years ago.

It's the 21st century Clippy. "You look like you're trying to do X. Here, let me help you do Y instead."

I'll take issue with that. For all Clippy's interpretation problems (way ahead of their time), it was still trying to facilitate actions that were useful to you (not Microsoft).

Dark patterns are defined by trying to willfully get you to do something that's counter to your own intent.

What's the difference, if the result is the same? Do you not think that the employees who write big "use the app!" banners believe they're doing what's best for the user?

As for Clippy, it's not hard to design a straightforward auto-correction feature, which detects what you typed and suggests a useful addition or replacement. Google, Apple, etc., all have their own designs that work perfectly well. I have trouble seeing an animated 3D cartoon as anything other than "trying to willfully get me to do something counter to my own intent". That's a classic way to manipulate people.

You are ignoring the general population's and the industry's attitude toward computing metaphors and cartoons in the 1990s. What do you imagine is the exploitative profit motive of Clippy? Microsoft fido get more revenue when you formatted your document as a resume or whatever.

"Here, help us pay our bills instead."

It’s actually working well to curb my reddit addiction by making it harder to idly browse on the phone.

Now all they need to do is remove the old design and I might be able to quit for good.

When combined with an AMP result page you might get when coming from Google, it's sometimes just impossible to view the actual content of a post without getting kicked to the app, or out to another browsing context... Reddit on mobile is a purpose-built nightmare.

Google was also supposed to start penalizing sites that used their AMP pages as interstitials, but...I'm not sure whatever became of that.

For now, https://i.reddit.com seems not to have any of the dark patterns.

A good rule of thumb in these situations is to go for the hard-to-see button.

The worst dark patten in my view is 1) growing an online community around a set of values 2) growing so big you eclipse all competitors 3) suddenly changing your values to appeal to advertisers.

Reddit is in good company here, notably with YouTube and Twitter.

It's the Peter Thiel/Sam Altman receipt.

- http://zerotoonebook.com/ - https://playbook.samaltman.com/

An old-fashioned term for this is: selling out.

Alternate theory is that the sociohopaths (diagnosis not epithet) have won.

The values people can be browbeaten, outnumbered and marginalized. Once that happens it’s hard to change back, even if you identify and remove the ringleaders.

Thanks, I've been trying to put into words what bugs me about reddit so much. Sure, the dark UI patterns are a thing, and the extra ads are not great... but it's all to be expected. But you phrased it very well: first growing a community around a set of values (remember they were even open source once?) and then, when the opportunity comes to make money, do everything humanly possible to go against those values.

I agree that this process sucks. Do you think it's possible to do 1 and 2 without 3? How could a business that remains focused on benefiting free users compete/profit?

In some people's ideal world, Reddit would run an extremely lean organisation. Instagram got acquired when they had 13 employees, showing you can be successful with a very small number of employees.

If Reddit had 10 employees and a $5 million annual salary budget, all the employees would be very well compensated, but they wouldn't need to raise $300 million from investors or aggressively pursue ad revenue by pushing an app to avoid ad blocking.

Personally I'm not sure if running as a pseudo-nonprofit would work or not. It's possible there's a cat-and-mouse game with spammers, astroturfers, and griefers that can only be solved with large numbers of employees and high revenue. Perhaps successful online nonprofit projects like Internet Archive and Debian have only avoided this because the don't have the combination of user-generated content and a large user base that make them attractive to spammers. Or perhaps the fact Reddit has so many more users than MetaFilter is a sign sites following this model just don't get big.

There is a difference between earning huge profits and earning a good living.

I would posit that it is possible for Reddit to finance itself and it's operation without going as far as they are doing now.

However, that would imply forgoing possible megaprofits that VCs wants - as well as probably reducing growth in headcounts and interesting internal projects. So there are both internal and external forces pushing in the direction of more monetization.

I think Basecamp is a nice example of forgoing profit for a better product.

Why does it have to profit?

I don't know if you meant to be sarcastic or funny here. However, business have to earn profit in the long run, otherwise who'd pay for all the employees, infrastructure costs etc.?

Paying for employees, infrastructure, etc requires sustainable revenue, not profit.

It's impossible to run an organization at zero capital buffer perpetually (see: even Wikimedia likes to have a capital reserve). That's a great way to end up bankrupt. What you're suggesting is well beyond absurd.

When the recession hits how do you plan to buffer the revenue beating you're guaranteed to take? If you had built up a cash reserve, you can absorb some or all of the hit.

Where do you plan to get a large amount of capital to make opportunistic investments in expanding what you do? Debt? If you say debt / loans, that's just admitting the necessity of the capital buffer (which is better derived from profit via operations rather than paying for debt and the associated debt interest).

What's your plan for surviving a recession or industry change or regulatory hit (which can demand immense spending on compliance adjustment) with either near 0% revenue growth or low single digit growth? That's the most common business scenario, not 30% or 50% growth every year.

What if you have the opportunity to hire N talented engineers from a failed competitor. You've got zero or very low revenue growth and hiring these talented people could very plausibly alter your trajectory. It's an opportunity to jump on. Where is your capital for that coming from?

You can apply the exact same capital outlay scenario to equipment investment / upgrade opportunities.

How do you plan to absorb any manner of business disaster?

Profit is inherently necessary so that when inevitable bad things happen, you can afford to absorb them. It's also necessary for opportunistic expansion and investment, when you see an opportunity that requires a sizable upfront capital allocation. One of the biggest differences between organizations that seize on opportunities and those that don't or can't, is having the required capital to act.

> It's impossible to run an organization at zero capital buffer perpetually (see: even Wikimedia likes to have a capital reserve). That's a great way to end up bankrupt. What you're suggesting is well beyond absurd.

And yet, Wikimedia is a non-profit. So is Harvard. Non-profit doesn't mean you can't have a capital reserve. It only means you don't pay that capital reserve out to shareholders.

> Profit is inherently necessary so that when inevitable bad things happen, you can afford to absorb them.

Some of the longest-lasting institutions in the world are non-profit.

> Some of the longest-lasting institutions in the world are non-profit.

Is it just some or is it all? Honest question, the only very long lasting institutions I can think of are not for-profit.

There are a handful of still-running for-profit businesses that were founded before 1000, which I consider to good enough: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies

There are, of course, religious institutions that are older.

You can pay for that without any profit. Profit is what is left after you pay the bills.

> Do you think it's possible to do 1 and 2 without 3?

Wikimedia comes to mind. They're by no means perfect, but they're the closest match I can think of.

You are conveniently leaving out the second portion of the comment which directly asks how profit is possible in such a manner.

One answer to this is it is very hard because your users would need to pay fees instead of being sucked into ads en masse by dark patterns. And who is willing to pay a monthly subscription fee for reddit?

Wikimedia just gets donations instead because they provide useful content. The majority of reddit is memes and images so people will just migrate to Instagram. A faithful rest might pay, but not enough to reach a $3bn valuation.

Re: "Download the app!" gates, banners, etc. Medium does this too.

Why? What's the business reason? What does a native app provide the business that a mobile website doesn't?

The prevailing "business person" thought is that app users are more loyal (high value) while web users are temporary users that Google will eventually steal away from you when they decide they want to be in your market and want to stop putting you at the top of search result pages. See Yelp's decline as Google started putting their own local results above Yelp and the resulting lawsuits.

As a result, most Silicon Valley product managers are trained to think that websites are nothing more than the top of a funnel to eventually convert low-value search engine users into high-value app users. Once you realize this, almost every stupid thing websites do suddenly makes sense. They will do almost anything possible to grow app installs even if it makes the website nearly useless.

Sure, it's terrible if you care about the web and user experience. But most PMs only stick around a company for 1-2 years and they'd rather be able to show a hockey stick graph of "high value" app user growth to get promoted or get a new job then worry about what makes for a good user experience.

It's not the PMs being rogue evil; they (and the engineers) are serving their employers faithfully.

Another reason is that a local app can spy on you more (track your location, for example) to collect data to sell, harass you with notification spam, and display non-blockable ads.

I think the non-blockable ads is a big one. In my browser Facebook has no ads, the app on my phone is full of them.

Yep. Another more recent example is Venmo. Since Paypal acquired them, they've been steadily removing functionality from the website to force users onto the app.

Another good example is Sonos ... they are slowly letting their desktop application die to force users onto iOS or android apps.

In the case of Sonos, it is much darker and user hostile because there is no danger of "web consumers being siphoned off by google" - you have to buy the Sonos components anyway. In this case it is all about metadata and traffic and user profiling.

I barely ever use the Sonos app on either iOS or desktop. I just use Spotify or Apple Music and route music to Sonos from there, so not sure if you are correct. With AirPlay2 I only use the app to set up new speakers. So not sure if you are correct.

e: Most likely the desktop app has seen declining usage the last decade, which is why Sonos doesn't prioritize it.

Agreed. This is a great analysis. Also keep in mind if the funnel thinks web users are low value and app users are high value, if web users fall it is a sign that the strategy is working. Not that you have loads of annoyed users.

Forcing people to use a native app means they can inject ads without having to worry about being blocked by a browser extension.

It's also a way for PMs who own apps to build habit-forming loops. If you download the app, you can send push notifications, deep link from email, etc. "Better experience" and all that, ultimately leading to more ad impressions or a purchases in-app.

And don’t forget tracking scripts too. Another huge reason.

Many users who use mobile adblockers will use one across the entire device (easy on rooted Android) instead of just a browser extension.

I'm pulling these numbers out of a hat, but I would wager users with rooted Android devices are below 1% of the mobile user base, and probably below 0.1% of the total user base including desktop.

On Android, it used to be the case that many ad blocking apps were just Proxy services.

Blokada (https://blokada.org/) acts as a VPN. It slows my connection speeds to a halt.

Counterpoint, installing uBlock in Firefox is a piece of cake, but lots of apps don't work on rooted devices. I know there are ways to hide root from detection, but I don't care to ride that treadmill back and forth.

How many users have rooted Android? Especially people in the west who are worth a lot more to advertisers?

It can’t be that high anymore. All the signals seem to be that rooting is trending down. I could be wrong of course as I have no hard data.

Aren't the majority of users on iOS or unrooted android?

Business has one number they want to increase: app usage (easier to track users, serve ads, make money)

The dev team A/B tests a bunch of options until that number goes up, and then double down on the success. They don't really care about what users actually want, they're just pushing that app number up in any way possible. Their job performance is likely based on whether or not that number increases.

Medium does this too and it's a huge danger of taking a data-first approach to user experience. A/B testing on its own isn't bad, but it's often what drives this business behavior.

A huge investment will likely make them push this type of thing even harder because now they have to prove the investment's worth.

You can probably grab the IDFA or the ADID with an app directly, and having a stronger linkage between an online identity/cookie probably makes the data more valuable for advertising purposes.

100% device IDs are deterministic vs cookies. Advertiser platforms (like Reddit) need to tell a compelling audience story and that requires a strong user identity graph.

> Why? What's the business reason? What does a native app provide the business that a mobile website doesn't?

Simple: you can’t block ads in a native App (at least not by installing an ad blocker or other methods accessible to normal users, you‘d have to modify DNS responses or similar).

A lot of people are mentioning tracking, etc..

I think another major reason is that if someone is seeking to amuse themselves then in a browser they're as likely to skip over to another website; whilst in an app there's a mental barrier to that. I imagine people are more likely to change and view another subreddit, rather than jump to another website altogether.

There's a censorship angle too, wherein the app operators get greater control over the message their users receive than do website operators.

It gives users easier access and a better experience, so they're more likely to return and to spend longer. The ultimate goal is to become a "default time waster" for as many people as possible, who open the app whenever they're bored.

There's no "better experience" in an app, unless it relies on native features like low-level high performance graphics, accelerometer/sensors, and other physical phone attributes not yet exposed to browsers.

Specific native features that you're missing are platform controls, better UI performance, and support for APIs like notifications.

A comments section on a news site doesn't need high performance UI controls or native notifications.

The fact that Apollo exists and is popular (though, I personally don't think its controls are native enough) means that this isn't really true.

And Sync and AlienBlue if they're still around. It blows my mind that one dev is able to push out such a high quality product where the official app feels amateurish by comparison. It really highlights the difference between development that serves Reddit vs development that serves the user.

Yup, Reddit Sync is great, Relay for Reddit also! The official app is such a disappointment in comparison.

I found Apollo last year and was so impressed that it inspired me to finally get into iOS development.

Until then, not being much of a phone user at all, I'd been convinced that mobile experiences were always worse than desktop ones.

Also, out of the reach of adblockers or tracking blockers.

Sure, but on mobile people don't run ad blockers very often and if they do it's system wide like AdGuard.

It's a lot easier to run browser based ad blockers now than it used to be. Mobile Safari now allows them and installing an adblock extension in Firefox for Android is as easy as on desktop.

Aside from the other mentioned reasons, browsers can have ad blockers installed. The reddit mobile app ensures they can monetize.

[edit] now that I think of it, probably the same reason Twitch was pushing its desktop app.

Metrics, ads, notifications, install base.

Biz reason: No adblock, push notifications

Product reason: (potentially) better ux/design, but obviously a lot of people think they went down the wrong route

I think it has to do with analytics but maybe someone else knows more.

I would guess that with an app users are signed in and precisely identified 100% of the time, which allows for very reliable and deep user analytics.

Users are more likely to give apps e.g. location permission, or contact list permissions, which make a user value (in eyeball models) aignificantly higher than a web user.

I wish that button actually works reliably.

More often than not, I got redirected to App Store to re-download Reddit app, instead of launching the post in the app.

Don't forget their still live email signup approach.

Clicking 'Signup" brings you to a single email form field screen that in no way indicates you do NOT need to provide an email.

Clicking 'Next' without entering one lets you create your username and PW without an email address.

As a marketer, I understand (but don't condone or agree with) the thinking behind some of what they've done, but as a user of over a decade, I'm nervous about the direction they've been taking the service, and this is not good news IMHO.

People bring that up all the time, but I can't really think of fainter "dark pattern" criticism than an optional email field. I bet nobody would even comment on it if it was actually required. Reddit should probably just go ahead and require it to eliminate the complaints.

Hell, I'm more ready to call it an easter egg than deception.

I'd wager you are correct that if it were required, nobody would comment on it except existing Reddit users familiar with their more privacy-respecting leanings from their past (ie. not new users).

The dark pattern is that there is zero indicator that it is actually optional and they appear to go out of their way to hide that fact. It is about being upfront with your intentions, and what you are offering users.

Would help if they dumped the AMP pages too. Landing there results in a useless "not logged in" and "partial content" page. AMP is just a terrible fit for Reddit pages.

But the AMP pages give them preferential treatment in Google search results. I doubt they'd want to give that up.

So you are saying Google is blackmailing websites into having a terrible user-experience?

I guess everbody sucks on this new, modern and JS-USB-enabled (thanks again Google!) web.

> So you are saying Google is blackmailing websites into having a terrible user-experience?

Pretty much, yes.

AMP compliance gets you a better Google search placement. So, every site is going to make sure they get their AMP placement and then funnel you to something non-Google.

Yes.

AMP is an absolute cancer and its adoption would probably be 0% if google didn’t forcefully shove it down everyone’s throat. (And they are very good at learning from their own history, because that totally worked with Google+.)

I wonder how important Google Search is to Reddit, though. They are big enough (like Facebook) that they may not need it much anymore, and may have used AMP based on the promise of a better experience (meanwhile deliberately degrading mobile experience).

I bet Reddit does pretty well on long tail queries. It's one of a few high pagerank sites that has a little content on just about every subject.

I think there have been some linked articles on hn on amp pages actually performing poorly for seo

There are so many more issues with Reddit, I'm surprised they haven't been digg'd or myspace'd yet.

As soon as a viable alternative pops up that doesn't seem tailor made for racists, I'm there. So far every competitor I've seen pop up seems to think Reddit's biggest problem is their (rather weak) stance against hate speech and user harassment, and not all the actual problems being discussed here.

There was an attempt a few years ago to do just this. Remember Imzy? If the answer is "no," you're probably not alone; it shut down after only two years of operation. They didn't have any of the problems that we're discussing here, as far as I remember. (Personally, I suspect its extremely weird and confusing UX design was at least part of what did it in; I found its navigation so baffling I gave up pretty quickly.)

If I remember right, you couldn't see any content on Imzy without creating an account. I assume that instantly turned away over 90% of the users. Then, their design was extremely childish, and it looked like a safe place for kids, rather than a site for adults to socialize. I think they did a really poor job at understanding the market, and I'm not surprised they failed.

https://i.imgur.com/9uzaciS.png

How are you going to get any traction when after losing 90% of your visitors to that home page's design you lose 99% of the remainder because nobody is going to join for content that may or may not exist, let alone be interesting. That level of disincentivisation ensures that the site's user base will consist of 90% employees of the site, 5% their friends who signed up and never logged in again, and 5% of randoms that love having a captive audience... until it dies.

There's a great video by Folding Ideas which talks about the issues with secondary services (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3snVCRo_bI - this is in the context of video platforms)

One big 'bootstrapping' problem is that the first to adopt a new platform are the people who are _too toxic_ for the original.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world...”

What part of reddit makes it tailor made for racists? The fact that pictures of members of the KKK appear when you sign up, or the fact that when you're writing a comment you're suggested to include as many racial expletives as possible?

I think you misunderstood babypuncher's comment (I did too on first reading). It's not that reddit itself is racist, but all of the reddit alternatives that have popped up ARE super racist (Voat anyone?) because they are a backlash against reddit's attempt to tamp down on overt hate speech.

The thing is that there's really no other nascent burgeoning platform that could take its place (like reddit did to digg). The Internet has become much more centralized in the past ~8 years ago. And so because of that, users have no choice but to deal with it. I feel like one such event that could do it though is turning off their API for 3rd party applications. Wouldn't be surprised if it happens soon either, given the advertising pushes they've given their native application over the past year.

I hope it remains. I find it extremely useful for solving niche problems. A recent example of mine was Docker on Synology. It’s a weird interface with some niggling bugs. It turns out Reddit has this nicely covered and I’ve found this repeatedly. It’s way less technical than Stack Overflow but sometimes that’s what I need. The toxic stew can be avoided while the little subs have solved hours of pain.

Which subreddit had that information?

r/synology I think, but I was into the sonarr and radarr subs too. The Synology GUI is initially helpful, but quite quickly gets frustrating as some actions can’t be undone without starting from scratch. As an entry into the world of Docker, reddit was by far the best resource for me and there are lots of links to helpful blogs. Between permissions, ports and paths it’s more than a touch complicated.

All the issues stem from new populations of users contributing to the site, not a top down change. Reddit 5+ years ago was a different place because it was a much smaller place.

One issue is that reddit is not just one big social space. In addition to the front page and the main subreddits, it made up of many different small, but often quite active communities. People who used to form interest groups on various forums, random fan websites and blogs have moved to interest based subreddits instead. A lot of these communities wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for reddit making it so easy to create a subreddit on any topic possible.

While everyone on Digg or MySpace could easily move to reddit or facebook, it is much harder for a subreddit centered around say gardening, astrophotography, headphones or a tv show to just jump to a new website. I do hope that these communities won't be lost when reddit does end up losing its charm and popularity.

Well, you could be the one to do it.

Taking down an incumbent is hard, though. Might need deep pockets for a while.

I've seen this dialog (the misleading "[OPEN] [CONTINUE]" one) on mobile Firefox as well. Besides that you have the pulsating "open in the app" at the top of every page.

Fortunately I have u-block origin so I could just add a few filters to get rid of that nonsense. It doesn't solve the terrible performance however (because apparently you need a top-of-the-line smartphone to load and display a few kB of plaintext comments).

The app is even slower. It's amazing how bad their stuff is. I avoid Reddit on mobile altogether because of the terrible performance.

> a few filters to get rid of that nonsense

Care to share?

I've always thought that the day they crossed the line was when they arbitrarily changed which subreddits were default, removing some (such as /r/atheism) with no real reason. At the very early days of reddit, discussing atheism positively was still kind of unusual in the news. Then, over time, it became a very popular position and advocacy case especially among developers, and new users found the stridency and repetition of the subreddit annoying. I think they ultimately took the decision to remove a default subreddit that supported a community that is in general still one of the most hated in the US and in the world, just in order to appeal to new users outside of the hacker culture demographic that reddit started in.

/r/atheism was absolutely obnoxious, to the point that the obnoxiousness of some of the users is still a meme:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-this-moment-i-am-euphoric

> a community that is still one of the most hated

As far as I can see in the USA and in most of Europe it’s way more socially acceptable to declare to be atheists, rather than observing Christians.

> As far as I can see in the USA and in most of Europe it’s way more socially acceptable to declare to be atheists, rather than observing Christians.

I can't speak for Europe, but as of 2015, at least, about three-quarters of Americans identified as Christian. There are still large swaths of this country where being relatively outspoken about your atheism is, if not out-and-out dangerous, likely to have a negative impact on your social circles and even your career.

Remember that the HN crowd -- e.g., tech workers who by and large have pretty cosmopolitan outlooks -- is not really representative of "median America."

My experience is that there's rarely a time that is appropriate for it to come up in polite conversation. People talk about it all the time within their social communities as the social communities are more likely to be in line with their beliefs, but not really in "public" IE work, etc. The guy running around talking about "god is dead" at work is just as much of a jerk and treated as such as someone who loudly proclaims their christian beliefs as the basis for everything they do.

The two things go hand in hand. People strike a more defiant attitude when they anticipate punishment. They can seem clueless and overly confrontational when they cop that attitude in a context where it isn't warranted.

Also, religion comes up routinely, though perhaps not frequently, in contexts where religious belief is assumed. In an ordinary conversation about the right way to handle a situation, people will ask you, "Do you think God wants me to ______?" It's just a manner of speaking, but it forces you to either pretend belief or out yourself and face their judgment. It's only in "mixed company" where people avoid the topic.

I spent some time noodling with Buddhism. One of the interesting things there is that outside of certain places in Southeast Asia that means you are an atheist.

This gets interesting when talking to theists because, if you don’t point it out, many people will hear “he has a religion, he’s one of us”. Many assume Buddha is a deity.

If you do push the point, you learn that some people’s brains short out when you tell them there is a religion with hundreds of millions of followers that doesn’t have a God. The Venn diagram in their brain of Us and Them can’t process this fact.

When I was in high school in the late 90s, it certainly wasn't a popular opinion to be an atheist, the few times I brought up that religious organizations were questionable, or seemed to do a lot of backtracking through history, it did not go over well. I kept my atheistic beliefs to myself. This wasn't bible belt territory either, we are talking about a suburb of NYC.

I read Nietzsche on my own in high school, and just felt so relieved that I wasn't alone with these thoughts and wasn't just some weirdo. The internet was nothing like it was today, chatrooms were the forum for discussion and there might have been some geocities pages devoted to atheistic belief, but it was still in the dark corners.

It amazed me when I saw that /r/atheism was a front and center thing when I first started going to reddit. It devolved over time into a version of /r/IamVerySmart, but that IMHO was an amazing outlet for those having doubts about all the crap being shoved down their throat their whole lives. It would have saved me a lot of anxiety growing up.

Al Gore got up and apologized for a funding policy theory he had. He thought if we brought the Internet to rural areas that the brain drain would stop. (I argue that with Seattle and the Valley getting so crowded we might be on the cusp of something like what he thought would happen, but with smaller regional cities).

What happened instead was that marginalized people all over the US found out they weren’t crazy or bad. There were people who thought just like them three hours away. So they picked up and moved to the city faster than ever.

That is an interesting thought. It might also help explain why we have become far more polarized as a nation over the last 20 years. I think net/net we are better off as a society though, I don't recall the source, but I do remember reading a research paper that concluded that colocating minds had a multiplicative effect on increasing scientific knowledge.

On a somewhat related note: A lot of people cite the "faces of atheism" meme/trend whatever you want to call it as being the tipping point when /r/atheism just went too far and it became cringey. I mean some of those posts were a bit cringey, but overall I think it sent a very needed message- that there are lots of people out there from all walks of life that think like you do, don't think you have to give in to the prevailing beliefs. I don't think my upbringing was that abnormal- questioning the existence of god, my parents/family would have smacked me, probably verbally but if I really pushed it they likely would have punished me. My friends all seemed to firmly believe as well but were generally tolerant, it certainly seems you could be a social pariah in more religious parts of the country. Being exposed to new ideas like this I am sure spawned some people to say to themselves I don't have to go along with all this crap, there are bigger and better things out there.

> As far as I can see in the USA and in most of Europe it’s way more socially acceptable to declare to be atheists, rather than observing Christians.

If you believe that then you're living in a bubble. Please, go outside your comfort zone and see how the rest of the population thinks. Hint: It's not what you believe.

If you really think that's true I'd invite you to count the number of politicians (in the US at least) who are self-declared athiests. I think the data speaks for itself.

> it’s way more socially acceptable to declare to be atheists, rather than observing Christians

This was a story line in HBO's Silicon Valley.

> As far as I can see in the USA and in most of Europe it’s way more socially acceptable to declare to be atheists, rather than observing Christians.

If you believe that, I don't even know where to begin.

People in the US Bible Belt get death threats if they declare their atheism.

Online isn't offline. And most people still exist more in the offline world.

Both of your viewpoints are right - it entirely depends on what one is considering community.

In meatspace there are plenty of social communities where you will be looked down upon for being religious (if you really don't believe this, you either need to travel more or you need to keep questioning social dogmas even after you've found some place you fit in). The many more places where you'll be looked down on for being atheist does not support making one sweeping generalization - opposing flavors of intolerance do not cancel each other out!

It's similar to how the KKK is still a problem, yet we've got this new trend of oppressing free speech online. It's tough to affect the entrenched players in any game, and all too easy to attack easy targets in a simulation of fighting the good fight.

> Both of your viewpoints are right - it depends on one's actual surrounding community. It's much easier to choose your online community, which creates the impression of the whole space lining up with your beliefs.

No, I'm not letting you get away with "equivalency". That kind of mental gymnastics is what allows these kinds of "talking points" to exist.

Christian churches are not taxed. Atheist non-profits are. Christian religions get "marriage" enshrined in law and get to define what "marriage" is. Atheists get their partners decisions questioned in the hospital. I can go on and on about the privileges that religion enjoys in the US.

Taking away undeserved privileges is not persecution. If you want to see persecution, go to the middle east--THAT'S what Christian persecution looks like.

The US qualifies are one of the most religious of the countries that don't qualify as theocracies. Claiming that Christians are being persecuted in the US is hogwash.

If you want to talk to me about persecution, come back after every church in the US is actually paying taxes--I won't hold my breath.

It's not "mental gymnastics" to attempt understanding the viewpoints of a different group of people. FWIW I'm atheist myself - I've just gotten to the point where I can accept that religion as a concept has some positive aspects, and that knee jerk dismissal is the exact same vein of ignorance that atheists are persecuted with.

> Atheists get their partners decisions questioned in the hospital. I can go on and on about the privileges that religion enjoys in the US ... Taking away undeserved privileges is not persecution

So, you have implied that it would be progress for a traditionally-married couple to have medical decisions for their spouses questioned, in the same manner that an unlegalized gay couple does. This is the inherent problem with framing things in terms of privileges instead of rights - it implies that the way to make things equal is to tear others down, rather than supporting rights for all.

IMO, but I'm certainly not a scholar here - if you look at the actual messages of Jesus (et al), they were preaching against the oppressive power structures of their time. Their specific dogmas were then calcified and turned into their own oppressive power structure, because real understanding requires continuing vigilance.

If you're not yet to the point where you can forgive the overly religious, then I understand. But closing that door is just setting your dogma up to be a tool of the next oppressor.

You are giving a great example of why r/atheism was removed as a default subreddit.

Lots of people were fatigued by daily threads like this microcosm. It’s obviously important to folks in the sub, but it was many instances of people just not caring. There must be some form of directed apathy where a description is not that I care about something, but I definitely do not care enough to be aware of it. It’s not apathy as I dislike encountering it, but I am fine with its existence.

> As far as I can see in the USA and in most of Europe it’s way more socially acceptable to declare to be atheists, rather than observing Christians.

I don't know what it's like in Europe, but in the US, it's a very divisive topic. Really divisive. Like brawls in the streets divisive. Like secede-from-the-Union divisive. There's cities that will shun you for being religious, and other cities that will shun you for not being religious, sometimes even in the same state.

That's why the government shut down happened, frankly. The religious and non-religious parts of the United States literally hate each other so much that they'll act against their own interests just to hurt the other side.

There’s an episode of Silicon Valley that talks about how hard it is these days to be a Christian and work in the valley.

For workplaces, I think that ship has sailed. But it probably won’t help you with awkward thanksgiving or high school reunion conversations yet. All the kids I know hang out with the atheists but I can’t tell if that says something about these kids or kids in general.

Another clear red line was when spez started editing comments.[0] It was childish and non-consequential, but should have resulted in an immediate exodus from the platform. I'm not politically aligned with r/The_Donald, but I think this sort of petty power abuse should not be forgiven; the platform needs to die, as an example to other platforms.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5ekdy9/the_admi...

Really? I thought it was a fantastic reminder to users: they hold all the cards, and pretending otherwise is just diluting yourself.

If only other online platforms were that honest! Imagine Google sending out misleading gmails in your name, or Facebook mining your private messages for incriminating secrets and offering to "share" them with all your friends.

There's nothing technical preventing any of these kinds of abuses, and the sooner average users understand that, the sooner we'll have support for strong legal protections to rein in big tech companies.

For the record, systems at both FB and Google prevent internal employees from doing either. "There's nothing technical preventing any of these kinds of abuses" is only true in the sense that you can imagine implementations that don't prevent these kinds of abuses.

You're claiming that a rogue employee can't take it on themselves to do that on their own initiative. Either of those companies could trivially choose to do those things as a management decision. Maybe it doesn't make good business sense today, but who knows what the business landscape of 2025 or 2030 looks like?

And then my comment would be false. But as it stands today, it's true.

I do think you overestimate how trivial it would be for "management" (who? a senior PM? Sergei? Zuck?) to decide to turn off all internal security controls so individual Googlers could send emails using someone else's identity--it would likely run afoul of multiple current laws and contracts, to speak nothing of the universal, strong internal objections there'd be to that change and the high engineering cost to migrate off those systems. And I can't imagine a business landscape that would encourage any company to let individual employees do that.

There are tons of things to worry about wrt BigTechCos, but preventing and auditing rogue employees are something where their incentives align pretty strongly with the public good.

FWIW I do support stronger legal and privacy requirements (with some caveats, mostly because compliance is very expensive and potentially harmful to smaller companies).

Do they actually prevent malicious abuse, or do they just catch people after the fact and fire them? I know from reading about the NSA that they watch what data agents retrieve, and they're restricted by policy from going snooping, but there's nothing except fear of losing their job that stops them.

Google's servers have the ability to send email from [email protected] and it comes with all the appropriate DKIM signatures to be from "me". They have some kind of auto-reply system such that their computer can automatically send "as me". They're already 90% of the way there: I think you've overestimating how big a change this would be.

I'll also say that I have little to no confidence in "strong internal objections". VW engineers built the emissions-cheating system, Facebook engineers built Beacon, Google engineers dutifully slurped up everyone's private wifi traffic. As long as management dressed it up a little bit and/or reassigned any dissenters, I'm sure they'd get a compliant team to build whatever garbage they wanted.

Obviously you think you're the good guys, and you'd never do that, but you'd be surprised how "good" people can gradually slide into really unethical behaviour. If you haven't read them I recommend https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/558867.Disciplined_Minds and https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37976541-bad-blood

I... kind of agree with you, actually, with the caveat that I see decentralised platforms being the solution rather than laws. I think moving to a different platform is better than staying on the known-manipulator, but moving to a platform without a potential-manipulator is better still. Proper decentralised solutions would be and are prohibitively expensive at the moment, in a number of senses, but if we valued free (as in freedom) discourse more this wouldn't be the case, and the costs should decrease over time anyway.

Also, when they created comments and manipulated their timestamps to make it seem like they were created far earlier than they actually were, for advertising purposes.

They also obfuscate the real upvote/downvote numbers, purportedly to stop vote manipulation but I don't really see how it does anything but provide a mask of plausible deniability for editing the up/down figures for advertisements, subversive posts, etc.

It ensures batters cannot tell if their account has been shadow banned.

What incident is this referring to? I can't find anything via a quick search...

It didn't blow up like the comment-editing incident, but I was referring to https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/7a2mle/possible_...

That was beyond unacceptable because it didn't show the comment as have been edited with an asterisks. Which means they have and use special admin powers at will.

The only issue to Reddit it seems was that he was caught doing it.

I don't think admins can edit comments using the regular website interface. The CEO edited the comments directly in the database. That's why the asterisk never appeared. (Which, by the way, means the CEO has direct access to the database. Why?)

There are people sitting in prison RIGHT NOW from Reddit posts. Now think about the damage admins editing posts can do. You're right, it is beyond acceptable.

> Now think about the damage admins editing posts can do.

Why, their actions can lend plausible deniability to incriminating information in posts that have not been edited.

I'm a proud atheist, in part thanks to early Reddit. /r/Atheism at the time it was removed from the default subs list was a toxic cesspool filled with a lot of the same kinds of hateful rhetoric and magical thinking they criticize religious groups for. Removing it as a default was the right call.

>I’m a proud athiest

Might we say you are a religious athiest?

Not really. I don't claim to have proof that there is no god. I merely assert that not existing is the default state in the face of evidence-less existence claims. There could be a god, but that possibility has no bearing on how I live my life. If you want to ascribe a set of beliefs to me, the closest might be secular humanism.

Perhaps you might consider yourself to be agnostic?

Would you call yourself agnostic simply because you didn't believe Russel's teapot existed?

No, because that doesn't make sense.

r/atheism was made no longer a default because it became notoriously toxic

There was a actually a meta-game of where you'd (1) take a horrible quote, (2) mis-attribute it to Carl Sagan or Neil deGrasse Tyson or Stephen Hawking, (3) put it on an image of space and (4) post it to r/atheism to see how many up-votes it got.

It was a very easy game.

You didn't need to be religious to find /r/atheism obnoxious. Anybody remember that "faces of atheism" meme years back? Possibly the most obnoxious, pretentious and self-congradulatory thing I've ever seen become popular on reddit. At first it was funny, but reddit is pretty good at pushing jokes long after they've become stale.

It was a place meant as a consolation/safe-space for people being hated on for not believing in stuff without proof.

It became a place to hate on everyone who didn't believe in atheism.

Isn't that how every online community devolves? It starts as a place for a group to feel accepted, and then evolves to demonizing the other?

Evangelical Atheism

I welcomed that change. They had handpicked a few left-leaning subs like that one. I also remember there was one about feminism. I believe that was a bad idea, to position themselves like that. Maybe it was a good idea when reddit was a niche website. Now, as far as I know, they simply have an algorithm that shows the most popular posts of all subs, except a few ones that are banned (like the popular the_donald, a sub for supporters of Donald Trump). I'm not saying that I like the idea of a blacklist or that it is the best solution, but it's better than a whitelist.

/r/the_donald should have been closed a long time ago, due to their users and their mods breaking the rules (hate speech encouragement, mainly) that the rest of subreddits have to respect. Reddit has a dark incentive to keep it open, because it's a very popular community that helps Reddit make money, via ads and Reddit Gold.

Go read r/politics comments for 5 minutes and then go read r/the_donald comments for 5 minutes, then come back and tell me which subreddit has the most hate speech. Also let's not forget that r/politics mods sold the subreddit to Shareblue for $2 million.

Challenge accepted.

The current top comment on the current top post on /r/politics [1]:

>David Frum said it best this morning on NPR, his call for unity isn't actually a call for unity, he's demanding that everyone to support him and his policies.

The current top comment on the current top post on /r/The_Donald [2]:

>Schumer looked disgusting. Glasses at the end of his nose. Very disrespectful.

The politics comment might be biased but it is a least a political opinion worth discussing. The comment on The Donald is at best a childish insult and while I personally wouldn't call it "hate speech" I wouldn't be shocked if it was some form of antisemitic dog whistle. I think you are showing your own biases if you think those two subs have a similar level of discourse.

[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/anf6vn/trump_will...

[2] - https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/anf6ov/i_see_sc...

It's a reference to a classic Trump tweet: https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/14958910416893952...

(Edit to the guy below: I'm not saying I disagree with you, just adding some context.)

The disgusting and disrespectful portions might be a reference, but it was the "Glasses at the end of his nose" line that jumped out as a potential dog whistle. The response with 25 upvotes that talks about Shumer's "sniveling nose" also doesn't help.

I know that politicians getting criticized for their looks is just part of the equation and Trump is a big victim of that. However it is a little different when you are criticizing a Jewish person's "sniveling nose", especially in a community that is routinely accused of being hateful and antisemitic.

EDIT: This comment is being heavily downvoted, but I am not sure why. Like I said in my original post this wouldn't meet my personal definition of hate speak. However is it really outlandish to suggest that a community that has been accused of antisemitism might be signaling their antisemitism when their criticism of a Jewish person is the most stereotypical physical characteristic of the Jewish people?

The antisemitism accusation is completely over-the-top ridiculous. Trump's own daughter is a Jew. Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem, and not one democrat showed up for the ceremony. There are a couple openly antisemitic members of congress now, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. Louis Farrakhan hasn't even been disowned.

This is a case of projection if there ever was one.

There is a lot wrong with this comment.

To start with, nothing I said here was directed towards Trump so Ivanka isn't relevant. Even if she was, aren't we past the whole "some of my friends are black" excuse for bigotry? Plenty of people otherize a group while thinking the people they know in that group are "one of the good ones".

The next big problem is the equating Jews with all of Israel. It is entirely possible for someone to be antisemitic and pro-Israel or anti-Israel and not antisemitic. Israel is an independent nation with its own politics and there are plenty of Jews there with any number of political ideologies. Over recent years the political climate of Israel has been skewing right (in part due to the support of the American right/Evangelicals who are pro-Israel and not necessarily pro-Jews). It is therefore natural that members of the political left in this country are reacting by distancing themselves from the political actions of Israel.

I am not going to get into a debate about Palestine, Farrakhan, or anything more political than than what I mentioned above. HN is not the place for that discussion and I don't think that discussion has any relevance to the original question of whether mocking a Jewish person's nose is potentially antisemitic.

> Trump's own daughter is a Jew.

She's also a woman, but I don't think anyone would see that as sufficient to refute the claim that Trump is a misogynist. Not that Trump was even referred to here except as a victim of the popular act of mocking politicians appearance.

> Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem

Being a Christian Zionist, or politically pandering to Christian Zionists, isn't incompatible with anti-Semitism.

Ok so what exactly has he done that IS anti-semetic then?

Yeah Trump broke people's brains. Look at this anti-semite: http://i2.cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/170522092440-02-tru...

How many Trump tweets can be classic? I’d wager you’d try to give this context for any reference to any Trumpian thing. Which dilutes it meaning anything.

Do you have a citation for the $2M figure? I tried searching a bit. All I found were random sites saying roughly the same stuff conspiracy subreddits or sites were saying.

I’m not saying something didn’t go on, but if something did happen, where did that number come from besides “anonymous source[s]”

Cite?

This is hilarious. Yes the reason the subreddit for the President of the USA is allowed to exist is so the FBI can gather evidence.

on Russians, yes.

We're at such a weird area in American politics that I literally cannot tell if you're joking or serious.

Also the ‘Open Reddit App’ button at the bottom of the screen. Blocks content, can’t remove for the session, and a close button that is purposefully small in order to make it difficult to click. Enraging.

i.reddit.com bypasses all this

reddit also injects unique tracking into every outbound URL click, allowing them to monitor individual user behavior and engagement (similar to Google Search results)

I got so sick of the "use our app" shit on every page that I installed a third-party reddit app (Apollo). They wouldn't be pushing the app so hard if it was actually to my benefit.

I was browsing it using Firefox Focus, it pointed me to two options to use reddit: the app or Chrome (with its logo). I didn't want to open Chrome, so I closed and tried again. Only then I noticed that it was referring to any browser instead of Chrome... Not entirely bad, but a bit annoying.

Assuming you’re on Android. Using Firefox Focus on iOS I had the same issue, but the browser icon shows Safari. Still not sure whether they are being deceptive or incompetent.

For me, the "read in Chrome" option in Mobile Safari never works. So there's a choice between two options, and actually your two options are to read in the native app, or to let the popover dialog take up half the screen in the mobile browser. This would be truly evil if it was intentional and not just a bug.

The worst thing in promoting their app is that I would gladly use it if it was faster than a web site, but it loads so much slower that it's just a much worse experience.

Google realized that load times are critical 20 years ago. Facebook realized it when Google was launching G+.

> Google realized that load times are critical 20 years ago.

They seem to be forgetting it, lately.

Yes, Google transformed from an engineering driven organization to a tech driven one. Still, they want to make moneycin developing countries with crappy internet connections as well, so Google doesn't have any choice, it still has to look at latencies.

> incentives between Reddit as a business and Reddit as a community leader are not aligned, and that is a problem.

But Reddit is only one of those things.

The AMP pages with mobile app pop-up are the worst.

Especially as the cookie is broken so that you get the pop-up every single AMP visit.

Their current CEO seems to be a bad actor. Despite people reporting shills or Russian trollbots, the admins basically don't do anything in the name of "free speech" but to me, propaganda and counter-intelligence ops shouldn't really qualify... I wish they'd just clean up all the racist and weirdo (incel) subreddits and focus on nurturing the interesting communities (ebikes, woodworking, vinyl, guitarpedals). There's a lot of good stuff on reddit and it'd be a shame for them to get dragged down by the worst communities.

Well that’s a slippery slope to start editing or deleting posts you think are Russian propaganda. You might end up editing posts by real people who are misinformed or have those beliefs for some reason. And that is totally against free speech.

>lately it seems like the incentives between Reddit as a business and Reddit as a community leader are not aligned, and that is a problem.

That's by design. Reddit is just another data mining company. Of course they'd rather have you on the app than the browser. Apps can gather info about you even when you're not using them.

>recent example: Reddit now gates content in mobile Safari to push users to the app

They've been doing that for months now. Plus their mobile site is hideously slow and bloated.

Here's a tip: http://i.reddit.com. Looks old but does the job.

Apollo and an "open in Apollo" shortcut is IMO a much better solution.

It’s funny you say dark patterns. Reddit has been full of dark patterns long before that, between censorship and shilling. It doesn’t surprise me at all that they’re lining up to cash out, just like Facebook. They are positioned, more than likely, as good as they are ever going to be, without a serious financial transformation. Maybe once sold, Reddit will hang onto the limelight another 10 years. As it stands, I see a new Reddit clone about every 4-6 months or so. It’s not a guarded or protected model, like Facebook was. The supposed anonaminity of Reddit is nice, but anyone who knows about browser fingerprinting knows that’s basically a farce. The people paying for your data with Reddit are the same ones paying for it with Facebook. It’s hard for me to envision the data APIs getting any more secure, simply because that’s the thriving business model. But Powered by Reddit instead of Facebook. It’s gone from sociopath founded, to stolen by sociopaths. Slight improvement.

So what are you all's theories on why they want to push users to the app? Does that enable them to track more movement, target you with ads easier, etc?

I’m guessing a lot of it has to do with making it harder to circumvent ads

Their mobile interface takes ages (several seconds on a bad mobile connection!) to load and keeps pestering you about using the App.

I'm glad they keep their old mobile interface (https://i.reddit.com) which loads instantaneous. Unfortunately some links redirect you to the new interface, which is when I just close the site.

The gating is even worse on Android. They ask you to "continue" with the Chrome icon even when you're not using Chrome.

I only use the webapp, and the "Use the app messages" was very annoying, until I found that you can actually turn these messages off using some obscure setting (which, of course, I can't find right now...)

It's easy to turn that dialog off 'permanently' (as long as you don't clear the cookies) on any Android browser: When the dialog appears, click on the hamburger menu at the top right of the reddit page, then turn off the "Ask To Open In App" option. The option disappears when it's off, so it's not possible to turn it on manually (not that anyone would want to). I've set it off months ago in my main browser and it's still off.

I am using reddit less and less because of the insistence on using the app no matter how many times I decline.

They have also become particularly creepy and anti-privacy lately.

I'm probably the minority here but I wouldn't really call the way they're pushing their app a "dark pattern." It is an annoying pattern for sure, but I'm struggling to see what's unethical about it.

We should probably be cautious about using the term "dark pattern" so liberally, otherwise anything on the web that we don't like could eventually be categorized as such and the term loses its power.

I think that new banner is so much better than the old one, though.

https://i.imgur.com/PF3Zc8R.jpg

It's still bad. They should cookie the choice so it doesn't always pop up every time.

That wouldn't fit the business model of "push them to the native app as hard as possible"

This doesn't work for people who browse Reddit without cookies or signing in, such as for those who use Private Browsing.

So what? That demographic self-selects to be hard to track, so there isn't any good way to track their decision on the pop-up regardless.

Allow me to send a request parameter “?stfu=Y”

Which breaks on search result and referral traffic, forcing users to install third party extensions to maintain, thus creating new security vectors.

Why not just load your own css and set the div to "display:none;" then?

This is what I do on browsers that have greasemonkey. The downside is that I have to be aware of their div and other things they make to try to make me switch to mobile.

Specifying a parameter of reddit’s specification allows me to work with them as a user to follow their parameter. If their users don’t like certain features (like nag popups) then it helps them to proactively solve this problem before their users leave.

Sure, but as a PM at reddit, you're not going to release new features like blanket URL parameters that push behavior that leads to security issues. Just to cater to a self-selecting demographic that doesn't directly contribute to your P&Ls.

Honestly, that's a good idea. I should block the XPromoPopup class with a content blocker.

You can do that, it's just a bit hidden away. https://i.imgur.com/qIDu7q3.jpg

Of course. Looks like it's stored server side? I couldn't see where they are storing it. Good find.

The sad part is that it's not better in the app. I tried it.

It's an interesting question. "Reddit as a business" would seem to have an incentive to keep their esoteric and weird communities going, otherwise it's hard to see their appeal over other social-media sites. The notable thing about the dark patterns you correctly point out is that they hit the casual users really hard, but most dedicated users (the folks who plausibly provide the content and indeed community that ultimately gives Reddit its value) can easily get around them. It will be interesting to see if this pattern can prove sustainable.

they also hate TOR users

the captcha is not completable, and when it is, the next section says the captcha signature is invalid

but you can always circumvent that with a clearnet VPN, just need to isolate its use to just reddit, that session.

differently from Google, reddit was bootstrapped by dark patterns! their founders even brag of it!

my point being that with Google your complaint is valid. But on reddit case, you are just signaling that you liked one dark pattern (which probably benefited you) more than others.

Max, would you be willing to evaluate Reddit alternatives? One is https://notabug.io/ after the Aaron Swarz quote, has seen hypergrowth since it started a few months ago using our P2P tech.

You emailed me about this so I'll reply here:

I call shenanigans on the hypergrowth, where the metrics you sent me imply ~1 million pageviews per month yet there is barely any engagement or new/original content on the site itself. (and the few comments there appear to be very Voat-esque)

Semi-related, I dislike straight-up Reddit/Hacker News clones, including the UI. If Reddit/HN has enough issue to warrant a competitor by cloning the UI, that just repeats the same problem.

I think ~1 million pageviews (according to SimilarWeb: https://www.similarweb.com/website/notabug.io) is notabug.io+snew.notabug.io (see subdomains section: snew.notabug.io 97.85% notabug.io 2.15%).

So notabug itself is 2% of 1 million ~ 20k pageviews.

That makes more sense, thanks for that clarification!

However, snew.notabug.io is a mirror of the corresponding Reddit posts w/o censorship, which makes it not an alternative! Shenanigans identified!

As one of the most active users of notabug.io: you're not wrong. There's no hypergrowth.

But the tech has real promise and that's the story here. Of course 'alternatives' get the scoundrels first so criticizing it on that merit is a bit generic.

There's value in federated systems with a p2p overlay even if they're not attracting the money driven crowds. You can't post sci-hub links openly on reddit. You can't even discuss how to handle DRM and bypass it.

Centralized systems are always going to go through the same lifecycle after they reach a critical mass requiring real money. It's not pretty. If anyone can self-host from home or even contribute hosting by visiting with a webrtc enabled browser it benefits a lot of groups pushed out for perfectly cromulent reasons.

You do realize that reddit owns Notabug, Inc, yeah?

notabug.io isn't owned by Reddit.

I'm aware of that, I'm just saying they own the corporation with the same name, which they got when they acquired Aaron's company.

They own Notabug Inc, not notabug.io

There's also a namespace collision on Freenode IRC. The #notabug channel is definitely not for notabug.io it's for the free code hosting group https://notabug.org

The UI is based on some open source repo by Reddit.

Yeah, it's based on the old open source reddit.

Using Gun and Blockchain to mirror content on other servers to prevent data loss.

Notabug.io is a P2P tech using the old Reddit UI.

http://k666.kr5ddit.com/ Is a free and open source version of http://kr5ddit.com made to look like the old Scoop and function like Reddit.

I hate how comments pop-in out of order. It's distracting.

I actually hate Reddit these days. I've never really been into their various communities/subredits- and on occasion they're really useful spots of information or entertainment.

But...

Their current "force you into app" (which appears to leave you logged in, able to make account changes, even if you change your password) approach is fucking horrible. Their mobile navigation is broken by design and.... for what? What incentive do I have to sign up? Why should when its in such a hostile way. The incentive clearly is for them the organization to get new funding and not for me as a user since functionality has been reduced for NO reason. It's like Quora... that worked great for funding but has really done a lot to develop a mature business, eh?

... I'm gonna go pour out some coffee in memory of Digg.

> What incentive do I have to sign up?

Arguably the best Reddit experience is only available when you are signed in. Reddit's greatest value come from niche communities. Personally I enjoy things like r/savagegarden, r/mycology and r/askhistorians, so when I log in I see pictures of mushrooms and carnivorous plants, and get to read interesting articles about history and science. If you don't log in and subscribe to things you're interested in then you will see memes, jokes, pictures of people's pets etc, it's a totally different experience.

Disclaimer: work for Reddit.

Yes we all know the logged in experience is terrific.

However, the anonymous experience is (was) also terrific for very different reasons. Reddit is next to unusable on mobile safari in incognito mode. Sometimes I don’t want to be tracked. I want to read whatever I want to at the moment, without having that be associated to my name in a database somewhere, and without having related ads follow me around. It’s an intellectual freedom that to many people is non-negotiable.

Reddit is now taking money from a Chinese company, where this kind of anonymity is not possible. That’s frightening to me as a longtime reddit user, both logged in and anon.

Uh, you know you can make multiple accounts and don't need to even associate an email, right? You can browse just as anonymously logged in as out.

I'm specifically talking about Reddit mobile on incognito mode. You are bombarded by App ads and even dark pattern modals trying to get you to install the app. Compare it to HN, which is a great experience in normal or incognito mode.

I get that I can create an anon account, but I don’t want to spend 5 minutes doing that every time I open an incognito tab.

Just need to click "Next" when there is an email prompt, still available but an hard to avoid dark pattern

It's an intellectual freedom that has no precedent throughout history. If you walked into a library in the 1950s and thumbed through a book about communism, you were probably put on a list. If you walked into a privately owned book store, the owners had a right to gossip and tell others what you purchased, and I'm sure many people unfortunately made use of that liberty. This isn't new.

You could go a few towns over and there wouldn't be any gossip because they wouldn't know who the hell you were.

There are many amazing new possibilities brought about because of the Internet. Just because Stalin (and the FBI) tracked your library habits doesn’t mean we should squash out useful functionality.

Don't work for them, but I've had a similar experience.

I find it funny that the OP would ask this question while being an active part of HN. Reddit is HN, for niche topics for which communities are hard to find.

I am regular on subs like r/progmetal, r/boston , r/bodyweightfitness, r/frugalmalefashion and r/gifrecipes . Topics for which I wouldn't find even a close alternative anywhere on the internet.

In addition, there are popular subs like r/soccer and r/dota2 which have developed a personality of their own, with in-jokes, popular posters and regular weekly focused discussions.

In many ways, the front page of reddit is literally the least interesting part of it. I am glad it is that way, because it adds an element of inaccessibility to it, keeping away those without enough commitment. (HN does it too with its interface and topics that need specialized knowledge)

That is one usage pattern.

The alternatives aren't just visiting the main page while being logged out, but for instance hitting a thread or subreddit that is linked from another context. Like say a mobile app that uses a subreddit for the occasional announcement/discussion, which is where that nag popup gets really annoying.

I also visit several niche communities directly. And despite having a decade old account, if I want to comment I usually create a throwaway nym. Obviously that experience isn't as integrated as it could be, but that's the tradeoff we all have to make in the surveillance society!

Reddit.com/r/askhistorians+mycology+savagegarden gets that same experience though.

old.reddit.com/r/askhistorians+mycology+savagegarden

FTFY

Fine, show it for the front page. What is the advantage when you are already at a subreddit or a specific thread?

I hope your superiors realise how much they are stealing users from the future.

You've basically given your competitors a free USP - "it's like Reddit but without all the bullshit".

Signing up for an account is cool. But we are talking about installing the app.

OFF-TOPIC question: how did you first time find those subreddits?

I mean you can search?

If it is a common word or activity, chances are there is a related subreddit for it, and askhistorians is one of the more well known ones. There are a lot of similar ask subreddits titled in a similar fashion, but that obviously comes from knowing other parts of reddit.

As a long time reddit user I actually find the product to be borderline unusable without an account. There's so much noise and the account features allow you to focus in on what you want to hear.

I've never used the official reddit app so I cant speak to it but I have used an android app called RedReader for a few years now and it is my preferred way to browse reddit. I highly recommend it.

This. Can't recommend RedReader enough.

> I've never really been into their various communities/subredits

Well, there you go. There's the issue right there

I somehow naturally managed to stay away from bad subs.. that said their long effort to revamp the site is so sadly annoying I consider letting go.

Im a fan of third party, open-source Reddit apps on Android. Joey for Reddit is cleaner, leaner, and fairly intuitive.

At least you don't need an email to sign up.

Yes, you do.

The HackerNews community is more appreciative of these problems than Reddit's. But Reddit will suffer from the same problems that Facebook and Twitter suffer from, if not already. Reddit users are easily manipulated by engineered content and engineering content on Reddit is not hard if you know what you're doing. Evidently, there are power-users on Reddit (e.g. /u/GallowBoob) who know exactly how Reddit ticks and can get practically anything to the front page in front of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people.

Reddit is huge -- I suspect they will be bigger than Facebook (maybe not in valuation, but usage) in the next 7 years and these problems will only be exacerbated. Facebook isn't what 12-13 year olds today are interested in. Reddit is a more apt model for online discourse and culture than Facebook ever was.

> I suspect they will be bigger than Facebook (maybe not in valuation, but usage) in the next 7 years and these problems will only be exacerbated.

I only agree with that in the sense that I think Facebook (the facebnook.com site) usage will decline quicker that Reddit usage. As someone who's been on Reddit for almost 9 years, I feel like the redesign is kind of equivalent to the timeline change that Facebook had. While it's not going to cause massive user drop off on it's own, it's kind of the thing that opened people's eyes to the fact that they are the product on Reddit. Every new complaint about Reddit will be, "First they did the redesign and now they are doing {insert new annoying thing}"

I think we'll see a gradual decline in Reddit usage for a while, but nothing major as there are no real competitors in the space that can handle anywhere near their scale. Once an actual competitor pops up though, all it's going to take is one or two missteps and people will start moving off Reddit.

I'd love to be surprised with a decent competitor but all of the Reddit spin-offs I've seen are all trying to be not-Reddit, and that often includes keeping the community niche/exclusive.

I think the killer app would be to keep the community somewhat exclusive but also have a great breadth of niche, expert content. There was a time when Reddit hit this sweet spot (although there were also very large subs that attracted the worst users).

One of the main issues with reddit is that a lot of niche interest subreddits are 90-99% non-practitioners or extreme amateurs, even when weighted in terms of contribution. For example there is no subreddit where you can actually learn very insightful things about programming or computer science or machine learning, same for biology/physics/astronomy/etc.

I would be ok with a not-reddit competitor that actually succeeded in being a better reddit. But the #1 thing they should avoid at all costs is taking VC money. You can't have a great community of experts that is also trying to maximize it's viewership, that's how you get Quora or Reddit

r/haskell has been much more helpful than StackOverflow for me.

Previous comment says: "a lot of niche interest subreddits". Not "all of".

Out of curiosity have you heard of Tildes.net?

It's a non-profit site created by a former Reddit admin Deimorz (known for being the creator of /u/Automoderator, /r/SubredditSimulator...).

It's currently in closed alpha so the community is somewhat exclusive because of that; but if you wanted a HN+reddit hybrid, then it might be worth checking out.

sub: /r/Tildes source: https://gitlab.com/tildes

I already have a Tildes account. It's not really active so I haven't checked it out very often. They are very careful about community growth so I don't see how it will become a competitor to Reddit, as least not in terms of business value.

I think we'll see something eventually. There's too much money there and there isn't much of reddit that isn't copyable.

I think 100 million users is harder to copy than you think.

Exactly. I could go download the source code (or at least something like it, I'm not sure how much the github repo matches what is in production), and plenty of sites exist which have done this, but without the users it is meaningless.

If you really want an alternative, convince Musk to do it (or bless yours) and tweet it out. Even then I bet it would take years to match Reddit, and it may or may not ever actually exceed it.

raddle.me - free speech-minded actual leftists allow a clone of r/The_Donald on their site.

Voat? Yeah, they're kinda gross...

Sorry if I misunderstand, but are you suggesting that these forces are not active on HN?

They're more effective on a non-technical user-base where a larger fraction of users are unaware or less aware of those techniques.

HN is also a fraction of the size of Reddit, so there is less value in attempting to do so.

And it has zero incentive to use its data other than to sell joining YC to entrepreneurs.

Psychological techniques tend to work no matter whether we are aware of them or not. Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, fast and slow" explains why this happens, with lots of examples. It's a great read.

I'd argue that's hard to measure.

Can you convince a subset of doctors to go anti-vaxx as easily as you can a randomly sampled subset of laymen?

I suspect much of the readership of HN isn't only aware of dark patterns, but actively primed to recoil from them.

Blocking /u/GallowBoob did nothing but improve my reddit experience.

I've seen this comment more recently. I just thought he was a notorious reposter. What specifically is bad about him? (I often don't mind reposts when it's a first time for me..)

There are allegations that he's paid to post things on behalf of companies.

One such complaint is https://old.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/comments/amg6kr/netfl...

'He' is probably a small team of people using that account to repost paid content. There are dozens of massive accounts like this, I wish I had a comprehensive list to filter them all without going through user history one by one.

What is the point of aggregating so much traffic into a single account when it is not really a single person? Too easy to notice, too easy to block, why wouldn't someone paying to have content posted use many different accounts?

The account eventually gains some level of recognition - while you have vocal haters, you also have people that upvote their content (likely based on the username) to the frontpage. Most of what gallowboob posts is garbage and I guarantee you that if it was coming from accounts with less karma or notariety it wouldn't reach the front-page. You have to consider that some of the people upvoting are people commenting on the threads.

Something like a blocklist in uBlock Origin that blocks reddit power users.

Technically you could say that Gallowboob (and similar) posts ARE ads, and warrant blocking.

reddit.com##.link:has(.author:has-text(/^GallowBoob$/))

Reddit played a big part in the 2016 USA elections that crowned Trump. Reddit had to change its front page algorithm to avoid having Trump content near the top of the page for almost the whole time. The subreddit in question organized itself to mass-upvote certain posts at certain times, and Reddit wasn't prepared for such massive, non-organic influence.

I wonder how big of a part the Russian bots and trolls played. I'd love to read an in-depth book about it.

Reddit is still a haven for the far-right. It really leaves a bad taste in my mouth that they are tolerated there.

While this may be true, Reddit's "free speech" ethos has been part of its DNA from day 1. Reddit has also gone a long way to getting rid of the most egregious content (I mean, jailbait???)

What would you suggest the alternative is? I think the real problem is that society is coming to terms with the fact that anonymous free speech isn't all it's cracked up to be.

I don't think it's accurate to say that reddit has a free speech ethos. Maybe "free speech up until the point where it causes problems with revenue". For example, a year or so ago Reddit overhauled its rules to ban subreddits that were used to facilitate exchanging or gifting drugs (including alcohol and tobacco). However that rule has an exemption saying that advertisements for alcohol, tobacco, and narcotics are still OK. So /r/beertrade gets banned, but reddit will still happily show me ads for some winery founded by MIT grads.

Reddit will also ban subreddits for hosting content that some people may think is "bad", but definitely not illegal. Not that I miss /r/shoplifting, but the discussion itself wasn't illegal. They also banned legal things like firearm schematics and r/brassswap

Far-right communities would be alright if they could be hate-free. They usually have a hard time doing that.

> What would you suggest the alternative is?

Does there need to be one? This site seems to manage to avoid it. Quite how you get into the situation reddit did is mystifying to me.

I completely agree that anonymous free speech is not the ideal it sounds.

> This site seems to manage to avoid it.

If we are going to be reasonable a better comparison would be comparing this site to a single heavily moderated subreddit.

As an extreme you have subreddits like https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/ if you look into the comments you will see a lot of "[ Removed ]" threads. https://i.imgur.com/Q7mXkPd.png

Other subreddits are purposefully not moderated as heavily. It's entirely up to whoever runs it to moderate how they see fit.

Jailbait was tacky and creepy, but in line with what you have on Instagram. It pales in comparison to the virulent racism and sexism that still pervades the site (not confined to any subreddit)

It is also still a haven for the far-left. Does that leave a bad taste in your mouth too?

Does advocating for single-payer healthcare, free community college, marriage equality, pro-choice, and higher tax rates for wealthy individuals constitute 'far left'? Serious question. I have in mind what I would think of as far left, but I don't see those folks are particularly well represented in the United States.

Far left would be advocating murdering billionaires, punching gay people who don’t include trans people in their sexuality, etc.

I consider myself a right-leaning libertarian, and I am totally on-board with everything you said, save one. The more I ruminate on it, the more I think abortion is the single issue that encapsulates the political dichotomy of left vs. right in the US. Where you fall on the line, from "no abortions, ever" to "abortion up to a week after birth, no questions asked" readily defines how "right" or "left" you are, according to the press in the US.

> Where you fall on the line, from "no abortions, ever" to "abortion up to a week after birth, no questions asked"

This is the false dichotomy so often pushed by right-wing ideologues. Literally nobody on any side of the abortion debate advocates for "abortions up to a week after birth" or anywhere close to that. This sort of boolean thinking is the root of our (especially current) toxic political climate.

It seems like that might be difficult for you to believe, considering the bias inherent in your own statement, but I've never seen anyone on the "right" side of this debate not at least make exception for "health of the mother" or rape. So, to my eyes, both sides of my statement were equally specious. I was simply trying to frame the opposite ends of the spectrum as far away as I could, for purposes of the point I was trying to make.

I think your reaction to this is the very problem you're trying to describe, but, to each their own.

What do the surveys say?

There are plenty of actual communists on reddit you know.

Being OK with the recent abortion bills in NY and VA is pretty far left. Statistically speaking.

Reddit has also had a problem with anti-religious hate content, which isn't necessarily left wing except that the hate is often pointed at uncultured, socially conservative stereotypes.

I do not read headlines much but I recall hearing something about late term abortions recently. I am curious if the point is to push back against the far-right who want to outlaw it altogether? Because actually advocating for legal late term abortions would be out there a ways.

Thanks for the reply in any case. It is enlightening to hear what someone else's viewpoints are on where the current left/right ideological divide is these days. Sometimes it feels like we are in crazyland.

I personally try to avoid the religious stuff because I'm ignostic (commonly misheard as agnostic and I don't usually correct because it gets some folks a little bothered), but just a couple weeks ago we dropped off our kids with grandma for a weekend and when they came home they were telling us all about how grandma told them God this, Jesus that, etc. sigh. If I complain, I look like the asshole, but dammit, why do people think it's okay to proselytize to elementary aged kids that are not their own? So I can almost understand when people get a little nuts with the anti-religious viewpoint, even though I don't advocate namecalling and ridiculing others for their belief or lack thereof.

yeah the people who want to redistribute money are equally as scary as the ones who are actively racist

Please, don't equate taxes to a complete nationalization of nearly all industries plus a ban on all monetary transactions save a few whitelisted types. It's an absurd comparison that does nothing to further the current discussion.

While I question whether this is true, if it is, yes, it does. Violent extremism, or incitement of violent extremism, of any form, should not be tolerated.

Almost everything on Reddit is far-left, or at least anti-Trump. Every front-page sub (e.g. r/pics, which you'd think would be completely non-political) gets bombarded with this spam. You have to actually go looking to find right-wing content, letalone "far-right" content which I haven't come across unless you deem memes to be far-right.

Hell, the fact they won't change r/politics to a more accurate name and remove it from the front page shows you exactly who Reddit caters to.

Over 60% of the voting population disagrees with Trump, so by definition that position is not far-anything, it is mainstream.

The way to deal is not to push them off the net.

They will cry foul and get plenty of attention.

A while back, a far right sub got closed. People were kind of lost as always happens when moderators take a sub private.

Others, and this happened during the heay of the 2016 election, offered up a space. A thread on a definitely not far right sub.

Was, "have a beer, tell us about it" essentially. No judgement, just a place to talk past frustration.

The chatter that night was interesting. Relations were permenantly improved. Some of the "far" was also rolled off. (I was there, ran that little experiment and followed users and discussion for a time afterword.)

Aaron was passionate about this effect. Reddit, in general, used to be. When people talk broadly, things improve.

When they get contained, things amplify.

Reddit sees people with interests, things to say. Others, including some moderators at Reddit, sees groups of people.

That clash is not talked about as much as it should be.

Humanizing others different from us is something Reddit has done well. When it is done, the state of conflict improves. Reddit has also contained discussion, and amplified the toxic too. Ugly stuff.

We all run the same basic way, and we all have more in common than we often recognize, or admit.

One other thing:

A very toxic shitpost sub got to hating on a community I moderated. Two of us decided to make some friends.

For a month, we would rate their toxicity, employ good humor, laugh with, etc...

Amazingly, this worked far better than we expected. Soon, there were people in that toxic mess rooting for us, and it became increasingly difficult for the sub to be toxic and believe it had impact.

As the tipping point approached, we got banned, and the shitposts to follow fell flat. Everyone saw how ugly it was and our humor was missed.

They quit after that. The friends remained, some left the toxic haven.

Now, there are people like you and me that have the same bad taste for "far lefties", and in general, "those other people."

What we community managers, app builders, data scientists should be doing is finding ways to exploit the effects I put here.

And we should be making tools to foster better communication.

Those tools are software, and giving people options, making them aware of their own agency in dialog.

The former has only limited success as many communities will show. Blocks, bans, other things...

When combined with empowering people to take charge of their interactions, weigh what others say, it is a whole new game.

I have applied these to communities who end up very troll resistant and able to communicate across broad swaths of humanity.

Righteous indignation is not the only way to respond to toxic speech. In fact, it is often the very worst, yet the domimant exchange is indignation, largely for the often set expectations encouraging it.

Some rando says something toxic and when weighted, it is laughable, pathetic. It for sure is not meaningful.

Trolling works on righteous indignation.

Free hugs, humor, empathy, and more all snuff it out.

The same goes for very different worldviews. Make some friends, have a common human basis and those differences begin to melt.

Frankly, I see 3 billion being used to sell shit, get user data.

Shame that some of it is very unlikely to be used to improve communications and add some real value along the way.

Edit: Reddit is an amazing playform to run the social dynamics experiments. Lots to be learned there for those who go looking.

you mean alt right. Alt right is the racism and tariff producing political force.

I would hope you don't have a bad taste from right leaning economics. Not even China can deny the power of Free Markets.

Free market economics is not a "far right" concept.

I am relieved to hear people saying that.

China is not a free market. It is a state controlled market.

Reddit by and large was actively against Trump during 2016 and thereafter.

You must have blocked /r/t_d. I would trust that there would be little argument that, by number of subs, and subscriber count, Reddit leans pretty-heavily left. However, by front page posts, the site APPEARED to lean heavily right in the run-up to the last presidential election. Week after week, I was blown away that the admins didn't nerf the algorithm to "fix" it.

They did eventually nerf the algorithm. /r/t_d was abusing stickied mod posts to get on the front page and that got fixed. I think it was also partly because most of the pro-trump users and posts were concentrated in one subreddit causing inflated upvote counts.

/r/t_d also took advantage of the void left after the DNC primaries ended since the site was very anti-Hillary at the time.

Reddit is not a single entity, it is a clustered social network. The small part of it that supported Trump managed to create and empower a meme machine that is still going strong.

Subreddits are like thinktanks. They are the perfect breeding ground for internet content. You can gauge popularity, you can quickly refine the content based on the comments received, and if you're lucky you can even kickstart and guide whole movements.

As was a majority of the country, so that's unsurprising.

Most of the content on reddit's frontpage in 2016 was anti-trump just like it is today. Reddit changed its algorithm because reddit admins supported hillary. The donald subreddit is no different from politics. The only difference is that one has the support of reddit and the other does not. And even bigger difference is that reddit admins allow reddit's power users to spam anti-trump propaganda from multiple subreddits.

The idea that reddit helped Trump is absurd. Pretty much every social media company was anti-trump and many, like google, actively worked against trump.

It might soon be time for The Oatmeal to add a new panel to his famous "Digg vs. Reddit" cartoon:

https://theoatmeal.com/pl/state_web_winter_2012/reddit_digg

I love Reddit and have no problem with this move in principle, though I do wish there was at least one social platform that would try to follow the Craigslist ethos and stay "proudly independent."

I'm not a big believer in crypto, but Reddit seems like one of the few platforms that would allow a crypto economy to develop and provide an alternative to the dominant money-making models.

> I do wish there was at least one social platform that would try to follow the Craigslist ethos and stay "proudly independent."

I worked at reddit for 4 years, but quit in 2016, largely because they were clearly beginning to switch from a small, fairly independent company (despite being owned by Advance/Conde) to one that was going to become completely dependent on venture capital and I knew what that would end up doing to the site.

A few months later, I decided to start a non-profit and start working on a site that would be able to address a lot of the issues that I think are hurting online communities: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes (HN discussion of the announcement here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093)

It's in private alpha and is still fairly small, but it gets several hundred posts/comments a day and is progressing steadily. If you (or anyone else) is interested in an invite, send me an email at the address listed in the blog post and I'll be happy to give you one.

This sounds exactly like the kind of Reddit alternative we need. Most competitors right now seem to think Reddit's biggest problem is their policy against user harassment and hate speech (even though this is barely enforced at all).

Just based on your blog post, you seem really in tune with what the real problems with Reddit (and social media as a whole) are in 2019.

It looks interesting. Your blog says it has "Limited tolerance, especially for assholes." I'd like to ask you a question that would help elucidate this ethos. Let's say a user makes a comment about how illegal immigrants should be deported, and another user calls the first racist in response. How would the site respond & why?

It's impossible to answer questions like that. Depending on a lot of factors, the response could be anything from "do absolutely nothing" to "ban both users".

Community management and moderation aren't simple, black-and-white decisions. Anyone that claims they are has never been involved in doing it at a meaningful level.

This is actually exactly the response I was hoping for. Any community that responds in a black-or-white manner on a cultural issue like this one would be completely incapable of supplanting a global site like Reddit.

What if there are no other factors?

User A, new account, posts a single comment: "Illegal immigrants should be deported."

User B, new account, posts a single comment in reply: "You're a racist."

What does Tildes do?

It's not impossible to answer that. And the answer will tell us a lot about what Tildes wants to be.

Love what I've read so far and have sent an invite request. Thank you for your work, I was beginning to lament that all social media would fall into the toxic shitpost aggregator turned VC cash machine role.

(I totally miss my old BBS too...)

Do you have any screenshots of what the website looks like? I'm curious. I'm not asking you to make them just for me, I want to know if they already exist. If they don't and you don't want to make them, that's fine.

There were some at https://imgur.com/c7UWQa9

That screenshot looks pretty bad, since they made the site fairly thin, but not quite thin enough that the sidebar was hidden.

Here's one of the top of my home page right now, in the Solarized Light theme (there are a few other options too): https://i.imgur.com/GbfpnT1.png

The irony of that comic is that reddit had more traffic than Digg when Digg died. The "mass influx" from Digg to reddit wasn't all that massive, because most of those people were already reddit users too.

About 5 years ago, Reddit hired a crypto guy, Ryan X Charles, to make something called "reddit notes"[0] that they could never explain[1]. He wasted his time re-implementing bitcoin in Javascript[2], and was eventually fired.[3]

I guess you could say they were already early pioneers of the "cryptocurrency scam flameout" pattern.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/redditnotes

[1] https://www.engadget.com/2014/12/19/reddit-notes/

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2uadvd/the_real_re...

[3] http://fortune.com/2015/01/30/reddit-notes-is-not-going-to-h...

But why not mine bitcoins client-side with millions of mobile users? (/s)

If that would mean staying independent and free from economic/political interference, why not?

That would require Bitcoin to be free from economic/political interference first, and given the the block size debacle and concentration of power with the Chinese miners, that's not the case.

Because users like their batteries?

Because trying to do crypto properly in a language without integers is recipe for disaster?

(on the crypto note) is something like https://steemit.com/ what you are envisioning?

It does seem like we are stuck in a cycle where we are super into platforms until they become large and too beholden to investors, then we swap. Some kind of truly community driven (open source) federated service does seem like a real answer to this problem. Maybe we will all end up on Mastodon-like services pretty soon.

Steemit is interesting to me, but I'm not sure I'd want something that's so focused on users making money to replace reddit.

I've given up most social media but have become obsessed with Reddit.

No matter how much I use it, I'm constantly amazed that I can be immediately connected with the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic people on virtually any subject I care about.

I'm not a fan of the redesign or their push to look at other social media platforms, but I understand the direction they have to go to build revenue.

Seriously? I just assume most people on there are in high school, it seems like a place where the lowest common denominator ideas get upvoted and everything else gets nailed.

It's crucial to mostly ignore and unsubscribe from the default subreddits. If there's a topic you're interested in, try to find a small subreddit dedicated just to it. My personal reddit homepage looks virtually nothing like the default, and indeed whenever I accidentally view the "popular" feed I'm shocked at what the site devolves into if you don't manually curate your subscriptions.

Yep. Look at woodworking, sailing, overlanding, etc. and you'll find people who care about their hobby and are knowledgeable.

Some popular subs can have good content, too - askreddit has a good topic once or twice a month, and depthhub (used to) have good curation of deep learning.

>Yep. Look at woodworking, sailing, overlanding, etc. and you'll find people who care about their hobby and are knowledgeable.

I disagree. Those subs are chock full of people who suffer from "expert beginner" symptom. The real experts have moved on to communities with a higher bar of entry (mostly forums). You can't have real in-depth discussion about technical subjects when you're constantly getting buried by people who are mostly trying to score internet virtue signaling points by pointing out that their table saw is old and lacks the most modern safety features or that they're not using jack stands. Forums (or 4-Chan, or anywhere else with linear, non-ranked discussion) doesn't have that problem. Once you're above the lowest common denominator in any sub there's little left to gain because you can't reliably interact with people who are at or above your level (because those people get drowned out so they start keeping their mouths shut or leave entirely).

It's because Reddit displays the upvote totals. Anytime you set up something that looks like a scorekeeping mechanism, people are going to start treating it like a video game and chasing high scores, with all the attendant showboating and bad behavior that leads to.

I've also yet to find a subreddit I like. I admit I haven't tried recently, but the "high school" vibe is very much the one I get. I don't even mean in a bad way, I just mean in a very naïve way. I came of age on the internet, as a teen in the mid-90s, and I just feel like, 20+ years later, I've moved beyond the "everything is new" phase, and reddit still feels like everyone discovering things for the first time. Whether it's a car subreddit where nobody knows how cars work, or a tech-specific subreddit where nobody has the background of my peers.. I'm all for helping people along, but on every topic it feels like 95% rehashing the same old things I rehashed as a teenager.

I think it's just that, ultimately, younger people have more time for online community than middle-aged folks, and the average tone of most subreddits clearly shows this.

Perhaps I'd have a different perspective if I was pursuing a new hobby, so I was the n00b, but I'm.. not.

Agreed. I've seen cases where you had niche subreddits containing people who are somewhat experts, but when the sub gets remotely popular, it gets bombarded by people who don't know anything but feel like they can post whatever useless crap they want that has been posted a million times before. Eventually the moderators give up trying to control quality due to posts and upvotes by beginners, the experts leave in disgust, and the sub devolves into dumb conversations about the topic because now it's just beginners talking to beginners.

The heavily moderated ones are generally better. /r/askscience and /r/askhistorians are the highest quality subs I know of. They delete any comments that don't cite sources.

This the best comment and exactly describes my experience with reddit in the last 4 years.

Moderation and composition contribute a lot to a sub's quality. On one end you have fantastic and popular subreddits like Ask(Historians|Science|*) which rely on extremely heavy moderation and qualifications or sources. On the other end you have very niche subs that are really only of interest to enthusiasts/relevant parties, and so composition keeps the quality high rather than moderation. The problem with a lot of subs is that they are popular and unmoderated, and so left alone they just converge to the mean (and the mean's not great).

As someone who has been on reddit for a long long time (10+ years). It's clear as daylight that the site is mostly comprised of teenagers and that is the dominating voice. As other mentioned there are still (plenty of)diamonds in the rough if you know where to look but the site lost its voice and the leadership their values. Since spez has returned the strategy has been to gradually move the goal posts to keep uproar at a minimum.

This was inevitable though. At some point the corporate overlords will want to cash out. Time for something new.

It depends on the subreddit.

If you only browse /r/all then yeah it's very likely you will be in a room full of teenagers.

Go to /r/askhistorians to be in a room with academics that take themselves very seriously.

You could say the same thing about YouTube -- just look the "YouTube trending" page any time, it's a bunch of stuff only children and dumb people would be contributing statistics for (sorry to be pretentious, but am I wrong?). That doesn't mean YouTube isn't a valuable source of information -- you just have to find the right channels.

This is 5th most visited website in US and definitely one of the biggest in terms of raw text UGC.

You can find anything you want there if you look long enough.

UCG?

User Generated Content

User Generated Content

Well, based on my favorite subreddits, let's see:

/r/starcraft: doesn't have nearly as much good discussion as TeamLiquid, but TL's forums are not easy to trawl through. Great coverage of tournaments/announcements tho

/r/personalfinance: really great here, lot of professional financial experts drop knowledge bombs. I've improved my financial life oodles just reading through this.

/r/piano: lots of great/interesting posts, mostly people playing pieces or shots of their set-ups, not too much memery but people try a little bit. Quite a few better/more experienced players than I am to answer my Q's.

The main thing I hate is memes. They are very low effort, many of them are inside jokes/highly meta, and the humor is usually bargain-basement, not very funny. If you can avoid those subreddits where memery takes over, then you have a better experience IMO.

Depends on the subs you subscribe to. Reddit is as good as you make it to be.

Your reddit experience varies wildly based on which subreddits you subscribe to. If you don't have an account, you're likely seeing the unwashed masses.

The sports streams subreddits are a God-sent though for people like me obsessed about sports, for the first time in two decades I've started watching US sports again thanks to /r/nbastreams and /r/MLBStreams/.

In most subs I'd say you're right. Niche subs can be really great though.

that's 99.99% of the popular subs. But go to the non-pop ones or the ones with heavy moderation. And it's a gem of a place really.

That's because you visit popular subreddits. Anything under <50k subscribers is good, <10k is great. (Mostly made up numbers, but you get the idea.)

Reddit is basically Usenet 2.0, this time with moderation!

The same rules apply. The bigger the community the lower the signal-to-noise ratio. Also, the more political or religious the community the more strident the users will be. The echo chamber effect is huge.

The biggest difference is that Reddit mostly has spam under control, something the Usenet could never claim. Also, it's much less efficient under the hood, but the world has tons of bandwidth now so nobody cares. Plus as far as I know nobody posts binaries to Reddit by UUencoding them and splitting them across hundreds or thousands of posts--torrents are much less hassle.

Also, on Usenet 2.0, it's eternally September.

Sorry, this is not true. There were Usenet providers where you got practically zero spam and no false positives.

> Reddit is basically Usenet 2.0, this time with moderation!

And without the quality conversation.

The heavily moderated academic subs are great (/r/askhistorians and the ilk), but massive subs like /r/science are filled with clickbait headlines written by people who haven't read the literature or understood it's broader importance ("x in carrots can target tumor cells" -frontpage upvotes, yet published in a crap journal, or anything ctrl-f CRISPR). Many comments on these articles are only informed by these partially-true-well-not-quite headlines, yet they sail to the tops of threads.

Maybe some of the CS subs are better in quality, that's not my field, but the only biology sub I've found where technically trained people regularly post and comment has only like 50k subscribers and posts reach the top with 100 votes.

You are describing reddit 8 years ago. Reddit today is a mess of political propaganda and fake content. Hardly anything knowledgable or interesting. Certainly the only "enthusiastic" people are the hordes of democratic party employees and trump supporters. Every else is just exhausted by it.

Then you are clearly subbed to the wrong subreddits. I find too much fun content there covering all my interests.

> I can be immediately connected with the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic people on virtually any subject I care about.

Politics on Reddit seems to fall into either The_Donald or "Orange man bad" with very little objectivity in the middle in my experience.

There's a decent amount in the middle, but it's not as well known and will never hit the front page - 3 second memes are easier to process and upvote.

https://www.reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics/

https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalDiscussion/

CMV and ELI5 also have decent political discussion at times I think; askHistorians often seems to provide insight into current political issues; there's probably more I don't know.

Not surprising that if you want to understand political issues, you need to askHistorians given all political issues are historical in composition

iirc they have an age limit, like the topic must be 15+ years old or something.

For all the good and enjoyment I get out of Reddit, sometimes it seems like it's just various angry mobs that coalesce and split as needed to maximize the amount of angry voices present at any one time for any one topic.

I'm an avid gamer, but honestly I can't read popular gaming subreddit (wow and halo for game specific sub), it's almost depressing. There's so much flames and complaints that you can even appreciate something without getting a lot of flake.

Leave subreddits that are just as lousy with shills as Twitter, there are subs for a decent political conversation (at least, as decent as is possible in 2019).

Personally I've found lots of quality discussion outside the usual places. /r/europe tends to have nice debates every now and then. I'm sure other regions or subjects have nice communities where people discuss things without insulting each other.

/r/politics is fairly left-leaning by US standards, while The_Donald and /r/conservative are hardly about politics anymore. Furthermore, I'd say on a global scale /r/politics is pretty much dead middle, while subreddits like /r/latestagecapitalism represent the far left.

Frankly, Democrats are being pulled to the left by the progressives and Republicans went hard right years ago with the tea party, so the reason there's no middle-of-the-road discussion is because there isn't one anymore. Luxuries of a two-party system.

>Furthermore, I'd say on a global scale /r/politics is pretty much dead middle

I know these things are terribly subjective but that subreddit seems more to the left. [1]

https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/adjw5h/sweden_has...

r/politics is definitely in the "orange man bad" camp. There are a few objective posters on there but they are not the majority.

I'd say the vast majority of the global population is in the orange man bad category.

>Furthermore, I'd say on a global scale /r/politics is pretty much dead middle,

You have either not been there enough to see it for what it is, or been there too much.

/r/politics is far-left. I'm sorry if that offends you. /r/latestaecapiatlism is extreme-left.

The middle is in the controversial comments on these places.

The most common topics there are higher taxes on the wealthy and universal healthcare. Neither of these things are far left on a global scale: they are standard in most industrialized countries.

>Frankly, Democrats are being pulled to the left by the progressives and Republicans went hard right years ago with the tea party

The democrats have moved further left than republicans have moved right since 1994/2000: http://www.people-press.org/interactives/political-polarizat...

What's interesting is that most democrats want a more moderate party and most republicans want a more right/conservative party: https://www.minnpost.com/eric-black-ink/2019/01/gallup-poll-...

Interestingly, the GOP probably contains the conservative and right wing impulses of the base. And it certainly feels that way, among my friends, we hate that illegal aliens are entitled to health care at ERs. I want to see their countries billed for the care / or I want to see the illegals dumped at the embassy rather than hooked up to medicine. I'm certainly not going to get my wish granted by the GOP. However, should the party fail, there's a chance I could get the representation I want.

I really think "The illegals" needs to be erased from the discourse. Unless they have a distinct species moniker, they're still human beings located in the wrong place politically (in the geographical sense).

There's a simple solution - legalize everything and see how it pans out.

You'll just end up with Burning Man.

Probably not. There's an invisible order that underpins burning man - the United States' rule of law. If acts at burning man didn't invite the scrutiny of US Law Enforcement, it'd be a very different place.

'But there are drugs at burning man' - if it were truly a land onto its own, they'd be synthesizing the drugs at burning man.

You don't think language has an impact on perception? You think the Nazi effort to dehumanize jews with rhetoric didn't work? What a simple world you must live in.

It'll only took you one post to get to Nazis.

Please stop.

> I want to see the illegals dumped at the embassy rather than hooked up to medicine.

That is a horrible, near sociopathic, line of thinking. You seem to have gotten to a point where you can't even recognize illegal immigrants as human beings.

I don't see it as any more or less sociopathic than saying "you need to pay for these people's medicine or else I'll sic the authorities on you".

If I saw illegals as non-human, I'd advocate for the local DNR to hand out hunting permits for illegals.

Don't you see my humanity? I bust my ass to earn my keep, I don't demand access to things others have, if that attitude were reciprocated and people took care of themselves, their livelihood wouldn't depend on my opinion of them.

As long as you coerce others to provide for those who are unwilling to do so for themselves, you're going to have this tension.

My borders my choice. If I can't advocate for my hard work and sacrifices to be invested as I see fit, what autonomy do I have? Do you tell women they have to spread their legs for the less fortunate or else they're sociopaths?

You can see people as less than human without thinking it is okay for you to hunt them as animals. Advocating to let people die, instead of treat them, because they aren't here legally is putting their immigration status above them as a person and to me absolutely lessening their humanity.

If someone is hurt and comes to me for help, I don't ask to see their papers.

>You can see people as less than human without thinking it is okay for you to hunt them as animals.

Please keep reading my mind - why do I think this way? What status do I think illegals have if I want to treat them better than animals but worse than fellow citizens?

>Advocating to let people die, instead of treat them, because they aren't here illegal is putting their immigration status above them as a person and to me absolutely lessening their humanity.

Then why don't you advocate for a voluntary system to take care of illegals rather than tell me I'm a sociopath for exercising challenging but important fiscal discipline?

For the record I'd be fine treating illegals if someone else paid for it voluntarily - billionaire philanthropists, DSA chapters, the countries that these people remit their earnings to, etc. I'm not saying they don't deserve health care, I'm saying that I don't want to pay for it and I'd rather they suffer than I do.

Please address: My borders my choice. If I can't advocate for my hard work and sacrifices to be invested as I see fit, what autonomy do I have? Do you tell women they have to spread their legs for the less fortunate or else they're sociopaths?

> I'm saying that I don't want to pay for it and I'd rather they suffer than I do.

Glad to hear you admit it. Money > humanity.

You can advocate for whatever you want, just like I'm free to tell you that it's a horrible idea that's only justification is to "punish" people you think deserve it.

No.

My humanity is more important to me than others. I have to take care of myself because I know others would resent me if they had to take care of me. I'm sure you wouldn't be thrilled to provide for me if I came to your house with my hat in hand.

And you feel the same way - we're just arguing over where to draw the line. If you save any money that could be donated to those in need, you've also put money above humanity. Have you ever bought a Mcflurry? Did you really need that sweet treat more badly than someone needed a malaria net?

So where's the line of sociopathy? What's the permissible amount of money to put above humanity?

If you come to my house I'll happily call an ambulance for you. We have enough collective resources to treat the life-threatening illness of everyone within our borders, legally or not. We can worry about fixing immigration separately. Even when someone isn't a citizen, you should do your best to help people in reach not be sick. And this doesn't mean you have to give them an income for free.

And as a society-level thing it makes sense to fund with the general tax fund. Charging the countries of origin does sound like it should be attempted though!

Trying to fix every problem in the world is more fraught. We probably should be trying harder, but there are severe issues where throwing resources at a poor country invites corruption and can be worse than doing nothing at all.

>If you come to my house I'll happily call an ambulance for you.

And I'd do the same. My objection is that my tax obligation is roughly the GDP per capita - that's well above and beyond calling an ambulance. What are the limits of what you'd do for me? Could I come into your kitchen and eat until I'm full? Could I play your video games if I were bored? Could I ask for a sexual favor?

>We have enough collective resources to treat the life-threatening illness of everyone within our borders

Why stop at the borders? Is the inside the border / outside the border distinction more ethical than the illegal vs non-illegal distinction?

> What are the limits of what you'd do for me?

You don't get to come in my house unless it's an emergency. I'll help pay for things you need, but if you keep coming for food and shelter and you're not a citizen then we can get on deportation proceedings. (I don't want to tie deportation to medical attention because it can lead to people getting sicker, likely costing more, and definitely dying more. But for other things we can.) If you want niceties then here is the library and you can use the resources inside to search for a job.

Food for the starving would be a negligible part of taxes.

> Why stop at the borders? Is the inside the border / outside the border distinction more ethical than the illegal vs non-illegal distinction?

I think I addressed that fine in the last paragraph of my previous post.

But also this is what we have control of, and we should make the best of it!

If we could pay some single-digit percentage of GDP and provide basic health care to the entire world, I'd suggest that we have a pretty strong moral imperative to do so. But I don't believe that's the world we're in.

Centrism has fallen out of favor in our political discourse, largely because of the polarization of the current administration and culture.

Maintaining a centrist position can't work when both parties see the other as actively undermining/destroying the fabric of our system (i.e. Trump packing the courts with activist judges, dems raising taxes to Vietnam era levels.)

Identity politics largely doesn't permit nuanced political opinion because you're cast out if you don't subscribe to all of the major tenants of the party you're trying to loosely align with.

Reddit convinced me that showing topics based on time-decay does not promote in-depth conversation. Facebook semi-proved it.

There is something to be said about StackOverflow perennial content idea, but maybe something already said it better.

Twitter seems to be the enigma to that rule, because I still get heated replies to tweets from years ago from time to time. Even though time has passed, the conversation is still as shallow as ever.

I can't imagine being a celebrity and getting dozens of hate tweets in my mentions because a tweet I made 8 years ago shows up as a link on a facebook group somewhere.

Well, they lock threads after 6 months, probably to save moderation time. It's always possible for someone to re-create a discussion topic and get new responses going.

I actually found a shocking lack of knowledgeable people in fairly mundane hobby reddits like r/guitars. Other forums seem to attract a much more competent crowd.

It's way better than other social media. Not as much ego involved.

It amazes me the kind of sheer incompetency their product team has demonstrated over the past 2-3 years. (Edit - as pointed out in replies to this post, this is an unfair characterization fueled by my recent frustrations with the direction the site is going. I don't think it is unreasonable to point out that reddit is failing the expectations of their users, but I don't doubt for a minute that the individuals working at reddit are very talented)

10 years ago when reddit would go down, you rooted for them as the underdog to figure it out. Now when it happens, it's just sad. They still can't even handle the kind of traffic that the super bowl brings them. They've had years to figure this out.

What has the focus been if not stabilizing their infrastructure? It appears to be the introduction of a single page application that feels clunky, conceals ads better, and implements all kinds of dark UX patterns.

Meanwhile, there are still bugs that have existed for years that still aren't fixed. There's even a redirect loop that you can get stuck in during authentication in certain scenarios that will completely break the site and bring you back to the same page until your session expires. It's been there for at least a year now.

Reddit has gone full digg v4

EDIT: After thinking about this more, I'm not sure that reddit going full digg v4 means that they'll share the same outcome as digg. The internet now seems to be a small set of companies so entrenched in their position due to swallowing mass amount of users and raising enough funds to optimize all the various little corners that can be optimized. Reddit might not actually be dead, but as they continue to optimize the weird and cool ways that people used to use the site, I know it will be for me.

They've totally broken "quarantined" subreddits as well. I used to occasionally visit /r/watchpeopledie as a reminder of my own mortality and some of the horrors of the world, but apparently NSFW wasn't enough for people visiting "watchpeopledie" to realize they might see something bad. So they "quarantined" it, which actually means totally breaking it, in my browser at least. RIP.

Discussion by others here [0] "I'm a senior mod at /r/watchpeopledie, and we can all see through Reddit's bullshit and hypocrisy" and here [1] "Just a few thoughts on the hypocrisy of Reddit's quarantine"

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/subredditcancer/comments/9js8gf/im_...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/watchpeopledie/comments/9js9j4/just...

Yeah the horde of edgelords in WPD totally isn't one of the reasons the sub got quarantined.

Gore will always be considered shock content, but the comments in WPD are almost always downright repulsive.

A lot of subs are full of edgelords. The sub was quarantined because they need to make Reddit more palatable to investors and advertisers.

You're definitely right about this, the fact that even /r/4chan isn't quarantined despite the content of it's comment section tells you everything you need to know. WPD had very strict rules imposed before the quarantine occurred and the comments weren't nearly as bad as one would expect.

Frankly I think it's obvious that the entire point of quarantines is to hide away the content Reddit doesn't want advertisers to see without any community blowback. Quarantined subreddits are completely ad-free after all.

I remember just last year r/4chan literally had a picture of an overweight woman drinking a big gulp getting fucked doggy style by a man covered in blood with a caption "I have evolved" as the background to their subreddit. 4chan regularly got to the frontpage of reddit and many posts were not marked nsfw. Reddit should have done something about that subreddit years ago, because that could actually turn new users off of reddit.

Big Gulps are very disturbing. I mean, why would you not just spend the extra 10 cents for a Super Big Gulp?

A lot of subreddits had that happen to them. It's sad because they are choosing who can speak and who cannot.

They're not stopping those people from speaking, they're just hiding that content from average users. It's reasonable to think the average redditor probably doesn't want to see death videos alongside their cat pictures and memes.

>"the average redditor probably doesn't want to see death videos alongside their cat pictures and memes" //

Was that possible _by accident_ in recent renditions of reddit? IME you have to be in a reddit where that sort of content is, and change settings to make it default visible?

/r/all potentially could have anything pop up, no?

I could be wrong but it always (in my recollection, so only going back a few years) excluded nsfw? When I last visited even going to a fully nsfw subreddit all the media was blurred out, so you might have NSFL titles .. but if you're that timid then probably any site with UGC is going to be a struggle.

The binary SFW/NSFW designation is also a problem. First there is the difference between NSFW text and NSFW visuals. You will see plenty of text posts on Reddit labeled as NSFW because they include a dirty joke, talk about sex, or includes something incredibly un-PC.

When it comes to visuals, there is a big difference with how comfortable people are with sex vs violence (NSFW/NSFL). Some people would be happy to see one but want to stay away from the other. Then you have the difference within those categories. A picture of a person in skimpy underwear is not the same thing as hardcore porn. Similarly a video of an athlete hyperextending their knee on a sports subreddit is different than the type of gore that you might see on the watchpeopledie subreddit mentioned above.

Maybe you should be able to indicate the severity and category of the NSFW-ness. Potentially something similar to MPAA ratings were you can have PG-13, R, X with an indication if it is for sex, violence, or something else. However that puts even more work on the users/moderators which is probably why Reddit would never implement it.

I don't know how reddit even operates while having subreddits dedicated to hardcore pornography and extreme gore and violence on the same domain as sfw subreddits. Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, do not allow those type of things for a reason, because once young children start using the site and the parents/ media find out what their kids could be looking at, their is a large amount of outrage. Reddit seems to have not had that problem, because it is not as popular and harder to use for < 13 year old demographics, but if reddit keeps pushing an easier to use layout and keeps expanding, then they are gonna run into this problem at some point.

Reddit definitely had that problem in the past. As an example they had a “jailbait” forum which they only took down when CNN ran a long story about it at primetime.

Heh, recently 4chan moved their SFW boards to a different domain. I imagine it was so they could have advertisers happy in there while keeping the other one intact.

It use to show up in my /r/all feed when NSFW filtering was off. Definitely stood out among the other NSFW content you would be scrolling past.

NSFW is not filtered out of /r/all; it is from /r/popular. AFAIK though subs have to opt-in to being part of /r/all.

Perhaps interestingly, this is exactly what people criticize Twitter/Jack for not doing.

The problem is, it's generally different people in those cases. These two groups are fundamentally opposed, and satisfying them both is impossible.

You're right, when GP says "people want less X for Y" and I say "people want more X for Z," we aren't talking about the same "people."

It's sad that people conflate posting on reddit with "speaking".

From the American perspective: our love of and support for free speech means you can make your own website or newspaper and say what you want. (And people have the freedom, conversely, to tell you your content sucks and f you)

But we never envisioned a world where some private newspaper would be forced to print the speech of those they didn't want to, or disagreed with.

Considering the content of the VAST MAJORITY of quarantined subs (holocaust denial, virulent and shocking racism, white nationalism), it's actually shocking that Reddit allows this content to continue without banning.

You say it's sad they are choosing who can speak and who cannot, but I can point you to objectively evil and noxious speech on reddit today that isn't going anywhere...

Yeah like /r/theredpill

Can you elaborate? I assumed that quarantining a sub was about the posts, rather than the comments. This is based on my experience of every subreddit having lots of offensive comments (granted, mostly downvoted.)

To somewhat further your point, take a look at /r/greentext and /r/4chan. While the posts themselves are only somewhat racist, the comments that accompany them are disgustingly edgy and juvenile - they're not being downvoted however. I don't think anything is likely to be done to these subreddits.

Posts and comments are all contents. Offensive posts will not spawn inoffensive comments. In WPD you can probably get more upvotes by being more offensive. From what I've seen there, it's usually the ones trying to call for basic decency being downvoted.

Dare I ask what an edgelord is?

It's when you behave online like you are 15 years old. Everything about you has to scream 'enlightened contrarian' or 'devil's advocate' otherwise you'll become one of those conformists clicking their fingers to Taylor Swift and Imagine Dragons.

Conversations with them are impossible and frustrating because they aren't looking to talk to someone, they're looking to talk AT someone and collect as many upvotes as possible.

so the entirety of /r/politics?

I was thinking more like r/unpopularopinion. r/politics is wall to wall with Trump posts, gets tiring within the first few minutes.

Urban dictionary definition - https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=edgelord

But in general people who try to be "edgy" and "dark" to a fairly ridiculous degree.

Imagine someone who makes an edgy joke, then imagine someone who makes only edgy jokes, constantly - then they stop being funny.

It's the difference between making jokes that are edgy and jokes whose sole component is shock value.

obligatory xkcd : https://xkcd.com/2036/

Eh, they went back to Youtube. I've read the vilest, most shocking and dumbest comments on Youtube (and they had quite a few upvotes) - Reddit is meek by comparison.

That's cause to my knowledge you can't downvote on youtube, or rather you can thumbs down but I don't think it has any effects on comments.

I think WPD is genuinely important. There are edgelords, sure. Watching and thinking seriously about what I saw there changed my perspective on life.

I usually can't stand to watch the videos, but the discussions on mortality and the precarious fragility of life in general I've found valuable. Because of that sub I am more careful in many situations and do value life much more.

Which has nothing to do with the content.

Fighting/dealing with that repulsion is an endeavor some people seek.

Then surely you just don't subscribe to that subreddit. I don't like the Trumpy subreddits and their horribleness, but, sadly, I can't see why I should stop them.

Yes. Let's ban repulsive stuff defined by democratic vote. Since the country is mostly Christian, no more talking about gay people - that's repulsive. Welcome to Russia.

What is downright repulsive is people who think like you do. Here's an idea - you don't like it, don't go to the subreddit and let them do what they want. We don't need people like you dictating the repulsiveness level of what others can say. I know it makes you feel more in control of your life, but who would want to live like you do? That would be one sad existence.

"edgelords"? Really? That's the best word you found to describe them?

What would you suggest?

Offensive? Anyway got dowvoted a lot so maybe "edgelords" its the best word for it! Even I should start using it against people I dissagree with.

It doesn’t mean you disagree with them. It’s that they write their comments for maximum shock value.

It’s not the end of the world, but it’s hardly desirable.

That's the intended meaning, but someone could always call someone else that just to dismiss their argument pretending that it was said for shock value instead of persuasion; and for what I have read that's how it is commonly used.

That’s a possibility, but most well reasoned and argued thoughts do not turn into a shock piece, so I’m inclined to think not.

I haven't visited that subreddit on a long time, so I'm knowing this from you. What a pity. I visited on a similar reason to yours: to know how my own life can be taken suddenly, without notice or warning.

Since I move around exclusively by bicycle, I paid particular attention to the videos where cyclists met their untimely fate. I've learned a lot watching those videos, since it gave me a more clear perspective on how some things, apparently not too extreme, are insanely dangerous traps to a cyclist (riding near a truck with open wheels, for instance, even if at some distance).

Shame it's quarantined...

Getting off topic but I always ask folks what are some more examples of unexpected things to look out for?

I’ve become a bit disillusioned with cycling after 2 fairly bad crashes in about 6 months.

I didn’t have a fear of metal drawbridges, having gone over a variety of them numerous times. Then I hit one that was slick from rain earlier in the day. Tires swerved like I was on ice and I did not fall gracefully. Broke my elbow, nose, and needed many many stitches.

Recently I did all the “right” things- riding in daylight, in a bike lane, in bright clothing with a helmet, and still got right hooked by a careless driver. Walked that one off but limped for a week. after.

Borrowing the phrase from motorcycling but it rings true with bicycling as well. Ride like you are invisible and every driver is drunk and out to kill you. Assuming the worst intentions from cars on the road teaches you to slow down and be prepared to stop or swerve to avoid a collision. Wet metal and bikes don't mix, motorcyclists are taught to pull in the clutch going over train tracks and man hole covers for this very reason.

Thanks- I've always felt I rode this way, assuming the worst, but with each incident that assumption of worst intentions increases! Wt metal and bikes, such a no brainer in hindsight and wish I hadn't learned the hard way.

I could fill you a long list of dos and don'ts, what do look for and what to avoid, but cycling is inherently practical, and you have to learn it by doing it.

As you are by now aware, we're pretty much exposed to all kinds of dangers, and sometimes bad things happen. But if you aren't discouraged, and you keep on practicing, eventually you'll learn how to avoid most of the worst case scenarios where you could find yourself by your own negligence and/or lack of attention.

The important thing to retain is that you have to have the muscle memory to know how to react properly when in a tight spot. That's why reading about things isn't much of a help — you don't have time to think in order to act properly. My advice? Practice, and practice riding defensively.

I live in a very rough country for cyclists — Brazil. And in order to find my place on the road I have to be twice, thrice as careful as I would have to be somewhere else. But I've found that if you play it safe and learn to be nice and respectful of what the other perceives as its rightful place on the road, thanking everyone that shows you even the smallest act of kindness or basic respect for you, you'll be surprised how much things change on the road around you.

Be nice and don't try to be a hero. You're a glorified pedestrian and your skin is no match for steel.

Thanks for the thought out response. "Glorified pedestrian" is a good way of thinking about it. Legal rights are not the same as perceived rights.

> I didn’t have a fear of metal drawbridges, having gone over a variety of them numerous times.

Where do you live that has numerous drawbridges made of metal?

Your point aside, this /r/ falls under: things I didn't know existed but reluctantly clicked on, and clicked on, and clicked on, only to feel a need to DoD 5200.28 wipe it completely from my memory while I stewing in my own vat of nauseating regret.

> They've totally broken "quarantined" subreddits as well.

What really grinds my gears with this is the fact that you cannot see quarantined activity via the API. If you browse a user's overview on the website, you'll see comments/posts in quarantined subs with a "quarantined" label. But if you fetch the exact same data via API, the quarantined activity is simply not returned at all, even if the account is opted in to the quarantined subreddits. There is no way to retrieve this data, and as a result, my bot can't block users that hail from these cesspools...

You are right +1 . Meditating on immortality makes you fearless, anecdotally.

They have also been fairly recently quarantining political subreddits, more specifically socialist subreddits.

I find this sort of slightly gloating incredulity at just how "obvious" the things a company ought to be working on are to be surprising. You have almost none of the information required to make informed judgements about whether or not Reddit's product team is incompetent (maybe they're doing way better than they should be under the circumstances?), or whether they're focusing on the right things.

There are definitely problems with the user experience, but framing it in absolute terms and kicking off with a sweeping statement about the perceived incompetence of some people who are presumably bright and talented is… weird.

Reddit is a top 20 globally ranked site that does not come anywhere close to performing at the level of other sites that share a similar popularity.

In my mind, they fail their users in three distinct and pretty basic ways:

1. Site reliability is still a regular issue (my perception is this is due to both infrastructure problem and show stopping application bugs).

2. Bad UX practices that get implemented that are documented all over this thread. This is a mostly new thing that seems to have started in the past few years.

3. Continuously underdeveloping or cutting back moderator tools and 3rd party integrations/applications.

I am not judging the individuals that work at reddit, but the sum of their parts do not meet the expectations that most other sites of their popularity meet.

This is, of course, from the eyes of someone who uses reddit - not someone selling ads on reddit.

> I am not judging the individuals that work at reddit

I'm sure you don't mean to, but as an FYI, when you say:

> It amazes me the kind of sheer incompetency their product team has demonstrated

It does sound like you're judging the individuals.

I totally agree with everything you said in this post, I just think the way to couch it is not by seeming to attack the competency of people who have business pressures / goals. Just my two cents.

Their product team have probably made exactly what they were instructed to ... I've severely cut back since the recent "you must use our app" UX took over, it's pretty terrible.

Point taken, agreed, my choice of words was way harsher than it should have been.

#visits isn't what matters when judging competency, amount of revenue/spending for the quality is. How much revenue do they have? They have only less than 1% of the valuation of Google

The site is literally down for me right now. Second time this week.

Several high profile issues i encounter on a daily/weekly basis:

- Sometimes you are "not logged in", but when you click the login button, it says welcome back and you're properly logged in.

- Subreddits can change background color pagewide, which renders dark practically useless.

- It's so resource intensive that simply scrolling will make a youtube video in another tab start lagging.

> - Subreddits can change background color pagewide, which renders dark practically useless.

Disable subreddit styles altogether to fix this problem. I have my complaints as well but this one you can't blame Reddit for. They wanted to do away with custom CSS on Subreddits but the community was very pro-css and thus they kept it.

I personally like to keep it on by default and blacklist ones I find annoying.

My big issue is that I don’t think the product team should be a priority for reddit right now.

I’m sure their product team is doing “fine” insofar as they’re setting a roadmap, delivering on a fairly predictable schedule, and doing traditional things like analytics, user research, usability testing, and so on. I would wager some really smart people actually.

The issue as I see it though is that “product” will only get you so far if there are platform/community issues. Reddit has an opportunity to leverage their massive reach and throngs of volunteer moderators to build a strong voice for the internet. But I keep seeing the fringe game the system, large communities crushed under the weight of brigading and exploitation, and the stereotypes of edgy, immature users blot out any chance at real discourse.

In my opinion you can’t UX/UI/user story your way out of that bag, and the execs at reddit have repeatedly and conspicuously refused to take on the responsibility of cultivating their platform for success. Instead, I think they’ve throw “product people” at it.

It's hard to understand, as a programmer, how some website bugs that are obviously visible can remain unfixed for months and months. Presumably, the developers encounter these bugs themselves when using the site (assuming the developers use the site).

For me it's easier to understand as a working programmer, since my priorities are all set by management so I don't feel right working on things that bug me. Also little things I'd fix on my own in a second have lots of process around them.

Have you gone back and looked at your predictions immediately after Facebook acquired Instagram? They're pretty interesting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817840

If nothing else, I think your conclusion that the product team is incompetent (or displays a lot of incompetency) is debatable. That seems very uncharitable. Reddit isn't flush with money the same way Google, Facebook, Amazon and Netflix are. They can't throw wild amounts of cash at a problem to solve it or attract the talent who can.

I think your characterization of Reddit's infrastructure challenges - which basically considers the problems as solved versus unsolved - is the wrong one. In my opinion, a better characterization would be whether or not Reddit has:

1) the money required to attract talent or buy infra, in order to 2) scale the website to extremely high availability under extreme load, while also 3) doing feature engineering and turning a profit.

This seems like a highly nontrivial problem. Do you know of another website with Reddit's daily active users and revenue profile, but significantly higher availability?

Note that performance is a related but distinct problem from the Reddit UX and advertising. I think that they are probably introducing these kinds of user-hostile changes because they are precisely in the position I've described, and can't find a way to improve performance in the way you're describing.

Yeah, you're right - that's an unfair characterization given the way you've posited the problem.

My strong reaction comes from being a formerly very engaged user of the site observing a continuous detraction of all the reasons I started using the site in the first place.

>>> Do you know of another website with Reddit's daily active users and revenue profile, but significantly higher availability?

I'd say stack overflow. They're both a relatively simplistic website showing text messages posted by users. Nothing fancy.

Reddit is a simple message board as there were many 15 years ago. They don't host images or video themselves, which avoid the issue of bandwidth. They don't seem to have the breath of analytics and advertising tools offered by google or facebook.

I don't have any numbers, but it would honestly surprise me if StackOverflow was within two orders of magnitude of Reddit's traffic.

Edit: here's some confirmation.

Reddit has 330M active monthly users: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/reddit-now-has-as-many...

And SO has 10,002,577 total:

https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/9766...

StackOverlow is a small website that can run in a garage on a couple of servers, and that's with a lot of margin.

I wouldn't be surprised as well if reddit was two orders of magnitude more than that, but that's still a fairly moderate site to operate.

It is numerous orders of magnitudes away from the like of google, youtube or facebook.

> StackOverlow is a small website that can run in a garage on a couple of servers, and that's with a lot of margin.

Maybe things have changed, but in 2016 they were running three or four dozen servers in each of two data centers:

https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-ha...

I was thinking 10 or 20 active servers, looks like they have a bit more than that now.

You can see that most of the servers are deployed in pairs, the minimum to have any redundancy, so they are nowhere near capacity.

Another blog post stated that the servers rarely go above a few percents of usage, they are very powerful, often close to the highest specs available.

I will stand by my statement. It should be largely possible for reddit to serve 2 orders of magnitude more traffic than stack overflow with 1 order of magnitude its hardware. We're talking a couple of racks times ten.

> I was thinking 10 or 20 active servers,

You said a couple, which usually means 'two'.

You offered StackOverflow as "another website with Reddit's daily active users and revenue profile, but significantly higher availability" and then said this:

"I wouldn't be surprised as well if reddit was two orders of magnitude more than that"

> I will stand by my statement

I have no literally idea how to have a conversation with someone who's willing to revise their previous numbers by a factor of ten or more, say it's the same statement as it was before, and call it good.

I'm not revising the numbers. I'm saying that it's working out, with the worse case scenario being that it takes some more hardware.

Reddit raised hundreds of millions of dollars, whereas stack overflow didn't, they have the means to buy a rack more if that's what is missing. There is no excuse to be slow or broken all the time.

The amount of traffic is not significant. It's perfectly scalable and shardable, it's only text over HTTP and most of it is cachable by a CDN.

reddit has hosted images since 2016 and videos since last year

Stack Overflow does not have trees of thousands of comments, or nearly as much voting going on for individual posts.

They dont need to throw huge amounts of money at it. Reddit was much much better a few years ago. Its next to useless now.

Can you elaborate? I was, kid you not searching for good subreddits and then cane to HN for suggestions and found this on front page.

Reddit changed for the worse when they shifted from community focus to business focussed. There are so many ways that changed the website and everyone will tell you the same. The redesign was the last straw that got me to leave the website. These days the website is packed with adverts, incredibly slow (it takes about 15 seconds to load on mobile) and its packed with an incredible amount of tracking.

The content quality has gone down as well but I can't ever say reddit was known for high quality content.

Also the fact it has so many users has caused its decline. Reddit today has so many obvious shill/advert posts.

>incredibly slow (it takes about 15 seconds to load on mobile) //

I think that is to ensure that when they tell you "it's faster to use via our app" that they're telling the truth; certainly when the 3 "use app" buttons per mobile view came along mobile appeared to get slower (the change also including cunning "continue" confusion to make people think they're continuing to use the website but they're really "continuing to nothing and instead changing your mind and installing our app").

> I can't ever say reddit was known for high quality content.

When it first began. before there were subreddits, it was a place for respectful, serious conversation.

A few years later /r/TrueReddit was started as an attempt to get back to the glory years. Now it's as bad as the rest of reddit.

Aren't these types of availability/scaling problems what AWS/Azure/etc are intended to solve?

"10 years ago when reddit would go down, you rooted for them as the underdog to figure it out. Now when it happens, it's just sad. They still can't even handle the kind of traffic that the super bowl brings them. They've had years to figure this out."

Reddit goes down pretty rarely and I can't remember when it was ever down more than an hour or two. It also definitely didn't go down for the SuperBowl that I saw.

The rest of your points are fair though.

Reddit often goes "down" in that the front page is kept functional but trying to go to the comments page or interact with anything will cause it to 503.

Funnily enough, I'm getting a "Service Unavailable" right now (on the front page).

It definitely was down for me during the Superbowl - I checked periodically throughout the broadcast and each time was met with a "reddit servers are currently down" with the reddit teletubby logo thing.

They have intermittent server issues all the time that usually don't last all that long but I rarely if ever see intermittent server issues from any other top 20 site.

I also saw that and a lot of other people saw that [0]. However, outside of the past 2 weeks which I have seen the service unavailable messages, it has been pretty good.

[0]: https://downdetector.com/status/reddit/news/237455-problems-...

It down right now for me, second time this week. It's a fairly common occurence

Weren't they bought by Conde Nast a few years ago? Is that when it started to slide?

EDIT: My how time flies. It was bought by CN in 2006!

Reddit is ~1 year younger than Facebook, and ~1 year older than Twitter.

That is amazing. While Facebook has reached world domination and died again (spawning an empire and catapulting its owner to be one of the world's richest people), Reddit still seems to be slugging around in the "we have something, maybe we can monetize it idk" phase.

While admire that CN is not squeezing them to death, it appears like Reddit is vastly under-managed.

The reddit audience was historically very resistant to advertising. When it began it really wasn't a million miles away from the HN audience, could you imagine the drama we'd have here on HN if suddenly banner ads started appearing?

Reddit grew to the point where its audience is now a lot more broad and the previous audience is a vocal minority. They can get away with ramping up ads and other behaviour because the audience is no longer sufficiently monolithic to revolt.

Bearing in mind in the past the audience did revolt and basically kicked out the then CEO (temporary CEO but still...) Ellen Pao, in what was a kind of full scale riot that shut most of the site.

The ads are already happening all over HN. Don't you see the jobs posting for YC companies?

Remember that YC is an investment company. They certainly made billions of dollars through the companies they funded, that were in part thanks to HN.

Every time you send a direct job application to a HN company, that's 20% of your yearly salary staying in the company instead of going to recruiter fees. That's the hell of a revenue per click.

Yes, they've always been there since the beginning of HN that's in large part why nobody cares. I am talking about the kind of advertising for random crap that turns up on other websites, HN doesn't need to do that because frankly HN isn't that big (compared to reddit) and has deep pockets.

Reddit was a like a bridge between old-school vBulletin forums and nascent 'social media' when it launched; it explains why a lot of newer users find its UI hard to deal with. It never even seemed like they cared about revenue, because they didn't mess with API access for third party app developers, and didn't even have a responsive website until relatively recently.

CN spun reddit off as independent company in 2012, though afaik CN’s parent company is still the majority shareholder. They have Sam Altman, Marc Andersen, Peter Theil, Jared Leto and Snoop Dogg as investors (the usual suspects basically).

Facebook has over 2B monthly active users, approximately a third of the human race alive today, they have not "died".

$3B is a failure now?

Oh, and Digg is in between Facebook and Reddit in terms of founding, since Digg was the original point of comparison a few posts up.

(Plus the old "MySpace is only 6 months older than Facebook" [ignoring the semi-private nature of Facebook, initially].)

So true! The worst was when the "New Reddit" interface was launched. The site was almost unusable and I often had to refresh the page multiple times for the message thread to maybe load.

I just experienced a site overload/offline error a few days ago (not Super Bowl). It's really unacceptable for a site of its age and presence on the Internet.

>>It amazes me the kind of sheer incompetency their product team has demonstrated over the past 2-3 years.

The kind of things happen when their goals get set like:

1. Increase mobile app sign up/usage by 30%.

2. Revamp UI and launch by 2019.

etc etc.

People optimize for what they are asked to, setting fire to pretty much everything around.

>>They still can't even handle the kind of traffic that the super bowl brings them. They've had years to figure this out.

Kind of strange, because they rewrote their whole site in Python, which was originally in Common Lisp. All of that to solve this problem.

Seems like it was just a project for some one at Reddit to get a promotion.

OKR are a gift that keeps on giving.

> It amazes me the kind of sheer incompetency their product team has demonstrated over the past 2-3 years.

Growth & success despite inattentive & abusive product evolution (Reddit, Twitter) is actually a bullish signal of the core product's entrenchment.

Their valuation went up by a billion dollars over that same time period so I'm not sure "incompetent" is the right word here.

I myself have been looking for a good Reddit alternative.

r/RedditAlternatives is pretty good for exploring what's new.

Notabug.io seems nice.

Ever since the site redesign in May, popularity has been falling (source: Alexa Top Websites): https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/reddit.com

I hope that affected the amount of money they raised. As a reddit fan, the site redesign has not been pleasant. The mobile experience, too.

It's also interesting that the "over 330M active monthly users" number somehow hasn't changed in over a year now. Their site has it here, as "Last updated Nov. 12, 2017": https://www.redditinc.com/#section-3

Their official blog posts continue using that same 330M number: https://redditblog.com/2019/01/23/health-fitness-on-reddit/

The TechCrunch article does as well.

Either their number of active users hasn't changed at all in over a year, or they're actually shrinking and deliberately just staying with an outdated number that looks better.

I would actually be OK with the new site design if it didn't tank performance and have some really weird caching issues where I have to refresh the page to see updates.

That's good news. I hope it makes them rethink their relationship to their users.

Well, otherwise, tildes is looking great.

Every time I see someone mention tildes as an alternative to reddit I check it out to see if I can create an account yet. For [edit] almost a year now the answer has been "no."

It's quite easy to get an account if you want one. Just ask.

Tildes only started last May. Where were you checking for the several years before that?

At least we can continue to use old.reddit.com for now on desktop. On mobile, I refuse to use their own app since it's hot garbage and stick to Apollo, which works pretty well so far.

Unfortunately the way that comments are rendered depends on which view you use. There's probably a subset that works for both but many [new.]reddit.com users won't realize that their post doesn't render correctly for old.reddit.com.

Given this design, I suppose one must suffer: [new.]reddit.com adoption or the experience for old.reddit.com.

Could you elaborate? I've managed to avoid the redesign completely, and I haven't noticed any comments that appear to be rendered incorrectly.

The one that keeps coming up is how 'code' is rendered. Old reddit uses four leading spaces for a code block and IIRC new reddit uses triple-backtick. It's probably slightly different, not-quite-100% compatible markdown dialects.

Admittedly it's a problem more common on the more technical subreddits.

Ah. I have noticed that one actually, but I chalked it up to someone confusing Github/SO/Reddit markdown. Didn't realize that Reddit itself was inconsistent.

Yep, as soon as they stop offering the old design I am out.

For now. Other issues with old.reddit is that it blocks web.archive bot, and their new design doesn't work for web.archive.org's captured content. It shows white page when page loaded.

Yeah thank god.

Even if it's uglier, I much prefer the experience of using old website than the React redesign.

Not because it's a single-page app, but because it's slower and has many usability problems.

I hate it because of the tracking, scroll around with dev tools open and see the activity. Call me paranoid but I bet they're building a psychological profile on each user by watching how they interact with topics. I hate it so much I did something about it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/8ra9y6/i_hate_the_...

You can disable the redesign. Its also somewhere in the preferences.

http://old.reddit.com

But "somehow" it forgets my preference constantly and I have to 'opt-out of redesign' several times a day.

And, if you follow any links, it sends you straight back to the new version.

I think there's an option in your account settings, you don't just click the "return to old site" banner, you have to toggle a setting.

Whenever I'm logged in it's always the old version. RES helps too!

There's a Firefox add-on that rewrites all reddit URLs to use old.reddit.com. Absolutely indispensable.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...

There are also browser extensions that force the redirect everytime. I haven't seen the redesign since it was released.

I had that problem for a long time but eventually it stopped occurring. I assumed someone had fixed something.

They fixed that a few weeks ago.

I still get it constantly. Whatever they did doesn't seem to be universal. Don't know if it's accounts, platform, or something else.

I have had to reset that flag NUMEROUS times now. I do it in my profile and a few weeks later, poof, back to slow/poorly designed UI.

If you take a look at https://pushshift.io/, comment/post activity has seen significant growth in 2018. Of course, this is a completely different metric from unique visitors. I mod a large-ish (top 20 by subscriber count) sub so I can see traffic stats for the sub. Our monthly unique visitor count barely grew over 2018 although that is not very representative of site activity as a whole either.

The team at Reddit has all the data. They will know how to leverage/present them in order to raise more money. Web ranking is not the only thing used in valuation.

In case someone missed it: replace "www" with "old" to get the old design back.

I know someone worked for reddit for a while last year (they don't anymore because they hated every second of it) and from what I understand the engineering teams there are a nightmare of groups that don't talk to each other, constantly write the same code in completely different ways, have no common style and just shoehorn in whatever they want. Everything breaks pretty much all the time. All of that is aside from the fact that the workforce acted like a bunch of teens that just arrived at college and are going crazy due to lack of supervision (Every project had to be tiptoed around because of complicated interpersonal relationships). Not to mention the CEO offering drugs to people in his cabin at camp Reddit (the yearly retreat they do) Oh, and the fact that the platform itself hosts tons of alt-right, incel, racist, sexist, and violent content. Apparently last year Steve (ceo) told everyone to enact a hiring freeze while he figures some stuff out, and then after a month or two, when managers informed him of all the candidates they passed up, Steve freaks out and tells them that they should have hired them. During the hiring freeze. That he enacted.

The app also sucks. They try to make everything play embedded, so that if you want to share it, you pretty much have to share the reddit link, because the link to the actual content is hidden. That's bad enough but the embedded stuff also barely works. More often than not I have to go directly to the source for an embedded video or giphycat thing to play.

Every story I've heard about reddit sounds like a nightmare. It really sucks that it's become the defacto repository for so many hobbies.

Reddit ads at this point seem to be worse than Twitter. Given what they know about people they should be able to target very well, I assume that the inventory just isn’t there.

I wonder if it says something about him, or about Reddit that a crypto company was better.

Can you elaborate more about the part of being messy? Is it really like the open sourced of lobste.rs with messy code that just works? Also I am sorry for your job experience.

When Reddit rolled out their new mobile site I had strong suspicions the org must be a mess internally. Out of all the problems one stuck out to me. For many months the comment sorting dropdown took 15 seconds to open from a warm start. That is a billion dollar company making newbie mistakes with React as if it was an intern doing the rewrite.

But the situation employees like you have been describing is surreal, I would never have imagined.

I think when it truly clicked for me was when they had a workable ecperience (old reddit) that was made pretty great by a plugin (reddit enhancement suite), and then when they did their redesign in an attempt to make RES obsolete, they managed to make something even worse.

They had a perfect opportunity to just roll all of RES's functionality into reddit, and messed it up. Can't even collapse comment trees in the browser app, but you can on mobile.

No comment on the internal management issues, but why is drug use considered an issue unless it is in the work environment? I'm really sick of people thinking that "drugs" are bad, while alcohol/tobacco are not.

If someone's substance use is affecting their work, then that's a legit issue. Otherwise it's as irrelevant as which (if any) football team they support.

In the experience of my friend (I know this equates to hearsay since they aren't here to directly comment) it definitely did affect people's work.

>the platform itself hosts tons of alt-right, incel, racist, sexist, and violent content.

This is despite being pretty ban-happy in general about topics they don't like. So now they've got the worst of a censorship-heavy platform and the worst of a censorship-free platform.

> This is despite being pretty ban-happy in general about topics they don't like. So now they've got the worst of a censorship-heavy platform and the worst of a censorship-free platform.

I think you have to separate the admins, who are reddit employees, and the subreddit moderators, who are mostly not.

The admins are ultimately accountable to the CEO, who is accountable to the board and, by extension, the investors. The admins want to maximise traffic, because that maximises their ability to monetise the users. A certain degree of controversial content is actually good for that as long as it remains below the threshold where you start losing advertisers (see 4chan).

Meanwhile, the moderators are usually volunteers, but there are a few very active "powermods" (or groups thereof) who have control over one or more large default subs. This has allowed them to carve out their own personal fiefdoms. Some of them are abusing this power to enforce their own idea of how things should work, or to push their ideology and narratives. Some others (like the infamous GallowBoob) have even found ways to monetise their influence by getting paid to promote content for 3rd parties without disclosing that fact. This often goes hand in hand with abusing their moderator privileges in order to increase visibility of their own posts (e.g. by removing highly upvoted posts from users, so their own posts can take the top spot in that sub).

This is a real problem, but reddit are mostly unwilling to intervene unless there is a large degree of external pressure, like we saw with the "creepshot" subs that got banned in 2013 after the media picked up on their existence and the one user behind a lot of them.

I see reddit as having three levels of censorship. User (downvotes), moderator, and administrator. The users can give a sort of "wisdom of the crowd" analysis that lets them evaluate subjective/borderline decisions better than moderators. Moderators deal with more clear rule violations like spam. Admins take a minimalistic hands off approach only getting involved when communities are bringing bad press to the site, bothering other communities, posting illegal content, that sort of stuff

The problems Reddit is facing now are largely a result of the admins getting more activist as Reddit is more visible than ever. They're not just merely banning subs now. They're quarantining them. They've systemically changed their algorithms to stop controversial content from being seen by most users. They're saber rattling against mod teams more and stacking mod teams. The users have gone from a core of mostly geek to well your typical eternal september users. The moderators are censor-happy and seriously don't know how to fuck off.

Reddit will never be as good as it once was because its size is such a liability. This is a site which went from a founding member risking jail to post stuff from JSTOR to the internet to founders who decided they've "Grown up" ($$$) and don't care about free speech anymore.

> The problems Reddit is facing now are largely a result of the admins getting more activist as Reddit is more visible than ever.

Really? It seems to me that the problems come from not banning things, still: see all the complaints about racism and other "undesirable content" on the site.

Citation on Gallowboob? The only accusation I'd heard against them was reposting too much.

> I think you have to separate the admins, who are reddit employees, and the subreddit moderators, who are mostly not.

Admins created automod which delegated shadowbanning to moderators. Who's to blame for that? The mods or the admins? It's an age-old question whether kings or peasants are to blame for humanity's imperfections.

Some mods probably would have scripted something themselves, yet admins helped them and others along. You can go in circles trying to assign blame. I'm not sure there's an answer except to continue to try making it better.

> Admins created automod

They did not. Automod was created by a user as just another script that interacted with reddit's api (albeit, a powerful and useful one). Deimorz eventually joined reddit and became an admin, and Automod was eventually integrated into the site code (primarily for performance reasons), but that was completely user-created, and in fact a great example of how reddit's community governed the site for a long time in absence of much direction from reddit Inc.

Okay, user created, and promoted to be on-server and faster by reddit. Automod is a heavy-handed tool that both mods and admins played a role in creating.

Yeah the bigger subreddits tend to be bad for meaningful discussion and have a lot of deplatforming and trolling. That said the smaller niche subreddits dedicated to a parituclar specialization tend to be better. I really got a lot our of r/ppc for internet marketing. I found that r/candlemaking was a great subreddit for the niche hobby. I think it's a bit like real life, things that are popular tend to attract trolls and megalomaniacs while small, niche and technical things tend to attract a better group of people. y.

The only downside is that maybe these niche communities would have done better as individual forums existing on the open web rather than as a part of reddit's walled garden.

the_donald subreddit is basically not allowed on the front page from what I understand

They sort of earned that by gaming the front page algorithms. The mods would repeatedly sticky 2 minute old posts and encouraged all their users to upvote the stickies. This caused any post of their choosing to surge into the the front page. They would have 1/4th of the front page full of posts less than 2 hours old pre-election.

That's because at first appearances, the Reddit hive mind would make Karl Marx blush red.

Dig a little past the front page, though, and all the problems of having those groups share the same space with everyone else become evident.

To their credit, they got rid of the "incel" stuff pretty quickly after it became basically-synonymous with "dangerously violent male-supremacist cult" (it used to just be "losers who can't relate with the opposite sex, and seem to be weirdly proud of this fact"). A similar story holds for the racist content.

They just created new subs as they got shut down, they're all still there

You mean the Donald? It is still there

I've been pretty close to the incel communities on reddit and I've never understood the bans they placed on them. There were a few posts asking for violence but, to me, they could have been false flags, and they were taken down fast by the mods.

Closing down a forum with thousands of users just because of the attitudes of a handful of them is, well, retarded.

For the record, this is the current incel sub: https://old.reddit.com/r/Braincels/

You had me believing that reddit was a bad place to work. When you complain that the CEO gave drugs to an employee in a cabin I started to question if your opinion matches my value system. When you were shocked they hosted other points of view then I completely changed my mind because reddit is a place for all viewpoints and thought reddit is starting to sound like a great place to work. Sounds like teams are implementing new features like crazy. The hiring freeze but reaction to losing some great candidates makes sense. Freeze hiring across the board but if great candidates are available grab them. Every rule should be reevaluated based on the situation. Sounds like he wants leaders and risk takers.. people willing to stick there neck out and ignore the boss if they feel it's the right call.

To your point about viewpoints: Reddit is pretty demonstrably not a place for all viewpoints. Note that I'm not making a normative comment here, I'm just stating a fact: in most of the mainstream and default subreddits, there are a variety of opinions you really can't express without being downvoted.

As for the thing with the CEO giving drugs to someone in a cabin...I think you should interpret this a little more holistically. For a variety of reasons (starting with illegality, and moving on to liability), that is generally not a thing you want your CEO doing in a well functioning organization of Reddit's size. It's not really about whether or not you're personally okay with recreational drug use. It's a bit of a dog whistle. Things that are generally okay can become very not okay in the context of the workplace and professionalism.

The comment around CEO and drugs was gossip pure and simple and should be ignored. I've seen many CEOs buy beer for employees it is part of many offices. Recreational drugs should be treated in the same manner. I will not judge him any differently.

Each subreddit is a kingdom to itself but the fact that you can start your own kingdom allows free speech without forcing all speech on everyone.

There is a huge difference between being downvoted and not being able to express your opinion because of censorship

IMO you should be able to express any opinion, and of course you'll be downvoted if you are a bigot or a religious nutcase

Right now Reddit is going full censorship, which I hate

GP’s comment should be taken into context: the CEO is not just a cool dude, he does stupid stuff like rewriting in DB user comments making fun of him.

Why can the CEO even technically get access to the data ?

Same with communities, a lot of them get banned. Basically every week I hear about some community get canned, it’s pretty usual, and often justified.

Yet these “other points of view” subreddits that are pretty frequently violating the service rules (no individual bullying, no doxxing, no stalking etc.), and get reported like crazy still get by for years under the excuse of “making efforts to collaborate with the admin team and act on the violations”.

I don’t have insider insight, but from the look of it I can’t imagine a healthy organisation behaving this way.

> GP’s comment should be taken into context: the CEO is not just a cool dude, he does stupid stuff like rewriting in DB user comments making fun of him.

Huffman has repeatedly demonstrated poor judgement. Using your admin privileges to edit comments for personal reasons is the kind of thing one would expect from some power tripping admin on some small, privately run forum, but not from the CEO of a multibillion Dollar company that operates one of the largest sites on the Internet. That incident alone should have been reason enough for him to either step down or get fired. In fact, his predecessor as CEO Ellen Pao even commented that she would have fired him for this.

I understand banning of subreddits is evil. I think no subreddit should be banned but the press previously were critical of reddit labeling it a jock-boy hangout who group together and attack gay female online users and dox them. They decided to change things their image to please that group. It made it a worse experience for many but stopped the bad press now a year later they are raising at 3b. Would not be possible without the window dressing.

Many users left, most just complain on reddit. Raw usage is not important at this stage for reddit.

That shouldn't make it a good or bad place to work

I am in line with extremely corrosive (as you say harrasment, bullying etc.) or straight illegal subreddits to get banned.

The strange situation for most of us is that while doing the window dressing they left a spiked bat and a swastica flag in the corner and pushed the poop bucket in a closet instead of just getting rid of it. And then have to defend not getting rid of it when publicly asked by their users (the CEO himself gets involved in these back and forth with the community, so it’s not just them ignoring the problems)

It could be just some weird bit that has no impact on how the company works internaly. As you say, content policy has no direct relation with work environment.

But I can’t stop myself from thinking, would that same CEO abuse his position to get rid of unconveniences internaly ? How do they handle gender balance or diversity topics ?

Looking at Ellen Pao’s shitshow (and she did a ton of that “window dressing”), it’s difficult to imagine the internal state is that much better than the external one.

Reddit has been raising money for almost 15 years! I wish I had the connections to VC's that reddit apparently does. I can definitely spend all the money a VC gives me, then raise more money, and then spend all that money, and never turn a profit for 15 or 20 years.

It's easy to get such connections with half a billion active users.

I'm actually quite amazed at this. I thought Reddit had gone the way of Digg some time ago. Isn't it mostly manufactured content these days? I certainly remember it had that feel about it at certain times in the past when they were trying to paper over a mass exodus.

Its really not - I can't think of a single game community site of which a subreddit isn't the better/more popular option - ditto with all sorts of interests (other than programming/entrepreneurship which HN has a pretty good slice of).

It really depends on the subreddits you are subscribed to.

No

At some point you'd think they'd expect them to make a profit though. At what point do the venture capitalists say 'screw this, it's not working' and let some of these 'unicorns' crash and burn?

I've been thinking about this, too. If you have the right connections and can pull down a bunch of VC money year after year for your business it seems you could go your entire career without having to generate profit!

It seems crazy to me that Reddit can't figure out a way to become profitable. Facebook is hilariously profitable on a fairly similar business model for example. It's not like Reddit is without ads, nor are they lacking in data they could sell (albeit not as high of quality as Facebook or Google). They even sell "Reddit gold" for real money.

Maybe they have exceptionally high operating costs? Or are they just really bad at selling ad space? I get that there are some advertisers that don't want to go on there because they are afraid their ad will show up next to a picture of a naked lady (which is something Reddit could control pretty easily), but Reddit is so big that it seems pretty hard to ignore.

I can answer this as an advertiser. Most reddit users don't log in or subscribe to subreddits, and thus reddit has a very small targetable userbase. Like, if I want to serve an ad to business owners, I can serve it to subscribers to /r/smallbusiness but that audience exhausts very quickly.

All of FB's users are logged in and can be targeted by interest.

reddit ads aren't very profitable as most of the userbase is probably logged out or just goes to /r/all.

reddit also houses tons of NSFW and controversial content which probably scares some companies away, even if their ads won't show up there.

Consider a few cases.

- you want to advertise B2B software to small/medium business owners.

- you want to advertise expensive fashion items to 20-35 y.o. women in NY/CT.

Will you pick FB or reddit? And then yes, lack of brand safety for non-targeted ads.

Can you not pick specific subreddits to advertise in (or have your ad appear next to on the home page)?

Seems like your userbase self-segments pretty quickly on Reddit, although it's no doubt a fulltime job for several engineers to keep up with the classifications on subreddits.

I guess the biggest problem is that so many users don't log in and just browse the default, which is pretty generic. Reddit could track the not-logged-in users and what they click on like Google, but that's a fair bit more work.

How efficient are subrrddits compared to always logged-in audience which told you their age, interests a location, explicitly?

Rethoric question.

Yes, you can target subreddits.

I used to post my DNS-host (dns-api.com) on /r/sysadmin, for example.

> you want to advertise expensive fashion items to 20-35 y.o. women in NY/CT

Instagram, every day of the week.

genuine question. is reddit good place to advertise a B2B software? my startup offers B2B warehousing/ecommerce solution and I never thought about reddit in that way even if I visit its front page daily.

You might get some brand awareness if you target specific subs (devops, etc), but I'd imagine the decisionmakers in companies that need what you're providing are not spending their time on subreddits, and the non-decisionmakers probably have adblocking on.

Thats just my perception though - also that reddit as a whole is very lowest common denominator tech/business wise.

Reddit seems to have a huge but very fragile audience. Monetizing the site would introduce changes that might drive off the users much the way Digg did.

Reddit's data isn't that valuable (as you cannot key it back to a real human), a huge swath of their users adblock, and it has tons and tons of pornographic content which - and i do not necessarily agree with - will lower ad values. The current path to monetization Reddit is trying is making their data more valuable via more detailed user profiles and chats, essentially creating a pseudonymous social network and hoping itll take off like FB.

However, I think the real money would be for them to be more like Craigslist. Subreddits could pay to upgrade to become more feature-rich "Classified"-like pages whose posts could then be further boosted (re: upsell for ad team) across other subreddits.

Users react with hostility to forced social media / redesigns geared to ad revenues. They like new features that are actually useful and enhance the experience.

They could have funded 150 startups for 10 years and created 1500 highly motivating startup jobs with that money but instead it will just maintain the status quo, pay Reddit engineers to be corporate cattle and allow reddit to be as innefficient as ever.

>They could have funded 150 startups for 10 years

This round is 150-300mln. How do you fund 150 startups for 10 years with 2mln per startup?

That's a lot of money. 200k per year. Enough to pay for two or three employees in most developed countries. 2 or 3 people is really all you need to build a meaningful startup.

It seems that investors in the US have gotten so used to paying high economic rents and financial middlemen that they have lost track of the real value of money. 2 million is an enormous amount of money.

I could build an entire reddit from scratch for 100k. Scaling to millions of users is not difficult these days. I could even build an entire cloud platform from scratch for less than 200k on top of Kubernetes.

Fun, I deleted my 9 year old account last night. It's wasn't out of some high-minded thing about how they're turning more into Facebook or privacy or anything. That site just hits my dopamine so effectively I had to quit and block it in my /etc/hosts.

I am spending more time on HN though...

Same. I haven’t deleted my account but I haven’t browsed the site in over a month. I’m far more productive now.

I had started off by trying to unsubscribe from the subreddits that were mainly image based. This didn’t really make much difference as my sub list was already too saturated, and I would scroll further to find the quick attention satiation. Eventually I realized it wasn’t worth the trouble.

HN is different though, there’s far less clickbait and no thumbnails. I regularly read articles that I feel teach me about important or very interesting topics. It’s pretty rare that I would read an article in full from Reddit. HN comments are often filled with valuable insights that I think will benefit me in the future, and jokes are fairly uncommon. I’ve been more and more frustrated with the low effort Reddit jokes over time.

Sure, the concept is the same between the two sites, but I think my frame of mind is very different when I browse either site. I don’t see myself needing to cut HN out as I did Reddit because it doesn’t have the same effect. HN is meat and veggies and Reddit is candy. Or a dopamine drip.

Likewise, been off for over a month (yay New Years) and my productivity has been significantly increased.

And I agree about HN, it's similar in system, but the content is very different. I'll look at the front page and maybe read 2 articles and their comments in full, and actually feel like I've learned something or it wasn't a complete waste of my time.

Gotta cut those dopamine drips. So many companies make their money figuring out how to hook you.

My solution is unsubscribing from subreddits that are too clickbaity and do not "educate" me. I sometimes realize "Reddit is too fun today", "oh yeah, I am logged out".

Is there something wrong with it being fun?

It's a pretty bad time sink for some of us. I have it blocked on my work machines so I don't get sucked down the click and scroll rabbit hole when I should be working.

>I am spending more time on HN though...

Same boat. Twitter as well.

Snipped reddit, went to twitter. Snipped twitter, came to here. Seems I just can't get enough of "talking with people on the internet."

GF says I should try to find a book club. She's probably right.

Twitter is the absolute worst of all of them, though. Of all of the platforms, it creates the greatest incentives for antisocial behavior, prioritizing shouting, content-less attention-whoring-for-clicks over everything else.

If you want to be an "influencer" on twitter (which most folks seem to want to be), you just shout the most outrageous things you can to try to cast a wider net.

You get what you look for.

In my experience twitter has been an educational journey.

> Seems I just can't get enough of "talking with people on the internet."

Are we sure this is a bad thing? Socializing with other people is a key component of well-being... could it be good for us even if it's online? What if it's even more fulfilling than IRL socialization? Why do we naturally recoil from the suggestion that conversing with people online could be a good way to spend a significant portion of our time?

Agreed, I've mostly quit Facebook, which was never that enthralling to me, but Reddit / Twitter / Podcasts / Hackernews are all much more interesting. None of them are adding significant value to my life other than that dopamine hit, but I still haven't left them.

It's better to just not be on the computer consuming online content instead of switching websites.

I don't go on reddit and am here only occasionally (would be 100% gone if I could delete my account). Instead of replacing reddit/HN time with X.com, I just do other stuff entirely.

Is there something you'd rather be doing with your HN time?

I am on HN more, but it hasn't replaced Reddit. HN doesn't move fast enough for hours of dopamine hits like Reddit is. HN is for when I'm at work and I need to give my brain a rest from a tough problem. My time at home no longer has any social media when it used to have WAY too much Reddit.

You could have gotten some good pocket change for selling that old of an account.

Could have probably sold it for $50-$100. (Yes, this makes reddit worse)

It's better this way.

I hope you didn't delete all your useful comments over the years. That would be a shame.

I pruned my comments about a year prior, so anything useful should still be there.

This works with most user script plugins like GreaseMonkey, ViolentMonkey or TamperMonkey:

  // ==UserScript==
  // @name BackToOldReddit
  // @namespace Reddit
  // @match *://www.reddit.com/*
  // @grant none
  // @run-at document-start
  // ==/UserScript==
  const currentURL = window.document.location.toString();
  
  if(currentURL.includes('//www')) {
    const newURL = currentURL.replace('//www','//old');
    window.document.location.replace(newURL);
  }

Uhhh, you don't need a plugin... you can just set this to happen in your Reddit profile.

This lets you do it without an account though. An order of magnitude more people use reddit logged out with no account, than those that have an account.

last round was 200 million in July of 2017. if we assume they had around 30 million left of it in bank today that puts them in 10 million negative every month. how does an online community/discussion website that makes money from ads and with not a lot of staff and no other expenses lose 10 million per month? when are they going to become profitable and how? Is it just a tax write off thingy? I never understood these things.

Reddit has 230 staff (as of July 2017).

edit (removed wrong maths): $1.9m per month in staffing costs @ 230 employees/100K each. Although a reply below says the staff may have almost doubled and $100K may be a low guestimate for the area (inc. benefits, etc).

My question would be: Why does Reddit have 230+ staff? What do most of them do?

Reddit has over 450 employees now (very last line of this article: https://www.thedrum.com/news/2019/01/09/reddit-hires-ex-twit...)

You forgot to divide by 12. It's $1.9m/month for staffing assuming average annual all-in comp of $100k and 230 headcount.

230 * 100000 / 12 == 1,916,667

They're not making 100K / month. So how is 10M / month not slightly crazy? I realize we're not talking anything but staff here, but 8M / month in sales/marketing/office space/infrastructure? Maybe my notion of what it costs to run a site as large as reddit is just way off.

Didn't they have like one or two developers just a few years ago? Or am I remembering this wrong?

We had fiveish developers for the first fiveish years. Then it sort of exploded after that.

To fair, five wasn't enough. We spent too much time firefighting and not enough time innovating.

>We spent too much time firefighting and not enough time innovating

I honestly don't mean this in a back-handed manner, but what innovations have come about since that time? Reddit is great because of its momentum and user generated content. That model does best when the admins stay out of the way for the most part. Many (including myself) are not at all a fan of the more recently emerging dark patterns or the site redesign. I don't see those as innovations.

I stopped working there right as it exploded, so I can't list them all, but I know a ton of backend work was done after I left to make site more stable and faster.

And externally the biggest one was mobile support, which is light years ahead of what it was back then.

Light years ahead with a subset of the features. Reddit has been down for me a lot lately too. I'm not sure Reddit has been getting better tbh. As long as the communities stick around I'll keep using it though. I like reddit a lot.

I wish there was more firefighting now - the state of being logged in is broken way to often, and lets not talk about constantly getting a broken auto-scroll that gets the first content but not enough to fill the page, and then don't ever fetch any more.

thats crazy. yeah exactly. what do 230 people do there?

Engineering: - Infrastructure (500M MAU) - Web Dev - iOS Dev - Android Dev - Design - UX - Localization

Data: - Ranking timelines - Ad performance - Recommendations - Business analytics - R&D

Product: - Coordinating across the above 2 and adding/measuring (new) features

Sales: - Ads

Finance/HR/Admin/Accounting/Office Manager(s)/Recruiting: - Running a company

Reddit serves out a crapton of pages every day. They need a robust backend service which means you need people to maintain it.

Beyond that you have community managers, people to run AMAs, people to manage ad accounts, HR, etc... 230 people to run the one of the largest and most dynamic sites on the Internet doesn't seem out of line.

I could easily see 100 engineers split between operations, front-end/back-end/mobile, DBA, etc. I could see a dozen each of marketing, HR (moderation + community management), project/product/team management, and C-level. The rest could easily be sales.

Sure you could argue you don't need 100 engineers for that, but if you factor in on-call rotations and how they're constantly refactoring everything...

A hundred engineers for a site like Reddit is ridiculous. Scale is not an excuse - WhatsApp being the famous example of a hyperscaled product with many native clients and only a few dozen engineers. And who would Reddit be selling to? Are they going to run their own in-house ad platform?

I'm sure Reddit justifies it to themselves somehow.

Reddit provides a pretty large amount of features (once you include advertising, moderator features, subreddit customization, image hosting, etc.) while WhatsApp provided a very small number of features. As a note, Reddit is already running their own in house ad platform and have been for a while.

Yea, if true, that 230 figure is shocking. I wouldn’t have thought they’d have more than 25% of that. What on earth are all these employees doing?

I worked at an avionics manufacturer that had a dozen or so products (things like physical displays and map systems that go into airplanes) that had less than 10 full time engineers. A few software devs, a few EE’s and an industrial engineer who did the chassis. Sure it’s not an apples to apples comparison but wow. Does it really take that many people to maintain an already-working web site? Isn’t the promise of “cloud” that your staff can scale far slower than your user base?

Craigslist has what, 50 people? Better comparison. Even that seems to be a lot.

>Does it really take that many people to maintain an already-working web site?

Probably. Unless you want to get shut down/sued for all the child pornography, narcotics trading, violent threats, doxing, etc, etc which people will use your site for. Not to mention all the other attempts to directly exploit, hack or manipulate your site. And larger scale tends to attract more bad actors.

> when are they going to become profitable and how?

It's been 15 years. I think it's just a ponzi scheme at this point.

"No other expenses"???

I'm sure their hosting and server costs are huge considering the traffic they get everyday (#5 in US according to Alexa).

Until recently Reddit wasn't hosting any images or video on their own servers. That was a recent "innovation".

They could also feasibly curtail the custom styling on subreddits to reduce the space burned on hosted images there for backgrounds and headers.

Besides that all Reddit ever was was a lot of text.

Reddit is still great if you take the time to curate subreddits that pertain to your interests and you use a 3rd party app (Apollo is really fantastic.)

I mostly spend my time moderating r/CrohnsDisease and making sure the people who post there get at least one thoughtful reply. I browse r/all most days but rarely do I post content or comments outside of my main subs because there’s just so much toxicity on the platform.

I wish Alexis had been able to influence the core values of the company before leaving the second time, he seems like one of the few genuinely good people at that level of major tech companies these days. It’s a shame he’s moved on to other things.

I find the front page basically without value... ...but individual subreddits for can be quite valuable global public spaces for specific topics. They're centralized, searchable, and generally don't put any walls in front of non-registered users. A lot of internet searches will lead you to years-old posts on a subreddit dedicated to the subject, with a long discussion thread, and links to more of that same content on that same subject. Forums previously filled this function (and usenet before), but Reddit has the advantage of a more modern and consistent interface. Facebook groups could have potentially filled this role, but are totally opaque to outside searches, and so are not easily discovered.

Reddit isn't worth $3B, and management trying to justify the validation and provide returns to the investors will kill it. Just a quick peek on `/r/beta` will show you the weird things Reddit is doing to maximize value and how it is alienating users.

Unobtrusive ads don't make investors enough money, Facebook has already shown that. To derive maximum revenue per user, you need to drive your users to the edge of not enjoying the site anymore. With these investments Reddit will be walking that line, and who knows if Reddit is too big to digg?

What about Instagram? People seem to like their ads, at least from the friends I've talked to.

It amazes me that a fourteen year old company with a mature business model requires equity financing. I'll never really understand how tech companies work, I guess.

That's mostly because they DO NOT have a mature business model. Reddit struggles because their main source of revenue, ads, performs poorly on the generally tech savvy audience that makes up the core of their platform. They have been trying to figure out for literally the entire life of the company how to turn a top 10 visited website into actual consistent and repeatable revenue. You'd think it be pretty simple but look how much push back they've gotten on even relatively benign monetization strategies.

Interesting that most of the comments here are about Reddit itself (the product) and almost nothing about Tencent.

For reminder, Tencent owns

- Riot Games (League of Legends, one of the most played game in the west)

- Epic Games (Fortnite, another one of the most played game in the west)

- and now Reddit (one of the most visited social network in the west)

So just purely based off investments, Saudi Arabia owns Twitter. Russia has had its hands in Facebook since 2009. Now China has a big stake in Reddit. Genuinely curious where this will lead.

Must be .com bubble 2.0 if VCs will throw that much money at a company who can't monetize that many users after this many years.

Not my money, so I don't care, but I do really have to wonder what their plan is.

The way I see it, Google, Apple, and Facebook won't buy them because they're not competitors and they already have more users. And 99% of Reddit users probably use 1 or more of those 3 already anyway.

An IPO seems unlikely because they're not making enough money.

So maybe they're hoping for a buyout from a media company?

> So maybe they're hoping for a buyout from a media company?

For the second time, of course: https://techcrunch.com/2006/10/31/breaking-news-conde-nastwi...

Reddit has an interesting corporate history of being a startup --> acquisition --> subsidiary --> spinout --> "startup" --> ??

Huh, I vaguely remember them getting bought, but didn't know about the subsidiary and spinout parts.

I guess they're all playing hot potato until it goes bust.

Reddit is the only social media I use. Never used any other services at all. The only annoyance is the redesign. It completely sucks. Very much reminds of the digg 4.0 redesign before it died. I don't know why all these aggregation sites go to that look and feel but its very bad to use. Hope they don't abandon supporting the old design. That would definitely make scale back my time on there significantly.

I use https://old.reddit.com since I can't grasp the new UI

Something about Reddit that has been really irking me lately is the decline in quality of the comment threads, which is arguably one of the only reasons to visit the site nowadays since link aggregators are so common.

People seem to treat commenting like a game instead of a forum for discussion. I often see the same patterns from Twitter there (i.e., inciting outrage to get upvotes, virtue signaling, or just pointless jokes on serious articles). The introduction of Reddit Gold has made this substantially worse, as now there’s an additional point system which awards single comments instead of points of discussion.

I don't disagree, but I think this has been the case for a while now on reddit. I haven't noticed any drastic change in comment quality over the few years, and I've been using it almost daily since 2012.

There are communities that moderate very heavily and don't allow the joke/sarcastic/low-effort comments (askhistorians, politicaldiscussion, etc).