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A comment on Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews.

Re:Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion ... by danso on Thursday January 05, 2012 @05:09PM (#3430788)
Whatever you think of @reddit's march towards decline...this was my favorite part of the blog post...and something I hope rings with other popular sites:

Here’s a list of things we don’t (and won’t) do for traffic:

We don't get traffic through ads.

We don’t participate in any traffic trading.

We don’t email our users (unless they choose to enter an email and then forget their password).

We don’t harass users to sign up.

We don’t harass users to invite their friends.

We don’t pester you to download our app.

We don’t use slideshows and other pageview gimmicks.

We don't know anything about SEO.

We don't integrate with Facebook.

We don't even link to our Facebook or twitter accounts.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion ... by ig1 on Thursday January 05, 2012 @05:11PM (#3430796)
If you're one of the 3-5 sites a user goes to everyday, you have a completely different set of rules from everyone else
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion ... by sjs on Thursday January 05, 2012 @08:44PM (#3431545)
Reddit didn't appear out of the ether as one of those sites. They built a user base like everyone else.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion ... by blangblang on Friday January 06, 2012 @02:02PM (#3434543)
Reddit didn't appear out of the ether as one of those sites. They built a user base in a manner unlike everyone else.

FTFY.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion ... by sjs on Friday January 06, 2012 @03:26PM (#3434895)
Poor wording on my part. What I meant is that they too had to build a user base from nothing.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion ... by bad_user on Thursday January 05, 2012 @06:14PM (#3431062)
As with any user-generated content website, it has a problem: amongst those many users Reddit has there are also lots of dicks that spoil the conversations for everybody.

I don't think Reddit wants to go on the path of Youtube - useful for finding out links, but with useless and rude conversations that make you mad at waisting time reading them. I think Reddit got popular because in addition to links, users had meaningful things to say about those links, but the overall quality has been constantly dropping. Reddit should try to find ways to alleviate this phenomenon.

Here's a case study from today. I submitted a link to both HN and /r/programming [1] [2]

Most popular comment and criticism on HN:

   1. User tumblr.
   2. You're done.
Most popular comment and criticism on /r/programming:

   Scumbag programmer: Titles post "Blogging for Hackers". 
   Writes the whole thing in Ruby.

   Edit: Whoops - looks like those Ruby rockstars woke up.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3428369

[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/o3v2u/blogging_...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion ... by dekz on Thursday January 05, 2012 @06:31PM (#3431127)
Unfortunately proggit has become a cesspool, a complete juxtaposition of what reddit once was. I'm not familiar nor certain of a case where this has been turned around? Is it even advantageous for Reddit to attempt to remove the dregs from their site?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion ... by bad_user on Thursday January 05, 2012 @06:41PM (#3431160)
It is my belief (and from personal observation) that the bad apples constitute a very loud minority. Punishing just a couple and clearly promoting your values makes a big difference.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion ... by dekz on Thursday January 05, 2012 @06:55PM (#3431202)
I find it much harder to swallow the comments on reddit, at least here on HN there is a guideline which encourages comments which add to the discussion; whereas on reddit, it's a shamble of memes and novelty accounts which depending on the account handle are allowed to be rude/obnoxious/racist.

I find it easier to leave proggit/reddit behind and follow Hacker News simply due to my alignment with the guidelines and the current HN hive-mind (no memes, helpful discussions).

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion ... by redthrowaway on Thursday January 05, 2012 @07:34PM (#3431324)
Reddit has a much bigger list of dos and don'ts than does HN: http://www.reddit.com/help/reddiquette

As memes are appropriate for many of the subreddits, they're obviously excluded. Still, HN is really no different than a subreddit run under the same rules.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion ... by rudiger on Thursday January 05, 2012 @05:17PM (#3430825)
Regarding the "decline" of Reddit: any site that gets 2 billion monthly page views is going to be wholly different from its incipient form of several years ago. Surely the users of Reddit who pine for its past have many alternatives today.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion ... by leoedin on Thursday January 05, 2012 @07:27PM (#3431306)
Some aspects of HN are very similar to the way reddit was four years ago. The topics covered are slightly different, but at least half of the HN main page is normally not directly startup related, and the discussion threads are almost always interesting.

Hopefully it'll stay that well. Childish and one line comments seem to stay away, which is absolutely fantastic.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion ... by sidswift on Friday January 06, 2012 @03:32AM (#3432548)
> but at least half of the HN main page is normally not directly startup related

I agree with you, as HN is supposed to bring topics of interest for hackers, and there are many things other than startup world that we may be interested in. But for startup related items, the submissions are almost entirely devoted to software, computing and related services. There are very few (no?) posts related to startups in science or hardware (and we are living in times where very exciting things are happening in these areas). In my opinion, a hacker community will benefit from having a wide range of interests (I haven't seen Michael Neilsen posting here for a while).

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion ... by __alexs on Thursday January 05, 2012 @05:22PM (#3430853)
The alternatives often seem to come in the form of communities splintering. e.g. /r/gaming, /r/gamingnews /r/games, /r/truegaming etc. The expansion and decline in quality (i.e. rage comic spam) is usually followed quite rapidly by new sub-reddits being created and communities forming with stricter areas of moderation.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion ... by prawn on Thursday January 05, 2012 @05:54PM (#3430981)
I browse Reddit but don't have an account or post. I think a lot if it is trash though I love AskScience and occasionally find value in the AMA and TIL stuff. But your note on the rage comic spam made me want to post that it seems they've made some adjustments in the last year or so that prevented that 'spam' from killing the site in the same way that Digg seemed to lose relevance.

I wonder if the next challenge for them is the strong representation from r/atheism on their frontdoor? I say that as a very irreligious person who guesses that discovering their new selves is exciting for (I imagine, predominantly) American youth. But some pretty bland ra-ra makes it through and I can see that being off-putting for religious types and "this again?!" for those for whom a lack of belief is the default rather than something new and outrageous within their community.

Yes, I know people can create an account to customise their experience, but some fair percentage of their traffic is going to come from people not interested in taking their involvement to that level.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion ... by acgourley on Thursday January 05, 2012 @05:30PM (#3430892)
Still that is a suboptimal divide, and leaves a discovery problem. Someone will solve it and replace reddit in at least some profound ways.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion ... by ubernostrum on Thursday January 05, 2012 @05:50PM (#3430964)
Someone will solve it and replace reddit in at least some profound ways.

Doubtful. These are deep-seated patterns that have been playing out in online communities for decades, and every "oh we'll just build a new thing that won't have that problem" attempt has... had the same problems.

For examples, and some interesting thoughts on the issue, start here:

http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion ... by derefr on Thursday January 05, 2012 @07:45PM (#3431371)
Well, fundamentally, we've been designing online communities in the same (flawed) manner for decades. This is basically the recipe for reversion to the mean:

1. Allow any user to add themselves into the community; and then,

2. allow the course of discussion to be set by majority rule.

The site (or subreddit, or newsgroup, or whatever)'s focus and usefulness will gradually disintegrate as people in secondary demographics join (e.g. for programming, people interested in web design) and then tertiary demographics join who are only interested in things the secondary demographics like, and actually don't care about the original, primary focus of the community at all.

For examples of tertiary-demographic takeover, see Reddit's /r/music and /r/movies. The primary demographic wanted media discussion; the secondary demographic wanted to discuss specific pieces of media; and the tertiary demographic just wanted links to new media they hadn't heard of. (Which—for /r/music at least—when combined with the average new-Internet-user's set of "music they've heard of", the way people have a more positive association with music they've heard before, and the way democratic interest floats up the most agreeable items, the front page becomes basically "Reddit's Top-40 chart.")

Any community that avoids this will fundamentally have to avoid doing either #1 or #2.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion ... by StavrosK on Thursday January 05, 2012 @09:26PM (#3431650)
This sounds pretty easy to avoid by moderating to keep focus and prevent drifting. "This subreddit is for media discussion only. Irrelevant links will be banned."
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion ... by derefr on Thursday January 05, 2012 @10:43PM (#3431847)
I think the question is whether there's any way to do this without moderation, because moderation doesn't scale. (Community-based moderation might work, if you could trust the average user to moderate right. Now you have two problems.)
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion ... by ubernostrum on Friday January 06, 2012 @04:35AM (#3432662)
This hasn't worked for reddit. It hasn't worked for any other site that's tried it.

Seriously, folks, read Clay Shirky. The man knows what he's talking about.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion ... by forwardslash on Friday January 06, 2012 @05:25AM (#3432761)
It has for r/askscience.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion ... by bialecki on Thursday January 05, 2012 @05:21PM (#3430846)
Not to take a thing away from Reddit, but there are a lot of bored people out there and they don't know that many great places on the internet. To compound that, mobile devices have created more time when you can be doing something else (i.e. between commercials, on the bus, etc.).

It's not that there aren't a lot of great websites out there, it's just that most people I know only go to 2-5 regularly. Reddit is a great site, but I know a lot of people who go there 30 minutes after they just clicked through 100 links hoping there's something new (and then when they're bored posting about it - http://www.reddit.com/search?q=blue+links). I'm not sure why, but either people can only remember a few websites, other sites suck or they can't be found.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion ... by spindritf on Thursday January 05, 2012 @06:07PM (#3431035)
Because Reddit is not like those other sites. I have 130 feeds in my RSS reader, 9 pages on my speed dial (including HN and other forums) and still visit Reddit every once in a while.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion ... by roel_v on Friday January 06, 2012 @05:59AM (#3432835)
Here's one they forgot:

We don't make enough money to sustain ourselves.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion ... by kayhi on Thursday January 05, 2012 @05:37PM (#3430916)
My concern is that this stand may hurt profitability.

I don't think any of us want harassing or pestering, but have come across companies that it is a pleasure to read their email or invite friends.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion ... by 127 on Thursday January 05, 2012 @06:29PM (#3431117)
They do show stupid pictures ("Instead of an ad, here's...") instead of ads that steal my attention for no reason what so ever. The sole reason I'm using adblock. I do not want to, but those damn pictures are so damn annoying that I have no choice.

How about not show anything if you are not going to show an ad? Why steal my attention and bother me for no reason at all?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion ... by amitparikh on Thursday January 05, 2012 @06:34PM (#3431139)
Because reddit sometimes does show real ads in that space. And I think this feature was designed with 'fun' in mind -- it's lighthearted!

References: http://blog.reddit.com/2010/10/fun-in-sidebar.html and http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/dqse4/fun_in_the_sideb...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion ... by 127 on Thursday January 05, 2012 @07:02PM (#3431228)
What you consider "fun" and "lighthearted" I consider a waste of space and attention. Tell me how it is logically not.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion ... by redthrowaway on Thursday January 05, 2012 @07:42PM (#3431360)
Clearly you aren't their target market. The "instead of an ad, here's x" pictures have proven to be fairly popular.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion ... by whatusername on Thursday January 05, 2012 @09:45PM (#3431696)
Because having something "fun" and "lighthearted" in the space occasionally might drive higher cpm's when they actually sell ads for the space.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion ... by vecter on Thursday January 05, 2012 @06:35PM (#3431142)
Their revenue comes from ads. They've never claimed otherwise, what makes you think they did?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion ... by 127 on Thursday January 05, 2012 @06:59PM (#3431216)
The "fun" and "lighthearted" pictures are pointless and actively harmful. If you're going to show me ads, show me ads. But if you're not, don't. I'm willing to pay the price of being annoyed by advertising. The "instead of an ad" pictures generate no revenue for Reddit and they constantly waste my time and attention. They are purely a negative thing.

That's the most articulate way I can put my argument. If you still misunderstand, there's not much more that I can say.

Maybe some people actually enjoy the "instead of an ad" pictures. I absolutely hate them.

[ Parent | on HN ]