Reddit in 2016

https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/434h6c/reddit_in_2016/

by cryptoz • 10 years ago

82 119 10 years ago

reddit.com

dang• 10 years ago

Url changed from http://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-ceo-announces-big-chan..., which points to this.

kendallpark• 10 years ago

Our new Android app is going into beta today, and our new iOS app should follow it out soon.

It's amazing how long Reddit existed before rolling out a mobile app. Now I'll finally have something other than Facebook to check compulsively on my phone.

JTon• 10 years ago

Just now? There's a bunch of excellent 3rd party Reddit apps on many mobile platforms. Even BB10 and WP have solid Reddit clients. I don't think you were trying very hard :P

noxToken• 10 years ago

A mobile app that isn't third party. If something happens with your data or your account through a third party app, Reddit isn't responsible. This hasn't been an issue with Reddit, but it's a risk the end-user accepts when the app isn't "official".

jimmaswell• 10 years ago

Their site works fine on mobile, either the desktop version or .compact (you can add .compact to the end of a reddit url to see it). I never really liked the normal mobile version though.

kec• 10 years ago

AlienBlue was the de facto reddit app for years on iOS, to the point that reddit actually bought it / accqi-hired the dev for it a year or so ago. Unfortunately it's been pretty stagnant since it was acquired, very few bug fixes and afaik no feature enhancements.

sithadmin• 10 years ago

it's been pretty stagnant since it was acquired, very few bug fixes and afaik no feature enhancements

It's become noticeably buggier since the acquisition, in my opinion.

JustSomeNobody3• 10 years ago

Why you need an app?

JimDabell2• 10 years ago

It's amazing how long Reddit existed before rolling out a mobile app.

This isn't their first mobile application, it's their new one. The original one is six years old:

https://github.com/reddit/iReddit

6stringmerc2• 10 years ago

While I can understand the sentiment that spam and abuse threaten our communities I can't help but think - based on outside observations - that some of the biggest threat to the Reddit communities are people within Reddit communities. Though admirable and well-meaning, it's a flawed model at the core, at least this is what I've come to believe. In the most recent flare-ups, the "call is coming from inside the house!" seemed to really apply. Granted I'm not proposing some kind of methodology or overhaul to fix this conundrum, though it's certainly an interesting topic.

boxy310• 10 years ago

What specifically leads you to conclude it's a "flawed model"? Is it the problem of private ownership of a semipublic community, through individual accounts "owning" a subreddit?

6stringmerc2• 10 years ago

As a model, user generated / sourced content blended with user sourced moderation under a private enterprise with "standards and expectations" will always have issues regarding the (occasional) desires of users to share and embrace things which are not welcome by the private enterprise. That's kind of the flaw in the model. The 'image' of community and ownership breaks down when there's a dispute, most frequently seen with respect to rules.

hellbanner2• 10 years ago

Everyone can upvote. Contrast this to HN where you need a comment karma score before you can start upvoting.. it's effectively a grandfathering network vs a democracy where new accounts cost 5 seconds with no email verification.

JustSomeNobody3• 10 years ago

Ya know, I'm on reddit daily, and I NEVER see any of these flare-ups. I just kind of hang out on the nerdy subs I guess.

sliverstorm2• 10 years ago

I've always heard the reddit experience is far superior in the low-key, non-default, not-too-popular subs.

buckbova• 10 years ago

Precisely. This is what killed digg many years ago. It become of vehicle for spam and after I was basically forced out by a mob, I migrated myself to reddit.

I left reddit a couple years ago and pretty much only waste time on this news aggregator. There were too many agendas getting pushed and it leaked into every sub.

lumberjack• 10 years ago

Reddit is a great platform to disguise sponsored content as organic. If you are really good the users won't even notice. I wonder whether they have started monetizing that yet. There is clearly a lot of it on Reddit. It's just not clear whether it is with the help of Reddit or despite of them.

maxerickson• 10 years ago

You don't even have to be particularly good. I made a remark that Carrie Fisher probably wasn't organically following @Starwars on Twitter on a Sunday afternoon and got lots of downvotes and several people ranting about how cynical it was to question the thing that got posted to reddit. They want to enjoy the manufactured whimsy, not question it.

lawpoop• 10 years ago

Can you describe this sponsored/organic content dichotomy?

To get noticed, you have to have upvotes. If you have upvotes, that means that users appreciated the content. If, say, a company or person is promoting themselves and the community upvotes it, I don't see any problem with it. That's how it's supposed to work.

But I don't think that's what you mean by 'disguise'. I would guess rather that you mean that some entity is paying the reddit the company to create artificial upvotes (i.e. not originating from users) and maybe even paid commenters. I personally would be surprised if there were a lot of this clearly happening (there's a number of people on reddit that make a 'career' out of debunking stories, identifying brigades, etc).

Can you point to some popular posts presently on reddit that are examples of it?

fweespeech3• 10 years ago

Can you point to some popular posts presently on reddit that are examples of it?

http://www.redditsecrets.com/buy-reddit-accounts

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=725562.0

https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/32rr56/do_peo...

You can build a small voting ring for a few hundred dollars to boost posts. The problem is all of Reddit's countermeasures to reduce spam made it hard to tell how successful these things are.

However, the fact people are still buying in 2016, implies at least some people succeed at it.

Can you describe this sponsored/organic content dichotomy?

Really, only Reddit can say how bad this problem is but my guess its non-negligible and cutting into their monetization via native ads as its basically an end run around paying Reddit.

anon987• 10 years ago

http://www.slideshare.net/reddit/reddit-brands-of-the-year-2...

I assume that's the official Reddit SlideShare account.

deathhand• 10 years ago

If I then have a ring of people manipulating voting and nothing is done about it. Is it still organic? I can easily see the monetary incentive to such practices due to the traffic volumes. Heck I could even see it on HN. If I wanted my techy blog to be on the front page of HN I know I would land that dream job...

ageek123• 10 years ago

Isn't this basically what "native ads" are?

untog• 10 years ago

Native ads are usually signposted as such.

pearjuice• 10 years ago

No, that's product placement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_placement

zaif• 10 years ago

I think a lot of it is the pseudo-intellectual nature of the site to make people feel like they are more knowledgeable. If it's already a pop culture topic, like Tesla or Netflix, the topics will drive interest and thereby upvotes. John Oliver did a similar episode about Native Advertising.

forgetsusername2• 10 years ago

If it's already a pop culture topic, like Tesla or Netflix, the topics will drive interest and thereby upvotes.

And HN is different...how exactly? There's a definite air of superiority here, but I don't find the commentary any more insightful. Besides, "reddit" isn't a single entity.

pboutros• 10 years ago

Sounds like /r/hailcorporate is leaking!

(but yes, totally agreed)

mrfusion2• 10 years ago

Check out r/hailcorporate

AndrewUnmuted• 10 years ago

I found this rather disturbing:

"Recently we built an A/B testing system, which allows us to test changes to individual features scientifically, and we are excited to put it through its paces. "

Does this mean that Reddit made it all the way to 2016 without an A/B testing tool?!

Strom• 10 years ago

Automated A/B testing isn't super important. Especially for sites like reddit which have been basically the same since launch.

You can still get feedback from users, and I would argue this is more important than automatically detecting which button has a 2% higher CTR.

Houshalter3• 10 years ago

I was really upset when they massively increased the font size from normal. It looks terrible and everything takes up so much more space. I think it was probably done from manual A/B tests showing the larger font had some impact on how long people stay on the site or something, which doesn't necessarily mean anything.

fourstar4• 10 years ago

Reddit is the worst. I created a sub that ended up becoming a default (/r/lifeprotips) and ended up getting banned when I tried to promote a site that I built (which was my original intention with the idea). They banned me because I had adsense on the site (funny because Imgur was/has been the golden child for reddit and they've had advertising for quite a while).

I sent them a DMCA to remove the logo that I had commissioned from someone from Dribbble (for my site, but ended up using it as the header there). No response.

Reddit is run by a bunch of leeches who rely on moderators to create content and never reward them.

hire_charts• 10 years ago

Is lifeprotips.com the site you were trying to promote? I see that the banners are really similar.

fourstar4• 10 years ago

Correct.

pknopf• 10 years ago

I'm working on a site: https://skimur.com

I plan on making like Twitter, but "followers" "vote" for "tweets" so that the collective community sees the best content. Reddit isn't really meant for personal usage. Subs are typically topic related there.

Smudge• 10 years ago

Interesting idea, but right now this is just a self-hosted instance of Reddit, is it not? How do you plan to develop the idea further and (most importantly) attract actual visitors/users?

deelowe• 10 years ago

voat.co is already a good alternative.

na85• 10 years ago

The "next big thing" won't have voting. It's too easily gamed and leads to groupthink in the worst way.

Inb4 "HN has voting but no groupthink". It has both in large quantities.

woah• 10 years ago

You tried to use their site to promote your site and they banned you? And then you threatened legal action to get them to take down an image that you yourself posted?

fourstar4• 10 years ago

I took a survey of what was lacking on the subreddit at the time and there were plenty of things that were suggested that I thought I could build/provide.

kbenson3• 10 years ago

And then you threatened legal action to get them to take down an image that you yourself posted?

Why not? If he owned the rights to the image, it's use was contingent on his approval, absent any other agreement. The only reason it required a a legal notice is because they locked him out of the account he used that had rights to change it.

This is no different than offering to let the office use your ping pong table, then getting fired and having your building access revoked. If the business refused to return the ping pong table, which was in use contingent upon your and the businesses approval, they have essentially stolen your property. Feel free to substitute any other item item (such as fridge, chair, computer hardware or servers...) for the ping pong table in that example.

mej10• 10 years ago

You tried to use their site to promote your site and they banned you?

What is wrong with that? As long as your aren't spamming or trying to ruin the experience for others, why the fuck should it matter that you post your site to a subreddit that would be interested?

Also, people do this literally all the time in subreddits. Like, ALL the time. Wonder what was different in this case.

forgetsusername2• 10 years ago

Reddit is the worst.

Reddit is the best.

In fact, now when I'm searching for random terms or information, I'll often include "reddit" in the query, because I'm confident that on pretty much any subject there are bona fide experts or people who have already done the research willingly sharing their knowledge on Reddit, for free. Wonderful.

seangrant• 10 years ago

Can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but you should be weary of the information you read on Reddit. A lot of people simply rehash untrue statements they've heard on Reddit before. I'd say this is true anywhere but Reddit seems to be exceeding prevalent.

TeMPOraL2• 10 years ago

I do the same. For pretty much any topic there's a decent subreddit with a community of people involved in it, who did lots of research and collected relevant information in various FAQ / Wiki posts. Whenever I want to seriously learn something outside of programming, I usually search for a subreddit on it.

79522• 10 years ago

Reddit is run by a bunch of leeches who rely on moderators to create content and never reward them.

I think sites like Reddit emerged at a point where infrastructure for sharing was very valuable for users in its own right. It seems amazing now that the submit/upvote/downvote flow was so novel and we all lapped up the spirit of freedom. But actually the powerful feature of sites like Reddit and HN is the moderation rather than the technology. I would pay for some of the better subs, and certainly HN.

Good moderation is invaluable and it's a shame that it is hard to make money out of. I have a hunch that Google Contributor is aimed at this market as a sort of Netflix for content.

brownbat4• 10 years ago

submit/upvote/downvote flow was so novel

What was the timeline again... Slashdot emerged in 1997, it developed voting on several different criteria, you could filter for "funny" or "insightful" posts, and it had a pretty sophisticated meta-moderation system.

Digg simplified that with up- and down-votes.

Reddit borrowed digg's model.

I'm not 100% sure what the innovation of reddit was at the time, but I feel like these three just had slightly different tones to their communities. Slashdot was the geek site, Digg had more jokes and politics, reddit was sort of... deliberative? The culture was a lot different back then, a bit more like this site.

Huhty• 10 years ago

Reddit is run by a bunch of leeches who rely on moderators to create content and never reward them.

Snapzu (http://snapzu.com) is a reddit alternative that has a referral program that splits revenues with moderators, as a reward and incentive to grow it. Their system is similar where instead of subreddits, there are 'tribes', but it's essentially the same way of organizing communities.

Here is a link to their referral program page: http://snapzu.com/referralprogram/

fourstar4• 10 years ago

This is very interesting and I think there might be something here with this idea.

It looks like you might run/work there. Is your "Frank" on the affiliate program just an example or a real person?

Another question I have is about the legality of it. Are these technically employees or contractors?

Houshalter3• 10 years ago

I know it sucks, and I'm not saying their policy is best. But they do get a huge number of spammers and people self promoting their own websites.

The problem isn't that your site has ads, it's that you aren't supposed to submit links to your own website at all. Or at least not more than 10% of all your posts should be self promotion is the rule now.

I don't agree with this rule at all, but I understand why it exists.

ivanca• 10 years ago

Reddit has so many users that it always has to behave as the most common lowest denominator dictates, to survive this that CLD has to stay away from your subreddit, consciously ("I understand I'm not smart enough to talk here " or subconsciously "I don't care about this"). Otherwise it just goes to shit.

Banning sites for having AdSense is extremely hypocritical, Reddit lives thanks to ads or cohercing users to remove them ("gold")

wslh• 10 years ago

I have mixed feelings about reddit but mainly positives. One, it is the main driver of traffic to my blogs because there are specific subreddits with very focused audiences about these topics.

The negative was only related to the netsec subreddit which I think is really great but banned me several times in the last few months because some moderators said my post were offtopic while the same kind of posts were really successful there before. For example, benchmarking different ways of betwork traffic capture in Windows including drivers developed by ourselves.

Karunamon3• 10 years ago

Reddit's a neat idea, but I had to abandon it. Had just hit five years of daily participation on the site, too.

If we look past all the controversy and all the other reasons most people point at the site as a negative, it boils down to one thing in my mind:

Base cynicism.

There's cynicism when someone else reposts something.

There's cynicism over imaginary internet points.

There's cynicism by, from, and to the moderators and site owners.

There's cynicism every time something with a brand name gets mentioned (zOMG it's an ad!)

There's cynicism among communities.

It just goes on and on and on. Never-ending negativity. Everyone always assuming the worst of the other person (rather than trying to have an understanding discussion) and taking snarky potshots at them (and then hiding their comments by -1's in a fit of pique, rather than any kind of thoughtful analysis of quality).

I'm quite happier (and not a little bit more productive) not participating anymore. Reddit is, IMO, the world's greatest concentration of negative, irreverent, straight-up dickhead behavior in one convenient place.

(feh, word filter plugin went a little crazy there, sorry for the unreadable comment earlier)

Zikes• 10 years ago

One thing that I just can't wrap my head around is the "no participation" brigading rules. The site literally exists to share content for others to discover and discuss, but if you share anything remotely meta you get accused of brigading and are banned/shadowbanned.

Karunamon3• 10 years ago

The site would be better off with an outright ban on meta content.

Aside from one or two outliers like DepthHub, most instances of someone on reddit linking to something on reddit are a variation on "Hey, look at this stupid thing this person did, let's all point and laugh at how stupid they are".

Houshalter3• 10 years ago

That wasn't against the rules for the longest time, and people abused the hell out of it. There were (and still are, sadly) subreddits devoted to digging up comments they disagreed with and downvoting them, shaming them, and sending them hate mail. But even on regular subreddits, there were problems with meta content causing drama and downvote brigades.

neutronicus• 10 years ago

That rule absolutely needs to exist. Harmony through balkanization.

You don't get it if you haven't experienced how tiresome it is to see long-running subcultural feuds shitting up whatever conversation you'd like to be having.

kjanssen• 10 years ago

It's still better than Facebook, which groups you together with the people you know in real life, whether you share common interests or not. At least on Reddit you can sequester yourself to topic-related subs and stay away from the defaults. I've learned many useful things from the smaller, more specific subs, which are somewhat shielded from the cynicism of the larger subs (although there are still asshats, it is the internet after all).

petke• 10 years ago

I imagine if hn grows any bigger it will become like reddit. It's the smalltown vs big city mentality.

throwupper247• 10 years ago

I was heavily downvoted for snarky and spiteful comments and ultimately hellbanned as I tryed to pack up my cynicism in elaborate arguments. The downvote privileged are pretty vigorous about protecting their privilege.

mtbcoder• 10 years ago

I don't think it's a trait of just large communities. Cynicism, negativity runs deep on just about any forum, comment sections and social media site connected to the Internet. The anonymity that the Web provides seems to reflect a widespread layer of angst (at least in western society) that's otherwise hidden/masked in the real world.

softwaredev__• 10 years ago

Some designers I know always bash Reddit for having an "ugly" design, but out of all the link aggregators out there, the links on Reddit "pop" out at me. I can comprehend the whole page by just glancing.

Other link aggregators like inbound.org or growth hackers are definitely prettier, but I have to focus and slow down to understand all the submissions.

oneeyedpigeon• 10 years ago

They need to work on their mobile web design. This [1] is not a pleasant experience in 2016.

[1] http://m.imgur.com/StVB2Uu

Mizza• 10 years ago

They actually did this last year, check out https://m.reddit.com/

pantalaimon• 10 years ago

I much prefer https://i.reddit.com/ though

x1024• 10 years ago

Yeah, but they used "React.js, because we're cool, please think we're cool". Which is different from just "react.js".

Just look at how incompetently the site was redesigned: https://github.com/reddit/reddit-mobile/issues/247

45 seconds load time...

There's also the tiny buttons(obviously not mobile-first, even if it is a mobile-only redesign).

And of course, the poster child of "we are doing complex JS stuff, but still think that JS is for kids, so we didn't bother learning how to actually do it". I'm talking about the infamous "We built a single-page-app, but it doesn't always work right, and the back button is kind of broken, and it sometimes treats scrolling over a thing as clicking on that thing".

donatj2• 10 years ago

I've more or less given up on Reddit due to the overzealous moderators. Many huge events are censored from /r/worldnews because the mods seemingly found them not interesting or too hot topic.

Many perfectly valid posts are removed by mods, there was recently linked a version of the homepage based on votes alone and something like a third of the posts were deleted. I would much much prefer something more organic where what the people declared good was shown, and that power largely stripped from the mods/admins.

Reddit in 2016

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