Aliens in the valley: The complete and chaotic history of Reddit (2014)

https://mashable.com/2014/12/03/history-of-reddit/

by polm23 • 7 years ago

48 49 7 years ago

Scapeghost7• 7 years ago

How and why did "news aggregators" become more popular than regular forums?

Probably because you could talk about any topic. There is a low barrier for entry (easy signup). Mods take a more hands off approach. And users kinda moderate each other with upvotes/downvotes.

ilugaslifk• 7 years ago

1. "Hot"-style ranking

2. Non-dogshit UI

samstave2• 7 years ago

The UI is really important. Ive been on Reddit now for 13 years. I still use the old.reddit and desktop mode. With nightshift and RES and hoverzoom.

It probides the best information density and consumability.

The new reddit ui sucks. Mucking with UI/UX can spell death gir a site, as it did with digg.

I will never ho to the new york times as an example of how to have a shitty UX.

CoolGuySteve• 7 years ago

I liked the UI of digg a lot better, it was cleaner and had thumbnails. I mainly went to reddit for programming stuff back in the day.

I think 2 codependent things ruined digg before the redesign though:

(1) Users started to game the rankings so that the content was less diverse.

(2) The admin's response to that gaming started to cripple the "newness" of posts such that the content on the front page was a lot older than on reddit.

These two factors are starting to ruin reddit too, only now instead of MrBabyMan or whoever doing it for fun/money, it seems like it's actual foreign interference or something just as nefarious.

theopsguy• 7 years ago

A better ranking system is the key

ryandrake2• 7 years ago

Waiting for one to show up. We need a better ranking system for content that doesn't confuse "popularity" with "quality". Every comment/article moderation system that has crowdsourced upvotes and downvotes suffers from this. It inevitably leads to groupthink, herd opinion, and shutdown culture.

agumonkey• 7 years ago

Should we rank ? Boards let people like each other implicitely. You may be boring but you'll end up being the boring guy in the group.

nefitty• 7 years ago

The article serves as a prompt for top-level comments. Back in the forum days it really depended on if someone had a question, etc. When I was single digits age my first social internet experiences were on a near-death/paranormal forum. After a couple of years every topic had been exhausted and questions and conversations reoccurred more and more. It got boring.

dsadsa41• 7 years ago

Because as always, the average user is boring and adds nothing to an online discussion.

Reddit allows the average user to participate, but their crap will not be visible to other users unless they willingly sort by new.

DoreenMichele• 7 years ago

Because you need a non threatening but highly engaging reason to talk to strangers all over the world. Very personal stuff is potentially highly engaging, but inherently problematic and threatening. Err too far on the side of "safe" and now people are bored and have no reason to say anything.

elorant2• 7 years ago

Because they provide broad context. Forums are usually specified on a certain interest. You come to HN you can discuss everything from computers to astrophysics and from sex to transport. You go to a computer oriented forum and try to discuss about fertility issues then 95% of the comments are irrelevant. In here everyone focuses on the things they know. Same goes for Reddit. It's a community of communities.

saagarjha4• 7 years ago

You go to a computer oriented forum and try to discuss about fertility issues then 95% of the comments are irrelevant.

To be clear, you’re including Hacker News in the “computer oriented forum”, right?

In here everyone focuses on the things they know.

Haha, nope

ACow_Adonis2• 7 years ago

A couple of pretty rational reasons.

Threaded-forums had a format, which I would argue is specifically designed around their fundamental premise: asynchronous small group single-threaded discussion(even if they have a tree-based format of categorisation to help get to the specific thread/topic).

That works out great for a small,tightly-knit community, and one where you recognise or want to recognise who it is you're actually talking to and are genuinely interested in a long-form discussion. But that doesn't scale well, for several reasons:

1) Humans can only keep track of a small number of identities.

2) Most people aren't genuinely interested in participating in discussion (that is to say, amongst the general cateogry of humans, and by discussion I mean a back and forth sharing of ideas/information), let alone "long-form" discussion over a significant period of time.

3) On forums you're consistently stuck having to follow the path of a given thread, whether the path it takes interests you or not or veers off on a tangent.

4) The typical format of the forum was weighted towards a classification-drilling-down-search to find specific topics on which one specifically interested, rather than a 'bubbling up' of statistical popularity as the foremost mechanism.

Now there are exceptions to all those and forums have differed over time, but bear with me and give me the benefit of the doubt.

Now take something like reddit or hacker news.

Aside from a very high-level categorisation up front (individual reddit communities/the fact that you're the kind of person who actually visits hacker news), everything is just kinda thrown in together and sorted by some measure of recency+popularity: maximising exposure to the lowest common denomintor conditional upon people already signalling they're interested. And the time-weighting is actually just a conditioned way of always giving the impression of freshness and encouraging the desire to check back regularly.

The account names/identities of who you're 'talking' to are now almost irrelevant, because no one can actually keep track of identities across such a large community: with the exception that proves the rule amongst large-scale communities: the celebrity. A handful of well-known accounts that it is partly assumed the general culture will be familiar with. But other than that, its largely effectively anonymous.

The upvote mechanism biases automatically towards popularity, maximising exposure to potential audience. And the tree-nature of the comment threads allows individuals to quickly go to the ones that interests them...but...

By being hostile to depth (it is a pain on both reddit and hn to read anything more than a cursory N steps deep), and allowing the ignoring of individual branches of non-interest, the format again optimises for short-term, shallow, popularity-driven behaviours: perfect for optimisation towards mass adoption.

And lastly, we need to be honest: 90% of people aren't here for discussion (again, the format itself is actually actively hostile to long-form in-depth long-time discussion). They're here to read new content (roughly 24 hour time-based decay of the front page), popular content (upvote-mechanisms, avoiding threads and trees that don't interest them), and when they do post its not because they want to engage with an actual person (they cannot follow that many usernames relative to the size of the community and the format cuts off being practical at a very shallow N deep message length), but like the comment section of the newspaper, its because they have a psychological need to state their opinion/express their worldview/show their knowledge.

Facebook and twitter also have these properties to varying degrees, some of them more explicitly targeting these properties or trying to tailor them to the individual user's demand/desires. Facebook tries to do this literally down to the person's personal detail level and explicitly maximising eyeball time, whereas the likes of reddit achieve this through the channels (users self-select into the interesting communities) and then the upvote mechanism drives exposure within-channels/across-site.

In short, the medium of news-aggregators is specifically suitable for high-scale popularity. Constant quick turnover to deliver returning eyeballs, allows users to filter easily to their needs, low barrier to entry, explicitly tied to popularity to maximize audience, explicitly pushing overly-specialised/alienating conversation off the front page by limiting deep/long-time period discussions and pushing those discussions off-site.

saagarjha4• 7 years ago

they cannot follow that many usernames relative to the size of the community

By a quick estimate I “know” a couple hundred people on here: their usernames, some trivia about where they work and what their interests are, and what their opinions have been on previous topics; this subset leans heavily towards regular commenters and people who I interact with. On random topics this usually means that maybe 10% of the comments I see are from this group, but on specialized topics (security, compilers, UI toolkits) more than half of the comments I see are from them.

dmix2• 7 years ago

Mods take a more hands off approach. And users kinda moderate each other with upvotes/downvotes.

This is what originally made Reddit awesome but the reversal of which has been slowly killing the fun. Mods have hijacked Reddit and turned all of the popular subreddits into their own pet newspapers which they are the chief editors/owner and only they themselves decide which content the users will enjoy.

You basically can't post any comment or post which doesn't fit with the popular opinions/ideology/etc of the sub without getting banned or rejected from most subreddits these days.

That was entirely unsurprising, especially these days, when it happened on the various shamelessly partisan political subreddits. But about two or three years ago I saw it start spreading into other areas like city/country subreddits or generic news subreddits. Now it's on all the major subreddits and based on the moderator newsletters and other admin posts the whole hyper-involved and super careful power-modding approach seems to be encouraged by the Reddit admins.

Scapeghost7• 7 years ago

This is what originally made Reddit awesome but the reversal of which has been slowly killing the fun. Mods have hijacked Reddit and turned all of the popular subreddits into their own pet newspapers which they are the chief editors/owner and only they themselves decide which content the users will enjoy.

That is true and I hate it.

A handful of people should never get to decide what millions can talk about.

But compared to oldschool forums, at least they don't butt into conversations too often and make things awkward.

It's definitely time for the Fourth Age (counting NNTP as the first), that combines the best things about oldschool forums with the best things about Reddit.

api• 7 years ago

Political reddits are the worst. I am not aware of a single one that isn't a pure circle jerk. The libertarian one used to be this weird melting pot where you even had the odd Marxist or whatever engaging in actual intelligent discussion with Rothbardians and Randians and anarchists, but then it got taken over by pajama nazis.

Some of the smaller topical subreddits about science, space, and niche areas of tech and engineering are good. The further from politics the better it is.

varrock• 7 years ago

A recent post I made to a music community got removed because it was on the "do not post" songs list. I couldn't believe what I was reading. A music community that doesn't allow the users to post specific songs.

buboard• 7 years ago

It s impossible to have a meaningful discussion with millions of subscribers. Seek smaller moderated subs.

paulpauper• 7 years ago

Reddit mods and admins have too much power. this has gotten worse since 2014. so many subs have unpublished user requirements to post that you need an old Reddit account with at least 100 comment karma and 1000 link karma to have full use of the site. new reddit accounts are fucking useless

doublerabbit• 7 years ago

not forgetting the paid trolls, bots.

It always felt to me that the audience of reddit is a lot less than whats bragged. And that they use bots to prop up the numbers.

Zak• 7 years ago

Having been a moderator before it was easy to impose such restrictions, I'm very glad for them. It was effectively impossible to ban anybody because account creation is so trivial.

And yes, it's important to be able to ban people. Even the subreddit I moderate that's dedicated to a niche hobby and populated almost entirely by nice, helpful people has had an incident or two of serious targeted harassment. Those that touch on more controversial issues or potentially involve money have a high volume of abusive behavior.

Aliens in the valley: The complete and chaotic history of Reddit (2014)

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