Can Reddit Grow Up?

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/28/technology/can-reddit-grow-up.html?_r=0

by digisth • 12 years ago

141 159 12 years ago

beefsack• 12 years ago

Perhaps a good way to monetise without alienating their core users would be to only advertise on the default subs. The vast majority of users are there, including the less technical users who might be more likely to actually consume the ads instead of ignoring or blocking them.

Another idea which I saw the Whirlpool forums do in Australia is to only advertise to those who aren't logged in.

If the sub-communities continue to thrive I can't see Reddit fade into obscurity any time soon.

mfenniak• 12 years ago

I would've thought the opposite. The default subs have large numbers of subscribers (of course), but I feel like they don't have strong communities, or specific themes, that would appeal to an advertiser. Like... /r/funny? /r/creepy? /r/DIY? /r/IAmA? What would compel someone to advertise on those?

On the other hand, there are a good number of non-default subs that have strong themes that I'm certain advertisers would want to tap into. For example, city-specific subs, or /r/bodyweightfitness (105,212 subscribers), or /r/bicycling (126,713 subscribers). These communities are so specific that advertising seems like it would be more effective in those areas than any other. Of course... it needs to be done in a way that isn't intrusive or damaging, and that's probably a bigger challenge in a smaller community.

lelandbatey2• 12 years ago

Another example: /r/MechanicalKeyboards with 38,000+ subscribers. That's a community just ripe for good advertising.

SnydenBitchy2• 12 years ago

Given the hair-raising misogyny, racism, and general terribleness for which reddit’s core users are known, you’d think the company might worry less about alienating them.

BESebastian• 12 years ago

http://killallmen.club/

alaskamiller• 12 years ago

I've got my 7 year badge but I don't go back anymore. I'm aged out. The front page doesn't interest me, the memes don't resonate with me, and the reposts don't keep me.

It'll keep happening, year after year as most people age out. But year after year more people join up, I'm sure there's a net again. Enough of a momentum that it will just take decades before the decay happens. Radical changes also risk a Digg implosion.

Tough nut to crack. They've been taking every trick from the old forum (SomethingAwful, General Mayhem, OffTopic, GaiaOnline) days other than literally charging for membership. Which is always the final cashing out death knell.

Common refrain in the past when positing how the community is turning and reducing value the default rah rah answer has always been to hit the edgy subreddits rather than the mainstream ones. That changes the value of the reddit product from a community to community software.

My small business projects rely on subreddits for customer service. Give me customization tools and I'll eagerly pay. After all, it's like vBulletin but better and people out of the wazoo for that.

oblio• 12 years ago

There are people who follow the front page? I don't think I could understand this. In my view the value of reddit, as you pointed out, is in the subreddits: somewhat peer reviewed focused forums with a much better interface than the PHP forums of old. And that's where the money is, IMO. Just as you said, offering enterprisey features for them could rake in a ton of cash.

yzzxy• 12 years ago

Charging for admission has always struck me, at least in the case of SA, as a tactic to guard the community against, essentially, trolls and children. Not as a moneymaking scheme.

plorkyeran• 12 years ago

SA has also charged for registration for the vast majority of its existence (it was created in 1999 and started charging in 2001), so if it was supposed to be a cash-out before the site died it was a very poorly timed one.

roghummal• 12 years ago

I've got my 7 year badge but I don't go back anymore. I'm aged out.

...

My small business projects rely on subreddits for customer service.

ef4• 12 years ago

... said the dying old media company.

minimaxir• 12 years ago

The article was written by Mike Issac, who was ATD/Recode until very recently.

SwellJoe• 12 years ago

I'd never heard of Re/code (yes, I noticed the embarrassing spelling) until just now. reddit serves billions of pageviews a month. I'm not saying this guy's got nothing interesting to say, but it does seem a little bit condescending to say, "Can reddit grow up?" When reddit has already grown to be one of the most popular sites in the world in a quite short time.

archildress• 12 years ago

Maybe I'm suffering from nostalgia, but the Reddit comments were once a place where some good discussions were shared. Now, they've evolved into contests of wit and cross reference to other posts. In the "frontpage" subreddits, the comments are usually void of meaningful discussion that I remember in the earlier days, although I acknowledge I may be romanticizing it a bit.

I think I lost interest in Reddit as a whole when I found HN. Curious if any others had the same experience.

amwelles• 12 years ago

I find that the smaller niche subreddits have that vibe. I subscribe to /r/dogtraining which has loads of valuable information and a ton of helpful, active users.

snowwrestler2• 12 years ago

For me the Reddit homepage is entertainment; a guilty pleasure like some people surf TMZ or whatever.

But there seem to be some strong communities in some subreddits. /r/personalfinance is one example off the top of my head. AskScience aggressively prunes bad comments and the net result is good discussion (sometimes surrounded by a ton of deleted comments).

sehr3• 12 years ago

I think I lost interest in Reddit as a whole when I found HN.

Once you start exploring the smaller focused subreddits, discussion gets much better. Although even then, the poop can creep in.

Prune your subscriptions brutally. Once a sub goes bad, it doesn't go back. Report spam & inflammatory comments etc.. The community is only as good as its members!

droopyEyelids• 12 years ago

As a long time Reddit user, I used to see this advice and sigh, because I thought it was bullshit.

However, I just wasn't doing it right. Reddit is now a new tool, and you have to learn how to use it. This took me a long time to adapt to.

Remember at one point you figured out that you could search youtube for anything and find someone trying to share how they did it? (how do I change the steering pump on a '92 pontiac sunbird) Reddit is like that now.. for any interest or hobby of yours, visit reddit.com/r/hobbyname. Woah. There is a group of people talking about growing kefir. Large caliber air guns. Building decks. Kiln making.

It's almost like the new Usenet, in some ways. The difference is we have a huge ball of greatest common denominator shit that you have to figure out how to sidestep.

Alphasite_• 12 years ago

It can very well go back, just let it's popularity die down again and you'll be back there eventually.

bane• 12 years ago

I'm at 6 years on reddit and I don't think I have a single one of the defaults still subscribed. In fact, I've probably added and removed enough subs to probably be on a complete version 3 or 4 of my subscription list. I have collections of subs that range from some common to some very niche interests and I can almost always find something high quality on any given day.

You're right, you have to be brutal about your subscription maintenance. Once you stop liking a sub, unsubscribe immediately. Can't find a sub you like? Make your own.

dbg31415• 12 years ago

The community is only as good as its members!

I think Reddit has taken that too far... You can have 500 points inside a reddit, but if the mods don't like what you have to say you'll log in and get a banned message.

I lost interest in Reddit the moment I wrote a long-winded suggestion for someone asking advice, and was banned for it. Went through the hassle of actually taking to the mod who banned me... came down to, "I just didn't like the way you said what you said, I didn't care that you had 30 upvotes..."

When it was community powered it was fun for me, now it's just a vessel for whatever mod is up that week.

baddox• 12 years ago

Subreddits are key. I basically think of reddit as two separate products: the "front page of the Internet" which consists of the default and extremely popular subs, and the "power user" version where you manually whitelist subs. I now mostly use the latter version of reddit, and in the last 6 years or so I think my reddit usage has actually increased proportional to HN.

Hasu• 12 years ago

Prune your subscriptions brutally.

I recently logged into Reddit for the first time in over half a year. My personalized frontpage was filled with garbage- in the 8 or 9 months since I'd stopped using the site, a bunch of small, awesome communities had grown past critical mass into Low Effort Content Zone.

Then I remembered why I stopped using the site- this is all it is. You just watch good communities burn when they get too big, or fizzle out and die when they're too small. One must prune one's subscriptions brutally, and then search for new communities that haven't descended into the Eternal September. But the effort is Sisyphean and I despair of it.

baq• 12 years ago

/r/science went back and it didn't take _that_ much. but yes, usually it's easier to branch off to a subreddit.

hypron2• 12 years ago

I recently discovered HN and since then I go here when I want to think and browse reddit when I want to kill time. I used to browse reddit to think and watch youtube to kill time, but now there's so much brain-numbing shit on r/all it's almost pointless. Sure, the smaller subreddits are better, but the overall focus of the site has changed to humor from discussion.

sehr3• 12 years ago

but the overall focus of the site has changed to humor from discussion.

I disagree. I'd even argue there really isn't a focus after all. It's a massive site with an even larger userbase.

For example, once you leave the top 10-20 subreddits, you encounter places like /r/askscience, /r/books, /r/hiphopheads, /r/dataisbeautiful etc.. All primarily discussion based subs with consistently in depth threads on esoteric topics, even by HN means.

That's not even mentioning the live updated threads on huge news stories, or all the sports subs with their game threads and on the second updates. It's a viable resource that's looked down upon because of the front page, and that blows.

dominostars• 12 years ago

Pun threads, memes, and complaining about post quality have been a part of reddit since I started frequenting over 5 years ago. Honestly, with the popularity of so many niche forums the general quality of the website has probably gone up. The problem many people face is after frequenting for awhile you begin to see trends: before opening a post you can predict what kinds of responses are going to be upvoted to the top. It feels like the website has gotten worse, but the only thing that's changed is your enjoyment of it.

madeofpalk• 12 years ago

The perpetual cycle of the 'oldfags' complaining about the 'newfags' will never stop.

Osmose• 12 years ago

In the same way I go to McDonalds for quick mediocre food, I hit the frontpage for quick mediocre posts. It's not good discussion, but I still enjoy it for what it is.

jayd162• 12 years ago

It doesn't help that its currently July and summer reddit has always been shit.

davidw• 12 years ago

Reddit was briefly a pretty cool place when a bunch of people discovered it from one of PG's essays. He'd post from time to time, as would a bunch of other people who were basically "the HN set". My guess is that if you looked at the early users of HN and of reddit, you'd find a significant number in common.

A lot of hackers have a libertarian bent, and that really started to come out in Reddit's political discussions, which started attracting more people interested mostly in politics and some of the various 'outrage' stories being posted about police abuse and things of that ilk.

IIRC, that was the trigger for PG to create HN, which is much more focused in its approach.

Yet another reason why I loathe politics on this site.

mikelat• 12 years ago

I enjoyed Digg and Reddit when they were interesting and had an intelligent set of comments/articles. In both cases they changed for the worse when the websites got more popular and attracted mainstream internet users, it's what drove me to HN. I wonder if it's just a matter of time before the same will happen here.

Semaphor• 12 years ago

Stay away from every sub that allows memes. Stay away from big subs that aren't heavily moderated (AskScience and AskHistorians are prime examples of big subs that aren't low quality).

And suddenly you have a relatively high quality Reddit :)

Houshalter• 12 years ago

This has changed a lot recently. The admins removed a few of the garbage subreddits from the default list, and added a bunch of smaller communities, which also have stronger moderation policies.

programminggeek• 12 years ago

No, it can't without everybody leaving, but they will all leave anyway. My theory is that social news is like the popular club in a major city or a fad in popular culture.

You can't predict which will be a hit or for how long. What you can predict is that eventually when enough people show up that it will lose that quality that made it so interesting to begin with, and the people that made it special will move on.

This happened with slashdot, digg, and maybe a bit to Hacker News too. I think Reddit's subreddits have made it more of a community of communities instead of one monolithic thing, with a monolithic front page. That certainly helps it have some legs.

However, I really don't see how any fad can sustain itself over the long term and anything that is built on social communities is at the whim of the movement of social opinion and interest. People change, get older, and what made something cool for one generation doesn't necessarily work for another generation.

There is no reason that Reddit should be popular as opposed to any other community site other than it's where people are congregating right now.

In 5 or 10 years, where will people congregate online?

r0s• 12 years ago

Also, the content can range anywhere from a quaint series of animal photos to an intense discussion about bitcoin to graphic pornography, all in a single thread. That could spook brands that do not want their ads displayed alongside not-safe-for-work material.

Reddit is too adult for ad networks. Can they grow up?

matt-attack• 12 years ago

It seems that all the critique in the article stem from the advertiser's perspective. "Oh no we can't make money off of the reddit users" the site must be rubbish and outdated. It needs to be more like facebook so that we companies can connect with users".

mkal_tsr3• 12 years ago

Yup, it smells to much like, "oh, woe are we advertisers for not being able to exploit users for more money, Reddit needs to change, hmmpf"

firemancoder• 12 years ago

Why does it need to? Is it self sustaining? Maybe that's all it needs to be.

When you try hard to commercialize and squeeze profits, things change and you lose audience. This is exactly what it is limiting the lifespan of Facebook.

spaldingwell• 12 years ago

"This is exactly what it is limiting the lifespan of Facebook"

Facebook has over a billion users and has been around for ten years. No other social network can claim both of those things. Don't know if it qualifies as an example of a "limited lifespan"

goatman• 12 years ago

I think he isn't saying it has had a limited life span. He is saying that it's future lifespan is being limited. Basically, he thinks it has potential to go on much longer than it will.

shirro• 12 years ago

I don't understand the people who don't like Reddit based on the front page. FFS, Reddit is a platform and the action is in the subreddits. There are some very high quality subreddits with good mods which work as well or better than HN.

noblethrasher• 12 years ago

Case in point: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bs0rc/ama_fe...

codemaster30003• 12 years ago

Holy text walls batman :-). Great read though, great writers in that thread and definitely learned a fair share about feudalism (though probably won't remember it for long...)

egypturnash• 12 years ago

Man I love AskHistorians. I am proud to have provided a few top-voted answers there on the subject of animation history.

evan_• 12 years ago

OK, but there's basically no way to know what those are.

andrewflnr2• 12 years ago

Well, no. It makes more sense to think of a subreddit as a separate site that happens to share hosting with a bunch of other sites. Then it's obvious that you just have to search, follow the links, and try them out to see if they're any good.

tomjen36• 12 years ago

There is almost guaranteed to be a reddit for your interest and it is almost certainly located at reddit.com/r/your_interest.

benluke• 12 years ago

I feel like the idea of "default" subreddits that everyone is subscribed already when they create an account is part of this problem. If they instead polled new users on their interests/hobbies and generated a list of related subs based on your choices it would be a huge improvement, and could be used to gather data for advertisement.

nemothekid2• 12 years ago

According to [1] Reddit sees 112M uniques/month but only has 2M registered users. A large fraction of reddit only sees and lurks on default subs, which reddit knows nothing about.

[1]http://www.kunocreative.com/blog/bid/89711/Leveraging-Reddit...

hrktb• 12 years ago

As every I think it depends on your point of view. When I joined reddit, half of the default subreddits where so bad that it pushed me to create an account for the sole purpose of removing them from my front page.

Also, It feels like it's giving a place the people who are in for lulz, circle jerk and "bro" things. In the end everyone finds something (except advertisers apparently), and I think it's great.

k__• 12 years ago

I don't like Reddit, because it always felt like a family friendly-/light- version of 4chan.

skizm4• 12 years ago

Ideas for reddit monetization:

- Charge $10 a year to keep a subreddit name registered. 500k subreddits, say one half to two thirds pony up, thats $2.5 - 3.3 mil/year.

- There is a "trending subreddit" section. Implement a bidding system for a daily "featured subreddit" section similar to this (implement a N day cooldown so larger subs can't buy everyday)

- Implement a rev-share system with sub-reddit owners. Paying for a subreddit name could mean no ads, however if the owner wants, they can turn on ads and split the commission with reddit.

- Advertise (a little heavier than now) to only non-signed in users.

Basically I'm thinking you try and get the subreddit owners to help foot the bill since they are generally the ones getting the most value from the community engine that is reddit.

codemaster30003• 12 years ago

This is a terrible, terrible idea. The mods of each subreddit are what keep the subreddit alive, and subreddits are the building blocks of Reddit. There are mods who put tons and tons of time maintaining the quality of their sub(s), and they are volunteers and don't get paid for any of their work. Asking them to "pony up" their own money would, with no doubt in my mind, drive them away and completely destroy Reddit. You are grossly over-estimating the number of mods who would "help foot the bill," and completely forgetting about how much hatred Reddit would get form the community if this was implemented.

If Reddit considered this strategy for monetization, they'd be much better off shooting off their foot, then shooting their other foot.

zvrba• 12 years ago

Asking them to "pony up" their own money would, with no doubt in my mind, drive them away and completely destroy Reddit.

He wrote nowhere that mods should pay. I as a user would certainly pay $10/yr to keep subreddits I care most about going on.

beefhash• 12 years ago

The mods of each subreddit are also what kill it. There are people who squash subreddit names just for the lulz[1]. Furthermore, moderator hierarchy is solely based on the date of when they accepted the moderator invitation, which cannot be changed it any way -- if you want to change the hierarchy, someone at the top needs to remove all moderators and re-invite them in the exact order, making sure not to invite anyone before the previous invitation has been accepted, since the timestamp of when you accepted the invitation, not the timestamp of when you were invited, makes the hierarchy.

That system on its own is atrocious, but reddit admins also will leave subreddits suffering from moderator abuse to rot, suggesting to split the userbase by having those not happy with the status quo create a new subreddit. While this is common practice on IRC networks, too, they have more differentiated systems.

Rizon provides a channel takeover policy, which is based on people with minimal access actively requesting foundership over a channel[2], implying that they do care. reddit has /r/redditrequest, but it has intransparent times for how long a reddit request is allowed to stay unanswered, and you can't "skip" moderators higher in the moderation list[3], unlike Rizon's takeover policy, where you can do so if nobody else claims the channel during the three-day grace period. Undernet has a very strict timeout on channel managers (or founders), 21+ days of inactivity allows for a vote by the highest-ranking ops for a new manager[4].

reddit is thus intentionally staying in the past, refusing to deal with a long-standing issue, for which proposals have been made numerous times.

Now, the nice thing about paying money for a subreddit name (which, given the current size of reddit, cannot possibly hold worth comparable to a good domain name) is that it requires a commitment. At least someone on the moderation staff will have to actually shell out money, a limited resource. Instead of solving the moderation/subreddit squashing issue through the way of administrator intervention/software development, which has repeatedly been ignored (search for "mod" on /r/ideasfortheadmins for a bit), it could be solved through requiring active commitment.

Similarly, IRC networks are all run by volunteers who don't get paid for their work, and there are people paying money to keep servers running. While this completely breaks the subreddit <-> IRC channel analogy I've been making above, it still needs to be said. It's not like doing things for free implies that you get things for free.

As for reddit getting backlash over changes? Just check the last two /r/changelog posts, full of angry comments[5]. I don't think they're going to care, so what's there to stop them from charging money for subreddit names?

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/circlebroke/comments/1wvx09/subreddi...

[2] http://forum.rizon.net/showthread.php?3850-Channel-Takeover-...

[3] http://www.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/wiki/faq

[4] https://cservice.undernet.org/docs/guidelines.html

[5] http://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/2a32sq/experiment... and http://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/27f3a3/reddit_cha...

skizm4• 12 years ago

Mods pay nothing. Just one owner pays a fee to keep the subreddit alive. Similar to buying a domain name.

Widdershin2• 12 years ago

Could you walk me through your thinking around this?

Basically I'm thinking you try and get the subreddit owners to help foot the bill since they are generally the ones getting the most value from the community engine that is reddit.

From my own perspective, as a moderator of a subreddit of 40,000 subscribers, the community get the most value from the moderators. We work for nothing because we want to help the community. If there is a good, ethical way to profit off of this I am missing, please let me know.

skizm4• 12 years ago

Mods would pay nothing. One person who owns the "domain" (sub-reddit) pays 10 dollars per year. And it was just some food for thought. I'm not advocating it, but reddit does need a better influx of cash then the gilding system I think.

adventured• 12 years ago

50% to 66%? You never see such massive conversion rates in anything on the web. It would be closer to 3% to 5%. That leaves $250,000 per year. Most of those 500,000 subreddits are not overly active. 450,000 of those are so unused they're not even candidates for subscriptions.

In the process, that tiny $250k you yield, would destroy Reddit by shutting down at least 95% of all subreddits.

skizm4• 12 years ago

3 - 5% is all you need to keep half the subreddits alive. If 3 - 5% of the users are willing to pay then about half the subreddits will stay alive since, if the owner is unwilling to pay, chances are some user of that subreddit is willing to pay.

ignostic• 12 years ago

Reddit wants to be a big company using a site where big companies are the enemy. They could do it, but they need to overhaul the ad system.

Having purchased more than a few ads, I can tell you that their platform needs serious help. They're already a step behind because users don't give location or age. To an advertiser who knows the customer, this results in blanketing people you know aren't interested.

The real problem is that targeting ads to interested audiences results in very few interactions. When you target to a sub, you have a good chance of showing up on that sub's home page - but no one really goes to a sub home. You need to get people on their front pages. The front page is hyper-competitive: you are bidding against people who are willing to serve ads to ANYONE (ahem, Hipmunk). I've still had some success, but it varies a lot depending on when people buy ads. Their planning tool cannot be relied upon.

If reddit were a grown-up advertising company, they'd run it on a cost-per-click bidding basis for link/comment/share/save interactions. Votes would be free to the advertiser, but they'd use recent upvotes and downvotes as a quality score to push ads that people hate off the site and encourage ads people don't mind by giving them a competitive edge. They'd also create more sophisticated targeting options, e.g. people who subscribe to /r/A AND /r/B. Or people who subscribe to /r/A AND either /r/C OR /r/D.

calbear81• 12 years ago

I think they know their ad system sucked so I read somewhere that http://adzerk.com/ is now handling almost all of their ads after starting with their display ads.

Vik1ng• 12 years ago

    but no one really goes to a sub home.

But don't you also target the ads at comments sections of that sub?

ColinCera2• 12 years ago

> When you target to a sub, you have a good chance of showing up on that sub's home page - but no one really goes to a sub home. You need to get people on their front pages.

Not arguing with your larger points, but this is completely untrue for me — I only use Reddit via subreddit home pages, i.e., I never go to the "front page". I don't even know what a "front page" is. Is that where you just go to http://reddit.com/? I must have visited that once, way back when I first started using Reddit, but since then, never.

I have a dozen or so subreddits I'm interested in and when I will occasionally get a whim to check up on one of them, I navigate directly to the subreddit (autocomplete in the browser makes this easier). I also subscribe to RSS feeds for my subreddits.

Apparently I'm using Reddit in an unusual way.

snowwrestler2• 12 years ago

If you subscribe to the subreddits you like, and unsubscribe from the ones you don't like, then your logged-in homepage (http://www.reddit.com) will only show posts from the subreddits you like.

Basically it will be like looking at your subreddit RSS feeds, but sorted by votes in addition to recency.

steven2012• 12 years ago

Reddit has the best content for any message style forum I've ever come across. The combination of user voting plus moderation works incredibly. And it's not just a few subreddits, it's a huge swath of them. They've attracted the best community of users that I've ever seen and that positive feedback loop of easy-to-use UI plus great username creates a fantastic site.

The top comment is usually useful no matter what the topic is, and I usually never leave disappointed when I read a thread I'm curious about.

It would be a shame if they ruined the site a la digg by trying to monetize too aggressively.

tmuir• 12 years ago

I've been developing a theory of Reddit in my mind for about the last year. It's mostly grown out of the ubiquity and monoculture of AdviceAnimals/memes, but I think it applies to most of the frontpage reddits.

Redditors have basically developed and distributed a set of rules for what they find funny/cool/interesting, and endlessly repeat these same jokes/memes. If you follow the frontpage for any reasonable amount of time, you see the same few ideas over and over. Just about everything is somehow referential to a previous post. It almost feels Pavlovian after a while. Someone will post a picture with an attractive female in it. Someone else will comment with a Gif of a bunch of hotdogs being thrown in her face. Someone else will point out that hidden amongst the hotdogs is a finger. Someone else will point out that every time an attractive girl is posted, all of these things occur. This happens over and over, countless times every day. To call it derivative would be generous, because it's a carbon copy.

Advice Animals (Image Macros with text) seemed to take this to its extreme. The same 10 images are posted thousands of times per day, with a sentence about how some event in the posters life relates to the meme. If you take away the meme, and simply tell the story by itself, its dull and boring. Attach it to the same picture you've been seeing for the last year and half, and it's got 1000 upvotes.

Most of the material on the frontpage of reddit is not interesting on it's own merits. It's only interesting in the context of the thoroughly homogeneous userbase that has been conditioned to respond to the same 15 memes.

It seems to me like an advertiser's dream demographic. A clearly delineated set of rules to engage millions of potential customers. Flip this switch, turn that knob, show this meme, reference The Big Lebowski, and Bob's your uncle.

matkam• 12 years ago

The front page of reddit isn't really where the community shines. It represents the greatest common denominator of internet culture, which is pretty much what you described, fueled by kids. A while ago, reddit split off into sub-reddits, each with their own culture and moderators who do their best to keep up quality of posts. For example: reddit.com/r/TrueReddit

derefr• 12 years ago

If you take away the meme, and simply tell the story by itself, its dull and boring. Attach it to the same picture you've been seeing for the last year and half, and it's got 1000 up votes.

IANA Literary Anthropologist, but: when you tell a story from your life by itself, you're presumably telling it about you. People don't care about you: they've never met you, and after they read your words they'll probably never hear from you again. They don't have any previous impressions of you to pattern match their expectations against, so nothing you say can make them go "oh, yeah, that's just like her" or "ha, I knew it" or "oh god, it's going to happen to him again, isn't it?"

In the context of an image macro, on the other hand, your story is paraphrased into a sort of shared mythology: there's this one platonic Awkward Penguin/Insanity Wolf/Scumbag Steve, doing all of these things, and acting as a larger-than-life moral symbol of the effects of doing these things in the process. People know what to expect of the character, and so people can seek out these stories when they want something with that "feeling" to it.

Presuming you were living in Ancient Greece, you'd see these same people taking various minor heroic moments from their day-to-day lives, exaggerating a bit, and turning them into stories about Hercules.

(You can do this for a living, too, creating characters from whole cloth who are larger-than-life molds to match up to various day-to-day stories. The result is called a sitcom.)

wisty2• 12 years ago

People genuinely care about stories. A story about a wacky inventor is better than a story about their invention (see everything by Malcom Gladwell). Maybe a meme is better, since you already know the main character.

Or maybe there's a trade-off - a long story needs a new main character, but a short joke works best with a stock character. Compare War and Peace to "little Johnny" jokes.

zanny2• 12 years ago

It is several million differing opinions distilled into one aggregation. It will, of course, be the lowest denominator of commonality. And the result of that is a firm entrenchment in belief, so you get that homogeneity. It is a positive feedback loop, but it is anything but niche at this point.

sb23• 12 years ago

I know the comment i'm about to make actually follows the rule you just outlined - but it's really about which subreddits you're subscribed to. The general advice I give when introducing someone to the site is to ditch most of the default subreddits and pick ones that relate to things they're already interested in. Small subreddits have really great communities and are still generating useful and interesting conversations.

tomjen36• 12 years ago

If your theory of reddit is based on the front page reddits, then you have no theory of reddit.

FatalLogic• 12 years ago

On the contrary, tmuir's theory of reddit is a fair description of most subreddits (maybe all subreddits) which become popular without having very strict and dedicated moderation.

It does not describe smaller niche subreddits, though, that's true. They still have their own unique personalities.

I think it has a fair claim to be called theory of reddit, because it seems like any subreddit can go downhill in that way if it becomes popular. They converge on a point of mediocrity.

v64• 12 years ago

You should see what they think in the theory of Reddit subreddit [1]. This is the sort of stuff they talk about and focus on.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/theoryofreddit

scoofy4• 12 years ago

I honestly think the problem isn't reddit. It's the advertisers' model that has the problem. I realize that this is nonsensical, reddit needs the cash, but hear me out.

I've been a redditor for nearly 5 years. I'm a moderator on many subs and over time i've even been given the privilege of becoming a moderater on a subreddit with over 100k users. I've been given random reddit gold on 3 occasions (a strange revenue system for letting users know you care by paying reddit to give them some minor perks for about $5), so i think i understand the site fairly accurately.

When you move away from the large subreddits, into the niche, you realize that much of reddit is actual adults, with brains, and who aren't too busy to see news, and also have a discussion about it. I've always seen this as a problem for advertisers.

Advertisers want it one way. They want to send a message, and they want that to be the only thing said.

Take this amazing ad from thai life insurance: http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/22jybg/what_does_kin...

The top comment, while jokingly so, brings up the point that this is a commercial... it's not real... it's trying to make you think a certain way on purpose. It's manipulative. Reddit breaks the 4th wall. It calls bullshit, and much of the time, it's right.

Reddit's problem is that when an ad is truly impressive, a great deal, etc., the relevant firm doesn't need to pay reddit to get attention. The users will do that for them. See dollar shave club: http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/qk7xr/dollarshaveclu...

I really don't think there is much of a solution for reddit, but if i were in charge, the way i would generate revenue would be to hold the successful ads hostage. Shadow ban advertisers accounts if they don't play ball. Literally remove viral commercials, but do it quietly. It's an abuse of the system and the users know that, and i think users like me would understand. Make them pay a fee to even attempt to "go viral."

That's my 2 cents.

andrewflnr2• 12 years ago

But that leads directly to a war of countermeasures as advertisers try to not get their content classified as advertisement. It's a rather blurry line, and regular users will get caught up in a system like that.

scoofy4• 12 years ago

It's a fair point, but if the prices were reasonable, i think the firms would see it as a cost of doing business.

Remember this is revenue from firms attempting to create content, not paying for ad space. You'd have a shallower river of income, but a much wider one.

I'm not saying it would definitely work, but i think it'd certainly be something worth paying for. Especially when you're watching your ad successfully drive lots of users to your product... it's working! And then suddenly reddit calls your firm up and says:

"Hey, nice successful ad you have there blowing up on our service. It'd be a shame if anything were to happen to it..."

As for the users, if you shadow ban the content, more often then not they wouldn't even know. If they find out, you could simply explain that the relevant firm is abusing the service. Most would even help... a small button (is this an ad?). I'd click it, because i would know clicking it helps reddit. Remember, redditors are adults, with brains (they watch community, not two and a half men). There may be some push back, but i know i'd certainly understand, because big firms cheating the system is bullshit, especially if price discrimination is put in place to protect small firms. Dollar Shave Club pays pennies, Gillette pays hundreds.

And, hey, i really do love the site. If Alexis or Steve are ever in need of a beer in SF, i'd be happy to buy it.

Canada• 12 years ago

It would be great if advertisers tried to not get their content classified as advertisement.

If all advertising were of the subliminal/product placement variety, I might stop trying to block all of it.

jimmaswell• 12 years ago

adults, with brains, and who aren't too busy to see news

Do you mean new submissions, or the media news? If it's the media news, are you trying to say that the "smart" thing to do is to follow the news?

scoofy4• 12 years ago

I mean content.

Artemis2• 12 years ago

Clearly, there is a lot of monetization possible if reddit wants to tamper with the community and its organic post ranking. For instance, there is a subreddit dedicated to uncovering disguised ads on reddit: /r/HailCorporate [1]. The quantity of masked PR and the creativity of some ads is incredible.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate

jarcane• 12 years ago

There are certainly individual subreddits who've attempted such things, but what I've seen from that is that the line gets blurrier than I think people realize, and small content creators get stomped on as a result.

The Frogman is a good example here. He was banned from several of the bigggest subreddits for posting his own material, under the excuse that it was advertising/self-promotion because he technically makes money from his blog (never mind that he barely makes any and literally lives in his parent's basement). Meanwhile, regular redditors reposted his stuff routinely, often without even giving credit or reference. At one point, in retribution, moderators even started banning those after he started complaining about the weird double standard.

I think once you start manipulating what's allowed to appear, it creates an ugly and incestuous effect that will do more harm to reddit than help in terms of the community that actually keeps people coming there.

reddit already has a toxic reputation as the lesser evil to 4chan's greater evil in some parts of the internet, thanks in no small part to it giving voice repeatedly to some really ugly sides of human behavior, does it really need to add "arbitrary and incestuous gatekeepers" to that reputation too?

scoofy4• 12 years ago

I think if you keep it limited to, say, publicly traded firms, or some standard, then you wouldn't have a significant issue with this.

wamatt• 12 years ago

OP makes a compelling argument regarding the tensions between advertisers selling hype, and your average redditor's desire to tell it straight (anti-hype)

Here's an idea: there are some companies/services that are genuinely awesome and yet not marketed well. Now one may say they hardly need advertising because reddit promotes them naturally.

However, not all aforementioned companies explode and make it huge on reddit. So, what if you had a system whereby one incentivizes honest disclosure, whilst downplaying overselling?

In other words, a genuinely awesome small startup/service might submit itself and gain exposure (with full disclosure.) Upon a success, they would subsequently make a proportional payment for advertising to reddit, to help sustain the ecosystem.

It has parallels with a freemium model whereby some users (in this case successfully advertised companies) sustain the the others (non-paying users and companies).

underrated2• 12 years ago

the way i would generate revenue would be to hold the successful ads hostage. Shadow ban advertisers accounts if they don't play ball. Literally remove viral commercials, but do it quietly.

Playing whack-a-mole with YouTube/imgur/etc. rehosts of a constantly growing list of content is a losing proposition.

wdr1• 12 years ago

Advertisers want it one way. They want to send a message, and they want that to be the only thing said.

I believe this is a byproduct of advertising evolving in a largely a one-way, broadcast mediums (e.g., TV, magazines).

Clever brands are learning the importance of having an online identify & bi-directional communication. It's a big change, but the brands that get their first are going to find a big advantage.

AndrewKemendo3• 12 years ago

As a long time reddit user my question is: is there something specific pushing for further monetization? I thought the whole purpose of spinning off from conde nast was to get away from the need to monetize.

Why not just match development/maintenance with use? Reddit is well past it's exponential growth phase and is big enough to sustain the community with basically no growth in userbase - so unless I am missing something, this seems like a pure greed play.

mkal_tsr3• 12 years ago

is there something specific pushing for further monetization?

It's mentioned in the article and known elsewhere, Reddit is not profitable and has not been profitable to date. Not bleeding out all of your money seems like a specific push for further monetization.

AndrewKemendo3• 12 years ago

Profitable is different than sustainable. So why can't it be sustained without being "profitable?"

lazyjones• 12 years ago

Reddit seems to be doing well. I can tell, because I tried to advertise twice in the past 5 years or so and being from Europe, I had no way to pay for ads (US and UK customers only!). So they have still so much unrealized revenue potential that I wouldn't worry.

Goronmon• 12 years ago

I'm not sure I'm as big of a fan of advertising firms as the author, and some quotes stood out.

“People on Reddit want to be anonymous, and at some point these brands want to have a real relationship with their customers"

I find it hard to take an article seriously when it includes quotes like this in a non-critical context. Advertisement is about bullshit, not about "relationships with customers". The job of advertisers is to trick you into think you need whatever they are being paid to sell. They and the companies they work only care about their customers in regards to how much money they can wring out of them.

And the parallel is that advertisers don't give a shit about Reddit as well. They are just looking for a way to maximize their ability to wring every cent out of Reddit's userbase regardless of whether the advertising completely destroyed the community.

enraged_camel• 12 years ago

>I find it hard to take an article seriously when it includes quotes like this in a non-critical context. Advertisement is about bullshit, not about "relationships with customers".

The problem is that advertisers think of their job as "relationships with customers." It's the lie they willingly swallow in order to be able to continue looking at themselves in the mirror. I mean, let's face it, no advertiser thinks, "sweet, I suckered ten thousand people to click my ad!" Rather, they think, "I built relationships with ten thousand customers today!"

nemothekid2• 12 years ago

I think that is a rather cynical view of advertisers. The type of advertisers that think of their jobs as "relationships with customers." are not the ones currently advertising online (and by online, I mean anywhere other than Google Search).

They type of advertisers that would buy ad-space on a site like Reddit today are definitely thinking "sweet, I suckered ten thousand people to click my ad!" even if not in that language, but they are the ones pouring over CTRs and impressions.

The advertisers who actually care about "relationships with customers" are life style brands like, Nike, Coke, Apple, Budweiser, Louis Vuitton, and others, who don't actually care if you click through (what does a click mean to Budweiser? Its not like the market of people who want a bud light via. online is particularly large). They are more concerned with the "relationships with customers" and take a great deal of care on how the product received and how the message is delivered.

The goal of these advertisers is to deliver a message, with the confidence that their message won't be warped by content around it. You just can't get that with Reddit. Therefore you are left with these other "unsavory" type of advertisers whose only goal is to convert and will do that until they can wring out every cent out of Reddit's user base.

jevgeni2• 12 years ago

This comment is totally unbiased and objective, of course.

icebraining• 12 years ago

It's an opinion. There's no such thing as an "objective" opinion.

tomjen36• 12 years ago

Not all ads are for products you don't objectively need. You do likely need life insurance.

I would want to be informed if/when somebody made a cheap razor that actually works for me. I would want to know if somebody made a better vaccum robot, or made it cheaper. I don't objectively need a new smart phone, but I would want to know about it so that I could anticipate what my users would want to get.

babarock• 12 years ago

Advertisers want you to think of their work as information. It'd be more accurate to describe it as unsolicited information using gross exaggerations to build up a product and appealing to emotions not reason.

I too care about cheap razors, vacuum robots or newer smartphones. But I find it intrusive when a program I'm watching is interrupted with a fast paced 30 seconds clip of sexy naked people telling me to go buy their new product right now.

If I want information, a subscription model to some sort of info periodical is almost always available. But this is much closer to what we consider "journalism" than "advertisement". (I realize the limit between the 2 is sometimes difficult to define).

vanderZwan2• 12 years ago

I would want to be informed if/when somebody made a cheap razor that actually works for me.

Arguably, the whole reason the big name companies get away with 5-blade nonsense is marketing. Meanwhile, on Reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/wicked_edge

(I'm speaking as someone who has switched to a double-edge razor and couldn't be happier)

As is discussed elsewhere in this thread, the whole concept of specialist sub-reddits makes it easy for enthusiasts to share information on their own. Mods with an iron fist, combined with comments and upvotes can be quite a decent makeshift version of democratic peer review among hobbyists. Of course, this has lots of issues of its own, but the point is that it subverts (the in my opinion ethically icky) aspects of marketing - the only thing you can really do against that is either genuinely make a good product, or be evil and subvert a community from the inside somehow.

jbb555• 12 years ago

" You do likely need life insurance." why on earth would i need life insurance?

industriousthou2• 12 years ago

I think from advertisers' point of view, a "real relationship" is one that involves a financial exchange.

TeMPOraL2• 12 years ago

If only advertisers were honest partners who don't try to trick you into buying subpar products (i.e. crap) you don't want... What they call "real relationship" should be called "abusive relationship".

underrated2• 12 years ago

Relationship is a euphemism for demographic data, and it's a fact that this is the direction that most online advertising is going. Advertisers want access to as many axes of demographic data as possible, and to target narrowly across them. What the article author doesn't realize is that the subreddit system already does that, without giving up any demographic data. You can target any interest, no matter how narrow.

gregimba• 12 years ago

The fact you have to ask tells me no.

industriousthou2• 12 years ago

Why not have advertisers partner directly with mods and allow some sort of revenue sharing?

The concern seems to be offensive/weird user created content might be displayed near an advertisement. Well, the mods have control over the content.

Mods could chose whether or not to enable advertising and could chose whether to curate content to maximize click-throughs or not.

Ads could be programmatically targeted towards subreddits and individual comment threads rather than users.

cJ0th• 12 years ago

The article helps little in answering this question when they interview the wrong experts.

The first thing you should do when giving advice is acknowledging reality and then work with that. That is, you should accept reddit for what it is. But all those "experts" giving their opinion in the nyt article are mere bullshit-bingo players pushing reddit to become like every other company:

“People on Reddit want to be anonymous, and at some point these brands want to have a real relationship with their customers,” "“Can Reddit deliver that over time?”
“Reddit is a 1998 product, trying to have a 1998 business model,”

I think reddit should come up with a monetizing strategy that capitalizes on the trust users have in it (without abusing it) They would have a massively sustainable competitive advantage. Is there any other web company of that size that you would trust more? Could any one copy this trust within a short amount of time? It's rather tragic that in our society this has so little value that you have to think really hard to come up with a monetizing strategy.

Also, I think the idea of a "just self-sustaining" reddit, as some people here have pointed out, is rather interesting. Why does it need to grow? Isn't it enough that it is usefull to their users and poses a stepping stone for entrepreneurs like Mr. Ohanian but also external guys like, for instance, those from imgur or Mr ShittyWaterColour?

baby• 12 years ago

I'll just c/p what I wrote in the thread where the reporter asked us questions (http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/2bjsxi/how_c...)

Reddit is becoming bigger and bigger. Which is somehow bad as a quality point of view (look at HackerNews, and people there are already complaining that it got too big like reddit).

Reddit did a very smart thing to counter that: subreddits. So now you can still dislike reddit as a whole but find what you want in a subreddit.

Now I think that if reddit has a way to monetize its website, somewhere, it is through subreddits. You could put a free2play kind of system. Customize your subreddit but pay to unlock features. Create subreddits where you have to pay to get in (it already kind of exists with the lounge).

Advertisement. Reddit is really, extremely, reluctant to advertise on reddit. It's nice from a user point of view. But from an advertiser point of view, why? Reddit is the perfect place for ads. Users click and click and click and they read text before clicking. Google ads would make them profitable in a few days. It's important to think about it.

EDIT: I'll add that the subscription system makes and the subreddits make it an excellent way to know someone's tastes. It's even better than facebook imo.

JetSpiegel• 12 years ago

They don't need explicit advertising because they already perfected the product placement.

Compared to Reddit, that Power Glove film is a masterpiec

ASneakyFox2• 12 years ago

I don't think reddit can be profitable. The moment it is the userbase will move on to the next thing. A new site can spring up over night. A new reddit could be coded in weeks. its all a matter of people choosing to congregate there. This is an ongoing process that is constantly happening. Message boards are popular, and they're cheap.

ColinCera2• 12 years ago

> A new reddit could be coded in weeks.

Well, it wouldn't take that long, given that the entire Reddit code base is open source: https://github.com/reddit

Really, anybody can literally clone Reddit anytime they want to.

But not only is it likely impossible for a competitor to attract a significant portion of the Reddit user base, what would a competitor do assuming they did manage it? All a competitor would have done is bought themselves a money-losing operation. Unless you're a charitable billionaire or a well-funded non-profit organization, why would anyone want to do that?

ASneakyFox2• 12 years ago

I don't think it's do much a company could the over reddits marketshare. Its that there's comment sections and forums every where. If/when reddit dies there will be increased traffic to other forms of blogging/commenting/posting. And eventually a new website will fizzle to the top just out of chance (in the same way reddit did).

read2• 12 years ago

Is this a submarine?

Why is a site struggling with journalism (NY Times), and a subscription model, and a paywall (that will become permanent in 3 months), and possibly an advertising problem, advocating that another site (Reddit), with more users, without a subscription model, no paywall, and possibly no advertising problem, is about to change?

SnydenBitchy2• 12 years ago

What? Why is a person struggling to grasp the difference between The New York Times and The New Yorker trying to make some point about… something?

read2• 12 years ago

Whoops, my mistake. Sorry.

Why did I make this mistake? Did I subconsciously associate the initials NY with evil intentions? It wouldn't be surprising if The New York Times become a casualty of the The New Yorker's policy by accidental association.

return0• 12 years ago

Can reddit become monetizable? Some of the best online forums of the sort are not-for-profit. It's odd that there isn't yet a donation-supported open alternative of reddit, a-la wikipedia.

Grue3• 12 years ago

Great, a paywall. Looks like NYTimes has grown up and us plebeians are not allowed to read it anymore.

VLM• 12 years ago

Why do subreddits have to have only one business model, that being free? Why is the only way to get corporate revenue ugly ads that no one wants to see? Why does a company like Republic Wireless maintain their own lame forum system that boils down to a heavily brain damaged psuedo-clone of Reddit? Why, for a fee paid by RW to /r/, can't /r/republicwireless exist with all of the mods on that subreddit being RW employees, or whoever RW employees select? I'd like that for customer support and product announcements and it would let RW focus on their core competency which is being in the MVNO business not the "running an internet web forum" business.

There is a side issue, that I don't think a company that wants to be successful should take business advice from either a legacy newspaper in general, or specifically the NYT, which makes the whole thing comical. It would be like a telegram company demanding that an ISP make core business changes, because they're the experts, or at least they were back in 1890, LOL.

jasonkostempski• 12 years ago

I've had this idea about how ads should work in situations like this floating around in my head for a while. I know nothing about advertising or monetizing websites and likely this idea has already been presented and shot down but I'd like to see a conversation about it either way. Company X pays Reddit a fixed fee to display a mutually approved, static image, hosted by Reddit servers, linked to a mutually approved web page, on the specified page(s), for a specific amount of time. No generic ad network placeholder, no impression count, no JavaScript, no user tracking, no analytics. Reddit is simply trusted to present the image/link as agreed and Company X is trusted to keep the agreed upon web page at the URL, no switcheroos after the agreement is effective. Maybe the community would know about this arrangement and respect it by not blocking the easily identifiable (no cleaver markup disguises from Reddit) ad elements on the page. I'm thinking the link URL needs to be static, Reddit wouldn't dynamically add anything to it. If the trust is broken by any party the deal is off. Thoughts?

mark_l_watson• 12 years ago

As a long time user of Reddit, I have to say: put more ads on the right hand side margin! I don't care, make some money, and stay solid business-wise.

Please pardon an off-topic comment: I got to meet Alexis Ohanian when he spoke at Google last year and I really enjoyed his book "Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed." I am an old guy, in my 60s, and I worry a lot about the future our kids and grandkids will have, but then when I meet young people like Alexis who have such a strong attitude about helping society, I feel better :-) If you have a chance to hear him speak, don't pass up the opportunity.

Can Reddit Grow Up?

Related Stories