- "There won't be as many people." That's ok, probably even a good thing. 1.5-2.5 million users are more than enough, especially considering most of them are power users. I believe HN has around 1.5-2.5 million and the content here is way better than Reddit.
- "Making a social network is hard." Yes, but it's not too hard. Scaling is hard, but we're not scaling to Reddit's size (100+ million); and Mastodon has issues with scaling, but that's because their protocol is super-redundant in an effort to be decentralized (and apparently also kind of sucks). HN runs on 2 servers and uses a LISP dialect (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478379); even though HN is text-only and Apollo would have images or videos, I'm 100% certain there are enough dedicated Reddit users who can make this a reality.
- Also be aware that Reddit's community is different than Facebook, Twitter, YouTube; they're a lot more tech-savvy, a lot more anonymous, favor NSFW a lot more, and a lot more anti-corporate. Especially the moderators, who honestly control most of the community (though it's usually a bad thing). We're going to need those moderators to prevent the Apollo social network from becoming the next 4chan (because, hopefully you understand, that's a bad thing)
There's absolutely going to be an exodus if Reddit does anything non-negligible, the only reason Reddit is even considering moving ahead with these changes is because they don't care.
The two forums in my top level comment do compare similarly as 4chan and reddit. The old one was previously known as the epicenter of shenanigans and memes in my language which has lost its shine, the new one being increasingly astroturfed and becoming more of an echo chamber day after day.
No, they're just flailing.
The problem with Reddit is that its product is ideological conformity; but its owners are too busy pretending (or actually believing) that's not true to sell it honestly. Mods are, to put it bluntly, mostly replaceable, and charging for the ability to moderate an established large subreddit would go a long way provided whoever buys that power must go out of their way to plausibly deny that.
And ideological conformity is worth a lot of money- Twitter was fairly valued in the tens of billions for a very good reason- but much like Twitter, that sort of thing sells "at a loss" because having the kind of content which enforcement of ideological conformity upon is meaningful necessarily means major companies won't want to put their products next to that content. Reddit is not a product that can generate a concrete return on investment, which is partially why it can survive operating at a net loss for a long, long time; capital directly funds political power.
Cheap capital drying up means money is tighter- so financiers are getting harder to come by- and if you're in straits that dire and don't want to downsize you have to look for other sources of revenue. In Reddit's case, this will completely kill their main product, but they have a mental block that prevents them from dealing with that honestly so they might be screwed.
>Mastodon has issues with scaling, but that's because their protocol is super-redundant in an effort to be decentralized (and apparently also kind of sucks)
Mastodon has the same kind problem that Reddit does but massively amplified- server operators have power over user networks (the same thing happens on Reddit with bots) which is a no-go for honest communication.
So I run 'example.com', but only serve (ex:) content via JSON. Allow competing implementations of the API on AWS, Cloudflare, self-hosted, etc.. Then let UIs like Apollo act like an aggregator and an OIDC provider for their users.
The API side could moderate their own content and restrict access to UIs that play nice and the UIs could refuse to surface content from API sides that suck.
The only thing Reddit has going for it IMO is the uniform UI across communities and they seem determined to make that a crappy experience from what I've seen.
Reddit has something like this, but definitely not as intentional,
- https://www.reddit.com/r/all/.json
- https://www.reddit.com/r/all/.rss
- https://www.reddit.com/r/all/.xml
>The only thing Reddit has going for it IMO is the uniform UI across communities and they seem determined to make that a crappy experience from what I've seen.
Old reddit had stylesheets and they could be very interesting. I still prefer that over the current thing they built.
HN has about 5M unique monthly users depending on how you count them.
Why? I would think it's the much simpler "having a ton of users is worth a lot of money".
I only see a couple thousand people actively comment or vote.
Is there a chance it’s getting better?
Rather unfortunately, the position that "my opinion is unpopular, therefore contrarian and correct" is something that is easily manipulated. The demographic that falls for conspiracy theories loves to amplify the idea that they have some secret / esoteric knowledge. Again, a great way to manipulate people, encourage violence etc.
Any stats you can share on registered user engagement?
I'd love to see a breakdown or writeup on this subject in general.
That's an ancient (in internet terms) problem, framing Reddit as some sort of intentional ideology-spreading-loss-leader-for-powerful-capitalists doesn't correspond with their actions - after all, Reddit has been deeply involved in the spreading of all sorts of ideas on all ends of political spectrums.
They're just running into the same issues all these "give something cool away then hope you can make it profitable later" business do of trying to turn the revenue knobs slowly enough to not drive everyone off.
Reddit’s product is ad-supported message boards. It has a high valuation because it gets an incredible number of eyeballs every day and investors want to monetise them. Reddit is flailing because those users aren’t as monetisable as investors hoped. I don’t think it’s a whole lot more complicated than that, not everything has to be a political conspiracy theory.
You’re describing Reddit ten years ago. There’s not really a “typical Reddit user” at this point it’s so big. All kinds of people are on it and most of them are not techies with a particular ideological bent.
Twitter is similiar in that you’re self selecting who to follow, and who to engage with. Things you engage with have hashtags, have observable topics and categories that they generally post about, etc. If you’ve ever looked at the categories that you’re in after doing a Twitter data dump, you can see they know a _ton_ about you. What I don’t remember seeing in there is “confidence,” but it might just be that those numbers aren’t surfaced to users, or that it’s encoded in the ordering (and I don’t remember it).
The point is, Twitter and Reddit have largely the same types of signal that Facebook does, but certainly way less than Google. Facebook’s user engagement might be higher, but I’m willing to bet that the number of people using Facebook to follow their friends, and not random businesses and other accounts is greater, thus limiting confidence in understanding about someone’s preferences. What I mean is that my friends might never post about politics, and I might not follow political figures, or other talking heads, that suggest my affiliation…
In Google’s case, they drop a “pixel,” for tracking purposes, on 75% of the web (inflated estimate for effect), and analyze every accessible page on the internet with the goal of understanding what it says. As a result, they have far greater reach in what they can and do know about you…
I have to heavily disagree with this. Reddit content is way better in both quality and quantity. The only thing worse is maybe the Signal to noise ratio, and even that is questionable. For example, askHistorians is a gem. Many subreddits are very useful. Moreover, for many questions, I find myself adding "reddit" on google. Not once have I needed it to find useful content on hacker news.
Ask about anything remotely controversial, and you'll see how quickly it's an echo chamber.
4chan was horrible and excellent at the same time. A sea of garbage that was also full of gold.
Probably the only online community I ever enjoyed to be a part of. All else was shit.
But I'm also much older now. I wondered if the community changed, or if I was the one that changed and can't appreciate it for what it is anymore. Maybe both I and the community changed in different directions.
I probably will never have an answer. But I still remember the old times there fondly.
In a sense, 4chan in the mid-2000's was probably my final experience with the old web, in a time before walled gardens, before social media trying to lock everyone in and tracking the shit out of everything to shove ads down the collective throat. A place still not neutered by contemporary political correctness and value systems. Full of extremely smart people and extremely dumb people in equal measure. It was maybe the ultimate form of the prior iteration of internet forums and irc chat rooms.
Nothing lasts forever, entropy dictates that on a long enough timeline all things become shit. Oh well.
I think it's true that Reddit leans more towards supporting internet privacy initiatives, net neutrality, etc. whereas facebook users often have no awareness of these issues in the first place.
But at the same time, no requirement to associate with a real-world identity means there are more sockpuppet accounts, more astroturfing, etc.
Twitter and Reddit tech neighborhoods have good reputations.
/b/ = random /trv/ = travel /pol/ = politically incorrect /gif/ = .gif and .webm files /wsg/ = the work safe version of /gif/ (its toned down but still not actually safe for work)
I don't recall seeing that chart - if anyone can link me to it I'd be interested in taking a look.
This thread feels full of vague insinuations that some powerful political lobby is paying to use Reddit to manipulate opinions or something but no actual detail.
115 ru
129 de
215 tr
380 nsfw
765 ja
932 freeculture
985 request
1487 joel
1784 lipstick.com
2022 features
4208 science
31266 programming
322776 reddit.com
> "One thing I've noticed is that the bulk of reddit's content is usually IT-related or at least culturally related, while digg is more generalized in its content (perhaps this is a product of time?). My point is that it seems to me that the fact that the "who" uses the site has a greater influence on usability than "how" the site is used." -
> "In the beginning, digg was pretty much all tech-related links, and whenever someone posted anything else you'd get a flurry of "this is a tech news site"-type comments. As the userbase grows and you get a more diverse demographic using the site, it becomes less "elite" and expands into other areas."
TBH, 4chan these days are nowhere near the days when it was known as the boogieman of the internet. Still stuck with language that wouldn't last 10 seconds on Twitter or even Reddit, but we're not talking about a doxxing/harassment hub anymore. Or at least, no more a hub for that than Twitter/Reddit.
I do it more out of necessity than because reddit is a good site. You get into a niche enough subject and your choice is either a small subreddit or delving into the artifacts of the early internet like GameFaqs, Deviant Art, or some new site forums (the ones that still exist). I Still need to take a grain of salt and check if the redditor isn't blowing hot air or isn't on some unhinged rant.
HN is great but focused on very specific, technical contetnt. Not gonna be much oppurtunity to talk about media or craft hobbies here.