Reddit was great, many years ago, although there are many sub-reddits that are still excellent today. Moves they've made in the recent years, like hiding vote counts, were to improve growth, but it has also enabled more astroturfing and censorship (widespread).
More recently, they started injected tracking into outbound link clicks and introduced the terrible redesign to help with growth/monetization also. As they've grown, the quality of the content within sub-reddits and discussions within those communities, have fallen dramatically.
it never occurred to me before, but seeing it in a chart like this it really seems like Reddit has basically just turned into Gamers and their side interests, politics, and a few vestiges of old Reddit, like AskReddit, which at this point might as well be their own separate site for what all they have to do with the main demographic.
The Video Game sphere takes up a huge chunk of it. Then many of the other subs are basically gamer adjacent. Many of those technology subs are just about building PCs and stuff, which is largely gaming related or correlated. Even a lot of the politics is invariably linked to Gamergate type stuff. The Entertainment section is all genre fiction, anime, etc. Stuff you would expect a gaming forum to focus on.
The dedicated meme parts of the site are gone. The interesting stuff that fits in no particular category are gone. If you had told me 4 years ago that one day I would come to miss the derivative rage comics and image macros in the face of the unrelenting stream of toxicity that the site would become I wouldn't have believed you.
I've used reddit quite a bit the last two years and have felt the content quality has decreased. That, or I'm just used to it or bored of it. Feel like I may be getting a little old for it. There are still some subs that are useful, like fantasyfootball
The thing about recent moves is that, unlike Facebook, they still support older ways to have the non-painful experience from the user side at least. i.reddit.com is still alive and I use it regularly. Lightweight, decent UX with some flaws, but pretty much no ads. The user tracking is harder to get around, but a combination of pi-hole, ublock origin, and privacy badger helps there. So it’s not terrible yet. I think when they finally kill i.reddit.com is when I leave the platform.
In many ways, Reddit reminds me more of the "old internet" than Facebook or Twitter. There seems to be better discussions, more variety, and even quite a bit of experimentation going on within certain subreddits. It feels like a freer place and that much I like. I still don't like that people get into their own bubbles and do little to bridge the gaps between political and ideological differences, but it certainly feels more exploratory than the other two.
The obvious way out of that is to join bubbles that are aligned with your interests rather than political views. If your interest is politics then find a better interest :)
The biggest problem with reddit is that subreddits tend to get turned into little personal domains, ruled by a supreme dictator for life, turning the community experience sour for anyone who doesn't toe the party line.
It is interesting that the #1 story in HN is decline in FB and the #3 is growth in Reddit. Personal anecdote, I have shifted all my FB screen time to Reddit. Not out of any agenda, but perhaps to interact with a more diverse group of people. Bold prediction: FB will try to acquire Reddit soon
For me I've moved from Reddit back to Digg, Reddit seems to be the worst parts of Facebook combined with the worst parts of Twitter. The redesign is horrendously busy, the comments are trite or vicious, and the v.reddit videos either autoplay or never play when you click on them.
Imagine FB's data attached (by email or cookie) to Reddit's screentime - would easily quadruple Reddit's ad revenue with the same ad inventory. If they got away with it without driving away Redditors, would be salivation worthy as a marketer.
Reddit's main traffic problem for advertisers is that most users don't really subscribe to subreddits or make accounts, but rather browse the front page casually. So you can target, for instance, /r/smallbusiness to target small business owners, but you'll exhaust that inventory very quickly. A Facebook acquisition would mean that a much higher percentage of Reddit's audience could be served relevant ads.
"We know all of your interests. Not just your interests you are willing to declare publicly on Facebook – we know your dark secrets, we know everything… (laughs)"
Facebook and Reddit serve far too different purposes in my life to make sense of a comparison. I might just have grown too old, but the talk of Reddit (or instagram etc.) replacing FB don't seem to make very much sense, as long as FB is the go-to platform for connecting with real-world acquaintances.
I literally have no connections on FB to people I haven't met in person, and don't know a single friend's reddit account.
> but perhaps to interact with a more diverse group of people.
Your FB is probably far more diverse than reddit at this point. Maybe reddit 5 years ago, but reddit today is a propaganda platform for a political party and ideology. It's the echo chamber of echo chambers.
I've never had FB. I started weaning myself from reddit years ago. I primarily use youtube now. Though that is getting screwy too.
> Bold prediction: FB will try to acquire Reddit soon
Doubt it. Bolder prediction: FB will be around long after reddit is gone.
Reddit has a number of systemic issues (poor tools for moderators, hard to get rid of bad moderators, huge amounts of astroturfing)
It's a shame that they are 'good enough' to prevent much growth in the competitors, leading the cool tech made by competitors to often become exclusively filled with content that would be banned on reddit.
Some pretty poor categorization of some subreddits in there. gamesofthrones, mylittlepony, thewalkingdead, and BigBrother are in sports (asoiaf is in entertainment). sysadmin and techsupport are in hobbies/occupations while buildapc is in tech section. tumblrinaction, kotakuinaction, and blackpeopletwitter are in entertainment. DebateReligion is in news/politics, not discussion (with other debate subreddits) or lifestyle (with other religion subreddits).
But it's not in a structured format and tough to verify. There's no methodology for the current organization, and it doesn't look like it matches the actual graph.
The base classification structure was borrowed from r/listofsubreddits sub directory: https://www.reddit.com/r/ListOfSubreddits/wiki/listofsubredd.... However it was modified a bit in order to even out the clusters, size wise. Keeping it unchanged would make more than half of the subs entertainment. That being said, some hiccups were made during the formatting, and the purpose of the repo is to fix/enhance any mistakes people spot.
I get a lot of auto completes for "site:reddit.com" when I search for anything in the Chrome search bar or just in Google Search. I find reddit answers to be less likely to be advertisements or affiliate marketing. Honestly not sure where I would find information otherwise.
I use reddit on my mobile browser without logging into to an account. Recently when clicking links or images in the mobile view a pop-under will appear freezing the site until I select the prominent first option (to download the Reddit mobile app) or the second option to continue using my mobile browser. Because I am unauthenticated this preference does not carry over to page reloads for things like jumping to a different subreddit, leading me to experience this pop-under over and over again.
Needless to say it's cut heavily into my reddit usage. I genuinely believe they raised a bunch of money, hired a bunch of engineers and managers, convinced the C-levels a re-design was necessary, and then implemented a subpar re-design with a giant middle finger to users all in the name of ads. Glorious, world improving, ads.
It's incredibly annoying. I've built out my own mobile website for interfacing with Reddit because of it. Update after update the mobile.reddit.com keeps becoming harder to use.
login in solves a lot of problems. I know It's no longer anonymous but you can at least use a fake name. If you log in you can disable that infuriating popup. Also, you don't have to look at only the default list of garbage subreddits.
Reddit not logged in is like watching that garbage truck full of memes crash into on-coming traffic.
Over the past few years, both Twitter and Reddit have seen a huge growth of bot accounts. I'd put an asterisk next to any growth* figure by either company.
t_d at its peak was almost as big as politics, now that was not something I expected. Before SandersForPresident was archived when he lost the nomination it was about the same size as t_d.
Would be really neat to select a single sub or group of subs and generate a line chart of the same data.
It's interesting that it peaked at 1.5m comments/mo in late 2016 and it's shrunk to 820k comments/mo. That's a huge drop. It sort of makes sense, seeing as the election ended, but that activity decrease is far larger than any other subreddit, even political ones.
Number of comments seems like a bad metric. A lot of these are informal subreddits where the most common comments are going to be "lol" or users collaborating to complete a sentence one letter at a time as part of some meme.
Reddit for me is an acceptable middle point between the community-specific vBulletin forums of the 2000s (largely deserted now), and modern social media. You can explore a wide variety of topics (like on social media sites) while keeping anonymity and a sense of community (in dedicated subreddits).
When people say Reddit is 4chan-lite, I see where they're coming from. They're not signed in, so all they see is r/all, which has about the same quality level as the front page of Youtube.
The trick to it is to install the Reddit Enhancement Suite browser extension and start blocking the subs that frequently post low-quality/hate speech/just plain irritating content. Block a sub from your home page once, it never comes back.
Wish I could say the same for Youtube. I swear, you watch ONE Bill Burr standup clip, and your recs are suddenly full of "feminist gets pwned by redpill logic" and other "viral" garbage videos, each of which has to be manually set to "Not Interested".
I had a pretty strong reddit addiction and the redesign was fantastic for me- it completely cured my addiction! The redesign is just so awful and I hate using it so much that all I had to do was opt-in to using it and viola... 3 hours a day back in my life which I now use for the gym and to clean the house. It was an awesome change for me personally. No more reddit timesink!
I wonder if Reddit has surpassed Twitter, Snapchat, etc, for the title of most popular non-Facebook social network. You rarely see anyone do any kind of comparison of them.
Sometimes when I lurk on Reddit it appears that "the internet" is giving helpful and respectful comments to someone who, say, alleges that her husband had been sexually assaulting her.
When I start digging down into the lower quality comments those comments are obviously lower quality. But here's the thing-- within the lower quality comments is the OP responding to the low quality comments!
In other words, an OP (probably like many OPs) has a limited amount of time to get feedback on Reddit about a pressing problem. And mods/downvoters cannot react quickly enough in that period of time to appropriately moderate the responses.
Imagine OP's "Reddit time" (let's say an hour) as a rectangle in a video game that starts at 100% and drains to 0%. Let's say those dregs comments drained 15% of the OP's total time or energy participating on Reddit.
Now, suppose a lurker reads the thread later when the mods/downvoters have caught up with all their work. The lurker's default view is only the quality comments. This misleads the lurker by hiding the 15% time-or-energy hit the OP had from interacting with the dregs. The lurker likely assumes that participating on Reddit requires less time or energy that it does in reality.
Now the lurker tries out posting for the first time and starts to experience the 15% time-or-energy hit from the dregs comments. The more impatient OP is about reading comments, the more likely OP is to increase that wasted time-or-energy by interacting with the dregs.
Worse, that 15% time-or-energy hit includes content that would be beyond the pale for in-person social interactions-- it's mindless trolling or misanthropy which nearly no one would utter face to face. Some of it-- like accusations that the OP is an imposter-- is unique to social media.
Worst of all, that poster probably started as a lurker. So their decision to post in the first place was based on a view of Reddit that radically downplays the costs of interacting. I mean, I don't see any clear warnings on first post that let the poster know "shit will roll in" faster than the mods can flush it.
The obvious solution is to throttle all posting activity so that participating on Reddit slows to a level approaching those tree people from Lord of the Rings. (The larger time slices would actually get rid of whole class of problems, like the internet sleuthing BS that happened after the Boston bombing.) But I'm sure Reddit wants to encourage OPs to increase their # of responses for maximum buzz, so I don't really see any non-manipulative practical solution to this problem.
These days it feels more and more like <50% of the downvoted comments are trolls/jerks, and the majority are just people who might disagree with the hivemind.
I feel like reddit is one of the most underestimated internet properties in existence. It gets almost no attention except when specific incidents that explicitly involve it occur. But by and large it is completely ignored by the mainstream media, celebrities, politicians, just about everybody. I think it's role has been drastically underestimated in the 2016 election interference, for example. Facebook and even Google have taken flak over that, but hardly anybody really seriously interrogated how powerful TheDonald was both directly and indirectly (through how it created a nexus and community to energize real Trump supporters).
Reddit just exists, sitting there in the background, steadily growing over time, but never seemingly even trying to raise its own profile. Yet (or perhaps because of that) I certainly spend far more time there and get far more value from it than any other social media site.
One of the major reasons reddit became popular initially is because of Digg. Digg had content that was 2-3 days older than reddit (many posts from Reddit got reposted to Digg). Once people started figuring that out, combined with the Digg censorshop scandal(1), reddit took off.
One of the hallmarks of recent Reddit growth has been its mobile redesign. It aggressively nudges you to download their mobile app and it takes a few seconds longer to open any page (used to be instant with the old design). I presume they're doing this because their app has better user tracking (hard to disable tracking inside an app) and far less people are using ad blockers that work for apps too.
Personally I wonder if Reddit can do something about the low quality of their comments in the big subs. All comment sections are full of idiots making bad puns. It's terrible, much much worse than youtube ever was or that twitter currently is.
propogandist|7 years ago
More recently, they started injected tracking into outbound link clicks and introduced the terrible redesign to help with growth/monetization also. As they've grown, the quality of the content within sub-reddits and discussions within those communities, have fallen dramatically.
naravara|7 years ago
The Video Game sphere takes up a huge chunk of it. Then many of the other subs are basically gamer adjacent. Many of those technology subs are just about building PCs and stuff, which is largely gaming related or correlated. Even a lot of the politics is invariably linked to Gamergate type stuff. The Entertainment section is all genre fiction, anime, etc. Stuff you would expect a gaming forum to focus on.
The dedicated meme parts of the site are gone. The interesting stuff that fits in no particular category are gone. If you had told me 4 years ago that one day I would come to miss the derivative rage comics and image macros in the face of the unrelenting stream of toxicity that the site would become I wouldn't have believed you.
Just look at this joke post https://external-preview.redd.it/dv9xRUyCUzzan5wZnVBCmmHIriH... from 6 years ago. It all seems so innocent compared to what it is now.
HiroshiSan|7 years ago
Zarath|7 years ago
SOLAR_FIELDS|7 years ago
Avery3R|7 years ago
austincheney|7 years ago
Discussion is simply not important. Demonizing opposing opinions is very important though. Very much an anti libertarian echo chamber.
chrisco255|7 years ago
naravara|7 years ago
Leaving your comment moderation duties up to majoritarian voting is inevitably going to do that.
ThomPete|7 years ago
The obvious way out of that is to join bubbles that are aligned with your interests rather than political views. If your interest is politics then find a better interest :)
Apocryphon|7 years ago
bliblah|7 years ago
I have never found any sites/forums/bbs that didn't eventually devolve into a echo chamber given enough time.
People like to repeat the same opinion as others and those who don't like these opinions tend to be the first to leave for other pastures.
KozmoNau7|7 years ago
paulgrant999|7 years ago
[deleted]
rigged-system|7 years ago
dmode|7 years ago
ProAm|7 years ago
cm2012|7 years ago
Reddit's main traffic problem for advertisers is that most users don't really subscribe to subreddits or make accounts, but rather browse the front page casually. So you can target, for instance, /r/smallbusiness to target small business owners, but you'll exhaust that inventory very quickly. A Facebook acquisition would mean that a much higher percentage of Reddit's audience could be served relevant ads.
bluegreyred|7 years ago
"We know all of your interests. Not just your interests you are willing to declare publicly on Facebook – we know your dark secrets, we know everything… (laughs)"
crovalin17|7 years ago
This would be bad on so many levels.
matt4077|7 years ago
I literally have no connections on FB to people I haven't met in person, and don't know a single friend's reddit account.
lettergram|7 years ago
thewhitetulip|7 years ago
Also Reddit is owned by Wired's parent, Conde Naste. I don't think it is up for sale.
cft|7 years ago
rigged-system|7 years ago
That's just about the worst thing I can imagine
liftbigweights|7 years ago
Your FB is probably far more diverse than reddit at this point. Maybe reddit 5 years ago, but reddit today is a propaganda platform for a political party and ideology. It's the echo chamber of echo chambers.
I've never had FB. I started weaning myself from reddit years ago. I primarily use youtube now. Though that is getting screwy too.
> Bold prediction: FB will try to acquire Reddit soon
Doubt it. Bolder prediction: FB will be around long after reddit is gone.
cwkoss|7 years ago
It's a shame that they are 'good enough' to prevent much growth in the competitors, leading the cool tech made by competitors to often become exclusively filled with content that would be banned on reddit.
trynewideas|7 years ago
The hierarchy is on GitHub: https://github.com/MetASnoo/Subreddit-Directory-Skeleton/blo...
But it's not in a structured format and tough to verify. There's no methodology for the current organization, and it doesn't look like it matches the actual graph.
saternius|7 years ago
wufufufu|7 years ago
ben_jones|7 years ago
Needless to say it's cut heavily into my reddit usage. I genuinely believe they raised a bunch of money, hired a bunch of engineers and managers, convinced the C-levels a re-design was necessary, and then implemented a subpar re-design with a giant middle finger to users all in the name of ads. Glorious, world improving, ads.
minieggs|7 years ago
bhandziuk|7 years ago
Reddit not logged in is like watching that garbage truck full of memes crash into on-coming traffic.
jplayer01|7 years ago
iblaine|7 years ago
css|7 years ago
Would be really neat to select a single sub or group of subs and generate a line chart of the same data.
Mahn|7 years ago
edaemon|7 years ago
nerdponx|7 years ago
avar|7 years ago
saternius|7 years ago
lettergram|7 years ago
https://austingwalters.com/trends-on-hacker-news-activity-gr...
rchaud|7 years ago
When people say Reddit is 4chan-lite, I see where they're coming from. They're not signed in, so all they see is r/all, which has about the same quality level as the front page of Youtube.
The trick to it is to install the Reddit Enhancement Suite browser extension and start blocking the subs that frequently post low-quality/hate speech/just plain irritating content. Block a sub from your home page once, it never comes back.
Wish I could say the same for Youtube. I swear, you watch ONE Bill Burr standup clip, and your recs are suddenly full of "feminist gets pwned by redpill logic" and other "viral" garbage videos, each of which has to be manually set to "Not Interested".
b1r6|7 years ago
randycupertino|7 years ago
Hypx|7 years ago
saternius|7 years ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/87q8pn/the...
https://imgur.com/gallery/c4Wzo
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/8yma4e/oc_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/8ahy05/int...
liftbigweights|7 years ago
https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...
Note that FB owns 4 out of the top 6 social media platforms on that list. That's how dominant FB really is.
chrisco255|7 years ago
jancsika|7 years ago
When I start digging down into the lower quality comments those comments are obviously lower quality. But here's the thing-- within the lower quality comments is the OP responding to the low quality comments!
In other words, an OP (probably like many OPs) has a limited amount of time to get feedback on Reddit about a pressing problem. And mods/downvoters cannot react quickly enough in that period of time to appropriately moderate the responses.
Imagine OP's "Reddit time" (let's say an hour) as a rectangle in a video game that starts at 100% and drains to 0%. Let's say those dregs comments drained 15% of the OP's total time or energy participating on Reddit.
Now, suppose a lurker reads the thread later when the mods/downvoters have caught up with all their work. The lurker's default view is only the quality comments. This misleads the lurker by hiding the 15% time-or-energy hit the OP had from interacting with the dregs. The lurker likely assumes that participating on Reddit requires less time or energy that it does in reality.
Now the lurker tries out posting for the first time and starts to experience the 15% time-or-energy hit from the dregs comments. The more impatient OP is about reading comments, the more likely OP is to increase that wasted time-or-energy by interacting with the dregs.
Worse, that 15% time-or-energy hit includes content that would be beyond the pale for in-person social interactions-- it's mindless trolling or misanthropy which nearly no one would utter face to face. Some of it-- like accusations that the OP is an imposter-- is unique to social media.
Worst of all, that poster probably started as a lurker. So their decision to post in the first place was based on a view of Reddit that radically downplays the costs of interacting. I mean, I don't see any clear warnings on first post that let the poster know "shit will roll in" faster than the mods can flush it.
The obvious solution is to throttle all posting activity so that participating on Reddit slows to a level approaching those tree people from Lord of the Rings. (The larger time slices would actually get rid of whole class of problems, like the internet sleuthing BS that happened after the Boston bombing.) But I'm sure Reddit wants to encourage OPs to increase their # of responses for maximum buzz, so I don't really see any non-manipulative practical solution to this problem.
debacle|7 years ago
zmmmmm|7 years ago
Reddit just exists, sitting there in the background, steadily growing over time, but never seemingly even trying to raise its own profile. Yet (or perhaps because of that) I certainly spend far more time there and get far more value from it than any other social media site.
epa|7 years ago
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controvers...
sys_64738|7 years ago
11eleven|7 years ago
jplayer01|7 years ago
trillic|7 years ago
buboard|7 years ago
wpdev_63|7 years ago
brokenmachine|7 years ago
swampthinker|7 years ago
toephu2|7 years ago
empath75|7 years ago
saternius|7 years ago
nurino|7 years ago
Rainymood|7 years ago
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