Reddit has long been plagued with censorship. The CEO edited the post of a user because they criticized him or something. I can't believe how quickly that's been forgotten.
The Reddit situation reminds me of the post about failing to build a billion dollar company a few days ago. Reddit is trying to make VCs happy and continue to grow the business, but a platform like Reddit is best as a less reliant on growth, but stable platform. That allows the most ideas to be shared and the most natural interaction between users. I really think there is space for a competitor, but the switching costs will be high.
>The CEO edited the post of a user because they criticized him or something. I can't believe how quickly that's been forgotten.
The CEO changed a single post from "fuck <his username>" to "fuck <username of the moderators of the specific sub-board>" for an hour. While certainly this action was not received well, the drama it caused is way overblown and isn't evidence of being 'plagued with censorship.'
If anything it's plagued with shills from governments and corporations.
All forums are "plagued" in that way, though. This one too. Everyone who wants to run such a service has a personal idea of what expression is appropriate within the vision of the site and which ones aren't welcome. And everyone has personal sensitivities and makes moderation mistakes, too.
Honestly if reddit has failed, it's been in the opposite direction. They've been too lax with moderation and had to make rapid and disruptive course corrections when people point out the garbage they've been tolerating.
You have a first amendment right to express your opinions to anyone you want, but you don't have a right to do it on someone else's moderated forum.
Well, can you blame them for developing a habit of censorship when the laissez-faire approach gave them a huge problem with kiddie-porn trading, extreme racism, destructive conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism, misogyny, pro-rape communities, etc?
They tried the hands-off approach and it failed spectacularly. The site spent its boom years with basically negligible community-management while it spent its efforts doing damage-control on its overwhelmed servers.
> Reddit has long been plagued with censorship. The CEO edited the post of a user because they criticized him or something. I can't believe how quickly that's been forgotten.
That hasn't been forgotten.
Also, it has the wrong number of occurrences to be a persuasive data point toward the characterization "plague."
My 8 year-old account was shadow-banned site-wide for criticizing AMC's video player on a sponsored link (they've since disabled comments on advertising posts).
Honestly, idk if the cofounder episode was big enough to warrant the attention it had gotten.
Reddit has traditionally allowed for users to criticize the admins/founders to their hearts fill. This was one isolated incident, among a 1000 similar comments.
Now, the sudden disappearance of some highly voted posts is something I find more interesting. That, and tolerating subreddits that routinely break the site's rules.
>The CEO edited the post of a user because they criticized him or something.
No the user was/is apart of a radical political group that was harassing the admins and other users on a private website, essentially abusing the platform.
Spare me the claims of censorship. We can't even get rid of subreddits that sexualize minors or even safe havens for beastiality.
Free speech has become a thought terminating cliche.
Editing one post is bad, but also consider that they've become a massive safe harbor for the alt-right. Reddit admins routinely dismiss threats, quick to hide accounts from people like Elliott Rodgers, etc. They edited a the_donald post all while allowing bigotry and hate speech flourish on Reddit.
More information: The CEO edited post(s) from r/theDonald which was a horrible subreddit. They ended up creating a new feature (r/popular) to get rid of that sub.
I smiled on the inside when I noticed this -- people posting all kinds of content exposing China -- earlier in my r/all feed. Great effort by the community.
Are there examples of companies that said “this is enough money” and stopped concentrating on having ever increasing profits every quarter to satisfy VC or stock investors? I think of this a lot lately. It seems companies don’t want to just do what they do well anymore and be satisfied with that. Can someone give me some inspiration? Companies that have such pride in their work that they aren’t constantly looking for the next thing they can take on to grow and instead just focus on being the best and most ethical at what they do? Are there examples that this business model is actually more sustainable than the one where you are constantly trying to grow to more more more?
> Are there examples of companies that said “this is enough money” and stopped concentrating on having ever increasing profits every quarter to satisfy VC or stock investors?
Yes, except they're most often private companies and not publicly traded. Many of these inspirational companies are family owned and operated. Eventually, however, someone will get in charge of the company who isn't satisfied with "good enough" and they'll take the company public or accept investors and choose to place profit over concerns like customer satisfaction and employee well being. In other words, eventually someone will decide, "My pocket book is more important than the community I live in."
If you want inspiration, look at the Chelsea Milling Company, makers of Jiffy mix. It's nearly 90 years old, has approximately 65 percent of the pre-mixed cornbread market in the United States, and has never had a marketing department and does not advertise.
I work at a SaaS product that hasn’t taken any VC money. We have a modest staff, everyone gets paid very adequately, and we slowly are growing our business as our margin allows us to.
It’s not glamorous, it’s not explosive, but it does create a great work life balance. I have little fear of losing my job because we’re running out of funding, or having to build something we don’t believe in to appease shareholders.
I don’t even describe it as an internet startup to people, I describe it as an internet small business.
They don't show up on HN, they aren't doing anything glamorous or cutting edge. Just small to mid-size businesses building and selling products that people use.
If you haven't found any, it's because you haven't looked in the right places.
I am reading a newly published book "Company of One" that promotes a mindset of serving a smaller number of customers very well vs. growing and going for quality in everything your business does. Recommended.
I love the question you're bringing up. I truly want more companies to make this a goal.
A couple I can think of are MailChimp and possibly Atlassian.
I believe VC funding is mostly a trap for companies that, while it supplies and can incubate startups, ultimately just leads to more greed and never satiated investors. They'll just keep moving the line of target growth until the company is driven to the ground or, hopefully, it buys itself out of the shackles.
Maybe I simply haven't read too many stories of companies doing the latter.
All companies are beholden to their owners. When a company owns itself, they can make different decisions than when there are investors or share holders.
The way it's been explained to me, a company stock that pays regular dividends is basically the company saying "you investors deserve these profits rather than us trying to reinvest it in the company and grow". An example of the exact opposite would be Amazon, who notoriously almost never makes a profit on paper.
I am surprised no one mentioned Digg here. It was the original Reddit. Arguably its demise is attributed by inflow of VCs capital following by pivoting direction. Which resulted in community leaving for Reddit.
How would tencent owning a minor stake in reddit allow it to censor the site? Or is this outrage mostly because tencent is a Chinese firm?
I mean, censorship only works if you have the government backing you, are people legitimately fear the US government is going to bow down to a Chinese company?
Reddit already does some of the most aggressive tracking for surveillance, censors content they don't like, uses shadow bans, is run in an authoritarian way and has a score system that shows how good of a user you are - and reddit users are afraid of China because ...?
I think calling what's going on a "user uprising" is a wild exaggeration. This is some users who are predisposed to whinge about this sort of topic seizing the chance to do so and a bunch of other users jumping on the bandwagon.
There have been a number of planned exoduses from Reddit over the years (the banning of FatPeopleHate, some kind of succession crisis with the CEO, and the banning of the AMA mod, to name some off the top of my head), but none of them has actually materialized into anything.
My question is - What is preventing this? Is it just a matter of getting enough critical mass onto the new platform? Or is there some other logistical or engineering challenge that I'm not considering?
The way that Reddit is structured seems like it would be very vulnerable to a coordinated attempt to move users. In my experience, most subreddits have a heavily skewed distribution where a handful of users post most of the content, especially for the long-tail hobby and region-specific subreddits.
Intuitively, it feels like there are probably clusters of Reddit users who are subscribed to largely overlapping sets of subreddits, and who derive most of their utility from content generated by the same small-ish set of power users.
Depending on the terms of the investment, I wonder if some of these users might become very amenable to a migration to a new platform.
A quick aside. For those unfamiliar with Tencent, the Chinese government essentially has direct access to, and control over, all communication on Tencent's platforms. Nothing about the company in particular, its just part of doing business as a media company in China. But the fact of the matter is that you can be jailed for things you say in private group chats, and any chat can be arbitrarily censored, with no notification to the sender or recipient that the message was caught in a filter.
I think the concern shouldn't just be about censorship but also about political interference. First Russia and now China. Foreign ownership of media is a national security concern.
Deleted my reddit account. They can take their $150 million, but freedom of speech and more specifically being able to criticize the state is more important than your daily dose of catpics.
We need to find ways to untrap people from their online networks. Perhaps a common friendlist protocol with global identifiers? The market should be able to offer alternatives to reddit. User uprisings are just proof that the platform is a monopolistic trap.
I wonder how many strings come attached to this investment. I.e. if Reddit does something offensive to China - for example, publishes some state secret they'd like to keep hidden, etc., - would Chinese government lean on Tencent so that they lean on Reddit to change it?
What irks me about all this is that it’s entirely a one way street – American companies can’t go buying influence over Chinese social media companies because that’s simply not possible. These Chinese companies really want to have their cake and eat it too.
Pretty much the front page is purged of the "protest". I air quoted it for the sheer ridiculousness of it all. Why?
Pretty sure you would find many posting and or reading from their Chinese made phones in their homes with Chinese made appliances and other such accouterments all the while having ignored some of these events that occurred during their adult lifetime but where many occurred long before.
In other words it is a disappointing sign of what constitutes standing up for one's beliefs. Where posting on a social network, hash tag tweets, and more, are the only effort they will ever make. Yet they wonder why the world ignores them for the most part.
Oh I am quite sure there are politicians willing to exploit them, many willingly will line up for it, if anything to feel as if they make a difference. Then they forget by the next time they line up for their morning latte
I will not accept them influencing our affairs with their dirty money that they earned from being used as our slave labor. When will they learn their place?
[+] [-] jumbopapa|7 years ago|reply
The Reddit situation reminds me of the post about failing to build a billion dollar company a few days ago. Reddit is trying to make VCs happy and continue to grow the business, but a platform like Reddit is best as a less reliant on growth, but stable platform. That allows the most ideas to be shared and the most natural interaction between users. I really think there is space for a competitor, but the switching costs will be high.
[+] [-] intopieces|7 years ago|reply
The CEO changed a single post from "fuck <his username>" to "fuck <username of the moderators of the specific sub-board>" for an hour. While certainly this action was not received well, the drama it caused is way overblown and isn't evidence of being 'plagued with censorship.'
If anything it's plagued with shills from governments and corporations.
[+] [-] newsbinator|7 years ago|reply
I guess it'd be the instant death of the network.
That this action a) happened on Reddit + b) was mostly/quickly forgotten says a lot about the different demographics.
Audiences who largely come for cat pictures and political snark don't have to worry about CEOs breaking the 4th wall.
I've been a Redditor for 9+ years and I still am one. But today's Reddit isn't the one I signed up for.
[+] [-] ajross|7 years ago|reply
All forums are "plagued" in that way, though. This one too. Everyone who wants to run such a service has a personal idea of what expression is appropriate within the vision of the site and which ones aren't welcome. And everyone has personal sensitivities and makes moderation mistakes, too.
Honestly if reddit has failed, it's been in the opposite direction. They've been too lax with moderation and had to make rapid and disruptive course corrections when people point out the garbage they've been tolerating.
You have a first amendment right to express your opinions to anyone you want, but you don't have a right to do it on someone else's moderated forum.
[+] [-] Pxtl|7 years ago|reply
They tried the hands-off approach and it failed spectacularly. The site spent its boom years with basically negligible community-management while it spent its efforts doing damage-control on its overwhelmed servers.
[+] [-] jancsika|7 years ago|reply
That hasn't been forgotten.
Also, it has the wrong number of occurrences to be a persuasive data point toward the characterization "plague."
[+] [-] supercanuck|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darkmarmot|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] screye|7 years ago|reply
Reddit has traditionally allowed for users to criticize the admins/founders to their hearts fill. This was one isolated incident, among a 1000 similar comments.
Now, the sudden disappearance of some highly voted posts is something I find more interesting. That, and tolerating subreddits that routinely break the site's rules.
[+] [-] judge2020|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bdcravens|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kadendogthing|7 years ago|reply
No the user was/is apart of a radical political group that was harassing the admins and other users on a private website, essentially abusing the platform.
Spare me the claims of censorship. We can't even get rid of subreddits that sexualize minors or even safe havens for beastiality.
Free speech has become a thought terminating cliche.
[+] [-] tehwebguy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] YUMad|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sodosopa|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway415415|7 years ago|reply
I think I'm OK with that.
[+] [-] skilled|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway54323|7 years ago|reply
(Yes, not comments about how bad the government is, rather racist comments about Chinese people.)
[+] [-] DivestTrump|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pwaai|7 years ago|reply
Found a picture of Mao Zedong with someone's cum all over it. I'm dead serious.
https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/new/
[+] [-] JohnJamesRambo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] da_chicken|7 years ago|reply
Yes, except they're most often private companies and not publicly traded. Many of these inspirational companies are family owned and operated. Eventually, however, someone will get in charge of the company who isn't satisfied with "good enough" and they'll take the company public or accept investors and choose to place profit over concerns like customer satisfaction and employee well being. In other words, eventually someone will decide, "My pocket book is more important than the community I live in."
If you want inspiration, look at the Chelsea Milling Company, makers of Jiffy mix. It's nearly 90 years old, has approximately 65 percent of the pre-mixed cornbread market in the United States, and has never had a marketing department and does not advertise.
[+] [-] debaserab2|7 years ago|reply
It’s not glamorous, it’s not explosive, but it does create a great work life balance. I have little fear of losing my job because we’re running out of funding, or having to build something we don’t believe in to appease shareholders.
I don’t even describe it as an internet startup to people, I describe it as an internet small business.
[+] [-] itgoon|7 years ago|reply
They don't show up on HN, they aren't doing anything glamorous or cutting edge. Just small to mid-size businesses building and selling products that people use.
If you haven't found any, it's because you haven't looked in the right places.
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] otachack|7 years ago|reply
A couple I can think of are MailChimp and possibly Atlassian.
I believe VC funding is mostly a trap for companies that, while it supplies and can incubate startups, ultimately just leads to more greed and never satiated investors. They'll just keep moving the line of target growth until the company is driven to the ground or, hopefully, it buys itself out of the shackles.
Maybe I simply haven't read too many stories of companies doing the latter.
[+] [-] bdcravens|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calibas|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] etskinner|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sque|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mgbmtl|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] n1c|7 years ago|reply
https://open.buffer.com/buying-out-investors/
[+] [-] yuxt|7 years ago|reply
P.S. found this old article https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/07/13/reddit-didn...
[+] [-] analyst74|7 years ago|reply
I mean, censorship only works if you have the government backing you, are people legitimately fear the US government is going to bow down to a Chinese company?
[+] [-] luckylion|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Quequau|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lgats|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmknoll|7 years ago|reply
My question is - What is preventing this? Is it just a matter of getting enough critical mass onto the new platform? Or is there some other logistical or engineering challenge that I'm not considering?
The way that Reddit is structured seems like it would be very vulnerable to a coordinated attempt to move users. In my experience, most subreddits have a heavily skewed distribution where a handful of users post most of the content, especially for the long-tail hobby and region-specific subreddits.
Intuitively, it feels like there are probably clusters of Reddit users who are subscribed to largely overlapping sets of subreddits, and who derive most of their utility from content generated by the same small-ish set of power users.
Depending on the terms of the investment, I wonder if some of these users might become very amenable to a migration to a new platform.
A quick aside. For those unfamiliar with Tencent, the Chinese government essentially has direct access to, and control over, all communication on Tencent's platforms. Nothing about the company in particular, its just part of doing business as a media company in China. But the fact of the matter is that you can be jailed for things you say in private group chats, and any chat can be arbitrarily censored, with no notification to the sender or recipient that the message was caught in a filter.
[+] [-] fxfan|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayhendricks|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] entity345|7 years ago|reply
This summarises Reddit and social media in 2019.
[+] [-] buboard|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sabujp|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clircle|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smsm42|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teknologist|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shivetya|7 years ago|reply
Pretty sure you would find many posting and or reading from their Chinese made phones in their homes with Chinese made appliances and other such accouterments all the while having ignored some of these events that occurred during their adult lifetime but where many occurred long before.
In other words it is a disappointing sign of what constitutes standing up for one's beliefs. Where posting on a social network, hash tag tweets, and more, are the only effort they will ever make. Yet they wonder why the world ignores them for the most part.
Oh I am quite sure there are politicians willing to exploit them, many willingly will line up for it, if anything to feel as if they make a difference. Then they forget by the next time they line up for their morning latte
[+] [-] rblion|7 years ago|reply
However, there is still enough quality posts and comments to keep me hooked until something better comes along.
[+] [-] kuwze|7 years ago|reply