I'll admit to being one of the latecomers to reddit in the last year. I use to avoid reddit like the plague, because I thought reddit was just www.reddit.com (the main page) which the few times I visited was filled with random assortment of stuff I didn't care about.
Later, I discovered the true essence of reddit, sub-reddits. Things like r/loseit, r/fitness, r/gamedev, r/<things I actually care about>. Now I'm hooked--I visit the sub reddits multiple times every day. I no longer subscribe to the main reddit feed.
So, for things in store for 2012, you absolutely must focus on "help new users better understand the way reddit works".
In addition, if I were in charge of reddit for a day, I'd get rid of the reddit main page aggregation and instead replace it with a word cloud and the heading "Pick a topic that interests you to visit that sub-reddit for valuable discussion and content". Because, on the whole, the main reddit feed devalues the entire site with slop.
One huge problem, though, is that shit (specifically racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, fat shaming, ableism – oh, I guess that list really isn’t all that specific) tends to crop up everywhere. It’s a very reddity kind of shit.
Encountering blatant (and highly visible because upvoted) sexism (for example) in such harmless sounding subreddits as /r/soccer or /r/minecraft really kills all my fun. There are a few nicely moderated places, though, so not all hope is lost (and /r/soccer is at least usually devoid of shit).
I am a long time reddit user and am of the opinion that the "mainstream" subreddits serve as honeypots to attract disrespectful juvenile users and should be kept for that purpose. Making it easier to find the most interesting subreddits will only attract the wrong kind of people.
You do know you can unsubscribe to the main page, and the other default subscriptions, so your main page is entirely business, world news, programming, and Doctor Who, right?
Whatever you think of @reddit's march towards decline...this was my favorite part of the blog post...and something I hope rings with other popular sites:
Here’s a list of things we don’t (and won’t) do for traffic:
We don't get traffic through ads.
We don’t participate in any traffic trading.
We don’t email our users (unless they choose to enter an
email and then forget their password).
We don’t harass users to sign up.
We don’t harass users to invite their friends.
We don’t pester you to download our app.
We don’t use slideshows and other pageview gimmicks.
We don't know anything about SEO.
We don't integrate with Facebook.
We don't even link to our Facebook or twitter accounts.
As with any user-generated content website, it has a problem: amongst those many users Reddit has there are also lots of dicks that spoil the conversations for everybody.
I don't think Reddit wants to go on the path of Youtube - useful for finding out links, but with useless and rude conversations that make you mad at waisting time reading them. I think Reddit got popular because in addition to links, users had meaningful things to say about those links, but the overall quality has been constantly dropping. Reddit should try to find ways to alleviate this phenomenon.
Here's a case study from today. I submitted a link to both HN and /r/programming [1] [2]
Most popular comment and criticism on HN:
1. User tumblr.
2. You're done.
Most popular comment and criticism on /r/programming:
Scumbag programmer: Titles post "Blogging for Hackers".
Writes the whole thing in Ruby.
Edit: Whoops - looks like those Ruby rockstars woke up.
Regarding the "decline" of Reddit: any site that gets 2 billion monthly page views is going to be wholly different from its incipient form of several years ago. Surely the users of Reddit who pine for its past have many alternatives today.
Not to take a thing away from Reddit, but there are a lot of bored people out there and they don't know that many great places on the internet. To compound that, mobile devices have created more time when you can be doing something else (i.e. between commercials, on the bus, etc.).
It's not that there aren't a lot of great websites out there, it's just that most people I know only go to 2-5 regularly. Reddit is a great site, but I know a lot of people who go there 30 minutes after they just clicked through 100 links hoping there's something new (and then when they're bored posting about it - http://www.reddit.com/search?q=blue+links). I'm not sure why, but either people can only remember a few websites, other sites suck or they can't be found.
They do show stupid pictures ("Instead of an ad, here's...") instead of ads that steal my attention for no reason what so ever. The sole reason I'm using adblock. I do not want to, but those damn pictures are so damn annoying that I have no choice.
How about not show anything if you are not going to show an ad? Why steal my attention and bother me for no reason at all?
To put that in perspective, Flickr is at 1.5B. LinkedIn, 2.7B.
Edit: I'd like to go on record with a bet that by the end of the year, reddit will get more traffic than LinkedIn (which currently has a market cap in excess of $6,000,000,000).
LinkedIn's audience/traffic is far more valuable though, so I'm not sure why you added the bit about their market cap. Reddit users by and large are there for entertainment and don't click on ads. LinkedIn's users are there for work and by and large are the ads.
And Plentyoffish blows Reddit out of the water on page views. MySpace had massive page views (they resisted AJAX to increase ad impressions -- similar to POF).
It's a ridiculous metric. Certain types of sites simply get large numbers of page views due to their nature and design.
Monthly uniques, repeat visits, and average time on site are a much more reasonable basis for comparing different types of sites (and even that is quite flawed).
A lot of LinkedIn's value isn't the ads (although their a revenue stream), it's the data they have. This is why they recently started offering an integration with Salesforce to offer more data on leads. Having higher quality on people and how you're connected to them in the social graph is incredibly powerful.
Reddit doesn't really have anything like that. They may be able to monetize in other ways beyond advertising, but LinkedIn is already generating revenue well beyond ads.
Condé Nast had no idea what they were buying. The best decision they made, one I'm sure that was the result of the Reddit team making the case for it, was relatively hands off mgmt.
I suspect CN still doesn't really know what to do with it other than sit back and not screw it up.
If you don't actively unscrew it up, it will screw itself up.
Reddit is already in steep decline even though page-views are up. It's attracting a different crowd now. They're just one Digg-bar moment away from disaster.
There's a lot of truth to this. I'm doing everything I can to use my influence on the board of reddit, inc. to help, but the team we've got in place now has been carrying the torch brilliantly since we left.
Fairly niche perhaps, but i think Wired benefits from it. Other than the natural posting of wired articles on reddit, there have been a couple of articles in wired which originated from reddit content.
There is a lot of potential for datamining and finding trends, what is popular, what would go down well, etc, which they may well be doing too.
I love the reddit community, and I've been an active member for almost 6 years now. Congratulations to the reddit team for building a huge, diverse and successful community. However, I think that this latest stage of growth brings a lot of problems. The entire tone of reddit (in general) has become a lot more hostile during the last 1.5 years. It's what someone said about groupthink - downvoting or posting a quick, hostile reply to something you disagree with is much easier than actually articulating why you disagree. There is a lot of hating and lots of personal attacks instead of honest discussion.
I've been thinking about this for a bit. As an outsider it seems a lot like an up-scaled version of American society. Reddit used to be a relatively homogenuous group of people, but is now _very_ heterogenous, in the same way the US is. The problem is that reddit doesn't have the custom of politely avoiding contentious topics in the public space. So you end up getting mens' rights activists and militant feminists yelling at each other, Christians and atheists, racists and minorities etc.
I think this problem is only going to keep growing. Reddit has survived a long time, but this is a fundamental issue which is more about keeping an open mind and being tolerant of differences of opinion. It has more to do with societal conditioning than technology. It's a great example of what happens when you put radically different people within shouting distance of each other without traditional common courtesy to moderate things.
Like I said, I've been on Reddit for almost 6 years, but things are getting pretty bad. Almost every single time something that is considered controversial by any group is posted, there are multiple aggressive comments...which are upvoted if they are formulated in a sufficiently assertive way. The community is moving away from rational discourse, to a more traditional extroverts-first system where being loud and assuming that your opponent is wrong gets more recognition.
The entire tone of reddit (in general) has become a lot more hostile during the last 1.5 years.
On the contrary, I think the groupthink was much more obvious before they started policing the subreddits more closely in the last year. It used to be that /r/business was the most anti-business place on the web - any post that was positive about business would get instantly downvoted to oblivion, in favour of posts decrying how businesses were exploiting individuals and the government in various ways.
Then they split it up into multiple sub-sub-reddits, and now /business is actually a sensible place to read stuff about business.
I feel like that move happened a few years ago. I thought the people who still frequent reddit primarily visit the smaller higher quality subreddits that are more reminiscent of how the site used to be.
Reddit's growth has been amazing. It gets a lot of hate because of users reposting content without giving credit, but it really is an amazing site. I used to search Google endlessly for sites to get, for example, help on video games or services for video games, but now I think, "Well, I'll just check out their subreddit and see if anyone else has this problem." It's great for news and breaking stories. Sometimes I see it on reddit before I even see it breaking on Twitter.
I think Conde Nast did a good job as well in not fucking it up for the site. They let the owners do their own thing and let the site grow (an action I really wish other large companies would take when acquiring startups) instead of forcing them to put annoying ads all over or other stupid things.
However, I wish reddit would make it easier for users to find features and generally understand the site. I'm still finding useful features that have been hidden in the software.
I thank the reddit staff for their amazing work and hope that they keep it up. :)
I'm guessing they are making money (ads & reddit gold) since they have been able to make a few hires recently.
Unfortunately the overall quality of content on reddit has really gone downhill. Even after unsubscribing to the subreddits that were the worst offenders, it's really hard to find interesting stuff with meaningful discussions. These days I'm almost embarrassed to tell people I use reddit.
The most surprising figure to me is that 65% traffic is from the United States. I think for a lot of the biggest sites, that number is much lower and going down.
I admit that it's hard to measure this in an absolute way (and I agree pageviews is a flawed metric), but I submit that in two years, reddit will be as popular as Twitter is now.
[+] [-] giberson|14 years ago|reply
Later, I discovered the true essence of reddit, sub-reddits. Things like r/loseit, r/fitness, r/gamedev, r/<things I actually care about>. Now I'm hooked--I visit the sub reddits multiple times every day. I no longer subscribe to the main reddit feed.
So, for things in store for 2012, you absolutely must focus on "help new users better understand the way reddit works".
In addition, if I were in charge of reddit for a day, I'd get rid of the reddit main page aggregation and instead replace it with a word cloud and the heading "Pick a topic that interests you to visit that sub-reddit for valuable discussion and content". Because, on the whole, the main reddit feed devalues the entire site with slop.
edit: removed misleading line.
[+] [-] ugh|14 years ago|reply
Encountering blatant (and highly visible because upvoted) sexism (for example) in such harmless sounding subreddits as /r/soccer or /r/minecraft really kills all my fun. There are a few nicely moderated places, though, so not all hope is lost (and /r/soccer is at least usually devoid of shit).
[+] [-] ArcticCelt|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wisty|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackernews|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tnecniv|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] intellection|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danso|14 years ago|reply
Here’s a list of things we don’t (and won’t) do for traffic:
We don't get traffic through ads.
We don’t participate in any traffic trading.
We don’t email our users (unless they choose to enter an email and then forget their password).
We don’t harass users to sign up.
We don’t harass users to invite their friends.
We don’t pester you to download our app.
We don’t use slideshows and other pageview gimmicks.
We don't know anything about SEO.
We don't integrate with Facebook.
We don't even link to our Facebook or twitter accounts.
[+] [-] ig1|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bad_user|14 years ago|reply
I don't think Reddit wants to go on the path of Youtube - useful for finding out links, but with useless and rude conversations that make you mad at waisting time reading them. I think Reddit got popular because in addition to links, users had meaningful things to say about those links, but the overall quality has been constantly dropping. Reddit should try to find ways to alleviate this phenomenon.
Here's a case study from today. I submitted a link to both HN and /r/programming [1] [2]
Most popular comment and criticism on HN:
Most popular comment and criticism on /r/programming: [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3428369[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/o3v2u/blogging_...
[+] [-] rudiger|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bialecki|14 years ago|reply
It's not that there aren't a lot of great websites out there, it's just that most people I know only go to 2-5 regularly. Reddit is a great site, but I know a lot of people who go there 30 minutes after they just clicked through 100 links hoping there's something new (and then when they're bored posting about it - http://www.reddit.com/search?q=blue+links). I'm not sure why, but either people can only remember a few websites, other sites suck or they can't be found.
[+] [-] roel_v|14 years ago|reply
We don't make enough money to sustain ourselves.
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kayhi|14 years ago|reply
I don't think any of us want harassing or pestering, but have come across companies that it is a pleasure to read their email or invite friends.
[+] [-] 127|14 years ago|reply
How about not show anything if you are not going to show an ad? Why steal my attention and bother me for no reason at all?
[+] [-] raldi|14 years ago|reply
Edit: I'd like to go on record with a bet that by the end of the year, reddit will get more traffic than LinkedIn (which currently has a market cap in excess of $6,000,000,000).
Anyone want to bet against me?
https://plus.google.com/u/1/109191382354704910211/posts/ZRiC...
[+] [-] jonknee|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] staunch|14 years ago|reply
It's a ridiculous metric. Certain types of sites simply get large numbers of page views due to their nature and design.
Monthly uniques, repeat visits, and average time on site are a much more reasonable basis for comparing different types of sites (and even that is quite flawed).
[+] [-] bialecki|14 years ago|reply
Reddit doesn't really have anything like that. They may be able to monetize in other ways beyond advertising, but LinkedIn is already generating revenue well beyond ads.
[+] [-] pdenya|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] therandomguy|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benatkin|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Adaptive|14 years ago|reply
I suspect CN still doesn't really know what to do with it other than sit back and not screw it up.
[+] [-] astrodust|14 years ago|reply
Reddit is already in steep decline even though page-views are up. It's attracting a different crowd now. They're just one Digg-bar moment away from disaster.
[+] [-] icebraining|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kn0thing|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] polshaw|14 years ago|reply
There is a lot of potential for datamining and finding trends, what is popular, what would go down well, etc, which they may well be doing too.
[+] [-] marvin|14 years ago|reply
I've been thinking about this for a bit. As an outsider it seems a lot like an up-scaled version of American society. Reddit used to be a relatively homogenuous group of people, but is now _very_ heterogenous, in the same way the US is. The problem is that reddit doesn't have the custom of politely avoiding contentious topics in the public space. So you end up getting mens' rights activists and militant feminists yelling at each other, Christians and atheists, racists and minorities etc.
I think this problem is only going to keep growing. Reddit has survived a long time, but this is a fundamental issue which is more about keeping an open mind and being tolerant of differences of opinion. It has more to do with societal conditioning than technology. It's a great example of what happens when you put radically different people within shouting distance of each other without traditional common courtesy to moderate things.
Like I said, I've been on Reddit for almost 6 years, but things are getting pretty bad. Almost every single time something that is considered controversial by any group is posted, there are multiple aggressive comments...which are upvoted if they are formulated in a sufficiently assertive way. The community is moving away from rational discourse, to a more traditional extroverts-first system where being loud and assuming that your opponent is wrong gets more recognition.
[+] [-] swombat|14 years ago|reply
On the contrary, I think the groupthink was much more obvious before they started policing the subreddits more closely in the last year. It used to be that /r/business was the most anti-business place on the web - any post that was positive about business would get instantly downvoted to oblivion, in favour of posts decrying how businesses were exploiting individuals and the government in various ways.
Then they split it up into multiple sub-sub-reddits, and now /business is actually a sensible place to read stuff about business.
[+] [-] gonehome|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamandrus|14 years ago|reply
I think Conde Nast did a good job as well in not fucking it up for the site. They let the owners do their own thing and let the site grow (an action I really wish other large companies would take when acquiring startups) instead of forcing them to put annoying ads all over or other stupid things.
However, I wish reddit would make it easier for users to find features and generally understand the site. I'm still finding useful features that have been hidden in the software.
I thank the reddit staff for their amazing work and hope that they keep it up. :)
[+] [-] joshklein|14 years ago|reply
Regarding below questions about the business side of Reddit, see the previous conversation here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2966628
[+] [-] rbranson|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leak|14 years ago|reply
Are we allowed to ask how/if they're making money?
[+] [-] fletchowns|14 years ago|reply
Unfortunately the overall quality of content on reddit has really gone downhill. Even after unsubscribing to the subreddits that were the worst offenders, it's really hard to find interesting stuff with meaningful discussions. These days I'm almost embarrassed to tell people I use reddit.
[+] [-] tokenadult|14 years ago|reply
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