28 ms·

The Reddits

• preommr 2y ago
  > But Reddit was special, and when Steve came back in 2015, I knew the world was in for a surprise. It was certainly a surprise that he thought it was a good idea to edit a user's comment as a form of trolling when he's the ceo.
• adr1an 2y ago
  Reddit (the idea) is alive and spreading (federated) in Lemmy :)
• blastro 2y ago
  when old.reddit.com dies, i'll be done :peace:
• BowBun 2y ago
  Puff piece you would expect from key stakeholders in this whole fiasco (conveniently timed, might I add). Respect where respect is due, but nothing in this post is worth a grain of salt in my opinion.
  • kitchi 2y ago
    What fiasco? I think I'm missing some context here
    • nadermx 2y ago
      From my understanding, reddit is losing 100m+ a year and their CEO gets paid more than Nvda ceo, or apple ceo.
      • extraduder_ire 2y ago
        I think the often-quoted amount that huffmann is going to be paid includes stock he owns (will own?), with its valuation based on the targeted IPO price. I don't think he's getting paid an absurd amount of cash right now.
        • mportela 2y ago
          It's in his interest to have a small cash compensation though since long-term capital gains tax is smaller than income tax. Also, he can always take a loan against his stock to get liquidity without triggering income tax.
      • misiti3780 2y ago
        193M
        • misiti3780 2y ago
          getting downvoted for posting a true, public piece of information ... cool
      • nineplay 2y ago
        That headline has been linked everywhere so of course it's untrue. a) He received an large bonus and b) his increased salary is still half of NVIDIA's CEO. "Huffman in 2023 got a salary of $341,346, which is relatively low for a CEO of a major public corporation. In February, this was raised to $550,000. He also got a $792,000 bonus last year based on Reddit's user numbers, revenue, and a type of profitability known as adjusted EBITDA that excludes certain expenses." https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-defends-193-million-compensation-package-2024-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-def...
      • mycologos 2y ago
        Looking at their SEC filing [1], the CEO compensation breaks down into ~$1mil of cash and ~$192mil roughly split between stock and options. Both the stock and options appear to have further conditions attached to them that reduce that number further. I'm not even a fake accountant, so I don't understand the exact nature of the dilution, but the $193mil overall number seems to assume a lot of stuff goes extremely well in the IPO. I think the stock number assumes a stock price of ~$33. [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1713445/000162828024010137/reddit-sx1a1.htm#i1b9a579e78a34dfa99f7f26daeec195b_94 https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1713445/000162828024...
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • bloopernova 2y ago
      They weren't making advertising money from 3rd party API clients like RIF is Fun or Apollo. They decided to increase the price of API calls to an impractically high amount. This was uncovered by the Apollo dev, who recorded their meetings with the Reddit leadership, which also uncovered that Reddit leadership was lying about the interaction (accusing the Apollo dev of extortion I believe). Reddit wanted $12,000 for something other sites charged approximately $200. (see the reply to this comment by neilv for information that casts doubt on the "reddit leadership lying" part of this) Instead of charging 3rd party clients $5/month or something and retaining them, Reddit banned all 3rd party clients. But then went back on that after realizing that people with disabilities used 3rd party clients to access the site because Reddit's own app was not usable for them. Other 3rd party apps were still banned though. People protested, eventually taking thousands of subreddits offline, which Reddit then fixed by replacing the moderators/owners of each subreddit. There's probably more I'm missing, but basically Reddit tried to rent-seek but their engineering teams weren't able to provide the infrastructure needed to support API subscriptions for 3rd party apps. Edited to add: The initial Apollo developer thread is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca... And the post that details Reddit leadership lying about the Apollo dev: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/14dkqrw/i_want_to_debunk_reddits_claims_and_talk_about/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/14dkqrw/i_want_t...
      • dncornholio 2y ago
        > People protested, eventually taking thousands of subreddits offline, which Reddit then fixed by replacing the moderators/owners of each subreddit. Reddit couldn't have handled this better IMO. Mods literally held subs hostage, which, when you think of it, is just so stupid it made for some good natural selection.
      • neilv 2y ago
        > which also uncovered that Reddit leadership was lying about the interaction (accusing the Apollo dev of extortion I believe). I wasted a lot of time going through transcripts and recordings at the time, and (to my ear, and knowledge of the world) the facts available didn't fully support the confident accusations that the angry villagers with pitchforks were repeating from each other. Which injustice is kinda poetic, if you consider how Reddit as a venue nurtured thinking like "we did it, reddit!" and other collective stupidity.
    • Jenk 2y ago
      Reddit is about to IPO. YC are principle investors.
• endisneigh 2y ago
  Posts like this timed with the IPO remind me this forum is basically a marketing engine. Let’s not ever forget that.
  • nyc_data_geek 2y ago
    That is, unfortunately, the vast majority of the Internet at this point.
    • ohyes 2y ago
      I have a hard time conceiving of a platform one could currently make that would not become closer to a marketing platform the more user engagement it receives. Maybe niche BBs or a platform with enough distasteful content that no company wants their brand associated with it. (Ex. 4chan)
      • uaserussia 2y ago
        [flagged]
        • account42 2y ago
          I think you might need to adapt that strategy for the modern world where sexual degeneracy has become acceptable for corporate messaging.
          • FactKnower69 2y ago
            Explain this normal post you just made. Are you talking about how Steve Huffman was a moderator and champion of r/Jailbait?
          • uaserussia 2y ago
            [dead]
  • giancarlostoro 2y ago
• diggan 2y ago
  > Reddit the site (and now app) is such a fundamentally useful thing that it's almost unkillable. Looking forward to see how true this is. The communities I used to frequent, have maybe 20% of the activity they used to, before the API fiasco, even though they're "back online". I also stopped using reddit on the phone after my chosen reddit client was closed down (which I'm grateful for, thanks reddit). My reddit activity probably dropped way below half compared to before, as the communities I used to be in are now shells of their former glory.
  • spelunker 2y ago
    As an opposite anecdote, I probably use it as much now as before the API stuff.
  • unshavedyak 2y ago
    Yea, i stopped using it from mobile entirely when that happened. I expect them to kill `old.reddit` soon any that'll be the end of that for me. ATProto is far more interesting to me, if/when someone makes a link aggregator for them rather than the Twitter style UI of Bluesky. ActivityPub will do in a pinch, if needed. (i already tested this idea, for ~60 days with zero Reddit)
    • mrmlz 2y ago
      Modern Reddit is such a broken experience especially on the web. And honestly the community has degraded over the last couple of years.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      • pixl97 2y ago
        And the number of bots is out of control. I'm guessing they are accounts that pretend to be regular users by copying other user comments on the same topic and posting them days/weeks later when the topic gets brought up again. Then I assume at some point in the future they'll be sold off to spammers or manipulators of some kind.
• paxys 2y ago
  Translated: "Buy this garbage stock so I can finally make some money from this damn company" – Paul Graham
  • pm90 2y ago
    Does he actually have a financial stake though? It was sold to Conde Nast…I just assumed all the equity transferred over to them.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • paxys 2y ago
      It's complicated. Reddit was founded and funded by YC in 2005, then acquired by Conde Nast in 2006, then spun off again in 2012. Since then it has attracted ~8 more rounds of funding. Advance Publications (parent of Conde Nast) currently only owns 30% of the company, Tencent 11%, Fidelity 9.5%. Notably, Sam Altman also invested in Reddit in 2014 when he was president of YC, and now his "investment properties " own 8.7%. What the composition of that investment vehicle is, and how YC/Paul Graham are involved, I can't say.
• hersko 2y ago
  Reddit has completely destroyed their mobile website to drive users to their (bad) app. They also destroyed most of their app competitors with the whole API fiasco.
• badgers 2y ago
  I remember Digg being more popular than Reddit more than a decade ago. What happened that caused Reddit to succeed where Digg failed?
  • Kye 2y ago
    Digg was more self-immolation than failure. Reddit succeeded by being the place people fled to from Digg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#Digg_v4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#Digg_v4 Reddit is on the same path, but it's more of a slow burn.
    • jmclnx 2y ago
      > Many users, upon finally reaching the site, complained about the new design Sounds like Reddit. When I go to reddit, I use "old.reddit.com". I hate the new version, once old.reddit disappears, I disappear too.
      • the_duke 2y ago
        If old.reddit didn't still have a very sizeable user base they definitely would have killed it by now, so you are not alone.
        • nickelpro 2y ago
          It's only about 5% of users, which is sizable but not unkillable by any means. The third-party mobile apps had way, way more than that and they proved very killable.
          • pavel_lishin 2y ago
            I wonder how much those 5% contribute compared to the folks using the new interface.
      • Kye 2y ago
        The lack of an obvious place to go seems to be all that stands between Reddit and total collapse. Instead of an obvious Digg->Reddit type path, it's more like Reddit->a bunch of less than equivalent options. You've got your Lemmys and Lobsters and so on, but none of them are a centralized catch-all. I can't (for example) go to Lobsters and talk about Star Trek in a /r/DaystromInstitute equivalent, and the official equivalent running on Lemmy is far from equivalent to what the subreddit was before all this chaos. It's kind of the same deal with Twitter. Twitter was the place ~everyone went to as forums collapsed. Now there's [Discord, new forums, Reddit, 9000 different ActivityPub platforms, Bluesky, Cohost, ...] and none are quite a match for what even the narrowest niche used Twitter for. You could easily go from your forum chat threads and topical threads and recreate that experience on Twitter with a high level of fidelity. Digg->Reddit was similar. There's no obvious match for the centralized platforms because they sucked up all the energy for creating new centralized platforms that existed before.
• westmeal 2y ago
  Posts about the reddits on orange reddit :)
  • gingerrr 2y ago
    is reddit not already orangered?
    • westmeal 2y ago
      cant really argue with this logic...
• adamc 2y ago
  Reddit has become steadily less useful to me; the UI is awful. The endless pressure to use their app is irritating. So I dunno that I buy this adulation of Steve.
  • rideontime 2y ago
    Steve = spez, right? Not seeing a lot of adulation of him these days.
    • 1oooqooq 2y ago
      his best idea was to "make the use-the-app popups in the browser so annoying that people will finally give up and move to the app they hate"... so all of reddit was full of hate-memes for spez recently.
      • rideontime 2y ago
        A glance at his profile shows he hasn't posted anything since the intense backlash against the API changes: https://old.reddit.com/user/spez/ https://old.reddit.com/user/spez/ Doesn't exactly inspire confidence!
        • 1oooqooq 2y ago
          oh yeah, the api changes were because everyone moved to 3rd party apps, because the official one is garbage, and he had just killed the site with the use-the-app popups... so they changed the api to kill the 3rd party apps lol.
        • ttepasse 2y ago
          He posts in other peoples posts. ;)
    • phone8675309 2y ago
      Does he still edit comments in the database if the don't align with his political preferences?
• sakura24 2y ago
  [dead]
• nazgulsenpai 2y ago
  > Aaron was younger, a college freshman, and even more anti-authority than Steve. It's not exaggerating to describe him as a martyr for what authority later did to him. I started reading this cynically curious if Aaron would even be mentioned, but well said.
  • sakura24 2y ago
    [dead]
  • abadpoli 2y ago
    The NPR piece on Reddit this morning stated it was founded by Steve Huffman and Alex Ohanian, and didn’t even mention Aaron Swartz.
    • sparky_z 2y ago
      He wasn't really a founder though. He was brought in months later because his own startup idea hadn't got any traction. He's a founder only in the same way that Elon is a "founder" of Tesla - a retroactive title that was the result of a deal.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      • FredPret 2y ago
        The Elon-hate is so crazy to me. He pitched in a lot of cash at a do-or-die moment in Tesla's history. He then served as the CEO and driving force through some extremely lean and tough years, including working like hell to raise capital (which isn't optional if you're making cars) Would we have Tesla today without Musk? No. Would electric cars be ubiquitous if it was up to the likes of Ford, GM, Mercedes, Toyota to push the tech? No. It is, of course, entirely OK to dislike him - but at least admit his contributions.
        • FactKnower69 2y ago
• shubhamjain 2y ago
  > There needed to be something like del.icio.us/popular, but designed for sharing links instead of being a byproduct of saving them. I am kind of surprised that the idea was Paul Graham's. I always assumed that it was Steve and Alex who came up with it. Considering HN was also started by PG, which has survived and grown with just a few changes every year, I think he has a unique talent for creating lasting online communities. It's not an easy task, btw.
  • mportela 2y ago
    > I think he has a unique talent for creating lasting online communities And, most importantly, money
• the_gipsy 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • frame_ranger 2y ago
    [dead]
• frame_ranger 2y ago
  [dead]
• _Marak_ 2y ago
  Now that Reddit is a public company, will information about the "maxwellhill" account be released?
  • jtriangle 2y ago
    That'd be bad for the shareholders, so, no.
• 1970-01-01 2y ago
  Social media as a concept is in big trouble: Facebook, Tiktok, and others are constantly explaining themselves in Washington. Twitter has transformed into Elon Musk's media toy. Reddit is full of echo chambers that produce very little original content.
• observationist 2y ago
  You can incrementally delete your posts and interactions while backing them up. Once done, you can request your user data to verify that deletion has taken place, and then cancel the account. https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite , this and other tools make it easy to manage. Reddit has hamfistedly broken whatever value it once had as a platform for long form discussion, with the interesting and valuable fringe, hobbyist, and obscure niche forums having been banned or moderated into inane milquetoast. Now, its value seems primarily as a customer support resource for companies outside the US, or as a platform for attracting clicks on other platforms. Reddit's going the way of MySpace. Unless you like burning money, this IPO is one to skip. All the things that made Reddit great, once, are gone now. There are no compelling reasons to use it; it's slow, intrusive, disrespectful to user privacy, performatively moralizing and preachy, caters to the worst sort of moderation and curation power dynamics, and serves no relevant purpose in the ecosystem of the modern internet. The best and only value of Reddit comes from older archives of scraped content now used as training data for AI.
  • mr_mitm 2y ago
    > Reddit has hamfistedly broken whatever value it once had as a platform for long form discussion, with the interesting and valuable fringe, hobbyist, and obscure niche forums having been banned or moderated into inane milquetoast. Now, its value seems primarily as a customer support resource for companies outside the US, or as a platform for attracting clicks on other platforms. It's so sad. They really had a good thing going. I like to believe that it could have been a sustainable marvel of the internet of the likes of Wikipedia, if they had just stuck to reddit gold and non-intrusive ads for the revenue. How much can it cost to keep the servers going? The source code for the old reddit seems pretty stable and not like it requires tons of maintenance or the attention of many devs.
    • lenerdenator 2y ago
      That's because Wikipedia isn't run by a Silicon Valley swamp creature. It provides a decent living for those who run the corporate side of things, but was never intended to create millionaires. Keeping the servers running isn't a cost that will grow exponentially; you need a lack of focus on the product by incompetent people who think they should be unfathomably wealthy to get the revenue demands that Reddit has now.
• theGnuMe 2y ago
  Congrats to Reddit and YC. An example of the adage that all successful businesses succeed despite themselves and why product market fit is so important. I remember the early days.. I deleted that early account b/c reddit was so addictive. And it arguably still is. I remember receiving a few replies from Aaron. He was a kid who was living in the future way ahead of his time. I migrated here though when reddit diversified subreddits.. kinda like when Facebook opened up to the world reddit became less useful for conversation. And I've gone through a few accounts/handles for the same reasons here as reddit. Downvotes and even distributed slashdot moderation work to discourage conversation and ultimately engagement unless you garner a critical mass to break out of the algorithm. I imagine post engagement follows Zipf's law. This probably explains why people buy upvotes and followers etc... No site is immune to this as far as I can tell. Niche subbreddits help but then those tend to be actively moderated. Very specific forums also tend to be better for specific things (like car forums). Good advice is to never read the comments to the things you post and I guess that means replies as well :) .. It's a weird dynamic because what all humans really need is to be heard.. And yet magic internet points are not quite the correct filter. Maybe AI will save us.
• baal80spam 2y ago
  Argh - the font is nigh-unreadable on a FullHD monitor. Why on earth does the modern web UI insist on the SUPER-THIN variants of fonts?
  • RIMR 2y ago
    This is Paul Graham we're talking about. The man who on 12/23/2023, for the first time ever, installed a valid SSL certificate on his website. Once you adjust browser settings enough to read the content he publishes, you'll notice that he praises the recent developments at Reddit, so let's just say he's not a guy that follows best practices or understands good UX.
• SSLy 2y ago
  there's an ongoing flagging tug of war on this post.
  • doodlebugging 2y ago
    You're right. Many old comments that may have attempted to shed light on the skeletons in someone's closet related to prosecution of Aaron Swartz are gone.
  • bitcharmer 2y ago
    This is something I noticed in the past few months here. Gang-flagging clearly intensified on HN but it doesn't look like any of HN moderators care.
• neilv 2y ago
  > The Reddits were the "Cell food muffins." "Muffin" is a term of endearment Jessica uses for things like small dogs and two year olds. So that gives you some idea what kind of impression Steve and Alexis made in those days. They had the look of slightly ruffled surprise that baby birds have. LifeProTip: If the idea you pitch is obviously nonviable, be just so adorable.
  • dougSF70 2y ago
    As a successful VC, this is the core of my investment thesis.
    • neilv 2y ago
      At last, techbro ageism explained. VCs: "Ooo... Little baby founder so cute, I just want to fund you right up... Oh yes, I do! Yes, I do!" New Techbro: "I'm the special little baby." Same Techbro a Few Years Later: "Why are the special little babies in charge?" Newer Techbro: "OK, boomer."
  • lubesGordi 2y ago
    Seriously! Can these people not even read what they write or are they so out of touch with reality. Jesus.
• reagan83 2y ago
  Paulg taking a victory lap in really odd fashion: telling a couple of kids what he wanted them to build, saying he predicted ordering fast food on your cellphones was a bad idea and still can’t be done today (DoorDash?). This whole write-up seems off.
  • chankstein38 2y ago
    Agreed. It feels forced. "Hey Paul, we're doing an IPO soon, can you write something about how cool we are?"
    • rjbwork 2y ago
      My thoughts exactly. PG just writing a fluff piece to try to get them a lil IPO pop.
      • rchaud 2y ago
        https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
    • edanm 2y ago
      I admire pg. But I kind of doubt anything he writes will make any difference for the Reddit IPO.
  • ajkjk 2y ago
    Yeah, it's definitely marketing.
  • Tenoke 2y ago
    Yeah, I don't understand what he even means. >a way to order fast food on your cellphone. >[...]So it was not going to happen. It still doesn't exist, 19 years later. How does this not exist?? If there was a further problem with their idea why did he describe it in the way of something that not only exists but is super popular? Has he grown completely out of touch or what's going on?
• rideontime 2y ago
  > when Steve came back in 2015, I knew the world was in for a surprise. > If Reddit could grow to the size it had with management that was harmless at best, what could it do if Steve came back? We now know the answer to that question. Or at least a lower bound on the answer. Steve is not out of ideas yet. Does anybody know what "ideas" he's talking about? When I think back to recent developments at Reddit, all that comes to mind is the 3rd-party app fiasco and the "collectible avatars" and "Moons"/"community points" nobody but crypto speculators wanted anything to do with (and are now dead). Oh, and the death of celebrity AMAs after they fired Victoria.
  • relaunched 2y ago
    I think he's talking about Yishan Wong and Ellen Pao. BTW, true or not, that's a hell of a way to refer to them, respectively.
    • rideontime 2y ago
      I guess it was unclear, I meant what's improved at Reddit since spez's return?
      • iends 2y ago
        As far as I can tell it's gotten worse from a user perspective.
    • Macha 2y ago
      Honestly neglect sounds more like the pre-Yishan era where Reddit was effectively a few people in the metaphorical corner of a conde nast office.
  • jtriangle 2y ago
    Not to mention Steve editing users' posts, Ellen Pao being in the same social circle as Epstein, Maxwellhill conspicuously going silent when Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested, promising and then failing to deliver on direct user funding and adrev sharing, and flatly ignoring user feedback for the better part of a decade.
• jpadkins 2y ago
  [flagged]
• bilekas 2y ago
  A really good idea, that had an honest to the user direction originally, it seems the natural progression towards making financial sense for people who got involved unfortunately has pushed some of the communities away from it a bit. It would be good to go back to a real user driven approach instead of "user driven, when values and priorities are in-line". I've had many memorable years there, but after leaving I haven't felt I am missing anything special anymore. It's a lot of recycled content, bot heavy, power drunk mods.. I'll cross my fingers for an improvement but not so confident.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• LispSporks22 2y ago
  > it's almost unkillable. Kills my iPhone XS Max daily though. The navigation is completely broken as well. Some things don’t close, back button might or might not work, never seems to remember where I was before, frequently rescrolling stuff. This is all after ad blocking. Without it, endless spam of embedded ads distracting me, wasting my time. Janky loading, page hangs on clicks. I’m not sure wtf their engineering team is doing but the site’s basically broken. Maybe it’s the normal state of things. Before I was using some third party app that was working great until Reddit killed api access. My usage of it has dropped as well. It’s just unpleasant to use now.
  • ToucanLoucan 2y ago
    I was a frequent and enthusiastic contributor to dozens of niche subreddits about various techy topics, chiefly because it was a great way to kill time while using the restroom, shopping with the wife, all manner of things that are notable in that I don't have a computer. After using Apollo for so long, the reddit app is downright torture and I refuse to use it. I still occasionally reddit on a computer since the mobile experience is abysmal both in app and browser, but I'd be shocked if I manage 5% of my previous rate of activity. On the one hand, thanks reddit, I got a ton of free time back. On the other hand, that time was previously spent generating value for your website, so not sure that was a good move for you. Edit: Also, and this is strictly second-hand info from the Apollo dev who obviously is far from an unbiased source, but I have to admit alongside the thing just being objectively worse to use, my views of the reddit corporate structure also soured significantly. I think what they did with the API changes was a boneheaded move to be sure, but the way they went about it was so uniquely shitty to the people who had built small businesses around theirs that it truly boggled the mind. The dev for Apollo posted quite a bit around the "negotiations" if one wants to be generous and call them that in the lead up to the API changes, and the CEO just blatantly lied about him numerous times, in obvious ways, trying to paint him as this entitled kid in such a way that as a millennial, I have to admit I am THOROUGHLY sick of. Reddit as a company simply jacked the price, with barely any notice, refused to negotiate on a single point throughout and made numerous bad-faith claims about the developers who were (understandably) caught off guard. Like if you just want to close the API, fine, close it. But then that would paint reddit as the obvious bad guy, so instead they went round the back way with this "api price change" that was so ludicrously expensive that no app could possibly cover it, and then reddit gets to PR speak the thing as "well we tried to work with developers" in a blatantly bullshit way without technically lying. It's gross and tiresome and frankly, insults the intelligence of every reddit user. I can't say for certain if this wasn't the case that I'd still be using it more, as the app and mobile experiences are truly shit even without that. But this certainly has cooled my fervor to try to find ways to use it.
• rybosworld 2y ago
  Reddit has severely damaged their reputation recently, and usage has dropped. I'm pretty sure the article is just an attempt at revising history in front of the IPO.
  • jahlove 2y ago
    according to their S-1, usage did not drop. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1713445/000162828024006294/reddits-1q423.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1713445/000162828024...
    • Scoundreller 2y ago
      Did growth rate take a pause?
      • pleasantpeasant 2y ago
        Not sure but there seems to be a lot more bots on reddit. Entire threads with hundreds of comments from bots are all around reddit.
        • jonchurch_ 2y ago
          I can't dispute this, but since you shared an anectdote I will also. I haven't seen this in any of the communities I visit personally. Do you mean bot accounts which are passing themselves off as real people and karma farming? Or bots that self identify as such to fill a legit need? not out to defend reddit here, it also feels to be going donwhill to me, but this is not something I've personally experienced on the site yet
          • cdelsolar 2y ago
            "everything i don't like is a bot"
            • the_doctah 2y ago
• oglop 2y ago
  I stopped using it when I noticed it had those strange banners about language in every single subreddit. It was weird to go talk about a programming question and see that. ChatGPT gives me most what I got on Reddit without the weirdos and constant speech policing. Which is to say, half baked information and random wastes of time digging into some historical or scientific thing. Reddit 10 years ago was fun and weird, Reddit now is a safe space meant for a wide audience and so it’s lost most the edge and fun to me. Or maybe I got old.
• photochemsyn 2y ago
  see also: Reddit Data API Update: Changes to Pushshift Access - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35776848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35776848 16 comments Reddit's proposed API changes and the continued existence of RedReader - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35767700 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35767700 109 comments Reddit comments and submissions collected by Pushshift - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36038684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36038684 294 comments Since they disabled the ability to search effectively using pushshift, I haven't been back to Reddit myself.
• relaunched 2y ago
  This article understates how big the content discovery problem was on the web, at those times. Delicious, Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit and a million others. Reddit is the Craigslist of content discovery, in so many ways.
  • zachmu 2y ago
    Except craigslist makes a ton of money
    • bink 2y ago
      Reddit had $900 million in revenue last year.
      • rm_-rf_slash 2y ago
        Kid named opex
      • okwhateverdude 2y ago
        But how much profit? And how much of that revenue was spent on spez's comp?
        • frankdenbow 2y ago
          Appears to be about $341k ""A Securities and Exchange Commission filing said Huffman in 2023 got a salary of $341,346, which is relatively low for a CEO of a major public corporation. In February, this was raised to $550,000. He also got a $792,000 bonus last year based on Reddit's user numbers, revenue, and a type of profitability known as adjusted EBITDA that excludes certain expenses." "The bulk of his compensation package is now in restricted stock units and stock options. A lot of this compensation is based on Huffman staying at Reddit through late 2028, and some is triggered by completing Reddit's initial public offering, the SEC filing said. Half of the stock options vest at $25.29, a relatively easy bar to reach. The other half vest only if Reddit shares reach $45, $60, and $90 in public-market trading over 10 years, the SEC filing says — that's a higher bar and aligns the CEO's interests with shareholders."
• ChrisArchitect 2y ago
  It's not fundamental, it's a glorified forum host, not to say that isn't immensely useful in the current landscape. But it's also very much a result of timing that it is still here. The history is often overlooked: when digg imploded/shot itself in the foot, Reddit was in the right place at the right time and got lucky. Somewhere for the exodus to go to. Reddit itself was failing fast and on its last legs at the time held afloat by its core users and that's it. They didn't know what they were going to do and rather than being visionaries in any way really they got lucky hosting everyone with a slew of very standard web 2.0 features. And as with any social site, it's the userbase/community that pulls it thru darkness to the where it is now.
  • J_Shelby_J 2y ago
    Besides general luck and timing, there are two other factors reddit had going for it. 1) It was never the hot social media site, and still to this day it's a dark horse with even some of my peers not "getting it." We're finally seeing it get the user base and mass market usage of other social media platforms. But it's been an extraordinarily long process. So it was never a hot place to work that attracted product managers / MBAs / status seekers that would come in and META the site. And I think even the investors and/or owners didn't know what to do with it, and were kinda content to just ignore it and let it do it's thing. 2) General incompetence. Search broken for decades. Videos broken for decades. Limited features for decades. Inability to make a native app that's usable. Not to say that I mind the UI of old.reddit.com. But that the Reddit team moved so slow to do anything. The only time the acted with expedience was when controversies occurred. Yeah, they're finally rolling out new stuff, but it's only been in the past 2-3 years that dev on the platform has picked up. But the thing is, this is the REASON Reddit has become as important as it is. A "competent" startup would of enshitified reddit and it would of died 15 years ago. Just like Digg. Instead we got almost a decade where the site looked like the frontpage of hackernews. And in that time, users kept creating high quality text content. And that content brought other users. And it slowly snowballed to the point where reddit is now the place to get genuine human text content on any topic. This is not something that could of occurred in the sort of time frame most startups or VCs operate in. And now they're trying to play a game that doesn't exist anymore (social media in the 2010s), and destroying the site with bad UI, hostility to the primary content creators, changes to the algorithm to prioritize engagement vs. nurturing quality content. It's sad, but I'm happy Reddit existed for as long as it did.
• unethical_ban 2y ago
  " In those days the top forum for programmers was a site called Slashdot." /. still exists, and I still go a few times a week out of habit. The level of discourse varies widely, but at least I know I'm usually talking to a human and not an Asian bot farm.
• pants2 2y ago
  Reminder that in 2014, Reddit planned on giving away 10% of its stock to dedicated power users and moderators[1], before Ellen Pao (briefly) and then Steve rejoined as CEO. 1. https://techcrunch.com/2014/09/30/reddit-fundraising/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/09/30/reddit-fundraising/
• bastardoperator 2y ago
  People are already raging that Reddit can't pay moderators, but that Spez takes more compensation than Tim Cook while his company reports losses. Reddit said it themselves, one similar website could take them out and that's exactly what I see happening once the landscape changes from community to profit which to your point is already happening given recent events.
  • csa 2y ago
    > one similar website could take them out I’m guessing disaggregation will hollow them out by taking away many of the high-engagement subreddits, and only then will one website be able to come in to start the reintegration cycle. I’m guessing something similar to Discord, but discoverable via search, will be the Reddit killer. De-centralized, self-moderated, payment options available, the company optimizes the tool rather than the content, etc. A system like that removes most of the headaches that the current Reddit ecosystem causes.
  • ctrw 2y ago
    Mods are raging that they are getting paid. Users don't care because mods are power tripping assholes who make spez look classy by comparison.
  • jeffwask 2y ago
    Two executives combined my over $300 million or better than a third of the total operating revenue and they "can't" pay moderators.
  • TeaBrain 2y ago
    People moderate on Reddit because they enjoy doing so. The mods may complain about not getting paid, but they'll continue moderating anyways. If they don't, then other people will actively volunteer to take their place.
  • dmoy 2y ago
    You couldn't pay me to mod a big sub (again, I did it for a couple years). The mod queue of a large sub is soul-crushing (at least where large is >10M, idk about smaller ones). Humans can be real *******s. And the admins don't appear to care about it at all.
• concordDance 2y ago
  > Reddit has a certain personality — curious, skeptical, ready to be amused — and that personality is Steve's. This really does not match my experience of the site. Citations are vanishingly rare and myths get repeated endlessly.
• ecommerceguy 2y ago
  Obligatory link to an article covering how Reddit got started - Tons of fake accounts https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-huge-tons-of-fake-accounts--2 https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-huge-t...
• deleted 2y ago
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• shombaboor 2y ago
  reddit's success shows how much luck and timing is involved. It was basically a digg clone until digg imploded on their own and everyone flocked to reddit. Kevin rose should be listed as a cofounder.
  • IncreasePosts 2y ago
    Digg was just a poor man's fark!
    • shombaboor 2y ago
      fark pioneered foobies and i really have to think reddit nsfw has some of the biggest communities
• rndmwlk 2y ago
  >If Reddit could grow to the size it had with management that was harmless at best, what could it do if Steve came back? Harmless at best wasn't enough, so let's bring in actively harmful! I'm being hyperbolic but Reddit doesn't really seem to have grown in any meaningful way for a long time; frankly, it has regressed in many ways since Steve has regained the reins. Steve is operating with more info than I am, so maybe all his decisions are sound from a business perspective, but as a user I've only seen Reddit become less useful, less novel, less active, and less enjoyable. As a result I use it less, and I know others use it less as well. There is no real moat to Reddit outside of it's user base, if they continue to push too hard I don't see how they survive.
• shmatt 2y ago
  I really dont understand the hate. Reddit to me is a mini Facebook, with some added anonimity * Mods dont get paid - Facebook Groups has niche groups much bigger than niche subreddits. I subscribe to both FB and Reddit for the car models I own, the FB groups are 10x bigger with 20x posts. Those mods dont get paid either, and Facebook as a much bigger spam/fake account problem to work tirelessly to defend your group against * No API / 3rd Party access - well, just try asking Meta for a free API to build an adless wrapper around the Facebook wall, good luck But spez is the bad guy here and zuck is a saint. Or they're both bad guys but if you think that, then spez is on the right trajectory to easily have a $20b company in 5 years People seem to be confusing - high potential for profits with building an adless platform that also has succesfully passed the network effect
  • esafak 2y ago
    I'm surprised you have been on this site for ten years and have the impression that zuck is considered a saint.
  • sebastos 2y ago
    What you're missing is that up until relatively recently, folks were still holding out hope that Reddit could remain a place that was enjoyable to interact with regularly. It's only the last 5 years that it has completely degraded into an obnoxious hellscape that you occasionally have to pinch your nose and deal with to extract some information that is unfortunately buried there. Facebook, on the other hand, degraded into a hellscape a long, long time ago. The facebook wounds have healed, whereas the reddit wounds are fresh. Plus, people liked using Reddit a lot more than they ever liked Facebook at their respective peaks. You're seeing people coping with a deeper and more recent loss.
  • deleted 2y ago
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• abxytg 2y ago
  rest in peace Aaron Swartz
• FactKnower69 2y ago
  Cute revisionist puff piece about Steve Huffman, moderator of r/Jailbait
  • nosrepa 2y ago
    I'm not defending Steve, but at that time anyone could be added to the moderator list without their consent.
    • WatchDog 2y ago
      Reddit also made a special unique trophy for the top moderator of r/jailbait
• thepasswordis 2y ago
  This thread is so sad. Reddit was a big important part of the internet for like 15 years. People used to do massive Reddit meetups all the time back around 2010, and some of them were really fun. I still have some very close, family like friends that I met at those meetups. But now? Almost every comment here talks about how much they hate it. I honestly agree with the hate, and again that’s really sad to me. I truly think it’s the moderators that destroyed it. Reddit didn’t do a good job of defining their roles, and they power tripped their way into community destroying behavior. Half the people I know who used to run and attend meetups for my city’s subreddit are now banned from even participating in it, always from some stupid petty fight the moderators had with them[1]. It makes me wonder what types of people are still posting there? [1] there was a big push a while ago to replace the community mods with people who do “social media” professionally. The old mods that live in my city and people know got semi-threatened with doxxing (hey nice job you have there do they know your Reddit account?) and removed themselves to be replaced by “professionals”. Such pathetic internet drama. Anyway: we all collectively pour one out for the Reddit that once was. It can go to internet heaven with fark, slashdot, digg, stumbleupon, delicious, etc.
  • bitcharmer 2y ago
    I agree about the mods being a major driving force behind reddit's accelerating enshittification. It went very fast from a platform for exchanging interests and ideas to personal fiefdoms of sub moderators and their private political beliefs. And it doesn't help that all major subs are modded by the same narrow group of people. How reddit the company has no problems with that is beyond me. Apparently that's exactly what they want.
    • WatchDog 2y ago
      It’s funny seeing pg talk about Steve being anti authority, when the authorities of reddit are such a negative part of it. It’s quite alarming how reddit has made no effort to encourage a higher quality of moderators.
• thepasswordis 2y ago
  Did anybody else get offered the “directed shares”? Seems so freaking scammy to ask your users to provide you with your exit liquidity. I’m talking about this: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/22/reddit-will-let-users-buy-its-ipo-but-warns-that-they-could-make-the-stock-riskier.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/22/reddit-will-let-users-buy-it...
  • hollerith 2y ago
    If they didn't make the offer, they'd be criticized for offering any of the "pie" to users who helped them succeed.
  • s1artibartfast 2y ago
    Anyone who opted in could have doubled their money this morning. Is it still a scam with this knowledge? It was an option offered. Nobody's hand was forced.
  • urbandw311er 2y ago
    I’ve steered clear of anything like that since the Deliveroo IPO. I bought into the offer of “special early access” shares as a regular user of the platform… …then watched their value spectacularly plummet over the next few years while the founders rode off into the sunset with my cash…
• dom96 2y ago
  Reddit banned my account without warning because I created a Reddit API mirror. I even followed their API docs by including my Reddit username in the user agent used by my HTTP client, I thought I was giving them the ability to reach out if the mirror was causing them pain but nah, they just banned me. It was at that point that I realised all the protests that were happening weren’t going to go nowhere, and indeed that is what happened. Reddit has lost its way ever in a major way in the pursuit of profit.
• keiferski 2y ago
  It's very weird that for as many problems as Reddit has, there doesn't seem to be any serious VC-funded competition. Why is that? Every other social site has a half dozen well-capitalized competitors. Is it because Twitter/X and TikTok occupy all of the social media attention? Or because a forum is filled with mostly young people simply isn't a scalable business?
  • munificent 2y ago
    Network effects dominate all other forces when it comes to communities.
    • keiferski 2y ago
      Sure but there have been numerous exodus moments from Reddit over the last ±5 years. Even today, my feeling is that no one really likes posting on Reddit itself, it's just kind of...there. There aren't any alternatives. It's a very different situation from say, TikTok vs. Facebook, in which I think TikTok is simply a superior product.
      • munificent 2y ago
        > it's just kind of...there. There aren't any alternatives. Yes, that's the network effect in action. It's like having a bar you don't like that all your friends go to. You can try going to another bar, but your friends aren't there. You can try to talk your friends into going to the other bar with you but their friends are still at the first bar. Communities are incredibly sticky. > It's a very different situation from say, TikTok vs. Facebook That's largely because Facebook has gradually shifted away from being a community-oriented product and largely to a media-consumption one. If you're getting on Facebook to see pictures of your friends' kids, then some other app with a beautiful UX that has very nice pictures of strangers' children is not at all compelling. You're not there for the quality of the kid pics, you're there because it's your friends' kids. But if you're just getting on Facebook to scroll through memes and videos made by strangers (but perhaps incidentally reposted by people you know), then another app that shows you funnier memes and more entertaining videos will easily snap you up. The fact that Facebook transitioned away from extremely sticky community-oriented features towards mass popular media consumption seems like a shitty business strategy to me, but that's what they've done. Reddit is definitely going in that direction too. The mobile app in particular pushes you towards image and video subreddits, and it's inevitably harder to comment when using a phone where typing is a chore. Maybe that hardware transition is the root cause leading us away from more community-oriented apps. But, so far, Reddit still has enough community interaction to be very sticky. We'll see how long that lasts given the direction it's headed.
• dpflan 2y ago
  Why is now the time for a reddit IPO? Is it because of the idea that "data is oil", and reddit can sell enterprise subscriptions to access to its data? Someone who has reviewed the S-1, how are they making money? And what's the point of the IPO, deploy more capital to accomplish what?
  • bluescrn 2y ago
    If they get it done quickly, it might happen before the election (and then the fallout from the election) turns the site into an utter shitshow?
  • lupire 2y ago
    The time to IPO is before the value collapses. Trust the experts.
• cdme 2y ago
  Reddit going public meant reclaiming value they provided for "free" for users. The platform will only get worse for users as they try and claw their way to profitability.
  • barbazoo 2y ago
    Honestly I wish this would happen sooner rather than later. There's too many people on there being exposed to profanity, xenophobia, bigotry. I will applaud them for any decision that will drive more normal people away from their platform.
    • cactusplant7374 2y ago
      What's wrong with profanity?
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
• Dutroli 2y ago
  [dead]
• mikewarot 2y ago
  I remember Reddit. It used to be a great place to meet others with the same niche interests. It's a shame they self immolated. My only regret is that I didn't remove all of my comments before deleting my account. I'll never forgive them.
  • pas 2y ago
    > My only regret is that I didn't remove all of my comments before deleting my account. don't beat yourself up about this, because they are the kind of scumbags that spend time and money on detecting these deleted/removed comments and then backfilling them. > I'll never forgive them. we got too attached and they exploited it. they are abusive assholes, but we need to let it go, heal, find/create new and better online/offline communities (and platforms). Mastodon is quite nice!
  • BHSPitMonkey 2y ago
    Self immolation implies making a personal sacrifice in the name of a cause. In this case, they betrayed a set of their users with the goal of greatly increasing their wealth, and that outcome is now happening.
  • p337 2y ago
    I did a data request, and then encrypted every single one of my comments, and made a web app to decrypt it lol. I randomly get messages from people still decrypting the most random stuff and either mocking me or complimenting the idea. Highly recommend this route vs deleting because a rando can still read your content, but it's not as useful to Reddit itself.
    • hsjsbeebue 2y ago
      Not sure if it was you but I have seen such encrypted comments before.
    • the_doctah 2y ago
      If randos are decrypting your reddit comments then you didn't use very strong encryption.
• deleted 2y ago
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• OrvalWintermute 2y ago
  Paul is wrong on Reddit, and I think his article written on 3/21/2024 shows how badly the perception of value is around Reddit with the community. Because, he is not a user of Reddit, or, has completely missed the zeitgeist of the community Users are outraged with Reddit The UI is continually getting worse, and is iterating on worse The Epstein/Maxwell relationship is insane, and previous political coverups evidences corruption at the highest levels of Reddit meant to ensure that only certain things frontpage. The Admin Mafia is a very real thing The pay levels of Reddit execs is nausea inducing Reddit is likely a great example of value destruction.
  • cactusplant7374 2y ago
    And yet the site is growing by millions of users every year. They must be doing something right. Isn't HN discounting a company that is going to become very profitable (like Facebook) because of some internet drama?
• deleted 2y ago
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• deleted 2y ago
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• annexrichmond 2y ago
  A bit of a rant, but I find it hard to believe pg goes on reddit much if this is how he feels. I remember years ago reddit was a lot more like HN. The comment section (even for the main subs) was much more intellectual and critical. People appeared to actually read posted articles. It was a thing where people would read the comment section before the article because everyone knew headlines were generally clickbait, and you could rely on some internet stranger to have analyzed the article and demonstrate the headline wasn't all as it seemed. But now it seems that no one reads the articles at all or care for any sort of discourse with people with different opinions. Comments are filled with just jabs and pitchforks. No different than comment sections on news sites. Yet Redditors still seem to have the arrogance that it had developed over the years that their communities are better than those sites. And well, they used to be, but now they're just as bad.
  • slingnow 2y ago
    And it's very clear to me that HN is next to suffer this fate
    • diggan 2y ago
      Luckily, we have the golden rule that will surely prevent this fate: > Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills. Bottom of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • theGnuMe 2y ago
      Not next, it already does... but hacker news is also very hard to kill.
    • sdflhasjd 2y ago
      HN has got worse in some places - I think size is the enemy of any community - but HN has comfortably sat behind the curve because it doesn't try to leave its niche. It is mostly outside forces that have changed HN (I.e growth of the general Internet population and big tech), whereas Reddit, etc try to change themselves (by changing their format and gamifying engagement)
• Havoc 2y ago
  Strange article. Is this an attempt to drum up enthusiasm pre ipo?
  • swyx 2y ago
    it is pg's tradition to blog memories about YC founders when they IPO. calm down
    • Havoc 2y ago
      Tradition? Which other IPOs has he done this for?
      • fragmede 2y ago
        the Airbnbs would be the previous one https://paulgraham.com/airbnbs.html https://paulgraham.com/airbnbs.html
    • linehedonist 2y ago
      Though presumably he can have both sincere and cynical motivations for such blog posts.
  • replwoacause 2y ago
    I had the exact same thought and I’m guessing most others did too.
  • linehedonist 2y ago
    Definitely
• saos 2y ago
  Anyone shorting the stock?
  • theGnuMe 2y ago
    IPOs traditionally trade below their IPO list price after a pop for about a year. However, if reddit can generate continued media buzz then it might do well?
  • mattnewton 2y ago
    the venn diagram of retail meme stock traders and redditors is almost a circle. I don't think anyone has the chaos-theory-modeling tea-leaf-reading ability to understand the timing around shorting this stock right after IPO.
• kn100 2y ago
  nuked my 8 year old account and all posts and comments I had there after their API bull. Lemmy isn't as enjoyable as the communities are far smaller and less engaged, but overall I've spent a lot less time scrolling for no reason so overall it's a win. same thing with Twitter and Mastodon, except I feel Mastodon was far more successful a transition for me.
• lupire 2y ago
  This article is an ad for the IPO, posted by an investor.
• s1artibartfast 2y ago
  It will be interesting to see the different takes from power users that opted in and out of the IPO at $34. I imagine that bitter power users who balked[1] at the offer will be further embittered if they lose out on a significant windfall. Stock is currently at $52 and dropping [2], and if I understand correctly, there was no post IPO lockup period. If so, I bet there was some champagne being popped at 1030 AM by those who opted in. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39772319 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39772319 https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/RDDT https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/RDDT
• SwellJoe 2y ago
  I always liked the reddits (Steve and Alexis), but I'm not overly fond of what reddit has become. And, I fear the beatings will continue until morale improves. I just don't think the incentives are aligned with building a good community, anymore, so there's nothing pushing reddit toward becoming good again and many things pushing toward exploitation of the near two decades of conversation found there.
• deleted 2y ago
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• hgs3 2y ago
  Is there an equivalent of Reddit run by a non-profit?
  • notatoad 2y ago
    the fediverse alternative is lemmy. the most popular and easiest way to get started is the instance at https://lemmy.world/ https://lemmy.world/ which is donation funded and doesn't appear to be doing any for-profit activities, but i don't think an actual registered non-profit.
• apercu 2y ago
  What I don't understand is the compensation. It is multiples and multiples of anything any similar company pays, albeit complicated by the fact that most similar companies are public and while CEO pay might _only_ be limited to a few million annually, there's usually millions in stock grants. I wonder if that was his play, but, again, it should have been equity. I don't care who you are, the odds of you having an impact versus someone else to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year are miniscule. Good for you if you get to join the club, I guess. But if we have learned anything the last few decades (Musk, Welch, Fiorina, Schwartz, Lay, Ebbers) is that the louder they are the more likely they believe their own legend and screw up. We don't like Jobs around here, but he's maybe the last CEO that was probably worth the hundreds of millions/billions. My perspective (due to my job) is probably different than a lot of peoples, I see leadership failures all day every day.
  • therealdrag0 2y ago
    You don’t think Cook or Nadella are worth it?
    • apercu 2y ago
      Isn't Cook going to make something like ~$65m this year? That's half of the Reddits CEO. And Tim Apple (kidding) is a logistics expert who has done an excellent job stewarding Apple. He's fairly impressive. I think Nadella's comp is similar. Look, it's not my job on this planet to decide what people should make. But I do think the vast majority of CEO's lack vision, true leadership skills, etc. We can point to a few exceptions at the largest companies, but there are millions of CEOs. Hell, Musk proves the point for us, supposedly CEO is is the hardest, most challenging and unforgiving job there is, yet somehow that clown is CEO/president/chief architect of 5 or 6 companies (and he spends more time on social media in a day than I do in a month, and I'm only running one very very small firm).
• jokoon 2y ago
  I hope he has fresh ideas for moderation when reddit goes public I can't wait for reddit to go public, it's going to generate a lot of drama we are in the decade of internet moderation, I don't understand why the world doesn't care enough about this problem
• superdisk 2y ago
  A few years ago I sent a message to spez on Reddit asking if he'd ever open source the original Lisp version of Reddit. He actually responded and said he couldn't find it, but then a while later it was indeed released. I like to think maybe I contributed to the butterfly effect of that happening. https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0 https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0
  • ahansen 2y ago
    That's really cool! Thanks for link. I guess I just never assumed that would be open sourced!
    • Antrikshy 2y ago
      Old versions of Reddit (in Python IIRC) were open source. They just stopped updating it.
  • seoulmetro 2y ago
    I once asked a famous biscuit (cookie) factory nearby in a smallish city that never gives tours whether I could tour the factory just as a bucket list check off and never expected to get anywhere. They said they don't do that and will never do that unfortunately. A couple weeks later they auctioned off tickets to the factory tours as a "special event". I felt incredibly sour from that. I felt like a little more of humanity had eroded.
    • husucueh 2y ago
      You wanted something from someone for free and then felt sour that they were going to charge for it? Are you friends with these people? Why do they owe you anything
      • QuantumG 2y ago
        I think the annoyance is that they weren't interested in giving tours until someone asked, and they figured out they could make a profit. Pretty reasonable to expect a ticket, even if it isn't free.
• ChildOfChaos 2y ago
  Reddit is kinda trash these days, more rubbish is added to it when all that matters is the core functionality. However with growth, it's just full of idiots, you go to any subreddit for something that you are interested in and it's just a toxic mess. I've jumped into subreddits for a particular brand/person before that I hadn't heard about recently or that I enjoyed some output from them, only to find that the people on such subreddits spend there entire time ripping such thing apart 24/7, why even subscribe to that subreddit, if you hate that thing? There are subreddits for a lot of things that I enjoy, but as I have gotten older, it's become an issue that most of the users are kids and therefore don't know what the hell they are talking about, I wouldn't have such conversations with such people in real life, but the issue with Reddit is I have no idea who these people are. Reddit certainly has the potential to be one of the most interesting places on the internet to me, connecting you to all sorts of interesting things and ideas, but it's more and more just becoming a toxic cesspool.
  • stevarino 2y ago
    Yeah. I joined Reddit pretty early and loved it for the longest time. It was my main social media place. But anytime a small community would grow in popularity and hit somewhere threshold, it would be overrun by the greater reddit population The subreddit would quickly lose what made the community special and core users would migrate or just stop. And volunteer moderation is bothe best idea ever and the worst. When it works it's awesome, but it feels as if it's only a matter of time. So when the API changes hit last year, I saw it as Reddit handing me my hat. The old reddit was no more. I couldn't use it how I wanted to use it, at least not without paying. And given that my reddit usage was more habit than value, I made the decision to accept how things are. I miss it. This PG post felt more like a eulogy than a promise, despite the closing. But I think I'm better without Reddit. At this point it seems to primarily be a content farm for AI agents, both producing and consuming. So maybe the dark-forest Internet is starting to arrive.
    • iamricks 2y ago
      I agree, Reddit communities after a certain point become awful. I think you can still find great communities but they feel like ticking time-bombs. Only a matter of time before they became too big and issues from large communities begin to spill in.
• spacecadet 2y ago
  Market manipulation in broad daylight. lol.
  • spacecadet 2y ago
    No downvotes here, direct attack at the Ycomb-King-Slum-Lord himself
• downrightmike 2y ago
  Reddit is a lemon. "Some invitees say they’re worried about the company’s financial situation. Reddit recorded a net loss of $90.8 million last year, an improvement from 2022, when its deficit came it at $158.6 million. The company said in its prospectus that it’s racked up a cumulative loss of $716.6 million." Reddit's CEO and COO made $193M and $93M in 2023 but their CFO "only" made $6.6M So if you eliminate the CEO and COO, they have a profitable business. Given those two have tried to kill the community over and again, why keep them?
  • epolanski 2y ago
    CEO and COO compensation is mostly stock, so you can't do math like this.
• scoofy 2y ago
  This is a bittersweet period for me. I'm a long time redditor, large subreddit creator, and even very large subreddit former mod. I've even met both Alexis and Steve because of reddit. At the same time, it's glaringly obvious that while the site was build for analytical, idealist, content contributor folks like me (i.e., the type of people who have contributed to wikipedia at least a few times), the site is being converted to focus on content consumption in order to reach a broader audience. I don't want to be mad. I still use old.reddit and tend to stick to the smaller subs I know and love (e.g. /r/RainbowEverything, /r/flashlight, /r/knolling, /r/ShittyDaystrom), but whenever I click on /r/all, I die a little bit inside, because it feels like I'm staring a reflection of the worst instincts of humanity (both the awful and the cliché), rather than the best of humanity I saw on the first days of /r/all when it was a way to add more blogs to my google reader feed. We all built a cool website together, and it was fun. I'll keep using it, but I probably wont ever actively moderate again, simply because it's obvious that they have a different vision. I've always found reddit to be the best of all the social media networks, simply because it actually requires people to engage instead of using it as a megaphone. I may even invest in it somewhere down the road if the financials make more sense.
  • ametrau 2y ago
    The best take here. It pays to scroll on HN. > whenever I click on /r/all, I die a little bit inside, because it feels like I'm staring a reflection of the worst instincts of humanity (both the awful and the cliché), It really is awful. Maybe worst of all are the “snark” subreddits for celebrity gossip and catty bullying. But as you also point out, that is, like it or not, broad, and broad is where the money is.
    • scoofy 2y ago
      For some reason I am as bothered by the "feel good" posts as the nasty ones. I really can't put my finger on why, but that type of content really just rubs me the wrong way too. For example, the top post on /r/all right now is: >TIL that singer Dionne Warwick, upset with misogyny in rap lyrics, once set up a meeting with Snoop Dogg and Suge Knight at her home, where she demanded that they call her a “bitch” to her face. Snoop Dogg later said “I believe we got out-gangstered that day.” https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1bk944c/til_that_singer_dionne_warwick_upset_with/ https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1bk944c/til_... I mean... what? It obviously didn't influence him substantially, as he still used "bitch" in his songs. I just don't get the point of something like this. It doesn't make me feel good, it just makes me confused at why this is a popular post.
• rdelpret 2y ago
  I’m waiting for the discord IPO personally.
• jdprgm 2y ago
  While I still use Reddit often I kind of hope this marks the decline and something new emerges. Pretty much anything and everything their army of devs have built over the past 5+ years has been anti user. I can't even remember the last time a positive new feature was added. (This also kind of feels broadly true for the majority of the consumer apps in recent years -- remember the 2010's when devs actually added new features for users to apps on a regular basis?) There are countless things I assumed would have been fixed years and years ago that never have been. For example the trash search engine where you are better off using google with site:reddit.com. I do wonder if it's incompetence or intentional. Would love to see something in a vein similar to what BlueSky is attempting with twitter clone for reddit. Have a lot of ideas in this area lately.
  • pedrogpimenta 2y ago
    Lemmy is to reddit as blue sky is to Twitter and both run on Activity pub, IIRC.
    • wlonkly 2y ago
      Mastodon instead of Bluesky and you've got it, I think. (Bluesky has its own protocol.)
      • tcmart14 2y ago
        Yes it does. Bluesky uses the AtProtocol.
      • spartanatreyu 2y ago
        I've really fallen in love with mastodon. I follow a whole bunch of developers, artists and some writers. It's such a breath of fresh air compared to what twitter ended up being.
  • anal_reactor 2y ago
    > Pretty much anything and everything their army of devs have built over the past 5+ years has been anti user. That's because you're a power user. Reddit owners figured out that even though the service gained popularity as a middle ground between 4chan and Facebook, they can make most money if they kick out weirdos and cater to general audience, so they're consistently making changes to make it appealing to average Joe. You can clearly notice how they're slowly but surely removing controversial content and promoting userbase growth over everything else. My prediction is that Reddit will keep growing, but it's simply going to be "Facebook, but for people 15 years younger".
• shawabawa3 2y ago
  > They told me about the startup idea we'd later fund them to drop: a way to order fast food on your cellphone. > So it was not going to happen. It still doesn't exist, 19 years later. Weird take. Doordash/Uber eats/deliveroo are huge companies and it's absolutely the same idea they had, they just had it too early
• satvikpendem 2y ago
  Speaking of reddit, this is one of the most interesting comments on the site, by cofounder and ex-CEO Yishan: > What's the best "long con" you ever pulled? >> Here's one. >> In 2006, reddit was sold to Conde Nast. It was soon obvious to many that the sale had been premature, the site was unmanaged and under-resourced under the old-media giant who simply didn't understand it and could never realize its full potential, so the founders and their allies in Y-Combinator (where reddit had been born) hatched an audacious plan to re-extract reddit from the clutches of the 100-year-old media conglomerate. >> Together with Sam Altman, they recruited a young up-and-coming technology manager with social media credentials. Alexis, who was on the interview panel for the new reddit CEO, would reject all other candidates except this one. The manager was to insist as a condition of taking the job that Conde Nast would have to give up significant ownership of the company, first to employees by justifying the need for equity to be able to hire top talent, bringing in Silicon Valley insiders to help run the company. After continuing to grow the company, he would then further dilute Conde Nast's ownership by raising money from a syndicate of Silicon Valley investors led by Sam Altman, now the President of Y-Combinator itself, who in the process would take a seat on the board. >> Once this was done, he and his team would manufacture a series of otherwise-improbable leadership crises, forcing the new board to scramble to find a new CEO, allowing Altman to use his position on the board to advocate for the re-introduction of the old founders, installing them on the board and as CEO, thus returning the company to their control and relegating Conde Nast to a position as minority shareholder. >> JUST KIDDING. There's no way that could happen. https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the_best_long_con_you_ever_pulled/cszjqg2/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the... The best part is all the responses by Steve Huffman, Sam Altman, and Ellen Pao, all related to the Reddit leadership at one time or another.
• nashashmi 2y ago
  Amazing that reddit hits $54 from a ipo of 34$ and all I see on HN is negativity … about how it doesn't make money … about how it has a bad user experience … about how it doesn’t credit the mods … about how it hurt the third party developers. Yada yada yada. Look if anything you should learn from this, its this. User experience doesn't have to be terrific. API after a good growth trajectory is less advantageous. There are no competitions for moderators because moderators are a dime a dozen. And you don’t have to make money if you’re growing or are a game changer (wallstreetbets). You just have to be here for the long run. The run when digg failed. The run when twitter went all the way into the hole. The run when facebook becomes friendster. The run when instagram becomes exhausting. The run when threads starts losing interest. The run when google stops giving good results so you keep going to reddit. The run when Microsoft office has bad help articles and so you must ask reddit. The run when stack exchange becomes a cesspool of tired experts but they find Reddit more enjoyable. The run when all of the memes words like AmA and OP and poopstick are not just geek words but real life issues that pervade every platform… like HN. The long run.
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• neoromantique 2y ago
  I started using VPN full-time and Reddit bans any datacentre ip address, does wonders to fight muscle memory built over decades to avoid this god forsaken site.
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• justinator 2y ago
  Now I miss del.icio.us.
• aragonite 2y ago
  > Their idea was bad though. And since we thought then that we were funding ideas rather than founders, we rejected them > ... we wanted to fund Steve and Alexis, so if their idea was bad, they'd have to work on something else > There needed to be something like del.icio.us/popular, but designed for sharing links instead of being a byproduct of saving them. So I called Steve and Alexis and said that we liked them, just not their idea, so we'd fund them if they'd work on something else. So PG is saying the seminal idea behind Reddit wasn't even conceived by the original founders? If so, it's not clear to me the post's concluding sentence ('Steve is not out of ideas yet') offers much solace. But I disagree that the idea responsible for Reddit's success is link-sharing. I think Reddit's success has a lot more to do with the ease of creating a dedicated discussion forum for any given topic simply by navigating to `reddit.com/r/[topic]`. Wikipedia already uses this approach for article creation, but there wasn't anything like that for discussion forums (in the US at least[1]) [1] Baidu Tieba preceded Reddit by 2 years, and Reddit is commonly referred to in China as the 'American Tieba' (e.g.: https://finance.sina.com.cn/roll/2024-03-21/doc-inapaxhk7062547.shtml https://finance.sina.com.cn/roll/2024-03-21/doc-inapaxhk7062...)
  • kromem 2y ago
    I've always felt their success was being the first large network using both threaded comments and up and down voting for visibility. That combination was killer, but also no longer unique.
    • adw 2y ago
      Slashdot was way way earlier. Also massively overcomplex (metamoderation) and full of trolls and much narrower. Reddit was basically Slashdot 4chan, in a meaningful sense.
      • lmm 2y ago
        Metamoderation was an elegant way to handle slashdot scale, particularly given that they didn't have anything like subreddits. I suspect that partly kept it "narrow" - if you weren't into tech news or whatever, then you wouldn't enjoy slashdot. For a while there was a whole family of sites using the same codebase but with a different community feel, like Plastic and I think maybe K5?
• Max-Ganz-II 2y ago
  My account on Reddit, and so as I am the founder also the sub r/AmazonRedshift, on 2023-09-30 looked to have been banned by an automated system. The sub appeared to be working normally, I posted about the Amazon Redshift Serverless PDF, and then Reddit began behaving oddly. After some investigation, and some guesswork, I concluded my account had been silently shadow-banned, and the sub banned (and then shortly after, deleted). (Shadow-banning means when you log in as yourself, you see all your posts, and you see them in the threads where they were made. If you view Reddit when logged out, you then see all your posts have been deleted.) Two years of posts and the sub disappeared, instantly, abruptly, without warning, reason, appeal process or notification, and Reddit is trying to lead me into thinking my account is still active. Make of that what you will. Having had that experience, I concluded Reddit is not a safe place to invest time in.
  • dmix 2y ago
    The lack of transparency with this stuff is really annoying. I guess they want to hide it from users so their admins aren't flooded with users complaining or something? Or so spam bots keep running in circles? But it's ripe for abuse and false positives. Most users wouldn't know what "shadow banned" even means or that it exists.
    • peeters 2y ago
      Yeah the point of shadow banning is so that trolls/bots continue to scream into the void, rather than creating a new account. I'm guessing it's only so long before human trolls notice, and I'm guessing that bots could just have automated ways of checking ("was my last post visible to an unauthenticated user?")
      • the_doctah 2y ago
        Very easy to verify. Make a post, go to the permalink, log out, and see if your post is still visible.
      • wraptile 2y ago
        This argument never made sense as it's trivial to verify even for most amateur bot creators. Just pull the public page and check if the comment is there - that's like a single line of code: Selector(httpx.get(url)).xpath("//div[text(),'my comment']")
• greenthrow 2y ago
  This is so detatched from reality it borders on lying. People went to Reddit over Slashdot not because news there was "faster" (it never, ever was) but because Reddit had and has porn. Slashdot never did. In fact, the biggest innovation of Reddit vs Digg and Slashdot before it, isn't mentioned here at all; you could create and moderate your own communities on Reddit. I guess that is hard to square with Reddit seizing control of so many communities in recent years. This also completely ignores the fake traffic and posts that the Reddit founders admitted to in the early days and certainly seems to be going on still today. Most subreddits seem to be a shadow of there former selves and feel like ghost towns. The front page and /r/all clearly have the books cooked on what appears there. Brand friendly posts jump up with barely any votes. One or two posts from popular subreddits almost seem to be chosen daily to appear there.
• capital_guy 2y ago
  Reddit has declined in quality significantly since the API changes. All my favorite subreddits lost their moderators, which were always the heart of the site. Couple that with their constantly pushing their own (objectively inferior) client and killing the best ways to browse the site, I've really dropped off on how much I use reddit.
• woah 2y ago
  From what I can tell, Reddit took a huge legacy forum product and pivoted into a modern social media app, using all the algorithmically addictive tricks in the modern social media app playbook. Their numbers look really good with consistent growth in MAU and revenue year over year: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/reddit-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/reddit-statistics/ And IIRC they are larger than such properties as Pinterest and Linkedin. I use the app daily, and it is full of activity on a huge number of subreddits. It seems like the only people who don't like Reddit are middle aged men on programming forums who nevertheless use old.reddit.com every day. They've basically created the TikTok of text content.
• Thorentis 2y ago
  Wait so Reddit wasn't even their idea? Paul just handed them an idea and a bunch of money to go with it?
• pmarreck 2y ago
  I'm banned across all of my Reddit accounts because I accidentally posted to a single subreddit that I had forgotten I had been banned months before on a different account (which was unjustified, but there's no arguing with a mod having a bad day who misinterpreted you and will not accept your apologies... I stopped trying to resolve it and just moved on. Big mistake.) They called this "circumventing a ban", take it very seriously (as they should, I guess, but COME ON!) and it triggers a ban across every identifiable account that is connected to you, which they achieve via AI heuristics and fingerprinting. And this is VERY effective. If you create a new account because you can't reach anyone about this (because you won't) just to get back to anyone who sent you messages or comments or whatever, they will call this "circumventing a ban AGAIN" and that will be strike 2 and when you THEN try to get help they will say "it says here that you have multiple circumvention attempts" (to an initially unjustified ban)... etc... Do you see where this is going? Once Reddit (in the form of a mod having a bad day) has decided you are a "bad actor" (whether true or not), it's completely a slippery slope to a sitewide ban. If anyone could help me unlock my Reddit accounts, I'd appreciate it (you can use my rep here perhaps) because it's honestly been a horrible development- example- most of my health issues had support forums there that are now read-only for me. The really unfortunate thing is that I spent much of my time trying to help other people on it, and not being able to do that has felt bad. For some evidence of this, see my HN comments (although this is not really a support forum, per se). I've been on Reddit since it was new (my original and oldest account dates to its earliest days: https://old.reddit.com/user/lectrick https://old.reddit.com/user/lectrick) and I'd appreciate any help!
• 8ig8 2y ago
  I came to Reddit via Alien Blue and stayed via Apollo. Now I check a few subs periodically in a browser, but my usage has drastically dropped without Apollo.
  • Seattle3503 2y ago
    I used RIF. When that shut down I started checking in on my various accounts much less often. Multiple of my 500k+ user subreddits have been banned for being unmoderated since then. Ah well.
    • Fatnino 2y ago
      You can make RIF work again using vanced. You create your own api key and swap it in to the apk and then it works again.
      • Seattle3503 2y ago
        Does it work now? When I tried that a couple of months ago it was broken.
        • Fatnino 2y ago
          I use it all the time now. If you want NSFW to work, you need to be a mod of a subreddit. Any sub, even one you make yourself with no posts ever.
          • thrdbndndn 2y ago
            I'm using Vanced-RIF rn, it works fine most of time but has some small problems (e.g. if you open a Reddit link in a comment, it would crash). I don't know if RIF-vanced still gets any "updates" to fix these minor issues? I assume not, but never checked.
  • replwoacause 2y ago
    Same, I quit using Reddit when they killed Apollo. Their app is terrible.
• ineedaj0b 2y ago
  I find Reddit to be wayyy too political for one side (that’s usually how clustering works) but without another guiding interest -like Tech here- it consumes and spreads to everything. The admin are kinder to banning the opposing Red team people who congregate there. I don’t mind this, but it selects for annoying people. This is further confusing when the site has many European users who are not even aware of the US political game. (look at the frontpage any day, it’s all Blue tribe with maybe 3-4 neutral animal posts. Why can’t it be 20 neutral things with 3-4 political posts?)
  • goalonetwo 2y ago
    From all the social medias, Reddit is the biggest echo chamber. The voting system that glorifies posts that are voted by the community and hides posts that don't go with majority's opinion creates that one-sided effect. I don't spend a lot of time on Reddit but whenever I do, I always see the most left-leaning naive takes being upvoted massively.
  • morbicer 2y ago
    Sorry, as European I don't understand how anyone can be team Red nowadays. I have respect for conservative viewpoint but Republican party got overtaken by very dangerous and at the same time stupid people. Democratic party might be corrupt and maybe focusing on wrong things but they are not trying to destroy democracy and outlaw human beings. Since Reddit demographics is mostly young and educated, no wonder it's leaning Blue. (The amount of tankie delusion on Reddit baffles me as well though)
    • the_doctah 2y ago
      >but they are not trying to destroy democracy and outlaw human beings. 1. Trying to destroy democracy how? 2. Trying to outlaw human beings how? Be specific. Because you are parroting mainstream media nonsense, but you are likely just ignorant as a European.
      • morbicer 2y ago
        This wiki article is pretty tame explanation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
• dogcomplex 2y ago
  Evil pays well in the short term. Reddit has been squeezing users and making their app unusable for quite some time. Lack of competent alternative and the difficulty of "porting" the data already there is all that's keeping it up. Still, they'll probably just try to buy any competition. Note: they don't even let you escape the reddit app browser for external links anymore - no copying url (or any page content/links), no "open in external browser". Absolute pure evil UX.
• wilgertvelinga 2y ago
  If you enjoy visual representations, try https://scrolldit.com/ https://scrolldit.com/
• replwoacause 2y ago
  Is this just a promo puff piece for the IPO?
• exreddit 2y ago
  Figured I'd share this since its comp info you don't normally see. A lot of people made a lot of money today. I got 150,000 options for Reddit very early after it was spun out. With today's price, that's $7.5M, but I didn't get all 4 years of vesting, the pay was below-average, and my money was tied up. During the same decade, the faangs were up 12x on average, but the pay was better, and my money would have been liquid. Reddit might not hold up for 6 months, either.
  • fragmede 2y ago
    Why didn't you take a deal with a secondary market buyer? Quid or SecFi or whatever
    • krallja 2y ago
      Regardless of what price they quote in their emails, I’ve heard that Quid will only loan you a quarter of the FMV of your shares, at 15% APR (deferred) — plus 5.5% of your shares outright, which increases annually. It sounds like a horrible deal.
      • fragmede 2y ago
        100% of $0 is $0. Even 25% of $7.4m is $1.8m
        • krallja 2y ago
          These shares weren’t ever worth $7.4m at FMV.
          • fragmede 2y ago
            what was the 409a?
            • BowBun 2y ago
              Did you really just ask for a 409a in a public forum? You do realize those are closely guarded secrets?
• indus 2y ago
  IPO HN: Reddit (YC S05)
• testacpwoek 2y ago
  The people who cultivate Reddit communities are not the owners of Reddit, or the paid engineers of Reddit. Reddit isn't good because of Steve, or any of its leaders, the good and bad parts alike are 100% because of its users and unpaid moderators. Reddit is a tool, and the users have used the tool to create a massive site that contains a gigantic variety of subcultures, including ones that hate each other. Any "innovations" Reddit has made in the past decade have been making the UI worse and borderline unusable in poor attempts to monetize the site. It offers video hosting that it does poorly, an "improved UI" that it does poorly, chat that it does poorly, some nebulous web3 things that it also did poorly, and now is going to pretend that using Reddit as a training set won't result in a very unskilled, and exceedingly confident of its own correctness, chatbot. Spez has no vision for Reddit, and clearly neither does Paul. The way to make Reddit great is to empower the communities and moderators, and instead Reddit has done the opposite, because - let's be real here - Steve Huffman doesn't want to create a cool website or a useful tool, he wants to IPO and become a billionaire and ride off into the sunset.
• Implicated 2y ago
  As someone who has been aggressively cataloging "data" (posts, comments, subreddits, etc.) from Reddit and, importantly in this context, keeping those records relatively up-to-date, it's absolutely astonishing how much spam there is. I hash every string with a SimHash and perform a Hamming distance query against those hashes for any hash that belongs to more than 3 accounts, i.e., any full string (> 42 characters) which was posted as a post title, post body, comment body, or account "description" by more than 3 accounts. Regularly, this exposes huge networks of both fresh accounts and what I have to assume are stolen, credentialed "aged" accounts being used to spam that just recycle the same or very similar (Hamming distance < 5 on strings > 42 characters) titles/bodies. We're talking thousands of accounts over months just posting the same content over and over to the same range of subreddits. I'm just some random Laravel enjoyer, and I've automated the 'banning' of these accounts (really, I flag the strings, and any account that posts them is then flagged). This doesn't even touch on the media... (I've basically done the same thing with hashing the media to detect duplicate or very, very similar content via pHash). Thousands and thousands of accounts are spamming the same images over and over and over. From my numbers, 59% of the content on Reddit is spam, and 51% of the accounts are spam, and that's not including the media-flagged spammers. They don't seem to care about the spam, or they're completely inept. With the resources at their disposal, there's such a huge portion of this that should be able to be moderated before it ever reaches the API/live.
  • jtriangle 2y ago
    How long have you been doing this? And have you accounted for reddit-isms, such as posting huge chains of "Cat" or "nice"?
    • lazyasciiart 2y ago
      A 42 character min will filter those out, no?
    • raisedbyninjas 2y ago
      I think the comment memes usually fall short of the 42 cutoff. Some copypasta probably needs more sophisticated filtering.
• vundercind 2y ago
  > There needed to be something like del.icio.us/popular, but designed for sharing links instead of being a byproduct of saving them. Weird comparison—user-submitted-link-aggregator-forum-combo was well-trod ground by 2005. Fark was founded in ‘99 and wasn’t the first. Slashdot, kinda, though with more gatekeeping. Kuro5hin. Tons of them. This framing makes it seem like a new idea, like there were lists of links but nobody had thought to attach forums to them yet, but they very much had. [edit] oh man, yeah, another post mentions 4chan and pals. The framing of this as if we had peanut butter and bread but nobody had noticed we might be able to make a peanut butter sandwich gets stranger the more I think about it.
  • occams_chainsaw 2y ago
    kuro5hin, now that's a name I've not heard in a long time
  • Sebguer 2y ago
    I mean, Digg! Digg, and its ensuing collapse from a redesign, is the reason that Reddit got its userbase!
    • vundercind 2y ago
      Yeah, Digg of course, I wasn’t sure exactly of the timeline on this so was giving them that one as maybe-not-an-inspiration, but c’mon, “users post links and then talk about them” is practically an ancient kind of website.
  • linehedonist 2y ago
    Plastic, Metafilter, memepool, others too I’m sure.
• SkyMarshal 2y ago
  > They told me about the startup idea we'd later fund them to drop: a way to order fast food on your cellphone. > This was before smartphones. They'd have had to make deals with cell carriers and fast food chains just to get it launched. So it was not going to happen. It still doesn't exist, 19 years later. What does he mean here, since Uber Eats, Door Dash, Postmates, Grub Hub, and a bunch of similar startups all do some version of that.
• noobermin 2y ago
  This story really drives home how being in the right place at the right time really makes a difference. They essentially made iteration 1 in three weeks and that set them down the path to success. May be the landscape has changed then but I cannot for the life of me imagine anything that could be made in three weeks today and have the effect that reddit had on the internet and the founder's lives. If there's reddit/uber/instagram for x/y/z it's already been done or someone with deeper pockets than you is doing it already. The current centre of attention (deserved or not) is Gen AI which is built on decades of hard research and very expensive compute. Start-ups still pop up but nothing like spin up a random site in three weeks and change the world.
• treme 2y ago
  poor alex. did he sell all his shares for like 20M years back?
• sandspar 2y ago
  Complaints about the stupidity and herd mindedness of the Reddit user base can generally be boiled down to complaints about large groups of average people gathered together. Look upon the average person, ye mighty, and despair.
• wraptile 2y ago
  Reddit still makes me incredibly sad. I loved it. I was there for the first secret santa exchange and all of the historic events and it was amazing. It trully was a unique community and platform. Now it has been completely destroyed. Sadness.
  • shufflerofrocks 2y ago
    For real, reddit introduced me to so many new ideas & concepts as a dumbass teen, and helped me a huge amount in getting through tough times. I definitely would’ve been a different person today if I hadn’t found reddit, sad to see it is a shallower former-shell of what it was
• djaouen 2y ago
  I don't go on Reddit anymore because there is too much drama there lol
• MagicMoonlight 2y ago
  Reddit faked the initial users with bots to pretend it was active. Then we got the mysterious “subreddit simulator” which somehow had full read access to the database. Now we have a website where all the content seems to be from bots, right before they sell. I like reddit because it has every topic on it but it’s trash now. It’s not unkillable. Fundamentally it’s just a forum where users create their own subforums.
• jkmcf 2y ago
  With all the Reddit users effectively quitting because of the 3rd party app stupidity, why didn't Reddit make ad delivery part of the terms of API usage or some other solution? It's not like their costs go up because you access via the API vs the website/the official app.
• fuzztester 2y ago
  Anecdotes: I interacted with both Alexis and Steve, at different times in the history of Reddit. With Alexis: in the early days of Reddit. First was to ask him some general questions, probably. (Don't fully recollect.) Then he mentioned that they have just created this new feature called subreddits, and that any user can create a subreddit. I was into Ruby at that time, so I created one for Ruby. Didn't use it much, though, after that. I don't know if the current Ruby subreddit is the one I created or not. With Steve: years later, I was consulting to a new fintech SaaS startup, in it's earliest stage, so was helping them with requirements, high level app design and database design, and forms (UI). I pinged Steve with a few questions about architecture and technology, since Reddit was already at scale, and he replied with some suggestions.
  • RadiozRadioz 2y ago
    The Ruby thing is semi-interesting, but this reads like a lame claim to fame. "Hey, I asked questions to these famous guys once! Probably, I don't remember fully..."
    • fuzztester 2y ago
      JFC. You belong on Reddit, not here. :) Don't read meanings or motives into statements where none exist. No one should, and you in particular are very poor at it. I said "anecdotes", right at the start. I didn't make any claim to fame, or think of it, even. Don't judge others by how your mind works. Even your judgement is poor. If anything, I would say the Steve anecdote is more interesting than the Ruby one, because it shows a somewhat famous guy willing to give advice to an unknown person. Now, go back under your rock.
      • RadiozRadioz 2y ago
        I just do not think your original comment is useful to other people. Your anecdotes don't reveal any new information other than how you asked Alexis something, you might have made the Ruby subreddit maybe, and Steve answered your questions about a startup. This is benign information unless someone is trying to learn about you personally. Half of your two paragraphs is talking about what you were doing; if you'd helped them make some Reddit feature or your discussions had revealed something interesting/unique about themselves or Reddit, we might have something. But as it stands, your comment is linked to the subject matter in a trivial manner, and your anecdotes are quite benign. It's a low value story. In the absence of usefulness, I'm left to surmise the other possible motivations for you to be posting it. One of those being that you want to let others know that you personally interacted with these famous people, or you see yourself as important to the story. This would give you some gratification, so it's not entirely illogical to consider this as a motivating factor. Apart from the technical subject matter, the value of your original comment is akin to a Taylor Swift fan saying they met Taylor once, and they talked about the weather. It's a nice reflection on Taylor to have set the time aside, just like it's a nice reflection on Steve to have answered questions, but neither is groundbreaking enough to be interesting to strangers. Not that my comments are particularly useful. But my comments aren't top-level discussion starters, they are direct replies to you in absence of a direct message feature.