
Washington Post launches a Reddit public profile - waqasaday
https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/wp/2017/05/17/the-washington-post-is-the-first-national-news-publisher-to-debut-a-reddit-profile-page/
======
danso
Looks like they just came on board as Reddit debuted the new user profile
format [0]. I just got a message to turn it on as a user this past week. It
seems like it'll be a nice feature for not just users, but
brands/organizations as well. I hope it sticks to user engagement/meta-type
posts (IAMAs) rather than being an account that acts as an auto-submitter of
WaPo headlines to r/news/politics/worldnews.

That said, one of the challenges of having an official Reddit account that
constantly engages with users (it's been actively commenting and replying to
users), I would imagine, would be having to be in IAMA mode 24/7\. That's fun
until something a controversial question/challenge comes up, in which case
hours/days of silence will be seen as an admission of guilt/coverup (see
r/AMADisasters).

[0]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/6bu4vg/what_a...](https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/6bu4vg/what_are_reddit_profiles/)

~~~
minimaxir
I happen to have a spreadsheet of all Reddit AMA backfires
([https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DTCRqeQvjOZAyngC31kn...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DTCRqeQvjOZAyngC31knF49iANt48z9sPWZjx0smsMI/edit#gid=0)),
and the common thread among AMA disasters is the original poster being
_genuinely unaware_ that they might be received negatively (or they are just
trolls). I don't think that will be the case with the WaPo, anyways.

(For posterity, here's a spreadsheet of all Reddit thread backfires in
general:
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bUSN7-nocMJz2Wo1KTIn...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bUSN7-nocMJz2Wo1KTIn_hPNJaURB05uHCNqrCoEuy0/edit?usp=sharing))

~~~
praneshp
Another commonly seen trend is actors coming on Reddit to promote a movie,
rather than to engage with fans.

~~~
minimaxir
/r/IAmA as a subreddit is mostly self-promotion nowadays, but there's
_usually_ a decent amount of give-and-take.

------
CM30
Hmm, seems like they don't quite understand how Reddit is supposed to work. I
mean yeah, they're not breaking the rules yet. Their articles are mostly being
posted to their own profile rather than subreddits (though the way it's going
now, the 10% rule will be shattered sooner rather than later).

But they're making the usual company mistake on the site. Treating communities
as a pure advertising platform rather than a place to engage with the members
on their own merits.

They could be commenting on threads that relate to their industry or topics
they've wrote about with interesting answers or sharing things that help make
them appear as more 'in touch' with the public (like say, Sonic the Hedgehog
and Wendy's do on Twitter). Or moderating a Washington Post subreddit where
they feature submissions they think help out their publication.

But they're not. They're just advertising the site endlessly on their user
page, and making sure every post they make outside said page is an ad for
their publication.

Honestly, they're lucky Reddit is going down Facebook/Twitter/whoever's route
and trying to be a company friendly advertising platform at the expense of a
community or community platform. Otherwise this kind of behaviour would have
got them kicked out near immediately, especially on an old school forum or
mailing list.

~~~
criley2
I'm going to dissent here. I went to their page and it does not feel like one
big "go to the website" WaPo advertisement.

They're responding and engaging with users, even negative ones, they're
posting stories, and they're giving an insiders view to the newsroom that they
aren't offering anywhere else.

I mean, here they are offering exclusive access to journalists for questions
and posting exclusive newsroom info, and your criticism is that they're not
posting stupid jokes on twitter like Wendy's?

If it's all the same to you, I'll take the journalists acting like journalists
instead of teenage social media managers!

~~~
CM30
Admittedly, I didn't focus so much on the comments as the submissions there.
Their comments are certainly more in line with what you'd want from a presence
on a site like this, given how they answer other people's questions and all
that.

But I feel both submissions and comments are important here, and in both cases
a brand should do more than post their own work for readers.

------
CSMastermind
I'd prefer reddit die and something replace it. I go to the website every day,
mostly for sports and gaming subreddits, but as a platform, it's hopelessly
mismanaged.

They're technically lost. Look at the trouble they've had making a proper
phone app (they still don't have a good one). The user interface is lacking at
best (as evidenced by RES being needed to use the site for a long time now).
People have been asking for better moderation tools for nearly a decade. The
recent CSS dustup shows they don't even understand how people use their site.
Then there's the lack what would be super helpful features (the ability to do
a subreddit poll, vote for moderators, and access more than your last 100
posts easily).

The leadership is completely tone-deaf to the userbase. Just look at the drama
when they fired that AMA mod. Many times various CEOs from Ellen Pao to Steve
Huffman have acted more like spoiled 6-year-olds than chief executives. That's
before you start talking about them pushing their politics on the site.

And spoiled 6-year-old isn't too far off from the truth. Keep in mind Steve
Huffman and Alexis Ohanian were essentially gifted their success. They applied
to y-combinator with no idea of what to make. They were given the idea for
reddit. They couldn't make it work so they had Aaron Swartz forced on them (in
what was by all accounts a strained relationship). Aaron fixed the site and
made it what it is today then they all got paid. And those two have just been
coasting on that ever since. It's nearly a "born on third and thought they hit
a triple" situation.

If I were a VC I'd be throwing money at a reddit replacement. It's not hard to
envision a better platform, it just has a high barrier to entry because you're
likely not going to be profitable for years while you grow your userbase. The
payoff is huge though. Reddit is one of the largest websites in the world and
makes next to no profit because of its management.

~~~
dageshi
Personally I've been using reddit for about a decade. It seems more or less
the same site it always has been just a lot bigger and with some incremental
improvements. 99% of the user base has no clue about who most of the people in
your post are, they aren't up in arms about anything, they only care that the
site continues to work, which it does.

Additionally, I cannot see how a competitor can possibly compete with reddit,
reddit offers everything most people want without charging anything, without
excessive advertising and without demanding a lot of personal information. How
do you build a competitor that matches those criteria and then makes a ton of
money?

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
>Additionally, I cannot see how a competitor can possibly compete with reddit,
reddit offers everything most people want without charging anything, without
excessive advertising and without demanding a lot of personal information. How
do you build a competitor that matches those criteria and then makes a ton of
money?

The answer is simply "build what Reddit was like 5 years ago". It's plain to
see that Reddit is on a downward spiral - their product has been getting worse
and will continue to get worse. Same goes for the community. Reddit is showing
all of the signs of a dying platform, if you study the historical lifecycles
of web properties it matches quite well. Unfortunately, whatever comes up to
replace it is probably going to suffer the same fate.

~~~
vidarh
What Reddit was like 5 years ago didn't make much money.

~~~
wand3r
To my knowledge, it still doesn't.

------
darkmarmot
I had an 8 yr old Reddit account and was recently shadow-banned site-wide for
criticizing AMC's video player on an AMC 'sponsored content' post.

The Washington Post is sadly just another corporate nail in Reddit's free
speech coffin.

------
arca_vorago
I consider WaPo almost completely a modern mockingbird operation in full
force.

~~~
salimmadjd
ever since the Hiatt(s)[0] (Fred Hiatt and his wife, Margaret Shapiro ) took
over editorial position on Wapo. The paper has become a
neoconservative/neoliberal operation.

Bill Moyer did a nice episode showing the disproportionate number of report
Wapo did in pushing fro a war in Iraq [1].

Among notable neoconservatives/neoliberals working at the post and using it as
a pulpit are Robert Kagan [2] who worked on the "Project for the New American
Century" that became the blueprint of Iraq war agenda.

For me the nail in the coffin against the Post was when they used an unknown
research firm to push for a neo-mccarthyism Russian connection to over 200
blogs and publishers [4],[5].

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hiatt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hiatt)

[1]
[http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/citations.html](http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/citations.html)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kagan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kagan)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century)

[4] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/russian-
prop...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/russian-propaganda-
effort-helped-spread-fake-news-during-election-experts-
say/2016/11/24/793903b6-8a40-4ca9-b712-716af66098fe_story.html?utm_term=.3c6a553c5b0c)

[5] [https://theintercept.com/2016/11/26/washington-post-
disgrace...](https://theintercept.com/2016/11/26/washington-post-
disgracefully-promotes-a-mccarthyite-blacklist-from-a-new-hidden-and-very-
shady-group/)

~~~
toss1941
It was interesting to see how much of the media was cheering the cruise
missile strike in Syria. I think socially and economically WaPo is very
liberal but for some reason most of the media loves almost anything to do with
war.

~~~
0x445442
It's because WaPo and NYT are just propagandists for the US intelligence
apparatus which in turn is just a tool of the multinationals and oligarchs.

Real journalism seeking truth, no matter whose agenda that truth might
endanger, died years ago.

------
teej
I'm surprised no one has commented on this. Reddit has 270m monthly actives?
Doesn't that make it as large as twitter/instagram/Snapchat?

~~~
alaskamiller
Yes, it's a top 5 website in the US:
[http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/US](http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/US)

After 10 years it's now as important to kids as Facebook.

There posts getting 100k upvotes more often these days. And some are
approaching even 200k.

What's even crazier is the growth of the imgur subculture

~~~
chipperyman573
Upvotes aren't an accurate representation of users. The higher a post's score,
the more upvotes it needs to increase.

For example, a post with a score of 7 would increase by 1 every time it
receives an upvote, but may need 10 or 15 upvotes to increase by another point
once it gets over 1000 points (made up numbers).

A few months ago, the admins made a change to the algorithm to allow posts to
gain much more points than before. Now, a post gets 1 point per upvote until,
say, 10,000 upvotes, after which it only needs 5 upvotes per point.

~~~
alaskamiller
There was a point where after 6 years on Tumblr, when we started cracking
thousand likes on a post. Then came when there were 100k likes on posts.
Reddit reached that terminal velocity around year 8.

------
wink
Interesting, imho this clearly goes into the Twitter direction of following
certain accounts, not "thematic subgroups".

Not sure if a widespread use of this would encourage my reddit usage, I
usually visit certain subreddits for certain topic - and that not very often.
But then again following tweetstorms and hashtags on Twitter is pretty much
useless to me, that's why I follow certain people.

------
bpodgursky
I hope they stick to subreddits that don't shadowban you for posting links to
your own content.

~~~
kuschku
That's not up to subreddits — that's a site wide rule.

You can only post links to your own blogspam on your own profile.

------
nolok
Looking at the comments on some on those stories, it feels like they are being
swarmed by the pro-Trump accounts that permeates through a lot of reddit in an
organized manner. I wonder what step online communities can do to protect
against such brigading meant to alter and direct opinions, without sacrificing
the freedom they offer their user to have an opinion and discuss it.

Machine learning for automatic fact correction seems like a nice answer, until
you realize it would definitely go wrong, or be used to control opinion in an
even stronger way.

~~~
backhanded
Interesting. As an outsider (didn't vote for Trump or Clinton), Reddit seems
decidedly organized against the Trump supporters on that site. From what I can
tell, even the admins have made core changes to Reddit that any reasonable
person would see as an effort to reduce the visibility of the Trump subreddit.

I think the Trump subreddit is very childish (seems to be intentional). But I
hate the thought of websites like Reddit, FB, and Twitter engaging in
practices that clearly and systematically try to reduce the visibility and
legitimacy of one political viewpoint. What if the table was turned against
the liberal viewpoint? I would be just as worried.

~~~
scrollaway
This is fairly easily disproved by looking at non-US subreddits. I frequent
/r/france, /r/unitedkingdom and /r/sweden and non-liberal viewpoints, although
less popular, are certainly not silenced. They're just that: less popular
(thus more downvotes).

Things are different for the trump subreddit because it's a subreddit that has
actively engaged in hostility against other subreddits and particular reddit
users. Calls for brigading, slurs and harrassment of other users and admins,
I've seen it all by now. It's reprehensible.

The main Trump subreddit would have long been banned and nuked out of
existence if it weren't as popular as it is today. Right now, Reddit would
face too much backlash if it outright banned the subreddit for continuing not
to comply with the site rules. So it's understandable that the admins are
trying to handle the situation somehow -- that's not "an effort to reduce
[its] visibility", it's a compromise that doesn't involve removing the sub
outright.

There's plenty of pro-trump subreddits which aren't involved in this nonsense
because they're not spamming, harrassing, using bots etc. You don't hear about
them because they get lost in the noise.

~~~
hueving
> to handle the situation somehow -- that's not "an effort to reduce [its]
> visibility", it's a compromise that doesn't involve removing the sub
> outright.

I'm certain what will happen is that the admins will keep adjusting the anti-
voting ring algorithms until they effectively nerf all of the accounts that
frequent the_donald and vote there.

Then they have a cover for any backlash because they didn't do anything
specifically targeting the_donald, it just happens to be the case that
the_donald "unfortunately got impacted" by the new algorithm due to the
community's behavior.

------
losteverything
Is this just another way to link to articles?

I do like the fact that a newspaper equates itself with any Joe with a resdit
signon. How many steps in between wapo and "Average Joe and his facts and
opinion?" maybe 3??

~~~
curioussavage
The point is if an average user wants to post something that doesnt fit in a
community they know of they have a place to post it. It reallg sucks to try to
post something and have the stupid moderators shut it down for violating one
of their dozens of rules.

It also can give more power from moderators back to yhe people who are
providing the content. Moderators provide a good service to the community but
they are way too powerful/influential as is

------
aeleos
pretty interesting, seems like one of the first examples of news organizations
"advertising" on reddit. I wonder how it will go down and if any others will
follow.

------
sergiotapia
Will the admins also edit posts people make on their own profile?

------
GetStrFromObj
Any current/future investors might be interested in the fact that a Reddit
admin has been caught today testing a vote bot:
[http://archive.is/odx8z](http://archive.is/odx8z)

~~~
anonred
Isn't it more likely that the admin is using the post to ferret out
compromised reddit accounts in an upvote network?

~~~
zakk
As far as I remember that post received more than 4k upvotes in minutes, which
is highly unusual for a post in a rather obscure subreddit.

------
mythrwy
Washington Post and Reddit.

Now that's a match made in heaven. Or Hell. Or whatever. Now Washington Post
will have another outlet to tell Millennials why we need to invade Iraq again.
Or Syria. Or Ukraine. Or wherever they are stirring up the pot for.

