
Can Reddit Grow Up? - digisth
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/28/technology/can-reddit-grow-up.html?_r=0
======
scoofy
I honestly think the problem isn't reddit. It's the advertisers' model that
has the problem. I realize that this is nonsensical, reddit needs the cash,
but hear me out.

I've been a redditor for nearly 5 years. I'm a moderator on many subs and over
time i've even been given the privilege of becoming a moderater on a subreddit
with over 100k users. I've been given random reddit gold on 3 occasions (a
strange revenue system for letting users know you care by paying reddit to
give them some minor perks for about $5), so i think i understand the site
fairly accurately.

When you move away from the large subreddits, into the niche, you realize that
much of reddit is actual adults, with brains, and who aren't too busy to see
news, and also have a discussion about it. I've always seen this as a problem
for advertisers.

Advertisers want it one way. They want to send a message, and they want that
to be the only thing said.

Take this amazing ad from thai life insurance:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/22jybg/what_does_kin...](http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/22jybg/what_does_kindness_get_you_this/)

The top comment, while jokingly so, brings up the point that this is a
commercial... it's not real... it's trying to make you think a certain way on
purpose. It's manipulative. Reddit breaks the 4th wall. It calls bullshit, and
much of the time, it's right.

Reddit's problem is that when an ad is truly impressive, a great deal, etc.,
the relevant firm doesn't need to pay reddit to get attention. The users will
do that for them. See dollar shave club:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/qk7xr/dollarshaveclu...](http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/qk7xr/dollarshaveclubcom_our_blades_are_fing_great/)

I really don't think there is much of a solution for reddit, but if i were in
charge, the way i would generate revenue would be to hold the successful ads
hostage. Shadow ban advertisers accounts if they don't play ball. Literally
remove viral commercials, but do it quietly. It's an abuse of the system and
the users know that, and i think users like me would understand. Make them pay
a fee to even attempt to "go viral."

That's my 2 cents.

~~~
andrewflnr
But that leads directly to a war of countermeasures as advertisers try to not
get their content classified as advertisement. It's a rather blurry line, and
regular users will get caught up in a system like that.

~~~
scoofy
It's a fair point, but if the prices were reasonable, i think the firms would
see it as a cost of doing business.

Remember this is revenue from firms attempting to create content, not paying
for ad space. You'd have a shallower river of income, but a much wider one.

I'm not saying it would definitely work, but i think it'd certainly be
something worth paying for. Especially when you're watching your ad
successfully drive lots of users to your product... it's working! And then
suddenly reddit calls your firm up and says:

"Hey, nice successful ad you have there blowing up on our service. It'd be a
shame if anything were to happen to it..."

As for the users, if you shadow ban the content, more often then not they
wouldn't even know. If they find out, you could simply explain that the
relevant firm is abusing the service. Most would even help... a small button
(is this an ad?). I'd click it, because i would know clicking it helps reddit.
Remember, redditors are adults, with brains (they watch community, not two and
a half men). There may be some push back, but i know i'd certainly understand,
because big firms cheating the system is bullshit, especially if price
discrimination is put in place to protect small firms. Dollar Shave Club pays
pennies, Gillette pays hundreds.

And, hey, i really do love the site. If Alexis or Steve are ever in need of a
beer in SF, i'd be happy to buy it.

------
Goronmon
I'm not sure I'm as big of a fan of advertising firms as the author, and some
quotes stood out.

 _“People on Reddit want to be anonymous, and at some point these brands want
to have a real relationship with their customers "_

I find it hard to take an article seriously when it includes quotes like this
in a non-critical context. Advertisement is about bullshit, not about
"relationships with customers". The job of advertisers is to trick you into
think you need whatever they are being paid to sell. They and the companies
they work only care about their customers in regards to how much money they
can wring out of them.

And the parallel is that advertisers don't give a shit about Reddit as well.
They are just looking for a way to maximize their ability to wring every cent
out of Reddit's userbase regardless of whether the advertising completely
destroyed the community.

~~~
tomjen3
Not all ads are for products you don't objectively need. You do likely need
life insurance.

I would want to be informed if/when somebody made a cheap razor that actually
works for me. I would want to know if somebody made a better vaccum robot, or
made it cheaper. I don't objectively need a new smart phone, but I would want
to know about it so that I could anticipate what my users would want to get.

~~~
jbb555
" You do likely need life insurance." why on earth would i need life
insurance?

~~~
TeMPOraL
Because you might want to leave some money behind for your family if you
happen to die too soon.

Regardless, advertisers won't "inform" you about the best life insurance for
you, they'll lie to make you stop thinking and trick you into buying _their_
life insurance, which most likely will be subpar. Good products tend to
advertise themselves.

------
archildress
Maybe I'm suffering from nostalgia, but the Reddit comments were once a place
where some good discussions were shared. Now, they've evolved into contests of
wit and cross reference to other posts. In the "frontpage" subreddits, the
comments are usually void of meaningful discussion that I remember in the
earlier days, although I acknowledge I may be romanticizing it a bit.

I think I lost interest in Reddit as a whole when I found HN. Curious if any
others had the same experience.

~~~
sehr
_I think I lost interest in Reddit as a whole when I found HN._

Once you start exploring the smaller focused subreddits, discussion gets much
better. Although even then, the poop can creep in.

Prune your subscriptions _brutally_. Once a sub goes bad, it doesn't go back.
Report spam & inflammatory comments etc.. The community is only as good as its
members!

~~~
Hasu
_Prune your subscriptions brutally._

I recently logged into Reddit for the first time in over half a year. My
personalized frontpage was filled with garbage- in the 8 or 9 months since I'd
stopped using the site, a bunch of small, awesome communities had grown past
critical mass into Low Effort Content Zone.

Then I remembered why I stopped using the site- this is all it is. You just
watch good communities burn when they get too big, or fizzle out and die when
they're too small. One must prune one's subscriptions brutally, and then
search for new communities that haven't descended into the Eternal September.
But the effort is Sisyphean and I despair of it.

~~~
Howitzer
They don't all go bad, they don't all die or fizzle out. Some prosper. Usually
because of excellent and strong moderation.

~~~
mrec
See /r/askhistorians, for example. Phenomenal moderation.

~~~
dredmorbius
Yep.

Of which I'm quite aware for having been caught in it more than once. With
non-meme posts.

------
skizm
Ideas for reddit monetization:

\- Charge $10 a year to keep a subreddit name registered. 500k subreddits, say
one half to two thirds pony up, thats $2.5 - 3.3 mil/year.

\- There is a "trending subreddit" section. Implement a bidding system for a
daily "featured subreddit" section similar to this (implement a N day cooldown
so larger subs can't buy everyday)

\- Implement a rev-share system with sub-reddit owners. Paying for a subreddit
name could mean no ads, however if the owner wants, they can turn on ads and
split the commission with reddit.

\- Advertise (a little heavier than now) to only non-signed in users.

Basically I'm thinking you try and get the subreddit owners to help foot the
bill since they are generally the ones getting the most value from the
community engine that is reddit.

~~~
codemaster3000
This is a terrible, terrible idea. The mods of each subreddit are what keep
the subreddit alive, and subreddits are the building blocks of Reddit. There
are mods who put tons and tons of time maintaining the quality of their
sub(s), and _they are volunteers and don 't get paid for any of their work_.
Asking them to "pony up" their own money would, with no doubt in my mind,
drive them away and completely destroy Reddit. You are grossly over-estimating
the number of mods who would "help foot the bill," and completely forgetting
about how much hatred Reddit would get form the community if this was
implemented.

If Reddit considered this strategy for monetization, they'd be much better off
shooting off their foot, then shooting their other foot.

~~~
zvrba
> Asking them to "pony up" their own money would, with no doubt in my mind,
> drive them away and completely destroy Reddit.

He wrote nowhere that mods should pay. I as a user would certainly pay $10/yr
to keep subreddits I care most about going on.

~~~
c23gooey
User pays is equally as ridiculous as mod pays.

No way as a user i would pay $10/yr when there are multiple sites that will do
the same thing as Reddit for free.

Im not interested in paying any website for the privilege of expressing my
opinion and reading others.

~~~
kinj28
I see two valuable things for the end user at reddiit: a. Finding good sub
reddits (out of 500k am sure that is a pain) b. Getting their content some
sort of traction in the community which is ofcourse mod configured & rev
shared with the mod maybe.

Do you think users would pay for this? besides, do you think the 2nd point has
a scope of creeping in poop?

~~~
c23gooey
I agree that there are users who would pay for that. Indeed, there are
successful business models based on this idea already. Those models see
nothing like the traffic that Reddit gets, so they are not as interesting to
advertisers.

Yes, i see point b) having a scope of creeping in poop.

I'm pretty sure that point b) was a large part of the reason for the downfall
of Digg.

------
shirro
I don't understand the people who don't like Reddit based on the front page.
FFS, Reddit is a platform and the action is in the subreddits. There are some
very high quality subreddits with good mods which work as well or better than
HN.

~~~
noblethrasher
Case in point:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bs0rc/ama_fe...](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bs0rc/ama_feudalism_didnt_exist_the_social_political/)

~~~
codemaster3000
Holy text walls batman :-). Great read though, great writers in that thread
and definitely learned a fair share about feudalism (though probably won't
remember it for long...)

------
r0s
> Also, the content can range anywhere from a quaint series of animal photos
> to an intense discussion about bitcoin to graphic pornography, all in a
> single thread. That could spook brands that do not want their ads displayed
> alongside not-safe-for-work material.

Reddit is too adult for ad networks. Can they grow up?

------
ignostic
Reddit wants to be a big company using a site where big companies are the
enemy. They could do it, but they need to overhaul the ad system.

Having purchased more than a few ads, I can tell you that their platform needs
serious help. They're already a step behind because users don't give location
or age. To an advertiser who knows the customer, this results in blanketing
people you know aren't interested.

The real problem is that targeting ads to interested audiences results in very
few interactions. When you target to a sub, you have a good chance of showing
up on that sub's home page - but no one really goes to a sub home. You need to
get people on their front pages. The front page is hyper-competitive: you are
bidding against people who are willing to serve ads to ANYONE (ahem, Hipmunk).
I've still had some success, but it varies a lot depending on when people buy
ads. Their planning tool cannot be relied upon.

If reddit were a grown-up advertising company, they'd run it on a cost-per-
click bidding basis for link/comment/share/save interactions. Votes would be
free to the advertiser, but they'd use recent upvotes and downvotes as a
quality score to push ads that people hate off the site and encourage ads
people don't mind by giving them a competitive edge. They'd also create more
sophisticated targeting options, e.g. people who subscribe to /r/A AND /r/B.
Or people who subscribe to /r/A AND either /r/C OR /r/D.

~~~
ColinCera
>> When you target to a sub, you have a good chance of showing up on that
sub's home page - but no one really goes to a sub home. You need to get people
on their front pages.

Not arguing with your larger points, but this is completely untrue for me — I
_only_ use Reddit via subreddit home pages, i.e., I _never_ go to the "front
page". I don't even know what a "front page" is. Is that where you just go to
[http://reddit.com/](http://reddit.com/)? I must have visited that once, way
back when I first started using Reddit, but since then, never.

I have a dozen or so subreddits I'm interested in and when I will occasionally
get a whim to check up on one of them, I navigate directly to the subreddit
(autocomplete in the browser makes this easier). I also subscribe to RSS feeds
for my subreddits.

Apparently I'm using Reddit in an unusual way.

~~~
snowwrestler
If you subscribe to the subreddits you like, and unsubscribe from the ones you
don't like, then your logged-in homepage
([http://www.reddit.com](http://www.reddit.com)) will only show posts from the
subreddits you like.

Basically it will be like looking at your subreddit RSS feeds, but sorted by
votes in addition to recency.

------
beefsack
Perhaps a good way to monetise without alienating their core users would be to
only advertise on the default subs. The vast majority of users are there,
including the less technical users who might be more likely to actually
consume the ads instead of ignoring or blocking them.

Another idea which I saw the Whirlpool forums do in Australia is to only
advertise to those who aren't logged in.

If the sub-communities continue to thrive I can't see Reddit fade into
obscurity any time soon.

~~~
mfenniak
I would've thought the opposite. The default subs have large numbers of
subscribers (of course), but I feel like they don't have strong communities,
or specific themes, that would appeal to an advertiser. Like... /r/funny?
/r/creepy? /r/DIY? /r/IAmA? What would compel someone to advertise on those?

On the other hand, there are a good number of non-default subs that have
strong themes that I'm certain advertisers would want to tap into. For
example, city-specific subs, or /r/bodyweightfitness (105,212 subscribers), or
/r/bicycling (126,713 subscribers). These communities are so specific that
advertising seems like it would be more effective in those areas than any
other. Of course... it needs to be done in a way that isn't intrusive or
damaging, and that's probably a bigger challenge in a smaller community.

~~~
lelandbatey
Another example: /r/MechanicalKeyboards with 38,000+ subscribers. That's a
community just ripe for good advertising.

~~~
ufo
Are you sure? One would expect that most new product launches or major sales
would be linked to by users for free. Additionally, all the major vendors are
already linked to in the sidebar wiki posts...

~~~
lelandbatey
Major vendors, yes. But there are a lot of small run or custom accessories
that would sell quite well if they had more exposure. The wiki in the sidebar
is good, but what about when a company comes out with a new set of keycaps?
Getting that information out can often be iffy, but ads in a major community
would make it easy.

------
programminggeek
No, it can't without everybody leaving, but they will all leave anyway. My
theory is that social news is like the popular club in a major city or a fad
in popular culture.

You can't predict which will be a hit or for how long. What you can predict is
that eventually when enough people show up that it will lose that quality that
made it so interesting to begin with, and the people that made it special will
move on.

This happened with slashdot, digg, and maybe a bit to Hacker News too. I think
Reddit's subreddits have made it more of a community of communities instead of
one monolithic thing, with a monolithic front page. That certainly helps it
have some legs.

However, I really don't see how any fad can sustain itself over the long term
and anything that is built on social communities is at the whim of the
movement of social opinion and interest. People change, get older, and what
made something cool for one generation doesn't necessarily work for another
generation.

There is no reason that Reddit should be popular as opposed to any other
community site other than it's where people are congregating right now.

In 5 or 10 years, where will people congregate online?

------
alaskamiller
I've got my 7 year badge but I don't go back anymore. I'm aged out. The front
page doesn't interest me, the memes don't resonate with me, and the reposts
don't keep me.

It'll keep happening, year after year as most people age out. But year after
year more people join up, I'm sure there's a net again. Enough of a momentum
that it will just take decades before the decay happens. Radical changes also
risk a Digg implosion.

Tough nut to crack. They've been taking every trick from the old forum
(SomethingAwful, General Mayhem, OffTopic, GaiaOnline) days other than
literally charging for membership. Which is always the final cashing out death
knell.

Common refrain in the past when positing how the community is turning and
reducing value the default rah rah answer has always been to hit the edgy
subreddits rather than the mainstream ones. That changes the value of the
reddit product from a community to community software.

My small business projects rely on subreddits for customer service. Give me
customization tools and I'll eagerly pay. After all, it's like vBulletin but
better and people out of the wazoo for that.

~~~
yzzxy
Charging for admission has always struck me, at least in the case of SA, as a
tactic to guard the community against, essentially, trolls and children. Not
as a moneymaking scheme.

~~~
plorkyeran
SA has also charged for registration for the vast majority of its existence
(it was created in 1999 and started charging in 2001), so if it was supposed
to be a cash-out before the site died it was a very poorly timed one.

------
matt-attack
It seems that all the critique in the article stem from the advertiser's
perspective. "Oh no we can't make money off of the reddit users" the site must
be rubbish and outdated. It needs to be more like facebook so that we
companies can _connect_ with users".

~~~
mkal_tsr
Yup, it smells to much like, "oh, woe are we advertisers for not being able to
exploit users for more money, Reddit needs to change, hmmpf"

------
read
Is this a submarine?

Why is a site struggling with journalism (NY Times), and a subscription model,
and a paywall (that will become permanent in 3 months), and possibly an
advertising problem, advocating that another site (Reddit), with more users,
without a subscription model, no paywall, and possibly no advertising problem,
is about to change?

~~~
SnydenBitchy
What? Why is a person struggling to grasp the difference between The New York
Times and The New Yorker trying to make some point about… something?

~~~
read
Whoops, my mistake. Sorry.

Why did I make this mistake? Did I subconsciously associate the initials NY
with evil intentions? It wouldn't be surprising if The New York Times become a
casualty of the The New Yorker's policy by accidental association.

------
lazyjones
Reddit seems to be doing well. I can tell, because I tried to advertise twice
in the past 5 years or so and being from Europe, I had no way to pay for ads
(US and UK customers only!). So they have still so much unrealized revenue
potential that I wouldn't worry.

------
steven2012
Reddit has the best content for any message style forum I've ever come across.
The combination of user voting plus moderation works incredibly. And it's not
just a few subreddits, it's a huge swath of them. They've attracted the best
community of users that I've ever seen and that positive feedback loop of
easy-to-use UI plus great username creates a fantastic site.

The top comment is usually useful no matter what the topic is, and I usually
never leave disappointed when I read a thread I'm curious about.

It would be a shame if they ruined the site a la digg by trying to monetize
too aggressively.

------
cJ0th
The article helps little in answering this question when they interview the
wrong experts.

The first thing you should do when giving advice is acknowledging reality and
then work with that. That is, you should accept reddit for what it is. But all
those "experts" giving their opinion in the nyt article are mere bullshit-
bingo players pushing reddit to become like every other company:

> “People on Reddit want to be anonymous, and at some point these brands want
> to have a real relationship with their customers,” "“Can Reddit deliver that
> over time?”

> “Reddit is a 1998 product, trying to have a 1998 business model,”

I think reddit should come up with a monetizing strategy that capitalizes on
the trust users have in it (without abusing it) They would have a massively
sustainable competitive advantage. Is there any other web company of that size
that you would trust more? Could any one copy this trust within a short amount
of time? It's rather tragic that in our society this has so little value that
you have to think really hard to come up with a monetizing strategy.

Also, I think the idea of a "just self-sustaining" reddit, as some people here
have pointed out, is rather interesting. Why does it need to grow? Isn't it
enough that it is usefull to their users and poses a stepping stone for
entrepreneurs like Mr. Ohanian but also external guys like, for instance,
those from imgur or Mr ShittyWaterColour?

------
baby
I'll just c/p what I wrote in the thread where the reporter asked us questions
([http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/2bjsxi/how_c...](http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/2bjsxi/how_can_reddit_grow_up_to_become_a_real_business/))

Reddit is becoming bigger and bigger. Which is somehow bad as a quality point
of view (look at HackerNews, and people there are already complaining that it
got too big like reddit).

1

Reddit did a very smart thing to counter that: subreddits. So now you can
still dislike reddit as a whole but find what you want in a subreddit.

Now I think that if reddit has a way to monetize its website, somewhere, it is
through subreddits. You could put a free2play kind of system. Customize your
subreddit but pay to unlock features. Create subreddits where you have to pay
to get in (it already kind of exists with the lounge).

2

Advertisement. Reddit is really, extremely, reluctant to advertise on reddit.
It's nice from a user point of view. But from an advertiser point of view,
why? Reddit is the perfect place for ads. Users click and click and click and
they read text before clicking. Google ads would make them profitable in a few
days. It's important to think about it.

EDIT: I'll add that the subscription system makes and the subreddits make it
an excellent way to know someone's tastes. It's even better than facebook imo.

~~~
JetSpiegel
They don't need explicit advertising because they already perfected the
product placement.

Compared to Reddit, that Power Glove film is a masterpiec

------
AndrewKemendo
As a long time reddit user my question is: is there something specific pushing
for further monetization? I thought the whole purpose of spinning off from
conde nast was to get away from the need to monetize.

Why not just match development/maintenance with use? Reddit is well past it's
exponential growth phase and is big enough to sustain the community with
basically no growth in userbase - so unless I am missing something, this seems
like a pure greed play.

~~~
mkal_tsr
> is there something specific pushing for further monetization?

It's mentioned in the article and known elsewhere, Reddit is not profitable
and has not been profitable to date. Not bleeding out all of your money seems
like a specific push for further monetization.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
Profitable is different than sustainable. So why can't it be sustained without
being "profitable?"

~~~
mkal_tsr
Is Reddit sustainable while it is bleeding money? How many sites are
sustainable bleeding money? I'm serious. How is losing money a sustainable
business model?

~~~
AndrewKemendo
From the article and from what I understand around the site, they aren't
losing money, they just aren't making profit from the revenues they have. I
don't know what their books look like but it appears from what I have seen
that they have pretty thin delta between income and outlays.

------
jasonkostempski
I've had this idea about how ads should work in situations like this floating
around in my head for a while. I know nothing about advertising or monetizing
websites and likely this idea has already been presented and shot down but I'd
like to see a conversation about it either way. Company X pays Reddit a fixed
fee to display a mutually approved, static image, hosted by Reddit servers,
linked to a mutually approved web page, on the specified page(s), for a
specific amount of time. No generic ad network placeholder, no impression
count, no JavaScript, no user tracking, no analytics. Reddit is simply trusted
to present the image/link as agreed and Company X is trusted to keep the
agreed upon web page at the URL, no switcheroos after the agreement is
effective. Maybe the community would know about this arrangement and respect
it by not blocking the easily identifiable (no cleaver markup disguises from
Reddit) ad elements on the page. I'm thinking the link URL needs to be static,
Reddit wouldn't dynamically add anything to it. If the trust is broken by any
party the deal is off. Thoughts?

------
VLM
Why do subreddits have to have only one business model, that being free? Why
is the only way to get corporate revenue ugly ads that no one wants to see?
Why does a company like Republic Wireless maintain their own lame forum system
that boils down to a heavily brain damaged psuedo-clone of Reddit? Why, for a
fee paid by RW to /r/, can't /r/republicwireless exist with all of the mods on
that subreddit being RW employees, or whoever RW employees select? I'd like
that for customer support and product announcements and it would let RW focus
on their core competency which is being in the MVNO business not the "running
an internet web forum" business.

There is a side issue, that I don't think a company that wants to be
successful should take business advice from either a legacy newspaper in
general, or specifically the NYT, which makes the whole thing comical. It
would be like a telegram company demanding that an ISP make core business
changes, because they're the experts, or at least they were back in 1890, LOL.

------
mark_l_watson
As a long time user of Reddit, I have to say: put more ads on the right hand
side margin! I don't care, make some money, and stay solid business-wise.

Please pardon an off-topic comment: I got to meet Alexis Ohanian when he spoke
at Google last year and I really enjoyed his book "Without Their Permission:
How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed." I am an old guy, in my 60s,
and I worry a lot about the future our kids and grandkids will have, but then
when I meet young people like Alexis who have such a strong attitude about
helping society, I feel better :-) If you have a chance to hear him speak,
don't pass up the opportunity.

------
firemancoder
Why does it need to? Is it self sustaining? Maybe that's all it needs to be.

When you try hard to commercialize and squeeze profits, things change and you
lose audience. This is exactly what it is limiting the lifespan of Facebook.

~~~
spaldingwell
"This is exactly what it is limiting the lifespan of Facebook"

Facebook has over a billion users and has been around for ten years. No other
social network can claim both of those things. Don't know if it qualifies as
an example of a "limited lifespan"

~~~
goatman
I think he isn't saying it has had a limited life span. He is saying that it's
future lifespan is being limited. Basically, he thinks it has potential to go
on much longer than it will.

------
return0
Can reddit become monetizable? Some of the best online forums of the sort are
not-for-profit. It's odd that there isn't yet a donation-supported open
alternative of reddit, a-la wikipedia.

------
industriousthou
Why not have advertisers partner directly with mods and allow some sort of
revenue sharing?

The concern seems to be offensive/weird user created content might be
displayed near an advertisement. Well, the mods have control over the content.

Mods could chose whether or not to enable advertising and could chose whether
to curate content to maximize click-throughs or not.

Ads could be programmatically targeted towards subreddits and individual
comment threads rather than users.

------
ASneakyFox
I don't think reddit can be profitable. The moment it is the userbase will
move on to the next thing. A new site can spring up over night. A new reddit
could be coded in weeks. its all a matter of people choosing to congregate
there. This is an ongoing process that is constantly happening. Message boards
are popular, and they're cheap.

~~~
ColinCera
>> A new reddit could be coded in weeks.

Well, it wouldn't take that long, given that the entire Reddit code base is
open source: [https://github.com/reddit](https://github.com/reddit)

Really, anybody can _literally_ clone Reddit anytime they want to.

But not only is it likely impossible for a competitor to attract a significant
portion of the Reddit user base, what would a competitor do assuming they did
manage it? All a competitor would have done is bought themselves a money-
losing operation. Unless you're a charitable billionaire or a well-funded non-
profit organization, why would anyone want to do that?

~~~
ASneakyFox
I don't think it's do much a company could the over reddits marketshare. Its
that there's comment sections and forums every where. If/when reddit dies
there will be increased traffic to other forms of blogging/commenting/posting.
And eventually a new website will fizzle to the top just out of chance (in the
same way reddit did).

------
Grue3
Great, a paywall. Looks like NYTimes has grown up and us plebeians are not
allowed to read it anymore.

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gregimba
The fact you have to ask tells me no.

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ef4
... said the dying old media company.

~~~
minimaxir
The article was written by Mike Issac, who was ATD/Recode until _very_
recently.

~~~
SwellJoe
I'd never heard of Re/code (yes, I noticed the embarrassing spelling) until
just now. reddit serves billions of pageviews a month. I'm not saying this
guy's got nothing interesting to say, but it does seem a little bit
condescending to say, "Can reddit grow up?" When reddit has already grown to
be one of the most popular sites in the world in a quite short time.

~~~
cliveowen
>in a quite short time

Almost 10 years, the same as YouTube.

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tmuir
I've been developing a theory of Reddit in my mind for about the last year.
It's mostly grown out of the ubiquity and monoculture of AdviceAnimals/memes,
but I think it applies to most of the frontpage reddits.

Redditors have basically developed and distributed a set of rules for what
they find funny/cool/interesting, and endlessly repeat these same jokes/memes.
If you follow the frontpage for any reasonable amount of time, you see the
same few ideas over and over. Just about everything is somehow referential to
a previous post. It almost feels Pavlovian after a while. Someone will post a
picture with an attractive female in it. Someone else will comment with a Gif
of a bunch of hotdogs being thrown in her face. Someone else will point out
that hidden amongst the hotdogs is a finger. Someone else will point out that
every time an attractive girl is posted, all of these things occur. This
happens over and over, countless times every day. To call it derivative would
be generous, because it's a carbon copy.

Advice Animals (Image Macros with text) seemed to take this to its extreme.
The same 10 images are posted thousands of times per day, with a sentence
about how some event in the posters life relates to the meme. If you take away
the meme, and simply tell the story by itself, its dull and boring. Attach it
to the same picture you've been seeing for the last year and half, and it's
got 1000 upvotes.

Most of the material on the frontpage of reddit is not interesting on it's own
merits. It's only interesting in the context of the thoroughly homogeneous
userbase that has been conditioned to respond to the same 15 memes.

It seems to me like an advertiser's dream demographic. A clearly delineated
set of rules to engage millions of potential customers. Flip this switch, turn
that knob, show this meme, reference The Big Lebowski, and Bob's your uncle.

~~~
derefr
> If you take away the meme, and simply tell the story by itself, its dull and
> boring. Attach it to the same picture you've been seeing for the last year
> and half, and it's got 1000 up votes.

IANA Literary Anthropologist, but: when you tell a story from your life by
itself, you're presumably telling it about you. People don't care about you:
they've never met you, and after they read your words they'll probably never
hear from you again. They don't have any previous impressions of you to
pattern match their expectations against, so nothing you say can make them go
"oh, yeah, that's just like her" or "ha, I knew it" or "oh god, it's going to
happen to him again, isn't it?"

In the context of an image macro, on the other hand, your story is paraphrased
into a sort of shared mythology: there's this one platonic Awkward
Penguin/Insanity Wolf/Scumbag Steve, doing _all_ of these things, and acting
as a larger-than-life moral symbol of the effects of doing these things in the
process. People know what to expect of the character, and so people can seek
out these stories when they want something with that "feeling" to it.

Presuming you were living in Ancient Greece, you'd see these same people
taking various minor heroic moments from their day-to-day lives, exaggerating
a bit, and turning them into stories about Hercules.

(You can do this for a living, too, creating characters from whole cloth who
are larger-than-life molds to match up to various day-to-day stories. The
result is called a sitcom.)

~~~
wisty
People genuinely care about stories. A story about a wacky inventor is better
than a story about their invention (see everything by Malcom Gladwell). Maybe
a meme is better, since you already know the main character.

Or maybe there's a trade-off - a long story needs a new main character, but a
short joke works best with a stock character. Compare War and Peace to "little
Johnny" jokes.

