
With a huge 2012, Reddit may be the ultimate Web 2.0 underdog victory - playhard
http://pandodaily.com/2012/12/31/with-a-huge-2012-reddit-may-be-the-ultimate-web-2-0-underdog-victory/
======
kragen
Here's what I thought of Reddit in 2008: "merely a collection of trivia,
narrow, shallow, and sensational".

[http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-
tol/2008-January...](http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-
tol/2008-January/000878.html)

Since then I've become a Reddit user, but my opinion hasn't changed much. The
bottom line from that post:

"The pathological focus on recency in Digg and Reddit's setup, and to a
slightly less problematic extent in del's, has some benefits. It engages
people in dialogue, and it's ideal for things like organizing political
protests. It's great if you want to stay on top of things. But I think it's
more important to get to the bottom of things."

~~~
PommeDeTerre
It was the censorship that drove me away from the few subreddits I used to
browse.

Time and time again, users who posted very well-reasoned and insightful, but
somewhat unorthodox, comments were banned. I looked forward to reading their
comments, since they were at least thought-provoking, even if I didn't
necessarily agree with what was said. But then power-hungry moderators would
come along and permanently boot such users, often without any explanation or
without any way to appeal such a ban. So I stopped visiting.

~~~
jspthrowaway2
/r/science is a stickler for the rules, and many of the "default" subreddits
(the ones that are turned on for everybody off the bat) have serious
moderation issues by nature of their traffic.

The more esoteric subreddits are quite useful, in my experience, though much
slower.

------
RyanZAG
Reddit has done an excellent job of creating a 'celebrity platform' in which
anybody can theoretically become a celebrity. This works in the same way that
modern capitalism creates an environment where anybody can theoretically
become rich.

The real issue for Reddit is that more users actively harms their bottom line,
as the kind of dynamic content they have is incredibly difficult to cache well
and has to be recalculated continuously in thousands of ways, unlike Google
who can create a more static, long term view of data. The user base on Reddit
is also heavily skewed towards high school and college students - and these
are generally the hardest users to get direct revenue from. Reddit is also
trying to take the Wikipedia approach of receiving money directly from user's,
but Wikipedia's data is far easier to store and disseminate, and Wikipedia's
audience is far more global and includes more members of society who are
willing to donate.

Reddit is going to have serious problems with their current business model and
user base, and their audience is extremely fickle - their whole site is based
off a kind of popularity contest after all. I would not recommend investing.

------
jiggy2011
I wonder what % of their traffic is something other than /r/gonewild and
/r/atheism?

~~~
TillE
I think their top ten posts of the year capture the essence of Reddit fairly
well:

[http://blog.reddit.com/2012/12/top-posts-of-year-and-best-
of...](http://blog.reddit.com/2012/12/top-posts-of-year-and-best-of-2012.html)

Celebrity interviews, a lot of pointless crap, some navel-gazing, and one
mildly interesting thing about a videogame.

The celebrity AMAs are a new thing and a pretty big deal. Obama on Reddit was
very similar to Clinton going on MTV and taking audience questions. And like
MTV, like so many user-driven websites of the past, I wouldn't be surprised if
Reddit quickly fades out of cultural relevance when the next thing comes
along.

~~~
lelandbatey
Indeed. I believe that Reddit is pretty much hitting it's peak of mass appeal.
Personally, I left Reddit not to long ago (after nearly five years as a highly
active user) in favor of smaller, more manageable and more palatable
offerings.

It's also interesting that this blogger would bring up digg.com, a site that I
used in tandem with reddit till the great migration of 2009. From there, I
hadn't really gone back.

However, the new digg.com is _fantastic_! Lots of content, high readability
(on desktop and mobile) and nothing else. It's a focused tuned experience that
I really enjoy.

It seems like things have come full circle (again).

~~~
jspthrowaway2
You're the first person I've ever met, _including a former Digg employee_ , to
have a positive impression of the redesign. I'm intrigued.

------
lucian303
"But its impact this year was indisputable." Really? How much profit or even
revenue did it bring in. Because in the end, that's all that matters. Digg
committed suicide by algorithm and feudalism.

~~~
xiaoma
There are kinds of impact beyond revenue.

Consider the fact that the president of the United States found it worthwhile
to take time more than once during crucial part of his campaign to go to
Reddit. Reddit may very well had a large role to play in his upset over Hilary
Clinton last time as well.

~~~
lucian303
That impact is quite disputable.

