
Reddit in 2016 - cryptoz
https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/434h6c/reddit_in_2016/
======
fourstar
Reddit is the worst. I created a sub that ended up becoming a default
(/r/lifeprotips) and ended up getting banned when I tried to promote a site
that I built (which was my original intention with the idea). They banned me
because I had adsense on the site (funny because Imgur was/has been the golden
child for reddit and they've had advertising for quite a while).

I sent them a DMCA to remove the logo that I had commissioned from someone
from Dribbble (for my site, but ended up using it as the header there). No
response.

Reddit is run by a bunch of leeches who rely on moderators to create content
and never reward them.

~~~
woah
You tried to use their site to promote your site and they banned you? And then
you threatened legal action to get them to take down an image that you
yourself posted?

~~~
kbenson
> And then you threatened legal action to get them to take down an image that
> you yourself posted?

Why not? If he owned the rights to the image, it's use was contingent on his
approval, absent any other agreement. The only reason it required a a legal
notice is because they locked him out of the account he used that had rights
to change it.

This is no different than offering to let the office use your ping pong table,
then getting fired and having your building access revoked. If the business
refused to return the ping pong table, which was in use contingent upon your
and the businesses approval, they have essentially stolen your property. Feel
free to substitute any other item item (such as fridge, chair, _computer
hardware or servers_...) for the ping pong table in that example.

~~~
JimDabell
> absent any other agreement

The user agreement includes perpetual, irrevocable license to reproduce
content you submit to Reddit.

~~~
hellbanner
Does that mean if you link to a website, they own that code?

~~~
madeofpalk
The link itself (and the title) is the submission, not the site that the link
goes to.

------
lumberjack
Reddit is a great platform to disguise sponsored content as organic. If you
are really good the users won't even notice. I wonder whether they have
started monetizing that yet. There is clearly a lot of it on Reddit. It's just
not clear whether it is with the help of Reddit or despite of them.

~~~
lawpoop
Can you describe this sponsored/organic content dichotomy?

To get noticed, you have to have upvotes. If you have upvotes, that means that
users appreciated the content. If, say, a company or person is promoting
themselves and the community upvotes it, I don't see any problem with it.
That's how it's supposed to work.

But I don't think that's what you mean by 'disguise'. I would guess rather
that you mean that some entity is paying the reddit the company to create
artificial upvotes (i.e. not originating from users) and maybe even paid
commenters. I personally would be surprised if there were a lot of this
clearly happening (there's a number of people on reddit that make a 'career'
out of debunking stories, identifying brigades, etc).

Can you point to some popular posts presently on reddit that are examples of
it?

~~~
fweespeech
> Can you point to some popular posts presently on reddit that are examples of
> it?

[http://www.redditsecrets.com/buy-reddit-
accounts](http://www.redditsecrets.com/buy-reddit-accounts)

[https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=725562.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=725562.0)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/32rr56/do_peo...](https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/32rr56/do_people_actually_sell_reddit_accounts/)

You can build a small voting ring for a few hundred dollars to boost posts.
The problem is all of Reddit's countermeasures to reduce spam made it hard to
tell how successful these things are.

However, the fact people are still buying in 2016, implies at least some
people succeed at it.

> Can you describe this sponsored/organic content dichotomy?

Really, only Reddit can say how bad this problem is but my guess its non-
negligible and cutting into their monetization via native ads as its basically
an end run around paying Reddit.

~~~
RubyPinch
"However, the fact people are still buying in 2016, implies at least some
people succeed at it."

"However, the fact people are still sending money to random emails they get,
implies at least some people get the money they were promised in return."

------
6stringmerc
While I can understand the sentiment that _spam and abuse threaten our
communities_ I can't help but think - based on outside observations - that
some of the biggest threat to the Reddit communities are people within Reddit
communities. Though admirable and well-meaning, it's a flawed model at the
core, at least this is what I've come to believe. In the most recent flare-
ups, the "call is coming from inside the house!" seemed to really apply.
Granted I'm not proposing some kind of methodology or overhaul to fix this
conundrum, though it's certainly an interesting topic.

~~~
boxy310
What specifically leads you to conclude it's a "flawed model"? Is it the
problem of private ownership of a semipublic community, through individual
accounts "owning" a subreddit?

~~~
6stringmerc
As a model, user generated / sourced content blended with user sourced
moderation under a private enterprise with "standards and expectations" will
always have issues regarding the (occasional) desires of users to share and
embrace things which are not welcome by the private enterprise. That's kind of
the flaw in the model. The 'image' of community and ownership breaks down when
there's a dispute, most frequently seen with respect to rules.

------
Karunamon
Reddit's a neat idea, but I had to abandon it. Had just hit five years of
daily participation on the site, too.

If we look past all the controversy and all the other reasons most people
point at the site as a negative, it boils down to one thing in my mind:

Base cynicism.

There's cynicism when someone else reposts something.

There's cynicism over imaginary internet points.

There's cynicism by, from, and to the moderators and site owners.

There's cynicism every time something with a brand name gets mentioned (zOMG
it's an ad!)

There's cynicism among communities.

It just goes on and on and on. Never-ending negativity. Everyone always
assuming the worst of the other person (rather than trying to have an
understanding discussion) and taking snarky potshots at them (and then hiding
their comments by -1's in a fit of pique, rather than any kind of thoughtful
analysis of quality).

I'm quite happier (and not a little bit more productive) not participating
anymore. Reddit is, IMO, the world's greatest concentration of negative,
irreverent, straight-up dickhead behavior in one convenient place.

(feh, word filter plugin went a little crazy there, sorry for the unreadable
comment earlier)

~~~
Zikes
One thing that I just can't wrap my head around is the "no participation"
brigading rules. The site literally exists to share content for others to
discover and discuss, but if you share anything remotely meta you get accused
of brigading and are banned/shadowbanned.

~~~
Karunamon
The site would be better off with an outright ban on meta content.

Aside from one or two outliers like DepthHub, most instances of someone on
reddit linking to something on reddit are a variation on "Hey, look at this
stupid thing this person did, let's all point and laugh at how stupid they
are".

~~~
npizzolato
/r/bestof would disagree with you.

~~~
mrfusion
I think hn needs a concept like r/bestof. It's the only way I get to find the
really good user content in Reddit. There's no way I'd see most of that stuff
otherwise.

In fact the main reason I read hn comments is the hope of finding comment gems
posted by an expert in the field, someone with a unique perspective on an
issue, or someone with a heretical but plausible idea.

------
kendallpark
> Our new Android app is going into beta today, and our new iOS app should
> follow it out soon.

It's amazing how long Reddit existed before rolling out a mobile app. Now I'll
finally have something other than Facebook to check compulsively on my phone.

~~~
kec
AlienBlue was the de facto reddit app for years on iOS, to the point that
reddit actually bought it / accqi-hired the dev for it a year or so ago.
Unfortunately it's been pretty stagnant since it was acquired, very few bug
fixes and afaik no feature enhancements.

~~~
sithadmin
>it's been pretty stagnant since it was acquired, very few bug fixes and afaik
no feature enhancements

It's become noticeably buggier since the acquisition, in my opinion.

------
softwaredev__
Some designers I know always bash Reddit for having an "ugly" design, but out
of all the link aggregators out there, the links on Reddit "pop" out at me. I
can comprehend the whole page by just glancing.

Other link aggregators like inbound.org or growth hackers are definitely
prettier, but I have to focus and slow down to understand all the submissions.

------
donatj
I've more or less given up on Reddit due to the overzealous moderators. Many
huge events are censored from /r/worldnews because the mods seemingly found
them not interesting or too hot topic.

Many perfectly valid posts are removed by mods, there was recently linked a
version of the homepage based on votes alone and something like a third of the
posts were deleted. I would much much prefer something more organic where what
the people declared good was shown, and that power largely stripped from the
mods/admins.

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oneeyedpigeon
They need to work on their mobile web design. This [1] is not a pleasant
experience in 2016.

[1] [http://m.imgur.com/StVB2Uu](http://m.imgur.com/StVB2Uu)

~~~
Mizza
They actually did this last year, check out
[https://m.reddit.com/](https://m.reddit.com/)

~~~
x1024
Yeah, but they used "React.js, because we're cool, please think we're cool".
Which is different from just "react.js".

Just look at how incompetently the site was redesigned:
[https://github.com/reddit/reddit-
mobile/issues/247](https://github.com/reddit/reddit-mobile/issues/247)

45 seconds load time...

There's also the tiny buttons(obviously not mobile-first, even if it is a
mobile-only redesign).

And of course, the poster child of "we are doing complex JS stuff, but still
think that JS is for kids, so we didn't bother learning how to actually do
it". I'm talking about the infamous "We built a single-page-app, but it
doesn't always work right, and the back button is kind of broken, and it
sometimes treats scrolling over a thing as clicking on that thing".

------
dang
Url changed from [http://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-ceo-announces-big-
chan...](http://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-ceo-announces-big-
changes-2016-1), which points to this.

------
AndrewUnmuted
I found this rather disturbing:

> "Recently we built an A/B testing system, which allows us to test changes to
> individual features scientifically, and we are excited to put it through its
> paces. "

Does this mean that Reddit made it all the way to 2016 without an A/B testing
tool?!

~~~
Strom
Automated A/B testing isn't super important. Especially for sites like reddit
which have been basically the same since launch.

You can still get feedback from users, and I would argue this is more
important than automatically detecting which button has a 2% higher CTR.

