Reddit was great, many years ago, although there are many sub-reddits that are still excellent today. Moves they've made in the recent years, like hiding vote counts, were to improve growth, but it has also enabled more astroturfing and censorship (widespread).<p>More recently, they started injected tracking into outbound link clicks and introduced the terrible redesign to help with growth/monetization also. As they've grown, the quality of the content within sub-reddits and discussions within those communities, have fallen dramatically.
In many ways, Reddit reminds me more of the "old internet" than Facebook or Twitter. There seems to be better discussions, more variety, and even quite a bit of experimentation going on within certain subreddits. It feels like a freer place and that much I like. I still don't like that people get into their own bubbles and do little to bridge the gaps between political and ideological differences, but it certainly feels more exploratory than the other two.
It is interesting that the #1 story in HN is decline in FB and the #3 is growth in Reddit. Personal anecdote, I have shifted all my FB screen time to Reddit. Not out of any agenda, but perhaps to interact with a more diverse group of people. Bold prediction: FB will try to acquire Reddit soon
Reddit has a number of systemic issues (poor tools for moderators, hard to get rid of bad moderators, huge amounts of astroturfing)<p>It's a shame that they are 'good enough' to prevent much growth in the competitors, leading the cool tech made by competitors to often become exclusively filled with content that would be banned on reddit.
Some pretty poor categorization of some subreddits in there. gamesofthrones, mylittlepony, thewalkingdead, and BigBrother are in sports (asoiaf is in entertainment). sysadmin and techsupport are in hobbies/occupations while buildapc is in tech section. tumblrinaction, kotakuinaction, and blackpeopletwitter are in entertainment. DebateReligion is in news/politics, not discussion (with other debate subreddits) or lifestyle (with other religion subreddits).<p>The hierarchy is on GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/MetASnoo/Subreddit-Directory-Skeleton/blob/master/subreddits.txt" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/MetASnoo/Subreddit-Directory-Skeleton/blo...</a><p>But it's not in a structured format and tough to verify. There's no methodology for the current organization, and it doesn't look like it matches the actual graph.
I get a lot of auto completes for "site:reddit.com" when I search for anything in the Chrome search bar or just in Google Search. I find reddit answers to be less likely to be advertisements or affiliate marketing. Honestly not sure where I would find information otherwise.
I use reddit on my mobile browser without logging into to an account. Recently when clicking links or images in the mobile view a pop-under will appear freezing the site until I select the prominent first option (to download the Reddit mobile app) or the second option to continue using my mobile browser. Because I am unauthenticated this preference does not carry over to page reloads for things like jumping to a different subreddit, leading me to experience this pop-under over and over again.<p>Needless to say it's cut heavily into my reddit usage. I genuinely believe they raised a bunch of money, hired a bunch of engineers and managers, convinced the C-levels a re-design was necessary, and then implemented a subpar re-design with a giant middle finger to users all in the name of ads. Glorious, world improving, ads.
Over the past few years, both Twitter and Reddit have seen a huge growth of bot accounts. I'd put an asterisk next to any growth* figure by either company.
t_d at its peak was almost as big as politics, now that was not something I expected. Before SandersForPresident was archived when he lost the nomination it was about the same size as t_d.<p>Would be really neat to select a single sub or group of subs and generate a line chart of the same data.
Number of comments seems like a bad metric. A lot of these are informal subreddits where the most common comments are going to be "lol" or users collaborating to complete a sentence one letter at a time as part of some meme.
For those interested, I've done a similar (far less pretty) analysis on Hacker News:<p><a href="https://austingwalters.com/trends-on-hacker-news-activity-growth-community/" rel="nofollow">https://austingwalters.com/trends-on-hacker-news-activity-gr...</a>
Reddit for me is an acceptable middle point between the community-specific vBulletin forums of the 2000s (largely deserted now), and modern social media. You can explore a wide variety of topics (like on social media sites) while keeping anonymity and a sense of community (in dedicated subreddits).<p>When people say Reddit is 4chan-lite, I see where they're coming from. They're not signed in, so all they see is r/all, which has about the same quality level as the front page of Youtube.<p>The trick to it is to install the Reddit Enhancement Suite browser extension and start blocking the subs that frequently post low-quality/hate speech/just plain irritating content. Block a sub from your home page once, it never comes back.<p>Wish I could say the same for Youtube. I swear, you watch ONE Bill Burr standup clip, and your recs are suddenly full of "feminist gets pwned by redpill logic" and other "viral" garbage videos, each of which has to be manually set to "Not Interested".
I wonder if Reddit has surpassed Twitter, Snapchat, etc, for the title of most popular non-Facebook social network. You rarely see anyone do any kind of comparison of them.
Sometimes when I lurk on Reddit it appears that "the internet" is giving helpful and respectful comments to someone who, say, alleges that her husband had been sexually assaulting her.<p>When I start digging down into the lower quality comments those comments are obviously lower quality. But here's the thing-- within the lower quality comments is the OP responding to the low quality comments!<p>In other words, an OP (probably like many OPs) has a limited amount of time to get feedback on Reddit about a pressing problem. And mods/downvoters cannot react quickly enough in that period of time to appropriately moderate the responses.<p>Imagine OP's "Reddit time" (let's say an hour) as a rectangle in a video game that starts at 100% and drains to 0%. Let's say those dregs comments drained 15% of the OP's total time or energy participating on Reddit.<p>Now, suppose a lurker reads the thread later when the mods/downvoters have caught up with all their work. The lurker's default view is only the quality comments. This misleads the lurker by hiding the 15% time-or-energy hit the OP had from interacting with the dregs. The lurker likely assumes that participating on Reddit requires less time or energy that it does in reality.<p>Now the lurker tries out posting for the first time and starts to experience the 15% time-or-energy hit from the dregs comments. The more impatient OP is about reading comments, the more likely OP is to increase that wasted time-or-energy by interacting with the dregs.<p>Worse, that 15% time-or-energy hit includes content that would be beyond the pale for in-person social interactions-- it's mindless trolling or misanthropy which nearly no one would utter face to face. Some of it-- like accusations that the OP is an imposter-- is unique to social media.<p>Worst of all, that poster probably started as a lurker. So their decision to post in the first place was based on a view of Reddit that radically downplays the costs of interacting. I mean, I don't see any clear warnings on first post that let the poster know "shit will roll in" faster than the mods can flush it.<p>The obvious solution is to throttle all posting activity so that participating on Reddit slows to a level approaching those tree people from Lord of the Rings. (The larger time slices would actually get rid of whole class of problems, like the internet sleuthing BS that happened after the Boston bombing.) But I'm sure Reddit wants to encourage OPs to increase their # of responses for maximum buzz, so I don't really see any non-manipulative practical solution to this problem.
I feel like reddit is one of the most underestimated internet properties in existence. It gets almost no attention except when specific incidents that explicitly involve it occur. But by and large it is completely ignored by the mainstream media, celebrities, politicians, just about everybody. I think it's role has been drastically underestimated in the 2016 election interference, for example. Facebook and even Google have taken flak over that, but hardly anybody really seriously interrogated how powerful TheDonald was both directly and indirectly (through how it created a nexus and community to energize real Trump supporters).<p>Reddit just exists, sitting there in the background, steadily growing over time, but never seemingly even trying to raise its own profile. Yet (or perhaps because of that) I certainly spend far more time there and get far more value from it than any other social media site.
One of the major reasons reddit became popular initially is because of Digg. Digg had content that was 2-3 days older than reddit (many posts from Reddit got reposted to Digg). Once people started figuring that out, combined with the Digg censorshop scandal(1), reddit took off.<p>(1) <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controvers...</a>
One of the hallmarks of recent Reddit growth has been its mobile redesign. It aggressively nudges you to download their mobile app and it takes a few seconds longer to open any page (used to be instant with the old design). I presume they're doing this because their app has better user tracking (hard to disable tracking inside an app) and far less people are using ad blockers that work for apps too.
I'd like to say 'good job' on reddit, but they grew despite making a horrible job, like the redesign. I 'm glad it's doing well anyway.
Personally I wonder if Reddit can do something about the low quality of their comments in the big subs. All comment sections are full of idiots making bad puns. It's terrible, much much worse than youtube ever was or that twitter currently is.