What are /r/TheoryOfReddit's favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

I think the weird thing is how well the demographics seem to back this. According to google [for the US anyway].

Reddit: 70 / 30 (male / female)

Tumblr: 36 / 64 (male / female)

Sources: Reddit Tumblr

Funny, I've been rereading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance on my shit breaks and one of its best bits is that the attempt to define Quality is useless. People have an innate gauge for it but trying to analyze the criteria that compose it actually turns into a spiritless exercise of rote implementation, rather than truly judging Quality.

The problem that often occurs when parties disagree on Quality, it's that there is a lack of perspective. Something might seem awesome/deep only because you don't have a frame of reference for what is very awesome/deep. Of course, there can always be disagreements even between parties that have similar perspectives, buta common problem with these subreddits that strive for Quality is that users have different perceptions of the range of Quality that Reddit can offer.

In matters of taste, fuck democracy. The mods should just rule with an iron fist and ignore criticism. If people don't agree with their tastes, they can move onto a different subreddit or create their own. If you look at the most popular Youtube videos like Call Me Maybe or Gangnam Style, are these the pinnacle of music? Asking your audience to judge by a vague criterion of Depth or True is pointless if they eventually diverge from the judgement of the mods. The mods must either move the goalposts to fit the new voting constituents and shut the fuck up or just be ruthless despots that tolerate nothing but the posts that align with their own judgement.

The bigger point here is that both of these sites are user generated. Content on both sites is driven by users, who then cause the kind of skew you reference.

I think self-selection does a far better job of explaining why things like this occur. People would rather be involved in media that conforms to their world view, something reddit does for males and pinterest does for females. This then gets caught in a feedback loop where a skew to one side reinforces itself.

In England, ~3 months ago, more males used pinterest than females.

The value in calling a society racist as opposed to calling individuals within that society racist is that, in doing so, you recognize that the racism may be systemic and perhaps subtly enforced in some way at a larger level.

In calling Reddit as a whole racist, I don't think people mean to suggest that anywhere near the majority of users are consistently and cruelly racist. Rather, we are acknowledging that the community as a whole may display some racist behavior that could be, at some level, discouraging non-white people from participating (or participating fully) on the site. That is, non-white people may feel uncomfortable on the site because of racist comments occasionally getting large numbers of upvotes.

Also, Reddit may bear traces of the racism, classism, and elitism that have been inherent in internet use due to the disproportionate number of white, English-speaking, college-educated people who have historically had internet-enabled devices, have the leisure time to spend a lot of time on the internet, and use this kind of site. Due to the increasing prevalence of smart phones and the rise of social media sites, that demographic may be shifting. But Reddit is still very white and very male.

tried it out; uploaded a gif i had on imgur.

http://i.imgur.com/ZaxHZZ7.gif

it has a 20:1 compression ratio when uploaded to gfycat, can't really argue against that.

Only problem is that you can't resize on the fly in RES. But that's a small price to pay for the amount of bandwidth saved...

http://gfycat.com/SaltyImpressiveCrocodileskink

And what an odd url...

not sure how it is cheating when it starts out as a gif...

I think this would have a big effect on voting behaviour, but also on the decisions that the voting system produces. I was given some reddit voting data from March 2009 for research purposes, and there were users in that month with upwards of 10k votes on posts alone, with 80% of all votes coming from the top 11% of voting users. Users who voted the most also tended to vote more on early posts, to have a shorter delay between their votes, and to cast more down-votes. A paper with more detail.

Limiting the number of votes per user would shift decision-making power away from the users who "specialise" in long stints of quick voting. I'd be very interested to see what effect this had on Hot pages and /r/all, I think it would depend a lot on how low the limit was set and whether it was applied site-wide or on a subreddit basis.

I find this a really interesting question, and I actually wrote a page about it in my PhD thesis (p394).

To me it looks like relatively silent active voters could have disproportionate influence over reddit. I don't know whether they differ in terms of views or demographics from redditors who behave more typically, but its possible.

From an individual redditor's perspective I think a voting limit would increase the perceived value of votes and cause people to think more carefully before they cast them.

Reddit has previously published AMAs in book form, which constitutes a commercial purpose, so theoretically they could publish any content submitted to Reddit.

Wreaking is to inflict upon something. Wrecking would be to destroy, or break.

To put it another way -

They are inflicting chaos upon us.
They are destroying chaos upon us.

See what I mean?

> Because we wanted to cut back on people posting opinions everyone agreed with just to get karma.

~ Jeremy Edberg

additionally, there's this previous TheoryOfReddit post with more elaboration.

So, you'd think getting karma for self posts would encourage people to make self posts which would have more ingenuity, as per your OP. In reality, it did not go that way. People just posted generally agreeable claims as titles and would get massive amounts of upvotes. So reddit decided to stop giving karma for self posts. It would seem that this has actually had a good influence on self posts, there are less low-effort self posts now, the reason is self-evident.

> The former [text posts] is what makes Reddit great

I agree, however, we have to keep in mind: reddit is primarily a link aggregator, so link posts are important to reddit.

That’s not even the half of it.

The plans surrounding redditnotes would have fixed nearly every issue about reddit I regularly complain about.

https://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/07/06/reddit-came-close-to-becoming-decentralized-last-year/

u/yishan was the most visionary CEO of this place by far.

There are two sheets - subreddits and moderators. (I always miss when a spreadsheet has multiple pages.)

Info: This is data on subreddit moderators for the top 5000 subreddits (as listed by this page). Data was retrieved last week.

Code: https://github.com/dlew/reddit-mods

Background: I first started gathering data on mods last week during "no pics day" because I was curious about "locks." Suppose that users A and B both moderate subreddits X and Y. If A is above B in X, but B is above A in Y, then they're "locked" because they can retaliate against each other should either of them get removed.

After gathering the data, I ended up parsing some other interesting tidbits about mods - such as how many subreddits they moderate, how many they lead, etc. I wanted to share this data with r/TheoryOfReddit and see what people thought of the data.

Participation: If you look at the github project I provide a cache of the data I collected. Also, the code itself can be used to retrieve a new cache, though know that this will take a few hours. Feel free to do whatever you want with the data; it should be self-explanatory.

I'll leave the analysis up to others. I have my own thoughts on the data but I'm curious what others think first.

If you want to get in an argument about science, keep in mind you have to demonstrate your claims too. If you look at the scientists who take down pseudoscience, such as James Randi, you'll notice that they provide careful rebuttals of pseudoscientific claims. They don't just wave their hands.

Reading the article, there are reasons to believe it's sound. Latent semantic analysis is falsifiable: the author notes that he plugged in subreddits unrelated to politics and reproduced preexisting correlations, e.g. /r/Minnesota + /r/NBA is close to /r/Timberwolves. If the code did not reproduce correlations already known to exist, it would have been falsified. Secondly, the source code and data is freely available, so anyone can check the code for irregularities and make sure the results match. (In fact, I probably will later.) There are other studies which have bolstered scientists' confidence in LSA, such as this one. There are more in the long list of references on LSA's Wikipedia page.

Like any scientific model, LSA's shortfalls have been discussed, and there are occasionally allegations of fly-by-night data scientists improperly interpreting their data, but this study is easy to double-check and replicate. If one thinks feature selection was massaged to fit an agenda, one should be able to point to the lines in the code that are suspicious.

This isn't new. I witness the same behavior on newsgroups before the Web even existed (well, it existed, but its whole contents could be listed in a book). It is partly the anonimity, but mostly the fact that there are additional "filters" to the conversation. This also happens with phone conversations, or by writing letters: people could say things using these they would not in a face-to-face conversation. The distance created by the media lowers inhibitions.

Hmm... How does it cost that much?

I don't know how your bot works exactly but I'm assuming it queries /r/all/comments/new and messages/inbox/ 2 times per minute, if request is made then it uses API for some online wallet storage and transfers funds from one wallet to another then user is ~~massaged~~ sent a message and comment is posted to notify users of the transfer.

From my experience with reddit comments the average page returns about ~25kb of comments per request. Posting comments and sending messages doesn't require nearly as much data as it's only POST requests.

Now assuming you obey reddit API rules and make request every 30 seconds that would mean you get 50kb of data in a second, 3000kb/min, ~175.78mb/hr, ~4gb a day, ~130gb a month. Let's assume you get that much for messages too (you probably don't), that's ~260gb of reddit comments and messages.

The wallet API and messaging doesn't take a lot of resources since it consists mostly of smaller GET and POST requests, but lets say that consumes the same amount as parsing comments (in reality it probably uses ~1/10th of it) that would be another 260gb

Which brings us to (exaggerated) total of ~520 gigabytes per 31 days. In reality I'm guessing you use ~250gb or less per month??

Most VPS's offer 1TB+ bandwidth for as low as $5/month, like digitalocean https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing databases and CPU consumption shouldn't be a bottleneck as they're relatively simple tasks and database stores only IDs so the 20GB SSD should be enough.

Please don't think I'm saying you're lying or that you're wrong, this comment is more thinking out loud than "proof" or attempt to show that you're wrong. You have the stats and I'm just guessing data consumption and cost.

If you could share some real numbers I'd appreciate as I've been planning on running my own bot (for a subreddit) and by my calculations (like the one above) it is something that isn't too expensive.

>Is there a website that is like reddit was in its infancy?

Hubski is trying. As any social network in its infancy, Hubski currently doesn't have a big enough user base to generate a lot of comments, but it's also short on memes and shit. Additionally, their system tries to sidestep the karma-whoring issue by scoring submissions/comments upon the completion of a circle, rather than a simple numerical score.

You could as well say you just quit the internet. Or you could just filter more, find more niche sites, etc. But you can also do that with reddit ( /r/truereddit, etc). What always worries me a bit is how there is no real alternative left. Or maybe there is some underground tip but I should have heard of it by now.

Hacker News is good for tech-y stuff, but they're essentially like a technology/business-startup subreddit, very focused. Metafilter is still good and maintained its state for an amazing decade+ by now... still lots of funny cat videos, but only the really good ones.

I'm just very skeptical about staging a leave from reddit so dramatically, it makes you wonder how much substance there is to any of it and what use it is to just leave without discussing an alternative.

while nice, It seems that parts of the graph are still missing.

If we look at: The Reddit Switcharoo Mindmap you can see the Graph is a lot bigger.

(you should ignore the disconnect, as somebody has removed a switch-a-roo comment, however we routed around that.)

You can view a list of a lot of the switch-a-roo comments over at [/r/switcharoo](/r/switcharoo)

A complete, up-to-date Graph would be very nice. :D

When I joined in 2008, wtf, atheism, politics, awwww, fffffuuuuuuu, science, technology, and videos were the defaults. I am probably missing a few, but consider wtf, atheism and politics being a fair portion of the defaults. People were a bit snooty and there was a non stop political/atheist circle jerk. There wasn't any crazy hate subreddits that I know of. I remember when people considered youtube to have scum bucket comments - but google cleaned up youtube, and reddit took on those types of users.

edit: It's been 4 days since this post and I have been thinking. I wanted to add that the early reddit I knew was different. It felt like a small gathering of no consequence, like we had a club house and the last person to leave for the day would have to turn the lights off. Did anyone mention the math and programming jokes? It felt like https://news.ycombinator.com/

Thank you. That seems reasonable. Do we know whether Reddit does conform to this theory. Surely there are some figures out there?

Edit: Found this https://www.quora.com/Reddit-website/What-percent-of-Redditors-read-but-rarely-contribute

I don't want to get in a super pedantic disagreement about the definition of one word, but language is a series of evolving ideas. You're right that it means that because that's how people use it but that's true of every word in the English language, some words have just meant something longer than others. And as it happens, the original meaning is the opposite of what you said but since both meanings have been around since before any of our grandparents were born I don't see why it matters.

Not quite. I'm one of the devs volunteering for AnkiDroid (a semi-official free/libre port of Anki for Android). Picked it up as a COVID-hobby, and been running with it ever since.

Regardless, thanks for the word of mouth recommendation, it's software that's massively improved my life, and a reminder every now and than that it's done the same for others is truly heartwarming. Have a great day!

In the first blog post, someone has posted a link to their dissertation on memes. I haven't got the time to go through it in detail, but it looks interesting too.

https://www.academia.edu/15515551/On_the_Language_of_Internet_Memes_Dissertation_

And part of what I'm saying is: there weren't. Here's a new page chosen at random from the period before external links started to decline. There's one imgur link and one other image host (flickr). That's less than 10% of the links on that page. And of the earlier pages I've seen, that's about standard. By 2011, on the other hand, imgur links alone made up more than half of the links on the new page.

In other words, all of the evidence I've seen points to the popularity of imgur as a cause of the increasing use of Reddit as an image aggregator, and not vice versa.

If that really worries anyone, though, I'll be glad to run the script again, with a fuller batter of image hosts. Just compile a list of all of the image hosting domains you want me to include. I'll try to upload a revised chart later on today.

Found out the comment you meant (maybe)!!!

BTW sorry for keep replying to this comment instead of editing my previous ones, I just want to keep you notified

This was the only reason I could see for Conde Nast to buy Reddit back in the day. Reddit isn't so much a website as it is an architecture, and it's an architecture that refines conversations by "hotness" better than pretty much anything under the sun. At the same time, it's an ugly and awkward interface to get used to and without critical mass, it never catches on - although anybody can sandbox a Reddit install anywhere they want, nobody ever does because without the community to go along with it it ends up being quiet and full of tumbleweeds.

If I had a company and could choose between a PHPBB and a "reddit" for my user forums, I'd go with a reddit all the way. I think it's really a testament to the ineptness of Conde Nast that it took them <em>eight bloody years</em> to monetize their product.

This is the most likely explanation. Similarweb's ranking only has Reddit going up 2 places (28 to 26) recently. Similarweb is an all around superior product compared to Alexa with better data and thus more accurate reporting.

I mean, that time is probably now: https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/facts/ICTFactsFigures2017.pdf

average gap is 12% worldwide and 5-7% in developed countries. It's just that the internet is also extremely stratified: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/social-media-by-gender-women-pinterest-men-reddit-infographic_n_1613812

the site you browse can very well determine your mood on the topic. Funny how Reddit is actually one of the most imbalanced of all the big sites and also one of the most common ones to complain about the gender ratio.

I guarantee there is no ~~is a~~ secret conspiracy. Go back to bed, reddit! Your government is under control! Here, watch American Gladiators and congratulate yourselves on browsing the website of the free!

ytknows is still testing css for the subreddit, so odds are it will come up again soon.

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Bo9IIlbsagYJ:www.reddit.com/user/ytknows+&amp;cd=3&amp;hl=en&amp;ct=clnk&amp;client=firefox-a

https://imgur.com/yRIDj

I'm not sure about what is an accurate source or not, but alexa (which could quite possibly not be accurate at all) says otherwise. Also something that I find interesting is imgur vs reddit

Remove the posts, ban from the subreddit and probably contact the admins with the account names used, I'm guessing they were throwaways, so the most the admins can do is ban or shadowban them, which doesn't really get rid of the person (heck I know guys who go through TOR to get here.), but is the best we can do.

I've always asked this question, and it seems there are two options from here, both are small and will probably need your patience at first, but hopefully they will be able to substitute what we loved about Reddit. They are, Hacker News and Hubski. Personally I prefer Hacker News, it has a similar layout to Reddit, and its content is very similar to the tech enthused content Reddit was producing early on. Hubuski is a bit different, it has a bigger focus on a power-user and tag system, but both sites have a good direction.

It's not CSS by the way.

It's a slightly modified use of the Markdown markup language and conforms to most of the same syntax/conventions.

Haroopad is a good dedicated Markdown editor.

I'd like to invite anyone unhappy with the state of Reddit to try out a new kind of link sharing site that I've been working on for the last couple of months:

Personafy

It solves the Eternal September problem by scaling horizontally instead of into vertical categories, like Reddit does.

If you are interested in reading more about the problems with various social sharing tools and how Personafy fixes them, I wrote up a post about it here: https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/c4c4074591ba

> the main source of news on the internet. You need to go outside and get friends.

You need to read more carefully what you're responding to.

Reddit is the largest social news site on the web (example).

It's not as large as Facebook (a social network that people also use to get news) and it's not the largest or most prestigious news website (that would likely be a mainstream news outlet like the BBC or Reuters), but it's absolutely been the largest social news site on the net since Digg imploded years ago.

you can't be neutral on a moving train.

>This quote is from Howard Zinn, which was used as the title of his autobiography as well as a film about his life.

>Its meaning is complex: when you are on a train it has an obvious destination which is fixed. If you claim to be neutral on that train you are a agreeing with the destination as much as if you want to go there because even if you don’t care or are uninterested the train is going to go the that destination all the same.... In essence inaction within a system is de facto agreement and condoning of the system, you either pick a side or the train picks a side for you.

I have some strong reservations about this interpretation, but the phrase is probably one of the most concise ways I've seen the concept conveyed.

Reddit’s API will tell you them. The Firefox extension Reddit Reveal and the Uppers and Downers Enhance module for Reddit Enhancement Suite will expose them for you.

No. You are horribly, tragically wrong.

F7U12 comics are now in every subreddit, often crossposted to multiple subreddits, and spreading throughout. This shit degrades discussion everywhere.

Not only that, but there aren't any f7u12 comics that aren't hosted on Imgur. Blocking Imgur does a marvelous job of eliminating the gutterspeech elsewhere on Reddit.

Again, this is an experiment. One does not test a hypothesis by second guessing it, one tests a hypothesis by performing the experiment.

I actually think reddit is intended to be a news aggregator site and is thus poorly suited for answering specific questions (but great for stories in /r/AskReddit). I prefer to use stack exchange for asking questions about a specific topic- usually android or english language usage. Quora might be cool too, though I haven't spent much time there.

This is because a news story becomes uninteresting once everyone knows about it, and once it is gone it is virtually impossible to find (unless you know exactly what you are looking for), while a question stays relevant (or it can be edited by anyone to make it relevant again). The sites I mentioned also have tags, which make it easier to find questions I can answer, and (most importantly), people can edit each others' posts This (and automatic mod promotion) is the thing missing from reddit. Users also gain mod powers as they accumulate karma, which I think is a great feature that could ruin the large subreddits if it was implemented there. (there was a bestof post about this not too long ago)

TL;DR reddit was not made for Q&A, it was made to be a news aggregator. The comment/self-post system is a feature that was hacked in after the site became active.

Well, that's my rant. If you want my opinion, I agree with /u/newthinker- people are generally slow to migrate, they usually stay in the place with the most users, because those users are more likely to be able to answer the actual question.

It's a cognitive phenomenon known as &quot;confirmation bias.&quot; Simply put, once we believe something to be "true" we seek out evidence to support our claim, and ignore all evidence that does not support it.

And then we can have a Reddit discussion about the article bout Reddit articles. And later on we can have a discussion about that discussion, and someone can write an article about it, and then put it on Tildes.net, where only 10,000 people will (possibly) read it.

It's wordplay on Dr. Howard Moskowitz's aphorism, "There is no perfect pickle. There are perfect pickles."

Watch Malcolm Gladwell's TED talk on the topic of the tastes of the masses.

>they'll find a way of getting around adblockers soon enough

There are ways around it now. For instance, Google and others pay Ad Block Plus to have their ads whitelisted.

But, for the most part, it's a cat and mouse game. Any progress made by content providers will be countered by ad blockers.

There are very few scenarios where ads could be forcibly displayed against a viewer's will, none of them likely to ever happen.

>The admins have said that the % liked number for front page submissions tends to land consistently in the 90% range.

That's quite an important piece of information here. Let's denote by ua and da actual numbers of upvotes and downvotes, and by uf and df fuzzed numbers. Then we know uf, df and one equation (uf - df = ua - da). ua and da are unknowns. But knowing about "90% rule" gives us second equation, and we now can estimate (as 0.9 is rough number) ua and da for every front page submission!

ua / (ua + da) = 0.9 = 1 / (1 + da/ua). So ua/da = 9, ua = 9 * da.

uf - df = ua - da. So ua = uf - df + da = 9 * da, uf - df = 8 * da, da = (uf - df) / 8 = (net score) / 8

So roughly ua = 1.125 * (net score), da = 0.125 * (net score)!

Calculated that values and estimated value of fake votes for 5 submissions from /r/all: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ApnfcaJKXh0odC1VVmNGcTRfQ25pd0Jqbm9YYmtGMXc

I am not quite sure what to do with this though, it would be probably interesting to look at a graph of fake votes over time for some submissions.

Here's something relevant I put together for the AskScienceFair. I'm still thinking about what to do as an extended project.

It's interesting that you said hockey stick. If anyone isn't aware of how the hockey stick curve pattern in real life, Geoffrey West gave an excellent Ted Talk called The surprising math of cities and corporations that refers to it. The whole talk is great, but you can skip to about 14:00 for the relevant part.

Basically, we're destined to collapse, and we're closing in on the peak end of that hockey stick. Unless we seriously innovate before that time, producing a new hockey stick pattern, we'll die. Even that is unsustainable as you have to cycle faster and faster to stay alive. All the more reason that this article is crap.

> Those definitions redefine thousands of years of Latin prefix meaning?

A word's meaning derives from its usage and not its etymology.

"This is a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English. Etymologies are not definitions; they're explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago."

• http://www.etymonline.com/

"Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time. "

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology

> ... If the name itself is not accurate in representing the beliefs it represents then ...

Names cannot be inaccurate. They refer to what they refer to. A name could be misleading (depending on the reader), but it cannot be inaccurate.

This post seems better suited for r/IdeasForTheAdmins.

I think the main difficulty of this feature is interface. How would you weight them? Give each a point value? Rank each subreddit in a list? Put it in a pretty graph? If it's too technical, you'll put off users from using it and so it won't be worth the development time. If you make it too simple, power users will get frustrated.

This seems like a decent project for an Open Sorcerer, if one wants to take up the mantle.

You might search for the word "astroturfing" to find some examples and discussions.

Edit: This might interest you.

Relevant. But I completely agree with all the talk on voting as a new step for sorting through relevant information. Another downfall may be that it has to be somewhat consolidated in a way, since it takes people power to make the system work, your site has to be pretty popular before it would actually function well such as reddit. Right? Have you ever stepped into an unpopular subreddit and seen how differently it works than the frontpage? Just some observations.

>they only delete what we don't want to see.

Correction. They delete what is outlined in their rules for their subreddit that the creator of the sub wrote in.

>all comments deleted by mod X

Moderation Log tells us what is deleted by X Mod of Y Sub with the filters that are built into it. We can export that if needed but don't have to. For instance I perform 12% of the moderation for /r/ArcheAge when we include all forms of task while AutoMod does 80% of the other work.

> they would probably not object to this and since people who get censored could still be read,

I definitely object to this. We remove stupid threats and content that shouldn't be read for good reason. While not as serious we have it outlined we aren't going to allow any guild posts or gold sellers advertise on the sub. That's final. This stops stupid flame wars and drama in the sub completely.

Content is removed if it violates subreddit guidelines outlined by the creator of the sub not the community. When you subscribe to /r/Theoryofreddit you agree to the conditions made by the head mod /u/kjoneslol (who isn't helpful what so ever -___-)

The response if you don't like the rules is to make your own. That's how other communities have started and it's worked out well (see /r/weed and /r/trees)

Looking at the css of /r/debatereligion, the subscriber-based css rules toggle based on the following selector: body:not(.subscriber)

So: CSS is capable of discerning whether or not the currently viewing user is a subscriber, based on a class on the html body element. This has been the case for over a year.

Found this document: https://www.reddit.com/r/csshelp/wiki/moresnippets#wiki_27._no_downvoting_unless_subscribed

It's not a bad idea, but it's obviously up to the moderators of each subreddit to decide to implement and administer this sort of scheme.

I'm not sure this would change anything: people will post their comments wherever they feel like, and the moderators will end up removing joke comments from the serious comment thread anyway, just like they do now in serious discussion subreddits.

And, by the way, it's "free rein", not "free reign".

> She would respond instantly if she only knew, but there is no way for her to know!

Yes, there is. If she wants to know whether there are any answers to her question on Reddit, she can log on to Reddit.

> But the situation returns to that previous state. I don't know.

If you wants to know whether she has responded to your request on Reddit for more information, you can log on to Reddit.

> If you know or can speculate as to reasons why there are no email notifications (or even ajax notifications on a static page) please weigh in.

I can certainly speculate. Someone thought that using Reddit as a way to notify people of replies on Reddit was sufficient for Reddit users to find out what's happening on Reddit.

> AJAX, Email, SMS, push... Would notification tools like these improve your own reddit experience?

That doesn't matter. If push notifications would improve your Reddit experience, then set one up! There are a few ways to do this. I know that some people use If This, Then That to get the immediate push notifications you're craving.

But... hey... I responded to your post more than a day after you submitted it. You probably have absolutely zero interest in this topic now, and don't care at all about what I wrote. Oh well. Such is life.

Genetic modification has greatly increased hardiness of plants. Most conspiracy nuts think monsanto is some diabolical company trying to screw everybody over...even though their existence is to do the opposite, by ya know...feeding mother fuckers and keeping famine from wiping us out. tldr; live long enough to be seen as a villian.jpg

shit i must be a paid shill, guess i should call up monsanto and ask for a salary for my outstanding "reputation management" skills.

sources:

http://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2013/05/15/monsanto_more_saint_than_sinner_106533.html https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/10/13/5-things-you-probably-dont-know-about-monsanto.aspx

This is also my objection. You can require input, but you can't require quality input. (if you can programmatically determine the quality of a comment, there's no point in allowing users to vote at all...)

Additionally, this has been proposed numerous times here and in /r/ideasfortheadmins.

On the other hand, lobste.rs implemented this -- however I don't think it's possible to really see it in action without loging in, which requires an invite.

> Downvote Explanations > > Often on other sites, a user would have his or her comment downvoted without explanation and then edit their comment to ask why they were downvoted. On this site, voters must choose a reason before downvoting and those votes are tallied and shown to the original commenter. For submitted stories, downvote summaries are shown to all users.

Another unusual lobste.rs feature:

> If users are disruptive enough to warrant banning, they will be banned absolutely, given notice of their banning, and their disabled user profile will indicate which moderator banned them and why. There will be no "shadow banning" or "hellbanning" of users.

The problem with this: when you tell spammers they've been banned, they just re-register. Shadowbanning keeps them wasting their time with nonfunctional accounts instead of re-registering. However, lobste.rs combats this by staying small, and having a strict invite-only system in which users who invite spammers can themselves be banned. This unfortunately adds a very high barrier to participation; I think sites like reddit see shadowbanning as a small price to pay to keep registration burden low.

I see both of those as relevant criticisms of the culture and status of black American men. The first is highlighting the disproportionate number of black male prisoners. It is an unfortunate statistic that is responsible for serious consequences among the black community. The second is another biting criticism of the pervasive anti-intellectualism in the black community.

If you can't see the relevant social commentary in these 'jokes' for the apparent racism, then you're seeking out something to get upset at. I suggest you fight the social problems represented in these 'jokes,' not the 'jokes' themselves.

I have a November ComScore report for Reddit. Having spoken with the Admins about how they refuse to pay the Comscore "racketeers" (and having found their arguments convincing), it's safe to say that ComScore under-reports Reddit by a healthy margin. Let's call it a factor of 5 to be on the safe side, although the link I just posted would put it closer to 8.

My ComScore puts Reddit at 122,000 unique visitors per day in November. That was when we had ~500,000 usernames. Give it a factor of 5 and that's 600,000 viewers. Factor of 8 and you're at over a million uniques per day. Now - only those with usernames can vote - but that's still a lot of people.

And we've got ~40% more people now.

Alexa results

click compare to reddit.com...somehow, people on 9gag actually spend more time on it and it's almost identical to reddit on pageviews/user...and catching up in traffic rank :o

>> but Reddit is getting emptier with every passing day.

>Just the opposite. Reddit is one of the most popular websites on the Internet.

113th in the world and 46th in the US, in fact

The culture of people that post on r/politics is way different than the culture that posts on other, smaller subreddits. This comparison is like taking a look at /b/ and claiming the rest of 4chan is just like it. That said, Reddit usually forgets how big it is. Alexa says we're rated #117 in terms of traffic worldwide -- that is a lot of people coming in and out.

• Everyone should take a gander at the popular search terms people use to navigate here. The top 5 are: jailbait, ass, reditt, psx scene and reddit.com. It doesn't get much better when you go further down the list.

It wouldn't surprise me if there were some sock puppet accounts, but it also wouldn't surprise me if the front page (and consequentially, r/politics) is so saturated that it attracts a more "average", or "normal" crowd representative of people that have a much different (perhaps more shallow) Reddit experience. The U.S. especially is much more of a center-right country politically, so it'd make sense in terms of sheer numbers.

Dominated? I wouldn't use that word but I definitely recognise a shift from a strongly left leaning community to one that now contains people/communities/discussions from the right as well as the left.

Reddit was predominantly left leaning for a very long time. However I think that the balance between these two sides have moved to the point where the right leaning members of Reddit now have sufficient representation to no longer go unnoticed.

You have framed your argument in the left right context of the US. However, approximately 55% of Reddit traffic comes from outside of the US. For many countries, the left of the USA, would fall on the right side of the political spectrum.

In recent years, many countries have moved to the right. Why is the world shifting to the right? I do not have an adequate answer to that question. I would however suggest that any shift to the right on Reddit, or rather, an increase in members of the Reddit community identifying as right wing, is a reflection of the shift happening in real world political alignment.

Honestly I've always thought slashdot's mod points system was a way better idea than karma. Modpoints are a time limited resource. Upvoting or downvoting costs a point. Make them scarce enough, and people will be more considerate of how they are used.

I used my Python script again from the previous post to find out the totals again of the top 100 subreddits.

Total Min Users Online: 67976

Total Max Users Online: 240630

Total Average Users Online: 141570

Script can be found here.

The problem is, you're talking about a complete overhaul of the site. I think your idea is great, but it would be better implemented on a site starting from scratch.

Hubski kinda has that going on, though they're only using single tags.

Not sure if this is a Digg-centric comment trying to shame reddit or a genuine look for that quality "reddit from 4 years ago" experience... But if you look for quality:

If you don't care for specific categories, /r/truereddit and metafilter are doing fine. And there is a trend for larger subreddits to split into better moderated smaller ones. /r/gaming -> /r/gamernews. /r/creepy -> /r/nosleep. /r/askreddit -> /r/explainitlikeimfive, /r/askscience, /r/self...

The key is moderation and the willingness of moderators to actually delete shit if it doesn't follow some basic no-meme/no-circlejerk rules. Unfortunately it mostly swaps over to the other extreme, often enforcing some additional rules and splintering of content. But better than nothing.

One important thing you have wrong: Pandora does not go through your library or anything like that. You simply choose an artist or a song (or multiple) and it goes from there. So the more you use it, the better its supposed to get as it learns what you like and dislike through further use. Also if you really do want to use it outside the US(I love it and can't live without it) I would recommend Hotspot Shield. Most straightforward way to use pandora for me for free. Regardless, great question and I love the discussion. Cheers.

Well it depends from the subjects you're looking for (even in politics), the country you're from and overall your personnal orientation. It's hard for me to give you recommendations, mostly because I do not know which subjects (political or not) you're interested in.

I'm by no means an US political expert, so if you're looking for good books on the subject you've hit the wrong door. The only good references I could give you are <em>Democracy in America</em>, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, and overall how Liberalism evolved, philosophically (David Hume, John Locke, Geogre Berckley) and economically (Adam Smith ofc, Spencer, Max Weber and John Maynard Keynes). I can't really give you further recommendations from recent authors, as I myself lack knowledge on US's political system evolutions.

If your interest in politics is more general, you should dig Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan and Karl Marx's Capital: Critique of Political Economy. Those are essential to sum up the evolution of how Politics were perceived throught ages, and the opposition republicanism/liberalism.

As I don't quite know what you may be looking for, you can give me examples of political subjects that interest you. But again, if your main interest is US politics and the recent election, I'm afraid that my list won't help much.

Related - here's a survey that was done in /r/favors and 3 other subs. OP deleted the submission in /r/favors but did share the results.

(re q #7) I was surprised with to see /r/videos being so low and /r/til being so high. I don't know what other subreddits it was posted to beyond /r/favors but it's interesting nonetheless.

I am 33 and remember when Google bought Deja Groups in 2001, back before Google ruined the web interface to their usenet archive. I checked out alot of older usenet discussions from the early 1990's and 80's back when users actually posted under their real names by the old conventions. It was a totally different culture than their peers of today. The college crowd back then that dominated usenet was much more mature and serious. Of course you have to factor in that back then usenet was hard to use, plus posting under your real name and using your college email address -- that weeded out the worst elements.

Now look at those same college youth today -- it seems that they post so much to twitter, facebook and text on the cellphone that writing paragraphs is difficult for them. Most of them time when I get into Reddit scuffles it is with people who only post under the twitter limit who grew up on social media or always use their smartphone to post and not their pc.

> one will be able to horde Reddit Notes

I can send them in a barbarian army to conquer another country? Well, that's as good an explanation as any other I've seen so far!

Or, maybe, you meant one would be able to "hoard" them? ;)

> calling out those you don't know over grammatical errors, punctuation, etc,

In this vein, I'd like to point out that people don't troll reddit for stories, they trawl it. :)

> I'm certain they are ~~trolling~~ trawling for the stories here

> 4 percent of reddit is a huge fucking number

For context, take a look at where Alexa is ranking reddit nowadays; they're estimating it gets more US traffic than any other website other than Google, YouTube, and Facebook. Even 0.4% of reddit is a hell of a lot of people.

I have this chrome extension that effectively hides all mentions of karma on reddit. It was created by a redditor. I used it for a while, and it definitely had an impact on my reddit experience, but in the end, I decided I liked seeing karma scores.

If you use Chrome, you can install stylebot and set .arrow.down:hover::before to display: none;

which will hide the hover text.

> I think imgur's problem is that they have largely shit content. How is a site made of largely meme's, etc. make a profit by itself?

Their evident massive user base. Ads and this https://imgur.com/register/upgrade

Here's the Alexa rank for 4chan: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/4chan.org

They're ranked #422 in the US and #859 in the world. That's simply not even a remotely valid comparison. Reddit is the 9th most popular website in the US.

Frankly, we have no real reason to suspect that reddit isn't representative of the US population.

According to Alexa reddit is the 9th most popular website in the US and the 34th most popular in the world. It's a safe bet that the demographics of american redditors are at the very least a close approximation to the demographics of internet users in the united states in general. Considering how prevalent internet usage is in the US population, we should expect reddit demographics of US users to closely approximate the general demographics for the US population.

I don't know the answer to that, but would love a good source for it.

We can see coontown traffic here : https://www.reddit.com/r/coontown/about/traffic/

And some stormfront data here : http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/stormfront.org

I think the reddit companion has helped me ever so slightly to vote on "deep content". Other wise, once I'm done with a long article I generally close it, forget where I found it, and consequentially do not vote.

Yeah about 3 months ago he either deleted his account or it was deleted for him. You can still see some of his posts this way.

The exodus to reddit from digg was very sudden:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/02/reddit-digg-traffic-chris-slowe/

http://venturebeat.com/2010/09/01/reddit-excited-about-chance-to-eat-diggs-lunch/

Account age.... 5 months. You don't know about the big one. Those in the last five months were chicken shit in comparison to Saydrah. Two years ago. Still, the Admins don't do much about them.

There is a case to be made that the witch hunt against Saydrah was the single biggest event in the entire history of reddit.

There is nothing criminal about a lot of unethical business practices, but they're still highlighted here.

And this ignores the fact that /r/jailbait could be seen as illegal under US Fed Law. If you're legally inclined see US v. Dost and US v. Knox (United States v. Knox, 32 F.3d 733 (3d Cir. 1994))

To me, it doesn't matter. I used Remove It Permanently to hide all votes on mine or other people's comments -- I can see them if I downvote. I also have Reddit Enhancement Suite, which allows me to see how I voted on a certain user before, and a Greasemonkey "Ignore Users" script.

This, combined with only subscribing to small (<20,000 subscribers) or well-moderated sub-reddits, makes the reddit experience a lot better.

EDIT: This is what I see normally:

>heyfella (_) 1 hour ago

This is what I see after I downvote:

>heyfella (_) [-1] 3 points 1 hour ago

>Arbitrary date: Spez and kn0thing leave reddit October 27, 2009

Not really Arbitrary. 3 years to the day after CN bought reddit, it was likely the first day they were legally allowed to quit.... or more likely the amount of time they had to stay to get their full payout from CN.

~~Technically within a few days~~, but close enough to tell you they left the first chance they could.

Edit: It was exactly three years if you go by the day and week of the month, that is the purchase of reddit and the departure of the founders happened on the last tuesday of October.

There was a story just this past week in my local area about a guy who rammed a police car and then was shot and killed. I hit up Google News for some details and noticed that various news outlets had published 3 different ages at death for the guy (he was 44 but sources also said 46 and 47). Mistakes like this happen, and not just on amateur news sites.

link

For comparison, the source was posted over a year ago. But there again, while the post was rated well, the top rated comments explained why it is a poor concept.

well thought out post.

reddit's user base is a tough one to raise revenue from, see this . it's basically college kids or recent grads. this demographic doesn't usually have much disposable income and they get pissed off easily at "corporate greed" when companies start charging for formally free service.

then the other option is raising revenue via ads. personally i wouldn't mind seeing a lot more ads. if reddit fears losing users as more ads are introduced, where are these users going to go for a similar experience? what other company will take on a burn rate of $7mil/yr for this user base?

240 million valuation is insane. if the burn rate is $7/mil per year and reddit is not profitable, then it seems to me you may be implying a much loftier valuation than facebook had at its IPO. and this site seems like a toy more than a business. there is a lot of opportunity here for more smart and creative marketing to its users. my $.02

When you see the number of people there who requested the OP PM them with nudez, which was illegal afaik, then it become clear that r/jailbait is conducive to criminality.

But that's neither here nor there. Set aside illegality. Reddit is a business and public perception of the site is vital to it's future growth. Another poster drew attention to this http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/reddit.com you can see jailbait is a top search term leading people to reddit. Thanks to this and Anderson Cooper, it's only a matter of time before the reddit name becomes associated with sexual deviancy to those who know nothing else about it.

Do you happen to know of any Chrome extensions that can do the same?

Edit: Found it: Nanny for Chrome.

Edit²: Similar and more popular: StayFocusd.

Reddit thrives in large part to its monopoly-like status as an all-purpose comments site. Digg is dead, and Hacker News and Metafilter only fit a very select niche. reddit mainly got the users from digg, because there was no tangible alternative whatsoever - which probably helped kindle the rivalry and animosity between the two.

I think someone who tried seriously to create an alternative without just forking Paul Graham's Arc CMS (or whatever it is) and perhaps tried to be more entrepreneurial about it might very well succeed.

I am currently working on a more relevant forum CMS (AKA bulletin board) as an alternative to the ancient systems like vBulletin and PHPBB, because forums were never broken nor obsolete, but people just didn't bother to innovate them, because there was no (financial) incentive to do so. They same reason probably explains why one-person endeavours like, say, hubski are completely stale.

TheoryOfReddit/TrueReddit would probably be great places to promote such endeavours.

That's a good question. I guess it will depend on personal tastes, but I have no idea what the aggregate behavior will be. Personally, I focus more on people. I follow 19 people and 8 tags.

On a related note, I'm not 100% satisfied with the 'all posts' presentation. I am thinking on that. It might be worth while to have filters that you can apply on all posts to help with discovery. It's a bit hidden, but on this page http://hubski.com/activity, you can sort posts by video, tagged, text, etc. I'm also wondering if it would be possible to not have an 'all posts' feed at all. Discovery would have to be very good. But there may be benefits if it were done right.

I seem to remember a website that had like a web of subreddits divided up into catagories and you could browse new ones that way. I thought it had the name pearl somewhere in it but I cant find it right now. In the meantime heres this website which is similar but not as good.

http://www.pearltrees.com/subreddit_suggester

You're doing yourself a disservice, there are some very good apps out there that provide a far better UX for mobile than anything made by Reddit. I use Relay.

Unofficial apps have the ability to do that! I use Android, and

Play store link: Relay for reddit

I use Relay when I'm on mobile.

Play store link: Relay for reddit

I left the definition of quality undefined on purpose, I recently read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" and I wouldn't venture so far as to say what quality means for a system like reddit.

Can we agree on voting having at least having a weak positive average influence on quality in most cases as compared to no voting system at all ?

I agree with you there is no guarantee that "the best" will always reach the top and nothing else. It is more of a best effort kind of thing.

Have you tried out relay?

Play store link: Relay for reddit

Reddit has got nothing to do with which image host a users wants to use. Blame the users, not reddit.

Also, don't use the official imgur app, use Opengur instead. Way faster. And a lot better.