It's likely that the largest advertisers don't use the self-serve ad manager. They call their rep who operates the system for them. This is why the self-serve ad managers for AdWords, Facebook Ads, etc. are all pretty unloved.
Ex-agency guy here, now client side. This is not the full picture.
Just because brands outsource media management to agencies doesn't mean the many business reasons for improving the UI go away.
As someone who has collaborated with Google engineers and PMs on such things before, I can confidently say they care quite a bit.
You see, agencies margins are in part dictated by how much time it takes to do "low impact" but "mid-high" effort activities like reporting and day to day campaign management. It takes real people hours to do those things and if to platforms are delivering otherwise comparable performance, at the agency level, they will push towards things that deliver higher margins. Which might be the platform that lets them get the most done with the least effort.
And I'd also add that i think AdWords and FB have some of the most user-friendly interfaces for such an advanced and massive feature set compared to other players in the industry.
They've already started! They're A/B testing the sign-up modal being uncloseable which of course means it'll pass because some marketing schmuck can say "See we get conversions!"
Can you elaborate on this test? Do you mean they are leaning towards not letting you browse Reddit without signing in? Or rather moving away from unverified accounts without an email attached?
The former, I'm a member of their beta and while I hadn't seen it since I've been logged in another user had posted in the /r/beta subreddit that when they were lurking and not logged in, the sign up modal came up but the close button had been removed. Users found that it was an A/B test.
Unfortunately, I see why they are leaning in this direction and some of the other trends and expect it to get worse.
Sam clearly sees the potential for Reddit to become another feed-based advertising platform. In order to make it even a fraction as valuable as FB or Twitter, he needs not only to drastically improve the ad interface, he needs to also get better audience data so as to allow advertisers better targeting, and ideally target specific users using their own audience data.
This is unfortunately at odds with what Reddit's community seems to want, so there seems to be a very obvious long-term trend toward slowly boiling the frog. They get rid of undesirable communities, ramp up ad placements and monetization, get profiles more prominent so users have a reason to give Reddit more audience data for free, and then this move which will likely lean towards them making users create an account (tied to a unique identifier). I'd guess the next step is making them verify with email which in turn lets advertisers and cookie onboarding partners map to cookie IDs for retargeting purposes. This can immediately add significantly to the CPMs they charge advertisers because the end performance of those impressions will likely be quite a bit higher.
As a Reddit user for over a decade, I'm really sad to see this slow, but somewhat inevitable decline. I just hope it doesn't lose all of its magic, or that something equally magical springs up in its place.
Can confirm. I got it as a non-beta user while lurking. It also looked slightly different from screenshots others posted. So definitely being A/B tested with a few bugs (got PMed by a mod asking for details since users like me aren't supposed to get it).
Reddit is at a stage where it can attract as much help as it needs, so this seems like a great thing.
The startup world has always lacked for investors smart enough to grasp new stuff, brave enough to be first, and ethical/humble enough to attract the great founders.
Interesting that he named his daughter after himself. I guess having a unisex name had its benefits.
More importantly,I agree that reddit's public perception had changed a lot in the last year, it went from seeming like a boys club where others were tolerated to being totally nondinominational. Obviously there are still some subs that are pretty insular but for the most part as they've grown they've gotten nicer.
The stories of Reddit's problems with harassment, racism, and sexism have decreased over the last year but that appears to be mostly from the site doing a better job of hiding it. There is still just as much hate on the site except now it is just seething under the surface. I am sure that is better from an investor perspective, but it isn't really a solution to the problems.
> There is still just as much hate on the site except now it is just seething under the surface
Yeah but if your vast majority of users doesn't see it or know where to find it, who cares? I've been a reddit user for 2 years and never encountered the subreddits you are talking about nor have I sought them out.
The "solution" you are talking about is heavy-handed speech moderation
These things never stay contained though. The hate subreddits feed off of and seep into the rest of the site. In the old days someone had to make a conscious decision to visit a site like Stromfront. You weren't going to go there unless you already were interested in racist ideals. On Reddit those ideals are mixed in with everything else. This makes it harder to notice you are being exposed to hate and/or influenced by it. The end result is that Reddit is a boom to recruiting for hate groups.
There are three main ways of interacting with Reddit: posting, voting, and commenting. Hiding the obvious hate subreddits helped address the posting of topics. That was an important step and I don't want to diminish it. Reddit has tried to address the voting aspect with various tweaks to the ranking algorithm but whether it has been effective is still debatable. They haven't done anything as far as I'm aware to address hate comments. That is left completely up to the users and moderators.
This is the exact type of thing I am talking about. You see this bothsiderism all over the place on Reddit. I am sure the author of this comment doesn't think of themselves as a racist (and perhaps there was sarcasm intended in this comment that is lost in the printed word). Many users might read this comment without considering it is racist. Yet the comment is drawing a direct parallel between Stormfront and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Equating those two as opposite and morally equal sides of the same issue is an inherently racist idea.
For the sake of comparison, here is the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry for each:
Stormfront is a white nationalist, white supremacist and neo-Nazi Internet forum, and the Web's first major racial hate site.
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is an American nonprofit legal advocacy organization specializing in civil rights and public interest litigation. Based in Montgomery, Alabama, it is noted for its successful legal cases against white supremacist groups, its classification of hate groups and other extremist organizations, and for promoting tolerance education programs.
Bad groups can hide behind good ideals. Just because they are a "nonprofit legal advocacy organization specializing in civil rights and public interest litigation" does not mean they aren't racist or politically extreme.
I do agree that SPLC and Stormfront do not compare, but it could be argued that Reddit blocks or suppresses conservative, non-multiculturalist views much more than liberal ones. That asymmetry is part of what fuels the growing extremism IMO.
The fact that you equate conservative views with things like white supremacy is a huge problem. Rational and compassionate people can be conservative. No one is going to censor debate about things like state rights, a small federal government, tax cuts, trickle down economics, etc. But I don’t think it is controversial to say that white supremacy is simply morally wrong.
Well there does tend to be a correlation between right-wing extremism and white supremacy, so it's not like that comes from nowhere.
Conservatism goes beyond states rights and economics. It's also cultural. Conservatives tend not to like multiculturalism or cultural change, and tend to like things like gender roles, immigration tests, and just generally keeping things the way they were. Rational and compassionate people can have these opinions too, yet they are suppressed on pretty much all social media sites including Reddit.
When people with moderate cultural views and opinions get suppressed, they cling to the nearest groups with the closest mindset to their own. Unfortunately, on sites like Reddit, these are often extremist subreddits.
I would say it's a delusional victimhood on the part of those people.
/r/The_Donald has broken many rules of Reddit and the largest punishment they've been given is that /r/popular was created to steer people to less toxic content.
You can also look to how long they let /r/physical_removal (advocates of political violence towards "commies" and "leftists") and /r/incels (advocates of sexual assault, rape, and violence against women) stay open.
/r/MensRights is still around despite doxxing and harassing people in the past.
although the format is similar, reddit and HN are very different sites, and imo that's a good thing.
when i visit HN, i expect the articles to be topical and for the discourse to be informative and interesting. somewhat amazingly, my expectations are usually met here, which makes the site quite a gem.
at the same time, i don't always want that. sometimes i just want to see a true train wreck unfold in the comments. in a way i even appreciate the donald trump and hate subreddits. if there are ideologies spreading that can impact my life, i would prefer to go to the source and read their actual words than have the ny times regurgitate them to me.
there are benefits to the hands-on moderation and the wild west styles. the only optimal solution is having a wide range of choices.
> if your vast majority of users doesn't see it or know where to find it, who cares?
If those channels become extremist echo chambers, then the government could care when terrorists start being made on the site, affecting Reddit's PR in the long run. I know of several subs that are full of such extremist vitriol. Since they're a global website, they've got to consider things like long-term social impacts of their content.
Not sure why you're being downmodded. A lot has come to light about how Pao was scapegoated for many negative changes at reddit. Not a Pao fan, but what reddit did was dishonest.
This is true, but it's also gotten much more shallow and predictable IMO. The memes feel forced or manipulated by large corporations(see /r/hailcorporate), and I don't feel like part of a community anymore, simply an observer. I honestly just don't enjoy it as much. Idk if this is everyone's experience or just my own, though.
Sarcasm based on the OP's assumption that it was hubris that led the name selection of their daughter. It was literally the first thing the OP commented on. Where it entwines with privilege is the OP's assumption that Serena had no agency in the naming.
A lot of people have the opposite view though (reddit has gone too far down that path, and twitter is a lost cause). There are plenty of bad actors on both sides of this issue.
> Reddit is doing far far worse than even Twitter at combatting these issues
Do you have a source for this claim? Genuine question. Searching Google Scholar for "flame wars" or "Twitter Reddit sentiment" failed to produce anything useful.
/r/HailCorporate has plenty examples where corporations can be shown manipulating Reddit on a daily basis. I have to use a word search and replace plugin just to restore some amount of sanity to content and even then it's iffy.
/r/HailCorporate is an echo chamber that insists any time a brand is so much as mentioned without negativity, it must necessarily be an attempt at viral marketing.
Meanwhile in the real world, people talk about brands in everyday conversation all the time without the sanction of the corporation behind it. Not that paid shilling isn't a thing, but they take the confirmation bias, way too far, to the point where calling shenanigans will get you attacked.
As much as I don’t want to bring that particular debate here, this comment reads like anyone with conservative politics is a troll to be silenced. As someone who doesn’t agree, please understand how offensive and unconstructive this statement is.
All of those communities mentioned are not simply providing conservative viewpoints. The ones mentioned have coordinated harassment towards people and organizations that they disagree with.
What you call coordinated harassment may also be called political activism. A democracy requires participation and expression to advance. Of course it can be taken too far, but organizations should be able to handle political expression.
Because those subs have absolutely nothign to do with conservative politics and everything to do with alt-right echo chamber trolling.
There are plenty of places you can find polite political discourse on Reddit, like these:
/r/PoliticalDiscussion/ <-- the only one I sub.
/r/PoliticalOpinions
/r/Ask_Politics
/r/NeutralPolitics
/r/ChangeMyView
/r/GeoPolitics
/r/WorldEvents
/r/PoliticalScience
/r/Economics
/r/Politics
You include /r/politics on that list, which as we speak, has 100% of the front page dedicated to how horrible our president is. That is the absolute opposite of “thoughtful”, certainly not polite once you get into the comments and say anything that doesn't agree with that stance.
I’d give you echo chamber, but also point out that applies to most subreddits in your list, but especially to the ask_$ideology types. People celebrating their political wins isn’t trolling, neither is celebrating the losses of the other side. It might be many things, but posting to get a rise isn’t it.
It doesn't even make sense - people posting in their own communities about their own ideologies doesn't meet the definition either. Who would they be trolling, themselves? Oncomers who don't agree? If the latter, that applies to every political community everywhere.
/r/politics is a bit of an echo chamber (tho really that’s due to being sick of the Donald brigades) but Trump is objectively horrible so that isn’t a good yardstick.
You make three statements here. The first is a verifiable fact, the second is an unsubstantiated falsehood, the last is an unfalsifiable opinion.
That opinion, and the constant shouting of it from every rooftop and constant silencing and badgering those who think otherwise, is the reason for the existence of the_donald.
This very thread has someone in it who called me a liar because I posted an image that proves botted content on the front page of /r/politics, and then I had to spend half an hour screwing around with google to debunk it. That is the online reality for anyone who doesn't viscerally hate the president, and it's become very tiresome.
I like talking with conservatives. I may not be one but I think it is an important political viewpoint that can have valid perspectives.
But unless you’re going to say racism, bigotry, and all the rest that The Donald/alt-right bring to the table are conservative ideals I don’t see ANY way you could take what I said as espousing that.
See, the difference here is that as someone who regularly skims the top posts there (if nothing else to get away from the never-ending "trump is a baby eating puppy murderer" stories that exist literally everywhere else), I don't see the "racism and bigotry" that you're talking about.
> Reddit was in stronger shape, he said, claiming that it boosted revenue fivefold during the last three-plus years since he had re-engaged with the company. Reddit, which has been ranked as the fourth most popular U.S. internet site, raised $200 million last year and was in good hands with co-founder Steve Huffman as CEO, he said.
I'm not sure "failing" is the right term to use here. Just because you don't agree with the politics of many of the users doesn't mean that their communities aren’t successful and thriving. TheDonald's candidate was elected president after all...
We've already asked you to post civilly and substantively (as the guidelines ask) or not at all. We ban accounts that won't, so could you please improve this?
- The DNC was not paying Correct The Record. Like all super PACs, Correct The Record made independent expenditures on behalf of supportive donors around the country, and you can find their names here:
https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/pacgave2.php?cycle=2016&cmt...
- Correct The Record had about a dozen full-time content producers writing favorable posts about the Democratic candidate online.
I'm not seeing any references to improper payments made by the DNC, nor do I see the Reddit connection. While we're on the topic of independent expenditures, would you like to talk about the 328 million Russian Twitter accounts that were used in the general election to produce paid pro-Trump content?
> The DNC was not paying Correct The Record as you claim; they were independently funded by donors around the country, all of whom are listed here:
Super PACs have NEVER taken advice or worked directly with national campaigns. (they verifiably do)
> Correct The Record had about a dozen full-time content producers writing favorable posts about the Democratic candidate online.
> If this was supposed to be your evidence of a vast DNC conspiracy to ruin Reddit, I'm incredibly disappointed.
I would say reddit going from a place that once supported open and free ideas, to one that only pretends to, is a very dangerous thing. Shilling is real, people are paid to do it. On both sides. Clearly the left wing has the advantage on reddit.
> And given the 328 million Russian Twitter accounts used in the general election to produce paid pro-Trump content, do you really want to have this conversation?
NYtimes writing slam pieces about our president? More fake russian collusion stories? Color me shocked. I don't trust the media, and neither should you. The whole Russia story is hogwash.
Why the whataboutism here? No, I would not like to address these accounts and the questionable methodology that was used to get that "328 million" number, because it's irrelevant to the question.
As to the question, the answer unfortunately requires some familiarity with Reddit and having been a regular user there for a while. /r/politics is the big one since it was a "default" community up until that concept was eliminated a while ago (basically it was automatically on the front page if you browsed the site while logged out, and if you made an account, you were automatically subscribed to it).
I bring them up, because they're the largest political community on the site, and had a level of privilege that comes with that.
CTR is used as shorthand for the pro-Hillary tonal shift in /r/politics that happened fairly rapidly[1], combined with fairly obvious botting[2]. While there's no proof that any particular organization was responsible for those posts, or that Reddit's owners tacitly permitted their behavior, CTR is to my knowledge the only organization who had social network promotion (beyond the usual writing their own obvious posts or buying ads) of Hillary Clinton as its goal, going to the point of addressing actual individuals. AFAIK, this is new.
I did some digging, and your evidence of "obvious pro-Hillary botting" (your [2] above) is an alt-right photoshop. They couldn't find any real evidence of this happening, so they fabricated their own. Here's how.
The William_Trevino post is a real post on Reddit that was used as a template:
But all the other "FirstName_LastName" entries were edited in by the creator of the image. Unlike William_Trevino's entry, they have no associated Reddit post. You can try to find users by those names or posts with those entries' title, but they don't exist.
Okay - you're right. I'm surprised none of those show up in a title search. Reddit's search feature must be broken, because title queries are supposed to show even if the author is deleted.
So it looks like someone did make super obvious sockpuppets that posted some pro-Democrat content once. I still don't think you can generalize that to a trend - certainly nothing on the order of the Russian bots. If anything, /r/politics had a reputation at the time of being extremely favorable to conservatives.
Nope. The fake entries added by the photoshopper don't even produce any associated posts in title search results [1]. If they were real posts from a deleted user, they'd still appear in title queries with [deleted] as their author. [2]
It's a photoshop and you've been lied to. I hope this teaches you to think more critically about things, especially when they're what you want to believe. Thanks for playing.
Your methodology is flawed. I just searched my own Reddit account which I deleted early 2015, which was around for five years and had thousands of comments and 100ish posts, and it identically returns no results of any kind.
This accounts for every user called out on that image. I'd thank you not to call me a liar in the future.
I've gone ahead and not flagged you because I don't abuse the flag feature against people who make mistakes, given your utterly baseless and easily disproved assertion that those accounts were photoshopped onto this image.
Reddit is not even pretending to be fair and balanced. They lean far to the left (or pander to them) and the front page is often filled with anti-Trump, pro-Democrat propaganda.
Free and fair discussion is a lost cause on that platform, 45 has made anyone with conservative values an enemy.
Except - they explicitly state something along the lines of being a "24/7 pepe rally". /r/politics was a default sub that all new users saw when they signed up for reddit, or browsed without logging in.
Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian announced on Wednesday he will step down from daily duties at the internet company and focus his attention on Initialized Capital, the early stage venture capital firm that he co-founded and is known for investments such as Coinbase and Instacart. He will continue to sit on Reddit’s board.
Mr. Ohanian, 34, said the timing of his decision reflected a number of personal and professional factors, including his marriage last year to tennis superstar Serena Williams and the birth of their daughter, Alexis Jr. Mr. Ohanian said the decision also reflected his confidence in Reddit’s renewed growth, and his desire to focus his professional energy on investment opportunities in emerging technologies such as blockchain.
“I had a pretty productive last year, personally, when it came to getting married, as well as having a baby,” Mr. Ohanian told CIO Journal. “I came back from parental leave at the start of January, and really started thinking about where I wanted to be, what I wanted to be doing.”
Reddit was in stronger shape, he said, claiming that it boosted revenue fivefold during the last three-plus years since he had re-engaged with the company. Reddit, which has been ranked as the fourth most popular U.S. internet site, raised $200 million last year and was in good hands with co-founder Steve Huffman as CEO, he said. The company, launched in 2005 and backed by Y Combinator, says it was valued in last year’s funding at $1.8 billion.
This year will see a continuation of the company’s strategy to make Reddit more welcoming, according to Mr. Huffman. That includes an updated website, scheduled to launch in the first quarter, as well as initiatives to personalize the site for individual users, and to improve its chat functionality. “We’re basically rebuilding the entire product,” Mr. Huffman said. “We have a long way to go there.”
Mr. Ohanian has said that the future of social media lies in more authentic communication. At a time of growing concern about social media standards, the values of free expression and community can be at odds, though. “Our goal for Reddit is to create a platform where people can express themselves authentically and also to build a space where everyone can find their home — we evolve our policy regularly to maintain the balance between those two values,” Mr. Ohanian said.
The decision also reflected early-stage investment opportunities for Initialized, which he co-founded in 2011 with Palantir Technologies veteran Garry Tan. Initialized said it has more than $250 million under management, and that its portfolio is worth more than $20 billion. Its investments include Coinbase, Instacart, Zenefits, Opendoor, Soylent and Cruise Automation, now part of General Motors Co.
Startups today are in the early stages of building the infrastructure for the next wave of applications, many of which likely will run on decentralized networks rather than a central server, according to Mr. Tan. He compared the opportunity to early years of the internet, when basic infrastructure was being built. “The big thing now is the people creating the infrastructure are getting to share in the spoils,” due to the rise of cryptocurrencies, Mr. Tan said.
“I want to have a chance to invest, often the first check, in companies that are going to create the new internet,” Mr. Ohanian said.
Given its early stage focus, Initialized eschews investment theses and focuses on fundamentals such as vetting software, products and founders, according to Mr. Ohanian.
“There are clearly things around security and privacy and identity that are going to be dramatically changed through technology, just because it’s now possible,” Mr. Ohanian said.
One opportunity, he said, is that people may have direct control over the currency in their possession, without having to rely on a third party to store it. He views distributed exchanges as a way to make that possible.
He also said that such changes in trading and ownership will extend to other kinds of digital assets.
“Crypto Kitties is probably the best-known example right now,” he said, referring to the blockchain-based game. “I know it seems silly. But it’s a demonstration of the fact that you can create a digital thing of which only one can exist and be able to prove that it exists. Where people end up taking this and what it ends up being, that I can’t predict. But the means of exchanging those seems like an obvious next step.”
The ability to establish authorship opens up new opportunities, according to Mr. Ohanian. “This idea that you can identify ownership or authorship is interesting. We don’t have any really good solutions for this,” he said. “I take a photo, it could end up in a million places on the internet tomorrow, with everyone else taking credit for having shot it. It would have been nice to have had that at the beginning of the dot-com boom. We weren’t capable of having that. But we actually can have it now.”
While I appreciate you doing this, is this not "reprinting without permission?"
EDIT: Downvotes could mean many things. The next person planning on hitting the downvote button, could you spare for me a brief reply letting me know why?
EDIT2: Ugh, now I'm the "downvote edit guy." Obviously irrelevant now, but I don't want to remove the first edit and screw over people saying "I downvoted you because x," so, apologies for violating guidelines and making this mess.
Maintaining civil order is everyone's responsibility, not merely professionals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles
Denying a citizens obligation to be active member of the social order reduces us to passive objects in society.
Why are you fighting copyright monopolies? You are doing free work for the any-copyright industry.
Good journalism boosts the quality of civic life. Journalism funded solely by advertising has a poor record. So we're left with public funding à la the BBC, or the patronage of billionaires, thereby sacrificing the Fourth Estate's independence; or subscriptions. The latter requires a solution to the free rider problem [1]. Paywalls, and the copyrights defending them, are one such solution.
I consume news from subscription sources (e.g. the Wall Street Journal and the Information), advertising-back sources (e.g.Politico) and subsidized sources (e.g. the BBC and Bloomberg). I benefit from that reading, as does, I believe, the greater society I live in. I think it's fair and rational to fight for said journalists' compensation.
What risk though? The worst I could ever see coming from this is HN deleting your comment and banning your account. Has anyone ever actually been fined for resharing an article text in a webforum comment?
I have no problem with protesting pay walls, I hate them too.
However, correct me if I'm wrong, reprinting wholesale a journal's article is a copyright crime in the USA, is it not? Or I guess it constitutes fair use somehow?
You are right. Also, the wall of text can be a little annoying. So I recommend accessing this article via https://t.co/GVSZAdt6EV (the link from Ohanian's Twitter post), which doesn't paywall it.
As a submitter doing a workaround, I'd much rather find a legit link to a non-paywalled version of the article, instead of copying content.
I honestly regularly flag articles where the OP or somneone else does not put the full text in the comments. This is a community and there has been a huge uptick in news articles posted. While HN doesn't require "tech" articles I have noticed a big uptick in paywalled news articles hitting the FP and on mobile it is really a hassle when >10-20% of the front page is either not-accessible or requires a large amount of clicking.
While I understand your argument and why you make it I disagree vehemently and therefore I downvoted you. I believe that either HNers should circumvent the paywall and the content owners will likely benefit from the upvote in exposure for this who can afford/want to pay for it, or otherwise WSJ, NYT and others should be banned from HN.
Working around paywalls is a sanctioned HN passtime, and paywalls without workarounds are banned (though I have never seen this enforced, much to my displeasure).
It surprises me to read that paywalls without workarounds are banned - I've just glanced through the guidelines but haven't seen it mentioned, perhaps there's a submission-specific guideline set I'm not aware of? I rarely submit content
Reddit is done, I deleted my long time reddit account last month, it has become a circle jerk and even small subreddits are mostly useless. I remember when it was a real source of interesting news and comments. Hacker News is my online forum now and sometimes I even check slashdot for all times sake.
IDK I used reddit for ~3 years and then took about 2 years off; really been on and off reddit for longer. I just recently started using it again. I really dislike how they have decimated free speech but, and as Kevin Rose notes, the long-tail of content and the subreddit approach allow it to bridge a lot of gaps. You have to deal less with over-arching admin and also rich but niche subreddits. I really quit around the Ellen Pao fiasco but I participate in a few communities again. It is certainly different than it was and I am by no means one of the oldest accounts...
I've been on it nearly 11 years and I do see the rules being piled on. It seems like it has become so complex that just to post something you need to consult a flowchart or a manual as complex as the Turkish tax code.
The locking of threads option may end up being a contributor to reddit's downfall. That feature is powerful and is easily abused for a site where user's take pride in freedom of speech.
But I can also see as each generation discovers the site how attitudes change. The inevitable clash of generations makes for some interesting situations.
This is the link from Ohanian's Twitter announcement of the news. Mods, feel free to change the submission URL to this - it goes to the same article but doesn't trigger a paywall.
Isn’t it misleading to say Reddit is backed by YC now?
> reddit has had a long and complex history, starting as one of the first Y Combinator companies, then as a division of Conde Nast, and three years ago spun out as an independent entity.
