Listen to Steve Huffman tell the story of how Reddit got started
pod.linkI don’t really want to listen to the podcast, but I do seem to recall that Reddit drew heavy inspiration from the delicious popular page. digg was talked about a bunch but much smaller…
Related old comment with links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21245652
Joshua, Delicious/popular was mentioned a bunch of times in the podcast as a main inspiration. I'll send you a transcript someday if I can arrange it :)
Interesting note to see that Paul Graham initially hated the name Reddit lol
What's your take now, pg?
(summon(pg))
I have this theory that every great company gets to change their name once lol.. I could go down a pretty big list of companies that changes names after launching:
Ring / Doorbot
Amazon / Cadabra
Google / Backrub
Facebook / The Facebook
Coinbase / BitBank
Stripe / /dev/payments
Doordash / Palo Alto Delivery
Uber / Uber Taxi
Right, and before Digg people used to hang out on MetaFilter, then Usenet etc. Each was in its own way only a small upgrade over the previous one.
Delicious wasn’t the same kind of thing as digg and meta filter, though, so this doesn’t make that much sense
Listened to this episode on a road trip yesterday and really enjoyed it. If you do a "part 2", I'm curious to hear more details about how they pulled off the growth of Reddit, broadening from an initial niche community into a wider collection of communities. Thanks jl and clevy!
They got multiple migration waves from digg, added subreddits, then network effects started.
Early Reddit was pretty boring unless you were interested in programming or technology. The first big bump in users from digg was during the HD-DVD key fracas. The ham-handed response by digg to even talking about the key leak pissed off a lot of users. They were already simmering due to astroturfing/Payola by "power users" (we'd call them influencers today).
Then a huge influx came after the digg v4 rollout that basically turned the site into a giant advertising channel, more so than it had been.
I'm no Reddit insider but I got turned onto it in 2005 or so and watched the digg user influxes over the years.
Digg changed the way comments were threaded meaning there could be no cogent discussion in threads. I am confident that was the mortal wound to Digg.
I don't think you're wrong. Digg did not understand the core features that users valued. They assumed users would stick around through every monetization abuse they threw at them. Users put up with the "power user" bullshit (paid influencers and astroturfing) because the comments tied to those submissions could be worthwhile.
I think digg's fundamental problem was they viewed their user base like a passive audience. It turned out their users were in fact their main attraction. When they ruined the experience for users they left and digg was left with zero value.
Thanks to Cory Doctorow there's now a word for this phenomenon: enshittification.
It seems that most social networks have experienced this, and for those that haven't, it's only a matter of time.
Everything passes eventually. Microsoft used to be king of tech, but no longer. Google has been king, but clearly they are on the downhill slide from their peak. Someday AWS will no longer be the prime cloud provider. Someday another phone manufacturer will take Apple’s crown. It is as inevitable as the rising and setting of the sun.
Same way youtube discontinued their discussion platform. One day I had 200 interesting active discussions, the next there was non. Channels that relied on feedback turned into drifting ships.
Digg wrapping external sites in an iframe was also a big stumble.
Steve Huffman, aka 'spez'?
Wasn't he the guy who got caught anonymously rewriting user comments?
Secretly editing user comments, without a trace. As CEO.
...
Seems weird that this hasn't been brought up yet - maybe it was covered in the podcast?
Yep, that was him. He had an admin login to their prod database.
Honestly wish that signing comments was supported in more forums/aggregators. I know I can do it manually but I want verification built into the site.
Huffman also seems to be the guy who edited a list of co-founders to remove Aaron Swarz. [0]
He also said - after Swarz's death - that Swarz wasn't a co-founder. 'Unpersoned', I think is the correct term for such as this.
So... I'm left wondering why anyone is listening to this guy. Especially on a subject where he has been caught lying and rewriting history multiple times.
0 - https://web.archive.org/web/20201005184849/https://www.reddi... - Archive link necessary as the original has a deleted user, a deleted post, and many deleted comments. In fact, the entire sub (watchRedditDie) was ended, partly because Huffman reneged on a promise to reinstate Swarz on the founders list [1].
1 - https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/comments/vd2wj8/were...
>So... I'm left wondering why anyone is listening to this guy. Especially on a subject where he has been caught lying and rewriting history multiple times.
Hot take: Because their push for more users was successful, resulting in a massively large user base, the majority of which I would argue is the "lowest common denominator" crowd (read: mindless consumption) and would more quickly go, "Reddit cool, spez cool" than actually pay attention to what's happening there internally.
He did it in a pretty obvious way and said he did it basically but yah
He did it, then got caught, then admitted to it. The one mitigating point is that he did say he was sorry and that he wouldn't do it again. Mind, I'm saying this as somebody who deleted my account over this exact incident (straw that broke the camel's back), but there it is.
Oh, I'm not defending him.
Most of social platforms are nothing but feature AOL back in the day. They got a different look and feel. Some are cross over of ICQ and AOL (WhatsApp) AOL messenger Chat rooms (discord, telegram) Twitter is nothing but public chat room.
Slack is just irc, Dropbox just nfs, Google just grep, Craigslist just newspaper classifieds, amazon just Walmart, Netflix just charter, hacker news just coffee shops and bars, and on and on, what's your point
When you put it like that, I really prefer some of the precursors.
Reddit is just Usenet.
I like reddit because it's a bunch of millennials and has been from the start. My old manager, he talks all glowingly about the haydays of usenet. He's a gen-Xer. Given the equivalency of social networks features, the most important thing is just going to be the identity of the users consuming them.
I love to joke to my kids that twitch is just AM radio for their age group... they get mad on that one cause it's pretty on point.
As a Gen-X, almost Boomer, and the only social media I use is Reddit…
I think, perhaps, you might be looking at the wrong “groups”.
CasualUK is where I spend my time.
Case in point.
> hacker news just coffee shops and bars
Ok, I really follow you on the rest and the overall point.
But this one … hacker news is how : delicio.us/Reddit/digg/slashdot used to be, before the network effect.
I rarely talk about BRNF at bars and I don’t use drugs while reading HN.
What was hacker news before delicious/reddit/digg/slashdot... before the web bassed internet... before bbs's... what's the analog version of these?
Also I've talked about SQL, made an adobe flash joke, ML, and many other tech things at bars in the last month, with randos.
Had a good hour discussion about ChatGPT with an NFL journalist from the local paper.
Again, agreed. I’m just bored tonight. No animosity here.
My goal was to point out that the metaphors is not equality working across all the examples.
Why Dropbox got NFS and not the postal service or train station locker?
Why google got Grep and not the Dewey classification system ?
Why HN got a pre internet, multi-milenary and deeply human “ancestors”. While BBS would have been sufficient?
Same for Craigslist and Amazon I guess.
Cause that's what I typed while in the bathroom at a baseball game after 2 beers and it wasn't my a-material :)
Thanks for clarifying, I guess I'm in paranoid mode...
I didn't say BBS because I was never on one.
Dr. Dobbs, early computer magazines. Then there was email and usenet.
Wow. Good analogies.
"Google just grep"
That's a keeper.
Larry's dad to Larry (pretending that dad was not computer literate, but somehow knew just grep and the web):
Son, now that you're outta school, whaddya do to make rent?
Larry: Oh dad, Sergey and me, we just grep the web for folks. Makes us rent, and a tad more.
Generally the social platforms can offer one or more of these three things better than AOL ever did.
1. Recommendation engines, and other clever ways to drive up engagements.
2. Marketing. AOL's marketing was generally ahead of other tech companies at the time. Modern platforms have marketing on par with any other consumer brand. They are specifically great at FOMO, user acquisition, and feeling like a basic utility for modern life.
3. Network effect. Meta reports almost 3B monthly active users. What did AOL max out at? 20M?
Arguably all of the things you pointed out are actually disadvantages, it's a matter of perspective really.
Heh, you may not be old enough to recall BBSs or PCLink?
I’ve often wondered how the Reddit cofounders feel about selling so early. At the time they cashed out, they made single digit millions. If they had held out, they would have made 100-1000x.
Edit: After googling, the short answer is they regret it. Both founders do mental gymnastics to try to manage their regret, but it's apparent they regret it. Sources below.
My personal takeaway is to try to hold on to some percentage even when selling out e.g. rolling over 30% of your shares into the new entity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6qlUG3EbtU https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/03/alexis-ohanian-reflects-on-s...
I've enjoyed all of the episodes so far, but this one was definitely the stand-out.
I once emailed Steve with some questions about software technology choices and architecture for a new project I was on, in the early days of Reddit, and he replied with some advice.
This is not a obituary (I think?)
This made me laugh, however, it’s awesome hearing how he was in the same time period that the original post is about. Definitely relevant.
No, unfortunately :) [1]
Just an actual anecdote.
[1] ”The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”
-Mark Twain
:)
Reading my comment after a good nights sleep, it might seem slight snappish and/or brusque, that wasn't my intention and I'm sorry if that's the case.
I'm glad you shared it, thank you!
Oh no, it didn't feel that way to me :)
Anyway, glad you liked it, and thank you too, for clarifying your intent.
When looking up Digg on wikipedia I found this gem:
Alexis Ohanian, founder of rival site Reddit, said in an open letter to Rose:
this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It's cobbling
together features from more popular sites and departing from
the core of digg, which was to "give the power back to the people."
Funny both Alexis is a VC now, and he actually invested in kevin's NFT 10k PFP (Moonbrids)
The Reddit Mafia
reddit basically became everything the founders mocked when they first started it. https://sp.reddit.com/reddit2.html
That's why you never sell yourself as the hero,
Or you'll just wait long enough to become the villain
But modern reddit isn't really very similar to what they're mocking? Here's the joke mockup: https://sp.reddit.com/reddit2mockup.jpg
Open reddit now and there's no silly unusable tag clouds, no top-of-page ads, no 3rd-party ad serving, no gradients, no overdone logo, no tagline, no allcaps headings, no giant voting arrows...
The specifics are different but the trend is the same. Most HN posts from Reddit are old.Reddit.com, you try and view a Reddit page on mobile? Screw you, download the app.they’re doing the exact same thing digg did, the trends are just a decade later.
Let’s admit modern Reddit is probably half porn and only fans site. I don’t have quantifiable data but the way I see people on Twitter complain about porn on Twitter. I can only assume.
That's even farther from "basically became everything the founders mocked when they first started it"!
Well, this happens for every service over time, as companies decide to put profit over their users: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/enshittification
https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-huge-t...
This is an old article with a similarly themed discussion. I'll have to listen to the pod cast to see whether anything changed in the retelling.
I ask myself on a weekly basis when old.reddit.com will disappear. And there is nothing more cruel than the new Reddit, UI-wise. Even Twitter's "threading" of conversations appears to make more sense, even though I have still not figured out how it works.
The 'new' Reddit has so much wasted space and bloat. The old one is slick and optimized for content display. It's also an eyesore. Garish colors, weird icons...just horrible in every way. It has been many years and I still cannot bring myself to use it.
I know some people at Reddit and sadly it's definitely going to happen.
Used Reddit for 14 years as a registered member and longer since before I signed up.
The day old.reddit.com stops working is the day I stop using reddit completely, I detest their new UI so much that it’s essentially unusable for me.
I agree completely. I've used Reddit since at least 2008. I quit Facebook over what they did to WhatsApp and will never use another Meta product. Reddit is getting dangerously close.
It's very clear there is not an adult at reddit who can tell the people in power NO.
Same. My account is some 16y 10m old.
I use Reddit less and less YoY and even day to day. But the day old goes I’m out.
Frankly I only use it for fairly niche subreddits and even then it’s more like 10 minutes a day.
I’m also not a core demographic at this point anymore.
yeah, it's pretty wild how bad it is
I ended up having to pay $2 for a Safari iOS extension to auto-redirect reddit links to old.reddit just so I could actually read the site when I got there via web searches. There's no usability whatsoever
I just painstakingly pinch and pan around old.reddit rather than try to wrestle with their dog-awful app or redesign
semi-related: I've been trying to get the WallStreetBets mods to just make their own version of Reddit instead of putting up with the admins' constant bullshit.. they're basically singlehandedly funding that whole shitshow and get nothing out of it but scam ads, users randomly banned for saying a no-no word, etc
100% agreed, it is absolutely awful.
They learned nothing from the Digg apocalypse.
It has seen 0 improvement since it was released lmao. Like wait 8 years ago?
Yeah. The new UI is terrible.
The moment they kill old Reddit I'm out too.
I have mentally prepared myself to say goodbye to Reddit once it happens.
Complete with deleting my account for closure. This is what I recommend. It's pretty much facebook, pure dark UX at that point.
That is the day I will quit reddit and never look back. 6 months ago I rarely used old.reddit.com, but now I run into more and more dark patterns all the time. They tried to TikTok my feed and it was an awful experience. I frequently default to it now instead of using it only when I get sick of the dark patterns.
Reddit got popular because Digg screwed up their comment threading. It's sad to see reddit is starting to make anti-user mistakes like digg. Maybe they think they can force it because there isn't a competent competitor.
The problem with all of these sites is they start to service the lowest common denominator in the name of next quarters profits. As their websites become more hostile to the educated, the quality of content drops and profit goes up, but the golden goose is slowly being strangled.
Reddit was fantastic around the time of digg because the average user appeared to be college educated or greater. Celebrities like Randall Monroe were submitting high quality content. It was common for a literal expert to write a well thought out post. Now it's an "Americas funniest home videos" feed of fart jokes with your liberal aunt and conservative uncle having an argument in the background.
It seems so clear to me that billionaires mean we can't have nice things. Twitter and Reddit both promoted a "truth to power" free speech ideology, and now billionaires are coercing these companies into becoming cess pits that reflect the worst parts of humanity. Power doesn't like to be threatened so they will destroy the weapon.
I still can't decide if these companies are being destroyed because they promote a "no more billionaires" ideology, or if it is simply capitalistic greed and the search for next quarters profits.
> The problem with all of these sites is they start to service the lowest common denominator in the name of next quarters profits. [...] It seems so clear to me that billionaires mean we can't have nice things"
The pressure to increase quarterly profits to the detriment of the long-term emerges from the very nature of short-term investment, particularly as facilitated by stock exchanges. Eliminating billionaires would not eliminate this dynamic.
Yes, Reddit is not even part of a publicly listed company that has investor pressure to meet quarterly numbers, it is privately owned by the Newhouse family. People just like having more money than less money.
I think reddit is majority owned by Reddit employees.
As of Jul 2015, per Wired article:
https://www.wired.com/2015/07/wired-conde-nast-reddit/
>Advance Publications, is Reddit's majority shareholder
The lack of ownership transparency is an absolute failure. Reddit should not have been for profit anyway
The entire Internet at the 'fantastic' time of Reddit was very much tilted towards the elite class that could 1. Afford an expensive computer or phone (or have access from University) 2. Afford Internet (and for an added bump of exclusivity add mobile Internet) (or have access from University) 3. Have the time/inclination to put lots of energy into CREATING Internet content (via either a hobby site, or composing well thought out posts). What you are complaining about is the quality of a restaurant that has gone from an exclusive new spot you discovered to a Chili's franchise. (Phil's Fish Market?).
What everyone on Hacker News seems to long for is an Internet limited to 'that class' of people. They complain about billionaires and advertising, but maybe they should take a broader look at what they are really longing for.
> What everyone on Hacker News seems to long for is an Internet limited to 'that class' of people.
Yep, that is exactly what I want. I want to be around and interact with other educated people who act in good faith and I don't want to be around uneducated people who act in bad faith or can't see or aren't open to the contradictions in their own ideas.
Eternal September is the name of this idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News
http://paulgraham.com/hackernews.htmlGraham stated he hopes to avoid the Eternal September that results in the general decline of intelligent discourse within a community.The good things in a community site come from people more than technology; it's mainly in the prevention of bad things that technology comes into play. Technology certainly can enhance discussion. Nested comments do, for example. But I'd rather use a site with primitive features and smart, nice users than a more advanced one whose users were idiots or trolls.Why are you phrasing things as if "educated" and "good faith" are related?
> I don't want to be around uneducated people who act in bad faith
Are you fine with being around educated people who act in bad faith? Those generally cause much more damage.
In the game of prisoners dilemma, I want to be around people who practice the winning strategy.
A game to demonstrate why that is important: https://ncase.me/trust/
If you cooperate when others defect, you promote defection as a strategy.
If you defect when others cooperate, you undermine cooperation as a winning strategy.
So a community that shut down defectors and cooperates by default creates a community based around cooperation -- a high trust community.
Bad faith is another word for defection. It is hard to understand the game you are playing or see the consequences of your actions without education.
Sure, having a group of people who are of the same general education, sensibilities, and class is desirable.
When people who are only in the same space due to shared interests and experiences become too inclusive then that gets diluted and they are left being around a lot of people who are just a lot of people. No one likes that except extroverts and attention seekers.
Trying to shame us for pining for the days of educated and interesting content made by people we relate to for reasons that are not tied to monetizing everything (because, well, we don't need it) is silly, because by pretending you think that is wrong means you are either short-sighted or bitter.
This is not to say that exclusivity is desirable, but to say that communities exist for a reason and being nostalgic about losing a healthy one does not make you a bad person.
Unapologetically yes, this is what I want.
You can call it classist all you want but I want the ivory tower, not the swamp.
I think that's pretty unfair.
I don't give a toss if someone has an expensive device or university internet, and I resent the implication that only "an elite class" can compose a well thought out post.
The fact is, billionaires pay people to keep the status quo. Those people hire other people - to program bots, to hire PR goons, to spend millions or even billions on swaying vulnerable minds with echo-chamber media drones -- all to warp discussion online and IRL.
Tobacco companies did it, fossil fuel companies did it, and you can be certain tech companies and governments are doing it too.
You're discounting all of that, and then calling people classist for wanting good-faith discussion. Uncool.
I hope the Fediverse replacement for Reddit, Lemmy, will pick up in popularity before old.reddit dies.
It makes a lot of sense since each "subreddit" could be its own server.
I don't think Fediverse solves the problems that we see in Reddit (or Twitter, or any of the others). Instead of admin meddling from a single group of closely-affiliated admins (they all work for the same company), you just get meddling from many small groups of admins, none of those groups affiliated with each other except via ActivityPub. They can't shut down conversations they dislike entirely, but they can sever you from the Fediverse thoroughly enough that they might as well.
And they can do it early enough that no one ever knew you were there in the first place. Even the Reddit admins didn't do that... I don't know if it was apathy and indifference, or just that they couldn't pay enough attention back in the early 2010s, but they didn't. And that likely allowed Reddit to grow so large, it could be the forum for everybody, about everything. Fediverse and Lemmy just ends up being those old phpbb forums, that won't talk to or link to each other unless everything is excessively sanitized and drips with insincere civility.
Lemmy doesn't even have an Elon Musk to piss everyone off of Reddit and drive them to search for an alternative.
Are servers hosted on fediverse open to being indexed by search engines otherwise I doubt it can replace reddit. Reddit did discussion threads , subs, and searchable results from search engines really well. It was a really great version of "forums" . I am not sure fediverse or Discord can do such things.
How do they plan to handle moderation? The strong majority of subreddit mods still use old Reddit because modding on new is suffering. Many will give up modding and some will abandon using Reddit entirely. Do they have a plan to replace the thousands of free employees that currently keep Reddit habitable?
Have they given any hints as to when?
maybe plugins can restore the old look and functionality?
old.reddit.com and it's imminent disappearance underscores that there is a still need for a user-centric web browser designed to combat user-hostile web ui. Here are some features I think the browser should have by default (without plugins)
Short feature list:
- Overwrite website code and display a user-hostile UI of popular sites like reddit/Facebook (this warrants a whole list in itself)
- offer a reader view of any website including pay walled websites
- easy access to archive a page using archive.today and to view already archived versions
- Right-click anything to download, images/videos/audio, even when sites like instagram and twitter make it difficult to do.
- Bypass field restrictions. Ever seen a password field where you can't paste text for whatever reason. That would not be a thing.
- Tab freeze for tabs not in focus - save CPU and battery energy
- Click the back button and end up at the same place on the page you clicked from instead of having to scroll endlessly to find where you were before
- Use a common user-agent so the browser doesn't get blacklisted by websites
- Accept only essential cookies by default
- Easy right-click and delete of paywall style overlays or other elements
- Ad block may not need to be built-in by default, but the ability to right-click and nuke a banner ad (especially the ones that don't disappear and block text even when you click the "x")
-Respect new lines when posting comments instead of users having to constantly go back, edit their comments, and add new lines to break up a wall of text
I would love this. Almost all of these can be achieved using Firefox and tons of extensions, but its to much for some of my relatives who feel the same way about the web but don't have the technical knowledge to set everything up.
for example, bypass paywalls clean was removed from most (all?) web extension stores and now has to be sideloaded. I don't think most non techies would be comfortable doing this, so maybe something like a firefox distribution (a la librewolf) would be ideal, so you could build off the other extensions there, and the anti tracking tech built into firefox.
There's some appeal on doing this client side, but I do not hate the Nitter approach.
> Ever seen a password field where you can't paste text for whatever reason. That would not be a thing.
Can anyone explain this one to me? My passwords are impossible to type/memorize, and the password manager's Firefox extension sucks too much to rely on it. It's clearing the clipboard 10 seconds later anyway, so they website's not protecting me.
> offer a reader view of any website including pay walled websites
Not really possible if a paywalled website is a true paywall. Many paywalled websites don't even expose their content to crawlers.
I also think that, philosophically, the majority of the user base being able to bypass paywall isn't healthy for the Internet. It will only make content quality decrease and advertisement aggression increase. You can see this effect come into play with pages that use anti-adblocking tools, where you can't see anything until you disable ad blocking.
> Tab freeze for tabs not in focus - save CPU and battery energy
Chrome energy saver mode? Safari seems to effectively do this, tabs seem to be pretty dead until you are using them. I would also ask what kind of need there is to save battery life above and beyond present technology. Modern laptops sold on the market now can be in a web browser for an entire workday (e.g., ASUS Zenbook 13 OLED, any MacBook M1/M2).
Almost everything on this list is already available with browser extensions or existing browsers.
Anecdotally i have never had a problem with anti adblockers with UBOs anti-anti-adblocker list turned on, but maybe anti-adblock will get better if more people start using adblockers.
If a link is paywalled and/or the content is not able to be crawled/archived for a reader mode, a browser that warned me before I wasted time opening a tab whose content is totally inaccessible would be appreciated. Contextual lock icons on links or a hover state with a preview.
If paywall status was exposed via a standardized API to the browser, it could further make it more seamless to buy a subscription iOS-style that I know I can cancel easily later. Looking at you, NYT and other new sites.
When you grow up with the internet, it can be kind of easy to take it personally when companies torpedo part of the culture like it has no value. It ends up feeling like an attack on the internet, which itself has almost an amorphous personality, behavior and appearance that can still be fairly defined at moments in time.
Really wish more sites were like HN where they established themselves, their purpose and what they believed in, then stuck to it. If HN cost $1/mo to use, I'd use it.
When r/drama was given the boot, they made a simple reddit clone and open sourced it. I participate in a forum that uses it instead of phpbb or whatever. Works fantastic, but you may have to change the default styling, which was very um, dramatic, from what I've heard.
Well, i.reddit.com just recently disappeared, so it might be sooner than later.
The story of Reddit would make a good TV show, kind of "The Social Network" crossed with "The Crown". So many ups and downs, and many cross overs to other things happing in tech and the wider world. You could easily fill three or four seasons.
"The front page of the Internet"
You might be interested in reading the book about Reddit that came out a few years ago, "We Are the Nerds". It doesn't shed a great light on Aaron Schwartz.
But who would have the guts to be honest about the bad parts?
I didn't listen to the entire podcast, but I'm sure he didn't mention a single thing about Aaron Swartz one of the co-founders.
Edit: at the 34:00 minute mark he mentions him.
Yes, he mentions and talks about Aaron through the 39:00 minute mark.
I tried Reddit for a while but overall the site is not that different from any incarnation of Twitter. The main difference is individuals vs. subreddits, and if you're careful selecting interesting individuals on Twitter / interesting subreddits on Reddit, you can often find a fair amount of useful content, but the effort is barely worth the bother, it feels like looking for needles in a haystack.
If you're just passively absorbing content on either platform both are equally poor quality, not all that different from watching MSNBC, CNN or FOX - i.e. heavily gamed by advertisers and propagandists.
What Twitter and Reddit also have in common is a low-quality in-house search engine and a restricted API for search, which I assume is an attempt to control exposure of content by administrators, subreddit moderators, etc.
Twitter: "Please note that Twitter's search service and, by extension, the Search API is not meant to be an exhaustive source of Tweets. Not all Tweets will be indexed or made available via the search interface."
Reddit: "You can search subreddits and posts, but comments aren’t available to search via the public API."
They appear to want to feed users content algorithmically based on some profile/agenda, and not just let users go wandering around finding content based on their own criteria.
Well run subreddits are vastly superior to Twitter. By way of example, if you are into homegyms or woodworking or Austin, there are three subreddits dedicated to those topics. I may be missing something about Twitter that allows me to focus on an esoteric topic that isn’t dependent on a inconsistent hashtag denotion. Twitter topics are simply too restricted and opinionated for my liking.
One of the reasons I keep coming back to HN is because the comment search actually works, so it's easy to figure out what sort of things, if anything, has been said here about some topic. It's easy to search a project's name and find that one post from a guy 10 years ago who mentioned it, and also mentioned a better alternative.
With reddit it's not worth trying, even with Google and "site:reddit.com" searches. Reddit's SNR is awful, so you have to wade through dozens if not hundreds of posts of people mentioning the thing but saying nothing worthwhile. Pages of people asking questions relevant to your query, but not receiving any useful response. HN has some people asking questions, but most posts are about people volunteering information. On reddit, it seems like most posts are people asking questions into the void and rarely receiving an answer, and those kind of search results just aren't useful.
You can try the third-party archive Pushshift for search.
Here's an interface to their API: https://camas.unddit.com
Replacing "reddit.com" in URLs with "unddit.com" or "reveddit.com" is also handy, it lets you see deleted or removed comments.
Can anyone post the TL;DL?
I don't see a transcript and I'm not going to listen to a podcast so I'll just ask here: does he discuss how they seeded their site with fraudulent accounts/posts?
Step 1: convince your main competitor to piss of its entire user base.
Step 2: ? <- could be interesting to see if they did something special here
Step 3: get Obama and other major celebrities to establish you as a media company brand.
Step 2 probably has a bunch of stuff, but includes:
They posted content using fake accounts to stimulate adoption.
To my recollection they allowed a lot of skeevy (illegal and/or immoral) content to proliferate.
I think they probably ran at a loss for a long time; leaning heavily on volunteer personnel.
?
Step 2 for a Reddit clone/competitor would be much easier and more convincing given the current state of LLM’s.
One take I heard is Digg was actively combating vote manipulation, while on Reddit it was easy to get RonPaul/etc content onto the homepage. So the migration was memed to some extent.
This is a nice time to remind everyone that Aaron Swartz died while fighting for a freer internet and a freer world. He is, by Paul Graham, considered a founder of reddit but is rarely mentioned in these stories.
Instead of trying to go for broke and grind till he could cash out, Aaron put his skin in the game for what the internet should become. Which gets more relevant everyday that the internet megacorps consolidate power, control information, and shape the public discourse. Reddit is one such site. They should be embarrassed by how they dismissed the ethical dilemmas of operating reddit in favor of making a profit.
It'd be nice if they'd stop trying erase Aaron's work on Reddit but that's been underway for some time, and I'm not even really sure why. I can't fathom an end-goal where marginalizing Aaron's contributions is a benefit to them.
Yeah it was long before the government went after Aaron. You could hear it straight from spez but the comment linked here is deleted. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20241
If I had to guess as to why his contributions are marginalized, it would be that his contributions were ~16 years ago to a version of the website that is vastly different in scope and scale to the one that exists today. Founders are important entities for companies, but just having the title of "founder" doesn't also magically mean whatever contributions and decisions you made have to be memorialized and defended forever after so many things have changed.
Hmm. Tesla would be a bad analogy but what you said would apply to them as well. To give the founder of Tesla zero credit, as Elon does, seems wrong.
He wasn't really like Facebook's other founders either. (Unlike Elon and Tesla, Zuckerberg is unquestionably a founder of Facebook.) Zuckerberg gave them too little credit, but at least one of them demanded too much credit IMO. That doesn't make it right for Zuckerberg to give them too little credit.
There is a very big difference between giving no credit and giving a fair amount of credit, which might be small. If you listened to the podcast they talked about Aaron in a non-disparaging way, and a way that I'm sure is accurate to their beliefs about it.
But my point is that _even if_ Aaron was super, super important to the company 16 years ago (which I can't speak to), Reddit was a tiny little fledgling of what it is now. From what little I know about Reddit's history, I know that Aaron stopped working on Reddit very soon after he started and has had no contribution to the company since then.
I also do think it's interesting that the people that have worked at Reddit for years/decades all seem to have a similar opinion of the situation, and the people who haven't worked at Reddit at all are the ones that feel so strongly that Aaron is being wronged somehow.
Maybe Aaron himself was more proud of all the other things he accomplished! Saying he was an important but small part of Reddit's story is still something!
If people have to listen to a podcast to hear them present a balanced view, clearly they've failed to do so publicly.
I'll pass on listening to the podcast, there are thousands of others I'd rather listen to. Thanks anyways.
> > If you listened to the podcast they talked...
> If people have to listen to a podcast to hear...
birken wasn't saying that this information is only in a podcast, he's talking about a podcast because that's the article we're discussing.
I just noticed jl posted it!
Well I guess we'll both agree to disagree about the nuances of the early years of Reddit, something neither of us know anything about. Oh well.
I think I understand it pretty well.
Edit: I had to retract what I said here because a lot of things the reddit founders said from 2006-2009 seem to be missing and I couldn't find anything to back it up https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20339
To my recollection Aaron Swartz was anti-establishment; the reddit he was part of was grass-roots, laissez-faire, no holds barred, ... whilst reddit today is part of the media establishment, much more top-down, heavily modded and censored.
Reddit in the post digg-exodus days seemed like a veneer of 'news' covering one of _the_ seedy underbellies of the web. Not only, but to a large extent a hive of scum and villainy; not a chan-site but similarly lacking in societal respectability.
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He was only there for a few months, so I don't think the reddit community changed much and drove him off that way. It was like it was when it started for several years.
kn0thing and spez seem like they have a lot in common with Elon politically. Aaronsw not so much.
Sorry I can't seem to explain how I perceive their political differences at the moment and instead am just giving an example.
Libertarian?
Elon is the libertarian in this analogy.
I've felt for a decade now, even though the two weren't directly linked, that the death of Aaron Schwartz was the symbolic death of Reddit's soul. Nowadays the website is a dark pattern hellscape that forces app downloads for "age verification" and just because you scrolled through too many comments.
Schwartz is dead and Ohanian is a multi-millionaire married to an olympian, so I guess that tells you about what society values. At least we can already see the beginning of the end of the exploitative paywalled journals and people like Alexandra Elbakyan picking up where Schwartz left off.
I must be watching too much Spaceballs
Np, it's an easy thing to get wrong. I'm just trying to stop propagation of the wrong information.
I’ve been banned from multiple subreddits for commenting “I wish Aaron Swartz were still alive”. Just that. Nothing else. Instant ban with no recourse. That’s how toxic reddit moderators are.
It's owned by a Chinese company from what I understand. I don't think they have a particular bone with Aaron, but generally just believe in deleting inconvenient controversies.
Tencent owns 5% of reddit.
5% based on fictional evaluation, but $150 of the last $300 mil raised. Certainly enough to influence marketing and positioning.
IIRC they don't even have a seat on the board.
Well, that's what sort of happened.
He broke in to an MIT networking closet (he was never a student there, and MIT is not a public university) and connected his equipment to the network.
https://www.wired.com/2013/12/swartz-video/
There are a lot of much more legal ways to make the Internet freer. He was a smart guy and knew what he was doing was highly illegal. It goes without saying that it's very tragic that he decided to end his life.
I think that this is the major issue with martyrdom. Aaron is remembered for "fighting the man" but the real story is a significantly muddier than that. A martyr's death makes it seem like the martyr did nothing wrong even if they did, so tread carefully on idolizing them. (You and I certainly wouldn't appreciate a stranger breaking into our homelab closets and attaching equipment, and in many states we would be within our rights to defend our property with deadly force on sight).
People like Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman make the Internet and computing more free while avoiding blatant, stupid lawbreaking. Aaron sadly isn't around to make the successor to Reddit or do anything to help make the Internet more free.
I'm not trying to say that the feds being intimidating is right, but, ya know, Aaron did the exact sort of thing that goes far beyond petty crime.
Sorry, I know this is kind of a dumb and not so productive soap box. Oh well.
> He broke in to an MIT networking closet (he was never a student there) and connected his equipment to the network.
The closet was unlocked and he used a regular guest access to the MIT network. Also he was downloading documents that were created by using public funds.
> There are a lot of much more legal ways to make the Internet freer. He was a smart guy and knew what he was doing was highly illegal.
There are always other and more effective ways to everything. With this kind of argumentation one always must come to the conclusion that it is best to do nothing. Also let's not forget that he did much more than downloading documents at MIT.
> think that this is the major issue with martyrdom. Aaron is remembered for "fighting the man" but the real story is a significantly muddier than that. A martyr's death makes it seem like the martyr did nothing wrong even if they did.
That's a definition for martyrdom I have not heard before. Usually a martyr is simply defined as a person who is willing to suffer or even die for a cause, belief, or principle that they consider to be of great importance.
> Sorry, I know this is kind of a dumb and not so productive soap box. Oh well.
I will simply never understand why people will argument so strongly against their self interests.
I’m not really talking about the definition of martyrdom, I’m talking about the effects of martyrdom on the general public.
E.g., what would Christianity become had Jesus not died on the cross? The central motivation of the Christian faith is that Christ died for our sins. It wouldn’t be so impactful if Jesus died of old age like everyone else.
I’m basically saying that being a martyr is something that amplifies a person’s image, and that’s the reason why Aaron came up in the first place.
If he took the six month plea deal and was alive today, he would not be part of this discussion.
I'd agree that people aren't invoking him because they care about him personally, people seldom give a darn when someone else isn't being given full credit. But I think it doesn't have anything to do with martyrdom: People were complaining about the reddit thing wrt Aaron while he was alive too.
The comments are driven out of concern and feelings of loss related to reddit's former perceived public-spirited democratic spirit in favor of corporate interests. It's only natural that people would highlight an early participant who seemed more aligned with their perspective and who seems to have been diminished in the modern narrative.
Does Aaron's separation with reddit explain its cultural changes? Things are seldom that simple. But when talking on a forum about our concerns with how reddit has changed over the years a simple view is perfectly appropriate-- so for some people bringing up the missing co-founder, is a suitable way to express their views.
Perhaps you’re right…which brings up another point: all these people building idealist products need to stop selling out to investors and acquiring companies.
The recent news about Imgur violating its original purpose of being the anti-photobucket image host for Reddit is the same thing, and even worse: Imgur was bootstrapped.
A founder can’t be said to have an idealist perspective if they sell their idealist platform to the highest bidder.
Jack Dorsey also comes to mind.
hah. For Dorsey the point that happened was when he made it public, I believe he's said he regretted that! :)
But I think the invocation of imgur brings up a good point. Was what we believed imgur to be ever actually economically viable? They were "bootstrapped" but $40 million in 2013, back before almost all of their impact.
At least some of the funded things that 'sell out' were just never viable to begin with.
It's far from clear to me that reddit couldn't have become more like Wikipedia-- driven by its community and funded through public support-- but there are lots of things that we could decry for violating their purpose that I think couldn't exist economically in their original more public-spirited form.
I find myself wondering more how often alternatives that are viable but just a little less good are driven out of the market or prevented from ever being created by funded alternatives which aren't viable... leaving us stuck on a bait and switch tread-mill while the services we actually need die for lack of support.
I think your comment manages to be both uncharitable and misleading. Until very recently the MIT campus was extremely open and accessible to everyone. A great many non-mit students have many experiences going places far more dubious, including steam tunnels and machine rooms deep under the buildings. Can you tell me how many of them have been _federally prosecuted_? Can you name even one? If you could then perhaps we can have a good faith discussion about "highly illegal" and "far beyond petty crime".
Even after the new lockdowns ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33352567 ) the building in question is one of the ones still open to the general public. Tossing your equipment into an equipment closet, to access the exact same network you can access elsewhere but with reduced risk of some vagrant walking off with it is the same thing most people would do if they needed to leave some equipment connected and didn't have access to a more secure location.
There is just no way to deny that what Aaron was being prosecuted for was 'downloading too many scientific papers while having an anti-monopolist mindset'. Any mere urban explorer who arguably trespassed into a school facility would at most be facing a local trespassing charge, and in a case like this where the facility was expressly open to the general public and their unauthorized access was to an unlocked wiring closet, those charges likely wouldn't have stuck (or wouldn't have resulted in a very consequential sentence). Usually trespassers, when caught, are just kicked out and not charged at all. Exactly the sort of "petty crime" not-"highly-illegal" stuff you argue it wasn't.
Is it unfortunate that the feds had an option to cloak their almost nakedly political prosecution behind a complaint of dubious deeds? Wouldn't it have been better (for him) if he'd asked one of his many friends that had offices at MIT if he could leave a computer in their office? Sure. But we don't get to pick the cases that are used to defend our rights, the prosecutors get to pick... and they pick ones they think they have the best odds of winning, or in other words the cases with the best chance of letting them erode our rights, the best chance of having a chilling effect, the best chance of not resulting in a loss for the state that instead strengthens the freedoms they're trying to undermine.
So it's almost inevitable that our privacy is defended through the lens of accused pedophiles our our freedom of speech through obvious racists. The case being unfortunate is a _default_. But by comparison with those, prosecuting Aaron Swartz over this was like federally prosecuting hippy anti-war protesters putting up posters for _littering_. Wouldn't it have been better if did nothing that could be accused of being littering? Yes but the prosecutor would simply have waited for a different case where someone did, and it would just be that case being used to chill the public's freedoms. We could be a lot worse off than fighting for access to (primarily publicly funded!) knowledge through an accused trespasser. The choice of case would matter personally to the accused, but not to us-- if anything it's not hard to imagine a case much more muddled than one against Aaron that they could have used, say someone with a arguable commercial angle or a connection to a hostile state interest. Whatever case is being used as a proxy to attack the rights of all of the rest of us will always have some extra angle making it more complicated.
Sadly Aaron didn't get the support he needed from the public (including myself), he wasn't in the right place to see it through, and the intensity of federal prosecution is just out of odds with producing justice in the face of potentially vulnerable targets. It did end the political aspirations of the prosecutor, for whatever its worth.
They spammed posts and comments with fake accounts to fake growth until it caught on and then talked about it on HackerNews ...
Lol HN didn't exist until reddit was popular. HN was in fact created because reddit go so popular it no longer appealed to PG, so he started HN so he could moderate the conversation himself and steer the community they way he wanted it to go.
The other thing you said partly true -- in the beginning the founders had about 100 accounts that they posted with, but there were no comments back then. There was never fake commenting, and the posts weren't "fake" either. Alexis would scour the internet all day looking for interesting things and then posting them with random accounts, as would Steve.
So if anything Alexis and Steve were just really prolific users.
But the site was self sustaining by the time comments launched. ie. There would be fresh content even if Steve and Alexis didn't post anything that day.
Digg had it first, Reddit was Digg's second cousin. Reddit never took off until Digg shot itself in the kneecap. Digg was where the "fresh content" came from.
If Digg hadn't made the v2.0 mistake; Reddit wouldn't be where it was now.
The accounts may of not been fake, but reddit for sure had many plants; it was even boasted by the administration team prior Conde Nest. And now it's more blatant than before.
> Digg was where the "fresh content" came from.
This is not quite true. StumbleUpon is where fresh content came from. It was popularized on digg.
Fancy that. Thanks for the update in history.
I guess before that it was Newgrounds.
Came here to say this. Reddit was this quaint tiny site that was a breath of fresh air after digg's self-destruction. In those days there were no sub-reddits, just the front page.
I left after sub-reddits started and it went to shit as a result. It has been downhill since then (at least for what I want). HN is much more like what the original Reddit was like. I can imagine that if HN gets "sub" things it will also self-deatruct like Reddit has.
Jedberg. I've called you and them out on this before. There are HackerNews comments from '08 and '09 where the astroturfing and fake accounts are openly mentioned.
Don't make me go through the effort to dig them up.
As for the order of events, I wasn't clear. I meant they talked about it on HackerNews but not contemporaneously.
Thats some mighty handwavy mental gymnastics to not call them liars.
Pretending to be different people to post qualifies as 'fake posts'.
Fake it till you make it, or fraud?
Either way it's still bullshit.
While I am very ready to be critical of Reddit, including its creators, community, interface, and aesthetic, I am not personally offended that a couple jabronis posted a bunch of stuff to build up some initial momentum.
Could you please stop taking this thread into flamewar?
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35677196.
Yes.
This is what I remember from the earliest days. Back and forth between their own posts using multiple accounts to give the impression of active engagement and a growing community. Reposting things from Digg, Fark, etc and grabbing memes like Rickrolls, goatse, to draw eyeballs and clicks to their single page scrolling interface.
Dodging bullshit posts was a game of waiting for comments to post so you could see which actually had real content and not some nasty meme from somewhere else.
Deciding that they needed a coat of arms and figuring out what should go on it, the alien, narwhals, etc.
Exactly what I thought when I saw the title.
You really needed an entire podcast to describe that?!
RIP Aaron, was a great guy.
Alexis and Steve are bullshit artists that got rich.
Steve was especially bad when he dipped back in.
this is good timing, as we're witnessing in real time how reddit is ending right now :)
I'm winding down my participation. It's been a fun ride for the most part but it is really easy to get depressed reading a lot of stuff that gets posted.
Discussions tend to deteriorate quickly and quality comments with sources get buried. That isn't how it all started. I'll shut down my last account soon after overwriting and deleting all the posts.
It's fitting that Imgur is also gonna scratch all the content they have from people who never made Imgur accounts. I have a lot of tutorials, marked-up photos, etc that I used to help people thru issues on some of those niche forums involving home and auto repairs. It's good to know all that will be gone.
I'll be down to one site for online engagement and news.
How is reddit ending? In general it seems they waited for enough critical mass before instituting all the content policies that would kill smaller sites.
And while digg's implosion had reddit as an alternative, in 2023 who is the alternative to reddit?
> in 2023 who is the alternative to reddit?
I think the rapid decline of Twitter and the sputter of Mastodon indicates that a lot of us have realized that simply removing social media from our lives and not replacing it with anything feels pretty good.
A few years ago I used to visit Reddit a couple times every week. These days I only end up there if a google search sends me there.
I don't think twitter has anything to do with reddit -they don't exist in the same niche in social media. The sputter of mastadon was because the decline of twitter was largely short term outrage. I hear every day on hackernews that twitter is failing and I'm not sure that's true.
Twitter and reddit exist because there is a market for those types of social media experience. If even 50k computer science specialized people stop visiting reddit and twitter I don't think that matters to those sites overall traffic levels.
If you already aren't visiting twitter or reddit than you aren't really interested in the alternative for them, are you? Since you're already rejecting those experiences. You aren't the target audience, you're just imagining everyone is like you, when all evidence seems to go the other way.
So again, lets say people want an alternative platform to twitter, they could go to substack maybe. but whats the alternative to reddit? Discord? I don't think so.
the critical mass might have to do without power-users (sucks for all the subreddits people go to for technical help!) and moderators, as the api changes affect tools and apps mods use a lot.
as for implosion, it might be more of a twitter thing, slowly people will get enough and leave. sometimes you don't need a new destination, but you just stop by the site anymore.
How is that?
Reddit recently announced changes to their APIs pricing and features that will probably lead to the abandonment of most third-party Reddit clients. Users of those clients are upset.
https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_fe...
Can someone provide a tl;dr that specifically explains why this is going to harm the site? I know there were some communications problems with third party clients, but from my reading of the announcement it just sounds like they're going to start enforcing their previously documented but unenforced API rate limits on free accounts and they're providing a service to charge for bulk access. What else is changing that has everyone upset? The developers commenting from the big clients such as Apollo didn't seem to provide any info on if/how their clients would be broken. I didn't even see any comments suggesting the clients would break. It's mostly just anger about the opacity of the announcement.
I understand people being wary, especially in light of how Twitter changed their API years ago, but I'd love some more concrete info and specific complaints about this change in particular.
but lets say they're upset enough to leave - where will they go en masse that replaces reddit?
I doubt they'll go anywhere en masse. They'll probably just grudgingly use the official clients. Possibly with browser plugins to customize the UI.
Maybe I'll build a link sharing/discussion site like Reddit but on Nostr...hmm
TikTok is eating the world. It's already completely consumed instagram.
tiktok does not fulfill the same role reddit does. People can already choose to go on tiktok if they want - it doesn't replace reddit in any way.
Gotcha, thanks
I see no evidence Reddit is dying really.
Reddit is such a cesspool of low-quality commentary and rage-baiting. The front page/popular category is particularly egregious.
Front page is horrible, and I always skip it by bookmarking a subreddit that I'm already subscribed to.
Front page feels like clickbait and "get angry for engagement metrics"
No idea if it still works, but it was possible to select content from only certain subreddits
https://reddit.com/r/subreddit1+subreddit2+subreddit3
I’ve never visited the front page, but I’ve found a number of helpful folks on various construction trade or woodworking subs. I only have notifications enabled for /r/costco_alcohol quite useful to gauge the overall distribution patterns for specific whiskeys I like, so I know when it’s worth making a trip or not. Pretty much every sub I’ve recently spent time offering help in, or have found interesting enough to scroll around, has a pretty rigid policy of no politics and no religion. With all that said, I made the mistake of visiting /r/BayArea and found your assessment spot on.
I assume at least some portion of the front page (or /r/popular) has been for sale for a long time. For example, sports leagues like NBA or marketers trying to make viral videos for brands or new movie/TV show releases.
You have to choose subs carefully. Most are bad but some are okay
Congratulations on the most toxic, astroturfed site on the internet I guess
It’s not 4chan
4chan is mostly anti-astroturfed - it's actual people but they'll just kneejerk-hate anything which is popular on reddit or with 'normies'.
4chan is actually among the less toxic discussion sites, and definitely better than Reddit.
This is mostly owed to the quality of its moderation team.
4chan's infamy is largely undeserved.