More capital, more ads, more tracking, more annoying messages to force mobile users to use their app, more useless features, more (slower) redesigns, JavaScript everywhere... all things most users...
More capital, more ads, more tracking, more annoying messages to force mobile users to use their app, more useless features, more (slower) redesigns, JavaScript everywhere... all things most users don't want/like.
What's so bad about sites with boring pages (old reddit, craigslist, hacker news, tildes, etc)? Why annoy users with regular prompts about their app? Does a site like reddit needs to host videos/images, which is expensive even for them?
This focus on constant growth and user retention will end up killing reddit (or any other site/service that follows the same path).
They want to host images and videos because then users will stay on reddit and watch their ads. The fundamental problem with the original design of reddit (from a monetization perspective) is that...
They want to host images and videos because then users will stay on reddit and watch their ads. The fundamental problem with the original design of reddit (from a monetization perspective) is that reddit links to other sites by its nature.
That's why reddit constantly pushes the things it does. Reddit wants to be facebook in the sense that almost all fb content gets you further into facebook.
Isn't this true for most social networks though? At a certain point they are pushed by investors and advertisers to get more money out of users. They start to create features, not for the sake of...
Isn't this true for most social networks though? At a certain point they are pushed by investors and advertisers to get more money out of users. They start to create features, not for the sake of the user, but for the sake of their own wallets (and in return investors and advertisers). This keeps going until you get to a point where the site is so bad, people start to leave or search for alternatives. But because they also keep attracting more users, it keeps getting harder to leave.
Totally. I was just trying to point out that reddit is uniquely challenged in their quest to engage users since the whole point of the site is to get you to go to a different site (or was originally.)
Totally. I was just trying to point out that reddit is uniquely challenged in their quest to engage users since the whole point of the site is to get you to go to a different site (or was originally.)
What's so bad about bell-bottom jeans and shoulder pads? Well, they're outdated. They looked great in the 60s and 80s, respectively; but now they look really ugly. Most young people (who are what...
What's so bad about sites with boring pages
What's so bad about bell-bottom jeans and shoulder pads? Well, they're outdated. They looked great in the 60s and 80s, respectively; but now they look really ugly.
Most young people (who are what these sites appeal to) are used to flashy, colorful sites. Reddit is like being back in the 90s or early 2000s. I am young and I really took a while to get used to Reddit's interface and how outdated it looked. In hindsight, it was a good thing; because it filtered out people and invited a more serious audience (relatively speaking). Now with the redesign that's all gone.
Why annoy users with regular prompts about their app?
I absolutely despise it. But throughout the years I have learned that what I despise, most normal people are indifferent towards or sometimes even like it.
The bottom line is money, if they keep doing it (like so many websites out there), it's because it must be working, not on you or me, but on a significant amount of people; which is all they care about at the end of the day.
Does a site like reddit needs to host videos/images, which is expensive even for them?
That way they lower the bar enough for the most illiterate of the technological illiterate to participate and post BS. Thus more users, and more content, and more money.
This focus on constant growth and user retention will end up killing reddit (or any other site/service that follows the same path).
We can create modern looking websites using boring html + css (and some .js). For example, we could make Tildes look better with simple css changes: different font, changes to the...
We can create modern looking websites using boring html + css (and some .js). For example, we could make Tildes look better with simple css changes: different font, changes to the paddings/margins, different colours, etc. There's no need to go bananas and load everything using JavaScript in a slower and laggy way.
I would be okay with the change if it was faster or just as fast, but it isn't for most of the things I do. I agree that the sites I mentioned look "outdated", but modern and good looking websites don't have to perform like crap. Between a boring site and a fancy JavaScript site that performs badly on slow connections/poor hardware, I pick the boring option any time.
I have nothing against JavaScript, I think it can be useful. I also don't have a problem with modern interfaces, but sometimes they're just a downgrade:
Reddit: scrolling + lazy load sometimes creates lag, sometimes elements take a few seconds to load.
Gmail website: heavy, need a few MB of js to work, way slower for some users (there was a discussion about this on hacker news recently).
Gmail app for Android: new UI, everything is white. I don't use it but saw a ~40 year old woman struggling with it the other day.
Sometimes it looks like they're just doing things because it's trendy. MySQL? No, we need this fancy cloud service that costs 2x more and does the same thing, but hey, everyone is using it. Simple html + css for a text page? Nope, let's load everything with JavaScript and a bunch of fonts, because I'm sure all users are connected to their gigabit internet connection. C'mon.
Sites, apps, services, etc, should think about their users. Unlike their developers, not all users are young, have good vision, live in a big city with amazing internet connection or own the latest iPhone which is more powerful and costs more than some computers.
Then there's this idea about growth and success. Only $84.3 billion in revenue for Apple last quarter? Clearly failing! China's GDP growing 6%, not 8%? The end is near! A site can't keep up with their 10% monthly growth? Let's force mobile users to use our app so they create accounts.
For me all this doesn't make any sense and hope I never have to work for one of these companies were growth comes before everything else.
My number one problem with "modern" design. White, white, white. Google can manage to auto log you in for Chrome whenever you sign into gmail, but somehow creating a global dark toggle is beyond...
everything is white
My number one problem with "modern" design. White, white, white. Google can manage to auto log you in for Chrome whenever you sign into gmail, but somehow creating a global dark toggle is beyond them. At least on browsers you can override everything, for apps you're shit outta luck.
I have tildes set to a delightful green/blue color. Gives the website some character. Also the reason google apps don't have a dark mode is because part of the modern design trend is assuming all...
I have tildes set to a delightful green/blue color. Gives the website some character. Also the reason google apps don't have a dark mode is because part of the modern design trend is assuming all users are completely brain dead and can not be trusted to make any choices at all. Gmail will even try to write your reply emails for you so you don't have to make that choice anymore.
I half jokingly suggest that future phones will have no ports, no buttons and no touch screen. They will simply be a display to show you fluff and adverts with facial expression recognition to feed back to the algorithms to make sure you are always content. Give an interested expression and google will automatically order what is currently being advertised to you.
Out of interest, where do you consider Tildes on this spectrum? I'd say "timeless minimalism", but I'm also aware of how many years I've spent watching web design evolve!
Most young people (who are what these sites appeal to) are used to flashy, colorful sites. Reddit is like being back in the 90s or early 2000s. I am young and I really took a while to get used to Reddit's interface and how outdated it looked.
Out of interest, where do you consider Tildes on this spectrum? I'd say "timeless minimalism", but I'm also aware of how many years I've spent watching web design evolve!
My opinion isn't of much worth in here. Since I don't use any of the popular social media sites other than Reddit and Youtube. So my expectations and what I'm used to is very different from the...
My opinion isn't of much worth in here. Since I don't use any of the popular social media sites other than Reddit and Youtube. So my expectations and what I'm used to is very different from the average young person.
More importantly, I don't even know what I like in a webpage. I know I hate sticky headers and elements, autoplaying videos and ads, gallery articles that you have to click through... But I don't know what I do like.
Ironically, I often use uBlock element picker to nuke elements I don't like so that the page ends up being just the article I'm interested in reading, no ads, recommended reads, related articles, no media sharing buttons... I block Reddit's “try the redesign” burron, and the “join the secret santa” buttons...
That all points to me liking minimalists pages. But I still find Tildes boring. Maybe because it lacks color, it's mostly dull and grey. But so are books, and I still like to read them, so I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing.
If I could, I'd replace the white background with something slightly more lively. Just slightly (or maybe a lot, depending on my mood). But others could easily consider it tacky.
Have you tried the other themes? They're all just single-color backgrounds too, but maybe one of the other color schemes is more interesting to you than the default white/grey:...
Have you tried the other themes? They're all just single-color backgrounds too, but maybe one of the other color schemes is more interesting to you than the default white/grey: https://tildes.net/settings
@Bauke did a huge revamp of the theme system a while ago too, so it's now much easier to add more themes in the future (I need to write up some documentation about it at some point).
I have never understood this. How can something look great today, but look ugly tomorrow if it's the same look? Either it always looks good or it never looked good. Remember: everything you're...
They looked great in the 60s and 80s, respectively; but now they look really ugly.
I have never understood this. How can something look great today, but look ugly tomorrow if it's the same look? Either it always looks good or it never looked good. Remember: everything you're wearing and using today, which you think looks good, will be judged as bad in 30-50 years time. Who's right - you, for thinking it's good, or your grandchildren, for thinking it's bad?
It's not about the look itself, it's about the people doing the judging. If people don't judge something to look bad, then it doesn't look bad.
A content aggregator website like Reddit or HackerNews or Tildes doesn't need to have multi-coloured flashing lights, with bells and whistles on every page. It needs to be simple and uncluttered, and let the content (links and comments) shine.
Well, I was being nice. I've always thought they looked awful. But I didn't live in the 80s or the 60s, so it's impossible to know whether I'm biased or not, so I erred on the side of caution. I...
I have never understood this. How can something look great today, but look ugly tomorrow if it's the same look? Either it always looks good or it never looked good.
Well, I was being nice. I've always thought they looked awful. But I didn't live in the 80s or the 60s, so it's impossible to know whether I'm biased or not, so I erred on the side of caution.
Remember: everything you're wearing and using today, which you think looks good, will be judged as bad in 30-50 years time.
I mostly stick to the classics. Things that have always been considered okay, or things that jump in and out of fashion.
Who's right - you, for thinking it's good, or your grandchildren, for thinking it's bad?
It's a subjective thing, not a factual one. We both disagree and still be right.
A content aggregator website like Reddit or HackerNews or Tildes doesn't need to have multi-coloured flashing lights, with bells and whistles on every page. It needs to be simple and uncluttered, and let the content (links and comments) shine.
That's very much a subjective matter. Just like some people think we need downvotes and some think we don't.
Going back to the initial point, however. Fashion, technology, society... they all change with time. Ten thousand years ago in the tropical areas it was probably okay for people to go around naked. But we have since developed certain beliefs, technologies, and scientific knowledge that all point to it not being the optimal choice.
Very often, what is top of the line now will be garbage tomorrow. Because, compared to the things developed in the future, with better technology and material, what we have now is not as good. We don't know it now, because we don't have the future products to compare it to. I think it's pretty understandable.
Also, yes, for teens and people that only care about following fashion for fashion's sake, modern is better than old, regardless of technology and science. Just this past summer I saw lots of people wearing fanny packs (traditionally believed to be the opposite of fashion), only across their chest, which apparently made it cool. A huge SUPREME logo helps, too.
What I find fascinating is how they reconcile their stated goal to "listen to feedback" or "care about the users" with this sort of thing. When you tell me this, do you believe your own lies?
What I find fascinating is how they reconcile their stated goal to "listen to feedback" or "care about the users" with this sort of thing. When you tell me this, do you believe your own lies?
I really, really don't understand how a company that has very little chance of ever being financially sustainable at this point (with X hundred employees in downtown SF), let alone actually...
I really, really don't understand how a company that has very little chance of ever being financially sustainable at this point (with X hundred employees in downtown SF), let alone actually turning a profit at any point, can wind up with a $3Bn valuation... no matter how many users they have, especially given how fickle social media communities can be (Myspace, Digg, etc). And yet somehow reddit will probably continue to get massive amounts of funding in these VC rounds, and if they ever go public I'm sure it will probably be wildly successful... I just don't get it. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills (or all their investors are).
That's pretty much the entire tech industry though. Uber is now losing $1.1 billion per quarter but they're valued at $76 billion somehow. As Steve Yegge said:
Uber, as we all know by now, is losing money faster than any company has lost money in the history of money. As one famous investor put it, the ride-hailing space can be thought of as piling huge heaps of money on a table, pouring gasoline on it and lighting it on fire.
We've all seen this particular crazy before in the 90s - and we know how it will end. I'm looking forward to watching every major investor in the silicon valley culture get gutted. Frankly, if...
We've all seen this particular crazy before in the 90s - and we know how it will end. I'm looking forward to watching every major investor in the silicon valley culture get gutted. Frankly, if anyone has stock and investments in this mess, get the fuck out now while it's worth more than the paper it's printed on. You can stick with the few genuine service companies, though - they'll survive. We'll probably get a couple more years before this advertising-based internet model collapses, but collapse it will, and good fucking riddance.
It won't collapse, it'll evolve. Mass volume of data will be even more valuable when it's easy to weed it out and put some machine learning to identify trends and areas to manipulate for profit.
We'll probably get a couple more years before this advertising-based internet model collapses, but collapse it will, and good fucking riddance.
It won't collapse, it'll evolve. Mass volume of data will be even more valuable when it's easy to weed it out and put some machine learning to identify trends and areas to manipulate for profit.
I'm fairly sure it is a bubble (also economics-ignorant), but Uber at least is investing a lot of money into self-driving technologies. Presumably their end-game would be to eliminate drivers, and...
I'm fairly sure it is a bubble (also economics-ignorant), but Uber at least is investing a lot of money into self-driving technologies. Presumably their end-game would be to eliminate drivers, and thus allow themselves to reap far more cash per mile driven. Fully autonomous cars on an Uber/Lyft model could easily pay for themselves* within a year in metropolitan areas, and everything after that—sans maintenance—is pure profit. I imagine a good deal of investors are waiting for this to reach fruition and the money machine to switch on.
*meaning the car itself, how long it takes to make back on the R&D costs isn't very predictable until Lvl 4 vehicles roll off the line
LOL, of that I am almost certain... but aren't bubbles supposed to pop eventually? Because this one doesn't seem to be even close to doing so. It just keeps growing and growing and growing with...
LOL, of that I am almost certain... but aren't bubbles supposed to pop eventually? Because this one doesn't seem to be even close to doing so. It just keeps growing and growing and growing with more and more people (and businesses) embracing the "new economic model" where profitability means nothing anymore and growth (no matter how unsustainable) means absolutely everything.
I'm in complete agreement with this. Everyone is chasing 'Microsoft' and 'Apple' returns - that doesn't happen but once in a generation. Greed is no longer good, greed is dead. Took long enough...
I'm in complete agreement with this. Everyone is chasing 'Microsoft' and 'Apple' returns - that doesn't happen but once in a generation. Greed is no longer good, greed is dead. Took long enough for that idea to finally go.
Cover costs, provide good services, and to hell with the rest. Our economic models are completely wrong to chase profits - they should be chasing balance. Best presentation of that idea I've seen is the doughnut model and you know it's good when bringing it up can get a room of two dozen economists into a fight to the death. I find it pretty compelling, since it changes the goals but doesn't sacrifice the market, which is always the risk tinkering with capitalistic systems. There's a quick ted talk that gets the basics of the idea across.
I think a key feature of a bubble is that it seems like an endless party to those most involved in causing/maintaining it to begin with. Sure there are folks who see the writing on the wall, but...
I think a key feature of a bubble is that it seems like an endless party to those most involved in causing/maintaining it to begin with. Sure there are folks who see the writing on the wall, but it seems to me those voices get crowded out by people screaming for more champagne they buy with Andreessen Horowitz $$.
VC investors hedge their bets. They know that out of 100 investments, the great majority will fail. It may be enough if less than 10 turn out ok, or just one makes it big. Now, Reddit still has...
I just don't get it. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills (or all their investors are).
VC investors hedge their bets. They know that out of 100 investments, the great majority will fail. It may be enough if less than 10 turn out ok, or just one makes it big. Now, Reddit still has the potential to make it huge, like Facebook huge, and even if that potential is very small, it's bigger than with most other companies. Hence, it's a fairly good bet. It will most likely fail, but that's ok. And if it succeeds, you will be set for life.
Investors: "So, did you take care of the bots?" Reddit: "What bots?" Investors: "How about the state-sponsored propaganda problem?" Reddit: "The what now?" Investors: "Did you ban the fascist...
Investors: "So, did you take care of the bots?"
Reddit: "What bots?"
Investors: "How about the state-sponsored propaganda problem?"
Reddit: "The what now?"
Investors: "Did you ban the fascist trolls that brigade and disrupt every corner of the site?"
Reddit: "I have no idea what you're talking about."
Investors: "Do you even have a path to monetization that doesn't clash with the fact that the majority of your userbase uses adblockers?"
Reddit: "Are you giving us that money or not?"
Investors: ".... Okay, everything looks good. So, how's another couple hundred mil sound?"
It's not just the state-sponsored bots, a huge percentage of all submissions and comments on the platform are already coming from bots. At any given time, the PushShift Reddit Statistics page...
It's not just the state-sponsored bots, a huge percentage of all submissions and comments on the platform are already coming from bots. At any given time, the PushShift Reddit Statistics page shows that almost all the submission and comment activity (by frequency) are bots.
I always find it interesting to look at the "Most Active Discussion Topics" chart at the bottom and see how many of them are being caused by blatant spam. For example, right now it's got ones like...
I always find it interesting to look at the "Most Active Discussion Topics" chart at the bottom and see how many of them are being caused by blatant spam. For example, right now it's got ones like "Full Movie", "Eng Sub", "Free Kindle", and so on. It's heavier on the porn-related topics right now than usual, but a lot of that is spam too.
I know the PushShift guy has been working on coming up with a metric to flag potential bot accounts. The API already has a parameter reply_delay that can be used to see how quickly accounts are...
Haha there's a lot of work that needs to be done documenting and explaining the PushShift API. The size parameter indicates how many actual comments to return. In my case, I requested none,...
Haha there's a lot of work that needs to be done documenting and explaining the PushShift API. The size parameter indicates how many actual comments to return. In my case, I requested none, because I wanted to perform an aggregation using the author of the comments (aggs=author) and didn't need to see the actual comments themselves.
Do we know this for a fact? Is there any study, article or Reddit blogpost about it? I've always thought that, no matter how popular adblockers are, the vast majority of people still don't use...
Do you even have a path to monetization that doesn't clash with the fact that the majority of your userbase uses adblockers?
Do we know this for a fact? Is there any study, article or Reddit blogpost about it?
I've always thought that, no matter how popular adblockers are, the vast majority of people still don't use them.
Plus, I also think that most users at this point are mobile users. A huge chunk of which are on iPhone, which doesn't have any system-wide adblocker. And I wonder how many of them have paid for the ad-free version of the app they use (assuming they're using a 3d party Reddit app, which the majority of them more likely than not aren't, due to Reddit's heavy pushing of their own flawed app). There's also Android, which can have system-wide ad-blocking through various means, but they often involve a bit of a technology-inclined personality, which, while still abundant, is by no means dominant. This is all speculation on my part, though. But I haven't been able to find much data on it the times I've tried to find it.
I was being facetious, but this report from a year and a half ago says 40% of laptop/desktop users blocked ads and 22% of mobile users were. Compare that to one year prior to that where only 25%...
I was being facetious, but this report from a year and a half ago says 40% of laptop/desktop users blocked ads and 22% of mobile users were. Compare that to one year prior to that where only 25% of desktop/laptop and 15% of mobile users were blocking. 15% desktop/laptop and 7% mobile blocking increase in the span of a year -- I can imagine the amount of people using blockers now since the 2017 report has risen much more than the 15 and 7% increases from 2016 -> 2017. Even if blocking tapered off slightly, that'd still likely put desktop/laptop blocking over 50% and mobile blocking over 30%.
You're welcome! I should have included some sources in my original comment instead of it simply being a shitpost/me venting. Please let me know if you spot a 2018 metric, I'd be very interested to...
You're welcome! I should have included some sources in my original comment instead of it simply being a shitpost/me venting. Please let me know if you spot a 2018 metric, I'd be very interested to see how things have turned out.
I'd be much more interested in the trends of the use of ad-blockers, independent of any given browser/platform. I suspect there's been a slow but steadily increasing uptick in the number of people...
I'd be much more interested in the trends of the use of ad-blockers, independent of any given browser/platform. I suspect there's been a slow but steadily increasing uptick in the number of people using them, and that's what got the bug up Google's ass to start fucking around with Chrome - to prevent that trend from continuing and threatening their pathetic business model.
Is there an easy way to view reddit's current financial status? In the UK you can simply go on Companies House to get a decent overview of any registered company, private or public. I'm not sure...
Is there an easy way to view reddit's current financial status? In the UK you can simply go on Companies House to get a decent overview of any registered company, private or public. I'm not sure if that's possible in the USA?
This is the major issue. Even in the UK the rules for private asset reporting are so light the info is near useless (less so for revenue and other tax-generating things as the returns are also...
private or public
This is the major issue. Even in the UK the rules for private asset reporting are so light the info is near useless (less so for revenue and other tax-generating things as the returns are also public) - it also is, shall we say less than forthcoming? about international dealings and what external encumbrance the company might have (something that probably should have been dealt with in 2008 or so, but it got ignored like so much else).
In the US and elsewhere private companies disclose jack.
More capital, more ads, more tracking, more annoying messages to force mobile users to use their app, more useless features, more (slower) redesigns, JavaScript everywhere... all things most users don't want/like.
What's so bad about sites with boring pages (old reddit, craigslist, hacker news, tildes, etc)? Why annoy users with regular prompts about their app? Does a site like reddit needs to host videos/images, which is expensive even for them?
This focus on constant growth and user retention will end up killing reddit (or any other site/service that follows the same path).
They want to host images and videos because then users will stay on reddit and watch their ads. The fundamental problem with the original design of reddit (from a monetization perspective) is that reddit links to other sites by its nature.
That's why reddit constantly pushes the things it does. Reddit wants to be facebook in the sense that almost all fb content gets you further into facebook.
Isn't this true for most social networks though? At a certain point they are pushed by investors and advertisers to get more money out of users. They start to create features, not for the sake of the user, but for the sake of their own wallets (and in return investors and advertisers). This keeps going until you get to a point where the site is so bad, people start to leave or search for alternatives. But because they also keep attracting more users, it keeps getting harder to leave.
Totally. I was just trying to point out that reddit is uniquely challenged in their quest to engage users since the whole point of the site is to get you to go to a different site (or was originally.)
What's so bad about bell-bottom jeans and shoulder pads? Well, they're outdated. They looked great in the 60s and 80s, respectively; but now they look really ugly.
Most young people (who are what these sites appeal to) are used to flashy, colorful sites. Reddit is like being back in the 90s or early 2000s. I am young and I really took a while to get used to Reddit's interface and how outdated it looked. In hindsight, it was a good thing; because it filtered out people and invited a more serious audience (relatively speaking). Now with the redesign that's all gone.
I absolutely despise it. But throughout the years I have learned that what I despise, most normal people are indifferent towards or sometimes even like it.
The bottom line is money, if they keep doing it (like so many websites out there), it's because it must be working, not on you or me, but on a significant amount of people; which is all they care about at the end of the day.
That way they lower the bar enough for the most illiterate of the technological illiterate to participate and post BS. Thus more users, and more content, and more money.
Part of me truly hopes so.
We can create modern looking websites using boring html + css (and some .js). For example, we could make Tildes look better with simple css changes: different font, changes to the paddings/margins, different colours, etc. There's no need to go bananas and load everything using JavaScript in a slower and laggy way.
I would be okay with the change if it was faster or just as fast, but it isn't for most of the things I do. I agree that the sites I mentioned look "outdated", but modern and good looking websites don't have to perform like crap. Between a boring site and a fancy JavaScript site that performs badly on slow connections/poor hardware, I pick the boring option any time.
I have nothing against JavaScript, I think it can be useful. I also don't have a problem with modern interfaces, but sometimes they're just a downgrade:
Sometimes it looks like they're just doing things because it's trendy. MySQL? No, we need this fancy cloud service that costs 2x more and does the same thing, but hey, everyone is using it. Simple html + css for a text page? Nope, let's load everything with JavaScript and a bunch of fonts, because I'm sure all users are connected to their gigabit internet connection. C'mon.
Sites, apps, services, etc, should think about their users. Unlike their developers, not all users are young, have good vision, live in a big city with amazing internet connection or own the latest iPhone which is more powerful and costs more than some computers.
Then there's this idea about growth and success. Only $84.3 billion in revenue for Apple last quarter? Clearly failing! China's GDP growing 6%, not 8%? The end is near! A site can't keep up with their 10% monthly growth? Let's force mobile users to use our app so they create accounts.
For me all this doesn't make any sense and hope I never have to work for one of these companies were growth comes before everything else.
My number one problem with "modern" design. White, white, white. Google can manage to auto log you in for Chrome whenever you sign into gmail, but somehow creating a global dark toggle is beyond them. At least on browsers you can override everything, for apps you're shit outta luck.
I have tildes set to a delightful green/blue color. Gives the website some character. Also the reason google apps don't have a dark mode is because part of the modern design trend is assuming all users are completely brain dead and can not be trusted to make any choices at all. Gmail will even try to write your reply emails for you so you don't have to make that choice anymore.
I half jokingly suggest that future phones will have no ports, no buttons and no touch screen. They will simply be a display to show you fluff and adverts with facial expression recognition to feed back to the algorithms to make sure you are always content. Give an interested expression and google will automatically order what is currently being advertised to you.
Me too!
I've noticed gmail doing the prediction thing. It's kind of obnoxious, like the computer's trying to read my mind.
Out of interest, where do you consider Tildes on this spectrum? I'd say "timeless minimalism", but I'm also aware of how many years I've spent watching web design evolve!
My opinion isn't of much worth in here. Since I don't use any of the popular social media sites other than Reddit and Youtube. So my expectations and what I'm used to is very different from the average young person.
More importantly, I don't even know what I like in a webpage. I know I hate sticky headers and elements, autoplaying videos and ads, gallery articles that you have to click through... But I don't know what I do like.
Ironically, I often use uBlock element picker to nuke elements I don't like so that the page ends up being just the article I'm interested in reading, no ads, recommended reads, related articles, no media sharing buttons... I block Reddit's “try the redesign” burron, and the “join the secret santa” buttons...
That all points to me liking minimalists pages. But I still find Tildes boring. Maybe because it lacks color, it's mostly dull and grey. But so are books, and I still like to read them, so I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing.
If I could, I'd replace the white background with something slightly more lively. Just slightly (or maybe a lot, depending on my mood). But others could easily consider it tacky.
Have you tried the other themes? They're all just single-color backgrounds too, but maybe one of the other color schemes is more interesting to you than the default white/grey: https://tildes.net/settings
@Bauke did a huge revamp of the theme system a while ago too, so it's now much easier to add more themes in the future (I need to write up some documentation about it at some point).
I have never understood this. How can something look great today, but look ugly tomorrow if it's the same look? Either it always looks good or it never looked good. Remember: everything you're wearing and using today, which you think looks good, will be judged as bad in 30-50 years time. Who's right - you, for thinking it's good, or your grandchildren, for thinking it's bad?
It's not about the look itself, it's about the people doing the judging. If people don't judge something to look bad, then it doesn't look bad.
A content aggregator website like Reddit or HackerNews or Tildes doesn't need to have multi-coloured flashing lights, with bells and whistles on every page. It needs to be simple and uncluttered, and let the content (links and comments) shine.
Well, I was being nice. I've always thought they looked awful. But I didn't live in the 80s or the 60s, so it's impossible to know whether I'm biased or not, so I erred on the side of caution.
I mostly stick to the classics. Things that have always been considered okay, or things that jump in and out of fashion.
It's a subjective thing, not a factual one. We both disagree and still be right.
That's very much a subjective matter. Just like some people think we need downvotes and some think we don't.
Going back to the initial point, however. Fashion, technology, society... they all change with time. Ten thousand years ago in the tropical areas it was probably okay for people to go around naked. But we have since developed certain beliefs, technologies, and scientific knowledge that all point to it not being the optimal choice.
Very often, what is top of the line now will be garbage tomorrow. Because, compared to the things developed in the future, with better technology and material, what we have now is not as good. We don't know it now, because we don't have the future products to compare it to. I think it's pretty understandable.
Also, yes, for teens and people that only care about following fashion for fashion's sake, modern is better than old, regardless of technology and science. Just this past summer I saw lots of people wearing fanny packs (traditionally believed to be the opposite of fashion), only across their chest, which apparently made it cool. A huge SUPREME logo helps, too.
What I find fascinating is how they reconcile their stated goal to "listen to feedback" or "care about the users" with this sort of thing. When you tell me this, do you believe your own lies?
Since when do companies or governments care about being honest? You should really not expect them to, that way you won't be as disappointed.
No, but any type of dissonance is interesting especially when there's some degree of power involved
I really, really don't understand how a company that has very little chance of ever being financially sustainable at this point (with X hundred employees in downtown SF), let alone actually turning a profit at any point, can wind up with a $3Bn valuation... no matter how many users they have, especially given how fickle social media communities can be (Myspace, Digg, etc). And yet somehow reddit will probably continue to get massive amounts of funding in these VC rounds, and if they ever go public I'm sure it will probably be wildly successful... I just don't get it. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills (or all their investors are).
That's pretty much the entire tech industry though. Uber is now losing $1.1 billion per quarter but they're valued at $76 billion somehow. As Steve Yegge said:
We've all seen this particular crazy before in the 90s - and we know how it will end. I'm looking forward to watching every major investor in the silicon valley culture get gutted. Frankly, if anyone has stock and investments in this mess, get the fuck out now while it's worth more than the paper it's printed on. You can stick with the few genuine service companies, though - they'll survive. We'll probably get a couple more years before this advertising-based internet model collapses, but collapse it will, and good fucking riddance.
It won't collapse, it'll evolve. Mass volume of data will be even more valuable when it's easy to weed it out and put some machine learning to identify trends and areas to manipulate for profit.
I don't know a single thing about economics, but is this not what a bubble is? How the hell is this possible?!
I'm fairly sure it is a bubble (also economics-ignorant), but Uber at least is investing a lot of money into self-driving technologies. Presumably their end-game would be to eliminate drivers, and thus allow themselves to reap far more cash per mile driven. Fully autonomous cars on an Uber/Lyft model could easily pay for themselves* within a year in metropolitan areas, and everything after that—sans maintenance—is pure profit. I imagine a good deal of investors are waiting for this to reach fruition and the money machine to switch on.
*meaning the car itself, how long it takes to make back on the R&D costs isn't very predictable until Lvl 4 vehicles roll off the line
LOL, of that I am almost certain... but aren't bubbles supposed to pop eventually? Because this one doesn't seem to be even close to doing so. It just keeps growing and growing and growing with more and more people (and businesses) embracing the "new economic model" where profitability means nothing anymore and growth (no matter how unsustainable) means absolutely everything.
I'm in complete agreement with this. Everyone is chasing 'Microsoft' and 'Apple' returns - that doesn't happen but once in a generation. Greed is no longer good, greed is dead. Took long enough for that idea to finally go.
Cover costs, provide good services, and to hell with the rest. Our economic models are completely wrong to chase profits - they should be chasing balance. Best presentation of that idea I've seen is the doughnut model and you know it's good when bringing it up can get a room of two dozen economists into a fight to the death. I find it pretty compelling, since it changes the goals but doesn't sacrifice the market, which is always the risk tinkering with capitalistic systems. There's a quick ted talk that gets the basics of the idea across.
Do bubbles ever look close to popping? Isn't the point that once they stop growing they have already popped?
I think a key feature of a bubble is that it seems like an endless party to those most involved in causing/maintaining it to begin with. Sure there are folks who see the writing on the wall, but it seems to me those voices get crowded out by people screaming for more champagne they buy with Andreessen Horowitz $$.
VC investors hedge their bets. They know that out of 100 investments, the great majority will fail. It may be enough if less than 10 turn out ok, or just one makes it big. Now, Reddit still has the potential to make it huge, like Facebook huge, and even if that potential is very small, it's bigger than with most other companies. Hence, it's a fairly good bet. It will most likely fail, but that's ok. And if it succeeds, you will be set for life.
Investors: "So, did you take care of the bots?"
Reddit: "What bots?"
Investors: "How about the state-sponsored propaganda problem?"
Reddit: "The what now?"
Investors: "Did you ban the fascist trolls that brigade and disrupt every corner of the site?"
Reddit: "I have no idea what you're talking about."
Investors: "Do you even have a path to monetization that doesn't clash with the fact that the majority of your userbase uses adblockers?"
Reddit: "Are you giving us that money or not?"
Investors: ".... Okay, everything looks good. So, how's another couple hundred mil sound?"
Me: ლ(ಠ益ಠლ)
It's not just the state-sponsored bots, a huge percentage of all submissions and comments on the platform are already coming from bots. At any given time, the PushShift Reddit Statistics page shows that almost all the submission and comment activity (by frequency) are bots.
I always find it interesting to look at the "Most Active Discussion Topics" chart at the bottom and see how many of them are being caused by blatant spam. For example, right now it's got ones like "Full Movie", "Eng Sub", "Free Kindle", and so on. It's heavier on the porn-related topics right now than usual, but a lot of that is spam too.
I know the PushShift guy has been working on coming up with a metric to flag potential bot accounts. The API already has a parameter
reply_delaythat can be used to see how quickly accounts are replying to the submission or other comments. For example, here are all the users in r/politics over the last day who left comments less than 1 second after the parent: https://api.pushshift.io/reddit/comment/search/?subreddit=politics&reply_delay=%3C1&after=24h&aggs=author&size=0The results don't seem to match that.
Further, if you populate say, a hundred results, the comments identified don't match. https://api.pushshift.io/reddit/comment/search/?subreddit=politics&reply_delay=%3C1&after=24h&aggs=author&size=100
What am I missing?
Haha there's a lot of work that needs to be done documenting and explaining the PushShift API. The
sizeparameter indicates how many actual comments to return. In my case, I requested none, because I wanted to perform an aggregation using the author of the comments (aggs=author) and didn't need to see the actual comments themselves.Do we know this for a fact? Is there any study, article or Reddit blogpost about it?
I've always thought that, no matter how popular adblockers are, the vast majority of people still don't use them.
Plus, I also think that most users at this point are mobile users. A huge chunk of which are on iPhone, which doesn't have any system-wide adblocker. And I wonder how many of them have paid for the ad-free version of the app they use (assuming they're using a 3d party Reddit app, which the majority of them more likely than not aren't, due to Reddit's heavy pushing of their own flawed app). There's also Android, which can have system-wide ad-blocking through various means, but they often involve a bit of a technology-inclined personality, which, while still abundant, is by no means dominant. This is all speculation on my part, though. But I haven't been able to find much data on it the times I've tried to find it.
I was being facetious, but this report from a year and a half ago says 40% of laptop/desktop users blocked ads and 22% of mobile users were. Compare that to one year prior to that where only 25% of desktop/laptop and 15% of mobile users were blocking. 15% desktop/laptop and 7% mobile blocking increase in the span of a year -- I can imagine the amount of people using blockers now since the 2017 report has risen much more than the 15 and 7% increases from 2016 -> 2017. Even if blocking tapered off slightly, that'd still likely put desktop/laptop blocking over 50% and mobile blocking over 30%.
Thanks for saving me the trouble of finding that. <3
You're welcome! I should have included some sources in my original comment instead of it simply being a shitpost/me venting. Please let me know if you spot a 2018 metric, I'd be very interested to see how things have turned out.
I'd be much more interested in the trends of the use of ad-blockers, independent of any given browser/platform. I suspect there's been a slow but steadily increasing uptick in the number of people using them, and that's what got the bug up Google's ass to start fucking around with Chrome - to prevent that trend from continuing and threatening their pathetic business model.
I need an adblocker just to fix the horrible UI changes google keeps making, like sticking a sidebar full of crap I barely use next to my email inbox.
Is there an easy way to view reddit's current financial status? In the UK you can simply go on Companies House to get a decent overview of any registered company, private or public. I'm not sure if that's possible in the USA?
This is the major issue. Even in the UK the rules for private asset reporting are so light the info is near useless (less so for revenue and other tax-generating things as the returns are also public) - it also is, shall we say less than forthcoming? about international dealings and what external encumbrance the company might have (something that probably should have been dealt with in 2008 or so, but it got ignored like so much else).
In the US and elsewhere private companies disclose jack.