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.
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?
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.
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...
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.
"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.
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?
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...
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."
The Reddit Mafia
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.
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.
Complete with deleting my account for closure. This is what I recommend. It's pretty much facebook, pure dark UX at that point.
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.
It makes a lot of sense since each "subreddit" could be its own server.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
"The front page of the Internet"
Edit: at the 34:00 minute mark he mentions him.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
?
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.
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.
?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35677196.
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.
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.
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.
And while digg's implosion had reddit as an alternative, 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.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_fe...
Front page feels like clickbait and "get angry for engagement metrics"
https://reddit.com/r/subreddit1+subreddit2+subreddit3This is mostly owed to the quality of its moderation team.
4chan's infamy is largely undeserved.