Reddit’s first public year shows growth, but Wall Street’s still not happy Reddit's first year as a public company delivered solid results by most earnings metrics, but try telling that to Wall Street: Falling short on one key growth target sent shares tumbling despite an otherwise upbeat year-end report. Reddit posted its fourth quarter and 2024 full year results yesterday, reporting a net income of …
That is easy. What Reddit can do that a forum can't is nothing, but what Reddit does do which a forum doesn't is stay around for longer and be easy to set up. I don't use Reddit often either, but I fully understand why it's a thing.
I have had accounts on lots of forums in the past. Many of these were relatively small groups with niche interests. This came with several little annoyances. Let's see what something like Reddit does about each of them:
1. I have twenty login/password pairs to remember. Reddit centralizes them.
2. Occasionally, the people hosting the forums would grow bored. Sometimes, they would delete the forum. Sometimes, they would just stop any maintenance, meaning new users couldn't register (most of them needed manual approval because spambots were great at using forums). Reddit makes it easy to give someone else moderation powers and just leave. Nobody is relying on someone keeping the server online or trying to see if they can have the domain name and backup so the thing doesn't die.
3. Some of the forums were so niche that they had small numbers of users. By being hosted on a subdirectory of someone's personal site, they were not easy to find. Not that it's super easy to find niche Reddit groups (or whatever those are called), but there are several search facilities available that make it easier to locate them. That means more interested people who can post information and thus a more long-lasting group.
4. To have a forum, someone needed to decide to host one. Someone needed sufficient dedication to create the thing, but they also needed to be someone comfortable enough running a server. To us, hosting a prebuilt forum program in PHP on an HTTP server, either a fully self-managed one or some webhost's, is child's play. Five minutes and however long it takes to fill in all the boxes and it's working. That doesn't apply to everyone, meaning that there were many more forums about technical subjects than about other things. Fortunately for me, I am most interested in technical subjects, so that works out just fine. For people who want to talk with interested people on other subjects, though, making a new group on Reddit is easier.
I think I would use Reddit if they stuck with a forum-style interface, with comments in either a chronological order or in a nested thread model like here. Instead, they seem to have used bizarrosort where finding the context of a post takes far more work than it should. I'm sure I would find other things to complain about if I used it enough. Most of my experience with it comes from finding it in search results when I'm looking for information that's not easily found elsewhere, and when I use those pages, I often find what I'm looking for in that post, after fighting with the interface to see more than the two it typically shows me straight from the DDG search page.
Thanks for the detailed reply - I agree with all of it.
I wasn't clear - I wasn't referring to lots of individual "enthusiast" forum, which do indeed all suffer from the points you mention.
I meant what if there was a reddit equivalent, ran with the same backing, longevity, large group list, large user list.
Actually, I suppose I really mean the software - i.e. what would be worse about Reddit if it used "forum" software rather than the jumbled mess it has now.
I do use reddit from time to time - precisely for the long running diverse forums, and user base, but as for the "UI" (old and new), I just don't get it!
Your last paragraph basically nails it from my point of view too.
> what Reddit does do which a forum doesn't is stay around for longer and be easy to set up.
Not used CIX then…
The offline reader, pretty much mandatory in the 1980s has been updated and still works today.
Obviously, the only real problem with age is the maintenance of many decades of conversations.
CIX’s current problem is more of size in the market, ie. It has become a niche forum, in need of a benevolent investor with deep pockets.
For Reddit: What DoubleLayer said. Compared to old school forums: Easy to set up, low/no maintenance to the subreddit mod, far less spam issues. Why it's worth enough to IPO over... I don't know. As soon as that was proposed it should have been shitcanned and a competitor should have risen up and taken over imho.
For Pinterest: It's not my thing but it's intent was sort of a visual virtual scrapbook where one could store inspiration, ideas, links, etc with cached pictures, as opposed to a list of flat urls. It's not my thing either and regularly I have to add -pinterest to searches to avoid the thousands and thousands of pinterest links that all point to the same (now defunct) source.
Sounds very much like some low information Brit who thinks they know everything about the US because they read the Guardian , NYT etc and once went on holidays to Florida.
There is a hard core (and very violent) ultra left in the US that has been around for as long as I have known the US. Since Reagan was president. Lets start with Berkeley, CA, San Francisco, Portland, OR and Seattle, WA. There is a large Black Bloc / Antifa etc contingent and even larger group of useful idiots (affluent middle class LARPing "Revolutionaries") in all of these cities with direct roots back to the Weather Underground / SDS / SLA etc of the 1960's. They are just as ultra left as any casseur / LFI / BSW follower. Brit ultra-left Corbynistas etc are a sad joke by European standards. Pathetic Citizen Smith amateurs. If you have seen first hand a casseur versus CRS street battle you will know what real "street revolutionaries" actually looks like. The guys throw the bricks are mostly psychos.
These US ultra left wing groups enabled several city council members to be elected in West Coast cities who espouse an ultra-left / marxist political agenda and are directly reasonable for the extreme political / social disfunction in cities like SF, Portland and Seattle over the last few decades. With the exception of Portland and Berkeley all these ultra -left politician's have been kicked out recently by voters because of the damage they caused. Seattle being the most recent example. From still OK in 2010 to mad-max hell hole by 2020. The last one who survived (barely) in Seattle "resigned" her seat recently because she knew the game was up. A prime mover in the "minimum wage" big labor scam with destroyed most small businesses in Seattle.
So yeah. You haven't a clue what you are talking about. Got any more pearls of wisdom from your infinite store of ignorance.
"You can't charge employees rent to work for you no more cause of woke" would be faster to get your point across.
Ultraviolent left in Seattle vs Waco, Ruby Ridge and Malheur and all the Oathkeepers at the capital on Jan 6th (totally undercover antifa tho!). Ok buddy.
Enjoy Daddy and the billionaires who he fights for.
> You haven't a clue what you are talking about.
"Corbynistas", "Citizen Smith amateurs", "mad max hell hole"?
You are obviously trolling, you know nothing.
P.S. The whole of the USA will be mad max soon, the way Trump is nuking our laws, checks and balances, and pardoning his sycophants.
that it's stifling the user base and growth as a whole. That's not a problem. The problem is that the Democratic Party lost the last election due to some specific policies that are not popular outside of Democratic activist circles. Echo chambering prevents any course adjustment. The votes lost to Trump, or to non-voting, are considered traitors, idiots, or nazi sympathizers, and all such people deserve to rot in hell and get yelled at and cursed continually until they come crawling back begging forgiveness and admitting their sins.
When Sunak lost the election last year he gave a normal concession speech - "To the country, I would like to say first and foremost I am sorry. I have given this job my all, but you have sent a clear signal that the government of the United Kingdom must change and yours is the only judgement that matters.". Pretty good actually.
Kamala Harris - "At the same time in our nation, we owe loyalty not to a president or a party, but to the Constitution of the United States, and loyalty to our conscience and to our God. My allegiance to all three is why I am here to say, while I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fuels this campaign, the fight for freedom, for opportunity, for fairness and the dignity of all people, a fight for the ideals at the heart of our nation, the ideals that reflect America at our best. That is a fight I will never give up." It's better than Trump's non-concession by far, yet it doesn't acknowledge at all the signal that the vote sent, or the lost voters that sent it. It's only about the fight.
Check out this Pro-Publica article - " Trump’s Near Sweep of Texas Border Counties Shows a Shift to the Right for Latino Voters
The former president captured 55% of Latino voters in the state, according to exit polls. He also won 14 out of the 18 counties within 20 miles of the border, a number that doubled his 2020 performance in the Latino-majority region. " That is scientific data, and people who believe in science should be examining that data. How likely is it that all those longtime Democrat Hispanic voters suddenly became rabid xenophobic racists? Zero, actually. However, they were probably overwhelmed by the chaotic influx of immigrants, some of whom were desperate and not well behaved. They probably don't want to deport DACA, for example, they just want a less chaotic environment, less competition for jobs and housing. So if we accept they are not rabid racists, then perhaps we can accept that there are some white people too who are not rabid racists yet don't like the way immigration was handled.
The Dem party failed miserably to listen to what their traditional Hispanic voters were saying. Worse, the social media obsessed college educated activist wing believes the world consists of X-like and BlueSky-like universes only, and the lost voters were duped by evil messaging, which can only be counteracted by shouting more loudly and getting more angry. The have no communication channels with those border counties because those voters are not college educated and fluent in LatinX.
I heard Tim Waltz say, "Our policies were not wrong, it was a problem with messaging". That really broke my heart. The voters are NOT stupid - they are listening to actions not words, so it IS the policies that caused Democrats to lose. Fortunately all that needs to be is to listen instead of "messaging", and start acting on behalf of a wider base base of voters. A little humility and good manners would help.
It's been ate up by distrust. I do scan the front page to see if any relevant news stories have happened that I missed, but it's a quick front page scan, and I've seen a significant change in it leading up to the election. It became obvious there was something nefarious happening with the ownership. The fact that it's still open told me they wanted people posting for a reason, then I learned that open AI has a 10% share in it, and suddenly it clicked. It's feeding the beast. Open AI is probably hoping to take ownership of the data. It also recently became obvious how many bots were spraying it for a lot of people using the site. The front page posters themselves started to dip.
And honestly, who has the energy for anything anymore? And at this point, many Americans simply want to eat a pill and disappear. There's no point in any of it anymore. We've been robbed and thrown in the trash too many times. I know I don't trust it. What's to stop it from becoming another nazi site? If it hasn't already, and is just working its users for clicks?
Ignore the main page. It's full of crap.
It can be interesting as a way to see what is being pushed. Niche subjects just seem to go the same way they did way back with Usenet and IRC, so someone ends up with mod priveliges and starts waving the ban hammer around. Plus now having to deal with all the spam and bot traffic. It did some interesting things trying to get a reputation system, but that soon seemed to get gamed.
I'm also curious if they'll try to 'fix' metrics like users by forcing a need to be a user and logged in to read. I can see advertisers would like that, but why it would be necessary to log in just to read content. The Bbc's being weird like that. If you don't run a script blocker, every 3 article views it nags you to register and sign in.
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