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Top comments that mention products on r/TheoryOfReddit:

u/yishan · 1554 pointsr/TheoryOfReddit

I guess I'll make a statement about our revenue plans vs our community activity.

1/ We didn't make the frontpage changes for any revenue-related or mainstreaming reason. We made them because (as has actually been discussed in this very subreddit quite often) the default subreddits all evolve in different ways and the community itself begins to find one or more of those subreddits more or less valuable/desirable. (I think you all know what I'm talking about; this will be the only paragraph where I talk a bit sideways, because I don't want to shit on people) Similarly, other emerging subreddits begin to show a lot of promise so in the interests of adding more fresh material, we've added them to the defaults.

1a/ There is a minor point that sometimes taking a subreddit out of the defaults and removing the pressures of the limelight can allow it to incubate and improve, but that wasn't a reason in our decisions; it's just something that occurred to me today.

2/ Our revenue plans encompass the following areas:

  • We run ads. Even though we are really strict about ad quality (no flash, spammy, etc), we don't have a problem finding advertisers, and we don't get any complaints from them about our defaults and it doesn't seem to affect their decisions. It just... isn't an issue. /u/hueypriest says that sometimes they are concerned about /r/wtf, but you'll notice that (1) we left that in the defaults and (2) it still doesn't seem to make much of a difference in their decisions to advertise with us.

  • We sell you reddit gold. Our plan with that is to add features and benefits so that over time your subscription becomes more valuable - at this point, if you are/were intending to buy anything from one of the partners, a month's subscription to reddit gold will actually pay for itself immediately via the discount. Incidentally I should note again that the gold partners who provide those benefits don't pay us. The business "model" there is roughly: (1) partner gives users free/discounted stuff. (2) Users benefit, buy gold. (3) Sometimes users have a problem or question, so they post in /r/goldbenefits. The partners (who are specially selected for, among other things, attentiveness to quality customer service) answer questions or resolve your problem in the subreddit, where it can be seen in public and therefore is good for them. (4) Partner's reputation for good service increases, redditors discover another quality company/product that is actually good.

    It is marketing, but it's not what you expect: we think that quality customer service is one of those "difficult to see, but ultimately most valuable" aspects of a company, and companies who do this don't get enough recognition. Thus, this model helps make it clear when a company provides good customer service. The marketing value to them is not that they are a reddit gold partner, but that they are seen explicitly taking good care of redditors. (as it happens, if they don't, we will drop them) Again, they don't pay us for inclusion in that program - they have to be invited, and on the basis of us thinking they have something valuable to offer [at least some subset of] redditors.

  • redditgifts Marketplace is actually turning out to be promising. It's still nascent, but gift exchanges are quite popular and (again in reddit fashion) we heavily curate the merchants who are allowed in the marketplace. We'll see how it develops.

    In none of these cases do we need (or want) to modify or editorialize the logged-out front page. We do modify and editorialize the front page by selecting the defaults, but we do it entirely for community-oriented reasons. We will probably continue to do so.

    The truth (bland and unconspiracy that it is) is that we think if we do things for the community for community- and user- focused reasons, users will continue to be happy with us. Advertisers go where users go, and because subreddits already separate themselves from each other and advertisers can target by subreddit, there's very little fear of an ad appearing next to "objectionable" content that they didn't select. The user/community focus of reddit gold benefits and a marketplace is also pretty self-evident: if we make users happy with reddit, they will pay for reddit. There is just so much weird talk these days about financial engineering and weird business models by investment banker types that it pervades and distorts even normal peoples' expectations of how a business might be run - at reddit we are just trying to run a business in the old fashioned way: we make a thing, we try to make it as good we can for YOU, and you pay us money for it. My background is that of an engineer - I like to keep things simple.

    A note about short-term vs long-term money. It turns out that you have to plan for BOTH the short-term and the long-term. If you don't eat in the short-term, you die and never make it to the long-term. If you do everything short-term, you have no long-term future. So we need to make enough money this year to pay the bills and fund next year's growth, and we also need to put into place the cornerstones of future growth at the same time. It's a balancing act.

    Finally, if you would like to buy some tinfoil (actually aluminum), please use this Amazon affiliate link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001R2NM5U/ref=as_li_ss_til?tag=reddit-dh-20

u/kleinbl00 · 8 pointsr/TheoryOfReddit

TL;DR: The conflict over "power users" is due to the fundamental anonymity mismatch created by a site that creates usernames, tracks user involvement but permits no user identification or community beyond 15 characters and two scores. If you care to learn more, read on. If you don't, the following will bore the shit out of you.


I've given this a lot of thought. I've been fortunate to befriend an extremely intelligent social media guru (in the academic sense, not the SEO sense) and the reading list I've gotten off of her has been illuminating as fuck. The following theory owes its creation to the following books:

You are not a gadget

Predictably Irrational

Reality is Broken

The Starfish and the Spider

Further discussion can be found here and here. I realize it's pretty goddamn rude to front-load a conversation with a bibliography and footnotes but I want to emphasize that this is not something I treat flippantly. I have never had as much influence over the behavior of the world as I feel we all do at Reddit and the behaviors we see and experience are, in my opinion, a new social ground that deserves study. Using the 10/10 rule, I believe that public forums such as Reddit are likely to become the preeminent form of communication in the future and wrapping one's head around the foibles and failings of the medium while it still remains the domain of the early adopter is an investment that will pay off in spades going forward.



      • First off, the statement "everybody wants to take the idols down a notch" is indisputable truth, for varying values of "everybody." I would say that messages of support are far more likely to come in via PM and that messages of disparagement are far more likely to come in via public forum. The end result is that "take the idols down a notch" is a socially-condoned behavior while "worshipping the idols" is something that will generally get you shunned. The exception is when Reddit at large is busily worshipping you - post something that Reddit loves and people saying "I love this redditor" will get upvoted. Even then, however, the number of PMs of support you get is generally 5x the number of public accolades. The prevailing culture of Reddit is very much aligned with the (apocryphal?) Japanese proverb "The nail that sticks up will be hammered down."

        The reason this attitude prevails is due to the tripartite nature of Reddit and the incongruities it causes. Reddit is, at once and simultaneously,

  • A news website

  • A video game

  • A social site

    No one place can be all three of those things without friction.

    From a "news" perspective, Reddit could be compared to, say, Gizmodo. The difference is that Gizmodo is a top-down, conventional news site where a select few insiders produce content for a sea of outsiders. The boundary is obvious there - if your name is on the article, you're a for-pay employee. The criticism heaped upon Gizmodo is entirely appropriate because they're journalists. Letters to the Editor date back to the Revolutionary War. Reddit, however, has most of the same characteristics as Gizmodo, minus the editorial wall. So whereas "yell at the name you recognize" is a tradition well-served and understood in the world of journalism, in the everyone-as-editor world of Reddit "yell at the name you recognize" tends to concentrate the insults from those who contribute the least on those who are contributing the most.

    From a "video game" perspective, Reddit might as well be Farmville. We see each other's scores growing and when someone else's score grows vastly faster than ours, we're likely to presume they're cheating (particularly when the rules of the game are largely secret and passed down amongst users primarily via folklore). Reddit is also one of the least-rewarding video games ever created, as there are no multicolored sprites or triumphant marches played when a comment or submission scores well. As such, the "hipsterism" of Reddit promotes attacks on those with high karma because, after all, only nerds would spend so much time on a video game that can't even hold a candle to Pac Man. Finally, scores on Reddit are highlighted prominently and are an intrinsic part of the "game" even though the scores hold absolutely no value. Reddit puts "players" in a gold-farming frame of mind without giving them anything to spend their gold on.

    Reddit falls apart the most as a "social site." Unlike standard PHPBB communities, you can click on a username and learn exactly nothing about them on Reddit. You can't even see what their top contributions have been. Reddit awards users with a "trophy" for verifying an email address - which occupies the same lofty perch as producing the top daily comment or top daily post on a site with 500,000 users. Reddit is barely removed from the 100% anonymity provided by 4chan - with the exception of the "power users." The fact that we borrowed the term from Digg (where it meant something) and use it here (where it totally doesn't) only makes matters worse, particularly when combined with the poorly-understood mechanisms of Reddit's anti-spam filters. Most Redditors presume that they get a "posting too fast" warning in any given subreddit because they lack the karma to bypass the filter. When I mention it, people are usually flabbergasted that I run into the same problem, despite having a top 20 or 30 combined karma score of all time.

    And it's the anonymity mismatch that causes the biggest problem, in my estimation. Ask any redditor to name 5 reddit accounts other than his own and he'll have a hard time. Of those he remembers, dollars to donuts they'll be names that he either a) sees a lot or b) really pissed him off in a flamewar at some point. The rest of it is entirely too anonymous to remember. Probably half of p-dub's comment karma comes from people upvoting him so they could say "do your homework." Probably 3/4ths of L3mm1w1nkz's comment karma comes from his signature "PS I am a shithead." Gimli_the_dwarf, despite having a lot to say and extremely insightful posts, is going to be remembered for "And my axe." This is why novelty accounts flourish on Reddit - they're easy to recognize, easy to remember, and easy to reward.

    The flip-side, of course, is they're also easy to punish. The reason Randall doesn't post as xkcd any more, if I had to guess, is that as soon as people decided that xkcd wasn't indisputably funny people jumped on him. That's why so very many of the names that were prominent on this site a year ago are now gone - the opportunities for interaction are so very rare that -
u/Wallamaru · 3 pointsr/TheoryOfReddit

I've seen it happen in IAMA before. Some person starts an AMA, starts answering questions with "I cover that in my book, buy it here." People notice the motive, backlash ensues. It's all pretty organic. In fact, this is the first time I have ever noticed a mod jumping in to to explain the situation. But then again, I don't frequent that sub any longer.

Honestly it's one of the reasons I unsubscribed from IAMA. I think most of the posts in there are purely fictitious but then you get these guys who periodically show up, who are some of the only people who obviously are who they say they are and they get downvoted for trying to sell some of their work. Bonkers if you ask me.

Sometimes it works pretty well, I think Ken Jennings is an example of how to put the sell to Reddit. He came in with a great attitude answered a ton of questions with really funny replies and essentially said to check out his book and website if you liked the AMA. Of course, we can't all be Ken Jennings, but I think that is a good precedent on how to avoid the backlash.

edit: That's not my book by the way. I, in fact, do not have a book. I just thought it would be a funny book to link to whilst having this discussion.

u/ceol_ · 2 pointsr/TheoryOfReddit

Fantastic! I've gotta be honest, though: you're not going to learn a lot of "programming"; you're going to learn a lot of computer science. That's not a bad thing. You'll learn things like sorting algorithms, complexity, and discrete math.

A great language to start out with for this kind of thing is Python. Read Dive Into Python and Think Python to get you started. If you're having trouble wrapping your head around some concepts, I'd suggest Code: The Hidden Language. It's a great introduction to how computers work which should give you a bit of a kick into development.

Here's a quick example of using reddit's API to grab the last comment someone posted using Python:

import urllib2
import json

url = 'http://www.reddit.com/user/ceol_/comments.json'

request = urllib2.Request(url)
resource = urllib2.urlopen(request)
content = resource.read()
decoded = json.loads(content)

print decoded['data']['children'][0]['data']['body']

You can fool around with the reddit API here and see what it returns in a nice hierarchy.

Hope this helps!

u/Shadilay_Were_Off · 2 pointsr/TheoryOfReddit

> How many comments do you end up reviewing in a day?

There are two ways to read this - if you mean how many of the total content posted per day gets a mod's eyes on it, I'd say maybe 5-10% of the posts/comments per day (which I'm not supposed to share, sorry). Users are really good about reporting, so I don't see this as a weakness or something that can ever be reasonably increased.

If you mean how many reports we end up clearing a day.. I'd say more than 10, less than 100. If I had to split up our reports into "crap", "understandable but invalid", and "valid", it's about an even split between the three.

>Your sub is topic constrained?

Yes, by virtue of being a meta subreddit. If it's not:

  • Political (read broadly and intuitively. The problem /r/politics has where their definitions of what's "political" are weird, it doesn't exist here. If you think a thing is political, it probably is)
  • Objectionable (we let the votes decide this usually)
  • On Reddit (easy)
  • Notable (upvoted, gilded, etc)

    ..then it can't be posted there. We only have 11 rules, which is more like 9 since one is the same concept (don't brigade) split into incoming and outgoing, and one is a restating of the statewide policy on violence.

    >Is it relatively easy to figure out what is within the context and what is shit posting pretty quick?

    The title rules make shitposting (posts) infeasible for the most part. Top level content must be either a direct or archive link to something on reddit, it must include a direct quote from the content being linked to, and it must include a score. There's not much room for shenanigans there.

    There are shitposting comments, but barring organized brigades, these wind up downvoted and invisible relatively fast.

    >Recruiting mods and getting more people to wade through stuff is hard. WORSE when its politically charged because then the level of additional drama, doxxing and more puts capable people off of the role.

    That's true, but I have to thank the rest of the team (I think I'm the newest mod, added last year) for keeping a really great atmosphere in the discord. We treat it as a fun hobby, not a job, and I think that really helps when the inevitable drama starts.

    Doxxing is.. meh. I think precisely one of us uses a username here that we use elsewhere on the internet, and they're some kind of mad lad that literally doesn't give a fuck. There's the occasional reddit stalker, but it's nothing a gentle word of discouragement and judicious application of the block button (not to mention reporting them to the admins, which thankfully they've been good about dropping the hammer on) haven't been able to solve.

    >Plus as the mod team expands, the issue with connecting to the team and being consistent becomes harder - unless you have good solid rules and foundations in making sure people get the memo.

    Consistency goes back to the rules being mostly objective and minimizing the need for individual judgment calls. Every now and then there's something that slips through the cracks, and that's what the discord room we're all in is for.

    It's when you do stuff like "no low-effort posts" (what the fuck is a "low effort post?") or "no trolling" (determining intent over text, yay) that you get into trouble. I'd go so far as to say defining those two concepts over a large enough team to moderate millions of subscribers isn't just hard, it's literally impossible. Bad, disruptive conduct that doesn't raise to the level of breaking the sitewide or subreddit rules is best dealt with by comment voting, IMO. Trolling is one of those things where people "know it when they see it", and so it's safe to rely on the wisdom of the crowds.

    I also think that many subreddits don't even try to get enough mods. It's not like many have had an experiment where they add 20 mods to the team and then remove them all if it doesn't work out. They just sit there, with problems caused by lack of staffing, month after month after month, doing nothing, and then talk about how hard and stressful their job is as a result.

    >The defaults have some serious lifting going on behind the scenes from what I know.

    Not to name any names here or anything, but the one thing I hear often from very casual reddit users, even in real life, is that the site becomes a lot better once the defaults are unsubscribed.

    I think whatever they're doing doesn't work. Or at least, could work a lot better, but there's this ingrained, us-vs-them culture that prevents a lot of positive change from taking place. Mods on this site, generally, see users as an annoyance to be managed, like they're tramping around this well-manicured garden, rather than seeing them as co-participants in a community that sometimes make human mistakes. They're "in the box" towards their users.
u/[deleted] · 3 pointsr/TheoryOfReddit

I actually wrote a blog post about this, I REALLY need to expand upon it though: http://www.utd.alexhays.com/emac6361/2011/03/alturism-in-droves/

Its all boring already-known info to redditors, except for the last paragraph:

"I list all of these acts because it shows that kindness is a part of Reddit culture. If the first few do-gooders never existed perhaps Reddit would not have become littered with kindness. Each good dead helps sustain a culture of alturism (305). The sub-communities mentioned above were created by people who want to help others and themselves. If support systems do not exist in an individuals real-life they can now connect to supportive people online. Talking to people who are going through, or have gone through the same plight helps. Reddit admins unwittingly created a space for kind people to help each other."

The book being cited was Connected, it talks a lot about altruism spreading through networks. Essentially, if people are nice to each other in a community the chance of it happening again and again grow not exponentially, but sufficiently enough to harbor that as a trait as a major backbone. The roots of reddit being a small community of nerdy nice people helped the altruistic bug catch on, and it is still here so far.

u/jij · 1 pointr/TheoryOfReddit

I was thinking up a pretty neat system a while back after reading daemon (fantastic fucking book btw)... basically trying to come up with a trust system among anonymous nodes. Your post here just reminded me of it... It's not an easy problem :p

u/unkz · 2 pointsr/TheoryOfReddit

A phrase that you might be looking for is "rich get richer", or in mathematical literature, "preferential attachment processes". There's a very accessible pop-sci book about this:

http://www.amazon.com/Linked-Everything-Connected-Else-Means/dp/0452284392

u/evilnight · 1 pointr/TheoryOfReddit

It's an easy thing to fix.

Read Stephen King's "On Writing."

I'm quite serious. The man was an english professor and extremely well read, long before he was making any money as a writer. His entire thesis in this book is about fixing the problem that you appear to have... and the stories are wonderful.

u/joanofarf · 54 pointsr/TheoryOfReddit

Last things first, first things last:

>I think it's important, if we're going to have a positive effect at the grass-roots and moderator level, to understand Reddit as it really is, rather than as we'd like to see it.

What does understanding reddit "as it really is" mean?

In Interface Fantasy, Andre Nusselder writes:

>[W]e should avoid considering cyberspace as an objective fact or objective information. It is a product of human imagination, in which we use known metaphors for a new domain of information and communication. These metaphors inevitably go along with a distortion, misrepresentation, or bias of the domain they structure, since they describe it as something other than it really is.

>[...]

>As they compose the "real thing," we must be careful not to take metaphors literally, though this can be very tempting in the case of the (metaphorical) worlds that computers create.

Yishan sees reddit as a city-state; you see it as proto-feudalism. Both are equally "real" insofar as the metaphorization of data has a degree of reality.

You're going to run into problems any time you try to talk about something as "something other than it really is." If reddit is not a city state, reddit is also not proto-feudalist.

Because reddit as we see it is reddit as it really is.

EDIT: link

u/archiesteel · 12 pointsr/TheoryOfReddit

This isn't new. I witness the same behavior on newsgroups before the Web even existed (well, it existed, but its whole contents could be listed in a book). It is partly the anonimity, but mostly the fact that there are additional "filters" to the conversation. This also happens with phone conversations, or by writing letters: people could say things using these they would not in a face-to-face conversation. The distance created by the media lowers inhibitions.

u/jcm267 · 4 pointsr/TheoryOfReddit

I think the current problems with immigration are part incompetence and part malice. Big business really does love the cheap labor. Religious Americans are still having enough kids to sustain/grow their populations, so once we get immigration under control I think most things will sort themselves out over time.

I will check out the book you mentioned.