One point that hasn't been made is that part of Reddit Gold's success is due to the fun way in which it is presented. Reddit Gold members are jokingly considered to be an ultra high-brow, elite group that hangs out in a lounge with their monocles, top hats, Bentleys, and yachts.
It's a playful inside joke that makes people want to be in it, even if the actual features of a premium subscription are negligible. It's also common to have people give each others gold subscriptions in response to kind acts or as a reward for particularly insightful comments.
There are lessons to be learned for those implementing the freemium business model, for sure, although I completely disagree with people who claimed that this is an indication that advertising doesn't work. Selling products or services often beats advertising (revenue wise), but there is plenty of money to be made with ads. (I speak firsthand, as I've always done well with ads.)
SomethingAwful has had something like that since the early 2000s as well, with some things being purely status, like paying an extra $10 to get a bigger avatar image. Also introduced as a (successful) solution to their previous lack of success monetizing via ads.
(I believe, at least for a while, you could also change someone else's avatar for something like $20 or $30, and they could pay some similar amount to insure it against changes.)
I think it says a lot of bad things about online advertising that a completely voluntary subscription program that gives you essentially nothing beats it as a revenue source. Although that's just a guess, the success of reddit gold might be increase in revenue without having to serve more traffic.
It says nothing about online advertising. Reddit is pretty much the worst website to try and advertise to. The community is extremely anti-advertising, anti-capitalism anti-big-companies, etc etc. Coupled with that I don't think the demographic is one that spends big money. They're not shopping for holidays or cars, they're mainly wasting time.
Your comment has been upvoted to the top (I believe) because unfortunately that same culture of anti-advertising spills over to HN.
Remember. Google made $9bn last quarter, mostly from online advertising. A massive amount of that (about half?) went to 3rd party websites. There's money in this game...
All this post says is "Donations are successful for some value of 'success'".
If it was really all that successful, I don't think all the employees would have left.
Total Google revenues: $9.03b
Revenues from Google properties: $6.23b
Revenues from the AdSense network: $2.48b
Google cut of AdSense revenues: $0.73b
Payouts to AdSense publishers: $1.75b
It says a lot about online advertising. Google makes a packet, random websites with ads not so much. I think the alleged counter culture of reddit is massively overstated with respect to their imperviousness to ads. Its just one of those things redditors like to congratulate themselves over.
We've been toying around with advertising on reddit since our product is designed for the reddit userbase...we've been hesitant for exactly that reason...and their advertising seems a bit pricey considering.
I think for a community devoted to startups, having a particular dislike of online advertising, and a strange "That's not real income" mentality is unfortunate.
If you rule out advertising income because you don't like adverts, or because you don't have the skills necessary, then you're missing out on a slice of a gigantic pie. The vast majority of the general population are receptive to advertising and find it useful.
I think it's worth remembering that most people in the tech world are absolute outliers. In the real world, most people own and watch a TV. Most people buy newspapers. Most people view and click on adverts. Most people don't own ipads. etc etc
edit: You can downmod this all you like. You're the one missing out on the money.
>The vast majority of the general population are receptive to advertising
That's terrible justification to do something I consider sleazy just to make a buck. I am a proponent of the idea of voting with my wallet, unfortunately for some reason that concept seems to get whitewashed by people who justify ignoring it by saying its "just business". That mindset is even stronger by people who are not end consumers.
>You're the one missing out on the money.
I used to be OK running enough ads for my web properties to cover hosting. Then I discovered I had scruples.
This is the sort of uneducated attitude I'm talking about.
Advertising is not 'sleazy'. It works, and it provides a service to both advertiser, publisher, and consumer.
Do you also consider online dating to be sleazy, or job posting sites? Because that's essentially what advertising is - matching a consumer interested in something, to an advertiser who provides something.
Without advertising, most consumers would not have a clue what products and services exist. Most manufacturers would have no way to tell people about the service/product they provide.
Calling it an "uneducated attitude" is a bit of an ad hominem, and could just as easily be flung in the other direction, at the attitude that takes some sort of naive Economics 101 justification completely uncritically, without being familiar with the history, practice, and theory of marketing/advertising.
I agree that at its best advertising is matching, basically filling in an information gap. But it often does the opposite, exploiting an information gap / ignorance; in fact it's often explicitly and completely unapologetically aimed at doing that, looking to create and exploit information asymmetries. You make more money by selling people an expensive version of something they can get equivalent cheaper, or by luring people into a contract whose full cost they don't realize up front. There's a reason advertisers tend to read up on behaviorist psychology, because exploiting weaknesses in human decision-making, to encourage people to allocate their resources in a way that they wouldn't do with perfect information, is a big part of the game.
I may just know the wrong people, but I don't actually know anybody in marketing who doesn't have a sort of cynical "tricking suckers into buying our clients' stuff" view, at least some of the time. That's the game; you don't last long in the business if you have a purely idealistic view of only matching people to quality products that are a good match for them, especially since at larger firms you often have no choice about which products you're supposed to be selling.
>it provides a service to both advertiser, publisher, and consumer
Given the number of advertizing channels, and the pool of products and services offered, the cost (in time) to the consumer, is rather high just to learn that X exists.
>Do you also consider online dating to be sleazy, or job posting sites? Because that's essentially what advertising is - matching a consumer interested in something, to an advertiser who provides something.
I'd agree that they are essentially the same if I had to go to "fast food" section of craigslist to find out what fast food joints out there, or the "auto insurance" section to find out that Progressive is a thing.
>I'm literally amazed at the naivety.
Say I accept your premise, that still doesn't negate the fact that there is enough advertizement in other mediums that all the virtues of it are already sufficiently met that adding advertizement to my websites don't create any value for the visitor.
I don't believe in the eradication of advertizement, just that it has reached a level of permeation that subjecting my visitors to even more of it is something I do not believe in.
> I don't believe in the eradication of advertizement, just that it has reached a level of permeation that subjecting my visitors to even more of it is something I do not believe in.
Most people can tune out things they're not interested in.
Just as you walk down a street, you are bombarded with shop signage, and you filter out the ones that interest you, and the ones that don't. You read a magazine, and when faced with an advert that's not relevant or interesting, you turn the page.
There are certainly people who do not have the ability to cope well with adverts on the internet, and for them, adblock exists.
Most people can tune out things they're not interested in.
Vermont is a tourist trap and as such doesn't allow billboards. Should they allow them and just tell the leaf-peepers to enjoy the scenery around the billboards? Or is the presence of advertizement, willfully ignored or not, still intrusive?
We don't allow advertizement in schools (well, thats eroding, but anyway..), I'm willing to bet your workplace isn't covered in advertizement posters and have an intercom and/or tvs constantly blaring ads all day unless you work a particularity shitty, most likely retail, job. Why not? If you could just decide to tune out the ads once and never worry about it again, why not?
Advertizing is a necessary evil. You can just say that. You don't have to justify it as a practice you (or others) engage in beyond that. No, I don't think its _evil_ evil, I'm just using the phase, but what I don't understand is that you seem to be arguing for it beyond its role as a necessary evil. Why do you? Are you defending it as a practice you have diluted yourself into beveling is good for everyone so that you don't have to feel conflicted about engaging in it? Are you just talking the talk to make a practice you engage in (and yourself as a user) look better in the court of public opinion? Have you just swallowed the "if its profitable, it is therefore good in every metric" ideology hook, line and sinker? I really don't get where you're coming from.
"Vermont is a tourist trap and as such doesn't allow billboards. Should they allow them and just tell the leaf-peepers to enjoy the scenery around the billboards? Or is the presence of advertizement, willfully ignored or not, still intrusive?"
Sounds like it would conflict with Vermont's branding. In other words, for Vermont beautiful foliage is a far better inducement to get people to come and spend money than a bunch of signs with words on them.
> I'm willing to bet your workplace isn't covered in advertizement posters and have an intercom and/or tvs constantly blaring ads all day unless you work a particularity shitty, most likely retail, job. Why not? If you could just decide to tune out the ads once and never worry about it again, why not?
I work from home, and generally have the TV on all the time, showing me amongst other things, adverts. It doesn't bother me. In fact I find it very useful and interesting.
It's no more a necessary evil than "shops" are.
Shops are pretty much advertising. They connect a consumer to several manufacturers. They stock things you might want to buy. You go in, get bombarded with branding advertising products. You filter out the ones you want, and buy them. The shop gets a cut of revenue, just like a website gets a cut of any sale after a user clicks on an advert (Either directly, or averaged out to a per click/impression price).
Some people do hate shops as well. I've gone to the mall with people who find the whole experience absolutely horrible and uncomfortable. Personally, I love browsing round shops, seeing what you can find.
Shops are pretty much advertising. They connect a consumer to several manufacturers. They stock things you might want to buy. You go in, get bombarded with branding advertising products. You filter out the ones you want, and buy them. The shop gets a cut of revenue, just like a website gets a cut of any sale after a user clicks on an advert (Either directly, or averaged out to a per click/impression price).
Shops are pretty much advertising by their very nature. A shop without a stock of goods for you to buy wouldn't be a very useful shop.
Ignoring that weird anology, you seem to be arguing that since you personally enjoy advertising, then everyone else in the world should just deal with advertising all the time, because, well, speckledjim on HN doesn't really mind it all that much.
The most successful advertisements, i.e. the ones that work best are not simply broadcasting useful information to consumers. Instead, they typically rely on known cognitive exploits.
If advertising is just about educating consumers, why don't advertisers run ads that are critical of their own products? A half-truth can be worse than an outright lie, because it is more confusing.
I run ads on my sites and I think I have some scruples, thank you very much. They sort of cover hosting costs.
If people don't want to see the ads, well they can go find some other site to see: it's that simple. They get to use my site(s) for free, so I think it's a pretty good deal for them.
Others have already stated the points I wanted to make but I'd like to add another one to the discussion. There is a double standard on graffiti in the real world. Why can a company put it's logo in huge print for everyone to see but every time a kid spray paints his comparatively small logo, he becomes a criminal? The reasons appear to be that one is paying the government money and making a profit while the other is not.
While I can see the point you're trying to make, the companies concerned have obtained permission to display their logo in that way from the owner of the medium in which they have chosen to display their logo; the kid hasn't.
There's an arguable point from an anarchist, I suppose, viewpoint about the tyrrany of property laws and concentration of resources, but that's not I'd suggest what most graffiti artists are trying to bring to the forefront with their work.
I think that it helps to look at the issue objectively rather than considering it from the perspective of the status quo. My point isn't so much that the kids don't have permission as much as it is that they won't get permission if they ask, or they are too afraid to ask out of fear of persecution. Looking at the planet from the eyes of an alien, it's clear that a small subset of the population have a monopoly on the visual appearance of our hives. It's also pretty obvious that the tribes in power consider production to be far more important than anything else, where even self-expression and art are turned into commodities. Which brings me to the point I was trying to make - that in your house you decorate it in a way that makes you feel good. In the shared public spaces, only those who have enough resources get to decorate the place, and almost always for the purpose of acquiring more resources. It never looks good, so the joy of the many is sacrificed for the profit of the few. We often forget that even though the building belongs to someone, the space surrounding it is still public, yet the fact is not respected.
Because it's my property, and I don't want some young kid tagging my property. However, if that same young kid sought permission, I might give it to him if the message of the resulting art would be something I'd support.
Well then the public space belongs to both of us, which means that you can't display certain things. For example, try hanging up a huge image of a naked woman on one of the sides of your house. It's your property but because of the effect it has on those who see it, the local council would take issue with your decoration. Why should we be subjected to psychological manipulation on a near constant basis?
I can't think of a community that is less anti-advertising. If I had a nickel for every time a Redditor has talked about purposely leaving ad-block off on that site...
>If it was really all that successful, I don't think all the employees would have left.
I believe their payroll is significantly higher than it has ever been. No way to know what individual salaries look like, but it's beyond argument that they have more employees now, and those employees are being paid well enough to stay.
I do agree though that this does not speak to online advertising in general. Reddit is a single site, -obviously not enough data points to make broad pronouncements about the health of online advertising (which, incidentally, is a market predicted to be around 34 billion in 2012 in the U.S. alone...).
There's unfortunately a lot of people who believe all you need to do is slap ads on any website and watch the money come in. It actually takes time, effort, learning, and to some extent skill to know what will work and what won't work. You either need targeted users with intent, or you need more users.
Saying you can't make money from online advertising is like a non-programmer saying you can't write a tetris game. They're saying that because they haven't learnt to program yet and so it seems impossible to them.
> that doesn't necessarily meant that online advertising works, either.
The fact that Google paid out $4bn or whatever last quarter to 3rd party websites surely shows that online advertising works.
> a completely voluntary subscription program that gives you essentially nothing
I wouldn't say that the goodwill Reddit and its community have engendered over the last few years are "nothing". This is just a reminder that intangible goods are just as marketable as tangible ones, and it's not just Apple that can pull it off.
That's true, I doubt many sites would get as much from 'x' gold. It's still not the kind of revenue plan most people would consider as a better bet than advertising, that's what struck me as interesting.
I think that's something unique to Reddit's demographics. They're willing to donate money (are fairly wealthy), but absolutely hate ads and block them (are tech-savvy).
Keep in mind, reddit didn't even have a single dedicated salesperson assigned to it until September 2010. So it's a little unfair to draw conclusions about its marketability from pre-2011 data.
Rather, you should draw conclusions about the strategic vision of the now-departed Conde Nast executives who were responsible for allocating such headcount.
Definitely from the outside looking in, you have to scratch your head at the decision for a big company to buy a site for millions have it meet (surely) any user traffic expectations you had and then resource it like a bootstrapped startup.
Anyway, not maligning the marketability of reddit. It's just that it makes clear that advertising revenue is a hard way to make money.
It's not that surprising. I love Reddit, but it's probably pretty hard to sell legimitate ads on a site that serves hardcore pornography and which is frequented by people who vocally denounce advertising and commercialism in all forms.
You can get your ads served in selected subreddits.
Regarding your second point, you may have to personalize it in order to run a successful campaign on Reddit, but the returns can be good and manifold, especially for a startup.
Yes, there's loads of niche subreddits, some of which are pornographic. However they are in an minority, most people don't use reddit for porn, ergo reddit is not a porno site.
False analyogy. Playboy is a pornography magazine. But reddit is not playboy. Just look at the front page of reddit if you're logged in, no pornography. Create an account, no porn, etc.
If reddit is a pornography site, then so is google.
I was challenging the poor argument of the parent with an extreme example of mixed content. A newspaper, for example, will generally have no hardcore porn in it.
Reddit is a hardcore porn site, it's just it's not exclusively a hardcore porn site. Indeed in part it appears to skirt illegality without blushing. Advertisers do have problems with advertising on such sites I'm sure.
Presumably you and the parent would argue that if you advertised in Playboy next to a feature (I don't actually know the layout, I've just heard they have non-porn articles) then you wouldn't be advertising in a porn magazine?
How do you know it beat advertising as a revenue source? There are no details except that it's been judged successful. It may be simply that it successfully augmented their existing revenue streams.
Have they ever said that subscriptions bring in more revenue that ads? Obviously they're unwilling or unable to give actual numbers, but I have trouble believing that the revenue from subscriptions would be enough to hire a couple of engineers and buy tons of hardware, like the poster hinted.
What I liked most about the Reddit Gold program was how it shows the strength of the community: if you can pull off a 'freemium' move without actually developing significant extra features you're clearly doing something right.
The real bottom-line question for Conde Nast, the company that bought out Reddit, is when does the earnings stream from Reddit begin to pay back the investment used to buy Reddit at a reasonable rate of return? I have seen NO reporting at all that refers to actual numbers and "shows the work" to demonstrate that Reddit was anything other than a losing investment for the company that bought Reddit. If anyone reading this has a link to a thorough analysis of how Reddit contributes to Conde Nast's financials, in light of the large up-front (and now sunk) cost of acquiring Reddit, I would be glad to give it a careful reading, financial calculator in hand.
If a computer programmer buys a large real estate and says he hasn't got any return out of it, by not building anything, does it suggest real estate inherently is bad?
It takes commitment, knowledge and a careful execution to see a site that gets over a billion page views every month, to monetize. For that, let's start with not pissing off the people who work on it, first.
If conde has already paid a large sum to acquire a property, how much more, percentage terms, would it really cost to add a few more servers, a few more developers, ad-ops? If you can't pay for gas, you should think about it, even before you buy a car.
Ah, so you just remember the fairly recent numbers. I thought from your comments here and in the linked post that you had access to current numbers, which would have been fairly odd. Carry on.
I don't feel that way at all. As reddit grew, the desires of the masses changed. I'm no longer interested by the majority of it, but that doesn't mean it's bad. In fact, millions of people seem to believe the opposite.
I don't use reddit anymore because I found it to be an unproductive use of my time, but that doesn't mean it's bad. Youtube, for all of the stupidity of its comments, has nonetheless grown a fairly tight community of people who interact with each other through videos. Wikipedia, for all its politicking and acrimony, has a very tight community of core contributors. Reddit's community isn't the same as it used to be, true. It's much larger and much broader in appeal. Sure, that means I'm not as enamoured of it as I once was, but it's hardly a death knell. In every measurable way, reddit is doing better than it ever has.
>>As reddit grew, the desires of the masses changed.
I think that's what the issue is here. For people who have been part of a community for a long time it is painful to see this migration away from the core values you once thought the community stood for. In my opinion, "the desires of the masses changed" is just another way of saying that the community got hijacked by a wave of new users who didn't value what the entrenched users valued. This is, I think at least in a way, similar to a show jumping the shark.
Is it still Digg they're on about? I thought the complaint now was that reddit was turning into 4chan? HN is turning into reddit, reddit is turning into 4chan... Shall we take bets on how long it will be until people start bitching about G+ turning into facebook?
I think this is just a necessary byproduct of our need to find patterns in events and relate current experiences to past ones. Rather than saying, "the dynamic on this site is changing from something familiar to something new", we always feel the need to compare it to some past experience. Thus, techies are always looking for "the next microsoft", calling g+ "the next facebook", looking for the next Netscape Moment, and so on. It seems to be a very deeply-ingrained need for us to cast entities and experiences as being reminiscent of those we've had before. I'm sure this is an instinct that is usually very beneficial, but boy howdy does it ever cause an inordinate amount of kvetching on the tubes.
Well, he was right. The Reddit frontpage and vast majority of the new users (new being under 2/1 years old accts) have turned it into a complete idiocracy. On the other hand, the niche and smaller subreddits about specific pursuits and topics are doing pretty decently. Hivemind think and other stupidity still leaks in, but it's not too bad. The problem is as subreddits grow, they turn to crap. Look at the problem with the starcraft subreddit or plethora of marijuana subreddits.
I particularly like the subreddits that aim for better signal/noise ratio from the get-go and the good folks that help police them. One particularly outstanding fellow is blackstar9000, mod, creator, and prolific poster/commenter of several nice niche subreddits who has helped keep things in line. If there's any one who deserves some kudos in that regard, I'd nominate him/her for the honor.
I read reddit, but I would never buy a gold account. The site has too much hate speech, and it is hard to support that financially. Between the misogyny and the atheist anti-Christian bigotry, it's pretty bad. You don't have to be either a woman or a theist to see that's wrong.
The question of how to address this issue while maintaining free speech is a more complex one. The reddit founders, however, have shown no interest in finding ways to improve site quality from this perspective, and indeed, appear to support the bigotry.
Anyway, I bear a huge grudge against the site because they banned my account for sockpuppeting and harassment, so take all of the above with a grain of salt.
The site has too much hate speech, and it is hard to support that financially. Between the misogyny and the atheist anti-Christian bigotry, it's pretty bad. You don't have to be either a woman or a theist to see that's wrong.
The site doesn't promote hate speech, it allows free speech. Also I think you're overstating things.
The question of how to address this issue while maintaining free speech is a more complex one.
Free speech and censorship are mutually exclusive. Reddit already has mechanisms to allow community censorship (report posts, post deletion by moderators, banning, invite-only subreddits, etc.), but paid reddit employees only step in when things get out of hand.
Also the community is very fickle. Any perceived censorship by reddit employees that seems suspect and they get out the pitchforks. This has happened a few times (e.g. the Sears incident).
I do think the front page could be better filtered, though. Right now the default reddit front page is pretty... weird.
I was not proposing censorship. Reddit, as well as slashdot, HN, digg, etc. have a community process developed with the intent that the best comments make it to the top. The structure of that process determines what makes it to the top. Changes to that process can, very substantially, cut down on amount of certain classes of degenerate content. When bigotry began to appear on reddit, the reddit founders did nothing to combat it (and, indeed, slightly encouraged it). At the time, I think it would have been fairly easy to contain.
At this point, I'm not sure what can be done, since now bigots form a substantial portion of the reddit community.
For example, there was this guy named Lou Franklin who was probably the biggest bigot in the history of the site, and they took YEARS to finally ban his account.
I'd be interested in seeing any actual evidence you have for any of this, if any. The specific subreddits (such as /r/atheism) might sometimes be construed as a circle-jerk, but I've yet to see out-right hate speech against any sect of person that wasn't down-voted to hell.
That said, if you're a Christian on a site full of free-thinking and free speech such as reddit, you're going to have to be thick-skinned. Most, if not all, mainstream religions have never been kind to free-thinkers of their time, so you have to understand any resentment we may or may not have towards theists.
Notice how you automatically assume that the person pointing out bigotry is in the oppressed minority. This is not always the case.
If you expect a Christian on a site full of atheists to have to be thick-skinned, then by the same logic, you should expect an atheist in a high school full of Christians to be thick skinned. I don't think either of those conclusions is acceptable.
Actually, the similar situation would be an atheist in a high school full of christians in a region that's predominantly atheist, and he's not forced to be there: he has thousands of high schools to choose from, and doesn't have to go to school at all unless he wants to. Also, the only reason he was interested in this particular christian high school in the first place was the inquisitive, intellectual, creative atmosphere generated by all those christians.
> inquisitive, intellectual, creative atmosphere generated by all those christians
Are you thinking of the same reddit? It's a web site of funny videos, pictures of cats, rage comics, memes, and stupid jokes, and the occasional groupthink. 18 of the 25 front page links are imgur. Of the remaining 7, four are dumb discussions on reddit. One is a news article about the reddit founder (random crime story; otherwise uninteresting). One is a news link on youtube of actual news (if somewhat biased), and one is a link to an interesting study. Depending on how you count, that's 4-8% useful content. When you get into comments, it's even dumber.
reddit had a community of inquisitive, intellectual, creative individuals when it was formed at Harvard. Over time, the idiots and the bigots moved in, and right now it's a web site for wasting time on stupid amusements.
I was listening to right wing talk radio on a long car drive a few months back. What struct me was that the host, who mostly spewed venomous lies, would constantly refer to his viewers by some term (I forget the exact wording) like "the best and the brightest." I feel like reddit users are the left-wing equivalent of that. Clueless groupthink, combined with a very high opinion of themselves.
As an atheist, you're also free to move to a different country if Christianity bother you. US is 76.8% Christian. China is officially atheist. The only reason you're interested in this country is because it was founded on the Puritan work ethic, and has a very high level of social capital coming from Judeochristian values. But you shouldn't stay here and bitch about it. Same thing with blacks trying to go to the (better) white schools in the South prior to Brown vs. Board of Education -- they had their own place where they'd be accepted. Have fun with that logic.
Bigotry doesn't belong anywhere, even if people are free to leave. Intolerance hurts atheists more than it does Christians, and you're an idiot for endorsing it.
If it's been said once it's been said a thousand times over: if you're looking at the reddit frontpage for anything beyond slightly humorous cat pics or rage comics, then you're doing it wrong.
The stuff that gets to the frontpage is there because it's the most commonly appealing thing in the largest original subreddit communities (r/pics, etc). The intelligent discussions happen behind the scenes, on the small to medium sized subreddits. Anyone that's been on reddit for more than a week understands this.
There certainly are intelligent people in any community beyond a given size. You'll find intelligent Christians, Muslims, Jews, atheist, and Hindus. You'll find intelligent evolutionists and creation scientists. You'll find intelligent Republicans and Democrats. There are smart people who listen to Mozard, and smart people who listen to Limbaugh. You'll also find idiots in each of those communities as well. The ratios will be a little different in some cases, but in all cases, there will be both smart and dumb.
By that token, there are, without a doubt, plenty of smart people on reddit. They are, as your comment implies, a tiny minority, confined to a few subreddits (and those are mostly characterized by groupthink -- e.g. any conservative comment on most liberal subreddits will get voted down, no matter how intelligent and well thought out). The front page is defined by what most people vote for, and that's rage comics, misogyny, with the occasional sprinkling of anti-Christian bigotry (this used to be more prominent, but the average IQ has dropped to the point where r/atheism is beginning to look smart). That's representative of the average reddit user.
All that said, I'm not looking for anything on the front page beyond a way to waste a bit of time. When I first joined reddit, I looked to it for intelligent articles. Later, I looked to it for amusement. Now, I look to it less and less, since memes aren't the same thing as wit.
I can't really agree with that- it's hard to really define Reddit's "community"- one of it's strongest features is the 'subreddit' compartmentalisation. Personally, I have long since unsubscribed from the atheism and politics subreddits, so they aren't a part of my personal Reddit experience.
In case it's not obvious, someone logged into the cypherpunks account, edited the above comment, and changed the password.
cypherpunks is a generic account shared by many people on many websites. The username and password is cypherpunks/cypherpunks where allowed, and cypherpunks/cypherpunks1 where the username and password must be different. E-mail is usually cypherpunks@mailinator.com. It allows you to use websites while maintaining a semblance of anonymity.
This is now broken on HN. redditors rise to new heights in their debating ability.
I'm not going to repost all comments from the discussion, but the original comment was along the lines of:
I read reddit, but I would never buy a gold account. The site has too much hate speech, and it is hard to support that financially. Between the misogyny and the atheist anti-Christian bigotry, it's pretty bad. You don't have to be either a woman or a theist to see that's wrong.
The question of how to address this issue while maintaining free speech is a more complex one. The reddit founders, however, have shown no interest in finding ways to improve site quality from this perspective, and indeed, appear to support the bigotry.
People claiming that something won't work is not a good heuristic for finding things that will work. It may be the case that people say that many ideas that turn out to work won't, but they are overshadowed by all of the ideas that people say won't work that don't.
The big objections to CueCat, as I remember them, were that people would never install the hardware (and if they tried they'd need tech support), and that dragging adverts over to the desktop computer would be too much hassle.
QR code readers are a software (not hardware) install, and they install onto your phone (not PC), which is quite naturally close at hand when your reading off paper.
I'm not saying QR codes will proceed to establish themselves long-term. I am saying that if they don't, that will tell us more about the potential ecosystem for this sort of thing than CueCat's failure did, simply because major usability frictions inherent to the earlier technology are now out of the equation.
Agreed. I would add that, given you've found other ways to validate your idea, nothing inspires you quite as much to deliver as the opportunity to prove a naysayer wrong :P
It's a playful inside joke that makes people want to be in it, even if the actual features of a premium subscription are negligible. It's also common to have people give each others gold subscriptions in response to kind acts or as a reward for particularly insightful comments.
There are lessons to be learned for those implementing the freemium business model, for sure, although I completely disagree with people who claimed that this is an indication that advertising doesn't work. Selling products or services often beats advertising (revenue wise), but there is plenty of money to be made with ads. (I speak firsthand, as I've always done well with ads.)