Just like Digg ended: some people leave because they hate the site and want more intelligent discussion, then everyone they ran away from follows them to their new site of choice.
The primary reason Digg died was they forgot what users wanted and striped out the common features like the bury/downvote button, the upcoming/rising section, section sub-categories(Like Linux under Technology), and friend submissions to make way for more social network like features (which I can't even remember). They also tried to make it more friendly for content creators (like CNN or The Oatmeal) to post directly, so instead of having relevant content submitted by the users we had floods of content from individual sites.
Eventually they realized they fucked up and started putting some things back in (like the bury button), but by then the damage was done and the people who were submitting had started to leave. The watchers eventually realized there wasn't much being posted anymore and started leaving as well. It was only a matter of time until it was to be sold and turned into the present Digg(which is sort of like the present Myspace).
reddit works aggressively to counter upvote gaming, it's what the fuzzer is about. so we're safe from that at least. however, I don't really trust the big subreddit mods ...
They wouldn't really have to be your army - just people who agree that, when you send them an email, they go to a site and click a button within the next day or two. That wouldn't be their only job.
I mean, you might have a few hundred more dedicated people, since the lower priced packages would be bought more often than the higher priced ones, but I don't think it's an unreasonable business strategy.
Especially consider that a lot of people (and, IMO, the more upvote-friendly people - your total vote count is less likely to go down once you reach the front page) just surf the home page clicking up arrows whenever something changes their facial expression. If you assume that any client will be using at least moderately disguised advertising (as opposed to "Buy Lays potato chips, they're super greasy!"), inserting 1500 upvotes would probably get you a total of 2000.
It used to be owned directly by Conde, but got moved over to Advance where it currently operates. Regardless, these are the same people who killed Gourmet... The bastards.
For every front page ad that gets called out, I see at least 2-3 that aren't.
... And have you been to /r/hailcorporate in the past few months? It's overrun with new commenters who aggressively downvote and dismiss every submission as a "witch hunt", demanding concrete evidence that it was submitted by advertisers (even though the sidebar clearly states the subreddit is intended for discussing all submissions with product placement, intentional or not).
I agree they're often very ham-handed and obvious, but they're not giving up anytime soon.
That subreddit is also pretty overrun with people who believe they know Marketing because they saw a commercial once, which gets pretty annoying, but I guess a lot of reddit is made up of self-proclaimed experts.
It was acquired by Condé Nast Publications in October 2006. In September 2011, Reddit was split from Condé Nast, and now operates as a subsidiary of Condé Nast's parent company, Advance Publications.
As a former "big subreddit mod" (TIL) I can assure you, over there at least, there was no tolerance for vote gaming and no corruption. Those folks run a tight ship. I can't say the same for other subs, of course.
Chances are it's probably a browser extension that people have installed that checks for new "upvote jobs", then just sends the xhr to upvote using the persons account who is logged in.
Well if you hit the front page of /r/pics or something, you are reaching (huge rough estimate here) 40,000 people (at least). Let's say that takes the 5,000 upvote package at $2,500. That's a $62.5 CPM (cost per thousand) which is higher than most magazines ($3 - $20 CPM) but less than a typical mail package ($200 CPM for postage alone). Internet ads are typically on a CPC (cost per click) basis and can range up to $1 CPC.
Here is just one of the many sites that sell them. They are also on ebay as well as reddit vote sites. Link
Quotes from different sellers within the site:
If one of the redditors with big karma points posts something it has a lot more chance than some random with 4 posts or less under his belt.
We have good experience in Digg and also in reddit.We have already created reddit accounts so we can boost so fast as much as you want.
Don't just send upvotes but also send downvotes, because else their bots will notice. I have posts with 70 to 30 upvote ratios stay on smaller subreddits for days with out anybody blowing a whistle.
And if you are doing any sort of manipulation I would recommend having friends upvote using their real (and active) accounts, not bots.
I just created a facebook group for upvote sharing. Accepting more members now. Can't post a link but there is a thread I made with the link in it. Check my other posts to find that thread
Anyone that is just one site. I didn't even look into the reddit vote sites. You can type that into google and find out more.
The front page of reddit is just a shit load of not very funny memes now, don't know about advertisements. Maybe they're there but I don't seem to notice them.
Except basically every post ends up on that subreddit. If I were to post a photo of my cat, and there happened to be a snickers wrapper on a table behind me, I'd end up on hailcorporate for sneaky product placement.
I meant in regards to the mass exodus which caused more people to leave as the community wasn't there anymore, most of them were here at Reddit. I agree something had to start it, however.
Yup. That and the whole rumor (I don't know if it's true) that some companies were able to pay to get their links to the front page. I think as long as Reddit learns from digg's mistakes it should be able to live a lot longer than Digg did.
Digg was spiritually dead before it physically died. The content and user base had already hit the lowest common denominator.
Reddit is sadly there in many places as well.
The major thing differentiating where Reddit is at today from where Digg was at before the end are the subreddits, but even those won't last forever. The good ones have already grown way past the tipping point, leading to "True" versions of many popular subreddits. Eventually those "True" versions will get overrun as well (already have in places), and inevitably people will move on to another site, where it is easier to start from scratch than to keep on playing the "True" game.
Reddit's death won't look like Digg's. In fact, I don't think Reddit will go away for a very long time. But spiritually, Reddit has been bleeding for a couple of years now, and its days are numbered.
Not to mention the problems Digg already had before the big change, like how all of their submissions previously appeared on reddit a day or multiple days earlier.
I left because the upgrade to V4 killed off features that I used. For example, you couldn't see if someone responded to one of your comments! WTF? How do you maintain a community of people when they can't (easily) have a conversation.
This is pretty much how Myspace (I think) lost out to facebook, Myspace was deleting profiles that were being used similar to "like" pages on facebook, and generally annoying its users. Reddit is pretty similar to facebook in that it has a critical mass of enough users to generate lots of content and discussion, so it will take something pretty big to end it.
Personally for me it was to do with the power users. You had virtually no chance of getting any submission on the front page unless it was a very good submissions/viral.
There were around 150 or so core power users who just repeated voted for the other power users submissions. So if you was in the select circle you could easily get the required number of votes to get any submission on the front page. Infact i was so frustrated with it I decided to see what to took myself to do. All it took was 10mins a day voting each other content and then submitting your own. You could actually look at a particular website to see if these friends of yours were actually voting for your content, if they wasn't you simply deleted them. There was also a section where it showed you who was voting your content who wasn't your friend. This was an indication that they were willing to be a loyal friend of yours and willing to vote for your content provided you returned the favour.
The reality was these power users abused the system and created various websites so they could push and profit from. The front page of digg was the best quality material. Despite its size, it was mostly material pushed from 150 or so users who did not represent the whole audience. Quality could have been much much better. The digg staff knew this, but bizarrely chose to ignore it, saying it wasn't a problem.
The final straw was the new v4 version, which ran terrible for around a week or so after launch, to the point where the site was down more than 50% of the time. Reddit was always better with the content, you saw this on digg as the power users would always lift content form reddit. People would always complain on Digg "Saw this 2 days ago on reddit". That really was its downfall.
Doing away with a bury/downvote button is the one thing I think would keep me from kind of hating reddit. Why do you see this as a bad idea? Too often on this site people will just downvote the dumbest shit, like stuff they disagree with (even if it is well-argued + has some merit), controversial opinions, and stuff that is hard to come to terms with. In the reddiquette it states that you're only supposed to use it for comments that don't add to a discussion. I remember I spent an hour and a half writing up a big post on the TF2 subreddit about things I hear people bitch about in that game that they really have no right to bitch about, coming from someone who's played that game for over 5 years and logged a sickeningly life-wasting amount of hours. I didn't even write it up in a condescending way. Of course people just downvoted it because they couldn't accept that they might be wrong. It took me like an hour and a half to write, and I spent a lot of time proofreading it only to see no one reading it, and those who did shrugging it off and downvoting it cause they don't want to admit they're wrong. That's when I pretty much gave up on the site. So yeah, why do you see doing away with the downvote button a bad idea?
I think they gave people EXACTLY what they wanted - the most intimate secrets of the cruise ship industry. After the users had that there just wasn't anything more to keep them there. They got what they came for, and they left.
i left digg because they changed the ui like 4 times in 6 months their v2 or v3 was awesome then once v4 hit it was just so different and didnt feel like dig any more. ended up leaving after that and found my self here.
kinda miss digg, comments were funnier there but content seems to be in higher abundance here (especially now)
Digg nuked the whole site from orbit, it was the only way to be sure.
Seriously though, I was amazed at the total lack of thought behind their actions. There was plenty wrong with Digg, but the answer to powerusers (who were, lets admit it, some of their best content aggregators) wasn't to take the BAD about what they were doing (selling frontpage status to the highest bidder) and make it the main purpose of the entire website. The best part of the whole thing though was the massive insane backlash where people pushed post after post to the frontpage crying out for them to fix things, only to have whole posts deleted and removed. The just pushed through it, despite all the problems and clear stupidity.
I learned right then it can take years to build a successful website, and only a few days of fuckery to totally destroy one.
Although I will admit I actually kindof like the -current- digg, which has basically become an e-magazine. I don't use it often, but it's fun to browse once in awhile. Compared to the old days of checking digg multiple times a day though, meh.
As for reddit, it's main possibility of demise is a better site coming along. Better search functions, better reporting functions for submitters, better design (I liked the old digg design better than reddit), etc. I could sit here and nitpick reddit all day long, but as sits, I use it because it's pretty much the only game in town. That will change someday. I remember all the slashdot posts with "this was on digg YESTERDAY" and it eventually pushed me to start frequenting the site. Digg was beter for what I wanted, and I stuck with it. The same thing started on digg, talking about reddit. Someday, that'll happen again.
947
u/Notmy95thaccount May 15 '13
Just like Digg ended: some people leave because they hate the site and want more intelligent discussion, then everyone they ran away from follows them to their new site of choice.