I've tried Voat, but it's literally just Reddit.
The world needs a p2p, anonymity-first, censorship resistant link-sharing and discussion site/app/thing.
If anyone could point in some such direction, I sure would appreciate it.
You're on it. You're using it right now. This is it.
I've been an active user and contributor to (in order) local BBS, Fidonet, Usenet, Slashdot, Kuro5hin, digg/reddit, HN, and in my opinion, HN is the best, most interesting and functional discussion board that has ever existed.
Enjoy it! It won't last forever.
Simple stuff like collapsing long comment threads would be a Very Nice Plus, f'rex.
I've been on nearly all the platforms you've mentioned. The early ones (BBSes, Usenet) were tiny in comparison. Slashdot always kinda sucked for moderation, though its editorial curation was more useful than people today appreciate. Kuro5hin had some good ideas but ultimately never gained traction. I actually skipped digg. I use reddit, and like it for some elements, but it also frustrates me.
My interests are more toward a bloggy-oriented discussion platform, and the mix of capabilities, community, and hosting (free is unfortunately where I'm at for now), is hard to find.
I'm actually warming back on blogs, with self-hosted static-site systems being particularly attractive.
Every single time that's been tried it tanked because either pathological arseholes overwhelmed everyone else, or no-one wanted to use it.
But since you ask for an example that you can use: The "free" hierarchy of Usenet. It was set up to have no rules.
Absolutely. I once ran a community that grew from 5 to 50 to 300+ people, and had this utopian vision that moderation wouldn't be necessary, we were intelligent, enlightened people who would have healthy discussions and hash out our disagreements in civil ways.
Alas.
Even if you managed that and then managed somehow to get funding to grow and scale for a system with no obvious revenue opportunities history shows us you are still likely to fail.
How about a system like this.
Something like HN or reddit, but make it read only via online. And the only way to post into it should be by sending a hand written mail, to the admins. These will not be filtered, and will be posted exactly as they are written. People will be able to see the discussions online. The original note can be optionally delivered/forwarded to the recipient (let us snail mail that too)... There will be upvotes and downvotes. But nothing will be sorted or hidden based on that. In other words, take the "instant gratification" out of the discussions, and make them more personal.
We can see this today in the case of TOR. The network is censorship-resistant from within, but it's still vulnerable externally - if governments put its users into jail, that's effectively censoring the whole network instead of some specific content.
I am also interested by Yours (https://www.yours.network), which is built using Bitcoin.
And you can see a list of other related projects here: https://github.com/yoursnetwork/yours-core/blob/master/docs/...
Reddit had the advantage that the subreddit is a natural partition point so it's not quite as hard a problem as something more granular, but still: p2p social network is hard.
As for alternatives, what about The Pirate Bay? Links, comments, anonymity.
An existing example is Freenet, which has a decentralized messaging system.
This signals desperation than proper business development. Reddit should look at Snapchat: today they have a Nike filter live. This is smart monetization and gives more bucks than this affiliate hack. Besides, Reddit should have done this affiliate thing themselves and not employed Viglink. Any intermediate will not just take their cut, they take more and send lower reports in general (if a CPA deal).
They hired their first CTO in 2015 and he seems to be doing a good job. But theirs no silver bullet for a legacy infrastructure especially if you add all the pressure Reddit is receiving to monetize ASAP.
*there's
The contributors on the other hand get to use reddit for free. Sure, many of them could publish OC on their own websites and get hits. A lot of them, no one would care, because their content is only interesting in the context of the reddit culture and hivemind (this is especially true for comments).
Lets not forget how much traffic reddit could drive to your personal site or blog, either.
I am surprised it took reddit so long to do something so simple to generate money.
As a user, I feel that I get value from participating on Reddit (as I do here). If I didn't, I wouldn't participate. I'm not looking to get paid.
I'm actually amazed that Reddit continues to even exist given how much traffic it gets every day and how little income it must get from what (relatively) few ads it serves. I don't know what this massive cashflow is that people think they're entitled to tap into.
i suspect that they are going to have to get _significantly_ more aggressive with advertising or come up with a different business model altogether.
Only if their monetization plan is being led by someone from a news site. Snapchat being what it is, they would be smarter to sell less for more. That is, if you don't have (much) advertising and a lot of demand, the little real estate you do cede to monetization is more valuable. They don't have to do takeovers.
The problem is twofold:
1. If you're massively successful, then revenue sharing creates huge incentives for spam. Hence you often get people posting links to their content all over the place (especially on rival sites), at which point your brand gets seen as sleazy and your domain often added to a lot of blocklists. You also get a lot of low quality users signing up to post junk in the hope x amount of people click their ads or affiliate links. Digitalpoint got flooded with one liners and gibberish from people in poorer countries and ended up losing most of its more respected users in the process.
2. Revenue sharing often breaks down to a very, very limited amount of money for anyone using the site. Social networks and forums are not the best for ad clickthrough rates or affiliate links, This varies based on how exactly the users are paid (per discussion, per post, per video/image, etc), but it generally isn't enough for anyone to live on unless either got really low expenses or the site itself is ridiculously massive. That's why new sites don't do it.
I don't think Reddit should take advice from the company that has never been profitable (not that Reddit had been profitable, mind you).
And affiliate links are actually known to be profitable, there are countless of sites that exist solely off affiliate links.
"Nike filter", you must be kidding me. Nobody wants to put goddamn ads on their photos.
Plenty of people want to put certain kinds of ads on their photos, and are happy to do so!
So Reddit should offer a photo filter feature? This comparison is hard to comprehend since their features are so different.
Do you have any numbers on that matter?
Just look around, usually advertisers pair themselves with publishers with a similar brand awareness and quality. Eg Nike or BMW won't advertise on Reddit or Facebbok because there would be a too strong asymmetry between advertisers' and publishers' brands. Nike and BMW would rather place and position themselves to eg the next James Bond movie from Sony (=> similar brand perception).
Reddit is the typical publisher that is avoided by a lot of major advertisers. The brand and the audience is maybe too heterogenous and inconsistent. While a sub like Photshopbattles might be positive and funny many other subs like Gonewild (which is huge btw) give Reddit a mixed perception. However, doing a deal with Viglink shows that they must have tried everything before (to get deals with major brands) but finally resigned and go now the affiliate path.
There is one good thing about affiliate marketing though: ad blockers do not harm your business.
What is that?
Affiliate links are added if none are present.
I don't think there will be much revenue to share. It's too easy to get around this. Link to your own page, and redirect to your affiliate offer. Anyone that takes affiliate marketing on Reddit seriously will be doing this, so I doubt this will generate much revenue for Reddit.
MercadoLibre, one of the biggest ecommerce platform in latam, had an affiliate program, but they cut it when they were "big enough".
My best answer is that right now, they realize it's best not to ruin a great thing. They're on top of the world, things are going well, why rock the boat?
I guess it might make sense to view this as some sort of avoided opportunity cost: reddit could potentially redirect existing product links (say, to a CPU at Newegg) to a different shop.
My guess is that they kind of have to because they have an agreement with the 3rd party that's handling this.
I personally dislike affiliate links just like most others but unlike ads they don't ruin my browsing experience and are generally very transparent.
The real issue here in my opinion is how this was announced, as a "we're doing this, FYI". I'd instead open up a discussion with mods of large communities to get feedback and once they understand the goal get them to show support.
And if they had gone the route of involving large communities they could have also done a tiny rev share, similar to how YouTube compensates content creators.
The largest valid reason people dislike affiliate links is because it changes the motivation for posting. When you see someone recommend a product behind an affiliate link, you can be certain that they are motivated in part by money. That may not be the whole reason; they could very well be recommending the product because they actually believe in it, but you only know for sure that they intend to make money off the recommendation.
A secondary reason people don't like affiliate links is because people don't like the idea of someone "making money off of" them. In my opinion, this is kind of irrational. It doesn't cost the user anything extra.
Interestingly, Reddit's plan is pure in this regard. They are simply making money off recommendations people are already making. Their not posting the affiliate links, they're simply seizing the opportunity presented when someone else honestly and organically links to a product.
Lastly, you mention a revenue share. Ironically, this proposal would do what you are actually concerned about: incentivize users to post something inauthentic which they normally wouldn't. I think your proposed solution would actually turn this non-issue into the very issue you're trying to prevent in the first place!
In the interest of full disclosure, I run websites which profit from affiliate links. I suspect my opinion would be the same if I didn't, however.
I agree that when used by the direct posters, affiliate links cause a misalignment of incentive because the poster isn't necessarily adding value to the community but rather to their affiliate account. This can be done very naively or be abused. Users suffer both ways.
This however isn't the case here IMO because if Reddit is auto tagging all links the posters are pretty much in the same boat that they were of Reddit hadn't tagged those links.
You could say that because this is a revenue channel for Reddit they'd optimize tagged posts over non tagged ones when promoting content. That however mostly gets resolved by the same logic as above, plus we all know how stuff gets to the top of Reddit...
Lastly, communities making some revenue is, again, not a misalignment. Using the same logic as above, all auto tagged links are again just links. Hence, a community that generates good content would get some revenue. It's pretty straight forward in my opinion.
Lastly, most affiliates pay commission on sales and not impressions (and if they do it's really tiny). So the context and the targeting are the most important pieces.
It's yet another piece of javascript that connects to some other site that will cause degraded responsiveness. Worse when Viglink's servers are unreachable.
They rarely ruin it enough that is just close the tab and not use the site, but that doesn't really mean anything. If we can do without them I think we should.
In Reddit's case, it means they have an incentive to silently promote posts and comments that have affiliate links because it makes them money.
If a review of a product has affiliate links then I'll immediately distrust the review because it's not possible for me to know whether they actually like the product or because they get paid if they convince people to like it.
In this case however, since the posters aren't putting them in there's no incentive.
https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/4ldk0r/reddit_ch...
Besides, all affiliate networks are (by definition) third party. In many cases, it's just not worthwhile for the merchant/advertiser to setup a custom tracking and billing solution.
So many big brands are running multiple tags taking down more client info than Google Analytics - and then asking why pages are taking 5s+ to render
1) Maybe Viglink offered a deal to get exposure. I never heard of them until today.
2) They claim to cover 30k merchants.[1] Maybe there is a lot of money for reddit in the 29,999 other sellers too.
Potentially this also opens for other use cases such as substituting the product name with a link to buy, maybe useful in some specific subreddits.
HighUpManager: "We aren't hitting our expected KPI's, we need to find ways to increase affiliate revenue. Is there any way we can increase affiliate-link exposure?"
MiddleManager: "Well, I guess I could have my team modify the ranking algorithm so that our affiliate links rise to the front-page faster and stay there longer. However..."
HighUpManager: "Great! Make it so."
It's unfortunate Reddit can't leave a working formula alone - HN has barely changed in 7 years - I really respect the control that must have taken - the lack of category filters on HN means I always need some other source
I do hope this and the imgur change last week doesn't mark the start of the end but it's probably time for a new player ... CIX -> Usenet/Dejanews -> Digg -> Reddit -> ??
However, I have a feeling that some of the users will simply start rewriting links to not look like links.
http://superuser.com/questions/513323/how-to-open-hxxp-or-ot...
EDIT: Here's what the FTC says: https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/ftc...
> I’m an affiliate marketer with links to an online retailer on my website. When people read what I’ve written about a particular product and then click on those links and buy something from the retailer, I earn a commission from the retailer. What do I have to disclose? Where should the disclosure be?
> If you disclose your relationship to the retailer clearly and conspicuously on your site, readers can decide how much weight to give your endorsement.
> In some instances – like when the affiliate link is embedded in your product review – a single disclosure may be adequate. When the review has a clear and conspicuous disclosure of your relationship and the reader can see both the review containing that disclosure and the link at the same time, readers have the information they need. You could say something like, “I get commissions for purchases made through links in this post.” But if the product review containing the disclosure and the link are separated, readers may lose the connection.
> As for where to place a disclosure, the guiding principle is that it has to be clear and conspicuous. The closer it is to your recommendation, the better. Putting disclosures in obscure places – for example, buried on an ABOUT US or GENERAL INFO page, behind a poorly labeled hyperlink or in a “terms of service” agreement – isn’t good enough. Neither is placing it below your review or below the link to the online retailer so readers would have to keep scrolling after they finish reading. Consumers should be able to notice the disclosure easily. They shouldn’t have to hunt for it.
> Is “affiliate link” by itself an adequate disclosure? What about a “buy now” button?
> Consumers might not understand that “affiliate link” means that the person placing the link is getting paid for purchases through the link. Similarly, a “buy now” button would not be adequate.
Unfortunately, neither the FTC nor their equivalents elsewhere seem to be particularly good at enforcing these rules, so a lot of unscrupulous sites (and as in this case, many large ones) just ignore them altogether.
Seem impossible to enforce and frankly a little overbearing.
When a social media (always in the media) site that's well known starts tracking user links and proving that to any third parties - the argument from reddit will be that it's A) Anonymous and B) Secure - both of which are hot topics which are quickly starting starting to be disassembled by the general public - undoubtedly reddit will either be wrapped up in it which could be financially costly or publicisd and will likely turn off users.
Seems like a very odd time to be making a move like this.
This seems very underhanded. I really don't think I'll support this. I think I may need to write a Chrome/Firefox extension that grabs all of those links and rewrites them to be affiliate links to a charity.
