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How complicated is Reddit as software?

The most prominent removal — or, as the admins say, the only subreddit with more than 5,000 subscribers — is r/fatpeoplehate, a forum devoted to posting (among other things) pictures of overweight people for ridicule. A follow-up comment lists the other four subreddits as r/hamplanethatred, r/transfags, r/neofag, and r/shitniggerssay; they’ve all indeed been shut down, all but one “for violating the Reddit rules to keep everyone safe.” According to the admin, these last four ranged from 149 to 3071 subscribers, although in r/fatpeoplehate’s case, “more than 5,000” is a bit of an understatement; the last Reddit metrics (and a Google cached page) put it at around 151,000 subscribers.

If Reddit’s closing down all the fun sub-reddits in the name of political correctness (which it is, Ellen Pao is very SJW) then that’s a market gap for someone happy to epater les SJWs.

So, how tough is Reddit to replicate as software? Is it based on a box solution, like Wikipedia? And who has the cash to throw at this?

27 thoughts on “How complicated is Reddit as software?”

  1. There’s been a clone knocking around for a while, voat.co

    Now its chance to shine, but it seems the servers aren’t ready and it’s running like its 1995 at the minute.

  2. How much do you think this is reddit’s SJW tendencies and how much is pressure from advertisers.

    If there’s a reddit-clone that only has the things that have been kicked off reddit because advertisers don’t want their ads alongside them, then how will that clone make money?

  3. If Reddit’s closing down all the fun sub-reddits in the name of political correctness

    Which it’s not, not even close. They’re closing down the ones that encourage going all over the rest of the site and abusing the other users.

  4. In years to come we will tell our grand children that you used to need a thick skin and a sense of humour in order to use the internet.

    Our grand children might laugh, but only if the SJW nanny says that it is OK to laugh at the ramblings of a person in the old peoples zoo.

  5. Wot Matthew L said, and,

    If Reddit’s closing down all the fun sub-reddits in the name of political correctness (which it is, Ellen Pao is very SJW) then that’s a market gap for someone happy to epater les SJWs.

    Haven’t the Nchans done that already?

  6. The software is trivial to replicate. The server capacity would be a bigger issue – especially with no immediate monetarization of the readership.

    But the biggest asset Reddit has (and is about to lose) is the existing subscribed user-base.

  7. I looked on reddit once but I couldn’t follow the threads. The way its ordered seems a bit odd for me. It’s not like the neatly ordered forums I’m used to.

  8. What Martin Audley said.

    Reddit’s nothing special. Digg used to fill the Reddit niche, till it managed to piss off its own users.

    Digg dug its own grave. Reddit’s soon going to be un-read by most of its former contributors.

    There’s just not that much of a market for SJW bumfingery. Tumblr is already a thing. The “gaming” websites that foolishly attacked their own readers over #Gamergate will never recover.

    But the biggest asset Reddit has (and is about to lose) is the existing subscribed user-base

    Since Ms. Kung Pao failed in her trumped up lawsuit, maybe she’s hoping to create grounds for another trumped up lawsuit, after Reddit sack her.

    It’s what her crook husband would do – and he’s still broke, so they need the money.

  9. @Steve

    ‘Since Ms. Kung Pao failed in her trumped up lawsuit, maybe she’s hoping to create grounds for another trumped up lawsuit, after Reddit sack her.’

    Are you suggesting Kung Pao isn’t chicken?

  10. Technically Ellen Pao is only the interim CEO of Reddit. She’s merely making sure that she can sue them after they do not renew her contract.

  11. Shame about Christopher Lee, I was hoping the old boy would make a ton. Read the Times obit, interesting life – makes me wonder what I’ve been doing with mine.

    However, reading the biog of Ron Moody, who also died today, I found that he (Moody) married aged 61 and subsequently fathered six children (explains why he wasn’t on telly much in later life) so I have plenty of time.

  12. The Meissen Bison

    …you could be forgiven for thinking he’d have sooner got his teeth into Romanian or Hungarian.

  13. So Much for Subtlety

    Rob – “We will never see his like again, unless he reappears just after sunset tonight.”

    +1

    MC – “Read the Times obit, interesting life – makes me wonder what I’ve been doing with mine.”

    We are seeing the last of the interesting people die. People who did something with their lives. In the future every obituary will read “He spent his life entering data at the office before going home every night to become a hero of World of Warcraft”.

    Tim Newman – “Blimey!”

    In December 2012, he released an EP of heavy metal covers of Christmas songs called A Heavy Metal Christmas.[117] He released a second in December 2013, entitled A Heavy Metal Christmas Too.[118] With the song Jingle Hell, Lee entered the Billboard Hot 100 chart at #22, thus becoming the oldest living performer to ever enter the music charts, at 91 years and 6 months.

    A renaissance man!

    The Meissen Bison – “…you could be forgiven for thinking he’d have sooner got his teeth into Romanian or Hungarian.”

    I expect there isn’t a Romanian in the world who would have agreed to teach him. Although he could probably could have just slurred his Italian a little. Just as that Borat guy shouldn’t plan any holidays in Kazakstan.

  14. Reddit is fairly complicated, but:

    1) It’s open source, so you could create a clone easily.

    2) People have already created clones such as Voat. Hell, Reddit itself is basically a clone of earlier sites.

    3) It doesn’t really matter, because network effects. Something will cause the exodus from Reddit to The Next Big Thing, but it’s very unlikely to be this, and it’s very unlikely to be an exact clone. Reddit succeeded Digg by *not* being an exact clone.

    Also, it’s easy to blow the banning of this sub (it’s basically one sub; the others are trivial) hugely out of proportion. Reddit is huge, and it has an amazingly rich vein of very, very shitty “subreddits”. This was (sad to say) one of the smaller and less problematic ones. Which leads to a couple points:

    1) If Reddit was trying to ban problematic subs due to, eg, SJW reasons, they’d probably start with the “Chimpire” (a network of virulently racist sub dedicated to the proposition that blacks are literally chimps), or maybe /r/cutefemalecorpses (exactly what it sounds like), or /r/punchablefaces (currently dominated by pictures of Ellen Pao), or one of the pro-rape subreddits (yes, there’s several), or whatever.

    2) It’s pretty clear that the real reason Reddit banned /r/fatpeoplehate is the fact that they had been harassing the admins of a related site, Imgur (and in particular, digging up their real life names and contact details, a practice known as “doxxing” on Reddit, and one of the few unforgivable sins).

    So this isn’t the start of a massive wave of bans, and any obvious replacement would have done the same thing, because one of the few things that unites the Reddit admins and the hoi polloi is their hatred of doxxing.

    In short: This is **VASTLY** less important—and less interesting—than it sounds like to people outside of Reddit.

  15. Followup: Also, Reddit has been halfheartedly banning terrible subs for ages now, and every time a bunch of people complain, and then everyone forgets about it and keeps using Reddit.

    There was tons more drama when they banned /r/jailbait (a subreddit for child porn); if that didn’t do anything—and it didn’t—why would this?

  16. Cody, strictly speaking, jailbait refers to definitely post pubertal females who tend to *look* older. Or to put it another way, females who would be of legal age in some jurisdictions (E.g. Portugal where I believe the age of consent is 14) but who are most definitely not of legal age in the U.S. (Or relevant place). Typically /j posts were also supposed to be *legal* photographs, that is sufficiently clothed to pass muster.

    That said, /jailbait did (as I understand it) have a definite problem with people posting pictures that would qualify as child pornography. And hence the ban.

  17. Just to add to the above, drama when the /jailbait sub reddit was banned yes, but more in complaints from users.

    There was little real argument about the nature and scale of the real problem and that was that distinctly illegal child pornography was being posted and that despite some very active moderating the problem persisted. Hence ultimately little real argument against the ban

  18. One further comment, I’ve tried to find where this “doxing” and other such abuse, and it doesn’t seem to exist. So add “accused of doxing and other unspecified and unproven behaviour” as another stalking horse for the SJW crowd.

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