[stuartjohnson12]

It failed on Reddit because Reddit is maintained by a bunch of volunteers to whom Reddit provides woefully, woefully, horrifically underdeveloped tooling to automate their communities in a more nuanced way. Hacker News has three advantages. First, it is moderated by the same people who build the tooling, so the incentives are aligned. Second, it is an enormous source of soft power for a venture capital firm with the resources, incentives, and likely the competence and capacity to keep it running smoothly. Third, the scale is smaller and is not tied to hardline revenue constraints like CPM, user LTV and DAU-maximization which restrict what Reddit can do.

[spartanatreyu]

> It failed on Reddit because Reddit is maintained by a bunch of volunteers to whom Reddit provides woefully, woefully, horrifically underdeveloped tooling to automate their communities in a more nuanced way.

Not to mention reddit mass removed experienced moderators when all the moderators had a protest about reddit removing their access to good third party tooling.

That's the day the site started its death spiral.

[scoofy]

I quit moderating because it was destroying my mental health.

Getting called a fascist and rehashing how “no, you’re libertarian politics are fine, but can you please just start your own sub” in a long, drawn out, hateful, back and forth gets exhausting after the 200th person who comes to the bicycling subreddit and feels they should be allowed to endorse harming cyclists with their vehicles.

Everyone got mad at spez for having the audacity to fuck with these kids, and there is a point there, but after living with it, I could see myself doing the same damn thing.

[qingcharles]

Moderating Reddit subs can be a huge money maker. I know people making $100K/year from it. There are cabals, especially in the adult sections. Reddit has tried to address this recently by limiting the number of subs a person can moderate, but that just causes these big accounts to create more user accounts and split all their subs up that way.

[anonzzzies]

I must be old and naive but you can make money with subreddits?

[qingcharles]

On the adult subs, at least, menu links, sidebar links and banner ads, automod reply links, and by limiting your sub to only paying guests or your own managed models.

[dawnerd]

Plenty of subs blatantly allow certain brands to advertise while banning anyone else. Kind of amazed Reddit themselves haven’t put more effort into to stopping it since it kinda sidesteps their in house advertising.

[saltyoldman]

Because said 100k'er are probably paying off someone inside reddit. Remember when Ebay sent some couple bloody pigs masks? Yeah evil people work at companies.

[cik]

At scale they will. For now, someone else puts the effort into growth marketing, eyeball capture. Reddit eventually changes the rules, seizing control, thereby acquiring users for less human cost (as opposed to missed revenue opportunity).

[phito]

Corruption

[mschuster91]

> It failed on Reddit because Reddit is maintained by a bunch of volunteers to whom Reddit provides woefully, woefully, horrifically underdeveloped tooling to automate their communities in a more nuanced way.

And on top of that, some of said "volunteers" are power-hungry, petty, useless fucking morons. Especially the large subreddits tend to be run by people I wouldn't trust to boil some pasta without triggering a fire alert, and yes I know people who manage that.