Skype replaces P2P supernodes with Linux boxes hosted by Microsoft - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/05/skype-replaces-p2p-supernodes-with-linux-boxes-hosted-by-microsoft.ars <comment><USER4> Something not mentioned by Ars is that the difference in cost between datacenter bandwidth and broadband has changed significantly in the last 10 years. Datacenter resources are now so cheap that P2P has little advantage. (I think the rise of cyberlockers are another manifestation of this trend.)

<comment><USER5> that's pretty interesting. do you have a link or something with some of the cost analysis?

<comment><USER4> Here's bandwidth pricing: [http://drpeering.net/white-papers/Internet-Transit- Pricing-H...](http://drpeering.net/white-papers/Internet-Transit-Pricing- Historical-And-Projected.php) Let's say 100x drop in 10 years. (But broadband upstream certainly hasn't gotten 100x faster!)

Determining the cost break-even point between P2P and client-server is more complex and I haven't seen any public analyses of it.

<comment><USER6> Problems with DSL upstream bandwidth is the main reason that Kragen thinks P2P networking won't work very well: [http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen- tol/2011-August/...](http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen- tol/2011-August/000935.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Let me just make this very clear: you don't go from zero operating cost to multiple millions of hardware and colo space to do the very same thing, in a move so transparent that it needs security researchers to dig into your program to find out it has happened at all.

I guess Skype (by extension, Microsoft) is growing interested in what people are speaking about. To get hold of that data you need to route it through your own network, at significant processing and bandwidth cost.

<comment><USER8> Or instead of engaging in conspiracy theores with zero proof we should look at whats going on here rationally. Skype is really unacceptable in any corporate environment. I don't want a random PC on my network to be a superpeer and suddenly use my 50mbps connection routing calls to the world. Run skype for a couple of mins, fire up tcpview, and watch calls come in and out. Not only is this a waste of my resources it also provides a shit experience of dropped calls, sudden drops in quality, and connection issues. The P2P model for video and talk is suboptimal and MS knows their real customers (IT managers and IT buyers) aren't going to go for this.

I have yet to get high quality video to work on skype, even between two clients each with 10+ mbps lines. MS knows this is a problem.

More than likely Skype will be for SMB and residential use and high end enterprise will continue to use Lync or alternatives. This is a welcome move as it legitimizes Skype for many.

<comment><USER9> He phrased it like a conspiracy theorist, but it's a little naive to think that intercept capability wasn't a factor in this decision. As far as I know skype was the biggest player in communications that wasn't being _completely_ monitored.

<comment><USER10> Skype went down for a couple days about a year or two ago, as did a few other voip services at around the same time. I suspect this is more than just a single company that is behind it, rather the US government.

<comment><USER9> Sure, it's not a secret that the NSA is the one pulling in _all_ of the data they can get their hands on right now. And they absolutely _want_ all skype traffic, since they already have all internet and phone traffic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> MS using Linux to run their business. That says it all.

A company with more money than it knows what to do with, acting desperately to save itself from obsolescence.

Skype was flawed from the outset, being non-transparent (about how the network is set up, turning machines into supernodes withtout permission, and the encryption they use). It's all closed. Why? You can't verify it's well- designed. Now it's worse. Do I want MS routing my calls? Scanning every file transfer? Being able to peek at any video?

No thanks. That's not their role.

There are other true decentralised P2P Video/oiceOIP solutions. People now know that free calls, even video calls, through the internet are feasible, even without having technical knowledge.

Right now, use Skype. But it will not hold the market when more robust, flexible, decentralised, transparent services are ready for non-technical users.

Because they will be free. And Skype will not be free: the price you will pay, to a software company[1], is your privacy, at the least, and probably more.

1\. No software company has a need to know such things. They are not the government, they are not law enforcement, and they are not defenders of national security. They are a software company. Who are they accountable to? It's just not a smart idea to let MS take this role. The potential for abuse is too great.

<comment><USER12> If we had 1 good application programmer for every 100 cryptoweenies, the world would be a better place.

Write code or shut the fuck up.

<comment><USER11> Code is written. Command line only. So not ready for you yet.

There are good application programmers (who are also competent cryptographers). But it seems, based on mailing list and forum comments, all the incompetent ones hold them in spite. One can only guess why.

<comment><USER13> Command line is good enough for me; Where can I find it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Certainly helps solve the intercept problem for the American national security agencies.

(Was that still a problem? My info is probably out of date, but skype being p2p _was_ a pain in the ass for spying on customers a short while ago)

<comment><USER7> Skype offers lawful interception access to anyone interested. The encryption is literally just obfuscation to deny intermediate peers access.

<comment><USER9> But not large scale trawling of all call data or the ability to mirror all traffic to another location as far as I know.

<comment><USER7> Of course not; thats not "lawful interception" in the countries that Skype would market such services to. They don't have access to that large-scale data anyway, hence my comment on getting access to it by routing it through your own infrastructure.

<comment><USER9> Right, which is the "intercept problem" I was talking about. Your concept of "lawful interception" is pretty dated when we're talking about national security agencies rather than police.

The NSA is splitting signals and trawling _everything_ for what they want, it's how it's done now. The recent wired article about the new datacentre was pretty interesting. Which was, as far as i know, not possible with the p2p architecture that skype had previously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Good to see the grsecurity patch getting a bit of publicity. I think for critical devices it's an essential patch, mostly because of it's integration with the PaX patch which is aimed at preventing many different types of memory overflow exploits.

<comment><USER15> You can use PaX standalone tho.

I'd like to know if they used GrSecurity's RBAC or if they just used the patch and that was that.

<comment><USER15> Or downvoted for no reason. haha.

That's PaX standalone: <http://grsecurity.net/~paxguy1/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if this has to do with mobile.

A laptop on a broadband line can keep track of all the P2P nodes necessary to keep my contact list & chats up to date, have a 3-way video call, and top it off by routing for a few less-well connected peers nearby. Asking that of my phone is a bit much.

Skype on an iPhone + wifi is rough sailing as it is, let alone on 3G or with a less-powerful device. The behavior I see (really random incoming chats, call false-starts) seems to be more related to the P2P layer than the app itself. I almost never see that behavior on Skype desktop.

I think leaning a bit more towards client-server would be a lot more friendly for mobile devices. Hopefully they hit the right mix.

</comment><comment><USER17> Is this in response to the Skype IP Lookup tool that was released this past week? Or something completely unrelated?

<comment><USER18> Unrelated, although this might make such things harder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> My biggest complaint with Skype is its inability to persist chat messages when one client is disconnected. If this addresses that it would be great.

That said, we're using HipChat now and love it. If you use Skype for group chat and don't use the phone a lot, I recommend the switch wholeheartedly.

<comment><USER20> Say what now? It always seemed to do that quite fine for me. If a client drops off, I can still send messages, and they'll sit in the window with the little "working" circle next to t hem. The partner picks them up when they reconnect.

I've logged in more than once to have a metric ton of IM's waiting for me.

<comment><USER19> But if you send a message they won't see your message until you're both online again. So if you sign off before you sign on, it won't send until both clients are online again (could be days).

If you use multiple computers it gets worse - if you send the message from your laptop it won't go through until _the laptop_ and your friend are online again.

Its not a huge problem with a 1 on 1 chat, but with groups its frustrating.

We benefit greatly from having the chat room as sort of a canonical log of what's happening. Its nice to be able to leave a message for coworkers before you sign off for the night, and know that everyone will see it. With Skype we didn't have that guarantee.

<comment><USER20> Ahhhh, gotcha. I see what you're getting at now.

It's kind of odd that they don't - messages are stored server side (have a bunch of conversations and then sign into an empty skype elsewhere - <USER2> chats are synched). You'd think this would be trivial to add.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Just so I understand this: they're switching from direct P2P messages between users (like MSN), to routing the messages through their own data centers first (like Facebook)?

So in theory this will prevent any messages ever getting lost en route to the recipient?

I can't tell you how many messages have gone undelivered between my friends and I when we used to use MSN messenger exclusively (even happens once or twice on Skype), causing serious breakdowns in communication. ("Did you get that message? Did you get that message?)

I always wished they'd switch to this architecture.

<comment><USER22> Is MSN P2P ? It's been a long time (like.. oh. 7 years maybe ?) since I've used it, but iirc it was centrally routed. Only some things like file transfers were P2P.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> When I had a fixed IP address and no NAT between the internet and my PC, I regularly caught Skype promoting me to supernode and using a serious part of my bandwidth. It made me get into the habit of quitting Skype unless I wanted to make a call. Perhaps I can keep it running now.

</comment><comment><USER24> What alternatives to skype exist? Something that does voice, and not likely to invade my privacy.

<comment><USER25> I would recommend looking at something like Mumble <http://mumble.sourceforge.net/>

Assuming you are concerned about the code you run, the location you run it in, etc. Does not provide encryption to my knowledge, but VPN can solve that.

If you are looking for something more robust that can interconnect with telecom stuff, I'd suggest <http://www.freeswitch.org/> or <http://www.asterisk.org/>

<comment><USER10> Mumble requires a server.

<comment><USER25> I don't know of any truly distributed encrypted voice systems you can trust out there. Hosting your own server for a service seemed like the next rational way to solve the persons question.

<comment><USER26> Try not to think in terms of server and client being separate machines. Or thinking that a server needs to be complex or able to handle an unlimited number of nodes. It's possible to be both a client and a server. And that is in fact what Skype was doing. Some clients were also functioning as supernodes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> With IP6 supernodes won't be needed for A/V traffic. Supernodes are only needed for NAT hacks.

Skype succeeded because it worked in many different network environments. As contrasted with h323 and sip. Just to remind.

<comment><USER4> Think again; firewalling and NAT are coming to IPv6 whether they're needed or not.

<comment><USER28> Who has ever said IP6 didn't need firewalling? That sounds insane... And where is this IP6 NAT you speak of??

<comment><USER29> All the enterprises that have deployed in RFC4193 space are using IPv6 NAT. It's been available in OpenBSD (a popular IPv6 Firewall/NAT device) for several years. If cisco hasn't deployed it yet in their ASAs, they will soon.

Enterprise cannot leak their internal addresses, and, if they do, they want it to be something that nobody can make use of/route to.

<comment><USER27> Frankly speaking I'm not familiar with IPv6 NAT.

So to hide IPv6 corporate network structure it is necessary to send outside all IPv6 packets with one global address. Is this an only option?

It should be possible to hide internal network structure with some address shuffling techniques.

<comment><USER29> IPv6 NAT (or, more precisely, PAT/NAPT) is pretty much identical to it's IPv4 ancestor. One external (globally routable) IP Address which represents the entirety of the internal IP address space. If you are on a corporate LAN, and your IPv6 address is from the RFC4193 range (it starts with "FD" e.g. FDC2:D343:1234:5678:..." ), and, you are accessing IPv6 resources outside your company, then some kind of PAT/NAT/Proxying is taking place.)

I'm sure it will be very popular.

<comment><USER30> The brilliant and problematic property of the translation (and why I think it will catch up) is that it allows to easily make your today's problems someone else's problems five years down the road. Noone gives a ding about what happens in five years in one's network - let alone the larger internet.

BTW, next time you talk with the "address-hiding security" fans, check what result they get from <http://panopticlick.eff.org/> \- very curious!

<comment><USER29> I'm one of those "address-hiding security" fans - I've architected and deployed more than 7 million (currently operational) IPv6 nodes, 100% of them in RFC 4193 space. We have many layers of security. Link Layer Security, Application Layer Security, Firewall Security, IPsec Security, App Transport Security in addition to the non-routability security.

I've never understood security professional who turn their nose up at the usefulness of using a non-routable IP address in your environment. It's always seemed self evident to me, that putting your resources on something like "192.168.1.5" - on an internal network, in addition to all of the other steps you take, would be yet another layer of defense that makes an attackers life difficult. And, in an enterprise environment, I would rather optimize for security than ease of two-way communication with external entities.

<comment><USER28> Do you really NAT all those meters though? It seems much more likely to me that you only have one or two specialized ALG's running.

One to many NAT really makes an attackers life easier in a lot of ways - <USER3> least as far as computer networks that support active users. NAT makes it much easier to hide from flow analysis and IDS and the proliferation nat traversal and tunnels to escape NAT make it much harder to spot rogue traffic. Lets not forget the classes of attacks that private v4 space has eased like DNS rebinding and home router attacks.

It's interesting, the only network I knew of that was ip6, aggressively secured and that many nodes is DISA which definitely doesn't allow any public network traffic - and yet uses global address space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I had my account hacked, and it also happened to a friend a few weeks ago (and i m unable to reclaim it because they ask for the day i registered). Is it possibly related to the transition?

</comment><comment><USER32> I just wish they would update their Linux client.

<comment><USER33> same here. I hope linux boxes save Microsoft some money and stability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> So, Microsoft would use Linux boxes..

<comment><USER35> When they bought hotmail, it took them years to migrate off the freebsd boxes that was running it -- they had several failures, and when they finally succeeded, they needed several times as many NT boxes as the original BSD boxes.

I would guess that the supernode software was written by skype long before the acquisition (they were running their own supernodes, despite what the article claims -- although not as many, and most supernodes were users), and microsoft hasn't had the chance or the reason to port them to Windows yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Let's hope this at least makes user presence more accurate. I'm doubtful.

</comment><comment><USER37> Everything Skype does will soon be replaced by WebRTC anyway.

<comment><USER38> How soon?

I presume you mean this - <http://www.webrtc.org/>.

Is it just a more simple way of setting up chatroulette style sites only using browser native programming rather than relying on Flash?

<comment><USER39> It allows you to do the same thing Skype does. It uses a server (supernode) to make P2P connections (via SDP signaling) between web browsers. I can assure you, it can be used much like Skype is used.</comment></comment></comment>


Reddit just passed Facebook as #3 most popular website in US - <AUTHOR> https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/US <comment><USER2> The biggest value gain from Reddit, to me, is the ability to centralize effectively around different hobbies and activities. In the past, if you wanted to find an online community for a movie or a game, you had to find a forum for that community. Finding forums that are well managed and capture a good segment of the community is hard -- and Reddit just becomes a default place to look now.

Let's say a new TV show starts airing, and you really like it and want to discuss it more. You can probably bet there's a subreddit for it, and in that community, a ton of people interested in it. You can bet there are threads for discussing it in other parts of Reddit too. Worst case, you can make one yourself.

This is something that everyone has in common. Everyone has a community they want to "be apart of" and Reddit lets you express yourself to those communities without having an identity tied to that community. There are groups on Facebook, but it's so tied to you that it's hard to just be a part of a community. On Twitter, people tend to congregate around others in their interest domain, but by default, all posts go everywhere. Someone into a show on Twitter is going to dilute their feed and have a similarly diluted feed if they discuss it. In contrast, a subreddit is a concentrated mass of people around a topic.

I don't really get much value outside of this centralization. The default subreddits are too general for my taste, so I don't subscribe to many. But for the 80-90 different topics and communities I like to see, it's great.

<comment><USER3> I think it's okay to some extent but I find that forums definitely are a much better resource and controversial threads or posts in forums don't get buried or hidden by a downvote. Some of the most humorous threads you'll read would have had a -inf rating and thus never seen on reddit.

To me, reddit seems a great way for a community to reinforce groupthink.

Instances I can think of are forums for motorcycles, cars, photography, and certain tech forums. The ability to nest down by topic rather than having one giant page for say all of BMW cars is what I like about forums. /r/BMW is basically worthless to me as it's just picture sharing. I also dislike reddit because it's hard to remember a name constantly. It's easier when there's a little profile picture next to the name. You go, "oh yeah, that guy. He's helpful." You remember those posters more often.

Never been a big fan of reddit as it feels pretty shallow in comparison to forums and getting to actually know fellow members decently feels rare.

<comment><USER4> While it is true that sometimes valid, yet unpopular, opinions get downvoted and buried, most of the times the things getting downvoted and buried are simply comments or opinions that are worthless. They are either trolls, racist, or derogatory comments that I WANT to have hidden from my view.

I think the upvote/downvote system is what makes reddit so popular, since it acts to filter out the useless comments that often fill up other forums.

Unless you have VERY active moderators in those other forums, you will be inundated by useless comments.

Now, reddit's system is not perfect, but the hiding of some comments is certainly a feature and not a shortcoming of the platform.

<comment><USER5> >They are either trolls, racist, or derogatory comments that I WANT to have hidden from my view.

This view is pretty naive. I suspect you just don't hold any opinions against the groupthink of the subreddits you participate in.

<comment><USER6> I think when its moderated away, it often shows bias. But when its downvoted away, in subreddits which have constituency that shows proper reasoning skills, I tend to agree that its all about quality of the comment.

A controversial comment does in fact command a higher burden of proof. Thus the comment has to be of even higher quality. And when it is, I feel it survives the downvotes.

At least I've generally been able to go against the group think and survive downvotes. But generally you need a clear argument, have a real point, and not show bias.

Now, it won't always fly, but I think high quality controversial comments can.

<comment><USER5> Well they can't unless there are no other groupthink comments present. By definition a controversial comment isn't getting upvotes from a significant portion of the group so any regular "good" comment will quickly push it down to the bottom.

If the majority of your group is rational, a rational comment will not be controversial even if the view is unpopular. However, the vast majority of the population is not rational when it comes to reading unpopular opinions and that shows in every subreddit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Keep in mind:

1) Most Facebook users use the app, not the website, which Alexa doesn't track (Which is also why Facebook doesn't fear commonly used ad blockers).

2) Alexa uses a number of metrics to rank sites, including pages visited. Reddit users load many more individual pages than FB users.

In reality, Reddit is nowhere near close to the traffic and engagement leviathan that is Facebook.

<comment><USER8> plus a lot of Facebook users concerned about their privacy installed some third party script blockers. They are probably now below Alexa's radar

<comment><USER9> I would hazard a guess that percentage-wise more of Reddit's users are savvy enough to install script blockers than Facebook users are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Reddit works because it's anonymous, information-dense and relatively ad-free. Change any one of those three and the user base will abandon you.

It's been Reddit's dilemma since the beginning: you can't monetize a toxic user base that has total freedom. Sure you can try to drive away the toxic users, but it turns out that those toxic users are also pretty influential in non-toxic aspects.

I'm still skeptical of Reddit's ability to turn a profit. But as a community platform it's the best out there IMO.

<comment><USER11> > Reddit works because it's anonymous, information-dense and relatively ad- > free.

Reddit is none of those now. It's not anonymous ( they track your identity and feed it to the government ). You may be "anonymous" to fellow users, but not anonymous to authorities. It isn't information dense. It's propaganda dense. Almost all the content there now is government, media, ngo, etc propaganda. As for ads, check out the videos, movies, music, etc subs when a particular movie, album, etc comes out. The frontpage will be littered with ad-like submissions ( aka ads ).

Reddit is 80% government, politics and news propaganda and 20% ads ( movies, music, etc ). I think you are confusing the reddit of 2011 with today's reddit.

> It's been Reddit's dilemma since the beginning: you can't monetize a toxic > user base that has total freedom.

Actually reddit could and did monetize "toxic content". How do you think reddit has been around for nearly 13 years? And once again, you are confusing reddit of 2011 to reddit of 2018. Today, reddit isn't any more "toxic" than twitter, youtube, facebook, etc. Reddit is heavily censored. Besides, on social media, you don't monetize content, you monetize eyeballs/clicks/data points.

> I'm still skeptical of Reddit's ability to turn a profit.

Do you really think reddit is unprofitable? Let me guess, you think that youtube is not profitable right? You think these companies have been around for more than a decade because they are not "profitable"?

Their "hollywood" style accounting may make it seem like they are not profitable, but these companies are incredibly profitable. It's why youtube has a valuation over $100 billion and reddit's valuation is in the billions.

> But as a community platform it's the best out there IMO.

Have to disagree with you there. Any garden variety forum is better than reddit. Also, reddit stopped being a community a long time ago.

I've stopped using it because it's all political nonsense or advertisements.

<comment><USER12> > Reddit is 80% government, politics and news propaganda and 20% ads ( movies, > music, etc ).

I am a heavy Reddit user and I don't notice any of these things, except when I specifically go looking for them. Curate your subreddit list and unsubscribe from all the default subs - they are all garbage, and that isn't even Reddit's fault, it's just inevitable once they reach a certain size.

<comment><USER11> > I am a heavy Reddit user and I don't notice any of these things

You don't see politics related content on reddit daily? I used reddit since reddit was days old ( years before the digg migration ) so maybe we visited different websites.

> Curate your subreddit list and unsubscribe from all the default subs

That defeats the point of reddit doesn't it? Or what made reddit great. I never used reddit to be part of a bubble. Not only are default subs a bubble today, reddit itself is a bubble.

> and that isn't even Reddit's fault, it's just inevitable once they reach a > certain size.

Actually it is reddit's fault. When they allowed and encouraged censorship, it allowed a small faction of political and news media/ngo affiliated mods to turn subreddits into their propaganda platform.

<comment><USER13> How do you avoid being in a bubble? Usually of your own creation. Whether it is curating the subreddits you see, or selecting the news sites you visit, you are only ever going to see a tiny fraction of what's going on in the world.

I skip pretty much all the political and news subreddits and stick to the focused communities that match my interest. Things like r/3dprinting, or r/omscs, etc. I find most communities are decent as long as they're not enormous. Any significant political content and I bail, I am just too tired of being reminded how horrible many people are.

<comment><USER11> > How do you avoid being in a bubble?

Simple. By exposing yourself to a variety of ideas, opinions, viewpoints.

>Whether it is curating the subreddits you see, or selecting the news sites you visit, you are only ever going to see a tiny fraction of what's going on in the world.

Hence why I never subscribed to a subreddit...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have recently created a software package and wanted a forum to have my users post "fun" stuff that is not strictly technical since it's sort of a hobby. I have decided that it is way too tedious to host my own forums, so I chose a middle ground that is to create a subreddit. It is working out pretty well.

There are be several reasons that hosting a forum/fanclub on Reddit is better than on Facebook. Facebook mandates real name use, one username for everything that not everyone is comfortable with, I'm sure everyone on HN is already aware of that. But I think there is another subtle reason.

In the past, I have relied on Facebook to host another hobbyist project, and it was super active. I thought what is more convenient than having one place to notify users about the ongoings and stuff and plus having a mobile app that kicks ass, right? It turned out, after a while, the group died. No one would interact with our news anymore, even when we don't spam them with junk news. I think the subtle reasons is that Facebook is way too aggressive on interaction. Maybe something exciting is happening and many people flock to comment on it, and so Facebook spams everyone with notifications and emails about the current ongoing that many of the users don't care about. If a user gets annoyed and decides to mute the group, then I will lose a good, caring person forever. Reddit has no such jealous nudging mechanism, the user has to explicitly check that subreddit to know. So the participation becomes much more passive and the user can choose to update about the ongoings at their own convenience.

It turns out being more gentle for hobbyist groups wins over being aggressive. Not that I only have those two choices, though...

<comment><USER15> A lot of that may be due to the way Facebook has changed their algorithms in the last few years. I know that both Pages and Groups that don't pay for engagement have had huge issues with their content no longer showing up in follower's feeds. Could be that rather than users "ignoring" the group

</comment></comment><comment> rc-1140 Reddit has always been a strange place to me, even as it has grown to be a cornerstone of socialization on the internet. I didn't grow up with it, I'm still not a huge fan of the layout even after the redesign, the way comments work still annoys me, and there are still plenty of stereotypical Reddit users that I do not want to associate or be associated with. However, I can no longer deny that it serves no purpose or that it is arbitrarily bad: it has a bevy of information I simply can't get anywhere else, "everyone" uses it in some manner so it's not an unknown in conversation, and it's got plenty of niche communities that might appeal to my interests.

In the process, it's eaten up all sorts of one-off forums and communities that don't wave the Reddit flag because it's just way easier to make a Reddit board for your interest/community. Reddit also doesn't have cute features like emoticons, their markdown isn't as intuitive as BBCode tags to me, and the versatility of a given Reddit board is limited to what can be done with CSS and each board's Wiki. Files have to be hosted elsewhere (game mods, game recordings via SourceTV and similar, etc.), though this isn't anywhere near as big of a deal as I'm making it.

Am I joining the e-Dinosaur ranks?

<comment><USER16> Restricting CSS and wikis to be standardized is fantastic - it means that mobile users and desktop users might actually get to see the same subreddit.

<comment> rc-1140 For my interests, I guess I can't see the value in a mobile user; maybe in some really one-off cases in my interests it would be prudent for a unified view? The most I've seen a Reddit board do is have fancier sidebar links. My thoughts when it comes to having differentiated Reddits are forum-like features such as shoutboxes, hyper-specific file uploads, or even flat-out disabling Karma on that board (dunno if that one is already possible).

Sure I can have a forum with all of these features, but not the ease of use or traffic that Reddit gets. Like I hope I got across in my previous post, still undecided and hesitant on Reddit as a whole, even to this day.

<comment><USER17> The value of a mobile user is that a huge proportion of social media usage comes from people using their smartphones. I appreciate the quirky designs for a few subreddits (r/mildlyinfuriating is a standout), but I have my user settings configured to ignore custom CSS on desktop, just for ease of use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What surprises be about reddit is that they get advertisers and ads while having one of the largest porn communities.

No one talks about this, and people are quick to say "Tumblr/4chan is just porn!", but not only is there a myriad of porn subreddits, many of them have OC content (people posting themselves), who thanks to reddit's new profile followers feature have a fanbase. One only needs to look at /r/sexsells (NSFW) to see this in action.

With the shutdown of Craigslist personals, people are (using and have been using) reddit for hookups as well. Crazy that they "get away" with the #1 killer of social media platform ad revenue.

<comment><USER19> If my understanding is correct, subreddits that host NSFW material (or at least, a substantial amount of it) get tagged and age gated. I imagine it's pretty easy to let advertisers opt out of those areas.

<comment><USER20> Well 4chan has safe for work boards as well but has a lot of trouble attracting advertisers even to those.

<comment><USER21> All blue boards mean is no actual porn or like, gore. You can post people in the underwear or other racy imagery that is not actually safe for work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> As a long, long time user of Reddit, it has been quite saddening to see its descent into the shallow, ultra-toxic husk of a corporate entity that it is today.

I'm not surprised by its popularity; it's a headline-surfers paradise, one in which you get feel good points for displays of virtue or shitposting easily digested content in an era of unparalleled narcissism and shortened attention spans.

All is not lost though; as the steaming pile of defecation of the internet it serves effectively in attracting and distracting basically those who would otherwise pollute the greater internet community with their presence.

So congrats, Reddit, I guess.

<comment><USER23> I'd like a reddit-like site that is more exclusive, it filters out the non- serious users with a yearly subscription fee of say $100.

<comment><USER24> "I'd like a reddit-like site that is more exclusive, it filters out the non- serious users with a yearly subscription fee of say $100."

This exists: [https://www.metafilter.com/](https://www.metafilter.com/)

The fee is $5 which turns out to be an insurmountable barrier for just about everyone. I personally like the site very much.

<comment><USER25> Metafilter has just about the highest groupthink quotient of any site I know of. Every single post ends up being about social justice, even when it isn't.

<comment><USER24> Agreed. I know that going in, though, and I still enjoy a lot of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Looking at Reddit data on BigQuery, the number of sitewide submissions has been growing steadily, despite the continual drama: [https://i.imgur.com/V8AptYU.png](https://i.imgur.com/V8AptYU.png)

Query to reproduce:

       #standardSQL
       SELECT TIMESTAMP_TRUNC(TIMESTAMP_SECONDS(created_utc), MONTH) as mon,
         COUNT(*) as num_submissions
         FROM `fh-bigquery.reddit_posts.*`
         WHERE (_TABLE_SUFFIX BETWEEN '2016_01' AND '2018_02' OR _TABLE_SUFFIX = 'full_corpus_201512')
         GROUP BY mon
         ORDER BY mon

<comment><USER27> The continual drama bothers only a relatively minor group of power users. A lot of newcomers to Reddit are casual submitters who neither know nor care about it.

<comment><USER28> I think the continual drama mostly bothers non reddit users and reporters

<comment><USER29> I haven't seen very negative coverage about the redesign, which I assume is what the "continual drama" is about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The also have the highest "daily time on site" of all the sites on the list by a good amount. (15m vs 10+m for runner-up Facebook)

That said, are these numbers reliable? And: Don't a lot of people visit FB via an app? I assume that's not counted here.

<comment><USER31> Same could be same for Reddit, and their app ecosystem.

<comment><USER32> I can't say I'm enthused by reddit-on-mobile. I stick to the desktop version. No idea if I'm alone in that...

<comment><USER33> Narwhal on iOS is pretty great. First-party reddit app is quite bad. Ironically reddit heavily pushes their official mobile app if you visit on mobile Safari.

<comment><USER34> These days Apollo seems to be the best reddit client on iOS: [https://apolloapp.io/](https://apolloapp.io/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I've recently been thinking that Reddit holds a lot of potential that has yet to be tapped or expired. The recent pivots post CEO change (mobile app, redesign, crackdown on garbage) speak to a future where currently fractured private communities such as those on Discourse or Slack can find a more publicly accessible presence. Facebook Groups, while immensely popular, currently falls into the same opt-in, zero-discoverability category.

The timing couldn't be better with the hollowing-out of Tumblr.

<comment><USER36> Facebook also tending to restrict access to information behind a login. Compared to reddit, which most of its content is publicly visible. They are built on two very ideas though.

The amount of times I have to ask someone on Facebook to get information for me is upsetting. To clarify, I'm banned from Facebook, not for being a dickhead though

<comment><USER37> In the old days we used to call that excommunication. To be banned from your social network is to be excommunicated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So this doesn't account for mobile native app usage, right? My impression is that mobile accounts for the _vast majority_ of Facebook users. In the 2018 Q1 earnings report, FB saiid that 91% of its ad revenue came from mobile:

[https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release- details/...](https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release- details/2018/Facebook-Reports-First-Quarter-2018-Results/default.aspx)

<comment><USER38> Because adblock is not available for apps?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Reddit's year-over-year growth has been outrageous. A year ago I categorized each of the top 5,000 subredddits, and many of them have gained 10x the subscribers since then. For a website that's been around for this long it's absolutely unreal.

<comment><USER40> Yeah congrats Spez.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Newsgroups took a dive when people moved to web forums, scattered all around the web.

Now people are moving back to a centralized website, reddit, that's interestingly almost like reading newsgroup threads.

Always thought the biggest problem with forums, not feeding RSS feeds back into newsgroups to keep it alive. But then, you couldn't reply, and was only for archival purposes.

At least with Reddit, I can use ifttt to push content into reddit, and make the discussion happen on reddit, in dedicated subs.

</comment><comment><USER42> tell me again how Alexa even gets this data these days? I mean ages ago it was thru sketchy browser addon toolbars etc, but seriously how many are installed now? Never really trusted their numbers

<comment><USER43> Same as how TV and Radio ratings are done - statistically significant sampling of the population via surveys: [https://support.alexa.com/hc/en- us/articles/200449744-How-ar...](https://support.alexa.com/hc/en- us/articles/200449744-How-are-Alexa-s-traffic-rankings-determined-)

<comment><USER7> The global data panel is not surveys of a random population. It's data collected from people using Alexa toolbars. It's highly weighted towards desktop traffic and the kind of people who install toolbars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Most of reddit content is facebook-tier entertaiment, I have to create a filter script to block thousands of irrelevant subreddits to increase signal- to-noise ratio. (filter script in question: [http://void.wikidot.com/code:reddit-contentfilter-user- js](http://void.wikidot.com/code:reddit-contentfilter-user-js) )

</comment><comment><USER45> Why doesn't reddit try to roll out an enterprise product?

I'm sure a lot of companies would be willing to pay to have an interface like reddit internally. Most current solutions for this problem aren't very good and I feel like reddit could be a good alternative. (not the redesign though, loading times on that would make it basically unusable)

<comment><USER46> About 6 years ago we had a self hosted reddit that someone hacked to hook in to our ActiveDirectory.

It's the best QA/Wiki/Group communication tool I've ever used at a company.

I've thought a few times that you could build a startup on selling a modified version of open source reddit to enterprises. (Not sure how much of reddit is open source anymore though.)

<comment><USER47> How does this solution compare to, say, Slack in your experience?

<comment><USER46> It's much better for threaded discussion.

If I post an interesting article in our team slack room, if people aren't actively discussing it, it gets lost very quickly. The threading in slack never seems to attract people's attention (but that may be just people on my team ignoring it.)

With reddit, you can have discussions and sub discussions, and sub discussions if you really want to.

I actually left that company a couple months after they set up the reddit server so I'm not sure how it ended up being used or if it even was. When I was there we mostly used it for discussing interesting articles or projects that people came across. (Much like you'd use reddit for in general.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Reddit on mobile browser is the worst experience one can have. A very big chunk of the screen is hidden with "get the app". You click on the mini text and the you need to scroll down to dismiss the bar.

It has become similar with their new design, even on desktop platforms. "click here for old reddit or dismiss" and sometimes the old.reddit.com link has no underline with it, suggesting that a click there won't work.

</comment><comment><USER49> I don't know how it is for other countries outside the US, but in the Netherlands it doesn't add up at all. E.g. Russian social media site VK.com ranks #4 and another 5 Russian sites (in Cyrillic, which most Dutch people can't even read) decorate the top 20:

[https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/NL](https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/NL)

</comment><comment><USER50> The initial idea of Facebook is great. I can't exactly knock it when this site is heavily influenced. But the problem with having specific boards that satisfy every little interest is that an echo chamber effect often occurs. My karma on that site is so low, not because of trolling, but speaking my own opposing views. I'll never be able to post on a FreeBSD subreddit, claiming a specific case where I find Linux better suited. Or when I read the OpenBSD mailing list and post that Theo De Raadt needs to get a grip, when he rejects Rust because no core utilities have been implemented. Making points that radical are just asking for trouble.

It's a great way to collaborate with people within the same niche, but it's a clique. They only want to hear themselves talk. Believe it or not, despite 4chan's well known toxicity, boards like /g/, /adv/, and /mu/ are perfect examples of true anomity. Where specific interests are shared within threads of each board. They may come off harsh to the light hearted, but they're not afraid of opinions.

<comment><USER51> Side note, my understanding is not that OpenBSD rejects Rust due to "no core utilities have been implemented", but because it cannot bootstrap from a C compiler alone.

<comment><USER50> Do you have a link to that? So much for self-hosting.

<comment><USER51> What do you mean? Rust is self-hosting; that's exactly the issue. It's written in Rust.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I admit after reading this headline I was scratching my head as to what #2 could be. And then I looked and it was super obvious haha.

<comment><USER53> "You're Not Going to Believe Who is #2.."

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I'm really surprised Yahoo is #7, I thought Yahoo was all but dead.

<comment><USER55> Think of all the grandparents that have Win Vista / XP machines with IE defaulted to Yahoo.

Also, all the spyware/malware/adware seems to be wrappers around a Yahoo search for some reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> What's interesting to me is that YouTube is more popular than Facebook.

I realize that Facebook gets used a lot on mobile phones and that overall it's probably more popular. But it's still incredible that YouTube.com is more popular than Facebook.com.

That's just one of Google's properties. Google is basically dominating the web.

</comment><comment><USER57> Anyone interested in building an open source, add-free, Creative Commons- licensed (perhaps not the posts as these belong to users, but the posts in aggregate) copy of Reddit?

My ideal "Reddit" more closely follows the freedoms of Wikipedia / FOSS. Reddit currently allows 3rd party clients to have access, but I envision more - an analytics API, ML tools to train your own consumption / discovery agent about what you like, filter out noise (including comments!), etc.

Reddit functioned with a skeleton crew for awhile. A small team could subsist on donations and build something for the public good.

Something community owned and operated could be of tremendous value, and we wouldn't worry so much over its uncertain future.

Federation could even be built in...

<comment><USER58> The federation aspect is very interesting to me. Can you describe in more detail?

<comment><USER57> I imagine it would be similar to Mastodon, but instead of people being on a node, you'd have communities on a node.

One server might focus on the southeast, eg. /r/atlanta, /r/georgia, /r/falcons, etc. Another might focus on gaming, hosting subtopics such as /r/nintendo, /r/minecraft, /r/ps4, etc.

If you're on one machine, you can have it pull in discussions from other nodes. Or your client software might do that automatically for you.

Nodes might agree on a common short form namespace to refer to different communities, and we might even be able to bolt this on to existing systems, eg. /r/me_irl is Reddit, whereas /hn/show is "Show Hacker News". It doesn't necessarily have to be backwards-compatible with non-fedarated systems, but it could be.

I imagine single sign on, and good APIs for ingesting another community's or user's content. Ranking metadata can also be supplied by the host community, but local communities or individuals can apply their own transformative equations on top of them.

<comment><USER59> I was just thinking of something exactly like this. I started my own nas in my basement using yunohost and I really think self hosting on old hardware and federation could finally help decentralize the internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Anyone know what reddit's DAU is?

They used to publish this publicly ([https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/about/traffic](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/about/traffic)) but since trying to become a real business and monetize they have since taken that down.

edit: I see from [https://web.archive.org/web/20170507102752/https://www.reddi...](https://web.archive.org/web/20170507102752/https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/about/traffic) on 2017/5/1 they hit 1M DAU.

</comment><comment><USER61> Eh. Reddit's userbase is increasingly younger (have you seen the home page while logged out lately?) and they can't really monetize them. Sure, they have contracts with pizza and soda companies in the US, but that's it.

Recently they've been trying to "Facebook-ize" their UX, they gather a lot more data, implement affiliate links and a _lot_ more logging, but it's still not going far because the last of their adult users are leaving the site. At least this was my experience with Reddit in the past 2 years or so.

I only go back to look for very specific things and leave afterwards.

</comment><comment><USER62> I wonder how much traction a lightweight Reddit with a nice clean html interface would get.

Something like HN but with unlimited categories, not just all/show/ask.

I would _love_ such a thing. For me, Reddit already was on the edge of being too bloated before the redesign. Now I barely use it anymore. Before the redesign, I was on HN like 10 times a day and on Reddit 5 times a day or so. Now I use Reddit maybe once a day. And I always have this 'Uh oh this is going to be annoying. Do I really want to check it?' feeling.

<comment><USER63> I think you need a pretty significant community size to make the 'subreddit' model work. It's kind of a 'chicken or the egg' problem. I believe reddit didn't even offer subreddits initially.

<comment><USER62> Maybe. Then starting with just a few categories and slowly adding more might be a good approach.

<comment><USER64> You mean like 4chan? Also you can make your own reddit client, it has a pretty open API. So, you can make your own reddit client looking like HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Reddit frightens me way more than Facebook ever did. Reddit gives the impression of what ideas are popular with its rating and comment system. But those systems are remarkably easy to manipulate.

Imagine a Russian troll farm operation making a certain favored candidate look far more popular than he is, for example. Or a corporation rallying fake support around a piece of legislation.

Sock puppetry on an industrial scale could pose a serious threat to our democracy. Reddit needs to figure out how they could mitigate that threat.

</comment><comment><USER66> More surprising is that yahoo is #7! I might be out of touch but I can't think of a single person that uses yahoo, maybe it might be the default homepage on my grandmas computer...

<comment><USER64> I've never seen anyone who used Yahoo too. I've seen one or two people who used Bing and even Yandex (lol) but no Yahoo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> The sourced link states that Facebook as 7,127,042 sites that link to it. Seems excessive. I often find sites linking to Amazon (824,044), Youtube (2,722,482), Wikipedia (1,928,776), Imgur (172,079) but rarely to Facebook.

Maybe this has to do with Facebook's plugin/commenting system that tracks across the web(?). Possibly social networks cross-supporting eachother, that is... twitter (5,421,978) linking to Facebook and _vice versa_.

</comment><comment><USER68> Alexa ratings are based on people who run the Alexa toolbar. Which is dominated by webmaster types who care about Alexa.

Who are more likely to be redditors than the average user.

</comment><comment><USER69> Reddit is super valuable from the perspective of being able to poll a "hive mind" specialized in a certain thing about best practices and ideas. e.g. I want to learn more about making EDM, more about photography, more about shibari etc. Usually the advice is pretty decent between beginner and intermediate level, for the high end super-custom guidance usually it falls flat.

</comment><comment><USER70> Reading Reddit is like reading an article in a newspaper on a subject you are well versed in ... Then you read about something you know nothing about - while having the ability to upvote/downvote, and happily vote, even if you are not really qualified, and have now forgotten that the facts are probably backwards or wrong.

</comment><comment><USER71> The Alexa statistics look suspect in some countries. The top 10 most popular websites in the Netherlands [1] includes 3 Russian websites, with Vk.com at #4.

[1] [https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/NL](https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/NL)

</comment><comment><USER72> I gave up on Reddit a while ago because it is such a massive time-sink. Kills productivity like no other. Atleast Twitter is short and digestible. Reddit can eat entire days.

But now I want to come back and see if I can strike a balance. Can anyone recommend great focused subreddits to keep my frontpage junktainment-free?

<comment><USER73> Your frontpage is junkfree after you unfollowed all the defaults and blocked the ads. After that, it's literally empty.

Now follow subs on topics you are interested in. I do it that way and I only have to unfollow in very few cases due to a lack of moderation or an usergrowth that brings in the masses.

I also avoid threads that get discovered by an audience beyond the initial subreddit it was posted in. That's easy to notice as conversation immediately stops and mindless chain commenters make karma rain over each other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> No disrespect to Reddit, but that's __a lot__ of visitors + page views for what a fair percentage of the population might not be aware of (in a FB, etc. sort of way).

Maybe I'm not questioning Reddit's "fame" per se, but the validity of the algorithm that puts them at #3.

Perhaps it's just me?

</comment><comment><USER75> An interesting part of it is the low number of references from outside sites. Reddit is amazing for concentric closed tribes with occasional ripple-like effects in the main page from some niche subreddits. Is this the real hivemind of a big chunk of mankind?

</comment><comment><USER76> Wow, the _Daily Time on Site_ is the best in top 50. I've always felt they sold early.

</comment><comment><USER77> Says more about the stagnation of the Web than the rise of Reddit or the fall of Facebook. Facebook has market-leading apps. People are getting their Facebook through apps, not Web. Meanwhile, until very recently Reddit's app was a joke.

</comment><comment><USER78> I don't use FB at all, IG once or twice a week, SC a few times a months when I eat out nice or do something super cool worth sharing.

I use reddit every day and sometimes night. Favorite website of all-time.

</comment><comment><USER79> It also has by far the most daily pageviews per visitor, about 3x more then the top others (9.7 vs 2-3). Only xvideos.com the 2nd most popular adult site tops that, but close (10.56).

</comment><comment><USER80> Side effect of people migrating to Facebook Mobile while reddit is still more popular on desktops?

On Google's Play Store, Facebook is said to have 76 million users. Reddit has only 630k users.

</comment><comment><USER81> Isn't Alexa traffic counted by its toolbar?

So this is not really accurate data all. It only comes from people who have the toolbar installed. Which aren't many.

Facebook is still way more popular probably.

</comment><comment><USER82> Is it interesting that people spend the most time on Reddit than on every other website in the list? Even more than xVideos (which is #2)

</comment><comment><USER83> And according to the same link Reddit is first in terms of daily time on site, which apparently is extremely valuable in the ads world.

</comment><comment><USER84> Facebook no longer has the same purpose as it started. Reddit on the other hand it's still true to its purpose. Free, open, and fun.

</comment><comment><USER85> Unfortunately they may think that it was because of the redesign.

joking, joking, well kind of. yeah, no, the redesign is awful...still.

</comment><comment><USER86> This is less about reddits sudden greatness and more about the canis familiaris that faceache have been fornicating

</comment><comment><USER87> How do they sort this? It is astonishing to me that they measure ~75% more time spent daily on Reddit.

</comment><comment><USER88> I've never heard of diply or providr. Everything else on the top 50 I'm at least aware of.

<comment><USER46> Diply is one of those horrible list aggregator websites. I see ads for it on facebook constantly. Generally it's just a list of 10 things from an AskReddit thread.

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> What does it mean by popularity? Number of visitors? Number of visitors x time spent on site?

</comment><comment><USER90> It's strange to see GitHub so high up there. I wouldn't have thought it plausible.

</comment><comment><USER91> I didn't realize Quora was so incredibly dependent on search...even more so than Yelp.

</comment><comment><USER92> What surprises me is now far down PornHub is on the list. Reddit way sticker than PornHub!

</comment><comment><USER93> How much of this is due to FB's migration to apps vs visits on the browser?

</comment><comment><USER94> That's crazy how Yahoo is at #7 and is widely considered a failure

</comment><comment><USER95> But which site gets more traffic from Russian bots, facebook or reddit?

</comment><comment><USER96> Love reddit. Don't understand why it took this long to pass FB.

</comment><comment><USER97> Why is Yahoo so far up the list? Do they have anything good anymore?

<comment><USER98> Mail, for one. People are very tied to their email address and don't like changing it.

<comment><USER99> I have three siblings and one parent still using Yahoo. The other parent uses Outlook. They just don't wanna deal with the hassle of moving to Gmail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> > Reddit works because it's anonymous, information-dense and relatively ad- > free. Change any one of those three and the user base will abandon you.

Usenet meets all three criteria, but it definitely is not used nearly as much as it was in the past.

</comment><comment><USER101> Facebook's app is popular. Reddit's app isn't.

</comment><comment><USER102> I love the fact that I can consume reddit via RSS feed.

</comment><comment><USER103> This data does not take into account mobile app usage.

</comment><comment><USER104> And yet, what's the relative valuations?

</comment><comment><USER105> Just as reddit is losing its charm to me...

</comment><comment><USER106> How the heck is Yahoo still in the top 10?

</comment><comment><USER107> Well reddit is pretty much the only site that I compulsively check.

I no longer care about Facebook.

Actually I prefer anonymous reddit users more.

</comment><comment><USER108> Funny how the figure is ultimately inversely proportional to quality of content. Sites begin wanting great content so they can end by attracting the users who make awful content.

</comment><comment><USER109> Reddit's also become the #1 white nationalist site on the Internet. And the admins don't seem to care.

Shut it down.

</comment><comment><USER110> It blows my mind that Facebook is even top 5. Do people actually spend time on the site?

<comment><USER7> Dude, 50% of the american population uses Facebook every single day of their lives (according to FB's quarterly statements, which would be a serious crime to lie on).

<comment><USER111> I think he was making a distinction between the app and the site. AFAIK, most Facebook users utilize Facebook primarily through the mobile app. If you look at Google trends[0] for Facebook, you'll notice a linear decline since 2011. I believe this is due to the onset of the Facebook mobile app, but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

[0] [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=f...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=facebook)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER112> Thx to Aaron.

<comment><USER113> I am still sad about how corporate greed caused his death

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why did it take so long?

</comment><comment><USER114> Now the NSA will collect data from Reddit.

<comment><USER22> >Now

You'd have to be very naive to believe the intelligence agencies haven't been tapped into Reddit for a very long time already.

If JTRIG is active on Flickr[0], you can be damned sure they're all over Reddit.

0: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Threat_Research_Intellig...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Threat_Research_Intelligence_Group)

</comment></comment><comment><USER115> I avoided Reddit for many years - for no good reason mind you, I just didn't "get" it. Now I do and I am a big fan.

</comment><comment><USER116> Reddit has the illusion of anonymity which gives its users a false sense of privacy so they can act the way they truly are (parallels to Westworld if you watch the show).

It would be incredibly easy for Reddit to de-anonymize its user base, the same way Facebook was trying to do with medical metadata, and sell that info (at least for the US users, given GDPR in EU now)

</comment><comment><USER117> Reddit is going down.

<comment><USER118> Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

<comment><USER119> After all, this isn't reddit, right? :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER120> Reddit is quickly becoming a tool for the majority on the site to suppress minority on the site's opinions. Until a viable solution is created to promote diversity of thought it will always suffer from this problem. Reddit is just as bad of an echo chamber as facebook. Please everyone who read stuff posted on reddit, engage in critical thinking after each article you read.

<comment><USER121> I laid out some ideas what appears to be 79 days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16570017](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16570017)

In a nutshell, one of key aspects of the reddit system is that an upvote arrow affects everybody equally, so the majorities affect whether something is negative or positively rated. When you take that into account for where and whether you show a post, the net effect is that at scale you pretty much guarantee that the majority within a given community can suppress the minority. The majority may not even have to necessarily _try_ ; it's something built in to the system, even before we get into matters of people deliberately trying to game the system.

Systems like Slashdot, HN, and Reddit try to fix that either with human moderation or a variety of heuristics to try to minimize the impact ("that looks like a voting ring, let's make its votes worth less", etc.), but another alternative is to make the upvotes not be universal anymore. Instead of an upvote meaning "I think everybody should see this more", it could be rewritten to mean "I think I want to see more of this poster". It's more math, but we have bigger computers now. As a side effect, it's robust against a lot more attacks, though I don't guarantee it wouldn't have other weaknesses.

<comment><USER122> That would be done much more effectively using a graph database, as it would simplify the calculations immensely. But I think the reason people aren't doing this is certainly the computation required.</comment></comment></comment>


What's New in PHP 8? - <AUTHOR> https://kinsta.com/blog/php-8/ <comment><USER2> Inline Exception throwing, named arguments, Finally!

<comment><AUTHOR> str_starts_with() and str_ends_with() . It's a little late, but okay. I can't wait for it to be released immediately.</comment></comment>


The Myth of the Full-stack Developer - <AUTHOR> http://andyshora.com/full-stack-developers.html <comment><USER2> What, in 2010, a full stack developer didn't need to understand UX? Did the provisioning layer somehow magically vanish in 2010?

Its a bunch of false comparisons.

The simple facts are this:

1) Full Stack Developer == Generalist [ Do lots of things; not 100% as fast or effectively as a specialist]

2) Specialty Developer == One area of profession-level competence [e.g. Front End Developers would need to go and start learning all the other areas/categories from essentially scratch since they haven't touched them at a profession level in years]

I'm not sure why people need to come up with a bunch of silly comparisons that are more complex than this and call generalists a "myth".

</comment><comment><USER3> What does "full-stack" mean in 2014? What it's always meant.

A full-stack developer is a developer who sees something that needs to get done and does it, even if they currently don't "know how".

And these people do exist, and are every bit as valuable as you'd expect.

<comment><USER4> > does it

How? Especially if they've never learned the language/framework? This "Paul Bunyan" fairy tale of the "just do it!" hacker who can solve any problem no matter the odds just doesn't exist in real life.

<comment><USER5> Hello. I am this person. I am a generalist, I am not the best in any one area, but I have a broad range of skills across many domains. If I don't know how to solve a new problem, perhaps in a new domain, I will leverage the broad knowledge and learning skills to find out how to solve the problem. I won't be as fast as a specialist and there will be a greater risk of failure, but there is a good chance I will get the job done. I am not arrogant, I don't think I'm a genius, I don't think I am infallible. It's just that I am a generalist who likes to know a little about a lot, it's the way my brain works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The crux of the article is this:

 _" Do they believe they have familiarity with different layers, or true mastery?"_

Full-stack guys never (that I have seen) have mastery of all layers, but rather can perform at a reasonable level at all necessary layers to make an app happen. They might have mastery of a few layers, they might lean on infrastructure like herokou to cut out a section of the stack, whatever, but they can get it done.

They are also always scary smart, and scary employable.

</comment><comment><USER7> The idea of a "Full-Stack" developer brings to mind this:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competent_man](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competent_man)

In particular:

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." — Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

Except, of course, tied to software ...

<comment><USER8> For me it triggers a memory of this quote:

"Specialization is in fact only a fancy form of slavery wherein the 'expert' is fooled into accepting a slavery by making him feel that he in turn is a socially and culturally preferred—ergo, highly secure—lifelong position."

― Richard Buckminster Fuller

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> First "DevOps", now "Full-stack Developer". I'm kind of tired of these posts about labels. I would much rather work with someone who identifies as a full- stack developer, because I think it's a sign that they're genuinely interested in their field. My first impression of someone who solely does front-end or back-end work is that they're scared or unable to learn new things. It's not specialization, it's a lack of ability.

I didn't really choose to become a full-stack developer or get involved in dev-ops / IT / sysadmin work. It's just something you have to do when you work at a startup, because no-one else is going to do it. I'm really grateful for the time I've spent reading the Saltstack documentation back-to-front, learning how to set up RADIUS and EAP-TLS secured Wifi, setting up logging and error reporting tools, setting up DeployStudio, Munki and Boxen to provision new developer laptops, setting up the VPN, DNS, etc., even though that's not in my job description.

Anyway, we're hiring full-stack developers at ZenPayroll [1]. Come and work on some challenging problems with an awesome team!

[1] [https://zenpayroll.com/careers](https://zenpayroll.com/careers)

</comment><comment><USER10> The main argument in this article seems to be to define the term "full-stack developer" as someone who is equally good at all the different bits of the stack (or someone who is master in all of it). Then the conclusion is made that people who call themselves full-stack developers are not really full- stack developers, as they don't fit the definition.

However, most people disagree with that definition, and in fact use a definition that fits their own skills.

</comment><comment><USER11> Well, since a long time ago, i could not accept that some developers would title themselves as "Front-End Developer", or "Web Developer"...

It's like WTF!!! You are a Developer, why would you want to stay just in web development? if you're a developer you can move on anything you want anytime!! Why are you locking yourself just into "Web Developer"?

Well, that's my rage... Lots of answers from friends, basically, they are all afraid of tools they've never used, and they don't even bother to try them out.

I like to do any kind of work, from deployment scripts, load balancers, distributed computing, web front-end, desktop front-end, mobile, database, hell, i like to be part of all the entire project!! I've have a lot of luck because i've always been in small companies, and maybe we don't deliver the best solution, but the solutions work, and work really well, i have developed lots of systems, and they are not a headache to support, so i'm proud of what we have achieved...

But recently, when people ask you "what kind of developer are you", you can't just say "i'm a developer", because, i don't know why, but people assume that you don't know Web, SQL, FrontEnd, etc... And magically, a "Web Developer" is way better than just a "Developer". That happened to me lots of times, just because my title said "Developer", people that didn't knew me don't consider me for projects.

That's why i am now using the "Full-Stack Developer" title, you just can't use any other title on today's market. I don't want to be doing just "Web Frontend", or "Database Administrator", or "CI Manager"... Heck, i want to participate in all the project.

And i agree with other people here, a Full Stack doesn't needs to be a guru on every language/framework. You just need to know how to assemble everything to make it work. And it WILL NEVER be perfect, because requirements change everyday, but your stack can evolve to adapt to those changes.

Same goes for a "Frontend Developer"... A frontend developer can be really bad frontend developer, but he's a frontend developer because he wants to do only that and is happy whit that...

I believe a Full Stack developer is a guy that is not afraid to solve a problem in any stack of the system, not a guru or a genius.

Well, that's my point of view.

</comment><comment><USER12> 2014 is not any more difficult than 2010. If anything, it's considerably easier.

</comment><comment><USER13> Think of fullstack devs as smartphones: each function might not be as good as specialized devices (a real camera, large desktop screen, photoshop, a scientific calculator, etc), but having it all in a single device is not only convenient, it even opens up possibilities that wouldn't be available if the features weren't together on the same device, the same way fullstack devs might not be as good on all aspects a specialized devs on each topic (although we usually do also have deep knowledge on some of them), but they can also spot & enhance interactions between them.

</comment><comment><USER14> I consider myself to be a full stack developer. I started working on small layers like every developer. Eventually through need, knowdge transfer and bugs I developed the skills from hardware to software Linux/apache/mysql to code (I'm my case usually php) to HTML and CSS and js. With a variety of tools and frameworks along the way. These skills are required to face the variety of challenges and new projects that come. Not knowing how to configure apache would make me a worse developer.

</comment><comment><USER15> The idea that the 2014 stack is more complex than the 2010 belies the author's youth and lack of perspective. 2014 is not especially more complex than 2010. I mean granted there is more CSS and web technologies to know, that stuff is certainly moving faster than it did in say 2000-2004, and so there is a higher bar for what is possible. But the biggest difference between 2010 and 2014 is better tools. And to be perfectly clear, by tools I mean very broadly anything developers use to get the job done, languages, frameworks, browsers, services, etc. Developers weren't learning and mastering fewer things ten years, they were just mastering stupider things like IE6 layout bugs.

Assuming the same knowledge of contemporary tech, the 2014 developer can do more with less than the 2010 developer. The stack is only bigger if you have reason to make it bigger, which is far from a foregone conclusion. LAMP is more effective today than it was in 2010 because HTML/CSS/JS/PHP are better (and frankly LAMP was already moving off the bleeding edge a decade ago, not in 2010). Now obviously the development of JS frameworks and nosql databases has progressed significantly, so that potentially adds to the layers you can employee and the things to learn, but none of those things are required to be "full-stack". All that stuff could be done before, you just had to roll your own or use earlier-gen tech that was maybe not as optimal. Certainly heavy javascript was already well-entrenched by 2010.

The crux of the matter is defining "full-stack"? The author talks as if this is about being up to speed with all facets of the latest web tech, but that is a useless definition. There is simply too much tech now for anyone to know it all in any meaningful capacity. Of course I agree with the author that there are a lot of useless blowhards out there talking about being "full-stack" developers. This is because we are well into year 2 or 3 of "full-stack" being a cargo-culted buzzword that is latched onto by posers and wannabes from all walks of tech life.

But like all such overplayed ideas, "full-stack" has a legitimate origin. It comes from the fact that the web was really developed and evolved by two distinct sets of people. You had the programmers who were back-end focused (because javascript was not treated as a serious language for the first 10 years of its existence despite rapid ubiquity), and you had the web designers pushing visual design, first through HTML and then additionally CSS. It took a long time to close the gap between these two groups, and during that time, it was very rare to find anyone with any talent in web design who could program or vice-versa. In the mid-2000s once a few people started to achieve the requisite 10k hours of practice, true full-stack developers started to appear, and since then as the web became something that people had grown up with from early childhood, the number of people who built things end-to-end on the web only increased.

For a short time, "full-stack" was a pretty strong distinction because it meant a passion and focus on the web as a unique platform at a time when most top talent was immigrating from other disciplines. Today, however, everyone attending a bootcamp as a career move is training to be "full-stack" because that's simply what the HR people demand. It's completely orthogonal from whether someone is a good developer, and it's at least partially orthogonal from any list of particular skills—it just means someone can build both the front-end and back-end of a web app in some form; the specifics and expectations of which vary widely from job to job.</comment>


Ask HN: Network for hackers without the Recruiter Spam? Meet SubRoutin.es - <AUTHOR>

http://launch.subroutin.es
I've heard from friends/colleagues that the problem they have with networks like LinkedIn is that while they offer news on events, articles and of course meeting interesting people, it isn't too long before they're bombarded with recruiter spam.
SubRoutin.es will put the programmers and technical people right where they belong, at the forefront. It will be a platform to share what you're working on and discover just as much. And if a recruiter does manage to sneak his/her way on, then enough reports will get them booted right off.
Okay okay, not all recruiters are evil! the ones that provide value to the network won't find a hostile environment. There just needs to be a stop to being spammed with jobs that don't suit.
Of course every dev has gotta pay the bills, so a gig/job board will be the avenue for those looking.
If there's interest in a network where we can connect with other techies and share what we're working on and arrange meetups without the above hassles then I'd love to release it.
I'm trying my best to follow lean principles by putting a launch page up and making sure something is built that people want.
If you want to be one of the brave that get early access to the beta and shape what you want it to be, then sign up! <comment><USER2> Your website will not display without javascript.

What about privacy?

What will you do with the data that you gather? Sell ads? Sell the data itself?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi There, it's a launch page for now with launch rock. As for data, I don't believe in selling user data itself. I'd only ever consider selling intelligence based on machine learning which looks at the user base as a whole.</comment></comment>


Stochastic Weight Averaging in PyTorch: Improve Generalization in Deep Learning - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/timgaripov/swa <comment><AUTHOR> An easy way to improve predictive accuracy in deep learning.</comment>


Teamsters Tell UPS: No Drones or Driverless Trucks - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/teamsters-tell-ups-no-drones-or-driverless-trucks-1516795200 <comment><USER2> Buggy whip makers tell buggy mfgs "No motors, no batteries, no gasoline"

Seriously, do the teamsters not realize that if they cripple UPS's ability to compete that they'll just all be out of a job suddenly when UPS gets destroyed in the market? They need to figure out how humans can actually add value relative to the other options and implement those changes. They need to figure out how to long-term keep humans relevant to the delivery industry. These sorts of short-term hacks by the parasite will just kill the host.

<comment><USER3> Re: _" Seriously, do the teamsters not realize that if they cripple UPS's ability to compete..."_

If and when competitors have it and start hurting UPS's business, the teamsters may relax the request. What UPS should do is make sure the contract allows them to still do R&D and small-scale trials. If and when a competitor comes along that is a serious threat to UPS's business, the teamsters will probably relax the production-based automation clauses.

It's a compromise I think both sides would agree to. After all, they don't want to kill the hand that feeds them. The only actual thing UPS is sacrificing is being first-to-market with such automation. Just be ready to be 2nd.

<comment><USER4> You're assuming that the coordination costs and timescales of such a Teamsters / UPS agreement match the timescale of such a disruptive innovation arriving and putting UPS out of business. Historically that assumption is inaccurate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Here's an article on the same topic but with no login required.

[https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/24/labor-teamsters-want-to- ban-...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/24/labor-teamsters-want-to-ban-ups-from- using-drones-driverless-vehicles.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> Unless they get congress to pass a law to prevent shoppers from shipping via autonomous or drone vehicles all they will do is drive their company into the ground and themselves out of a job.

That said, companies do need to look at the morality of automating jobs away. Is there a social contract between companies and the population they serve? In a world where new jobs replaced old, the contract remained intact, in some form, but if now it's outright elimination without adding transformed jobs, there will likely be a breakdown.

</comment><comment><USER6> The future of delivery will be robotic.

1\. A robot arm using cameras, sensors, and a AI neural network, will unload a truck, and put it on the conveyor belt.

2\. Then the same AI robot arm will load a truck.

I predict that in the future, a delivery guy will drive his van to your neighborhood, where he will have 5 deliveries to make. He will drive to the center of all the customers. Then, 5 robotic dogs, will take the package to each of the 5 customers.

The robotic dog will scan the customer, get a face recognition for authorization, and a confirmation for hand-off.

Meanwhile, the delivery guy is sitting in his car twittling his thumbs, waiting for the robotic dogs to come back. Ten minutes later, the robotic dogs come back, they charge back up in their docking stations, and the driver goes off to his next destination.

The delivery guy will only be used to deliver extra bulky items, that the robotic dogs cannot yet handle. But future robotic dogs will be able to handle all kinds of bulky packages.

In 15 minutes, 5 packages got delivered. At a rate of 3 minutes a package. This is incredible, and it will allow UPS to increase their package delivery throughput.

Or, the driver will just drive closer to each of the customers. The robotic dog will deliver the package, while he drives to the next customer on the list. And when all packages are delivered on that route, then he'll come back and pick up each robotic dog, as they sit there waiting.

If the unions stop UPS from automating, then they're going to kill themselves. Another company will take over, and their robotic fleet will put UPS out of business.

They'll call themselves, the Robo Delivery Express (RDX).

And for some other scenarios, drones are going to start aerial delivery. These are more practical for suburban houses with a large front yard. You will need at least a 10x10 sqft area for aerial drone delivery. A mid-sized drone will fly to your house, and hover over the delivery point.

You will use your smartphone to authorize the hand-off. The drone gets the authorization to proceed. Cameras using an AI neural network, will scan the area to confirm safety, before initiating the delivery sequence, to make sure all is clear. Then a winch will wind down and gently put the package on the ground. Wind back up, take a last visual scan to make sure all is well, and then fly away.

The future is robotic. It is inevitable.

<comment><USER7> Why in the world would you need a nueral net to unload/load a truck?

<comment><USER8> Forklift driving? (I'm just spitballing)

<comment><USER7> OP was talking about a robotic arm to load/unload boxes onto a conveyor belt

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm all for capitalism and efficiency, but there really needs to be a more robust system to relocate and re-educate people who are displaced like this. Whether it be automation or any industry disruption in general. Massive tax breaks if you need to relocate or retrain maybe. Access to free-ish or maybe even subsidized education due to layoff. We need to make the human side of the equation in any job easier to flow from one region of the US to another.

I say this, but in the long term we should also be discussing what a "post- work" economy looks like when the machines ultimately take over everything and there is nowhere left to run...

<comment><USER10> There will never be a post work economy. If machines drive down the cost of labor then perhaps we will see rising inequality, but lower labor costs would put some machines out of business. From what I've observed though technology has made the world a much better place for all mankind. Some may be hurt on short timescales and we should work to improve that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Supposedly automation is innevitable, in order to maximize efficiency and profits.

However there is a cost, and long term it will be the ability to provide increasingly huge numbers of people with a job that can provide a reasonable standard of living, along with bread on the table and a roof over their heads.

At some point the huge majority "without", will act to regulate out of control change and enterprise which is not to their benefit, or that of their children. Revolution is not just a quaint concept limited to the past.</comment>


Try CleverScale, the 1st web acceleration PaaS - <AUTHOR> http://www.cleverscale.com

<comment><USER2> Looks like a really nice service! I'll definitely try it for my blog and well, it'll make me really happy if it makes it faster with a simple configuration!</comment>


Ask HN: Promote mobile app with no budget. Where to start? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Content marketing is a good place to start with no budget. Blog about what you are trying to achieve with your app.</comment>