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posted by martyb on Sunday August 20 2017, @02:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the I-always-wanted-to-be-a-VJ dept.

Reddit will allow video uploads on certain subreddits:

Social news site Reddit today [August 17] announced the official launch of its video hosting feature, meaning users of certain pre-approved communities can now upload video directly to the site. The feature is already in place as part of a beta testing phase the company began conducting in late June with around 200 existing subreddits. Reddit says it's now ready to expand the feature to other communities, and that those interested can work directly with site moderators and the company's video team to enable the feature.

"We wanted to make sure we controlled the video experience, so we built this from the ground up with our in-house team," says Emon Motamedi, Reddit's product manager for video. "One of the big motivations of doing this was bringing more cohesion around the content and conversations."

Motamedi points to how most videos on Reddit are just YouTube links, or videos chopped up into GIFs hosted by third-party tools like Gfycat. This is usually a cumbersome process, and it's unfriendly to less media savvy internet users. A bigger problem is that it fractures discussion between where the content is hosted and where a user wants to discuss. Usually, Motamedi says, "you go to YouTube to watch the video and you come back to Reddit to comment." That's not ideal. "Because our platform has the best comments on the internet and because it's such a big use case for our users, we wanted to build that in-house," he adds.

The "anti-evil" team will have their work cut out for them.

Also at Reddit's blog and Ars Technica.


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday August 20 2017, @02:24AM (5 children)

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Sunday August 20 2017, @02:24AM (#556568) Homepage

    So is that a tacit admission that Google's Youtube censorship team is not good enough for Reddit?

    Reddit has been proven to engage in censorship and fuckery since at least the early Snowden days. Admittedly I haven't been there much, but if I do go, it's to find answers to questions -- and the results are just as good, if not worse, than Google searches.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 20 2017, @03:31AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 20 2017, @03:31AM (#556580)

      Stoopid biatchie says stupid things.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by richtopia on Sunday August 20 2017, @12:06PM (3 children)

      by richtopia (3160) on Sunday August 20 2017, @12:06PM (#556655) Homepage Journal

      It might just be providing a better user experience. For the few Reddits I browse it is distracting to have the external content in Youtube; namely clicking on the link takes you to Youtube then you have to go back for the discussion. Not exactly difficult but when you have many tabs open it is easy to get lost.

      I am curious how Reddit's finances look. Video hosting is much more expensive than their current text-based requirements, so either they are currently flush with cash and can take on additional burden or will need to identify new sources of revenue to finance the additional server cost.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 20 2017, @01:45PM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 20 2017, @01:45PM (#556670)

        This is definitely not the problem. Adding support for automatic inline embedding of YouTube links would be trivial. You can play/close/interact with the video inline with minimal development effort. See here [voat.co] for an example on Voat which is based on the Reddit interface. Same thing with images. And this has 0 server overhead. Reddit's UI is just poorly done and more geared towards commercialization (e.g. trending things popping up in the bottom right) than optimizing the user experience.

        • (Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday August 20 2017, @01:59PM (1 child)

          by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Sunday August 20 2017, @01:59PM (#556676) Journal

          Reddit Enhancement Suite also adds support for embedded YouTube IIRC, and non-embeddable YouTube videos (an option for the uploader) are a tiny minority on YouTube. Reddit's "you go to YouTube to watch the video and you come back to Reddit to comment" explanation doesn't make any sense.

          --
          [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
          • (Score: 2) by richtopia on Tuesday August 22 2017, @12:21AM

            by richtopia (3160) on Tuesday August 22 2017, @12:21AM (#557305) Homepage Journal

            A third party extension doesn't invalidate the argument. If anything it supports it: clearly there is motivation to streamline the viewing process and a workaround exists in modern browsers.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 20 2017, @04:44AM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 20 2017, @04:44AM (#556594)

    "Because our platform has the best comments on the internet and because it's such a big use case for our users, we wanted to build that in-house," he adds.

    Commenting is so good, in fact, that alternatives like voat [voat.co] spring up due to reddit censorship, even spawning websites to restore the posts removed by reddit's overzealous authoritarian moderators. [uneddit.com] And, Google autocomplete for "undelete" includes "undelete reddit" as the first result. [catbox.moe]

    In truth, they're hemoraging users and trying to use video as a retention isn't going to work. It's better to just move to a platform that's not run by ideologues with double standards. I.e., broadly interpreting rules to ban / remove any content right of Stalin while leaving radical SJW "anti-dissent" groups like "shit reddit says" run amok, and only removing pedophile groups after a Donald Trump subreddit uses their weight to draw enough attention to it. [vocativ.com]

    Clearly "best comments on the internet" [reddit.com] is purely subjective. Hey, who wouldn't want put their brand in the hands of a bunch of fickle radical censorious leftists, pedophiles and cannibals, amirite? Oops, you said the wrong thing and pissed off an extremist admin who supports antifa violence. There goes all your hard work. Well, at least you have proof it once existed from 3rd party undeletion sites... if the admin, u/spez, didn't edit your comments [reddit.com], that is. Wow! Comments so good they need to be edited by the staff. Amazing!

    This reddit video thing is really gonna going places, lemme tell ya. You just might not want to be where they go, is all.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 20 2017, @01:44PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 20 2017, @01:44PM (#556669)

      i thought the green place failed and that videos were a large part of that.

      But... uh I think I can see that the average redditor is not the average user of fine textual presentation.

      I rarely find something there, but often I find the same unanswered questions I had getting worse than 'enthusiast' answers.

      I guess the gems in the rough make it worth it, but really, if it takes more time to watch the answer than to read it, I am going to seek other answers. Videos have their place... but usually once a site starts embedding video content, the people that are smart and concise have fled and the executives will move forward with ad revenue generation from this new type of content. Everyone will be encouraged to help the monetization, because video ads pay far better than static photos and text...

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 20 2017, @01:47PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 20 2017, @01:47PM (#556672)

      Dude you did not even need to bring in politics AT ALL to make your point.

      introduction of video as a retention tool is only going to keep the lowest common denominator that is easily amused. pros will move elsewhere because they have less time to spend watching that stuff.

      when a simple text based inteface like reddit goes to video... it's like they forgot what their purpose was. and its not about evolving. there are other sites already that do that. they probably won't even source it in-house; 3rd party vendors will take your content generation seriously (as opposed to your privacy) and will be theirs to monetize forever, etc, even if they say you own it, you'll give them an indefinite license that extends beyond your death, etc.

      read those eulas

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 20 2017, @09:05PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 20 2017, @09:05PM (#556780)

      > broadly interpreting rules to ban / remove any content right of Stalin while leaving radical SJW "anti-dissent" groups like "shit reddit says" run amok, and only removing pedophile groups after a Donald Trump subreddit uses their weight to draw enough attention to it.

      Wait. Is Trump now considered a Stalinist, or are talking out of your ass and contradicted yourself in a single sentence?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @03:23AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @03:23AM (#556859)

        the conspiracy theory is that particular group is one of the largest active ones on the site. the theory goes they are using those numbers to pump up the rest of the site for sale to someone else. the_donald estimates it anywhere from 4 to 1 to 11 to 1 being shown on the counters but full on for the advert rates. reddit has basically tossed anyone who doesnt 'post left' to the_donald. they are hemorrhaging users because the screechy users are getting everyone banned who does not lock step into the correct thinking. the irony is 'the_donald' bans anyone who is not in lock step with their flavor of views. the only differences is the_donald is at least somewhat honest about it. at one point reddit was messing with the alg and made the whole site the_donald because reddit admins had screwed up.

        Wait. Is Trump now considered a Stalinist, or are talking out of your ass and contradicted yourself in a single sentence?
        maybe it was a typo run on sentence and you are just being a bit too nit picky because it may represent something you do not like? their point was reddit was getting all ban happy on other things they didnt like until the_donald pointed out 'hey you have a child pedo ring on your site'.

        lighten up francis.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @07:37AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @07:37AM (#556910)

      and only removing pedophile groups after a Donald Trump subreddit uses their weight to draw enough attention to it.

      So are they opposed to censorship or not? Because ideally, nothing would be removed. Don't claim to be anti-censorship when you're going on campaigns trying to get certain speech suppressed.

      I'm tired of scaremongering about pedophiles, terrorists, and the like, as if I should be afraid and outraged by the mere mention of those terms.

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