tpeng · HackerTrans

11 years agodiscuss

See my reply to waterlesscloud for an explanation. There are some big problems in the defaults, particularly around political topics, however, these are not issues of scale. They are issues of diversity. Reddit will need to address the diversity issue in order to succeed.

tpeng

11 years agodiscuss

It's basically a mathematical guarantee. Reddit shows 200 comments by default, so if there are 20k comments, then you are roughly getting the top 1% of comments. If there are fewer than 200 comments, you are getting ALL the comments, basically unfiltered. I've also noticed that the best users make a greater effort on comments that may be read by a large number of users (granted, the average user probably does not)

Voting quality clearly goes up with scale. On a small subreddit, you can make a brilliant comment, and only one person votes on it and you are at score 0. On default subs, the voting tends to be more accurate (though with a populist/groupthink bias)

I think some are confusing comment quality with comment value. A really funny, but silly joke would be a high quality, low value comment. The default subs tend to be lowest common denominator subjects, like "cute" stuff and politics -- low value. Whereas niche subreddits are highly focused on your particular passions and interests. Niche subreddits have greater value to users, which is why they are also more valuable for advertising and monetization purposes.

At sitewide scale, the quality of existing niche subreddits would improve dramatically, and smaller niches that do not exist today as subreddits would gain sufficient scale to support independent subreddits. I think that these niche subreddits could support almost search keyword-like targeting (albeit with lower CPMs because no immediate indication of intent). Imagine native feed advertising volume with keyword-like CPMs.

Not that it's highly relevant, but I'm a developer of a popular reddit app for iOS.

tpeng

11 years agodiscuss

reddit has the potential to unlock a lot of value if niche subreddits can achieve critical mass. There are quite a few subreddits that could support highly targeted and valuable advertising. Comment and voting quality also appears to improve dramatically with scale; compare the quality of comments on default subs to niche subs. If niche subs can get that dramatic improvement in quality, reddit would also be able to attract much better demographics for commercial purposes

tpeng

12 years agodiscuss

The index fund is the greatest investing technology ever invented. The under-adoption of this technology is a behavioral problem. The solution definitely isn't additional layers of asset allocators taking fees on top of this.

I'm kind of confused by what Sam is talking about in the RFS about enabling lower cost index fund investing. VFINX has a minimum initial investment of $3,000 and minimum additional investment of $100. At 17 bps that's literally $5/yr. on the Vanguard S&P 500 fund. You are basically talking about a nominal cost to service accounts (send statements, support, backoffice, etc). It would be interesting to think about how technology can lower these costs, but cost isn't preventing anyone from participating.

tpeng

12 years agodiscuss

Many problems in AI, such as NLP, are AI-complete. While it's possible to solve subsets of the problem without creating a human level intelligence (and many companies have done so), these solutions do not "seem" very intelligent. Based on Sam's blog post it sounds like he does mean human-level intelligence. Which unfortunately does seem out of reach within our lifetimes though I hope to be proven wrong.