Can Steve Huffman Save Reddit from Itself? | Hacker News Reader

Can Steve Huffman Save Reddit from Itself?

nymag.com

39 pointscryptoz65 comments

I think reddit has the potential to turn into something really worthwhile, if they let it. But my personal opinion is they need to let the current culture go, and think more about what they want this site to be in 5 years, 10 years, 50 years.

What is their vision for social communications for the short, mid, and long-term future? Is it superficial communications and small discussions around niche interests? Or is more like the discussion boards as they existed, for example, in Ender's game, where where leaders of the world have serious talks about policy, politics, and philosophy, and invoke real change?

I mention the Ender's game boards specifically because it seems so easy to start to transition reddit towards something like that. Make karma worth something. Have karma split into types for entertainment vs. insightful commentary, and earn your way onto "serious" boards. Let the current site just be the starting point, but build a new tier above it, of more serious talk. Build your way up into a multi-faceted communication tool that can be taken seriously by all levels of society, while still leaving the light-hearted, superficial nature of its current culture intact for those who want it.

I have no idea what the reddit leadership desires... I am sure there are 1000 other directions it can be taken. But they need to pick a direction and start going there. Because right now, the site is growing in numbers, but stagnating by all other metrics.

What we're missing is a serious change in mentality. Internet Points/Karma and a different UI won't change that. We already have all the technology for such discussions, but no one is interested. The closest thing to serious public political discussions is happening in the House and Senate floor debates, or whatever is equivalent in your country, and nobody watches that.

Ironically if you watch UK Prime Minister's Questions it consists primarily of point-scoring and jeering, with occasional excursions into triviality.

On occasion in Parliament you will find people delivering impassioned, carefully researched speeches .. to an empty room.

The prerequisite for discussion has to be willingness to listen and finding a commonality of view, both of which are in very short supply these days.

Speeches to an empty room are still being read into the record (Hansard).

Much of that is due to incentives and not an inescapable aspect of public fora. Two notable examples that stand out in my mind of "people I probably disagree with about some things but trust highly" are HN's very own gwern, for exhaustive research, and Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex. Somehow they have hacked, avoided, or self-disciplined their way into good-faith engagement without giving up ground to do so.

Integrated fact-checking would go a long way in political debates; gwern provides his own and S. Alexander, while less exhaustive, is relentless in analyzing his own biases and hewing to rhetorical charity. They would be less remarkable in a world where political debates had integrated fact-checking, as politicians would have to adapt.

This is exactly right, and isn't a new problem either - it's literally always been the case.

I would almost argue that public debate doesn't really matter - it's always just a small handful of activists who get things changed (for better or worse).

Reddit is what Quora should have been. I'm always amazed at the quality of discussion on some niche sub-reddits. It's come to a point where I append "reddit" before my searches whenever I'm looking for any recommendations.

Not to mention the huge repository of stories on AskReddit.

At the same time, most smaller subreddits are also terribly parochial and hostile to new members. The culture in some subreddits is also very toxic.

Reddit would be an incredible platform if you could remove its cynicism and circlejerking

You use the word "serious" a lot. But ultimately it's still talk. Seriousness would imply being organised, in the activist sense. Which generally ends up excluding superficiality in favour of commitment.

"Serious" is also in direct conflict with "light-hearted, superficial". And the dark heart as well; you can't be serious when random people with racist or misogynist usernames can drop in.

  > Make karma worth something

Pay content creators? Controversial. Note that making it worth something would require that it be scarce and not easily gameable.

I didn't mean "worth something" to imply a financial value. I meant it more as a gatekeeping mechanism to the serious discussions. Which is why there would need to be split between viral/entertainment karma and "serious" karma. And that would also be the fix for your concerns of "just talk" or harmful personalities dropping in.

I'm not terribly concerned with whether people catch this vision or not - the bigger point is that reddit needs their own vision.

Karma's not exactly a reliable measure of anything you'll want to base policy on. It's easy enough to game, and a large portion of it is just a measure of how present and non-contrarian you are. It isn't generally allocated to anyone for saying what needs to be said, but the same trivialities we don't like in normal politics. This is especially true in bigger, more diverse communities.

If I were the product manager, I'd simply reply to that issue with, "So we'll fix it."

Dismissing out new ideas because of problems with the current paradigm is non-productive. Identifying issues, and proposing solutions to those issue is how to make progress.

You can say "we'll fix it" to everything. That doesn't cause it to be fixed, though. I'm not dismissing the idea, I'm asking for a possible solution.

One possible solution is multi-tiered karma. The bottom tier would be the status quo, but the higher tiers require actual insights and productive discussion, and can only be granted by those who have already proven themselves to have the capability to carry out that level of dialogue. There may even be moderation for karma, to give rationale for up/down, with moderators verifying new users at each tier. At the end of it all, the amount of karma isn;t going to be very meaningful, but the tier you are allowed to participate in would give credibility to a small set of discussions, making them meaningful at a societal level.

But I want to be clear that I'm not pitching this idea in any way. This whole idea that I am discussing was literally ripped straight from a sci-fi novel. What I really want is to encourage people to come up with their own ideas, and not just look for minor improvements to reddit's existing site.

I want reddit's leadership to live up to the concept of being revolutionary, not evolutionary.

I don't see Reddit as this platform at all since if it takes some more turns away from entertaining their visitors to something else, it won't be Reddit anymore. So why do that to Reddit at all?

When I go to reddit, I want entertainment. To do this I follow rule 5 of the Pentabarf: "A Discordian is Prohibited of Believing What he Reads.". This is how the page works out for me. From this point of view all that stress that happened recently seems pretty ridiculous to me. It seemed like they decided to tar the garden. Because after that you can be sure what will be in the area. Parked cars. If you now put a shopping mall next to it, it will still work, people will go there and hang out because there is not much else to do. But I don't see that as a creative pool anymore and it will bore me at some point. I'm pretty sure about it.

On the other hand there is this opportunity that grew with the Pao disaster. As far as I could see there is not one portal that came up with an real alternative that would catch "the spirit". Instead we got the hate-reddit and some hipster-reddits all in protection-mode just like Reddit today. Everyone is managing this their way (by circlejerking, minimum vote count which leads to more circlejerking or invite only).

This is no development of a culture that would participate in your "forum of the world". This is just a poor recap of real life politics. Their sides, dogmas and means to protect their world view. Killing everything that might threaten it on a meta-level.

I'm not really sure the Post-Snowden Internet we have today is even the right medium. I don't want my political views profiled and sold to the highest bitter. I don't want to give power to bot networks, circle jerks, SJWs, etc. We are still unable to cope with this groups within a entertainment network, how should we get them to interact on really relevant topics without just banning them from participation? Which seems to be the best way to go right now...

I think the first mistake here would be to consider Reddit as a one entity. Reddit is a weird place where content grow out of distinct subreddits, and sometimes, that content end up on the front-page (which I bet is the most commonly visited on Reddit). The discussions and "We are the Reddit army" is often a big fat joke (or circlejerk as Reddit calls it). People get eachother riled up, and start to believe that they have "a right" to dictate anything and everything regarding to the site politics. Just watch the whole fat-shaming incident. People were acting like someone was put on death-row, while pretty much all the management of the site did was take down a few horrible sub-reddits that made a laughing stock of people with serious problems. People started arguing that "condoning fat people was wrong" as if that was ever an argument. I think Reddit is beyond management. Last night I read that they're working on a new algorithm for the front-page which is probably the closest you get to control the "community" at this point.

It says a lot about a chunk of the population that being a small, fairly obscure subreddit will generally result in Good Things, but becoming a default will quickly result in being overrun by racists, gay-haters, mysoginists, and suchlike.

Heaven help you if your small subreddit attracts the attention of KiA, redpill, or the like, unless you enjoy a constant stream of filth from rape apologists.

> It says a lot about a chunk of the population that being a small, fairly obscure subreddit will generally result in Good Things, but becoming a default will quickly result in being overrun by racists, gay-haters, mysoginists, and suchlike.

The dynamic on Reddit has been the exact opposite, whereby subreddits that become popular are taken over by "SJWs", for want of a better description.

Can you name a single popular subreddit that's been overrun by gay-hate and misogyny through becoming a default?

Well, TwoXChromosomes did not enjoy being put on the default subreddit list. A quick perusal of some top posts there right now looks like mods do a good job. But, my vibe was that they needed to significantly step up the amount of work they did when they hit the front page.

That's not really a great example, because a default sub is going to attract men on a site dominated by men, and the ethos of that sub is to, basically, not have men's views represented. This would naturally lead to friction and so it'd make sense that more moderation would be needed.

I don't think it should've been made a default, anymore than /r/mensrights should be made default.

To sane people, "social justice warrior" translates as "not awful, has respect, a humane human being".

Thanks for the definition.

I'm definitely sane and what goes for SJW today is something I do not want to be.

I agree with you. However some people use social justice as an excuse to be awful to others. Combine that with the fact(?) that loud minorities are often generalized to be representative of the whole (especially when that minority confirms prejudices about the whole), and "social justice warrior" takes on a negative meaning.

> However some people use social justice as an excuse to be awful to others.

And to the degree they do that, they're not fighting for social justice.

> loud minorities are often generalized to be representative of the whole

Though often obsessedly so by people who don't seem to give much of a crap either way, anyway, and gloss over their own mute accompliceship in rather serious evils by pointing out things that are kind of peanuts in comparison. You know, when instead of criticizing people for hurting their own cause, or merely paying lip service to a cause that is actually worthy, unlike the petty games they use it for, they just go "Hah! See? that's what those SJW types are like".

I don't see any serious people of high caliber using that abbreviation, that's for sure. And it's not like people criticize "tumblr-SJW" generally have their own serious websites or at least posts screaming bloody murder: for me someone without a solution getting mad and overshooting the goal is still preferable to someone completely numb, motionless, and maybe even gloating and proud of that. I know it's not a dichotomy, that there are many alternatives preferable to both, but in the given situation of that one group criticizing that other group, I know where my sympathies lie.

> There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

-- Mario Savo ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhFvZRT7Ds0 )

^ To me that's not pathos, that's the baseline, and we all fall short of it, which doesn't move it one inch. If some kiddos on the interwebs discover a slice of that and do their own stuff, good for them. Godspeed to them. And in so far they make asses of themselves, I hope they learn to pick themselves up and fail better in the future, but I can't say they are doing anything so horribly wrong their parents did or their peers are doing so much better.

As Assata Shakur said, only the strong go crazy, the weak just go along; and that's why they build bubbles and communities in which they can have the appearance of being strong, and hide behind each other and their memes. That there is a grain of truth to some of them, that people indeed do use serious issues to get attention or money, doesn't really change that, it just means even a broken clock is right twice a day.

No it doesn't.

How can someone see the injustice in the world and not be grieved, if not angered by it, and be considered a decent person? If indifference to avoidable suffering and disgusting exploitation and mutilation of living beings is not awful, what is? As Einstein said -- and I quote him not because Einstein is correct by default, but because I think he is in this case, and put it very elegantly and succinctly:

> A human being is a part of a whole, called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

How can someone not have compassion, yet not be awful? How can someone have compassion, yet not care about justice?

How about a compromise, how about we define SJW as "stereotype about people of value with values, serving as relief for those that can't hang with them"?

In my (limited) experience social justice runs counter to true justice with such frequency that to claim it represents compassion is to throw out the concept of fairness altogether.

>the list of an individual user’s idiosyncratic sub-Reddit subscriptions is nothing if not a precise psychographic profile of his interests.

Not to mention voting habits, which specify a user's tastes much more finely. The value of that information is potentially astronomical. More honest and finely grained info than facebook likes could be, for instance, similarly for ad tracking. Also reaches some hard to target demos.

Speaking of voting. I cannot find any terms of service for hacker news when you create an account. Can our information legally sold to advertisers?

IANAL, but I'd say they can't sell the comments - they're copyrighted, and since they don't ask for an explicit license, the implied one is probably limited to displaying them on the site - but they could sell the votes/flags/karma information.

YC has little (to nothing) to gain by selling HN info, but everything to lose.

Not sure: he continued Ellen Pao's job in destroying the massive goodwill they had, and being a founder he was immune to calls to step down and effectively made the changes permanent.

Reddit used to be loved and trusted as a place that cared about its community and free speech, but now most users probably stay on Reddit only because it's popular, and would jump ship as soon as a more popular alternative, even in just a niche, shows up.

But of course, thanks to funding, possible good management and inertia, Reddit might just be able to out-innovate and out-compete anyone else and keep its current position.

> cared about its community and free speech

I'm sure we're all weeping over the demise of /r/coontown and other Stormfront-affiliated subreddits. What a sad loss, and what a valuable group of users to alienate!

If you want to say something, say it. Don't say the opposite in a sarcastic tone.

So you're in favour of all forms of free speech except sarcasm?

Edit: ok, evidently jokes aren't a popular mode of speech either.

This isn't about surpressing free speech. It's about basic communication and debate.

Sarcasm used to be a effective and totally valid way to make a point, -I mean it was even part of basic reading/writing education when I grew up 20 years ago.

Of course you can easily overdo it but I think banning sarcasm has a significant downside and we should rather teach people to use it correctly.

Once again, this isn't about banning anything. This is about productive conversation. A value which makes HN unique out of all the internet communities.

What the commenter was doing was insinuating a conclusion based upon a straw man, so as not to be scrutinised for the underlying conclusion.

Didn't downvote (ok, even gave you an upvote while commenting) but I think you misinterpreted the situation I/we reacted to.

Parent didn't censor the offensive post. Free speech means having the right to criticize others.

This isn't Reddit. Make a succinct point, not a straw man.

That word doesn't mean what you think it means.

As far as I understand the reddit situation, a major problem is that advertisers have a strong fear of screenshots of their product next to a random badthinking redditor's screed becoming subject of some five minute hate on twitter or facebook.

If I were a US citizen, I'd be less enthusiastic than you seem to be about this situation, irrespective of coincidental alignment of (current) outcomes with personal moral sensibilities.

I'd want to look very hard at the fact that the control loop for "what you can't say" on the ad-driven internet runs through corporate ad departments and random twitter mobs.

Much as I agree that advertising as an industry needs to die (and I recommend Patreon style funding to people wanting to be immune to advertisers), in practise putting the advertisers in an armlock has often been the only way to persuade overly idealistic free-speechers to put the brakes on stalking and doxxing, child porn and the suchlike.

Reddit as it stands now is a hive of scum and villainy. If they want to be considered sane and serious and not an upscale 4chan, they need to kickban all the hate frothing racists and misogynists and clamp down hard on "free speech". Unfortunately, since their site has stunk for so long, that's basically all who's left, except the few voices crying in the wilderness.

> Reddit as it stands now is a hive of scum and villainy

200 million users, and you think they're all that are left on there?

A rhetorical exaggeration, but the scum and villainy contingent are loud, and enablers are many. If it isn't you being targeted for hate, it's all too easy to say "oh I just talk about games" and never even notice how very white and male the discussion is. Not bothering to notice oppression is oppression (and an exercise of privilege).

What is wrong with being white and male?

There are complications about the origin of both concepts, but in context, absolutely nothing.

What's wrong is not noticing that your conversation is nothing but white and male. It implies that there are people who have been driven out, one way or another, and you aren't surprised by their absence.

>There are complications about the origin of both concepts

Are you suggesting that my race and gender are ...'problematic?'

Nah, at this point I'm suggesting that you're looking to argue.

Read this: https://medium.com/message/how-white-people-got-made-6eeb076...

>they need to kickban all the hate frothing racists and misogynists and clamp down hard on "free speech"

This sounds dangerously like fascism IMHO.

Absent the kind of hyper-exaggeration that makes people invoke Godwin's law, no, it doesn't. Your freedom of thought and expression is not imperiled if you get bounced out of a private club for being hateful.

This has nothing to do with Nazis, please get a grip.

Fascism is a clearly defined concept, and there are many examples other than Nazism. In point of fact: it is not necessary to invoke Nazism in order to define fascism.

The kind of autocratic and intolerant behaviour that you suggest is clearly reminiscent of fascism.

Anyway, I have seen the arguments you raise before and I don't really see that we'll arrive at any kind of agreement here.

"This sounds dangerously like fascism IMHO."

No, no, no... you've got it all wrong. See, smart and good people would be deciding what is acceptable and what isn't.

Totally different.

>and would jump ship as soon as a more popular alternative, even in just a niche, shows up.

I didn't jump to Voat. Reddit for me currently has the 'least friction'. I know how it works, I know the memes to post for free karma (although I prefer lurking). It's becoming really commercial though ... lots of content advertising. Reddit is really novel for the first 1-2 years and it feels great to 'participate' in the silly memes but after 1-2 years it becomes stale (my experience).

I think that Reddit creating itself into BuzzFeed but with Reddit content is a genius move.

Most people will react negatively on Reddit but those are the vocal minority. Most people that I know are on reddit just look at cute images of cats and lurk, rarely post.

> a place that cared about its community and free speech

And, of course, ethics in game journalism.

Free speech is a deep subject with many different interpretations even in the freest of societies (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech)

Political philosophy aside, personally I am saddened to see the same noble freedom that was once demanded to protect the expression of novel, perhaps subversive ideas and the speaking of truth to power invoked to defend the asinine, violent utterances of mobs of bullies as they attack their victims. People, obviously, shouldn't be arrested for public displays of ignorance or mean-spiritedness, but calling that "freedom of speech" makes me sad.

Reddits problem is not the small communities people barely know that they exist until someone points them out. It is the shift in attitude in the bigger communities. I can spend hours finding specific examples but the gist of it is becoming more US-centric and "nerd dismissing" place by the day.

When we applied to YC, Steve was nice enough to meet with us at Hipmunk, and as with what he did there, I think he's going to do a great job at Reddit, where I've become an increasingly invested participant, once I learned how to dig deeper into the subreddits, such as /r/oakland or /r/vandwellers etc. I think, based upon my experience on the site, compared to those on fb and elsewhere, that Reddit continues to have incredible growth opportunities, because there are hundreds, nay thousands, of subreddits that we can't even imagine, people will create, once people discover their power, like /r/camelracing or /r/swatvalley, or who knows what. 10 years from now, I think Reddit will be (one of) the biggest site on the whole of the internet. And if not Reddit, than its many copy cats. I just wish there was some way that I could help, aside from what little moderating I do.

/r/vandwellers represent! :D

Reddit has just grown too big and important. Neither the links nor the discussions feel genuine anymore. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way. I wonder what will replace it.

And of course I'm talking about the popular subreddits mostly concerning news and politics. Subreddits about classical music and such, still work fine. However any political subreddit seems compromised in some form or another.

Does reddit have funding issues currently? I ask because subjectively I've started getting more and more "too busy" HTTP 503's while browsing, which hints at a lack of capacity but surely that could be scaled out fairly easily if financies permit?

People seem to like lots of new content, and feeling like they have small, personal places to share content and have conversations with each other.

If Huffamn et.al. can further refine that feeling of Reddit being a small community and also a massive community at the same time, I see no reason for the platform to not continue being a dominant player in the social space.

Terrible reporting. I dug into those unsavory subreddits, and a huge number of them were mostly inactive, with hardly a posting for the last couple of years, and otherwise, like the fashion police one, they are hardly like what was described.

I'm tired of this 'look how bad reddit is' reporting. It's boring and inaccurate.

How do we save Reddit from the people who aggressively try to change it?

Been using Reddit since before the "Digg Exodus" phase; The recent changes on reddit really doesn't look promising, with the front page suddenly feeling sluggish and other issues popping up... but I hope the Betteridge's law doesn't apply here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

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