Reddit is still in turmoil
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
It's pretty clear that the Reddit corporation doesn't want Reddit to be an anything-goes, absolute free speech zone with no moderation or anti-harassment policies -- but that's what the site actually was for many years. Now, when the company cracks down, users think their freedoms are being curtailed. The mistake was ever allowing that kind of freedom in the first place, because people developed an expectation that it would persist.
Compounding that problem, the fact that the site was unregulated for so long caused it to attract the kind of people who need to be regulated the most. In other words, it's no surprise that the most tolerant communities attract people who are difficult to tolerate.
I suspect Twitter is having similar issues dealing with harassment, after letting it happen for so long. If there is a lesson in this, it is that online communities which plan to implement anti-harassment policies ought to do so from the beginning, and develop the expectation among the users that such policies exist, and will continue to exist. Don't just tack them on after several years, and don't enforce them inconsistently and arbitrarily as Reddit has done.
It will be difficult for Condé Nast to get its money's worth out of Reddit now. I doubt it will ever shake its negative reputation.
Sure, and then we wouldn't be talking about reddit but rather whatever site was actually free at the time.
The only reason web forums exist is because people are lazy about adopting decentralized Free software. Yet the owners of these centralized services, as well as paternalistic spectators, end up deluded that the communities they serve are "theirs" to mold and control. In reality these sites' power is but an epsilon, and they should be thankful they can at least exercise it to generate revenue by surveilling users who are too lazy to protect themselves.
Or because that open-source software is user-hostile and has no serious argument for its use for 99% of people. When users don't do something you like, in almost every instance it's your failing rather than theirs.
There are very few open software engineers who like improving UX. Since it's free you have to like it to do it, so I don't know if this will ever change.
I like improving UX but when I look at many open source projects from the outside they are run by cranky ubernerds who triumph technical merits above everything else and I can't imagine them being very cooperative with someone whose specialty was "UX."
Sounds like you've never actually tried.
I maintain an open source project (https://conversejs.org) that could benefit greatly from the expertise of a UX pro. However, to date no-one has approached me to help with this (specifically regarding UX). If you or any other UX people here are interested in helping out, hit me up at https://opkode.com/contact.html
I definitely don't have a lack of respect for UX people, having been fortunate enough to work with someone whom I consider to be a brilliant UX designer.
Good software takes strategy, UX, visual design, solution architecture, software development, QA, DevOps, post-launch support, KPI monitoring & analysis, marketing... and probably a few other skill sets to really have it thrive.
The trouble with many open source projects is that they are one-man endeavors, and the person who started it cares more about control than quality outcome. "This is MY pet project..." is a horrible mentality to take when shopping for a partner.
The moment the dev thinks, "Gosh, I'd rather spend my free time watching a baseball game than making those 50 changes the UX guy asked me to make... especially since all I really wanted from him was a color pallet..." that's about when the partnership dissolves. (Misunderstanding about the different areas of expertise intentionally included.)
One person can't think time is worth more than a teammate's. Good software requires compromise and horse trading and a lot of planning.
You typically need money to keep everyone interested.
Blame isn't singular - describing users as lazy, including ourselves for using this website, both encourages individuals to exert more effort adopting better solutions and just plainly characterizes the problem.
I do agree that the most productive way forward is for Free software to accept this facet for what it is, and to step up its quality.
What? What if I wrote it for my own use? What if it's among the thousands of web apps meant to be installed on a server you control?
There's nothing inherent about the technology that requires third party control.
I think web-apps are generally user-hostile. You are correct that there is nothing inherent about it though.
I think the same could be said for FOSS: There's nothing inherently user-unfriendly about it, it just has a tendency to go that direction.
Sure, some of these release their code as "open source" and you can setup your own copy. But I've never heard of one where the majority of users actually do so [0].
There are some locally-hosted applications that are intended to make themselves available on :::80 that use a browser as a UI toolkit, similar to how we can have a native app that links a browser as a library. But such things generally aren't referred to as webapps. The network transit seems integral to this term.
[0] Well there's probably some developer-focused tools where this could be the case because said developers already have to deal with "web stuff" and so the additional overhead isn't as high. But this doesn't generalize to all users.
We're obviously not disagreeing about the utility of local software, just that of "web apps". I assert that the platform itself is inherently biased towards making non-Free software. It's not impossible to create something that qualifies as a web app and Free software, it's just that this puts it in one small corner of an ecosystem based on user-disempowerment.
Obviously many web technologies could be useful to build freer systems (like say if DNS/HTTP were replaced with something distributed), but as it stands the term basically refers to the modern generation of proprietary software.
I get that a lot of by-day web developers want to apply their skills to build Free software, and that is great. They just need to be aware that it's an uphill battle against one's own assumptions, and building the same type of centralized systems desired by business interests (but releasing the code) likely does not suffice.
There are 188 PHP web applications in that list. 60 NodeJS web applications. 86 Python web applications. 25 Ruby web applications. I can go on.
You're just being silly by pretending that this segment doesn't exist.
> I assert that the platform itself is inherently biased towards making non-Free software.
As opposed to native applications? I recall those being distributed through "app stores" where you have zero access to even the binary, nevermind the source code, and demand payment in return for access to either the application or features within that application.
Does that mean native applications have a bias toward "making non-Free software"? No. And the answer is no for web as well.
> They just need to be aware that it's an uphill battle against one's own assumptions, and building the same type of centralized systems desired by business interests (but releasing the code) likely does not suffice.
I have no idea what this means, but based on your previous statements you're assuming a multi-user registration model with a centralized database you find on every commercial site which is a pre-requisite to monetization.
You don't need to have that for a web app. At all. You can build a calculator as a web app. Or any desktop or command line application as a web app. With no registration or database required. Just type in a web address and start using the app. There is nothing inherent about web development that requires a user-based system.
There is no uphill challenge to building free software using web. Now, you obviously won't have as many users of your software because getting things running is much more difficult ... but that's changing with platforms like Electron.
But, let's take a look at the actual technologies behind the "web":
1. A naming system/transport protocol
2. A document markup language
3. A virtual machine for sandboxed code.
(2) is user-friendly (PoLP). But creating a Free app implies ignoring the defining "web" features of (1) and (3)!
If a single user is the only one accessing a given name, then that naming system has basically been made irrelevant. (If multiple users are accessing a given name, then per HTTP only one is in control of that name, and thus we deviate from free software).
If a user controls updates to the code and (in theory) audits it, then the primary purpose of the sandbox (executing random third-party specified code) is gone. The battle-hardened sandbox is nice for security, but the functionality is otherwise indistinguishable from any other language.
Why should such an app be called a "webapp" if it does not utilize most web features?
> based on your previous statements you're assuming a multi-user registration model with a centralized database you find on every commercial site which is a pre-requisite to monetization
I am not assuming this - I am noticing that a large majority of released projects are. Either due to lack of developer thought about repudiating "web" assumptions, or deliberate corporate "free-washing".
Platform defaults end up defining the culture of a platform. A good question to ask yourself - if you were designing a Free calculator app and wanted to show a friend, would you send them the files you're editing and they'd set it up on their own httpd to try it out, or would you end up sending them a URL to your server and thereby undermine their freedom?
[0] Although as I've said, many of those PHP etc apps are not actually Free - for instance the blog platforms.
No. It's not irrelevant at all. It's how you "execute" that specific software. It serves the same purpose as a filename for a binary on a filesystem.
> If a user controls updates to the code and (in theory) audits it, then the primary purpose of the sandbox (executing random third-party specified code) is gone.
No. An audit is never perfect and that even assumes you perform one. While I frequently modify the software I utilize, I almost never audit the entire codebase, so a sandbox is quite useful.
> if you were designing a Free calculator app and wanted to show a friend, would you send them the files you're editing and they'd set it up on their own httpd to try it out, or would you end up sending them a URL to your server and thereby undermine their freedom?
I did just that. I sent them a URL. Here's the rub, it's a purely front-end only web app. No backend. That means their browser downloads the entire codebase instantly. The codebase is easily accessed, saved, and modified by them, if they want to.
The calculator was possible over a decade ago. With some of the stuff hitting JavaScript within the last few years, you can literally build anything you want in that fashion. Games, communication apps, etc.
This is harder than it already being local, or apt-get install turning into apt-get source. Likely, if they find your app interesting they will keep using it directly from your URL and end up at your mercy.
And that's the crux of my point - the assumptions of the platform are at odds with software freedom. Not in a way that is incompatible - as this is computing, we are always free to ignore the properties an abstraction provides and build a completely new one over it.
Your argument is analogous to a C programmer insisting that if one just follows the rules, C is just as expressive and safe as a higher level language. People are not perfectly rigorous, and the properties of the basic abstractions matter.
"Web" implies executing code off of a third-party server. Yes, there is a pathological case of having your own server (and that may become more popular one day), but that does not change the term's current wider definition and the general culture around it.
You have the same issues with the centralized package distribution system you're pushing? You're reliant on a 3rd party. How many apt-get the source? Saving source on a front-end web app is as simple as clicking "Save As" in the browser and you get the bonus of not having to compile anything. It'll just work.
> Your argument is analogous to a C programmer insisting that if one just follows the rules, C is just as expressive and safe as a higher level language.
Not quite. You're simply not seeing the levels of abstraction present in your ecosystem because you're used to them. Centralized repositories, binaries, toolchains, etc.
> "Web" implies executing code off of a third-party server.
If you follow this logic, your apt-get example is executing binaries off a 3rd party server. You sure you want to go there?
A few Reddit communities sprung up that track content deletions, like /r/undelete, and the sheer amount of stuff that winds up disappeared on arbitrary whims, rather than violation of a stated objective rule, is huge. Coincidentally, when the moderators of those places show up, the attitudes on display are the worst kind of toxic.
Well, other than the fact that a whole lot of the software involved in using web forums, on both the server and client end, is "decentralized free software".
And the fact that other software (much, but not all, of it free) was adopted for discussions before web forums got popular. Web forums got popular because -- on both server and client end -- most people are going to have the tools anyway, so adopting a whole new software (free or otherwise) stack for discussions is unattractive.
And it's certainly not decentralized - each instance of the software is its own walled garden. I can't install my own instance of say phpbb and use it to communicate with an existing forum.
So the 'identity' of what was a redditor changed dramatically from the start, and it's left us worse since the a lot of the default subs aren't exposing what was good and are mostly mindless/bandwagon-y in operation. Not to mention that some of the default subreddits that got chosen were poisonous and it changed the tone.
Here is a list of what changed: https://www.reddit.com/r/defaults/
It is inherent in social media, the more stuff you allow on your platform, the less able you are to generate revenue. I think that has been clearly demonstrated by Twitter, 8chan, 4chan, etc. never being able to generate large amounts of profit.
Facebook realized that censoring is unfortunately profitable, and made a platform that is much more easily advertised upon.
It is similar to the development of sports, where in the US all sports have commercial breaks, even in things like F1 that do not run commercials during the race, while ads are run over it in the US. I mean it even happens in soccer with showing ads during the game, as clearly demonstrated by the sprint ads during Copa America.
I would say that the "made a platform that is much more easily advertised upon" is the important part, combined with the massive data-gathering so the ads can be targeted better.
I've discovered that there are actually zero things that I want to announce to all my friends and family at once.
For example, if someone has racist beliefs which do not affect his actions in any way, his effect on other people in society would be exactly the same as it would be if he did not have racist beliefs. In other words, beliefs that are not acted on or expressed have no effect on society.
There may be some social benefit to knowing who the racists are. But if they are anonymous, that benefit is probably lost. Their speech is protected by the first amendment either way, but Reddit is not required to enforce the constitution, so they can shut down the accounts if they want to.
I would agree that unexpressed values would propagate less.
That was an extreme example used to illustrate the point I was making. Racism is also only an example; there are plenty of other beliefs that are bad for society. Personally, I suspect that sexism is probably far more prevalent on Reddit than racism, for example.
Social stigma can prevent one's beliefs from affecting one's actions, or at least reduce the effect of those beliefs on one's actions. If it is shameful to be perceived as a racist, racists will attempt to hide their racism by not acting in racist ways toward others, at least when other people are looking. This does not obviate the effects of unconscious biases or eliminate racism, but the net result for society is fewer overtly racist actions, and that's a good thing.
If racism becomes acceptable again, racists will feel freer to act on their beliefs, which will make life worse for the targets of their racism. So, there is a case to be made that if people repress their beliefs only partially, society is better off -- not as much better off as if certain people repressed their beliefs fully, but still better off.
The danger of allowing racism to flourish in online communities, especially ones as large as Reddit and Twitter, is that it re-normalizes racism and makes it seem acceptable to be a racist. It can be more than merely acceptable -- it can even be a contrarian badge of pride, justified as a rebellion against political correctness. (That kind of justification for it is reinforced when anti-harassment policies are not uniformly and consistently enforced, because it can make moderation appear to be arbitrary or politically motivated.) When that kind of thing happens, it makes society worse.
I do not agree with giving up on freedom of speech because some people will say hurtful things. Every time I have read racism or seen racists on TV it has merely exposed how ill-informed, counter-productive and just plain wrong those ideas are, and has prompted myself and others to dispute those wrong ideas. There is also the slim chance that if the dummies are called out on their wrong ideas, they may end up changing them.
Anonymous freedom of speech is a slightly different case, but I still feel that all freedom of speech is valuable and needs to be preserved.
However, I very strongly suspect that no matter what the level of racism on Facebook is, it would be far higher if people were able to post anonymously.
Counterexample HN and arstechnica.com
As I have previously hypothesised a lot of good users (me included) seems to be scared away by real names policies.
Pseudonyms allowed and linked to phone numbers or national ids combined with karma seems like a workable middle ground for me.
Some would say that racism is still acceptable in USA today. Just look at Trump. (Yes not as openly as before, but it hasn't been erradicated)
There's a saying that the USA went from thinking that racism was OK, to not knowing what racism is.
If a racist hermit is racist in the woods, does he make an offensive sound?
I have hypothesised that the reason is that without anonymity only
* (trolls with) fake accounts
* politically correct people and people who think they are pc
* and people who don't care about real life reputation anyway
post in any kind of controversial debate.
Normal knowledgeable people doesn't want to lose the dream job because of something they commented on 5 years ago.
* naive idealists who believe that truth and reason matter more than immediate public perception
This is subtly different than "people who don't care about real life reputation" in that they sincerely hope that despite any short term damage to reputation, in the long run others (or at least some subset) will come respect their honesty and rationality.
I'm probably naive and idealist, but at least on HN, I think this is a significant group. Although, am I reading correctly that you are considering HN to be "without anonymity"? In the current "persistent pseudonymous" system, what do you think constitutes a "fake account"?
No. Sorry if unclear. I categorise HN accounts as pseudonymous with optional real life names.
> In the current "persistent pseudonymous" system, what do you think constitutes a "fake account"?
What would annoy me is real sockpuppet accounts, controlling more than one account and using it to
* upvote ones own comments and postings
* astroturf
* using it as a strawman to defame opponents (i.e. by running a sock puppet account that seemingly supports some cases while posting bad arguments for that case etc.)
* etc
Personally I have nothing against using multiple accounts as long as there is a reason (i.e. someone has an account with full name and another that they use when they want to post or comment something that they do not want to reflect back on their real life persona, family and workplace.)
Honest question since two people read my post that way, I obviously was unclear, but where?
I wonder how feasible it would be for Reddit to implement subreddit-based web of trusts for users, as opposed to moderation. People could filter others (or not) individually and not have to rely on someone else to try to filter for the whole group.
The problem, I think, is that we haven't figured out new norms and boundaries for online socialization, as we have for other forms of communication and other media. One of the things that makes online communication so potent is that it is not just easy but also near instantaneous with a global reach. But we have been slacking on building the tools to manage the problems inherent in that power. One of which is the concentration and distillation of harassment. A tiny group of people can generate a tremendous amount of harassment which, through the magic of modern communication technologies, automatically gets funneled to the receiver. Even, say, a million people worldwide is still a tiny fraction of all people in the world, let alone all people online (less than 0.1%), but if there were a million dedicated harassers online it would be a hellscape.
In reality it only takes a few assholes to spoil the "mood" and the "fun" of interacting online in public, from a few dozen up to tens to hundreds of thousands. A minute but vocal, abusive, and provocative sub-group can easily change the entire tone of a conversation or change someone's experience using social media from good to bad. How many people sending you death threats and rape threats regularly would it take to sour your experience with social media? The real answer is: a very tiny number.
Right now that very tiny number of agents provocateurs are having an outsized impact on online communities and communication platforms, because they are leveraging the power of vitriol, hate, and targeted harassment. And also precisely because the platform builders (whether it's facebook, twitter, or reddit) have been far behind in building tooling to help deal with these problems, and because the social norms haven't caught up with the behavior. Going back to the '90s and even the '80s it was common for, say, usenet newsreaders to have tools built in for ignoring posts from people you wanted to ignore, and the modern tools for such things are barely at that level, if they exist at all, despite the problem being even more difficult to tackle. Additionally, there were a lot more moderated communities back then, whereas today the norm is unmoderated communities.
Just like the security problems of the early internet days we've largely been surviving based on luck and absence of dedicated attacks, and partly just due to ignorance of the worst that was actually happening. There are a lot of people who still don't think that harassment on the internet is a serious problem because they don't actually understand it all, having never experienced it in its most potent forms.
The worst takeaway from this would be deciding that most people are garbage and socializing with other human beings is best avoided (online or off). That's a classic "stranger danger" overreaction. We need better tools on various platforms. We need more people speaking out about the badness of harassment online and for people to stop parroting the stupid line "oh, it's just online, you can ignore it, it's not real" or defending targeted personal harassment as any sort of defensible "free speech".
I was a post-September usenet user, so apparently I never saw the glory days, but what passed for flamewars back then seems pretty tame in comparison to today. And I recall having much better (plonk) tools for ignoring stuff I didn't want to see.
Well, until the Meowers came about. That lead to what was quite possibly the biggest flamewar in Internet history, and it involved wholesale invasions of random newsgroups.
1. We don't always want to express all our opinions and thoughts among people we know, because they carries significant social cost. So we end up saying a disproportionate amount of those things anonymously online.
2. It used to be that nobody had to listen to the outcasts and the lonely. People we don't enjoy being around. But now they can participate in online forums as much as anyone.
In part, it's a good thing that these voices can be heard, and that they can find likeminded to talk to. But a lot of them are outcasts because they're jerks, and online we do have to listen to them.
A few relatively popular programming languages have begun publishing official community code of conduct documents[1][2]. While initially I thought it was a bit overreaching, I can now see steering a community early is much easier than trying to change course later.
The LLVM Project is in the final stages of adopting one[3] (after much discussion) as well. This will (once adopted) apply to the LLVM backend, the Clang (C, C++, & ObjC) front-end, libc++, the LLDB debugger, etc.
[1] https://swift.org/community/#code-of-conduct [2] https://twitter.com/migueldeicaza/status/672590341757927426 [3] http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2016-June/101807.ht...
Because attacking people for beliefs you don't like doesn't exactly make things better.
A lot of the people that seem to be trying to attack those they see as facist would be just as bad in the power as those they oppose. Except you know, with different targets.
The problem I see with a heck of a lot of online conversations is that it ridiculously fails this rule. Often times there are some issues on both sides of the coin worth discussing, but it's hard to discuss things rationally when the loudest voices on both sides are acting like spoiled toddlers or often worse. Often times, the extremists dominate the conversation and the resulting discussion is toxic.
Violence is never the solution, but isn't it possible to be anti-fascist (or against any other political movement that more relies on emotionalism instead of rationalism) without being violent? I would think so.
Responding to political concerns with violence just begets more violence. It just entrenches people's beliefs even further, inspires revenge from the 'other side' (or at least, their own axe crazy extremists) and eventually causes everything to erupt even further (through a civil war).
Honestly, I'd say this part in the most recent series of Doctor Who sums up some of the issues with people trying to solve all their problems with violence:
If those more violent parts didn't put the fear of God into the government, he could have been safely ignored.
It's possible to make generalisations across all the various groups, but you're going to have huge variance across them -- in pretty much all areas, including internal structure, attitude towards violence and political positions.
Of course groups are aware of one another and cooperate (as well as conflict, I assume) in an anarchic way, but there is no centralized power or executive. It's certainly not a single organisation.
From an organisational perspective, sports fan clubs are rather similar (mostly independent of one another, mostly local, very heterogeneous in how they work internally and interact with the world).
> we have an "antifa" movement in France (reacting to our rising far right), and they're often just as violent :-(
reply:
> yup, 100% okay with that, personally
> Me too (mostly). Personally trying to flush out internalised cishet machismo, but if there was ever an outlet...
> the only things fascists respond to is violence. Ignoring them or letting them attack you doesn't help
> good! bash their brains in tbh
It is clear that the kind of antifa they are endorsing falls on a particular point on the "huge variance" spectrum of attitude to violence. It is clear that the code of conduct is being applied selectively to one half of the political spectrum. And I say this as somebody who has always voted for the most left wing party in my country. This attitude towards violence and censorship and social shaming from my side worries me greatly.
GG also completely ignored the fundamental ethical violation in traditional game journalism - that review sites make all their money by advertising the products they review. Instead, it spent all of its time complaining about how some idie game developer is friends with an indie game reviewer, and sending death threats to Anita and Zoe.
If it looks like a thug, walks like a thug, and quacks like a thug... You can't expect anyone to take its valid points particularly seriously.
In a stunning lack of self-awareness, GG has never considered that perhaps it should apply its expectations for ethical behaviour to itself.
I have no advocated that anyone commit violence against "people online [I've] declared to be [my enemies]." In fact, in the thread you're linking to, right above the archived tweet, I say that I don't know what an anti-fascist movement in tech looks like. And today, years later, I still do not. But if you were ask me "hey Steve let's start a street fight with GamerGate, what do you think?" my first comment would be "what?" and my second comment would be "that sounds like a really dumb idea, don't do that."
You'll note that the subject at hand changed during this conversation: the parent I replied to suggested that I was suggesting something specific regarding the right wing in technology, but that response is about abstract antifa actions in France. It's also why I responded the way that I did: the equivalence between the two (European antifa and European fascist organizations) is laughable. But it's just Twitter; I'm not going to get into a debate about the details, I'm just going to say "okay" and move on.
But I did not and do not think, as I said above, that someone should go find tech fascists and cause them bodily harm. It's not something I did suggest or would support today.
it can be a distraction to focus on that early on when what's most important is user adoption...
Distraction?
The wrong kind of initial user adaption will create a toxic community that excludes later users. Any community that goes unmoderated for long enough inevitably turns into a cesspool.
The most important users are the initial adaptors, they form the basis of the expectations of the community.
But if you don't have a TOS and enforce it, then you're eventually going to get the attention of the nastiest, most vile people on the Internet. And given that almost the whole world is on the Internet now, that's some of the nastiest, most vile people in the world. Once you get their attention, they're going to go out of their way to make your website their new home. If you were a Neo-Nazi, and you were used to being banned from every forum you found as soon as you opened your mouth, and then you found a forum that had no rules and allowed absolute free speech, you'd fall in love right away. So much that you'd go out of your way to advertise it to your Neo-Nazi friends and coördinate a mass migration. Once the nastiest, most vile people on the Internet migrate to your site en masse, they're going to start targeting people for harassment, they're going to use it as a platform to spread hate, and they're going to take the opportunity to recruit from the general population by posting carefully crafted propaganda.
And, yes, they'll drown out the decent people. First, because the vile ones are actively invading your site in droves, while the decent people just stumble on it from random links and maybe friends' recommendations. Second, because the vile people will drive the decent people out. You know the old adage about how a thimble of wine mixed into a barrel of sewage is still sewage, but a thimble of sewage mixed into a barrel of wine is also sewage? It's kind of like that. Once there are enough vile people to make their presence known, they will turn your site into sewage even if they're the minority.
tl;dr: Most people don't need their conduct regulated, but if you don't establish and enforce regulations, your community will be thoroughly overrun by the people who do need their conduct regulated.
Cool that they are so open towards zoophiles and the occasional pedophile.
On another note, Code of Conduct for FOSS are the equivalent of stock photos showing ethnically diverse people having a lively meeting on company websites; it does not hurt anybody, but it's an utterly useless waste of everyone's time, and you feel a bit dirty having to pretend that it matters.
Is there any evidence that reddit has a greater fraction of asshats than the general population at large?
In other words, the unmoderated Internet is an amplification device for small groups of people who might otherwise not get a voice, and it doesn't actually matter what they're saying.
Of course, it's a lot quicker and easier to cause damage than to do anything constructive, resulting in unmoderated spaces online probably doing a lot more harm than good in the near-term. Long-term? No idea.
Yup. Besides egregious asshats, it has greatly helped conspiracy theorists to get together, fringe religious groups to get together, and fringe political groups to get together.
> In other words, the unmoderated Internet is an amplification device for small groups of people who might otherwise not get a voice, and it doesn't actually matter what they're saying.
I think that the amplification effect does vary, though, among different groups. Some groups already had worked out good ways to communicate before the internet, and to spread information. It wasn't as fast or as convenient as the internet, so things were slower than they are now, but it got the job done.
An example of such a group would be those in STEM fields. We had big libraries of technical material extensively cataloged and indexed and cross referenced, an extensive system of mailed bulletins and journals to keep us informed of new developments in our fields. We had telephones for long distance real time person to person discussion, and the postal system for less urgent communication or for sending documents and photographs.
The internet was a huge increase in the access to and speed of sending information for STEM people, but in some sense it was just a change in efficiency, not a fundamental change in what we could accomplish. I've compared it before to the printing press. We had books before the printing press, but it took a long time to make copies and they were expensive. The printing press made it faster and cheaper to make copies.
For those groups that were not organized like this, which includes the random asshats, the conspiracy theorists, and so on, the internet was a fundamental change. For them it like the discovery of fire or the development of agriculture. It put them in a whole new world.
They don't want to drive away their users. They know how Digg died. They're smart enough not to piss off the community enough such that any significant number of users will leave.
Among the various errors the administrators of Reddit may be guilty of, underestimating the damage & toxicity some categories of speech made in bad faith cause and having prepared no mechanisms to help their communities be resistant to or minimize that toxicity might be the most significant.
Digg died because Reddit existed, so there was somewhere for disaffected Digg users to go to. In particular users who by & large were interested in good faith participation. There is no similar analog that exists today and because users who show tendencies to indulge in bad faith participation new alternative sites often struggle with dealing a level of toxic behavior which makes it extraordinarily difficult to maintain growth.
In a sense it always comes up. Without sticking my neck out to say what reddit should or shouldn't allow, I simply want to point out that principled positions only count when they're uncomfortable to uphold. We wouldn't be having a conversation about free speech in the first place unless the conversation has already turned to the topic of sweeping away uncomfortable speech.
If someone wanted to make a convincing argument about speech which should be 'unprotected' there has to be a conflicting principle, or it's just lip service to the idea of "free speech" (because it's generally recognized as virtuous and they don't want to be seen as opposing it). "Fighting words" are unprotected in so far as they represent incitement to an immediate breach of the peace. Other principles raised to carve out exceptions to free speech should be similar in the obviousness that it's categorically not about suppressing ideas.
I think this gets brought up a fair amount, with both the obvious examples (yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater) and the not-so-obvious ones (whether 'hate speech' should be protected is very divisive).
A larger problem really is that many people are in a pretty binary mindset, especially about the not-so-obvious ones: Either you're a monster who has no principles, or you're a monster defending neo-nazis, without acknowledging that "allowable speech" is a constantly moving target.
Yelling "DEATH TO <X>" on a plane nowadays would almost certainly land you in prison (whereas 50 years ago maybe you would've just gotten a psych evaluation), and conversely talking about equal rights 200 years ago would've gotten you thrown in prison as a rabble-rouser inciting chaos.
Finding the acceptable level of "free speech" in a private community is something that's constantly going to be in flux, and successful communities will accept that ultimately neither group may be happy with the equilibrium: But it's still the equilibrium that maximizes happiness.
> More importantly there are categories of speech which are not put forward in good faith but are instead intended to do damage to communities that host them.
The dangerous part that you're omitting here is that "good faith" is an extremely subjective judgement. It's incredibly easy to imagine scenarios where dissenting speech = scrutinized HEAVILY for "not being in good faith".
For example, I'm pretty sure Erdogan has accused many opposition members of exactly that.
We got some press early on that really told an untrue narrative of what we are trying to do, but we've made a ton of progress in a few months of our private beta and our communities and platform are really beginning to come together. The link I gave above is to our company community and if anyone wants to try Imzy out I will approve your request as soon as you make it.
And even if I did, there is just too many users, across various discussion sites, to keep all the pseudonyms and their comment history in one's head.
I can glean a bit of info from news sites, but not very much if you say they're fundamentally misunderstanding you.
In short, Imzy is attempting to find a way to align the company as best as we can with the communities. We recognize that there is no one-size-fits-all type of community and trying to fit all communities into a simple, archaic message board doesn't give the communities much to work with. Compound this with our believe that having an advertising business model not being well aligned with community's best interests, we believe that we can build a flexible commerce system into the platform so that communities can use it if and when they need it for their communities (for instance, to sell each other things, to pay for events they are putting on, to support the community leaders).
How do we do this? It's going to take a long time and require us to make our platform extendable by developers.
Right now, we are at the starting point where we have to build some initial communities and get them starting their evolution process. We have innovated a lot on our community leadership tools (and still are) and have put a very rudimentary payments platform in place. Our next phase will be to start innovating on the developer platform and the things communities are able to do on the platform.
You'll notice that nowhere in this description did I talk about free speech or harassment. That is because it isn't part of our core thesis. Our core thesis is giving communities online the attention we feel they have never been given in the right way. However, we recognize that if we are successful, we will have a lot of people on the platform and be faced with the same challenges that twitter/reddit/facebook/etc are faced with regarding harassment. So, we are focusing on it early because we feel we need to set the tone for the early communities so that as we grow they can help. There are a few things we don't allow on the site due to our past experiences: porn, hate speech, harassment, doxxing, etc.. We realize there are a lot of gray areas here and so we are equally focused on building and scaling our community team early.
That ended up being longer than I thought it was going to be, but probably not as long as it should be. I hope it gives you at least a little better idea of what we are doing.
Advance also owns Conde Nast, but they restructured reddit out of Conde Nast in 2011.
That created a toxic culture, which allowed stormfront and similar groups to use it as a recruitment ground for racists.
Reddit still refuses to do anything about it. The 'quarantined' a bunch of truly vile subreddits but all that does is give them a place where they can coordinate brigades of the public subs out of view.
Yes, there were the more odious subreddits, but it was perfectly possible to surf around reddit and never be bothered by those.
The culture of reddit definitely seems to have gotten much worse over the past 5 years - to me, it just generally seems meaner, and there feels like there is more trolling overall. Even simple, seemingly straightforward posts seem more likely to spark some sort of vitriolic debate. Perhaps it was inevitable as reddit grew, but it still kind of sucks.
The very nature of Reddit is that each person will have different experience & memories: the truth of Reddit is that thre is no Reddit - there are only subreddits.
So, unsubscribe from most default subreddits, choose your communities and you'll be like me - having a 99% positive experience !
I'm pretty skeptical of this. I can maybe see my way to believing that googling "jailbait" beats out any single one of ["pic" "pics" "funny" "joke" ...], but the normal SFW subreddits have always been vastly bigger than the porn subs. I'm also really skeptical of the causation chain that leads from jailbait -> Stormfront -> general toxic culture. Do you have any harder evidence of this?
Edit: Sorry, "normal SFW," not "normal NSFW."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
Seems like for a time it was the second biggest refer keyword, web archive doesnt really back it up though.
Edit: oh please mods. Voat got tons of users apecifically to host /r/coontown , /r/fatpeoplehate and the like
You mean subreddits like /r/european and /r/truecels? Where death threats against women in interracial relationships were common? Where it was common to wish rape on women who don't hate Muslims? Where the former subreddit routinely called for ethnic cleansing and the latter subreddit talked about how western women are part of a corrupt plot to deny sex to men? Where AutoModerator was set up to respond to the word "entitled" by saying that constant access to sex is a fundamental need for men and should be considered a human right?
Everyone: I'd recommend popping onto /r/againsthatesubreddits and checking out the myriad posts on /r/european and /r/truecels AHS has linked to. You might have to dig through the archives, though, because both of those places were quarantined a while back.
They deserved to go.
"Many" means many, not all.
Condé Nast hasn't owned Reddit for half a decade now. Advance Publications owns both of them, and Reddit was split off as a separate entity with its own board and shareholders, one of which is Advance.
HN, afaik, has always had these rules in place. There's never been an expectation of free-speech here, and nobody minds, because they were presented up-front.
Celebrate cops being murdered, that's ok.
When Condé Nast employees express death wishes
Or Sony Film stars incite mob violence
http://web.archive.org/web/20160721232327/https://twitter.co...
There is a significant silence.
[1] http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/07/20/twitters-history-ce...
I think lots of webmasters actually believed in that but we all now realise that that simply doesn't work. I won't mention examples of lawless online communities but I'm sure all of us know of a few. In my experience they are all disasters.
It is a community (and I do believe it is a community of its own) imo not far away from Hacker News in terms of creating and curating interesting content, and discussing it, for a focused group of interest, except rather than tech the interest happens to be college football.
I imagine there are plenty of other spaces like that on reddit for people. I dabble a bit (mostly lurking) in /r/kettlebell too which seems to be similar except smaller.
It's like how politicians and media in the USA are always trying (and failing) to impose upon the citizens some country-wide cohesive cultural identity and feeling of belonging. The USA is too big, with too many different regional cultures and ideals. Doomed to fail, and you'll just annoy everyone in the process.
If you run a community, you need consistency. Members need to know where the boundaries are in regards to how you can act and what is/isn't acceptable.
Twitter doesn't really do this well. If you agree with the staff political stances, you can basically get away with anything. If you're popular enough (or a large company), you can often get away with things that would get a less popular user banned.
For example, contrast what happens when a left wing user breaks the rules and attacks people and what happens when a right wing one does it. It seems like the former will get punished a lot less harshly for the same offence.
Twitter needs to stop this, and enforce the rules for everyone in every situation.
Which brings me to a point about commmunity management I'd like to make:
Don't even get into this field if you want people to always like you. Or if you're obsessed with your 'reputation'.
Running a community site means making difficult decisions. It means losing friends over the community's rules and principles. It means you will get a very bad reputation from at least some part of society as a bully or dictator.
This is what a community manager is perceived as by a banned member:
http://www.managingcommunities.com/2012/12/03/community-mana...
Unfortunately, it seems Twitter (and a lot of such companies nowadays) seem more interested in keeping their friends in the media than they do running a decent community.
That is the same. Both are absolutely terrible at consistency. They both have very clear and obvious "protected" groups who can violate the rules with impunity.
And a few other subs seem like doxxing people they disagree with, usually with the depressing common assumption that there's 'no bad actions, only targets'.
Doxxing is a similar issue. However, were you banned by a mod or shadowbanned by an admin? Because mods can mod their sub as they want. Consistency goes out the window, which is good and bad. If you were shadowbanned though, that's a whole different story.
As for doxxing - both, actually. I had to create at least 5 different reddit accounts in the span of less than two years, always getting banned for petty stuff like stating someone's real name when it was actually used on twitter. Reddit is a waste of time and it's not because of cat memes, it's because of the attitudes of admins who doesn't give a shit about quality or their userbase.
EDIT: Not being tremendously familiar with this spat, it took me a while to figure out what Milo got banned for. Best I can figure out, it was for calling a Ghostbusters actress "barely literate". Since that's a bit of a weak-tea insult, I imagine the real offense was not stopping (how?) his army of followers from tweeting other vile things at the woman. Is that our standard? Should we hold peaceful BLM leaders responsible for tweets from their followers promoting cop-killing?
(looking for the tweet)
Then, should we ban people such as Shanley, Randi Harper and their likes when they "unleash" their followers on some guy?
And this is actually different. While Milo did not explicitly call for the attacks, Shanley and Randi routinely do call for a target to be abused, for their companies to be harassed until the target is terminated, etc.
I don't support any side, I'm just trying to show that the first comment regarding consistency is indeed accurate, Twitter has none.
No argument here. Twitter's inconsistent, if not outright apathetic about abuse no matter where it comes from. It's been pointed out there's no shortage of harassment and abuse from people on the left on Twitter. Maybe not at the rate and volume of the "alt-right" types, but it doesn't matter. Twitter needs to clean house.
Absolutely. If the goal for Twitter is to be a place free from this sort of abuse, then anyone using a position of prominence to call for harassment and abuse should not be allowed to do so.
I don't actually know who these people are/that they've done what you're saying, but if it's true, then I don't think it's a hard question at all.
Actually, I do think we should hold "peaceful" BLM leaders morally (not legally) responsible for tweets from their followers. How can a movement of justice accept the silence or ineffectiveness of BLM leaders with regards to inculcating a non-vile culture and calling out hate speech? Isn't tolerating that sort of thing from a movement's followers for the sake of internal politics and membership basically the same thing as tolerating a number of bad cops for the sake of "thin blue line" solidarity and internal police politics? It's not viable without becoming hypocritical. The only difference is in direct connection and legal consequence, not in the overall morality.
I think we can tolerate vileness as a culture and society, but we should not welcome it -- especially if it starts to abrogate what participants would consent to. We can't tolerate hate speech that incites to violence, period. We should not laud internet vileness as some kind of magical problem-solving "pure" expression, which is what we seem to be doing now. There is an important difference between a freedom and a virtue. Movements of social justice need to be teaching virtue. Otherwise, history shows us that such things will tend to devolve into demagoguery and mob behavior.
Whatever you think of COCs, they might be hard to take seriously if it's "be considerate or respectful, unless you have both a large following and were kicked off Twitter for what largely amounts to abusive and hate-speech like behavior, then we'll actively court you to come to our network!"
http://fredrikdeboer.com/2016/07/20/whos-in-and-whos-out-tha...
(And this is from a socialist)
https://twitter.com/MikaelThalen/status/757505701711405056
Left is a tweet by Leslie Jones, right is one by Kassie Dillon. The former is 'left wing', the latter is 'right wing'.
Only the latter got suspended.
I agree with this. Reddit as a community is a little like Los Angeles is a city. It's really a community of communities. Some are incredibly well run, others are not.
If Twitter gets consistent with moderation, any profits that they could ever have will go puff! It takes real people to do consistent moderation.
Because at the end of the day, numbers mattered to them more than a decent community. It's kind of like why the media is so polarised and broken now. Because getting your readers to flame you and each other to a crisp gets page views and ad clicks. It's easy to sell junk that preconfirms your followers personal biases.
Not to mention the false equivalences that others have already pointed out. Par for the course I suppose. "Ethics!"
Yes, I'm involved in gaming journalism and have some interest in the drama going on surrounding controversies like GamerGate, Brexit, various political elections, etc. Does this affect anything? Maybe, but I wouldn't say that makes it disingenuous.
I've seen people smear others with accusations of crimes to try and get them fired. I've seen people sic their followers on those they don't like. There have been various obvious threats left up that should have been removed in a decently moderated community.
And these issues come from all sides. They're not acceptable on either side, but from my experience, a conservative will seemingly get the rules enforced on them more harshly.
I wouldn't say those comparisons are false equivalences. I'm not comparing someone calling someone else a scumbag with a terrorist threat. Someone who claims they want to physically attack people should be banned much more quickly than someone who merely calls a few names.
But that's not happening at Twitter.
Nothing was more predictable than the feigned incredulousness, as if you haven't been harping on these exact talking points for months on this site while rationalizing GamerGate [1] and trying to convince us we've been deceived and it's not what we think.
Some gems from that query:
> So you believe what the media tells you about GamerGate? Because there's pretty clear evidence that regardless of your side in this debate, there was a decent chance you'd be trolled, bullied or doxed because of it.
> [GamerGate is] basically a revolt against what some see as a broken media, political correctness being forced on a community that didn't want it and favouritism among the gaming press.
There's no changing you, obviously, but for the sake of the "ethics" you're always talking about, your past efforts should certainly be disclosed when you hijack a top-level comment to make the unsupported claims you're making.
1. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=cm30%20gamergate&sort=byDate&p...
On the one hand, users want more freedom than on most traditional community sites. There's a certain expectation that communities nowaday are basically the equivalent to a free speech zone in a local park, where near enough anything goes. And because social networks originally were really hands off about what people posted, that's become the baseline now. You need to claim your site is free speech friendly to get people using it.
On the other hand, true freedom of speech is impossible on communities owned by companies and individuals. You'll get a lot of material that's extremely disturbing. Advertisers won't touch the site with a ten foot bargepole. And to some degree, a lot of normal users will actually be put off when the site draws in the less savoury users that freedom of speech often attracts most.
So Reddit is kind of screwed. They either have to say 'there's no freedom of speech here, here are acceptable standards' (and watch their audience evaporate) or say that there is freedom of speech still (but have their audience gets more and more angry when stuff gets removed anyway).
This is completely OT, but I've always enjoyed the spanish version of that idiom: "entre una espada y la pared" (between a sword and the wall).
If they had made an announcement: "Hey, we're done with free speech. Here's our plan" then I think it would have been less of a problem. But like you said, they are trying to be on two sides at once: They want the benefits of free-speech, without the costs.
This is very insightful line. And it applies not just to internet communities, but any real life communities as well.
> I suspect Twitter is having similar issues dealing with harassment, after letting it happen for so long.
> Don't just tack them on after several years, and don't enforce them inconsistently and arbitrarily as Reddit has done.
Twitter is well on the same path. The inconsistency is what makes many furious. When you ban harassment from one political end, but allow from other, it doesn't paint the company as fighting harassment. It paints a company as fighting one political end.
So yea, I question authority. I think it's great to question authority. I don't like when others question authority and then will not tolerate when their own authority being questioned. From my POV, the part of Reddit's userbase that conveys that attitude, such as users in the Donald Trump subreddit, is the heart of the problem.
Say what you will about republicans, but they often end up being the biggest defenders of constitutional rights.
Democrats on the other hand (aka "progressives") are always looking for ways to limit constitutional rights in order to create a "safer society" and stable "social climate". Just look at Europe - where "hate speech" can get you arrested or your door kicked down, and guns are completely banned.
Our constitution is extremely useful. It's among the best systems for protecting our rights that we as humans seem to have devised, and we disregard the wisdom it encodes at our own peril. But that doesn't mean it's either perfect or sacred. If a law is actively harming (or negligently failing to protect) the inherent worth and dignity of every human being, then that law is wrong by definition, and I've yet to hear an argument that the Bill of Rights is exempt from that analysis.
The framers debated the inclusion of the Bill of Rights in the US Constitution for the simple fact that enumerating the rights made them appear though they were "granted" or in your words "Legal Rights." Furthermore, just by entertaining the idea that they should be explicitly enumerated, called into question whether they were "inalienable". However, they fully believed that those first ten amendments were "Natural Rights". In the end, they felt that enumerating them worthy, and given how the amendments are treated/respected/discussed and the litigous environment today - I'm glad they did.
Plus the Bill of Rights aren't quite Natural rights as I understand them. Half the Bill of Rights (plus the 13th and 14th amendments) are about setting up a Legal Right to a somewhat complex and specific trial by jury system. But you don't actually have a Natural Right to participation in that exact system. You do have a Natural Right to just and fair treatment from your government, even when accused of a crime, and a jury trial is a very good way (though not necessarily the only good way, nor the absolute best way) to formalize that right.
On the other hand, I believe I have a Natural Right to bodily autonomy. If I want to surgically change my gender, or have sex with another consenting adult, or ingest a mind-altering substance with full knowledge of the side effects, then that's my right and the Government should have an extremely high bar to clear in order to prevent me from doing so. However, the fact that these rights are not enumerated in the Constitution has historically been a huge barrier to having them respected, which indicates to me that the framers fears were well founded.
No, they debated them because any enumeration would fail to be exhaustive, and they wanted to avoid omissions from negating rights. There was no mistake on either side that the rights written into law would be legal rights, even if they were motivated by conceptions of natural rights.
The confusion of the Bill of Rights with a statement of natural rights rather than a set of legal rights designed to achieve goals set by moral principles which include a particular concept of natural rights is a more recent phenomenon.
To address your specific point, by itself, speech cannot harm the worth and dignity of any human being. Worse yet, what constitutes "worth" and "dignity" is so extremely subjective and culturally relative, that any such analysis would be the same. Because of that, I dare say that it is a poor basis for legal constructs. We should stick to laws that reflect measurable, objective harm, and use other mechanisms to deal with things like these.
For example, hate speech is best dealt with not by fines and prison terms (which tends to create martyrs out of those people, and boost their propaganda - "if they're trying to silence them, they must be saying something important"), but by voluntary boycotts, public shaming and other forms of social ostracism. This makes the definition of "hate speech" fluid, subject only to the social mores of the given era - as it should be. It also means that no idea can be completely silenced solely on account of being offensive, which is important to ensure true political freedom.
Perhaps subreddits should be required to have numbers after their name, eg /r/news2 (numbers 0 and 1 would be forbidden, eg no /r/news0 or /r/news1).
Twitter, for example, ban political trolls and populists, but tolerate terror organizations and their supporters. Like what the actual fuck...
I saw this so many times.
First they make it free for all everything goes, then people come and use it and then they start moderation/cencorship to the max.
Wikipedia, Stackoverflow, Reddit, etc.
It's totally normal and okay for users to feel cheated, because they WERE cheated...
Removed some words to make this statement more accurate.
Reddit itself doesn't manage the communities, and that's a problem because the Thought Police are now doing it for them.
The idea that people should be allowed to create and manage their own communities is nice in theory, but why should Xx_JoeSchmoe123_xX be in control of the largest League of Legends community? Just because he hit the 'Create Subreddit' button before anyone else? That makes no sense, but it's how all of Reddit is run.
Reddit probably thinks "This is great! We've got all these community managers (moderators) working for us and we don't even have to pay them!" But the quality of their moderation is often proportionate to their salary...
That used to be true. But they've been stepping in and trying to clean up speech they don't like. As soon as you take on the responsibility of cleaning up one group, you take on the responsibility for every group. And reddit just doesn't have the manpower to do it.
If you want to build a tolerant community, you build it. You don't take an existing one and try to put the screws to it until it becomes what you want.
And if you want a diverse and female inclusive culture, you build one, you don't do it by taking an existing group and cracking down the cohesive elements they've developed.
It is kind of disturbing that ordinary people think their peers in society need to be 'regulated' . Only egomaniacs overestimate their own virtuosity and underestimate everyone else's .
I think it's important that an actual, "say what you want as long as it's not illegal" site exists. A lot of the polarization in this country is due to both sides isolating themselves from the other 100% of the way.
Such a site needs to exist somewhere. Now do I necessarily want that on Reddit or Twitter? I don't know. I'm extremely left-wing ('90s liberal; so pro free-speech over political correctness); and honestly Milo's tweets were appalling whenever some people I knew there would retweet him. I won't miss seeing a gay person defending a VP that supports conversion therapy.
But I can clearly see that there's a liberal slant going on in these moderation policies. And I can imagine being on a site where the opposite were true, and know that I wouldn't like that very much myself. For that matter, there's another bias when it comes to celebrity status. I would bet good money that there is absolutely nothing Trump could say that would get Twitter to ban his account or remove his mark, even though he's in the extreme right. He's exempt from the rules that nobodies like us have to follow.
What I'd rather see Reddit/Twitter working on are better tools to defend against harassment. I've had to write my own Greasemonkey scripts to filter out certain types of attacks, and I'm not even remotely relevant. I can't imagine how someone famous, let alone someone famous who can't code their own Javascript filters, can use these sites. And well, I think we saw the results of that lack of control over harassment with the Ghostbusters actress.
But these scripts aren't hard to make. Give people the ability to filter out tweets that contain certain phrases from people you don't follow. Give them the ability to temporarily block all new notifications from people they don't follow for a few days after someone sics their followers upon them. Etc, etc. All very easy stuff to make.
The change that came with moderation was very dramatic. It was basically cultural whiplash. It also accelerated the replacement of intellectualism and aesthetic freedom with groupthink and the same kind of web forum small mindedness you had in the early 2000's.
> I am continually astounded that people sort of trust corporations like they trust people. We can talk all day about how the current team is trustworthy and we're not in the business of screwing you, but I also have to say that you can never predict what happens. reddit could be subject to some kind of hostile takeover, or we go bankrupt (Please buy reddit gold) and our assets are sold to some creditor. The owners of corporations can change - look what happened to MySQL, who sold to Sun Microsystems, who they trusted to support its open source ethos - and then Sun failed and now it's all owned by Oracle. Or LiveJournal, which was very user-loyal but then sold itself to SixApart (still kinda loyal) which failed and then was bought by some Russian company. I am working hard to make sure that reddit is successful on its own and can protect its values and do right by its users but please, you should protect yourselves by being prudent. The terms of our User Agreement are written to be broad enough to give us flexibility because we don't know what mediums reddit may evolve on to, and they are sufficiently standard in the legal world in that way so that we can leverage legal precedents to protect our rights, but much of what happens in practice depends on the intentions of the parties involved.
> The User Agreement is intended to protect us by outlining what rights we claim. But it cannot protect you - you must protect yourself, by acting wisely.
None of these cultures handle censorship well. They all originated in an environment where, to some extent, you could say whatever the hell you like.
Many of Reddit's early users came from these cultures, and they were responsible for the early culture of the site.
And now, Reddit is desparately trying to adapt itself, and attract people from Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr, whose cultures are radically different, and perhaps even to some degree less toxic than the pre-September usenet, whilst also being more toxic. I don't know how.
The point is, a culture that previously only dealt with unacceptability in relative terms - this is unacceptable in this context - is now dealing with absolute unacceptability - this is not acceptable, ever. This isn't a change that people will likely adapt to well. This is prompting a migration to sites like Voat, and others.
The problem is, Reddit is introducing censorship which is incredibly inconsistant to a site where the concept of censorship is anathema - Bans, yes, people get punished for breaking the rules. But having your posts quietly vanish without warning?
No wonder the userbase is pissed.
Unless I got it completely wrong, which is possible.
This comment particularly stuck out to me.
Very few other communication platforms of Reddit's ilk will go through the process of shadowbanning users - that is - the user still has full functionality of the site, however their comments are not visible to other users; only themselves. To an unknowing user, it appears no action has been taken on their account.
It is a shockingly effective means of silencing dissenters or those who disagree with the majority; and this punishment has extended far beyond those who speak abusively/offensively. The nefarious part is wasting the user's time as well.
They probably should, like how Dota 2 will put players who abandon games often into games with other leavers, but most popular games go through "ban waves" to get rid of groups of cheaters at once (Valve has done this many times with CS: GO for example).
Well, apparently Rockstar did this for Max Payne 3 in 2012, and apparently it also applies to GTA-V
http://www.rockstargames.com/newswire/article/35441/taking-a...
http://www.gta5tv.com/gta-v-cheaters-pool-details/
http://kotaku.com/gta-player-says-he-hired-cheater-to-rescue...
I wonder how long until we have to have a regular and an augmented Olympics.
Quake's metagame has evolved around extreme dexterity, complicated scripting, and an obsessive desire to use every trick in the book to push youself beyond the game's intended limits. This is why things like the bunnyhop, the rocketjump, and wallrunning are not only accepted, but expected.
I think current anti-cheat tool suck. Cheaters are usually obvious, sometimes blatantly flying around, or performing inhuman actions. Simple machine learning should be able to detect cheats with high accuracy.
A single person can eat up hours of your time if you attempt to reason with them. They'll create new accounts, they'll use accounts they created a long time ago against this eventuality, they'll make appeals to you and to other users, and they will stir up as much shit as possible.
I've had a person literally call me on the phone to complain that their account was banned.
Shadowbanning means that none of this happens. I check a box, and the collective community can breathe easily, and I can actually sleep. It's an incredible force multiplier.
If you thought I was making a contentless post, sure, I can fix that: plenty of people who weren't spammers have been shadowbanned. Just look it up.
The fact that people have been shadowbanned is not evidence that it was intentional.
And while I freely admit that I might be wrong, in this case, it doesn't actually matter. Even if shadowbans are only given to spammers, that's not what the reddit community thinks is happening, leading to the current social climate on reddit.
I... don't care? I guess you're making some kind of assumption that this conversation needs to know what you think the climate of Reddit's community is. I'd ask "Why" but, I care even less about that.
Shadow-banning is for spammers, full stop. I don't care if you think other people think otherwise.
Why wouldn't I make that assumption? Go read the OP. One of the main points is that shadowbanning, or the belief in it, creates more distrust between reddit's admins and users.
https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3sbrro/accou...
And it's a claim until you give evidence. Until a day ago, as of now, you didn't.
It's tense in the real world when people with diametrically opposed worldviews are forced to mingle, but it can sometimes go OK because the human aspect tempers it. Occasionally, with especially open-minded participants, a friendship can be kindled. That doesn't seem to happen at all when these people are not put in a room together, but on a message board, especially an anonymous message board.
reddit didn't know whether it wanted to be a warm fuzzy community, for which common ideals and values are foundational, or whether it wanted to be an agnostic, neutral, unfeeling platform provider. IMO that's responsible for a big part of the culture clash that we see on reddit, and it's left them in the awkward position discussed here.
It's such thinly veiled hate speech. The tone of the denials hint to those who are anti-semitic that this will be their platform from which to indulge in their hatred.
Even a decade ago, no large corporate forum would put up with this sort of liability. It's crazy.
There is some value in ungoverned spaces, where advertisements, political astroturfing, politicized content curation ("no 'RT' allowed, but we'll allow VoA and Sky") play a secondary role to the contributions of individuals.
The internet was supposed to be an ungoverned space - a 'piazza' or 'forum' - but when it wasn't and when the 'Web' wasn't social media was supposed to fill this gap. Behind the cry of those protesting the take down of 'revenge porn' and 'fat hate' postings, I hear the more sober voice that adknowledges that there's one less place that's a safe and free place for expression - as unpopular as some of it may be.
So yes, it's "ungoverned", but it's still a goldmine for information study. I guess /r/syriancivilwar must be tracked heavily.
All those things are daily occurrences on Reddit.
The formula for doing that is pretty well-known by this point:
We'll see a ban on throwaway accounts and a push for real names, then a ban on third party URL shorteners, then interruption ads, and finally some sort of paywall.
Reddit is a useful piece of internet infrastructure, and I'd be pleased if it would stay that way. It doesn't need to become its own media empire with its own Rupert Murdoch, etc.
Some things that could be improved:
- opt-in home pages that are tailored at specific audiences. The standard one is pretty low quality.
- more detection/policing of voting rings and vote fraud in general.
How is that distinct from multireddits?
> more detection/policing of voting rings and vote fraud in general
One thing that'd help with this is better mod tooling for detecting when it's happening on a reddit you mod.
as far as detection tools for mods, https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/4tpla8/_/d5j7uo...
Because investors have poured a ton of money into it expecting it to be a media empire.
Reddit has recently received substantial outside investments: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/01/reddit-se...
aren't they banned already?
from the reddiquette[1]:
>please don't use link shorteners to post your content
Reddit released a native app and an image host years too late. (I just checked the data and it is not killing Imgur: Reddit image usage was 18% in the top image subreddits at beginning of June, today it is 25%).
The biggest fundamental change Reddit has made in the time since is...making self-posts count for karma. And tracking outbound links.
It really shouldn't be that impossible to have a successful business with hundreds of millions of users. Especially with the wealth of data available to Reddit.
It chooses to pursue other monetization means to preserve the Reddit experience.
We'll see if it's able to stumble onto another sustainable business model.
Except Redditors are explicitly anti-advertising. You can't have both - the current community/culture and billions in revenue.
I think they would love to do that, but for whatever reason Uniqlo and others won't buy in. Maybe someone will correct me, but I think they've been trying to sell more ads for many years with little success.
Some of the problems were actual bugs that seemed odd in a production code base, and others were because they had stripped everything relating to some paid services they used for search or indexing or stuff that I don't remember.
In general it was a huge PITA to do anything with compared to what the leadership was hoping. (That it's be like the WordPress in terms of required investment was what they'd been hoping for.)
that seems like a pretty significant rate-of-uptake to me - why would you say it's not killing imgur?
There is growth in Reddit Pics and decline in Imgur, but it'll be a few months before the lines intersect. A cry from the Imgur killer everyone expected.
There simply hasn't been someone with vision and the skills to deliver at the helm.
Frankly I think it's because anyone competent is wise enough not to touch Reddit with a 10-foot pole.
What's important is the users and how there is room for them to exchange both ways, unlike standard medias.
There also are many people watching for bias, would it come from moderation, brigade, corporate, etc. You will often reads posts about actual professional in a field explaining you something, and it often is enlightening (granted that I would not trust reddit for a decision that implies my own existence).
Generally, reddit works because the users can see and feel that people are exchanging, talking, sharing, reacting. It's "alive". Even facebook cannot really pretend being that lively place, that "bazaar".
What must be really tough is how you manage that many teams of moderators. That must be a nightmare, but to me it seems that it's vital. Fortunately it seems that they will always find people for that, because their subreddit revolves around something they like, and they will often do a good job (it seems) because they want to promote that hobby, not that it will directly benefit them financially (example, moderator of askhistorians).
Yup. I'm one of the mods for /r/AskEngineers. I want to promote engineering in general: designing things, fixing things, learning how things work. I'm glad to do this, and to encourage good and useful discussions.
I especially like when we've got questions from engineers who are working outside their own discipline, and just need a little nudge in the right direction. Getting just a paragraph from an expert can save days or weeks of effort.
What you absolutely should _not_ do is build a brand around being in the first category and then transition to the second. Especially if all your content is user contributed.
Of course, no one thinks of themselves or their in-group as horrible. You could substitute horrible for flawed if it makes you feel better.
If everyone is flawed, then whats the point of having an arbitrarily selected group of flawed people censor all the other flawed people? That logic seems flawed, unless it is purely from a monetary interest.
Moreover, deeming people "horrible" is completely subjective. All of the great pioneers of human rights were considered "horrible people" by the majority.
>Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured. But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream." Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." Was not Martin Luther an extremist: "Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God." And John Bunyan: "I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience." And Abraham Lincoln: "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free." And Thomas Jefferson: "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal . . ." So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?
-Dr. King, Letter From a Birmingham Jail
It seems reasonable that the people who put the time and effort into creating and maintaining a discussion site are perfectly valid to pick and choose what type of content they see fit no matter how arbitrary their rules.
If their rules are too harsh or unliked people will just go elsewhere.
I'm not a teetotaler by any stretch of the imagination, but drinking at work seems counterproductive.
Sometimes, as the parent said, this happens out of the work fridge, as going to the bar isn't feasible, and it's nice to take 30m or so out of a long afternoon to be slightly less heads down, as said above, the fact that beer is involved is more just that it's a common source of enjoyment than any intrinsic ties to the hanging out. Coffee, video games, etc are all other ways of doing this, and I think if the culture is natural and very laid back you can avoid the peer pressure that naysayers like to bring up.
To your earlier point of being counterproductive, by 4 on a friday, I am so far from my peak of engineering productivity that a casual chat that spawns some interesting conversations is probably far more work-beneficial than my banging my head further on the same thing I've been doing for the prior 79 hours of the week, if I'm being honest with my workflow.
Just my thoughts. The stated lack of pressure comes from a recognition that these are just that, MY thoughts; I absolutely believe that this pattern doesn't work for anyone, but after so long of seeing the anti-drinking sentiment grow I wanted to chime in a bit with a positive spin; in as mentally intensive a field as we often have a chance to unwind is so valuable to me.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense, i do that myself. Absolutely agree with the 4 on Friday point as well. I like drinking.
It's just the at work part that makes me nervous. I see the utility in not having to move to a different location, and how that is more inclusive to everyone. I think it takes a very light touch. Because it's at work people might feel more obligated to participate - even if they don't claim any feelings of obligation. Because people are drinking, they might be a little less tactful than normal. These two can compound in ways that aren't great for everyone.
You and your team sound like smart responsible adults. And i'm sure organizations that approach it with your level of delicacy will do great.
All people are different and value different things. If you hire responsible adults, you can give a lot of leeway with how the work gets done.
A well rested person with a little beer in them is going to probably be less incompetent than someone who was up all night with insomnia.
I'm intolerant to caffeine and if I drank the same amount of coffee some folks drink it would leave me a juddering wreck
In advertising for example it's not uncommon for creative teams to head off to the pub for a brainstorm in the afternoon if its thursday/friday.
This probably goes without saying, but alcohol isn't the problem. I imagine problem people and problem cultures often like to involve alcohol, so there's a correlation.
At that point in the day, I definitely liked being able to crack open a cold cider. It's not like I was getting drunk, and I would often continue to code for a few more hours.
Everyone from the CEO down was totally sloshed by afternoon, every day. I would absolutely hate to work in that environment, but it's definitely "a thing".
There's no point in having your quota of "people of colour", as the article puts it, if the business model is unsustainable and leads to people being fired anyway.
Why not focus on creating a successful company first, and then worry about things that carry an administrative and management overhead.
If you want to appeal beyond that, you may want to broaden your culture.
Sometimes the founding cultural DNA is too strong, or attempts to change the culture fall short for a variety of reasons.
I've never been stalked on the internet. I've never received threatening phone calls. I've never been personally harassed, or physically threatened. If by some happenstance, one or two people did any of the above, I'd probably laugh it off.
A company full of people like me is unlikely to consider those use cases as seriously as they should.
Reddit has serious problems with blatant racism, sexism, and harassment on many of the larger subreddits. Until they start taking these issues seriously, they will have a hard time expanding their user base to include more women and minorities.
It's funny to me that someone can say "having a diverse userbase is related to having a diverse workforce" with a straight face, while half the shit in their/everyone's home is Chinese and Japanese.
Your assumption is that people of color have nothing to bring to the table; that white people are better suited to helping create sustainable business models. The label I would use for this belief in the absence of reliable evidence is "white supremacy", although I understand that's a difficult word for many to swallow. You can call it "mild white supremacy" or "subconscious white supremacy" if that's a little more palatable. I don't intend it as a slur, although I know it will feel that way to some. I am using the term because I believe it is the most accurate term for describing the belief.
I didn't say, or even imply, this. I said that it makes no sense to put significant management and administrative resources, within a failing company, into something which will not help the company succeed. I'd say the exact same thing if we were talking about a company full of Japanese people in Japan, or black people in Kenya, or whatever.
If they find it difficult to hire and retain women (which the article states), then they can put that to the side while they ensure that their company does not die.
The tone of the piece makes me feel like it wouldn't even have been written if the employees who left had been 'tech bros'
Don't make a Reddit podcast, make Reddit a podcast hosting network.
Don't make a Reddit video show, make Reddit a video hosting site.
Don't make a Reddit magazine, make Reddit a source for anybody to publish their own magazines.
Why does Reddit have writers and editors and creative directors? It's like a rock band having a position for a flower arranger.
Is this the point where Reddit has official jumped the shark? Where to next for my cat picture memes?
edit
Want to increase quality and revenue? Give a cut of advertising revenue to the mods of successful, high quality subs.
Incentivize for the behavior you want.
Provide the platform and get the users to provide, mod and benefit from the content.
On Reddit you can't even place an add on a specific subreddit if it's not one of the big ones.
Would someone please confirm this? If true, wow.
EDIT: I'm an idiot.
I'm pretty sure r/pics and r/gaming are two of the biggest subreddits out there.
That said their ad targeting system is quite bad in other ways.
As a reference, I have an ad on the /r/programming/ as well with 678,120 readers, that one has 113,613 impressions/views during the same time period.
It's odd because Youtube, Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu did it because it's about the same cost as paying the content creators. And then they own it.
Reddit is already getting their content for free. They should really just focus on improving community features.
The new m.reddit.com fails after a few minutes, on each page.
This isn't as straightforward as it seems. It's kind of like that old quote, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." If the behavior you want is there because people are just casually messing around for fake internet points, it will change when you compensate them. It's probably possible, but far from simple.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law#Expressions Turns out the original formulation was "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes."
As long as content is hosted on company-controlled servers where ad revenue is the model for survival, you're going to see slow declines and eventual busts like Digg. Users hate being advertised to and censored.
The future is probably something where people pay a small amount to access a forum that's somehow distributed on their machines (phones, PCs, etc) and not controlled by any organization. Data transfer (even mobile) and storage are getting cheaper. It'll be like bitcoin, but for discussions.
That's really not what happened at Digg. The problem at Digg was a structure which rewarded "power users" and allowed third party commercial interests to gain control of the site. It's bad enough that Digg had advertising - eventually we were looking at Digg ads to get to content that was itself advertising.
And not all user generated content is worthless. Youtube is a good example of this - I can point to user after user who has uploaded quality original content of one kind or another for years.
Yes, 90% of it is crap, but if you subscribe to the channels you like and check out the channels your subscriptions recommend, you can avoid nearly all of it. And, you know, Sturgeon's Law.
Regarding your second point, if you include Youtube comments, and not just the videos, it's definitely 90% crap.
Comments on youtube... yeah, they're crap for most videos. I guess technically comments are user generated content, but I never really think of them that way. Even more so on a site like youtube where the videos are the important bit.
(A more real problem is that early adopters of any web community building effort are overwhelmingly just there to self-promote in one form or another.)
No. The future is the next Digg, the next Reddit, etc. Just like a torrent site, when one goes down (for whatever reason), the next in line pops up to take its place (and users). The internet does not want to pay money to access a forum. The internet also does not want to be advertised to. So the cycle will continue.
Essentially for a coup of Reddit to occur you have to take a large chunk of Reddit at once. That is very hard to do.
Reddit, the software platform is open source: https://github.com/reddit
It doesn't have a standard spoiler syntax for comments or a spoiler tag(people hack it in with nsfw tags styled to say spoiler but from the main page it will look like porn(ie be marked nsfw)).
It lacks a wysiwyg editor by default. It would be nice to have a nsfw subreddit namespace so that sex related subreddits don't take up possibly safe/useful names and so that you know that /r/humanporn isn't porn. Also a nsfl tag. Ability to expand "ALL" comments. Ability to pick percentage of home page each of your subscribed subs get.
Also a policy that allows removing bad mods from power, ie /r/Holocaust really should not be run by anti-semitic holocaust deniers.
Oh a way to sort posts by reverse age and allow posts in between time x and y not just last hour/day/month/year.
---
Of course reddit does have good mobile apps (at least on android), a competitor would need a good mobile app for at least 2 systems which can take a while.
It's having the issue a lot of 'free speech' centric services have; it appeals to a minority who feel censored, but not the mass market that simply want to discuss less controversial topics.
And until there's enough people able to talk about a variety of subjects, the site is basically pigeonholed as the 'place people banned from Reddit might go'.
But, more importantly, how much Reddit costs to run, at their current scale, is immaterial. Reddit has raised $50 million in VC money and is valued at $500 million, that means that half a billion is the mark they are expected to meet/exceed in lifetime revenue, independent on what their costs are. For better or worse, for-profit startups have very different incentives than non-corporate internet communities. This allows Reddit to not be 4chan (wider audience, some level of control on trolling and harassment, etc), but at the same time, it can't be 4chan (including running on a ramen-for-one-and-electricity-bill budget if need to be)
Normally I'd suggest they start another business doing some honest work (i.e. not ad revenue). Say, a hosting service, since they have experience with that already. Reddit then could become a marketing expense for them - something they'd run for the sole ability to say "Yes, we're the ones who're running the Front Page of the Internet! As you can see, we have some experience!".
But, as you said, they took VC money. It changes the picture significantly. I'm not sure they can be helped.
In every get-rich-quick scheme there's a catch. In startups, the catch is that if you care about your product then taking VC money is a difficult decision because it means surrendering your business to the whims of people who absolutely don't care about your product.
Craigslist wiped the entire classified ad industry and much of the newspaper industry off the face of the earth merely by being the low-cost provider. Ad-supported businesses should be afraid. Very afraid.
As for Reddit, the VCs may have to take a haircut.
Is the content mostly text or does it have a lot of images/videos/sound files? If the former, it's a lot cheaper to run than the latter (hence why a lot of big community sites are so 'vanilla').
What's the audience/topic? Some fields are easier to monetise than others. People in tech are more likely to use Adblockers, but they're also more likely to try out new methods of monetisation (like say, a Patreon type system or something involving Bitcoin).
How much do you know about running a server? Much cheaper to run a big site on an unmanaged service than a managed one.
How many people post vs how many people read. More posting in less time = more server resources and more service costs.
What script do you use? Something lightweight and lacking in a lot of features is going to hold up for longer on a shared server than something like XenForo or IPB or VBulletin.
So it can be really cheap if you're after a simple forum with an audience that doesn't block ads and might be willing to spend a lot on subscriptions or donations. It can be really expensive if you're offering a live video chat microblogging/livestreaming service.
I've seen large forums with hundreds of thousands of posts on $5 a month hosting, and sites with about 50 users needing a dedicated server.
What about HN? I don't disagree that a lot of ugc on the web is crap. I do think though that there are viable strategies for encouraging quality content.
stackoverflow would be one counter example.
So would a lot of subreddit (IS, CS, and science oriented ones for example).
Oh and what about wikipedia?
No, oh no.
Why mods?
Cuts should go to users posting the content.
Maybe make it so that OC is rewarded [more], karma "farming" is discouraged, echo chambers don't become the only places with activity, and make sure that hiveminds do not drown out all other discussion. Otherwise Reddit just becomes the online cousin of mainstream media, and a more compelling rival will pop up sooner than later.
They could even reward gilded comments that start good discussions, and so on.
There's a big difference between how you think when you ask "Do I want this?" versus when you ask "Will people want this?". You shouldn't confuse these.
A lot of scams are based on confusing people about what they want vs. what they think others will want. First and foremost MLM-schemes. You convince yourself the product is good, because you hope to make money from it. Then you convince yourself you will make money from it because the product is so good, in a vicious circle.
> echo chambers don't become the only places with activity, and make sure that hiveminds do not drown out all other discussion
And do you have a proposal for how to achieve this, beyond the old "putting the right people in charge"?
I was actually brainstorming over this – an alternative, or rather, something that builds upon the fundamentals of the Reddit/HN format – during a long drive today, and I think I did hit upon something that could be effective, and fun.
Now to polish up my idea and figure the best way to put it out there. :)
Which annoys everyone who didn't leave an unsavory comment and also begs the question - if you aren't into babysitting threads then what did you expect the role of a mod to actually be, and if there aren't enough mods why not get more?
One thing that bothers me about reddit already is the amount of blatant advertising in many subs where people review things. A few brands catch on early and everyone becomes a promoter, sometimes because the brand developed recognition, sometimes because of subversive marketing.
I run a company with an advertising based revenue model with seven figures of yearly revenue, and CPM isn't what the largest advertisers are looking for. Everyone wants custom created content now, and they pay high premiums for this type of content.
I love Reddit as a news aggregator, but I can see why they need an editorial and content team for revenue generation. I'm certain that most large user generated content sites like Snapchat and Facebook have writers and editors to help paying advertisers create content.
On the other hand, you're not wrong. Just because it works for Netflix doesn't mean it CAN work for Reddit, or that Reddit can execute on the idea.
...but Netflix is an amazing example as to the value of a content aggregator/distributor turning their hand to content creation.
fake edit
Flower arrangement does sound pretty useless, but your comment reminds me of the "no brown m&m's story": http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/vanhalen.asp
Maybe they're a hippy rock band and instead of a pyrotechnician to light the shit out of the drummer, they need a flower arranger to nature the shit out of it, instead?
I've seen a lot of sites try this, and I'm trying it myself on my own site.
However, it can very easily go wrong. If you restrict it to mods (like said here), you incentivise them to only allow topics that advertisers might like (at the expense of the community). Or only topics which can get clicks from average Joes that pass by every now and then.
If you provide revenue sharing in general, you often then incentivise spam by giving people a reason to post as quickly as possible to get their ads up there. It's why Digitalpoint scrapped the idea; quality was in the gutter because of it.
Reddit is struggling for money, but they have an amazing platform to test out ideas on. Out of their millions of users one person should be able to come up with a way to monetize the platform. Google did this with their ads: the most popular ads get rewarded.
If I was a moderator and I was given a list of options to generate revenue for Reddit (and myself or my community) I would have to consider it. Maybe I have a community that reviews widgets and I can link to stores that have the best deals for highly reviewed widgets. It is transparent to the community, gives everyone a good deal, and pays for Reddit.
Can anyone compare the Reddit app to Relay?
I only subscribe to a few subreddits (lisp, Ruby, Haskell, AGI, and a few others) and the user supplied content is plenty good enough for me to visit the site once a day.
"Great! Let's take advantage of that popularity to make a ton of cash!"
"Hm. We'll have to dramatically change pretty much everything about how it operates."
"What could go wrong?"
What if the company is failing because instead of focusing on hiring competent people (of which they have a severe lack, at least in the engineering side) they focused on having a diverse team?
Recent changes (eg. stealth adding link tracking) and comments (eg. Huffman's, we know everything about you) have been user hostile and making the distribution would garner some good will.
I believe Y Combinator was the force behind the pledge, why would they push for and publicly announce something that they couldn't do?
You are correct Y Combinator is behind the pledge (http://www.recode.net/2014/9/30/11631424/reddit-raises-50m-p...), but it was only a plan. Plans fail.
[0] http://www.redditblog.com/2014/09/fundraising-for-reddit.htm...
The guy who was hired to make it has since left many months ago. Nail in the coffin effectively, they wouldn't announce the death of something they never got off the ground. Just silently brush the remains under the rug.
Edit: Found the article I was thinking of
https://ryanxcharlestimes.com/fix-reddit-with-bitcoin-7da3f8...
> Yishan would resign a month or so later due to exhaustion, and new leadership took over the company who set out a new direction that didn’t involve any of the work I was doing. The cryptoequity project was shelved, and decentralizing reddit indefinitely delayed. I was laid off after being at the company for only four months.
I've heard people make the case that audience bubbles are bad for society at large, because they narrow down what kinds of conversations people have. But ever since leaving Reddit, I've noticed my own outlook on life improving. I think that audience bubbles cause an individual harm, similar in kind to that reported by people who de-convert from extremist religious or political ideologies.
I wonder how much better off people would be if social networks implemented some kind of "group hug" algorithm that made posts less likely to spread if they were too in-groupy, and made people more likely to receive posts from wider and wider venn diagarams of adjascent audience bubbles the more insular their own posts seemed to be. You wouldn't even have to force people to confront antagonistic views, just make them more likely to see more moderate ones.
I think in general the way everyone uses social networks is confusing. The focus always seems to be on who is talking and not on what's being said.
To me, Facebook isn't a social network as much as it is a chat application. Diff'rent strokes for diff'rent use cases.
https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/4oenqn/uspez_ad...
Reddit shit its pants when the Trump Train came to town and disturbed the echoes in the chamber.
I have a "Freedom From The Press" Reddit t-shirt. I am embarrased to wear it.
I know I can buy gold and customize the front page, but I am a little hesitant to pay money to make the front page not suck. I have ads turned on in my adblocker so they do get ad revenue from me, I'm not totally freeloading Also, there is a limitation to the number of subreddits you can exclude. That is the nail in the coffin right there for me buying gold.
Finally, I'm not impressed with some of the censorship and social policies they have and don't really want to support a business who seems to have either questionable or widely varying policies on things.
The result, I check it maybe once a day, down from several times a day.
Why on Earth would you go to the Reddit frontpage? I stopped doing that like four years ago. Why not just create a Reddit account and avoid seeing the default subs on your frontpage? Reddit Gold has just about nothing to do with that.
But yes, when you're logged in you only see the subreddits that you're subscribed to.
I do have a reddit account, I have had several over the past 10 years. I look at my subscribed front page as well. However plenty of times there is a subreddit I didn't know about suddenly trending. If I just look at the subs I'm subscribed to, I'm kind of limiting myself to my current interests, I won't learn about new things in new subs.
Hopefully any employees hired specifically for these ideas were able to find other groups at the company or future employment.
If the people in charge now tried to start reddit back then, with all the focus on fairness, equality, correctness, and inclusiveness reddit would never exist.
It would be something else. I'm not sure it would be bigger, smaller, better, or worse, but I know it wouldn't be reddit.
You can't have a bunch of "bros" build a popular site and then pretend that they didn't. You can't bring in a bunch of nerds into a community and then kick them out and take it away from them once it's popular and successful.
Actually you can try and do those things, but it won't work because the tribe will reject you and go somewhere else. It happened to slashdot, it happened to digg, it will happen to reddit and Hacker News too.
If you don't understand the tribe, you can't hope to lead them. You don't lead the tribe by pretending it's not what it is.
Reddit's owners and operators seem to be ashamed by their tribe. That is going to be their downfall.
Mods are mods aren't paid, so they use a lot of very broad auto-moderator bots -- many of which are very poorly written. You can get a permanent ban from a Subreddit for having a user name the bot finds offensive, for example. You can have a post removed because you didn't end your question in the syntax the bot was expecting... and even if you fix it, and appeal to the mods, and they reverse the decision, your post gets restored as older and without any votes so nobody will ever see it. It's more that the moderation is an example of bad automation -- I think this is what reasonable users get up in arms about.
When Reddit was formed, it supported free speech of everyone. They didn't have a plan to earn a profit, they just wanted a better discussion board than Slashdot, Kuro5hin, Digg, Stumbleupon and others. Digg eventually had to make changes to their site that went into the paid accounts and paying for promotion/advertising of links/info.
I first studied computer science and data processing aka information systems it was later called. Then I went back to college to earn a business management degree to learn how to make working business plans.
At South Park they had a skit about Underpants Gnomes, that parodied the startups out there:
Step 1 Steal Underpants!
Step 2 ?
Step 3 Profit!
This is basically a joke, but some companies have an incomplete plan like that.
Ellen Pao was a patsy for the board of directors to blame when the changes they wanted to implement would prove to be unpopular but attract better advertisers that had liberal points of view to support Reddit.
I cite Kuro5hin, because it once was a very good site, and it didn't have a good working plan or a very good editors or management and eventually spirals down into a forum controlled by the trolls that chased everyone else away. Then it was mismanaged and then it went down and went to a new server and was never recovered from backup. Kuro5hin never had a good working business plan, it was like an Underpants Gnome business plan. The users created the content, it got voted up or down, section or front page, and if a story didn't make it you could always post it as a diary in the 'Ghetto' section as the users called it.
Reddit is suffering what Kuro5hin did, the trolls start to take over certain subreddits, and drive people away. They post racist, offensive, and mean things and all band together to vote it up to the front page. Subreddits like /r/Ferguson that was about the Ferguson riots and Mike Brown got taken over by trolls posting racist stuff and so Reddit quarantined that subreddit and gave warnings to people subscribed to it.
Ellen Pao was a scapegoat who carrier out an agenda by the board of directors. She was given the job of CEO knowing that she would fail, and make the changes the board of directors wanted that would make her unpopular to users, but popular with advertisers.
At that point Reddit was no longer about free speech, but censorship, Reddit didn't trust the users to create content so they hired editors to create their own content and blog. Sort of like what Digg did. If they follow Digg they will take paid promotions of links and try to shut down accounts they don't agree with and delete and censor them.
I have to say looking at it from a business angle they can't monetize content if they keep banning and censoring users and try to take control of what appears on the front page. Either they are for free speech or not, either they want controlled speech that meets Liberal guidelines and a Social Justice Agenda, to attract more people like that to provide a safe place on the Internet, or they let the users decide and vote on it democratically even if they don't agree with the politics, or speech, and then the trolls get control of the front page like they did with Kuro5hin.
Actually I like bane's suggestions that Reddit make podcast hosting networks, video networks, get into e-publishing and other stuff that they can sell advertising on or use to pay for a membership to remove the advertising.
There has to be some sort of sane way to earn an income, by advertising, or paying for memberships to avoid seeing the advertising, and making a paywall to verify accounts for $1 or $5 to keep the spammers and trolls out that want to use free accounts and bots to control what is on the front page.
They need a Baysian filter to detect the spam and junk, the same way email programs do it. I've seen a lot of spam and junk posts in /learnprogramming and other subreddits and I always flag it, but it takes a long time for someone to look into it.
After the Ellen Pao scandal many alternatives to Reddit got founded. They have to treat their employees as human beings with equal rights, which is what they are supposed to believe in via liberal values, but instead they fire employees and don't work with them to settle differences. Reddit seems to be hostile towards diverse hires, even using some like Ellen Pao as scapegoats and patsies.
They need to take responsibility for their mistakes, change their business plan so it works, and find a way to hire more diversely and treat employees and contractors better so they don't leave or get fired.
There's a lot of well made points to you post, so I feel bad focusing only on this one thing, but I really don't believe in creating a "safe place". It's simply not possible to provide a safe place online, while providing a platform for any meaningful debate.
Even if Reddit, or others, had the resources to provide a "safe space", the result would be a place no one goes to. People are offended by everything, and eliminating content until everyone feels "safe" would leave you in a situation where most content is never seen.
Reddit is already a mostly left-wing echo-camber. Opinions that diverge from the norm is pushed to smaller subreddit. Making Reddit "safer" would mean closing down the subreddits that you disagree with, but you're shrinking the user base every time you do that.
I understand that it's a terrible thing to tell people, but if you want to be in a safe space, stay of the Internet.
Rape threats and other threats of violence are not part of meaningful debate.
Unsolicited images of genitalia are not part of meaningful debate.
Anti semitism like this [1] isn't part of meaningful debate.
You can safely ban all of these without harm to the robust debate in the community.
Of cause you can, my point is that banning these things, all of which is illegal anyway, won't even get you half-way to creating a safe space.
WTF ? My subbredits certainly are - but there is also conservative xenophobia aplenty if that is your thing !
Or subreddits like /r/worldnews, which are basically left-wing xenophobia echo chambers.
I'd actually argue that most larger subreddits are like that as well (strongly left wing, with a bent of xenophobia), just less explicitly.
To me reddit has done well because it has stayed the same for years digg is the diner that expanded.
Like Google or FB, Reddit could just gradually become unbelievably massive. It already is approaching that level of name recognition. Monetization should be subtle, with an appropriate long-term view.
Also, please don't create many obscure throwaway accounts on HN. This forum is a community. Anonymity is fine, but users should have some consistent identity that other users can relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be an entirely different forum.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12140780 and marked it off-topic.
I'm pretty comfortable saying comments like that don't belong on HN and that we would all do better to think more and inhibit ourselves before posting them. If people want to slag others on the internet, there are plenty of places to do it; here we try for a higher standard.
Can you point out the specific words that "demean" the work of others? All I see is the assertion that reddit is a startup (which is factual) and the founders wanted to get rich (which is true for every founder I know, and is not demeaning in any way).
This superciliously presumes to know what the founders were thinking, makes it sound like they didn't actually care about Reddit since "from day one" they supposedly had something more trivial in mind, and implies that they were merely in it for a quick flip.
In reality they were almost certainly more genuine about it than that; they sold Reddit early, but they also both went back to it years later, which is extraordinary. So the above is uncharitable and trivializing, and seems intended to diminish a.k.a. demean them and their work. Such a low level of discourse is not welcome on HN, whether it's the Reddit founders being demeaned or anybody else.
It's also easily disproven by what's publicly known about the origins of Reddit (pg suggested they make a social news site, not an image board), so the comment is guilty of intellectual laziness too. It's not surprising that these poor qualities show up together.
So the inference made by the commenter conflicts with the inference made by you. So what? Maybe they (reddit founders) really didn't care, maybe they did. Cases can be made for both, with varying degrees of conviction.
The whole thing is highly subjective. I don't agree with the conclusion either, but it's not a mindless personal attack. To me it's an opinion, and even the language used to express the opinion was structured in a civil manner.
I am defending the comment because I can see myself making a similar comment in another context without any intent in my mind to offend anybody or poison the discussion.
Honestly, I feel censoring these sort of comments is extremely childish. I am not the moderator, you are. So the final decision rests with you. I hope I have made my case and you will consider my comments in future.
(And honestly, "The plan from day one was to make a kinder, gentler imageboard, get acquired, and make the founders rich." does not play with my notions of civility or informed opinion.)
In fact a plurality of this community is critical and skeptical of Silicon Valley (which is fine when the criticism is substantive and not when it isn't, as with anything else). And certainly the vast majority of HN users resides far away from SV.
That's legit, but I don't think you're likely to run into a problem. I took a quick look at your comment history and it doesn't seem related to this at all. Perhaps you're just naturally charitable and it's hard for you to see it when someone else isn't.
(Completely offtopically, I noticed an interesting comment of yours from over a week ago and replied here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12146979)
The reason why we use throwaways is precisely because of sporadic and heavy-handed "moderation" by you and your employees.
Not only that, but you engage in hellbanning. It's an absolutely disgusting practice, which only encourages us more honest users to hide behind throwaways... Or toe the line with silicon valley groupthink.
(note: you can delete this username whenever. I plan not to use this again. I don't want my regular accounts hellbanned.)
If you want your claims about HN moderation abuse taken seriously, you'll need to supply links to specific cases of alleged abuse. Outraged comments such as this one almost never do so, and on the rare occasions when they have, I have not observed the community agreeing.
Data suggests that these comments are typically posted by a tiny number of users who create multiple accounts to do it. If there were reason to believe that the broader community felt the same way, we'd be a lot more proactive about changing how we moderate HN. But in fact the evidence points to the reverse.
What you said about banning is misleading. In the majority of cases we post publicly about it: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=....
So they took all of Dan's words as truth? The guy with the competing Reddit? Come on Techcrunch. That's pretty bad.
Now, for the facts:
1. None of these people left voluntarily. They were let go. So they need to stop with the 'people are leaving in droves' nonsense. Reddit has has almost multiplied in employee count in the last year, and has moved to a new office, much larger office building.
2. All of these people, except for Nicole were part of an experimental product that was cancelled. If this was Google or Facebook, you wouldn't even know. It happens every day. But because you got a juicy tip from an ex-employee building a shitty competitor, you run with it. Because, hell, it's Reddit, and you just might hit the frontpage!
3. Shit like this, "The plans to overhaul Reddit’s reputation as a hotbed for harassment and to remake the company as a multi-media publisher have yet to prove successful — at it seems that the departures of senior employees are impacting Reddit’s product and performance." -- WTF does that mean? They tried Upvoted, it didn't work, and they're folding it back into Reddit.com and letting go of people that they don't need for the next iteration. That's business. It has nothing to do with color of skin or your genitals.
4. Numbers always dip in the summers. Especially for Reddit. The kids are off for the summer. It would make sense that they peaked right before summer. According to Alexa, Reddit is the 9th largest site in the US, and up 9 spots this month on the Global list to #27. So it seems they are definitely growing.
You went even further than that and hounded this guy elsewhere in the thread. That's unacceptable on HN, so we've banned this account.
It sounds like u238ed worked or works at reddit, so presumably he/she has some insight into the culture there.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12140907 and marked it off-topic.
What a joke, a bunch of kids playing startup one more time in their favourite playground. Utter disgrace.
I can understand that this idea would be extremely unpleasant to a lot of people. And a slow migration to curated content may seem more wholesome. But it doesn't work that way.
"television programs, magazine, books, etc. that are regarded as emphasizing the sensuous or sensational aspects of a nonsexual subject and stimulating a compulsive interest in their audience."
There are plenty of subreddits like r/earthporn that fit this definition. In fact many of the default communities do.
Ask a reddit user why they like reddit they'll probably mumble something about AMAs.
Then visit /r/all and a completely different picture will be painted for you as the sites most popular content is a mixture of pornography, racist jokes passed off as being subversive and political ranting.
There is... like, less than 10% matches what you describe
and a AmA is in 10th position with near 5000 points
This is just false. I have no idea where you are getting this idea from or why you are stating such clearly inaccurate claims, but they are false. Take a look at the history of /r/all and find me a single day when what you are claiming is even remotely true: https://web.archive.org/web/*/reddit.com/r/all. Yes, there is plenty of the content you describe on Reddit if you go looking for it, but it is absolutely not the "site's most popular content."
fwiw, there is blatant porn at #90 at the moment.
Hate to break it to you, but porn is pretty popular on the internet at large, not just on reddit. Racist people exist, and will flock to any platform where they can freely express their shitty ideas.
Pardon the hyperbole, but your prejudice towards all users of reddit is like to claiming that all people who use the internet are closet porn addicts and KKK members.
Generalizations don't help anyone, and they make you look just as closed-minded as the racists you dislike so much.