Washington Post launches a Reddit public profile
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
That said, one of the challenges of having an official Reddit account that constantly engages with users (it's been actively commenting and replying to users), I would imagine, would be having to be in IAMA mode 24/7. That's fun until something a controversial question/challenge comes up, in which case hours/days of silence will be seen as an admission of guilt/coverup (see r/AMADisasters).
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/6bu4vg/what_a...
Is that really different from Twitter?
At first, for the first organization that does it, maybe. I have to believe that over time people will get over organizations' inability to respond immediately to things on Reddit just because it's Reddit.
(For posterity, here's a spreadsheet of all Reddit thread backfires in general: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bUSN7-nocMJz2Wo1KTIn...)
A friend of mine is the lead mod for the /u/washingtonpost account, and his primary goal for that account is engagement. Even as far as submissions go, they are trying to create content crafted for reddit, such as those news rollups they're experimenting with. His personal goal is for the account to become like the Wendy's Twitter of Reddit--a bit more irreverent and conversational, and willing to joke around with users. So far he's gotten a generally warm reception, especially when he pops up in unexpected places like TIL.
Part of the opportunity for them with reddit is that it's a bit less ephimeral than Twitter or Facebook, which creates new opportunities. As long as a piece of content is relevant, it stays on top of people's front pages, and WaPo can jump into the thread to answer popular questions, which then everyone can see. In a way, this actually gives them an incentive to not auto-post and let stuff rise organically, so they can engage in the right places.
As an avid redditor, I really feel like they have the right idea (it helps he's into the same things as reddit in general) and I feel like good things are gonna come of this over the next few months.
But they're making the usual company mistake on the site. Treating communities as a pure advertising platform rather than a place to engage with the members on their own merits.
They could be commenting on threads that relate to their industry or topics they've wrote about with interesting answers or sharing things that help make them appear as more 'in touch' with the public (like say, Sonic the Hedgehog and Wendy's do on Twitter). Or moderating a Washington Post subreddit where they feature submissions they think help out their publication.
But they're not. They're just advertising the site endlessly on their user page, and making sure every post they make outside said page is an ad for their publication.
Honestly, they're lucky Reddit is going down Facebook/Twitter/whoever's route and trying to be a company friendly advertising platform at the expense of a community or community platform. Otherwise this kind of behaviour would have got them kicked out near immediately, especially on an old school forum or mailing list.
Hopefully this means more mods will take a good look at someone's profile and work out how much they're actually contributing to the community rather than running a bot against their submissions and counting them.
They're responding and engaging with users, even negative ones, they're posting stories, and they're giving an insiders view to the newsroom that they aren't offering anywhere else.
I mean, here they are offering exclusive access to journalists for questions and posting exclusive newsroom info, and your criticism is that they're not posting stupid jokes on twitter like Wendy's?
If it's all the same to you, I'll take the journalists acting like journalists instead of teenage social media managers!
But I feel both submissions and comments are important here, and in both cases a brand should do more than post their own work for readers.
They're technically lost. Look at the trouble they've had making a proper phone app (they still don't have a good one). The user interface is lacking at best (as evidenced by RES being needed to use the site for a long time now). People have been asking for better moderation tools for nearly a decade. The recent CSS dustup shows they don't even understand how people use their site. Then there's the lack what would be super helpful features (the ability to do a subreddit poll, vote for moderators, and access more than your last 100 posts easily).
The leadership is completely tone-deaf to the userbase. Just look at the drama when they fired that AMA mod. Many times various CEOs from Ellen Pao to Steve Huffman have acted more like spoiled 6-year-olds than chief executives. That's before you start talking about them pushing their politics on the site.
And spoiled 6-year-old isn't too far off from the truth. Keep in mind Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian were essentially gifted their success. They applied to y-combinator with no idea of what to make. They were given the idea for reddit. They couldn't make it work so they had Aaron Swartz forced on them (in what was by all accounts a strained relationship). Aaron fixed the site and made it what it is today then they all got paid. And those two have just been coasting on that ever since. It's nearly a "born on third and thought they hit a triple" situation.
If I were a VC I'd be throwing money at a reddit replacement. It's not hard to envision a better platform, it just has a high barrier to entry because you're likely not going to be profitable for years while you grow your userbase. The payoff is huge though. Reddit is one of the largest websites in the world and makes next to no profit because of its management.
Additionally, I cannot see how a competitor can possibly compete with reddit, reddit offers everything most people want without charging anything, without excessive advertising and without demanding a lot of personal information. How do you build a competitor that matches those criteria and then makes a ton of money?
The answer is simply "build what Reddit was like 5 years ago". It's plain to see that Reddit is on a downward spiral - their product has been getting worse and will continue to get worse. Same goes for the community. Reddit is showing all of the signs of a dying platform, if you study the historical lifecycles of web properties it matches quite well. Unfortunately, whatever comes up to replace it is probably going to suffer the same fate.
Reddit was born out of the first Y Combinator batch in 2005. This batch turned out to be an exceptional group of people who helped make Y Combinator into Y Combinator. But it was far from a forgone conclusion that they would be successful or that Reddit would one day become a top five website on the internet.
My experience with Alexis and Steve is that they're extremely generous, helpful, and have set the tone for the "pay it forward" spirit of Y Combinator's alumni network. I'd encourage you to wish them the best of luck instead of hoping someone takes them down.
I agree with parent comment, a reddit like idea with a tech refresh, and less toxic leadership, would be successful. But as acknowledged, it would take time to grow its user base.
I like its low tech interface, as I like the HN simple, modest, low-key interface.
Reddit's leadership is beyond terrible- anyone remember their CEO shadow-editing users' posts? Where even Pao commented on it? Except no one cared because it was in /r/the_donald.
Ever since Reddit made upvotes / downvotes hidden, and started fuzzing upvotes, it started going downhill rapidly.
Why? Because it's basically become an advertising platform using the default / larger subs. Just follow /r/hailcorporate to see.
Voat had a very specific adverse selection problem. Whenever a community is formed in reaction to viewpoint discrimination[1] move towards a stance of active moderation against certain viewpoints, your community is going to (initially) consist of a few principled, marketplace-of-ideas true believes and then a whole ton of the worst elements of the viewpoints being discriminated against. Or as I heard it put recently: "If you establish a witch-hunt-free zone, you'll attract tons of actual witches".
The suggestion upthread here has no such downside. If anything, the better comparison would be Reddit vs Digg, back in the day. Digg had a far better network (and corresponding network effects) back in the day, but Reddit kept plugging away being quietly competent while Digg kept making changes that frustrated the userbase and over time pushed the people who cared the most about quality of conversation to another network. This is the exact _opposite_ problem that Voat had: the sample that was on the smaller site was higher-quality which allowed Reddit to hum along and continually gain users until Digg collapsed and Reddit got a flood of users.
[1] I mean this in the descriptive sense, not the sense with a negative connotation
The Washington Post is sadly just another corporate nail in Reddit's free speech coffin.
I admit I can't discern the difference between the dozen WAPO or NYT articles I've read in the previous fortnight, for instance.
No.
What was that information? And according to who?
"Facts pertaining to terrorism and airline safety", in Trump's own words.
>And according to who?
People present at the meeting with the Russian ambassador in the White House. Sources in the US and Israeli intelligence communities who had to deal with the fallout.
"McMaster refused to reveal details of the conversation, which he said was privileged and confidential."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-h...
"McMaster says that 'at no time were intelligence sources or methods discussed.' But The Post's reporting doesn't say that they were. Instead, the report states clearly only that Trump discussed an Islamic State plot and the city where the plot was detected by an intelligence-gathering partner. Officials worried that this information could lead to the discovery of the methods and sources involved, but it didn't say Trump discussed them."
You don't get rewarded with verified information for publishing fake news. The burden is on the journalist to verify their sources' information. And if they can't, to not publish.
The press manufacture loaded questions faster than the administration could answer them - but that's not their job. If you don't agree, then can you first tell everyone why they should listen to you considering you still haven't stopped beating you wife? [0]
[0] according to official sources close to foldr.
> Officials worried that..
Yet more insidious 'Officials'.
So, returning to my original point: who has gone on record to say what Trump said?
Presumably no one since anyone in a position to reveal such privileged information would be liable for doing so? So all "well he didn't deny it" double-speak and insinuation, from a press starved of information, and hence resorting to punitive speculation.
That's a tangent anyway, if there is no verification, the only value a statement has is the authority and sincerity of the person who says it: we have neither that, nor do we even know the context (we have just the words, or interpreted statement - it's easy to cherry-pick those).
"Executive Editor Ben Bradlee later recalled that many people wondered “how the Post dared ride over the constant denials of the president of the United States and the attorney general” as well as top presidential aides. Bradlee replied that the Post knew its information was correct. Leads from Deep Throat as well as other well-protected sources consistently checked out. Tapes of Nixon’s conversations show that The Washington Post was right."
> Leads from Deep Throat as well as other well-protected sources consistently checked out
I admit, I don't know much about water-gate, or if the following DW[0] paragraph is true:
"An anonymous source was not enough during Watergate. Without a second source to confirm, The Washington Post would not publish anything, even if it came from the credible Deep Throat."
Are you saying this is not the case?
[0] http://www.dailywire.com/news/16487/another-another-watergat...
See e.g. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/water...
No on the record sources at all.
If they are multiple independent, unbiased sources, that is different.
Not clear what you mean by this. The WP used multiple anonymous sources for many of its Watergate stories.
>If they are multiple independent, unbiased sources, that is different.
The current stories about Trump are based on multiple sources. What gives you the idea that they stem from a single source? After all, Trump’s administration is one of the leakiest in living memory.
> The current stories about Trump are based on multiple sources
I don't see evidence of that, but also there were two important conditions: independent and unbiased.
The problem here is I also don't trust the press anymore to not misrepresent sources. Eventually, the evidence needs to surface.
Right, but your statement did not make any sense. There is no connection between the number of sources used and whether or not they are anonymous.
>but also there were two important conditions: independent and unbiased.
What makes you more confident that the Watergate sources were independent and unbiased? You are trusting the judgment of the journalists in both cases.
>I don't see evidence of [multiple sources]?
Are you kidding? There are, at the very least, people who were in the meeting, and people in the Israeli intelligence community, who clearly weren't.
> There is no connection between the number of sources used and whether or not they are anonymous.
there is - If there is only one source it requires more scrutiny. Multiple independent sources might at least be checked for consistency.
> What makes you more confident that the Watergate sources were independent and unbiased
I don't, as I already stated, I don't know much about WG - you brought it up.
> people who were in the meeting, and people in the Israeli intelligence community, who clearly weren't.
Depends on what you are trying to prove - If it's "what Trumps said" then people not in the meeting have no reliability on the matter.
And that is so regardless of whether the sources are anonymous.
>I don't, as I already stated, I don't know much about WG - you brought it up.
If the WP was following your guidelines for the use of sources, it would not have published the Watergate stories.
>Depends on what you are trying to prove
That Trump shared classified info.
Did Trump describe that information as classified?
Who asked Trump if he leaked classified information, in which interview? Anything specific? Or selective reporting?
> He was asked if he leaked classified information and responded by defending his right to do that
He was defending his right to [release] classified information? He does have that right, but:
"I have the absolute right to [share] facts pertaining to terrorism and airline flight safety"
I can't see the mention of "classified" in that particular statement.
So to summarise; the press claimed Trump gave the Russians classified information - Trump nor McMaster has confirmed or denied this. The press heavily imply this means their original claims are right, but again, the burden is on the press to prove their original claim, by their original source; you don't just get that as a reward for making unverified claims. My original point is no one has gone on record to affirm it, it's just insinuation games.
That is why I mentioned the context. He said this in response to allegations that he had shared classified information.
Trump did not answer to the allegations made. You quote the tweet yourself, and it does not address "classified" information, you're assuming that it is, and hence putting words in Trump's mouth. you don't know.
Also, it does change the perception of the story. As someone who has followed the Syrian civil war somewhat closely, I get the sense that the US has repeatedly tried to "cooperate" with Russia on Syria (while putting Ukraine on the back burner). In other words, the US - not a democratic or republican president - has a policy of constructive engagement. That changes the story - it is about cool academic cucumber handling one way, smarmy braggadocio salesman handling it a different way.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/horrified-israeli-intel-officia...
Put simply:
The US has a process for sharing intelligence whereby the intelligence community runs through a long list of concerns, redacts things that are too secret, protects sources and methods, protects allies and relationships, protects national interests, etc, and makes intelligently informed release decisions based on a mature review process.
Donald Trump blurted out Israeli-sourced active-asset-in-the-field top secret code word intelligence WITHOUT following the declassification/sharing protocol precedent, performing analysis, redaction, or doing even the merest hint of due process at all. -- And he did that in a fit of braggadocio, "I have the best sources, the best intel, such as..."
He's entitled to do that. To be careless and crass and a braggart with our most trusted and important secrets.
But we're entitled to criticize such craven carelessness.
See, even the language is as biased as in the Pravda in its heyday.
There are no public logs that show how the discussion advanced, but there is a heavy push by the Leftist media to portray and spin the exchange of information in the light that fits their narrative. There is also absolutely no reason to believe that Trump doesn't want something in return. The two stories are almost identical, but spun in entirely different ways which shows the blatant stench of bias.
Well, except for the part about the Washington Post actually having journalistic standards and ethics.
Bill Moyer did a nice episode showing the disproportionate number of report Wapo did in pushing fro a war in Iraq [1].
Among notable neoconservatives/neoliberals working at the post and using it as a pulpit are Robert Kagan [2] who worked on the "Project for the New American Century" that became the blueprint of Iraq war agenda.
For me the nail in the coffin against the Post was when they used an unknown research firm to push for a neo-mccarthyism Russian connection to over 200 blogs and publishers [4],[5].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hiatt
[1] http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/citations.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kagan
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C...
[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/russian-prop...
[5] https://theintercept.com/2016/11/26/washington-post-disgrace...
If it bleeds, it leads.
War makes good for good photo's/footage and is a polarising issue which means you get to make headway whichever side you fall on it.
Real journalism seeking truth, no matter whose agenda that truth might endanger, died years ago.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2003/03/18/b...
After 10 years it's now as important to kids as Facebook.
There posts getting 100k upvotes more often these days. And some are approaching even 200k.
What's even crazier is the growth of the imgur subculture
For example, a post with a score of 7 would increase by 1 every time it receives an upvote, but may need 10 or 15 upvotes to increase by another point once it gets over 1000 points (made up numbers).
A few months ago, the admins made a change to the algorithm to allow posts to gain much more points than before. Now, a post gets 1 point per upvote until, say, 10,000 upvotes, after which it only needs 5 upvotes per point.
If you sort top, almost all 100k+ upvotes are after this switch.
https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5gvd6b/score...
Are there some stats on demographics? I know it was cool for kids like 10 years ago, but did the demographics just shift with the initial age group or are they still actively getting teenagers?
Not sure if a widespread use of this would encourage my reddit usage, I usually visit certain subreddits for certain topic - and that not very often. But then again following tweetstorms and hashtags on Twitter is pretty much useless to me, that's why I follow certain people.
You can only post links to your own blogspam on your own profile.
Machine learning for automatic fact correction seems like a nice answer, until you realize it would definitely go wrong, or be used to control opinion in an even stronger way.
I think the Trump subreddit is very childish (seems to be intentional). But I hate the thought of websites like Reddit, FB, and Twitter engaging in practices that clearly and systematically try to reduce the visibility and legitimacy of one political viewpoint. What if the table was turned against the liberal viewpoint? I would be just as worried.
Things are different for the trump subreddit because it's a subreddit that has actively engaged in hostility against other subreddits and particular reddit users. Calls for brigading, slurs and harrassment of other users and admins, I've seen it all by now. It's reprehensible.
The main Trump subreddit would have long been banned and nuked out of existence if it weren't as popular as it is today. Right now, Reddit would face too much backlash if it outright banned the subreddit for continuing not to comply with the site rules. So it's understandable that the admins are trying to handle the situation somehow -- that's not "an effort to reduce [its] visibility", it's a compromise that doesn't involve removing the sub outright.
There's plenty of pro-trump subreddits which aren't involved in this nonsense because they're not spamming, harrassing, using bots etc. You don't hear about them because they get lost in the noise.
I'm certain what will happen is that the admins will keep adjusting the anti-voting ring algorithms until they effectively nerf all of the accounts that frequent the_donald and vote there.
Then they have a cover for any backlash because they didn't do anything specifically targeting the_donald, it just happens to be the case that the_donald "unfortunately got impacted" by the new algorithm due to the community's behavior.
But it's a difficult problem.
It's pretty crazy: I started on reddit about 10 years ago and it has noticeably changed in their attitude towards allowing political opunions that they do not agree with
On top of this, the Trump subreddit wasn't even legitimately getting most of it's posts to /r/all. They were actively trying to manipulate things in order to flood /r/all - making a sticky of new posts to get rapid upvotes, saying they would upvote any post on the subreddit, etc. The result was that the usefulness of /r/all went down, because a lot of it was just posts from one subreddit. The posts in the Trump subreddit also aren't innocuous. After the U.K. parliament attack, for instance, they made a post with the title "But hey, it wasn't all bad. In the end a Muslim was shot." that got ten thousand upvotes.
The resist subreddits strategy is one of width: lots of subreddits where they focus on one or 2 posts in their subreddits network to get visibility on the front page.
The resist strategy is more annoying because there are too many different subreddits that they control to effectively filter them out
One of the subreddits I frequent is for a liberal major city. The the_donald shills are vastly outnumbered, but every single post has a few of them popping up to argue in their disingenuous signature troll style (tu quoque, gish gallop, rinse + repeat).
I used to waste time arguing with them, but now I just down vote and move on. These people aren't interested in any kind of real debate; they just want to broadcast their Breitbart talking points over and over again.
I do like the fact that a newspaper equates itself with any Joe with a resdit signon. How many steps in between wapo and "Average Joe and his facts and opinion?" maybe 3??
It also can give more power from moderators back to yhe people who are providing the content. Moderators provide a good service to the community but they are way too powerful/influential as is
Now that's a match made in heaven. Or Hell. Or whatever. Now Washington Post will have another outlet to tell Millennials why we need to invade Iraq again. Or Syria. Or Ukraine. Or wherever they are stirring up the pot for.