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Comment by rottyguy | Hacker News Reader

I'm seriously puzzled how reddit isn't eating facebook's lunch. the content is light years better (and is upstream for much of the facebook feeds I eventually see)

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I am an avid redditor with a mostly dead facebook account, so I agree that the content is better, but it's different networks entirely. Reddit has still held on to its psuedo-anonymous roots, and thus hasn't lived up to the "social" part of the social network. The people still consumuning content on facebook are doing so because that's where their friends are.

You know the people that feel a need to tag their friends in a comment on funny posts? That's the kind of user that reddit hasn't been able to convert. Whether reddit wants or should try to garner that traffic/content is a choice they need to make, but the site is doing fine regardless.

I think the bigger issue is why FB hasn't been able to create the kind of conversations that reddit does- the lack of real threading and the lack of a true downvote (preferably anonymous) keep conversations on FB abysmally superficial. You can't engage in a debate with someone if the back-and-forth gets impossible to follow after the second reply, especially with more than two participants. Likewise, FB and users have no idea whether people disagree with a post or are simply ignoring it; or on something like a critical article, whether a user agrees with an article and it's the article's subject which makes them angry or the user disagrees with the article and the post itself makes them angry. FB, with its status as the defacto social network could be a place where people have real constructive discussions, but instead its inability to foster real dialogue has a lot to do with the current stupidity of political discourse and the problems with reality bubbles and whatnot.

Reddit's system has its issues too. Early comments always get more votes and have more sway than later ones, and the "reality bubble" effect is worse because the general consenses upvotes posts that agree with their opinion and downvotes ones that disagree - effectively hiding them whether they're factually correct or not.

Hacker News is much better than Reddit in general for allowing comments on both sides of an issue to be heard, but it's not perfect either. I think it benefits from not being able to see the number of votes on someone's post because it removes that way of checking the previous hive consensus. I'm not sure I even like the greying effect on heavy downvotes.

The best real discussion (especially for ongoing topics and events) I've seen is still on old-school forums like SomethingAwful. The barriers to entry help ($10 on SomethingAwful, 500 points to downvote on Hacker News) but I think Discourse went too far in that direction, where anti-spam limits can make it hard for new users to even write a good post or respond when they want to. I'd like to see a modern forum site where anyone can create a subforum and moderate it themselves the way anyone can create a subreddit on Reddit.

> I'd like to see a modern forum site where anyone can create a subforum and moderate it themselves the way anyone can create a subreddit on Reddit.

Isn't that...Reddit?

Reddit is very geared towards short-term discussion. Top comments on a post are usually from the first couple of hours and posts last less than a day. For long-term discussion traditional forums with chronological posts and threads that get re-bumped to the top are still king.

Meh sounds like Reddit just needs a sort by 'weight' option that sorts by amount of comments.

That's quite different if I'm reading your meaning correctly. That type of system tends to result in the biggest threads staying at the top and getting bigger and bigger while new ones never appear.

Weight can mean anything, freshness of nested posts eg.

They're completely different things; Reddit is strangers, Facebook is people you know.

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