Another thing I think should be changed is that mods shouldn't be all powerful and they shouldn't be able to just shut down.
This would in essence create your personal echo chamber.
My favourite system has been Slashdot because you could promote your view of (moderated, and meta-moderated) content voted to be insightful, say, whilst reducing viewing pure joke posts, and such. You could also boost/nerf particular voices.
Reddit is too much "cutesy animal" content, I wish I could filter all of that, it just doesn't amuse me.
I'm not saying there's no such thing as echo chambers, but there's so much else going in when you engage with sources you select that doesn't have anything to do with whether a pre-existing belief is being echoed back to you.
People tend to consider content that appeals to and reinforces their biases and desires to be more interesting, of higher quality and more trustworthy than content that doesn't.
Even self-described "free thinkers" tend not to want their beliefs challenged or to be moved from their comfort zone too much.
I’m very open to other ideas and I actively manipulate the mechanisms on sites like Facebook to prevent being put in an echo chamber. But I am difficult to convince using emotional arguments and I also don’t have time to read a 900 page dissertation on my lunch break. Long form journalism is amazing though, but unfortunately rare and often now corrupted by bias.
Most people in my circle are in the same boat. We are all welcoming of total mental shifts if warranted by the data. We’re happy to entertain an idea long enough to get through a lengthy article even if we’re not sure of it. But if you start with trying to gut wrench you’ve lost us.
Unfortunately the majority of people respond more strongly to pithy memes and emotional appeals, so that’s most of what I see both from those who putatively agree with me and those who don’t. It takes extraordinary effort to find good arguments about anything being written/presented by anyone.
This is why I want the described system. I can make it work for me by being selective about who or what I upvote.
(It wouldn't be just upvotes though. I'd like to apply all kinds of ratings. The whole point is that I'd be in control.)
If you don't want to put in the time then fine, but maybe you shouldn't hold a strong opinion one way or the other. Your own echo chamber is likely no better than any other.
I mean real research, e.g., quanifiable fact, scientific research. This is not your opinion, it's data, and data tells us things we didn't know before.
They could make it so that the more time you spend on Reddit, the less control you get over your feed. I know it's a complete non-starter for business reasons, but it's an interesting thing to think about.
We already build our own echo chambers with personalized multi-reddits (which I use to great effect, since the defaults are trash-tier) as well as the main sub-reddit subscription list. I quite like this idea.
Groups that try to pull you into their echo chamber almost always have dubious or selfish intentions, ranging from blatant advertising to astroturfing. This puts power back into the hands of users.
It's also a much better userbase to my mind, but that's probably a function of small size.
Modding is hard work; reddit barely provides the tools we really need. Note that _bionoid_ mentioned bots - you effectively need to use third-party tools to effectively moderate even a moderate sized sub.
I'm not sure what you mean by "just shut down", but the best subs tend to be the ones where rules are enforced strongly and consistently.
For years, the /xkcd subreddit was run by a group of Holocaust deniers, simply because they got there first when an old mod left. They censored content, linked to bizarre white supremacist garbage, and generally did the reddit equivalent of domain squatting. Experienced users went over to /realxkcd or something, while new users just wandered into the garbage fire. I don't think that's a free speech or mod tools issue, I think that's an 'unhelpful labelling' issue.
Another sub, I believe /frission, had a head moderator who had a drug trip or religious experience or psychotic break or something. He kicked out all the other mods, announced that the sub had "served its purpose" by guiding him to this moment, and declared that he would delete all posts and then take the sub private in 24 hours time. There was a massive archiving effort and pleading with the site administration, but ultimately the only thing that helped is somebody talked the guy into restoring one other mod who could avert the meltdown.
Broadly, I'd like to see reddit massively expand the bot api and in-house moderator tools, because it's a thankless job to do right. But I'd also like to see some form of administrative or community review for the cases where moderators go utterly off the rails and destroy subs - even something extreme like >95% agreement would have handled these cases.
That's true. I do wish there was a way to wrest control away from absentee mods - or something like your example - but I'm not sure how such a system would work in a fair, hard-to-abuse way.
And I completely agree with your last paragraph, with that caveat of needing to think very hard about how to make it abuse-proof.
Advogato tried the trust metric approach, but it now seems to be offline. https://web.archive.org/web/20161124203307/https://advogato....
I just wish they never had tried to "modernize" their site, as the 2.0 commenting system is a downright mess.
https://github.com/notabugio/notabug
My goal is to replicate reddit, but the distributed nature of notabug would allow you to experiment with these ideas on your own peer, or possibly just a custom UI build.
But for the majority of subreddits, I have it sorted by newest comment first. I don't understand why social media sites today are moving away from that, 99% of high-scoring user-curated content just means it's a particularly popular or inciteful comment.
It doesn't promote good discourse if out of 10 comments, the one that naturally floats to the top is the most inciteful one.
They don't want you to know when to stop looking. If they present feeds "newest first", you can move on as soon as you get to an item you've already seen. With a "curated" ordering, you never know when you'll see new content, so you keep scrolling (and thus providing them your interest data and looking at ads).
This is a very interesting word. I think you mean insightful, which is what people usually use to describe a clever or novel thought.
I've never seen the word inciteful before, but that would probably mean something that really riles people up and makes them angry. After rereading your last sentence, it seems like you actually meant inciteful, but it's not a word that's used very often.