Reddit’s Astonishing Altruism
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It really is heart-warming to hear of all the good that those on Reddit have done. But I can't help feel that it's the exact same mob mentality which made me want to leave Reddit in the first place — discussions got extremely polarised very quickly and there seemed to be very little room for reasoned dialogue.
The article makes it sound like a good thing that "comments are generally downvoted by dozens or even hundreds of people with remarkable speed, pushing their noxious posts down into obscurity within minutes". But, since everyone can downvote — hell, I have even see non-controversial statements get downvoted heavily — the quality of dialogue often ends up being at the level of the lowest common denominator.
I really can't conceive of any way a forum (online or afk) with sufficient mass (with the accompanying noise, groupthink and trolling that any community of people will pick up) to accomplish the things that Reddit has/may yet could turn out any more reasonable.
Have you been there recently? They're "contrarian" in the sense that they disagree with the non-Reddit mainstream, but they hardly respect contrarianism to their own views. I definitely would not call them "open-minded." (At least, not in the main subreddits. There are smaller, more intellectual communities within Reddit for which this is not as true.)
Have you been anywhere else recently? Can you give an example of a community, of comparable magnitude, that is more open minded?
I am easy to criticize reddit, popular as it is on HN, but it is a surprising community for its large population, and as you say the smaller parts of it can be very good. One can find all the flaws with a thing that one wishes to but, in the end, if none are better it's still the best.
The main difference seems to be a different political skew: Reddit has a lot of democratic-socialist types, while HN has a lot of libertarian types. On Reddit it's unlikely you'll be upvoted if you're right-of-center, but on HN it's unlikely you'll be upvoted if you're left-of-center. Conversely, you can get upvoted on Reddit for a generic "corporations suck" comment, and you can get upvoted on HN for a generic "unions suck" comment.
The level of technical competence on HN is very high, and there's way less noise, so if you're a technically competent person with a business side (or if you're just interested in the business side), HN has a plethora of good for you.
As you note, the level of technical competence in the subreddits and threads that pertain to technical matters is higher on Reddit. Articles and discussions about just about any facet of any field that requires long-studied domain knowledge will have at least one commenter that really knows their stuff and wants to help people understand it.
This does come with the problem that someone who is just crafty with words can create detailed troll paragraphs that laymen can't easily distinguish from legitimate information (and this does happen, and is arguable inevitable once a discussion community grows to contain some ill-defined number of members), but that is a problem endemic to language itself, and it seems like at some level you have to assume that people know how to critically analyze what is told to them and be able to make a fair guess at legitimacy, and know to defer to well-sourced data (in addition to being able to identify good sources....)
The problem with groupthink and immaturity on Reddit is something that occurs in almost every large(r) online community I can think of (/. anyone?), and has many causes, not the least of which is that it's comprised primarily of young, idealistic, nerdy people -- and we all know that it's much easier to be loud and passionate and blunt-to-a-fault when you haven't gotten past whatever developmental phase it is where you get over yourself a bit and stop being so reactionary. In addition, you have group psychology and a large percentage of users that aren't the most socially well-off folk. In addition, a bunch of other stuff.
In short, it seems to me that Reddit is more a force for "good" than not. There are "bad" things, and the community can be swayed and manipulated like any other -- but they're largely more aware of that than other groups, and seem to be more willing to actually listen to well-reasoned arguments than others.
They also have the benefit of becoming a very popular site at a point in time where the internet seems to be becoming a major player in social and political action, but that's a different can of worms.
This is exactly what I mean. For example in a discussion about D, Walter Bright (the creator of D) joins in. In a discussion on Scala Martin Odersky joins in. That's pretty awesome.
> This does come with the problem that someone who is just crafty with words can create detailed troll paragraphs that laymen can't easily distinguish from legitimate information (and this does happen, and is arguable inevitable once a discussion community grows to contain some ill-defined number of members)
Yes, although surprisingly often the crowd will choose the good comments will to be upvoted. There are exceptions of course. For example jdh30 nearly always gets downvoted no matter what he says, even if his comment is helpful and correct.
> HN also has a much stronger focus on entrepreneurship (understandably so).
Yes, on entrepreneurship topics HN has better discussion. Reddit is a bit anti-entrepreneur (especially anti-bigco).
Parts of it, certainly. It definitely has a generalized semi-anti-capitalist vibe, and yes, anti-bigco. I don't think too many of those people are against entrepreneurship in the sense of individuals (or small groups thereof) making a living for themselves doing what they are passionate about; I would imagine that the crankiness would tend to arise when an individual or company started going past providing for themselves, to providing for themselves in gross excess at the expense of the livelihoods of other individuals -- possibly many other individuals.
you cant really be for one and against the other.
This is like saying that a cup of water with a drop of red food dye in it and a cup of red food dye are equivalent because they both contain red food dye. One of them is going to be much more beneficial upon ingestion. That's a terrible analogy.
It just so happens that the majority of "big businesses" doesn't really give a fuck about how much suffering they create -- their primary motivation tends to be profit and power, where as the majority of "small businesses" are primarily concerned with providing for the livelihoods of the people in the business, because the people are passionate about whatever they're doing.
Don't mistake an argument against viewing people as dollar signs as an argument against big businesses, and don't mistake the tendency for most of the businesses criticized as sociopathic to be big businesses to be indicative of the criticism being of big business itself.
People who are anti-bigco tend to be so because of the whole "profit is the only imperative" thing, not because they are businesses that grew.
Your logic is right one way: big businesses started out small, but not all small businesses become big.
Reddit has bouts of reasonableness, but I've never found a subreddit that is free of the mob.
Except /r/dwarffortress.
I'd imagine that would depend on what subreddit the thread was in. Frontpage? Yeah, probably. Then again, if it is well reasoned, there will also be people pointing out that the downvotes are frivolous, and agreeing with points and debating.
Reddit's biases overlap a fair amount with HN's. Pick a topic where HN and Reddit agree, and you will see the effect more clearly, since the HN crowd on Reddit otherwise serves as a bit of balance.
I find making sensible, well reasoned and referenced arguments works pretty well. I've never been voted down because people disagreed with me.
No community is perfect, but I'd say that Metafilter is considerably more tolerant and open to a wide range of opinions on a subject. You can't downvote others if you disagree with them, and baseless attacks are simply deleted by moderators; it forces you to build a well-reasoned argument if you want to debate.
I would like to know how informed abstainers see Reddit. I feel like given some contrived option to identify themselves with the heritage of their birth culture or nationality, or by their careers, or by where they would fit into traditional subcultures, very many Redditors would identify as Redditors, by interests and attitudes in common with a sufficient critical mass, even with dissent. The Colbert/Stewart rally, more than the individual acts of kindness, has fed a zeitgeist within Reddit that they are a community awakening to their own political power. Momentum is currently building to a campaign in protest against the TSA (which will probably fizzle, with much disillusionment for all). But I think 4chan has showed online subcultures with some chaotic convergence of will can increasingly effect the world outside their own community. And I can't conceive of any way a community, online or off, could come to be sufficiently large to find political feet, and turn out any better than Reddit has.
Regarding HN:
HN still has a higher signal-noise ratio, but as HN gets more popular (with many coming from Reddit, I presume -- and going the other way, as I did), I find that the difference between HN and applicable sub-reddits is dissolving. In particular, I feel like there was some suppression of humour on HN that has weakened since I arrived, which as lame as it seems was a not insignificant differentiating factor.
I see Reddit as a self-aggrandizing media outlet. Members generally accept liberal values as status quo. Meaningful discussion imitates base prime time political discourse.
Some of my specific gripes are:
1. Racism on Reddit is an acceptable subtext, as long as the subtext is funny. 2. Sexism on Reddit is acceptable as long as your mother, wife, or daughter are not directly considered. 3. Israel is wrong on Reddit.
I know I'm painting a pretty nasty picture of a lot of people, and I apologize to those who don't deserve it, but I've seen group think plenty of times before in my life and Reddit is it.
That said, that doesn't mean that I think it's necessarily appropriate to make racist jokes on a board like Reddit -- it's a textual medium, and depending on the context could be extremely unintentionally offensive to people.
That said, I can't say that jokes of any subject matter bother me on Reddit. There is some actual misogyny, and some interpreted-as-misogyny-when-it's-not drama (and you can replace misogyny with just about any "going to offend people" term here), and it detracts greatly from having useful discussion.
Then again, although the primary purpose of Reddit was useful discussion, it's really more like a pub filled with pretty smart drunk folk. It's a social gathering place, and great stuff can be found, organized, talked about, and done -- but there's also going to be some guy slurring something about his genitalia and women or whatever.
It's not that they're against women, they're against whomever is not telling them their side of the story. It's only natural, if a friend tells you that their boy/girlfriend did something bad, you'll side with them, and so will the other party's friends. Usually both parties have a share of the responsibility, but it's human nature to usually take the side of the person who tells you the story.
I think that what you state here absolutely happens, but I think that there's also a good bit of actual nerdy women-are/men-are angst floating around that at least gets interpreted (or is interpretable) as misogyny/misandry. Not as bad as it used to be, and it always gets called out (at least recently as far as I've seen), but it's there.
I figure it's largely just a function of relative immaturity, and that it's not a serious thing as long as it's called out and it's obvious that the vast majority of people on Reddit don't actually think like that. I definitely don't think that Reddit is a bunch of ridiculous sexists -- it's one of the most egalitarian groups of it's size I've ever seen.
Edit: To clarify, I don't think there's a very large overlap between the people who are making "offensive" jokes, and the people actual displaying misogyny, misandry, or other forms of bigotry (whether realized or not) in the Reddit community, although some of the former certainly gets interpreted as the latter here and there. It can be hard to tell sometimes.
Digg had a hell of a lot of momentum in the space - but they were too focused on trying to polarize interests around the articles that were submitted - and much much less focused on the community that was providing the interest.
The beauty of reddit (much more a /. approach) was to provide as free a forum for the opinions on submissions. Digg really was submitter focused (which I believe to be too emulative of traditional media) - whereas reddit does an excellent job of the true meta discussions that would occur if you had a crowd in a public square that were presented a story on, say, a billboard and documenting the ensuing conversations.
Reddit truly emulates how people in a quorum would act. Digg tried too hard to play both the publisher and consumer side of media, with too much publisher bias and we see where that got them.
Exactly; HN is very myopic - to the point of exhibiting aspergers. HN actually is too 'geek centric' -- whereby the community here is too focused on looking like the in crowd of the YC/FB alumn...
(downvotes welcome)
To your point itself, very few stories on the front page of HN at any given time have members of HN, or people you would accuse members of HN of playing fawning court to, as participants. Many of them have one or two comments that say "Seriously guys? This isn't Reddit." They're usually buried gray at the bottom, forgotten under a mound of productive discussion on whatever the topic is at hand.
Uh, the internet's a big place. If you don't want "geek", then by all means, don't let the door hit you on the way out.
That doesn't mean we are all geeks all the time, it means that we don't spam this site with every other thing in our lives.
I'm a geek/nerd/whatever, and proud of it, and I have nothing to do with the "in crowd" at YC - I live on the other side of the world.
I used to. I stopped when the noise got too annoying to sift through, but I would see good comments hidden to most people by downvotes more often than never.
The "don't downvote this guy" reversal happens often, and it's really a very nice thing about the Reddit community, but a solid comment or argument is not guaranteed that treatment by any means, and sometimes that reversal doesn't actually work.
Even then, go read /r/trees, it's full of people who are very sensible and will contradict other "Ents" if they're being stupid about their use of cannabis. They chastise other Democrats for having extreme views.
It's cheap to sit on the sidelines and classify reddit. If you're only reading the headlines and not participating in the discussion then you're missing the point. Similarly, if you're only subscribed to the default subreddits, you're missing the truly good stuff.
It's unbelievable how much GOOD content appears in the android, ubuntu, electronic music subreddits that people never see because they dismiss it they way you are.
Maybe if you don't check your threads for replies. Granted, not everyone does that, but I've conversed with more than a few folks long after the original story vanished.
Why?
Forums/mailing lists don't have that problem. Every post is given equal merit in the number of eyeballs that read it. Those comments that are not interesting can get ignored, those that are interesting will either merit a "yeah, I agree" response, or a "you're wrong for [x,y,z]". That is a dialogue. Community moderated upvoted/downvoted discussions are not a dialogue. They are a "here's what we all think" metric.
I'd almost argue that groupthink is inherent in human interaction in groups larger than one. Almost.
Forums and mailing lists are certainly susceptible to it, even though it occurs less often, but I suspect that has more to do with the size of their memberships. SA, for instance, has tons of it.
Oh, and /. had a serious problem with it for a long time. Their moderation system helps, and maybe it's gotten a lot better (it's been a while since I was active on it), but oh man when /. was the site, it was pretty bad.
/. is a good example of what seems to happen to a lot of online communities -- a small, competent, awesome base of users is very active for a while, things snowball, you then get a huge upsurge in users and activity and trolling, and then that eventually fades and your userbase stabilizes at a point where the userbase is pretty solid and there's not too much in the way of ridiculousness going on.
---But seriously most people are members of Reddit, Digg (well..), HN etc. it's not like each website only has the same guys and girls (yes girls!) whether people admit it or not some if not most people read many types of social news websites.
The level of discourse increases quite a bit in subreddits, and you can usually find good discussions on even obscure interests. On the other hand, its pretty rare for the level of discourse to get to the level of HN. But level of discourse isn't the only quality of Reddit.
I think the main reason for me switching to mostly reading Reddit was because I found it very comforting to read r/atheism (my family is very Christian, mostly fundamentalist and I was a closeted Atheist). I suspect that emotional support is what a lot of people go to reddit for.
To put in the cliché Freudian speak -- Reddit is the Id and HN is Superego.
Reddit is the place to call people stupid, post silly pictures of cats, but also a place to get together and donate for a cause, talk someone out of a suicide, or just spread around stupid memes for fun. A well placed witty one-liners will get you hundreds of upvotes. Anything too intellectual will likely get a TL;DR type reaction.
HN is the site that discusses issues in depth, rational, evidence backed arguments are expected, civility and maturity is expected as well. A stupid one liner will most likely be frowned upon.
But I think we need both. I am a member of both sites and both provide for a what I consider a healthy outlet for my online presence.
I mostly agree with your post except for this. I actually find that Redditor's are extremely good about offering a counterpoint to a sensational title. Oftentimes, someone in the field related to the article will post something intellectual debunking the story (especially in the case of something to do with science or medicine) which will offer far more additional material than the source itself.
If you avoid the stupidest subreddits (/pics, /funny, etc) it's actually amazing what high level of discussion you can meet. (while having a good laugh too, btw).
They can get their users to 'do good' in the world, but can they make any money yet?
Not at all. I think Reddit is a classic example of the "evaporative cooling effect" in groups. It's now dominated by a very restricted set of opinions. It looks very open and welcoming (initially, at least), if you share those opinions, but it's obviously ridiculously narrow-minded, if you don't.
However, I'll tell you a secret: the subreddit called TrueReddit does not suffer from this. It's really pleasant.
However, one unfortunate thing is that the programming subreddit isn't (in my opinion) part of the signal. It's just as full of intolerable sniping and general assume-the-worst behavior as anywhere else on the web.
however, judging by the number of upvotes they all receive, there's probably hundreds of thousands of people out there who disagree with me, but seriously, a lot of comments on there are like i can haz cheezburger without the cutesy grammer.
To me, this increases trust in humanity!
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for helping people. But reddit was a link aggregator at one point, and it has been disappointing to see that side of it melt away over the years.
Yes, yes! Exactly!
I used to read programming reddit, and made a lot of comments there. Then I started to notice a pattern -- people were so happy that they wrote a blog post that it was suddenly forbidden to comment on it. One post I remember reading was something like, "hey guys, I made a PHP app! it's open source so please comment". The app was doing something like submitting a form field like "?shell_command=someapp%20--args". I said it was maybe not good practice to allow the user to supply an arbitrary UNIX command. The reply was, "well, my app sets that, and nobod is going to change it". I told him anyone could change the URL and run whatever they want. This got downmodded and I was told I was being an "idiot jerk".
Then I didn't read reddit anymore. Obviously I was raining on some sort of special parade that I was not even invited to.
Anyway, there's something off about the Reddit community. I think your post sums it up quite well.
Just because it has a "politics" Reddit doesn't mean the entire site sucks.
I come to HN for the simple reason that it's more about startups and programming than most anything else, and overall I am just as happy with its content. It's considerably more granular, and sometimes that's precisely what I want.
I read both sites and have for quite some time now (although mostly lurking). I get immensely good return on my time invested in both.
People get confused about what reddit is; it isn't like digg or HN in that it is one link aggregator, it's a web service that allows you you to group similar webpages together.
It just so happens that the most popular groupings happen to be the least interesting to outliers, which should be obvious...this is why they're outliers.
check out: <http://www.reddit.com/r/truereddit>; <http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience>; <http://reddit.com/r/longreads>;
Think about reddit like usenet, the grouping syntax is just different.
reddit.com/r/$group
instead of
$group.$subgroup.$subgroup.$subgroup
edit: Additionally, remove /r/pics, /r/funny, /r/atheism and add the more obscure tech subreddits. There is plenty of tech content that comes through in /r/programming and /r/javascript that shows up before it shows up here. It is a link aggregator. Please take the 5 minutes, make an account and setup your subreddits correctly. I think you could be very pleasantly surprised.
Again, my issue isn't that reddit is an active community, it's that it has turned from a link sharing site to a larger, more work friendly version of 4chan with an incredibly inflated sense of self-righteousness.
And to be sure, I'm no reddit noob, I've had an account for 3 years and spent a lot of time cultivating my subreddits. It is a matter of opinion, I realize, but overall it has become a pretty poor source of good web content these days, for me anyhow.
Their acts of vengence are terrible and misplaced. Even just now I read a post about the Gizmodo jerk responding and making fun of reddit in a tweet. Someone commented to torment his flickr photos and someone immediately replied back that it would be a dick move.
You forget that reddit is made up of people. When it reaches the size it is, you're guaranteed to have the idiots that do vigilante stuff. But when one of the ADMINS who rarely condemn the community SHREDS into everyone about stopping the vigilantism... I think you're missing the forest for the few rotten trees (and I think it's because you want to).
I still think you are COMPLETELY wrong about the relevancy of posts in the good subreddits. You're doing a poor job of cultivating your subreddits frankly if you can't find a good combo resulting in quality links. Again, you bring up this sense of "self-righteousness" that is COMPLETELY unsubstantiated and not for you to say.
I think you've made your mind up without giving them a chance, and even when pressed for details, you make the same vague claims about their motives and intentions without any more substantiation than the first time you said it.
Customize your frontpage and set your thresholds, and Reddit is whatever you want it to be.
The cleverst thing they have done is also entirely simple. By making all thread replies to your posts appear in your inbox as personal messages, and highlighting the orange icon, it successfully encourages users to make reasonably deep replies to those that bite.
This seems to generate interesting thread content very quickly.
My only gripe is the lack of resolution in the voting system (ala /.). Meme overload is a real problem when browsing reddit.
QED.
4chan's retaliation would involve ripping your head off and taking a dump.
reddit is a lot more self controlled, 4 chaners fuck with people just because they can, reddit only tends to screw with the more mainstream evils
Reddit is Neutral Good.
Would some of those thousands of dollars have been better spent fighting malaria? I really can't say. Is it impressive to donate only to those causes that are presented in such a fashion as to jerk at the proverbial heart-strings? I should think not.
Is reddit above the rest of the Internet in its altruism? I would say perhaps not, but they're a good and valuable net community. There are many instances of Internet activism accomplishing something good, both inside and outside of reddit, and I would say that reddit's accomplishments are nothing short of pretty good.
Maybe that is fun when you're 16, but it gets old after you've aged some.
EDIT: While I agree with your sentiment and my comment could be interpreted has harsh depending on the tone of voice, I've said this kind of thing before (x is made of people) and always wished I had clarified it more. So please think of it as more of an invitation rather than a challenge.
A good example of what a smallish sub-forum can do, take a look at http://www.reddit.com/r/motorcycles/. This is a topic I'm interested in, but there are literally thousands of subreddits, smaller or bigger.
The fact that it is their reddit taking action, and not some church group or NGO, is probably what motivates at least some of the participants.
I never understand the point of posts that ask knowledge that can be easily obtained (in both concise and verbose forms; with all the perspective and facts you could want) by just clicking on one of the top 5 results in Google.
What a bunch of self serving douchebags. I'm sure they contribute online, but what will they do when someone in need approaches them in the street?
This kind of behavior is disgusting.
They did some really great things, and your response is "disgusting". Sad.
Reddit's primary purpose is to share and comment on links whereas churches are founded to spread goodwill in a community.
Edit: To clarify my point further: If the aim was to spread goodwill, it would be more efficient to open a center directly focused on such.
In the context of this thread it is irrelevant how effective / ineffective, good / bad a church is. The church is used to define an entity that represents a contrast to reddit's intended functionality.