r/ChangeMyView Is Graduating Reddit: Introducing ChangeAView.com
changeaview.org
changeaview.org
I couldn't put my finger on it for the longest time, but what I eventually realized was that I didn't like how inauthentic the whole thing felt. Changing a deeply held belief just isn't that easy, yet almost every thread has the OP giving a delta.
How it appears to me is that people have beliefs that they realize are either unpopular or controversial, and so they use the subreddit to learn what they "should" believe or at least a rationalization for ignoring their true beliefs.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were political operatives from both parties crowdsourcing arguments that agree with their point of view by posting the opposite point of view.
A large portion of Reddit in general (especially the front page and popular subreddits) is people making up stories/opinions/content created specifically to illicit as many replies and argument as possible, as that's what gets more votes and attention. It's a popularity contest, not a place for genuine discussion.
You see it here too, to a lesser extent. You see it everywhere there's likes/upvotes tied to accounts. People compete for the high score.
I still personally think forums were/are a better format for discussion. Just a flowing conversation where general activity in a thread bumps it up and not votes.
IRC is better. There is very little on screen besides the discussion itself. IRC nicks can be used to grab attention, but there are only a few characters to work with so usually it's just a bit quirky but not really distracting.
OpenStreetMap-US has a slack with ~1400 people.
I wouldn't call HackerNews just a chat. It's articles, then some chat in the comments. That wouldn't work well with Discord I don't think? The main goal of HackerNews (for me) is to load it up, scroll, consume posts from the day, contribute/collaborate/ask questions/ etc. Discord is more about being engaged in the conversation as it is happening
I have been on IRC since 1993 but this is news to me.
Even Metafilter with their very low key favorites "voting system" gives rise to a contest for getting the most favorites.
I think that is part of what fules the negative culture. The anonymity and lack of moderation surely helps but outrageous threads simply have a higher chance of surviving on 4chan.
There's not that many networks:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Internet_Relay_Chat_n...
You can also go in the other direction, checking if the stuff you are interested in lists a channel (which I realize is sort of obvious, whatever).
This seems to be a thing developer-type people struggle with a lot, and I really think it is an engineering mindset issue. We tend to like the things we have control over or understand completely, and technologies that have hidden parts (like Reddit or certain controversial programming languages) are disliked for their perceived dishonesty.
With forums, posts aren’t generally deleted except by maybe an admin if someone has been violating rules, and due to the permanence, people generally spend more time thinking what what they post.
Some forums aren't shit, but all of those cookie cutter PHP forums all seem to be shit.
From what I have seen, private forums are much more civil but its tough to actually build a community when its so much effort to join.
Were I setting up a discussion forum today, I'd immediately look for something halfway between HN and Reddit. Reddit itself is too much of a PITA to host (we tried in our Hackerspace, but didn't go too far); HN has too little markup and no built-in functionality for storing notifications about replies.
This is what drives me up a wall with forums. All. The. Visual. Noise. So much crap that obfuscates what I really want to look at.
Usenet was incredible before the eternal September. There was noise, trolls, flame wars and mentally instable people and good and bad moderation decisions, but the good was really good. Party due to the higher quality of the users and from the inability to make money from it. Top people were reading and lurking in relevant newsgroups and commented sometimes or sent private comment via email.
HN has two things common with Usenet, good moderation and higher than average users. What has changed is the motives. There are many users who are self promoting or marketing with pseudo-informative submissions. They push blog posts that are just written to increase visibility and "what I experienced when doing business", many of those stories made up. With all this negative stuff, HN has still good singal/noise ratio and you can learn from comments and discussions.
Also note that posting and commenting guidelines might be experienced as somewhat stricter than here.
Even imageboards like 4chan, in the smaller boards at least, you can get a decent discussion as there is no concept of upvotes nor automatic hiding of posts and replies are always in chronological order. The only main difference between them and a traditional forum is anonymity.
But in the end, everything expires after a few hours anyway, no matter how popular, which I always thought was the true value of 4chan
The aim is modest: just to change op’s view on a topic of their choice, not completely reverse it like the priests in age of empires do.
It doesn't mean strictly that you've changed your opinion entirely to agree with them, but that you can appreciate a new perspective.
From https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/index#wiki_what_i...
"Following on from the previous segment, we therefore believe that a change in view simply means a new perspective. Perhaps, in the example of literally looking at something, you've taken a step to the side; or a few steps; or you've moved around and now stand behind it. Maybe you haven't 'moved', but it looks slightly different to you now; in a new light.
A change in view need not be a reversal. It can be tangential, or takes place on a new axis altogether."
- auto-discovery and growth through r/all - no longer will you have people popping in because you made it to Reddit's front page
- loss of the great number of current subscribers who (before) can go to their reddit homepage and see your top posts automatically, but (now) would have to go to a totally new website to see your posts. I subscribe to about 40 subreddits but only visit deliberately about 3 of those.
Good luck (sincerely), but I would not be surprised if r/CMV stays larger than your new independent website.
Adding a character limit was just a design decision on the part of the Mastodon developers to make their app more Twitter-like. There's nothing stopping others from building apps that don't have a character limit, and they would be able to federate with Mastodon and other AP-enabled apps just fine.
It's not a tiny userbase, but it's quite small by present social media standards.
http://sp3r4z.fr/mastodon/general
And not necessarily by suing, Reddit could save itself some trouble and simply delete the subreddit.
I'd be surprised if Reddit liked that.
Reddit offers an extensive API to do just that: https://www.reddit.com/dev/api/
It makes tons of business sense to let things like that happen. It is in no way a legal can of worms or in fact any trouble at all.
"with submissions [ALSO] going to changeaview.com [AND] reddit.com's comment section" ?
If the replies only went to changeaview.com the entire comment section would be blank when browsing via Reddit.
https://trademarks.justia.com/869/44/ama-86944696.html
Update: they didn't, but they did trademark "nosleep."
(They did reach out to us to try and organize a live, in-person r/nosleep Halloween event, only to eventually ghost us about it. Twice.)
This does open the Pandora's box of monetizing a group of people that really dislike getting monetized. (Reddit users, that is.) And if it does work, maybe Reddit communities will start to be seen as a way to start community-based businesses/organizations.
A volunteer position is voluntary. There is no contract or minimum time commitment (though some subs have minimum mod action requirements). If a moderator no longer likes to commit their time, they can either go on a hiatus or leave.
Monetizing individual Reddit communities or paying moderators will create a whole plethora of financial and ethical issues which Reddit HQ is obviously unwilling to address at the moment. I'm pretty sure they've thought about this and decided keeping the status quo is the best choice for the time being.
I created that subreddit YEARS ago and initially wanted to build the website for it.
I populated all the good life hacks that I found throughout the internet initially to the subreddit and the community naturally grew — but I also invested time and money into it (by giving gold to top members).
Then when I launched the website, I had an auto moderator rule that removed a post from anyone who submitted a link-based post and PM’d them telling them to submit to the new website (@lifeprotips.com).
Well, guess what happened? Someone got upset and reported me. Because I had Adsense on it, that went to “justify” their case saying I was monetizing the subreddit.
It resulted in a subsequent shadow ban which eventually led to the removal of my reddit account (pretty old account with lots of history).
The mod who did this is /u/krispykrackers.
Good luck, though. I’m rooting for you, because Reddit doesn’t reward or appreciate creators, and without them, they’d be nothing.
I don't think this will "succeed", but not because of anything related to migration; it's just not that good of an idea, from a business standpoint. If they redefine success as something other than growth and user retention, maybe they can create a fake kind of success, but this site will not grow users or any of the things a normal startup looks for when launching a product, and the monetization will never be worth anything of value, but simply because the idea isn't that great.
WRT. communities - no, there really is more to it than "moderation class", just like there's more to HN than pg, dang and sctb. Regular submitters, regular commenters and people voting are what creates a community, what makes visitors go there, what makes one subreddit better than another on the same topic. They're the soul of a subreddit. Despite what the subreddit creator or moderators want, nothing can prevent those regulars from deciding to stay, or to move elsewhere. 'fourstar built a site and wanted to migrate the community by fiat, but people didn't move, and instead reported him.
> it's just not that good of an idea, from a business standpoint. If they redefine success as something other than growth and user retention, maybe they can create a fake kind of success, but this site will not grow users or any of the things a normal startup looks for when launching a product (...)
Here is a thing: nobody in the community cares. The regular posters, commenters and voters don't care about "growth and user retention" beyond "people like it in here". Lurkers and irregular visitors don't care about it either, they're interested in actual content the community curates. Communities like subreddits exist so that people with like interest can exchange thoughts and media about those interests together. That somebody monetizes them indirectly through ads is an artifact of hosted platforms, but nobody will be willing to abandon a perfectly good one just because someone related to the community wants to take this money for themselves instead.
Imagine this: a guy got together some people and started organizing regular open poetry evenings in a coffee shop in the center of a city. The event became successful, grew quite an audience; the coffee shop wanted it there (as it drove foot traffic), so it kind of kept organizing itself. Fast forward couple years, the original organizer suddenly announces that from now on, the meetings will take place in a coffee shop he just opened on the outskirts. How do you think the regular guests and performers would react? I imagine they'd laugh the guy out of a room - it's ridiculous to leave a perfectly good meeting place and move to the middle of nowhere just because one person really really wants to make money off them. I imagine if the guy was telling the guests to go elsewhere next time, the coffee shop itself would step in and kick the guy out.
Regardless, my argument still holds. Whatever semblance of community there is, it's obvious it won't appreciate someone disrupting it in order to make a buck.
Also, I hate to break it to you, but Reddit is making more than a buck on your little "community". Nothing whatsoever is different or special about Reddit vs. this website.
You're not part of anything, you're not building anything, the people you think of as "friends" on Reddit aren't, and you need to realize that. That site isn't for what you think it's for.
In this light, the fact that CMV has the hubris to think their ‘experiment’ is significant outside reddit is not surprising, but no less laughable.
Even more naive and immature is the idea that conversations either lead to epiphany or do nothing. Comments are read several orders of magnitude more than they're responded to. You might not change that person's mind right now, but that kind of discourse is a part of how other people form or reinforce their opinions, and the OP might be more willing to change their mind in the future upon having other interactions and experiences that challenge their views, especially if someone has shown them a good-faith argument in the past.
Ah yes, where ever did I get that idea when forming my opinion about a site titled change my view, where you literally get a whole separate level of fake internet points for giving people deltas, cough, epiphanies?
>The definition of 'change' (verb) is "make or become different."
>Following on from the previous segment, we therefore believe that a change in view simply means a new perspective. Perhaps, in the example of literally looking at something, you've taken a step to the side; or a few steps; or you've moved around and now stand behind it. Maybe you haven't 'moved', but it looks slightly different to you now; in a new light.
>A change in view need not be a reversal. It can be tangential, or takes place on a new axis altogether.
https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/index#wiki_what_i...
I myself am keen on big houses, fun parties and fast cars, so I can see the attraction for the founders, I'm not sure what's in it for anyone else though.
If the option is to successfully monetize a portion of the flow vs nothing, it may turn out to be a net positive for the subreddit admins.
(Another thing I'd really love to see would be an extension of this: a DAG of arguments, not a tree. This would most likely make sense only when arguments solidified, and could be rearranged and deduplicated to form a graph.)
Just as I work to keep spammers and self-promoters at bay, I'd find it pretty scummy to form a startup around the sub and make money out of the contributions of thousands of community members.
Separately, I like that at Reddit I know what I get now and very likely to get in the future. But what if ChangeAView pulls a Quora and starts making it harder to view content, like requiring login, etc.
Well, that's one of the many many problems with Reddit's moderation.
> Just as I work to keep spammers and self-promoters at bay, I'd find it pretty scummy to form a startup around the sub and make money out of the contributions of thousands of community members.
Exactly. As you said, you may have created a community and technically own the forum, but you're not the community. The community is its own thing, and the founder demanding it move somewhere else so they can monetize it would be no different than an invasion of spammers - just another attempt at profiting off the community.
"Jimmy graduated from college." Not "Jimmy graduated college."
Alternately acceptable exception that proves the rule: "State College graduated 1500 students this year."
See also: "Oil needs to be changed." Not "Oil needs changed."
People are afraid of "to be" these days.
Correct (I think) alternatives: "Oil needs change", "Oil needs changing".
The oil needs to be changed
The oil needs changing
Not great. It’s very common, but it’s gerund abuse. In a lot of places it’s considered hillbilly talk.
I enjoy being a bystander to efforts to break free from platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc; Stackoverflow, for example, pushes their data dumps into the Internet Archive [1] and that data will never be locked up. Even if unsuccessful, efforts to break free of closed platforms are necessary, otherwise we're burning up untold amounts of human effort for data that will be lost to time in the name of VC and shareholder profits.
Why I don't like it: a big part of it is people taking troll posts seriously. The third post down on changeaview.com when I visited it is "To be transgender or to condone it is nothing short of a lie". Then the author goes through a bunch of talking points. They're not there to give people a fair chance to change their view but to get people to read their garbage. Still, people argue posts like these and get to feel good about it, when they're really just helping to provide attention to trolls.
If it sounds like astroturfed content then it’s likely to be so, whether intentional or not.
These are all things that don't bother the new users at all and the loss of the founding population of redditors isn't causing any tears at corporate.
Of course they go after the scoundrels first in this quest but as the frog slowly boils more and more mainstream 'controversial' subreddits like changemyview will get pushed out.
r/DarkNetMarkets has https://www.gwern.net/DNM-archives
r/TheRedPill has https://trpbackup.com/
Reddit got rid of the "post view count" and has decided to " restrict access to sub-reddit traffic pages to mods only".
source : https://redd.it/6atvgi
Holy crap, some people actually discuss something like this?
On one hand, knowing it's associated with racists makes me hesitate to ever use it. On the other hand, why should I let them change my behavior when a minuscule bit of research would show that I'm clearly not a racist? Like with many such things, it mostly depends on the context, but would be interested in the conversation and not so quick to dismiss it as pointless.
>On one hand, knowing it's associated with racists
I'm pretty sure this is just west's or even a certain number of countries problem. This topic is the second time I've personally ever heard\read that somebody uses this sign as something other than an "ok" sign. The first time I've read about it in someone's tweet - I even decided to call out to my friends\readers\etc and one guy from Canada new about this.
Anyhow - no, nobody should stop using some sign just because a small, even if very vocal group of people started using in for whatever reason they have. Next time they will start to wear some color and what? We should stop wearing it? Last time I checked people are pretty damn good with wearing brown coats from Hugo Boss despite the obvious history facts.
This is like building a cage around yourself just because there are a few stray dogs with rabies in the town.
>dismiss
I'm not saying it should be dismissed, if someone have questions or doubts - one should feel free to voice them, sure. I'm just amazed by the topic, or rather by the fact that some people haven't found an answer to this after so many years. If this helps them to find one - I'm glad.
I have a small sub (30-40k =/- subscribers)and thought about doing this. I have the infrastructure for my personal projects but don't know if I wanna deal with the upkeep and some of the few mods we have.
We're not political, we just wanna help people learn something and tell someone to bugger off when it's needed. Would open up a lot of possibilities and we would just use the Reddit sub as a link farm back to our site. It's horrible UI and other inabilities aren't the experiences we want for our users.
As an example, Tales by Toxlab (https://old.reddit.com/r/TalesByToxlab) is a subreddit of personal stories by a single person ... who died in 2016. By Reddit's rules, anybody could claim that sub for any purpose.
The xkcd sub was taken over by Holocaust-denying neo-nazis (https://www.dailydot.com/news/xkcd-reddit-moderator-drama/). That was eventually recovered.
I've maintained a sub since five years, and yet haave now ownership in it. For a sub that's merely topical that might be acceptable, but this sub is not.
Funnily enough, it also implements some of the stuff mentioned here, like public visibility of moderation log so the users can see what mods are doing, and with which justification.
(Disclosure: I’m the creator - prior HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18370208 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19161171)
I had to go search in some reddit thread to find it since if you search for aether you get a legacy project from Eclipse.
Also the source on github does not appear to be up to date with the version that is download from the site. (2.0.0-dev.6+1811211332.746ec27e.d on git hub and the one I downloaded is 2.0.0-dev.11+1903010147.3fd391a3)
Link to aether thread: aether://board/86e782e80681ac580b4d6d102b12e787c066e59f194fee57bb0bf83cc1e42fc6/thread/e4871294ed115310e029a3b4c37b378ffefa7de490ef5b58bb1aeb1b1cbbea1e
That's actually good. The new Reddit design is a dumpster fire, and something I would not myself want to inflict on other human beings.
There are othr issues.
See:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/8rq08y/i_wont_...
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/20yhxc/reddit_...
https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/acg9zf/alternativ...
(I say this, after finally throwing in the towel and unsubscribing from /politics today. Even as a nevertrumper, the daily drumbeat of vitriol against anyone who doesn't exhibit perfect ideological conformance is staggering)..