Don't think this has to do with Reddit so much as the way we interact with each other online, in general.
Online communication should function the same way. Reddit/HN/Facebook's algorithms based on voting and popularity are absolute garbage for carrying on normal human discussions. That's because discussion is not their purpose, it's addiction to horde bickering and engaging in popularity contests for content.
The only natural/real-world scenario that you'd find "popularity" to sort discussions is a screaming fight, political campaign, or those dreaded high-school popularity years. And surprise, that's what Reddit feels like most of the time.
They are different mediums and have different requirements. I don't think real life conversation can be used as a good example for how online communication should work. I don't know that upvotes are the right answer either mind you, and I agree with your points about it. But it's just the best some platforms have come up with to combat the issues presented by large quantities of people talking all at once.
As someone else suggested, sort a popular thread by "new" and you're right, you get the full spectrum of opinions. However you also get lots of "internet noise". The baseless claims, useless yelling and general spamming that all open internet communications are subjected to.
It definitely does, and it works better than "popular" sorting, here's how. You walk by rooms and overhear people talking. You hear a lot of small conversations, sorted by most recently heard. You find one you're interested in, and you're welcomed into the room of 2-20 people. You continue having a discussion, and it's less likely for it to turn "heated" because everyone in the group knows each other a bit.
You argue that it's "too hard to follow if everyone is talking". But the point is that you don't try to follow every thread/room. The alternative is worse: On Reddit, there are only a few ballrooms (posts on the front page of a subreddit), but they each have a couple keynote speakers (comments upvoted 2,000 times). But if you try to talk to anyone in the ballroom, they'll won't pay attention because the speaker they came to listen to is at the podium.
On Hacker News, it's not as bad because it's small. Instead of walking into ballrooms, you're walking into seminars at a university. There's a designated speaker, but anyone can interrupt the speaker at any time to offer helpful comments.
Community driven content feed sites are not great at fostering close communities, but they are great at offering a more shallow community experience to more people at once. I want to blame feed style sites for the downfall of community online, but they are likely just a symptom of an influx of people online and needing a different way to accommodate that. Imagine a global chat network where #science had 20,000 chatters, how would you chat about anything meaningfully? So you can see feed sites as inverting the dynamic of community to cater for larger numbers, which matches your analogy with the ballroom and keynote speakers and also what happens in real life.
Community driven content feed sites definitely offer something that chatrooms or threaded discourse can't, which is discoverability of information over a broad range of topics in a short time period. But it does this at the expense of depth and community, and also at the expense of breadth of opinion.
Threaded chatrooms are actually a pretty cool alternative, and I would love for them to have more wide spread usage. You can enter some.network/#science for general chatter amongst friends, and then when a topic you care about comes up you and all the people who care can dive into a thread to talk about it.
Is there any practical prototype or example of threaded real time chats?
Because there might be a very good discussion, but the latest comments could be "my peepee is very big" and "no, your peepee is small!". And the good discussion would be overshadowed by garbage comments.
When there are hundreds or thousand of people talking, I do believe popularity is better than recency.
If you've got 1000 people in your house you'll have a couple of conversations going on in the kitchen, a couple in the lounge room, a couple outside and people will be wandering between the different sections and conversations. This seems pretty familiar to traditional forums where you'll have specific sub forums, and topics in those sub-forums, if you wander from one forum to another you'll see the most recent topic/conversation taking place. Sort by new in reddit seems to be the opposite, you'll see the newest topic but you want see the active conversations, at the topic level you'll only see the latest top level post not any ongoing conversations.
There is a limit where this breaks down of course, but perhaps the solution is to accept the limit and have many smaller communities instead of one big one.
I totally agree. My suspicion is that reddit and other community driven content feed sites are a symptom of the influx of people showing up online. They became popular as they're a shallow enough community to work with a large population of participants. More in depth community can only be sustained meaningfully up to a certain amount of participants. Even in teams, there is a limit to how many people can be part of a team effectively and humans naturally break up into smaller groups within larger ones.
The OP is talking about a situation where there are a thousand people in a room all talking at the same time.
I don’t see an easy way to split interaction on a forum like Reddit in the same way as a thousand people in a house.
I would say that actually showing users vote numbers is probably counter-productive. It's probably too appealing to our primate brains to be able to assign precise values to social interactions, and I think we'll probably find out in time that gamified social media is in the category of things like sugar, slot machines and opiates which are just a net negative for many many people.
SA is organized into sub forums which are like subreddits I guess, and a lot of the discussion takes place inside what are essentially Reddit like megathreads. In the threads I follow and post in, sometimes sure it gets off topic but when it becomes a problem the mods usually step in and probate the offenders (6 hour posting ban), but normally after a warning. People don’t post low content low effort things like I see in every single Reddit post. I’m talking about things like inside jokes that people quote and run to the ground.
GitHub Issues is another odd example. They sort by "newest thread", which I've never seen any other service use by default. It makes long difficult issues/proposals end sooner than they should, because a comment someone makes 2 seconds ago is still buried on page 12. It doesn't matter than I set the sorting mode to "most recent comment" because other people don't do it as well.
Discourse is a fantastic example of a good community platform. You can "star" a post to give your appreciation, but that doesn't give your post any visibility boost by default. It treats all comments equal, as they should, and gives threads attention that is linearly proportional to the number of comments, which is how discussions/subjects work in real life.
In the past you had to have half a brain to even be online. I don't mean internet connection wise, I mean to set it up and find stuff.
What scares me the most is "justice by social media". People felt wrong doing against them burning torches and calling for pitchforks online, instead of getting a lawyer and getting justice. It's a lot easier, but it then snowballs into a raging fury of everyone strongly or mildly related to the issue chiming in, demanding justice. Then is justice served? no.
> And if the Anglophone internet is ::gestures:: like this now maybe it’s cause it’s less of a professional-class preserve? The dividing line maybe being smartphones where “people on the internet” went from “people who specifically spend $X/mo on it as luxury” to “people with telephone service”? That’s a real possibility, that for all the “Global Village” stuff the wondrous effect of the ‘90s internet was to create a cultural space that was MORE gatekept by wealth and education.
> That’s… kind of depressing, though. “Haha you thought the world was getting better because you were eliminating elitist barriers but actually it’s cause you were making them higher, which is good because the poor and non-elite are disproportionately idiots with worthless ideas and to the extent they’re on top of things the thing they’re on top of is undermining the basis of a good society, and anyway those times were a phenomenon of a narrow early adopter base and you’ll never ever get them back unless you make the non-elite economically and politically irrelevant.” Depressing but very well precedented, that’s exactly the arc newsprint, radio, and TV followed before.
https://kontextmaschine.tumblr.com/post/185164859368/your-gr...
I think a big part of the problem is that somewhere along the line "real world" entities started to capitulate to the demands of social media mobs.
Like there was that case of the young woman who made a joke in poor taste to her dozen twitter followers on a trip to Africa, and somehow it blew up into a front-page story on traditional media and I believe she was fired from her job.
Her employer, and indeed all of us, could choose not to react to this kind of outrage storm, and then it would have no consequences besides perhaps some passing embarrassment until the internet chooses to move on to something else. Social media only has power because we give it power.
I think mobs often mistake vengeance for justice.
I think it's far graver than that, sadly: A cacophony of kangaroo courts, all yelling into echo chambers.
Worse, though, is the failure to delineate between an individual's actions and those who have nothing to do with the 'x' thing in question.
More egregiously, as a result of that aforementioned failure, even family members of those "suspected" for 'x' thing are ripe targets for abuse; which is entirely ignoring the premise that the individual in question could ultimately be innocent, in the end[0].
It seems that this group of individuals (en masse) demands its pound of flesh and its going to get it, no matter who it comes from.
I'd say that's far worse than simply mistaking vengeance for justice.
[0] - https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-falsely-accuses-sunil...
Regarding the other points, we may well look back at things like Myspace as Halcyon days of somewhat pure Social Media usage. It's a pity we can't still have a social media platform that isn't mined to hell for analytics, ads and GPS stalking but it seems that the tide is turning and people in the Western world are getting over the hype cycle and caring less about being a part of it. Tellingly I had cause to listen to a focus group this week that had privacy concerns about Facebook; before then I assumed it was only the HN crowd who thought that! I look forward to the next 5 years in tech but if I were to lay odds, I wouldn't bet on Facebook weathering well.
Opposite experience here. Examples: the #archlinux channel on Freenode I had on autojoin for ages but never saw that higher quality discussion there. The #Fedora channel is pretty good but not so much chatting there.
Last I used IRC was over a year ago, so maybe things changed.
Having spent some (great) time in more traditional forums recently I think the algorithmic driven nature of reddit (and HN for that matter) along with it's centralization are the biggest contributors. The scoring systems have gamified online discussions to the point that you can't really have worthwhile discussions, most people with anything interesting to say (anything not mostly accepted by the group as a whole) will be punished by the algorithms, people with the most agreeable opinions will "win".
Being centralized and gamified is also the ideal environment for astroturfing, you can have a big effect for minimal investment. If someone clicks on a topic you can easily control what the first comment they see is, with more traditional forums it's first in best dressed and a lot of people will skip straight to the latest entries.
They work great for things like "how do I fix this problem" or "recommend X", but it is a terrible format for political discussion / anything remotely controversial.
It has a very noticeable polarizing effect in those cases.
Twitter isn’t much better, it too has been gamed. By simply having hordes of accounts saying whatever the message is, and replying to all.
HN, Reddit, Twitter and any other semi-anonymous social media site are just too easily gamed and astroturfed by anyone with a VPN and some time. Facebook and Twitter's "organic" content tends towards clickbait preying on people's anger responses.
Reddit has become so mainstream that everyone has a place. I think the big problems arise in the more general subs where all the miscreants from the web intersect. Same with YouTube, or any large community really. No amount of censorship or moderation can solve this, it's a problem for any sufficiently large userbase. If a solution can exist is doubtful, even.
hn also seems to be more accepting of opinions which people disagree with. Here it seems to lead more to a civil debate about why you are wrong, whereas on reddit you would more often than not get downvoted and called names.
More than reddit. But HN is much more homogeneous than reddit is. There’s plenty of perspectives that generally aren’t welcome for discussion here. HN also makes an effort to moderate against political flaming. You could argue that the moderation isn’t entirely unbiased, but it does keep the comment threads more civilized.
> homogeny certainly makes a group far easier to lead
What about the value of diversity?
I like to think of this as the "Tower of Babel" problem, where basically all the world's people cooperated on one monumental task, and God "confused their language" so they couldn't complete it. We see this pattern any time people form a critical mass: fragments form, there's a falling out, and the whole thing comes apart. Take any sufficiently old group of people and the pattern asserts itself.
The great thing about the internet is even if all the primary communities are small, it's trivial for members to inter-mix on their choice of small communities, self-selecting for culture fit rather than requiring armies of moderators to keep the conversation on track (though some moderation is still necessary).
The comments that get detached are marked as such in a direct reply, with a link to the context.
But speaking of that, I wonder what happened here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20040963...
Not true, or not (always) true. My comment here was a response to the top comment in the thread, but it was detached without context, warning, or comment and for seemingly no reason.
You used to have to go actively seek out the toxic parts of the internet (except for the occasional raid of your forum by a rival, but you could usually ride that out). Now because they refuse to ban the like of The_Donald, it is like a Knitting website and Stormfront trying to share a single forum.
I have almost never seen a civil conversation between a Trump and non-Trump supporter on Reddit, but all the time I see nasty slapfights which simply divide the community further.
They have half admitted the issue by the new subreddit quarantine process, but members of those communities are still allowed to be toxic in the general subs.
The sub relentlessly breaks the rules, raids other subs, never engages in good faith, spreads racist propaganda, serves as a breeding ground for white supremacists, is incapable of civil conversation. Like the president they worship they are toxic to community
And instead of banning them the admins engage in silly games like manipulating their comments(one of the admins changed db to change one of their comments).
They've poisoned many subs. For instance it's incredibly rare to see an Immigration story in /r/news without the comments making you feel like you're in the middle of a kkk gathering.
I do still enjoy going on 4chan (hardly a heaven of civilized discussion) and this very website. So in my mind, it can't be just because of a general trend in online discussions.
Recently, I've gone totally cold-turkey on the platform. Where as previously I had been posting daily for 9 years!
It can still be great, you just need to take a bit of time and subscribe to subs that interest you without being too popular.
With popularity comes the inevitable drop in quality.
The place I post this most is in GitHub issues. ;)
The platform used for discussion certainly has a large impact on the way people interact, and the culture that grows around it.
I'm open to arguments that Reddit is better or worse than most, but for my own view, I think the majority of subreddits are not a good place to be interacting with and in general have poor discussion quality and a fair bit of bullying - which I think is largely because of the nature of the downvote/upvote system and comment chains/weighting reddit has in place.
I personally think that reducing his particular gripe down to saying it's "a broader issue" isn't useful for narrowing down specific problems with particular methods of discourse.
> Don't think this has to do with Reddit so much as the way
> we interact with each other online, in general.