Nobody wants the redesign. Reddit doesn't need avatars. It used to nicely tread the line between enough people to make it active, but not so many that it didn't still feel niche. It feels very mainstream now, and I think it's lost a lot of what made it actually good. It's asymptotically approaching a social network, but to no benefit, and only the downsides that come with that.
Early reddit was a really fun place. Not sure how to explain it, but it kind of felt like one of those movie/cartoon mad science labs, but as a community. Basically everyone was an engineer, programmer, or scientist of some sort, or so it seemed. Most of the front page was science, tech, and programming news, and the remaining bit was people posting about tech gadgets and other stuff they made. It seemed pretty similar to HN, but more active and with a less market-oriented crowd just making stuff for the hell of it (which HN still gets a decent amount of).
Then people started posting pictures of cakes, political/religious discussions were everywhere, and it just felt weird. Digg was starting to decline and small waves of people started coming in, and once v4 launched and killed Digg, reddit's comment section completely changed, and the submitted content soon followed.
Now I go and see avatars and people buying gifts and gold (someone actually took an old 4chan joke and turned it into a business idea) and endless fake videos and random images. It looks like an absolute circus now.
People having been mentioning that finding niche subreddits is the answer, but in my experience, it's just a game of musical chairs. Virtually all of them get bad eventually.
I think this is where everyone goes off the rails a bit, and I want to explain why: Reddit can't be a community. Reddit is too big to be a community. Reddit is too diverse to be a community. Where's the community between Old-School Runescape players and Lisp programmers? There might be some tiny Venn-diagram overlap, but there's no shared goal there, no spirit of common purpose. The two worlds aren't allied, they aren't opposed, they're simply sharing a common platform useful for allowing online discussions, and they don't cross paths otherwise.
After all, what's a great white shark to a wolf?
If you expect a platform-as-a-whole to be a community, you'll be driven off one platform after the other, time and time again, until you either find one so niche it's never going to grow, or you die unsatisfied. Hell, you might not even be satisfied with the niche platform, given that it'll be a stagnant backwater utterly ignored by the rest of the Internet.
Reddit's solution is Usenet's solution: Subdivisions! Allow tons of smaller sub-platforms to proliferate, and allow them to be communities. Or not. There are some fairly community-like subreddits, and there are some clubby Usenet newsgroups.
Around 2004/5, it wasn't too big or too diverse. They didn't even have comments at first, much less subreddits. Once comments showed up , I figured "oh well -- now it's no different from slashdot." Of course I was so wrong. I enjoyed coming to the comments after reading the article and seeing lots of interesting commentary.
Right you are that subreddits span quite a spectrum. I chuckle to myself when I overhear conversations about reddit pro/con. It's clear that some people judge reddit by the default front page and they have a very different experience from mine. I've had no thumbnails as the default for probably almost as long as the user preference was available. The combined difference in content and UI between "old" reddit-no-thumbnails-my-subscriptions and new reddit-popular is night and day. It's two vastly different sites.
I can confess to being a part of the problem, though. I started the bad habit of reading the title then the comments and skipping the article. And once imgur appeared, I upvoted the onslaught of mindless memes while never taking the time to consider thoughtful articles. They are after all, the "it" that we have supposedly "redd". I'll put in a plug for /r/TrueReddit - there's often interesting content there.
For example: I might get into a mood. I rant, I take the least charitable reading of a situation, I move away from people. I know I'm not always like that, I just get like that sometimes, and I move on.
When someone else does it, if I don't know them, I might think "Wow. White t-shirt brown shorts is an asshole. Stay away from them." See what I did? I said they are an asshole, not that they're in an assholish mood.
(Side note: This is one reason E-Prime, an English without the verb "to be", exists.)
The cure for the fundamental attribution error is knowing the person in multiple moods. Some people, OK, are snippy little shits who will self-aggrandize and look for every opportunity to start a fight, but most people have ups and downs. Knowing a person means seeing beyond any given mood or action to the person beyond the moment-to-moment.
Make a group big enough and there's no effective way to do that. You can't keep track of 50,000 names. You can't keep track of 50,000 unique images attached to names. Everyone fades into the mass, unless they're Power User level celebrity scale, and then they're reduced to a few broad strokes in your head. All you have to relate to them is what they're doing at the moment. The fundamental attribution error is the entirety of your social context.
That means you can't give anyone the benefit of the doubt. Are they arguing in favor of an unpopular opinion? Downvote and move on. They're an asshole because right at this moment they're taking the asshole's part. The biggest voting block wins, and the space is a hive mind, since there's no way to make a good argument for an unpopular position and have it be heard, whereas bad arguments for popular positions are promoted.
In addition to the problem of maintaining community when the number of people increases, I also think that it’s a function of communicating in writing, rather than in person.
I vaguely recall attempts at quantifying the loss of information when communicating in writing due to the loss of tone of voice and body language. i.e. even if your words are rough, your tone of voice and body language may allow you to be better perceived.
In addition, the increased likelihood of participants writing in something other than their first language, increases the chance of misfired communication significantly.
People can make "I know" sound like anything from a death threat to an erotic tease using everything which doesn't come through in text.
> In addition, the increased likelihood of participants writing in something other than their first language, increases the chance of misfired communication significantly.
Even within a language there's plenty of room for people to misunderstand: How much swearing is necessary to avoid sounding like a stuffed shirt, and how much makes you sound like you're too ignorant to be worth reading? Which specific words are comradely and amusing, and which ones are going to derail everything the moment they appear?
If two people have a relatively slight disagreement on that, you can end up with a rather loud argument over a horrible perceived insult, on one side, and some weirdo who got extremely bothered by an adult talking like an adult, on the other.
For if that were the case, YouTube would be a thriving beacon of clarity, when it clearly isn't. And as an effective counter-example of a only-written-yet-successfulish-conveying-meaning you have HN.
So no, communication by writing is not the problem.
It's certainly easier to get the 'road rage' mentality when writing, than when conversing in person. As well as losing information, communicating through text makes it more difficult to relate to other people as people. It can lead to people behaving in terrible ways that they'd never do in person. Road rage does a similar thing: ordinarily nice and well-balanced people can be enraged by other road-users, but would never have such a response walking down the street. (This was captured rather brilliantly by a comic [0].)
I wasn't the only one who was surprised to see that real-names policies (such as on Facebook) fail to get people to behave themselves.
I guess I should find friends in real life (also known as 'meatspace')
Note: that's literally what I think, I'm not trying to sound smug , neither am saying this ironically. Stupid limits of written communication, haunting me even here!
I do think it has become a tire fire disgrace but that doesn’t matter much.
I remember this one user... robotrecall? Something like that. She was really intelligent and her insight and opinions on things were such a joy to read. When she left, I remember thinking that was kind of the end of it for me. It coincided with a lot of other changes as well. Whenever I go and check it out it’s kind of jarring how weird it has become in comparison. None of the content really seems real on the main subreddits (like the early days but so different); the site seems like an enormous native advertisement or subversive troll playground.
I'm imagining all this because I've never done it, and it must be hard to do it and certainly impossible to please this crowd anyway, but I can see how it happens.
But, given a platform that gets big enough before it plateaus, it has usually already hired on a CEO and taken on investors that now expect it to keep growing anyway. It can only do so by tossing away the things that made it unique, in order to appeal to the people it previously repelled; and hope that the people it previously attracted with that uniqueness, will stay through inertia.
It seems inevitable that every growth-driven platform will -- like a balloon -- be grown until it bursts.
'Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.' Especially when founders leave.
That's how the WWW felt when it first started, then the AOL lot turned up.
Even Twitter was like that in the first 6 months or so.
See the problem was not about the age specifically but rather childish behavior. So by realizing that we targeted the most obvious one( being impatient) and had great results.
So yea, making something deliberately harder to use might be just enough.
Avoiding eternal september sounds like a killer feature to me :P
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com
Although hn doesn't have an exact assigned niche (it falls towards science and technology but that's not an enforced rule), it's fairly civil because the site doesn't need to make money and it's well moderated (almost to the point of authoritarianism, albeit that's not necessarily a bad thing in a website). A similar phenomona can be found in a place like r/neutralpolitics (heavily moderated to keep everyone on track, doesn't need to make money since subreddits are free).
This isn't feasible for a site the size of reddit though (they need money for servers and stuff), so federation is the only real alternative since each sub would pay (probably a provider, honestly, but they could selfhost) a little to keep their spot going. The trick is to make the federation invisible to the end user through some kind of reddit-ish frontpage site, which would be much like current reddit's frontpage but be accessing the federated subs, each with it's own moderators/janitors. This may be unfeasible, but it's the only way anything like reddit could keep free speech up. Add an easy to setup ad-network for each sub (they can opt-in to serve ads to the people accessing their sub's page, like Google ads on blogs) and it works. If a sub becomes evil just unsubscribe.
Also Google+, then Google noticed they accidentally built something right and proceeded to fix it.
I'm pretty sure that's how Reddit is supposed to work.
People keep saying Reddit is blah blah.
I usually only go to Reddit to find an answer / solution / review / commentary on something specific, and via internet search always land in some subreddit or another which seems like a fairly reasonable community.
If you want to see whats percolating in the high-traffic subreddits, use r/all. I find it's worthwhile to check it no more than once a week, but it's useful for checking the pulse.
I think people are committing the age old error of romanticizing the past
How do you feel about the quality of advice Reddit gives on subjects that you are an expert in?
Because I know how I feel and that makes Reddit the absolute last place I would go for advice on something I'm unfamiliar in. I can google something and skim the top results myself.
Reddit gave me the impression they are surplus genuine OEM keys. I paid AU$45 rather than AU$339. Mind you, if I change harddrive or motherboard I have to get another license, but I'd have to do that 7.5 times before I've spent $339.
Went ahead with the purchase, activated by phone no problems. All good. Thanks Reddit.
My other recent use was to get a feel for whether the diesel heaters for motorhomes being sold on eBay for ~AU$300 are any good, versus the name brand units at ~$AU2000. Yep, all good, went ahead with the purchase, no problems, all spare parts available. Thanks Reddit.
Seems to work as intended, for my use case anyway :D
To answer your question though, I actually don't know! I'm an expert in about four fields-- anatomy & pathophysiology, nutrition, metal fabrication and laser cutting / CAM of ferrous and non-ferrous metals, 2D CAD, but haven't really thought about looking at Reddit on those topics. Maybe I should, I might have something to contribute.
Of course, it's gotten much worse still, since then.
Like pretty much everything on the internet.
It wasn’t just random, I noticed a major shift leading up to the 2008 election. Reddit’s decision to lock some vocally awful subreddits (/r/politics /r/atheism /uspolitics etc) made the homepage a gaggle of Obama & anti-religious rhetoric rather than anything compelling.
Now that's an interesting phenomenon I hadn't thought about before. There's been a lot of discussion recently about tech companies removing/blocking content they do not agree with. In most cases (racism, hate-speach, etc) this seems pretty well justified as it helps keep these people from rallying together, but I never thought about those boards being a sort of trap crop [1] for the internet, keeping the pests distracted and away from the areas the rest of us enjoy.
They just binned /r/t_d entirely, and, in my opinion, that IS an agree/disagree decision. The same folks will be back with the same content under a different sub, but I doubt they spend enough to punch through again this time. I think, given their success last time around, that the price will be much higher.
Then again, what do I know? I was a pretty avid user at one time. Now I block the whole site and everything related. At this point, there's very little useful content left. It's basically just a giant portal for porn, and with 2 young boys in the house, and no way to filter it, I don't want it on my network. If they'd offer a DNS-based "safe" mode, like search engines, I'd open it back up.
Back in the day, I was an avid SlashDot reader, I even participated in the Sony Rootkit fiasco (I got my 10 minutes of Internet fame for compiling a list https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/398332-neowins-official-s... ) .
At the end of that time, I remember briefly looking into Digg and been nauseated about it, looking into Reddit and just finding it weird (no story summaries?) and looking at HackerNews comments and thinking what a bunch of capitalists wannabe they were (I think with time the discourse in HackerNews has become more "leftist" leaning towards Open Source, freedom, and similar thoughts).
I ended up coming more and more to HackerNews as the quality of the discourse in Slashdot went down, and because the quality of the discourse here in HackerNews became better. I also got into the "startup culture" around that time, so I am sure my perceptions changed.
For some reason I also got more and more into reddit at that time, specific subreddits (mainly about my country while I was an expat, but also about US Politics which I find pretty entertaining to follow).
One thing I have been seeing in HackerNews in the last years is that the "comment effort" has decreased. You see more people writing single line comments like "or so he said" that do not really contribute anything. Although the moderation team make their best to maintain a good amount to SNR in the site, I think something like a reminder each time you are commenting with the main guidelines (be civil, strongest plausible interpretation, good-fate, etc) would help as more an more new people join.
I think this is the inevitable result of letting anyone post anything.
Yup. I've had a reddit account since r/politics was relatively balanced! It was fun and awesome.
And now I am seriously thinking of deleting my account altogether. It is just not worth it any longer.
"The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong."
It's very young right now, I don't think it's been live much more than a month (?), so is a bit of a ghost town. Unlike the other Reddit clones that have popped up recently (ruqqus, saidit, voat) it is not overrun with right-wing trolls (yet).
I think it's going for a distributed model, like Mastodon, where anyone can run their own instance with their own rules and whatnot.
Use Archive.org to compare 2008 to 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016 and onwards. The addition of thumbnails and gradual shift of the frontpage away from textual content and towards images is almost as remarkable as the increase in high-anxiety, anger and tribalism.
At some point sub-reddits were added, as well, which probably didn't help with the tribalism.
At what point in time could one derive value from reddit without subreddits?
Hah that was in 2006.
The real change for subreddits was when they became user-creatable, but even that was already in 2008.
Point is it's not like they're a recent addition.
edit: Just noticed who I replied to. I guess you would know better.
Reddit was a better Digg, just as Digg was a better Slashdot. Like Digg before it, there was an “Eternal September,” and one of the consequences was that Paul Graham launched Hacker News to preserve the culture that was being diluted.
This is one of the reasons HN has a strongly opinionated culture and the appetite for firm moderation to maintain that culture: It’s not just a tool for YCombinator, it’s a deliberate attempt to maintain something that was repeatedly lost when previous “hacker” social media sites hit the mainstream.
Even if we look away from its more controversial aspects, at the root of the issue is a simple truth that all successful social media sites become their own worst enemy.
You and I can exchange arguments about whether Reddit 2008 was or wasn’t better than Reddit 2014, but fundamentally, I suspect we agree that “dilution” has a certain effect on culture.
The flip side of that, of course, is “Who are we to scoff at the newcomers?” I am not a more valuable user than someone who joined yesterday, and there is nothing wrong with a social media site evolving to serve newcomers with new tastes and interests.
My son loves exchanging Star Wars and other memes on Reddit. I love that HN doesn’t do memes. C’est la vie.
To me, jumping the shark is typified by the creators/stewards of a thing making more and more desperate attempts to cling to relevancy, with no coherence between their attention-grabbing efforts, and with nearly all of them corrupting the thing that made the original show/site popular to begin with.
HN may not be the place it was, but I don’t see the site doing wild things like allowing people to post videos that play on the site.
I really think “Eternal September” describes it: There is a new generation of users that now dominates the culture. Thus, it is no longer what it was, but nevertheless the stewards aren’t trying to recover its lost “glory” with stunts.
To me, it feels like a pub that used to be a cloth-cap and sandwiches place, but as the neighbourhood around it gentrified, it evolved to serve a wider menu. But it’s still a pub, it’s not like they pulled out the darts boards and replaced them with a DJ and dance floor.
Reddit, on the other hand... Reddit is throwing stuff at the wall incoherently.
I remember the thing that really struck me about the Reddit community back then, even on some of the larger subreddits, was that people generally thought of themselves as a community of people helping each other. Lots of "I live in town Foo, I can donate Bar to you" type of stuff. I distinctly remember how that felt like a novel thing for a (relatively at the time) large community. Sure, there was some trolling, but absolutely nowhere near the level of toxicity that is just much more common now.
In some ways that mirrors online discourse at large, but in other ways you're right, just feels like whenever I community reaches a certain size it just starts to suck by definition.
I remember having a deep sense of fear in choosing to give up my digg account, knowing I was going to get banned for posting the AACS key. It was like I was losing a vital part of my identity online.
After a while with my reddit account I felt the same way (it being a vital part of my identity online), but, in recent years I care less and less about the platform. My account is now dead. I just checked and it's almost 2 years since I posted anything.
I have created a few alt accounts which I use for discussing some specific niche things on some niche subreddits which I enjoy, but, the site as a whole has no appeal to me anymore. If I couldn't unsubscribe from the default subs, I would leave the site and never return.
There are some cool communities I enjoy. I spent time (on an alt) in /r/thelastofus discussing the game after I finished playing TLOU2. I spent time on /r/seattle and /r/seattlewa reading about CHAZ/CHOP and events there.
I enjoy HN a lot, but, it's very focused which has an effect of myopia.
When the redesign becomes mandatory and old reddit goes away (and don't kid yourself, it will), I will probably leave and never return, but, unlike digg in 2007 I'm not going to feel like I'm losing anything when I do.
What about your online identity do you value so much?
It just feels like some sort of weird emotional and mental investment I suppose?
Will it? The old phone design has been running for many years now, no?
HN has 3? moderators. Number of moderators isn't the issue it's whether they're operating with ulterior motives, particularly hidden motives. Here, I think you can assume promoting Ycombinator and other pg associations are a motive that's not explicit.
People who only stick to the image-posting part of Reddit seem to like it. Not that it speaks highly of it.
Is looking at images profane all of a sudden?
Post blurry picture of tv “is this any good?” Every response: “the model # is on the back.”
Thankfully there is respite in third party apps. I use Apollo, but there are many good options that push the new "features" to the side or omit them entirely.
Feels like a lifetime ago...
Had to look that up, fancy pants.
I don’t think there is an near tangent approach plan at all, more like what seems a clear intention.
Add in their beta-ing a pay to win karma system right now... it’s like they want the worst of everything.
Next they’ll make a “Reddit award” that is just a loot box, trying to edge a n the worst part of gaming.
I still use Reddit rather often, don't get me wrong, but my interest has been dwindling.
Same here, really.