The Downfall of Reddit – Why Reddit Sucks, and How to Fix It
jsavage.xyz
jsavage.xyz
OP goes to subreddits full of hyper-polarized edge lords
OP tries to respond with (what he thinks is) reasoned debate
OP gets virtually run out of town on a rail
You wouldn't get this sort of behavior on a well managed niche subreddit. There's tons of great technical subreddits. None of them are remotely mainstream. The best ones are 50k subs or less.
This article is a case study of "Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes". Reddit isn't broken. OP's expectations are.
My point applies to Reddit in general after 14 years of use.
> There's tons of great technical subreddits.
Know any great non-technical ones, such as for politics / current events?
> Reddit isn't broken. OP's expectations are.
I don't see how quality discussion isn't a reasonable expectation.
FWIW HN shows the signs of this deterioration in the sense of a certain respect. I like to model forums by the percentage of their posts which lead to information gain. Ideally, I'd like to formulate this as some sort of K-L divergence with some sort of temporal decay on a binary variable. In a rough handwavey sense, I find that the information gain from many HN posts is high but HN comments is low, but it would be interesting to me if we could think up something more concrete.
The worst examples are posts on Google, Facebook, or Apple. Most commenters could be replaced by /r/subredditsimulatorGPT. On the other hand, it might be that I have just fully mined HN as an information source. It's likely this is true, in which case I should find some mechanism to reduce the content here.
One idea I have had is the idea of overlay networks - essentially the underlying data of the forum is the same, but we place intentionally different filtering mechanisms on the view layer. One could be "high karma users". Another could be "actively followed users". Anyway, just thoughts.
Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I do feel like platforms could improve to better foster higher quality discussion, or at least better tailor users to see the type of content they enjoy, which is what I mentioned at the end of the article. It doesn't seem like there's been much innovation in that department, especially since Reddit virtually has a monopoly so there's not really much incentive for them to change anything.
So I don't disagree that techniques can improve quality. I just think the big bang for the buck is in the read layer.
Also, I believe that the most popular posts on Facebook are the ones like "Can you solve this math problem? 4x3-2=?" and stuff like that, so you overestimate how much quality matters to the bottom line which means that platforms are not incentivized to improve quality (not out of some evilness but out of pure economic incentives).
The only way these platforms can improve is by growing the moderation teams in ways that scale with the userbase and reinforce the neutrality you're looking for. It's a bureaucracy nightmare but you almost need mods for the mods level of checks and balances to ensure that you don't end up with a Reddit-like situation of 25 people pulling the strings of discourse.
Reddit strips nuance from conversation.
Adding nuance introduces attack vectors, complicates your argument and requires that the group as a whole be more informed in order to create compelling arguments.
It's so much easier to throw out quips and one-liners that help your world view, and obliterate comments that present constructive criticism.
Whenever I feel overly confident in some viewpoint, often the first thing I do is look for the contrarian view, because that's where you're more likely to actually gain knowledge and be forced to defend your viewpoint. Unfortunately, Reddit makes it too easy to end up in your bubble.
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If he wants nuance again, he needs to visit more nuanced sub-reddits that aren't approaching terminal velocity. This happens every time a social media platform/news aggregator gets popular. Look at the history of Digg, /., and even HN itself to see why and how they get overtaken. If your userbase grows exponentially and your moderation doesn't, you're going to end up in the same place as teenagers and know-it-alls take over just by sheer volume.
The modal on downvote does add a barrier, but maybe it would reduce downvote=disagree. Or maybe not. I don't know. Either way it could be worth testing, though obviously wouldn't be as impactful as changing the algorithm.
Happy to hear recommendations on subreddits on higher quality discussion, especially pertaining to things like politics and current events where it's very difficult to find high quality discussion.
While that's true, it's also completely empty in terms of usable, actionable steps that can be taken. You mention an algorithm that rewards based on the length of comments but that also rewards any kind of copy-pasta or bot-driven blogspam comments. The other suggestion is to use an AI/ML to improve the quality but that completely ignores that AI has to be trained to be useful. If Reddit, whose goal is to generate views on ads and clicks to sponsored content, trains the model to suit them then it's no more useful to you than the current algorithms (which, for reference, sort by disparity between upvotes and downvotes - top equals most upvotes while ignoring downvotes, "best" equals highest upvotes with lowest downvotes, and controversial sorts by the smallest delta between upvotes and downvotes).
As for recommendations, I don't think you'll find what you're looking for on Reddit. Even subs like /r/neutralpolitics, by virtue of today's political climate, lean left and subs that tend to lean right are full of deleted comments, over-enthusiastic mod censorship, and memes.
Of course using length of comments isn't perfect, and that should never be the sole input in any general-purpose algorithm, just one variable among many. I still believe it could be used to help improve quality. It would likely be more about punishing extremely short comments (eg. one or two sentences) which are rarely insightful, rather than simply scoring comments based on length.
This explains everything anyone needed to know about your original post. Reddit itself is an ad. Those other networks you mentioned use their algos to do one thing and one thing only and that's make money.
High quality content and discussion that expands one's knowledge however is certainly not empty. Reddit has unfortunately failed in that regards, and seems to have no interest in fixing it.
There's tons of subreddits, and the author seems to be conflating the software with individual communities.
what the author of the article ignores however is that the 2008 reddit he was initially exposed to was mostly accessed by people using personal computers, instead of people using smartphones. I'm always surprised whenever anyone overlooks this basic fact and its implications when assessing "how the internet has gotten worse" since 2008 or before.
There was an /r/obama before users could make subreddits. It was certainly this way in the past, but more porn.
You admittedly didn't know that, and had to post a source you Googled in a panic, which says:
> There may have been a few more subreddits created by other employees as well but I’m not sure. Basically they would all have been things of personal interest to us.
Which supports that idea.
I can't find anything that says r/obama was an early Reddit-created subreddit, but if it was, then they would have done it to have less Obama content on the homepage rather than to celebrate Obama.
Source: https://www.quora.com/What-were-the-first-subreddits-and-how...
Digg was not the exact same way; reddit in contrast had a huge Ron Paul audience (pretty much everything but mainstream republicans), I was surprised he didn't have a subreddit.
now reddit hates Rand Paul saying and doing the same things his father did, because they've bought into the Democratic Party line so hard that anything "right of" whoever the current (D) main characters are, is basically an evil Russian nazi bigot just like the rest of the Republicans (and Tulsi Gabbard, apparently, judging by the #1 story today).
the front page of reddit was never like some truly open marketplace of ideas where every political opinion was given equal treatment and consideration or anything but it was a lot more genuine and a lot less blatantly following party propaganda lines, that's for damn sure.
Rand Paul was one of Trump's top supporters in the senate during and after his presidency. His ideals are very different than his father's.
would you care to elaborate on this point? I don't see it and instead it seems that the sentence before this one, along with the general "if he's not a Democrat and he opposes Democrat talking points then we hate him" reddit consensus better explains the current reddit attitude toward Rand Paul than a supposed generational change in ideals between the Pauls. I don't see reddit eagerly claiming to support Ron Paul anymore, anyway.
I think many just discuss this as if it's some inevitable human trends or feature of the internet, but I disagree. If platforms did better to reward higher quality discussion and a variety of viewpoints, then maybe there never would've been a /r/the_donald in the extreme form there was.
And how is HN not exactly the same in that regard? Any system that distills approval or disapproval down to an upvote and a downvote (like/dislike, thumbs up/thumbs down, love/hate, etc.) is going to inherently generate polarization for any topic. The difference is that you don't come to HN for political takes but it's just as bad as reddit for people spouting incorrect technical information and techno-political opinions.
Even in this comments section, the most insightful top-level comment reply I've gotten as I write this is literally at the bottom: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30674104 , while the second-highest comment is "This is just an article by a guy with bad opinions upset others don't agree with his bad opinions."