Reddit has been down for more than an hour
theverge.com
theverge.com
I feel like I get the same amount of benefit out of each site, but twitter delivers it w/ less stress. Maybe it's just an artifact of how, on Twitter, I generally only follow 'experts' and interact w/ their followers vs the sorts of folks who camp on Reddit waiting to start arguments.
I do this on Reddit. If there's a back and forth and I feel like the person replying is not commenting in good faith then I'll just block them.
I've taken to increasingly absurd responses to this trope. I often explain with perverse metaphors involving their mothers. Highly recommend finding your own flavor of fun responses to this ludicrous bad faith response.
The www was very much built on sharing http links as a form of citation, no reason not to make use of such an fundamental and established function.
Imho the opposite has become a much worse issue; People casually claiming the most extraordinary things, far outside the realm of opinions, with not even an attempt to source it.
There’s also the risk that the request for a source just devolves into an argument about the quality of the source, which basically torpedos the discussion.
Why not add a source to begin with, so others don't have to "waste" their time asking for one/looking one up?
With anything that's citing numbers, or statements by some official person or institution, that's imho a no-brainer.
Particularly as a Google search can yield wildly different results based on location, search history, and wording of the search request. So assuming everybody else can "Just Google it", is often not very useful.
> There’s also the risk that the request for a source just devolves into an argument about the quality of the source, which basically torpedos the discussion.
You call it a risk, I call it an opportunity to fact-check if the original claim is actually true, or just one of the many headlines that take liberties for sensationalism.
It's also an opportunity to establish a "base truth" that people can agree on as a premise, to start a discussion from.
That's not a given when people from often vastly different educational, socio-economic, cultural and language backgrounds interact with each other, as it constantly happens online.
Source?
;)
Expecting others to put in the work to authenticate your claims, by sending them on wild goose chases on Google that might or might nor yield the same results you got, is a recipe for getting overwhelming amounts of disinformation.
As it's way easier to casually claim an unsourced falsehood, than it is to research a topic and debunk that falsehood with credible sources.
A better response is, "I see it different, here's a source I'm providing or story of personal experience that suggests why. Do you have other context or information that could help me understand your position?"
Mute for sure, but blocking is just petty.
This was how it was until ~2 years ago. Then it turned into some intermediate step where you opted out of interacting with them at all but you can still see the comment chain by default. The blocked user was simply collapsed, but you can expand it and see everything. i.e. it ruined the point of a "mute".
Then almost a year ago it became what you describe. You still see collapsed blocked users, and you still can't respond, but the user can no longer respond to you nor any child in your chain.
I hate it and simply want a "mute". I don't care if someone wants to yell at a wall. The announcement seemed poorly revceived by comments, but they still kept it around to this day.
I do this regularly on Reddit, it's the only way to stay sane.
But get this: I had one person get so enraged they logged in with a second account just to reply to me saying I was dumb for blocking them, then they blocked me! I guess some people really need the last word.
In general though, I feel like... 25% of my reddit comments get replies from folks with questionable reasoning skills and entrenched positions vs maybe 5% on Twitter where it's more conversational and exploratory.
Some niche subs never downvote people, and some downvote almost everything
I think your best bet is to ignore karma altogether on that site
Beyond a certain size all communities harbor this behavior.
Then when I'm REALLY bored I'll go click my own history and see what the peanut gallery thought of my various comments. I get a lot of mega-downvotes for really innocuous stuff for no apparent reason, along with the occasional angry response, so it's best to keep my stress levels down by keeping that stuff isolated.
I'd be a nervous wreck if my phone/watch were buzzing at me every time some dickhead online decides to rip into me. I don't know how people can stand it.
The problem with Reddit is the same problem with cocktail parties — you really need to read the room before spouting of something that will be unpopular.
Trying to cram context and nuance, about topics that can be very big and complicated, into 280 character text bites is not the easiest task.
While the character limit for a Reddit comment is 10k.
Yay, someone downvoted me just like on a reddit!
Lowest common denominator means front page or highly trafficked subs will be terrible. But find a smaller community and it's generally better.
I’m not talking about /r/politics or any of the other massive subreddits, I’m talking about tiny subreddits like /r/bikewrench or /r/hats. Subreddits narrowed to the point that conversation is actually reasonable. The discussion in /r/neoliberal and /r/socialdemocracy both have me subscribed.
Maybe I’m not looking at the right subreddits though, who knows.
I've never seen a discussion of why some political idea is better than another getting in depth political theory with wide coverage outside of the current groupthink on reddit. It's always varying forms of appeals to popularity, authority, or someones favorite confirmation bias study that they are trying to shove down your throat to get a sweet dunk. The way the political subs differ is just rhetorical window dressing. Totally useless.
The other kinds of subs can be nice for a time. But i've always seen them to either die, become popular/overrun, and/or get a cancerous mod that makes everyone miserable.
This obviously has it's limits when the group has diverse views about the policies.
The strangest, and often most interesting conversations that take place in /r/socialdemocracy when the socialists or communists who see social democracy as a stepping stone toward socialism are forced to deal with the other social democrats that firmly think some/many markets are good for society as a whole. There is a ton of nuance in those conversations, while at the same time, anyone suggesting that we shouldn't have some form of socialized health-care will be laughed out of the room.
Another example of this is the Strong Towns movement and their various subreddits. It seems to be a very serious, very cross-party neo-urbanism community which puts Bernie Sanders voters in the same subs as Mitt Romney voters, all discussing the merits of walkable cities and the inefficiencies and concerns about municipal bond debt capacity.
These niche political subs can get pretty interesting.
You speak of people debating communism vs socialism vs pro-market democrats, etc. etc. are these debates rich with historical and philosophical examples, building on a canon and discussing the ethics of how these ideas would actually play out? Or is it news articles, rhetorical games, semantics, and confirmation bias studies?
The real significance of the difference there is the sincerity of the curiosity to find a solution. If someone has dedicated their time (reading serious, old, important books or doing REAL research) to understanding they have very few original thoughts and observing what came before them so they can say something productive. From what I have seen, that sincerity is stuck at a high school level pretty much site wide.
For example, here on HN you can actually find people who have pretty deep knowledge in their fields and they don't need an online debate to show that. They just contribute and people often ask questions of them not as an infallible source or to test them but out of curiosity. The 'debates' that do happen here assume a much different character from reddit most of the time. There's a much healthier dynamic and its as realistic as I think it can get for what is possible on a text based social media platform.
There's a bunch of communities I enjoyed for a while. All of them are polluted now.
This is what frustrates me about the idea that social media promotes connection. It's more like standing in a crowded room and listening to snippets of other people's conversations. It's only once you've been there a while you realise everyone is talking to themselves
If you get deep into many established subjects on reddit, most of the highest quality posts are all 8+ years old. That's not a coincidence. My usecase was the classics, but I noticed it to be true for many other topics. It has become a know-it-all facebook thats gamed by corpo and national interests now.
In /r/sanfrancisco, yea, asking "hey, i'm visting SF so what should I do?" is misunderstanding the subreddit. It's for locals.
Even for locals, many do not like the regular discussion of the very real socio-cultural issues facing the city. There is a regular push to "make this subreddit something that creates content for me" but that's not really what reddit is about. It's a place for people to share created content, it's not a curated news feed for users.
It's tiring and one of the reason I don't interact so much on the web anymore.
The site would benefit from listing who upvotes and downvotes each post/comment. That would sort out a lot of the abuse issues long before other ideas such as real identities.
To do that you have to visit each and every post and downvote it.
I really want to see the current algorithms being used in the codebase. The rest is just shitty code written by overpaid monkeys.
I'm sure there are some redditors petty enough to actually do that.
I used site with this rule few years ago. It results in immediate downvote of other post/comments (or group of posts/comments) of user that downvoted your comment. And also public shaming, and long comment threads with arguments "why you downvoted me?".
I started to think that its really very hard to fix social issue with some technological solution.
Personally, I miss the old slashdot system. It was far from perfect, but it was still much better I think.
The absolute worst are when some mod shadow bans you (all posts / comments are silently removed), and refuses to tell you why. I had that happen on my city subreddit, I guess because I said we needed a larger police presence to get property crime under control. That was the only remotely controversial thing I've ever said there.
The joke goes that BPT is all white people, and TwoXChromosomes isn’t actually moderated by anyone XX
black people in the US have some kind of shared experience they want to discuss, conservatives maybe don't want to fight with everyone all the time. its not my place to invade then. if there are people who to engage online with multiple viewpoints there are plenty of places to do that.
i wish the city subreddits enforced residency requirement or something similar to post
What I really disagree with is having a public sub that's basically 'read only' except for your chosen group. I will straight up filter your sub from r/all if you do that.
It's too bad the content of a site is tied to its moderation system. It would be great if you could, say, use reddit but abide by a completely independent way of moderating.
Edit: yup, still works! #86xxx
Used to love the site back in the day.
The last time I was in such a contest I started out very proud of my low number, but was quickly and thoroughly beaten many times by people with numbers down to the single digits...
Oh well, I was an early user of the WWW too, using Mosaic. Before that: nn and gopher.
That's why there are no social networks. They are moron menageries. Idiot aggregators. Stupidity sieves.
Plenty of ways to market without clickable ads. Shaping consensus and datamining reactions, in real time, is far more useful than getting the bottom 33% to click on ads which are easily blocked by modern browser plugins.
Not everyone plays that game. I upvote all of my opposition in reasonable, heated arguments on Reddit to give them an advantage. That way, if my ideas truly have merit, the wisdom of the crowd will let me know. It’s a way to check myself and call BS on my own ego.
If I can frustrate them enough to make a violent threat, that's usually enough to get their account permanently banned. And then I win.
I got an account with an 11-year history wiped out the other day, that's my high score so far. Good times.
Parent poster could just be an asshole trolling people.
On the other hand, I find it's easy to be downvoted into oblivion for no apparent reason. I find it hard to just ignore and forget about those threads, even though I know I should. Example (sorry, I have to get this off my chest): a redditor with a history of substance abuse started with winemaking (as a hobby) and asked how many glasses of wine they could safely consume. A physician (verified in that subreddit) responded that two glasses every day would be fine. I commented (as a medical layperson) that suggesting OP that it's safe to drink two glasses of wine every day (not just every now and then) might not be a good idea considering their history, at least to my knowledge. Suffice to say, that day I learned that some people seem to be easily offended when commenting about reasonable alcohol consumption considering past addictions. Or perhaps I'm vastly overestimating the risks of substance abuse disorders...
I agree with you. Perhaps they read your post after their second (or later) glass of wine!8-)).
I thought that was a good idea, until I started seeing posts about stuff I knew really well.
There’s no perfect system or perfect just-world. Like you, I see mistakes like this all the time on Reddit, with some of the best examples of what you describe found on r/todayilearned. And I’ve seen lots of cognitive bias at work just like you have. For example, if multiple people downvote someone who has the correct answer, other people will often jump in and follow the downvoters just because of the bandwagon effect. When my Reddit account gets more than 100,000 karma, I will often abandon it and start over, because people tend to upvote accounts with higher karma instead of honestly appraising the content. I love starting with zero karma and watching all the dynamics play out with a fresh account to limit this kind of bias.
Win the crowd and you'll win your freedom.
What does this mean? Does reddit actually ban you if you're downvoted "too much"?
Seems crazy.
That's fascinating. I never knew this.
My brother's reddit account was suspended recently. He's somewhat conservative and the last bit of posting he made (that I could find) was arguing about COVID & masks. I don't know if he posted anything controversial beyond that because I haven't had a chance to talk to him recently. He seemed to relish going into hostile subreddits and "mixing it up."
HN isn't any different. Possibly worse, since only accounts with a certain level of internet points are permitted to judge others.
Well, I'd argue Reddit is worse simply because of the topics of discussion that proliferate there, and because insulting is allowed in many subs. But the gamification part and the subtle flamewars are very present here on HN.
The worst new tactic I've seen people use is replying to you and then blocking you so you can't see or reply to their comment, or any direct children of that comment. It's sooo petty and annoying, but Reddit has decided that's how blocking works. Which is ridiculous.
Culture, partially due to mod slots being used for parallel construction of advertising and PR cleanup more than stimulating actual discussion.
Credit to DanG for keeping this place whole so long.
Agreed that Reddit is particularly bad, but some of the worst flamebait arguments I've had were here on HN. One person insisted on having the last word, here on HN, no matter what. At the end he (I don't know why I think it was a "he") was simply mirroring back what I just said, which is more or less the way I argued with my brother when I was 10.
Unless you get in early on a reddit thread that explodes, you will generally only get 2-3 replies per comment at most. Usually none, sometimes 1. And that's how you get into arguments.
I think maybe it's not just about writing content directly in response to someone else, but writing response that I think will be useful to the community who stumbles across and reads it? Not that I'm always perfect about that.
Either that, or HN strips emojis. Might be that.
Utterly deranged.
Amen. From about 1999 to ~2010, I was a practitioner of "don't wait up: somebody's wrong on the internet."
It gradually dawned on me that it was better for my mental health if I just avoided arguments as much as possible. I'm not perfect about it, but I rarely get into pissing matches these days.
A good sign that I need to is if I am upset and a particular comment keeps popping back into my mind.
The best way I've found to walk away is delete all my comments and close all the tabs. If the thread is gone, I can't respond to it. If the tabs are gone, I won't have any reminders that the discussion existed.
Possibly I'll be perceived as losing the argument, but my pride is not more important than my mental well-being.
The thing which I've found helps me with this is to just delete my account. Besides some subreddit-specific accounts, I generally delete my one main account and start a new one every few months, usually after some nasty interaction with someone on reddit, especially when people start to follow me around. I've had multiple occasions where people start commenting about a disagreement on an unrelated thread/comment I make, even in a completely unrelated subreddit sometimes!
It's such a weird place, if it wasn't for some niche subs I enjoy participating in which I don't think have any parallels elsewhere, I would really prefer to just stop using it entirely.
The most recent one was some comments about The Last of Us TV show.
The further I withdraw myself from it all, the stranger it looks when I return to it. I never regret not participating in these places.
but the biggest problem is, as I see it, there isn't anywhere new to go, really.
Reddit was a great upgrade from what digg was offering, threaded comments and subreddits and much more democratic moderation.
What's the alternative to reddit, what does it offer?
The ousting process has been updated a few months ago ( https://www.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/wiki/top_mod_removal ).
Unless you get to one real person, one vote (a significant hurdle) and avoid the possibility of a brigade from one interested and determined group, such a process would inevitably be far worse.
fatpeoplehate, incels, thedonald
They would go out into other parts of the site and be spread their pessimism with unnecessary arguments. It made the site more of an echo chamber, less diverse, and less supportive of free speech, but it did make many places less tedious
Anything I want to learn more about I can search for and find detailed descriptions/reviews/stories from real people talking about their real products with no advertising cluttering up my experience. It's a delight.
Disclaimer: I exclusively use Apollo, which is why I never see any ads.
Reddit takes me back to when everything was forums and message boards. Good times.
Not only will Discord become unusable but large quantities of very specific knowledge will now be unindexable and therefore unarchiveable, lost for future generations. It will be a sad day for the internet.
Exciting times!
Beware the Ides of March...
I don't like to stay logged into my account so I use this.
The front page is absolutely never worth interacting with, but those "smaller" communities (and we're still taking 50k-300k subs, larger than many alternatives I've seeked out) I haven't found a substitute for.
Probably concentrating on IPO and trying to keep the balance sheet tight.
* Yishan Wong wanted to prioritize subreddits that had the most gildings and the users didn't like it, so he packed up and left.
* Ellen Pao took over and also resigned because the community didn't like a firing of an employee.
* Steve Huffman came back at Sam Altman's advisment, and proceeded to salvage an alt-right subreddit (/r/KotakuInAction) after being closed by its creator, approved the hiring of a sex pest admin, shut down RedditGifts, went all in on monetization, launched a React redesign that still sucks, gated features behind an app, and further siloed the community outreach from corporate.
Community oriented services are a pain in the ass as they scale, but reddit has not taken the challenges in stride. I feel like Digg got lucky imploding instead of becoming popular.
I wish Snapzu or Lemmy had the numbers reddit did to make them usable, but that's kind of a double edged sword.
HN - status page of the web (even if it is extremely slow right now, guessing it's getting hugged).
Any one of those is usually a fairly large event around here, all three at once is another story
There is/was a thread about on Reddit, and half of the threads were someone saying, "Mastodon.social is fine, what's the problem?" and responses pointing out the post was about mastHEAD.social.
Daily Kos is also down. Archive.is was spotty this past weekend. It seems like outages are becoming more common.
But we were trying to watch HGTV on Apple TV, got kicked out of an already logged in session, and now have no way to log back in. I can’t imagine they will have any choice but to issue at least some refunds if this goes much longer.
Edit: They don't really care about speed because there is no competition similar to Reddit? So why bother?
I wonder if it is only reddit, or if there is a cloud service that is acting up. AWS shows green across the board, but hasn't their status page been unreliable in the past?
Still, on the whole… probably net negative.
If you're just arguing who's who in the Karpman Drama Triangle, those arguments are never productive, even outside reddit. Those are more about status than facts.
You are already logged in and will be redirected back to Reddit shortly.
Then..
> Something went wrong. Just don't panic.
Don't worry Reddit! I am OK. I hope you.. don't panic :)