Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)
lethain.com
lethain.com
I don’t even remember there being technical issues, I just remember logging in one day to find a website I enjoyed replaced with a bunch of crap I wasn’t interested in.
New stuff like reddit, insta, twitter, simply took over filling the urge to hit f5 for latest content.
Edit - makes me wonder if they used the site themselves.
Especially with a high profile implosion like this, it’s really interesting to contrast our experience in the userbase to an internal perspective.
>Digg V4 is sometimes referenced as an example of a catastrophic launch, with an implied lesson that we shouldn’t have launched it. At one point, I used to agree, but these days I think we made the right decision to launch. Our traffic was significantly down, we were losing a bunch of money each month, we had recently raised money and knew we couldn’t easily raise more. If we’d had the choice between launching something great and something awful, we’d have preferred to launch something great, but instead we had the choice of taking one last swing or turning in our bat quietly.
I'm surprised the conclusion is not that they learn to never do a full rewrite of a social product again.
Reddit at the time felt lighthearted and fun. I think I read somewhere that a lot of the comments were being written in-house, which makes sense in retrospect. For example, someone would leave a comment like "Is this the real life?", and then the entire lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody would appear line-by-line as comments without missing a beat. It seems improbable that a bunch of strangers could have done that perfectly.
While there are some parallels between Digg v4 and what's going on with Reddit today, I think predictions of its death are greatly exaggerated. However, I would be happy to see something else take its place.
In a few years nobody will remember that this is what precipitated the fall of Reddit. It’s already turned into an echo-chamber of nonsense, ruled by all-powerful mods to whom every user is a racist transphobe nazi homophobe enemy.
Even the smaller subs catch the contagion year over year.
I’ve been a Redditor since before the narwhal baconed at midnight. I miss the Reddit that was good.
I’m excited to see what replaces it.
I have never been accused of being a racist transphobe whatever, if that’s your number one issue with the site maybe some inward reflection is in order? Just don’t get involved in political flamewars, they serve absolutely no purpose for anyone involved.
I mostly stick with smaller, non-default subs and don't really run into this problem anymore.
Perhaps you simply haven't encountered the kind of person who, at the vaguest sense of an opportunity to claim the title of Most Moral Person, will leap up to condescend you based on the most uncharitable and motivated reading of your words.
If it happens again and again, in different circles with different people, like GP indicates happens, then maybe, just maybe it's not everyone else that's the problem.
If I think AITA subs and similar communities really aren't very tolerant people at all. Sure, there are people that like to provoke, but I think some subs are just some form of merger of similar people believing themselves to be oh so generous in their judgmentality but in reality are pretty toxic by almost all standards.
> in different circles with different people, like GP indicates happens
But you just chose to ignore it and soldier on with your rambling diatribe.
If people in completely different subs like StarTrek and CanadaCoronavirus and god knows how many others all say someone is an asshole, then the person is just a fucking asshole. That’s all there is to it.
It’s not some big conspiracy caused by “merging of subs” or whatever other BS you and your friends come up with to justify your shitty behavior.
Considering this thread is no longer on the front page and you somehow chose to reply to all my comments and their sibling threads in here, I’m just going to go on a limb to say you’re probably a sock puppet for someone else here. Next time, just use your main account.
And only on Reddit.
In real life, and in other online communities (e.g. I’m a member of a “DINK” Facebook group for people without kids), I haven’t had this problem.
I haven’t gotten into flame wars with ad-hominems in recent memory either.
People are a lot less eager to play the “you’re vaguely problematic” card outside Reddit.
Reddit is not one person, you understand that right?
If multiple people on different parts of Reddit are telling you you’re an asshole— something I explicitly called out— then Occam’s Razor says that you are, in fact, the asshole.
The meme certainly applies, but not in the way you think it does.
If it’s only Reddit that finds many people’s behaviour objectionable Occam’s Razor would determine that Reddit is the problem.
Bullshit.
Reddit is made up of millions of people with different viewpoints. There are subreddits that are left leaning, centrist, right leaning, and everything in between. And many, many more which have no political viewpoint because they literally have nothing to do with politics.
To claim an entire user base has a “certain political viewpoint” is plainly ignoring the reality of the situation.
It certainly is a great strawman but it’s in no way shape or form representative of reality.
I’m going to ignore the rest of your comment because you clearly can’t conceptualize the basic idea that Reddit is not one mind. Come back to me when this most basic of concepts has sunk in and we can have an actual discussion rather than whatever this idiotic back and forth you’re insisting on is.
If this struck such a nerve with you, then you may want to take a step back and re-evaluate why you're so deeply triggered by people advocating for introspection instead of deflection.
It's pretty clear from your comment you won't, but that's a separate issue.
Projecting your obvious superiority complex onto others while at the same time accusing others of doing so is, quite frankly, hilarious.
Next time, just introspect instead of digging this idiotic hole further. It’s not really that hard to ask yourself “am I the asshole” and it’s quite obvious you’ve never done it in your life.
Either way, I’m done with whatever you want to call this obnoxious rambling of yours.
I've not run into that either and I've been on reddit since before digg v4
Banned. That's anti-vaxx propaganda on my part, evidently.
I messaged the mods to explain that I was triple-vaxxed and what I said was not only factually correct, it wasn't even controversial.
The mods patiently replied that anti-vaxx trolls like me will be reported to reddit to have my entire account banned "for harassment" if I contact them again.
What inward reflection do I need? This is just one of myriad examples with mods who don't actually read or process the content about which they're banning people.
Does it seem to you like the kind of person you’re interacting with is reasonable here but unreasonable to the point of group toxicity elsewhere? Or that I'm unreasonable here?
Your initial comment here was unsupported by real world examples, and used a lot of rage-bait buzzwords.
When asked to put up a concrete example, no-one called you a fascist/nazi/transphobe in the example. They banned you for, according to you, "just asking questions" on a country specific coronavirus subreddit.
Your tone comes off as "I'm right, they're wrong. I'm the victim here!"
" saying at the time we didn't yet know how many doses and on what schedule of the vaccine would be needed."
"I messaged the mods to explain that I was triple-vaxxed "
So we can infer from this post that this happened sometime after Aug 2021. So someone went into the Canada Coronavirus group, a group where posts seem to get tens of comments, and brought up completely innocently, "how we don't know how many doses" we need. To make a broader point on what... could it have been, "how we shouldn't have a mandate?"
Perhaps this was closer to Feb/2022 where the Trucker protest was raging across Canada. Of course, the mods may not want a big flamewar over mandates in their group that seems like a niche information aggregation sub.
I consider the playing of the accusation of the JAQ wildcard (an immediate victory in the minds of some subsets of observers) to be a much more dangerous (often literally unrealizeable) cultural norm, it is a go to staple technique in any delusional internet rhetorician's toolkit.
It is a well known tactic for ill intent. For a reason. People do it all the time and should be called out for doing so.
It's quite obvious when someone asks you questions with ill intent.
You believe the example was asked in bad faith? I heavily doubt it, it is a pure insinuation. I believe you are just walrussing here.
edit: Never mind, "walrussing" allegedly does exist. But I believe the criticism still can be understood.
This was the content of my comment, which got me banned from /r/CanadaCoronavirus.
I answered yes. As someone who has built communities online and in the real world, you are someone that, at best, needs careful management. I wouldn’t willingly include you in a team or community. I’ve done life or death stuff with the teams I built, I’m pretty good at this.
From reading through here plenty of other people think similarly. You are more willing to argue than you are to hear that your behavior is problematic. Even after asking specifically, and being told so.
You are exceptionally talented at this. You have literally dozens of people bickering. Congrats.
Unambiguously, I consider you toxic.
Someone who has a strong opinion and defends it?
Someone whose basis for their strong opinion you’ve deemed woefully insufficient?
Someone who doesn’t change their strong opinion when presented with a dozen comments against it and a similar number for it?
That HN commenters are divided on my opinion isn’t toxic: it demonstrates it’s an issue with Reddit that’s affected half of those who’ve spoken up and it’s left us annoyed, shamed, or slighted. That we’re discussing it here demonstrates it’s a Reddit-specific problem.
If my behavior is problematic, then why is it only problematic on Reddit? On HN, apart from this thread, when someone disagrees with me they don’t reach for any -ist or -ic words (“toxic”, “problematic”) to describe me: they disagree with the comment on its own merits.
What does “problematic” even mean, other than that it’s bad and I should feel bad?
Calling someone toxic, problematic, racist, homophobic, etc allows for no defense because they can’t prove evidence of absence. “I’m not problematically toxic and here’s the proof…??”.
Lucky we are not building medical devices here. I’m not interviewing to be on your team in a work environment.
Instead this is an example of the kind of topic that is interesting to discuss casually on HN with other hackers.
The benefit of HN, unlike Reddit, is that disagreeing with someone doesn’t also turn them into a cartoon villain who must be vanquished. People here are allowed to be wrong without also being -ists, -ics, or assholes.
What exactly would they accomplish if not banned, and were allowed to continue to "ask questions"?
Why should anyone be afraid of them achieving that accomplishment?
"Do people have ideas, or do ideas have people?"
Carl Jung
Some mods have a hair trigger on that ban hammer.
Nope. That is it. Many, many subs would outright ban you if you dared to question the narrative or posted to a "misinformation" subreddit like /r/lockdownskepticism. It was pathetic, honestly. God forbid anybody disagree with what society chose to do with covid....
That’s kind of what I mean about inward reflection. If you find yourself on the receiving end of modding after stating entirely true and relevant facts… yes, maybe the mods are out of control. But maybe the impression you’re giving off while stating truth still leaves a sour taste. If you find yourself fielding accusations of being antivaxx and being racist and being a transphobe, etc etc, all in different subs with different mods then there’s only a few commonalities left. I’m not saying you did deserve any of this, I don’t have the evidence to, just that it’s something worth pondering.
My claim is the latter: it's a Reddit auto-immune disease that was hardly present in the early days and is now impossible to miss after years of gradual decline.
There are power-hungry mods, no doubt. They can be politically oriented in either direction, or sometimes just like to be the monarch. But I've been around reddit for over 15 years now, and in my view if you're regularly being accused of being toxic, I'm inclined to believe that you're the cause. And it may not be due to the factual nature of your posts, but the manner in which you share them.
Again, I don't know you, and my experience certainly can't generalize to everyone else. I was a mod for about six months, hated it, but that gave me all the insight I need into how dishonest (or possibly not at all self-aware) people can be when recounting how they were "wronged."
This is the very basis of why HN rules and moderation are structured the way they are: to actively discourage such an anticipated decline.
If a person seems reasonable and thoughtful on one anonymous forum, Occam's Razor suggests they are similarly thoughtful in another anonymous forum.
And I would argue any giant social network also inevitably declines into troll behavior and bad-faith brigading without active mitigation strategies. It is hard to balance these things.
I certainly think "I'm routinely regarded as an a-hole because I act like one" to be much more plausible than "I'm routinely regarded as an a-hole because this giant social network has a metaphorical auto-immune disease that results in me experiencing this routinely."
Especially when others participate in that same social network and don't experience that same problem.
The one benefit I could give this person is that they are seeking out subs that have a high likelihood of being ran by highly political moderators and are extrapolating that to the whole of reddit. The same could be true for what kinds of discussions they find themselves participating in. If they are attracted to highly political communities and controversial discussions, they would have a higher likelihood of running into such issues.
If interacting every day, it's getting harder not to be labeled an -ic or -ist of some kind in a sizable home town sub or a sub about a generic tv show.
That problem doesn't seem to exist on HN: more often people reply to the content of the comment without labeling the commenter.
My main problem with your conclusion is that this does not comport with my - and seemingly many others - experience, and my brief time as a mod has shown me that people who believe themselves to be victims often don't appreciate or admit their own culpability.
But I can't say that with any certainty, you're a whole human being with your own lived experiences, and I've no desire to review your reddit comment history either way. I do appreciate you are not the only one that feels as you do. I just can't square my experience with the one you claim impacts "every user" which is, quite frankly, preposterous and one of the main reasons I have a hard time taking your observations at face value.
But that's about all I have to say on the matter.
Don't forget the sub-perceptual cultural axioms of the era the Event occurred in within Time.
When you ask a reddit mod what is bias? It doesn't know. It was surrounded by it its whole life.
I know that had you stepped up to help out one of your favorite subs, you'd have a different lense. You comment is v clearly just ignorant.
Maybe the burden of moderation makes them this way, I don't know. But reddit is worse off with them.
If you have ever moderated a subreddit you'd understand why mods wind up with heavy handed approaches.
Even moderately sized subreddits are a lot of work, especially of a post gets to the front page. You can't have gourmet experiences at fast-food scale. When you have a long list of reports to go through, and you have been moderating long-enough, your decisions are based on heuristics rather than nuanced explanation or checking the post history of some (non-subscribed guest) snowflake Redditor who think their spicy take is insightful and/or you're taking away their 1A rights when they haven't bothered to read the rules of the subreddit they are commenting in. Subreddits are not a townsquare open to all-comers, they are very large clubhouses with distinct rules and norms - mods exist to enforce those rules.
There's no time for - nor an upside to splitting hairs on whether a commenter is a transphobic nazi[1] or merely matches the archetype. When modding, false positives are vastly preferable to false negatives since mods value their time more than the individual commenters who get caught up, and I don't see this changing even if you were to become the mod
1. Or is a "woke brigader" on the conservative subreddits.
They're somewhat less so to those who end up being the false positives.
If your hobby's main forum on the internet dried up and withered away 12 years ago because the only place to discuss it is reddit, then it's not as if such a person can just go elsewhere. You have a monopoly on the conversation and you're clearly not interested in justice anywhere near as much as you're interested in kicking out people you just don't like well enough to care about justice for them.
Anybody that thinks Reddit is fascist should spend 60 days moderating a popular sub. Your attitude might change.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t mods with power trips. Reddit has essentially outsourced their trust and safety department. It isn’t going to be perfect.
I have little in the way of opinions about Reddit, but this strikes me as the wrong approach on general grounds.
It might be true that anyone who spends time running a subreddit will change their mind about moderation. However, the only point of a subreddit is for people to talk to each other and to read what others are talking about; moderation is nothing but incidental overhead. That doesn’t mean it’s easy or unimportant, but it does mean that the burden is on the moderators to prove themselves reasonable to participants who don’t and shouldn’t have to, by default, understand their work going in.
There can be different approaches to that, and in some of them the participants will come to understand and care about how moderation works—I’m not saying that they shouldn’t. But I am saying that if they don’t see why they should but the moderators wanted them to, generally speaking it’s the moderators who failed.
There is no natural law that says that there’ll always be a way to succeed, though. Perhaps in some communities, in some political environments, etc. there just can’t be a good discussion forum. In such cases, maybe it really are the users who suck. But the fact remains that if users get annoyed about the moderation and leave, then the moderators have built a forum that’s wrong for those users.
(This is of course the standard argument against every instance of “the users just don’t understand how complex the backoffice is” ever. But this instance might look a bit unfamilliar because it doesn’t involve computers.)
The balance seems impossible. If your moderation is "light touch" the forum ends up like 4chan. If your moderation is heavy handed, you're a power-tripper control freak lording over your site. You can't win.
I don't know how dang does it here. He's some kind of wizard.
Even 4chan has stronger moderation than what you advocate
(There are moderation practices that I disapprove of and are not coincidentally outright incompatible with the view I expressed. Like the advice to just ban the user if you dislike interacting with them or if they’re complaining about suppression—especially in a small community like that advice was targeted at, I know I’d be more or less unsalvageably bitter after witnessing this in practice, let alone being its target. But it’s still not the strength that upsets me in this hypothetical, it’s more the perceived arbitrariness. Which, if the moderator is not in fact being arbitrary, is again a communication problem, not a policy one.)
Moderation is overhead, but so is Postgres. Both are very useful solutions to real and difficult problems. Both still have to pay for themselves with some mix of user-visible shinies and keeping out of the way instead of grumbling about how difficult the problem is. The correct choice of that mix is highly situational and I don’t pretend to have the panacea in that respect.
If you are not advocating for a particular type of moderation then why are you all bothered about how any type of moderation is applied? What would be the point of your suggestion?
Except in this case the ones in the “back office” are volunteers and not staff.
I’m amenable to your argument in most other contexts. But it strikes me as an awful argument to apply to volunteers.
In that context, if you don’t like it then you have to step up and do it yourself. If someone is doing work for free, you don’t get to complain about the quality. Instead, you pick up a broom and do the sweeping yourself.
Which isn’t to say that Reddit mods are beyond question or reproach, but if there’s a concern shared by all moderators, it strikes me as wrong to say “that’s a backoffice issue”. If you don’t like it, go back into the office.
The bright line for me is whether they can handle direct criticism. Everything else is window dressing - is your ego strong enough to handle someone saying they don't like you? If not, you won't make good decisions.
You never used IRC, have you?
Your response is to disagree with him, identify yourself as a moderator, and then... be abusive?
How exactly did you think that profanity and personal attacks were going to help make your point?
I don’t think “jesus fucking Christ” complies with the HN guidelines, but anyway:
I was recently banned and accused of secretly being a Russian spy by the moderators of a politics subreddit, for my liberal, but not far left views. I am active on at least two subreddits of invading Russian soldiers dying so I would’ve thought it would have been clear that I dislike the Russian government.
I'm pretty sure you were the problem
What problem is that?
Your comment reads like a puerile "no u" and adds nothing to the discussion. It's quite ironic given the topic.
For example, these wouldn't be the insults you would here from anyone who qualifies as centrist or anything further right unless you are legitimately doing something wrong. There are also plenty of more conservative subreddits with awful mods too that would never use those insults. And if someone calls you a "transphobe" on some niche gardening subreddit, odds are you are doing something obnoxious and off topic that would upset the mods regardless of whether you are actually a transphobe.
Combine that all together and it starts to sound like OP is one of those people who is "running into assholes all day" without ever questioning whether that is any indication of their own behavior.
Gaslighting in action.
To earn the Transphobe badge, all you have to do is complain about anyone else bringing up the subject of trans-anything on a niche gardening subreddit. Or refuse to boycott Harry Potter.
You're very quick to denounce this guy as an asshole "doing something wrong" based on absolutely no material information-- just a bunch of assumptions and speculation. Hardly an honest assessment on your part.
In my experience on reddit, most of the time people heavily complain about how awful mods are it ends up being that person was actually just an asshole.
I agree that mods can be an issue and many are power hungry weirdos. I’ve been on reddit over a decade and have dealt with them plenty. My solution to dealing with subs run by bad moderators is unsubscribing/filtering them, as the content is typically of poor quality anyway and it’s usually a giant echo chamber. If that solution doesn’t work and you are constantly running into problem mods, it’s more likely that you are the problem or maybe you are seeking out communities where it's very likely to be ran by bad, heavily political moderators.
The comment in question above does seem like the typical comment you see on reddit, where when you look at their post history you realize they totally deserved it. If that’s actually the case for this person, I can’t say, I agree there isn’t enough info. But I can say I’m not surprised people are quick to assume that’s the case, cause it definitely reminds me of those kinds of comments where that is the case.
Yes, this is the "obnoxious and off topic" behavior I was talking about. The mods of a niche gardening subreddit likely don't want to moderate a debate about your refusal to boycott Harry Potter.
For instance, I recently earned the badge by saying the Dax character on DS9 isn't "a trans person"... she's an alien with a symbiote, that has lived 7 lives and doesn't much care which gender of body it inhabits per se, or whom its host is going around kissing.
I'm providing plenty of content here in my comments based on which to either denounce me as an asshole or to agree that I'm not one.
That's p clearly a metaphor for fluid concepts of gender and sexuality.
You're jumping through a lot of hoops to not directly show or link to what you actually said, making vague remarks about what was said instead and then playing the victim game.
Someone else called it out in a separate thread as well, regarding the Coronavirus debacle. You seem intent on providing a single side of a story and then expecting everyone to believe you without doubt.
Maybe just make it easier for everyone, link to the comments, and let us judge for ourselves.
Whether or not my reasoning is correct that the Dax character is too loose a metaphor for trans people to be applicable to real world issues, the point is this makes for no reason to label me an enemy of the state. I could be right or wrong, but it's a valid point of discussion in a Star Trek sub, under a post about how Dax is a trans character.
I'm not linking directly to the comments for one obvious reason: I don't want to link my HN account and my Reddit account together.
For that reason you can judge everything I've said in the worst possible light if you think that's fair under the circumstances.
Many people come to niche subreddits specifically to get away from all the divisive political rhetoric that has infected all other corners of the internet.
If it walks like a duck...
A partial defense is the reactionaries are quite good at mainstreaming their blather. For example, a few of us fell for Haidt's moral foundations nonsense, if only briefly.
Reddit's moderation system is exactly the kind of world I don't want to live in.
I left in 2018 or there-around. Probably stayed too long, in retrospect. 10+ year account, moderated multiple subreddits and a pillar of the community type figure in a few others.
On some level it felt like each election cycle dug deeper trenches until the entire website looked like the battle of Verdun. This wasn't exclusively an American phenomenon either. The same thing happened on several national subreddits.
I also got the sense that the reddit members cultivated a sort of creeping depression that was really allowed to fester on some subreddits essentially all about exchanging thoughts of hopelessness and doom. This was before Covid. I can't imagine it got better those years. Granted, Reddit was wallowing in "forever alone"-memes even 15 years ago, but it feels like the darkness of that abyss got darker as the years passed.
I've looked back a few times but I've immediately turned heel as I saw what a toxic dumpster fire it's turned into. Like it isn't as obvious if you've been in it, but jesus f christ on pogo stick is it ever clear to see when you've been away for a couple of years.
“It’s already turned into an echo-chamber of nonsense, ruled by all-powerful mods to whom every user is a racist transphobe nazi homophobe enemy.”
Moderators (excepting automod) are human, and like all of us they sometimes make mistakes, some may have biases or having a bad day. I have not seen what you are describing.
And sometimes groups tend to become pathological, such that no one joining the group is just "someone making occasional mistakes". Groups become like that for various reasons, but one of the qualities that seems most problematic tends to be "authority with minimal or no effective oversight".
This is why most police departments are just cesspits of anti-human torment and oppression. If reddit mods aren't murdering people, I'd chalk that up to the fact that they aren't given sidearms, fetters, and a mandate to patrol the streets.
> I have not seen what you are describing.
Cops never see anything worrisome either. You know, until some 11 yr old is shot in his own home after putting his hands up.
Reddit mods probably have it better in that reporters don't really go out of their way to put their abuses in the headlines.
Nobody on Reddit has called me any of those things.
I guess later that meant that masstagger flagged me as a T_D poster, so about 10% of my future posts were responded to by someone telling me I was a racist piece of shit.
I would also get mod messages once a week from subs I never post in(like 2xc) saying I was banned from their sub for participating in hate subs.
And then later my account was perma banned for no good reason at all, I'm assuming it helped that I was tagged as a T_D poster.
The great Digg migration was something of a perfect storm. Digg shot themselves in the foot, yes, but Reddit was already up-and-coming and viewed as the most viable alternative.
There isn't really a viable alternative to Reddit yet.
I’ve literally never had this problem. And I’ve commented on a multitude of subreddits for years.
Curious to see some concrete examples where your comments were framed in this manner.
It really reached an insane degree on the official subs at least. There are some karma farmers that certainly are human that post and post the ever same topics, but the quality of many submissions really dropped significantly. And I compare that to the former reddit quality, which was optimized for mass instead of quality. Today it looks like some form of propaganda spam. Perhaps a result of news outlets copying more than before.
Reddit should have build on its strengths. It was better for discussion than Twitter or Tiktok. Not too deep, but at least you could find new ideas. Now they used the platform to consolidated opinions and killed the advantages that formerly differentiated the platform.
- commenters who are the problem according to the other half
- moderators who are the problem according to the other half.
I admit I'm much more of a lurker than a contributor, but I do post things from time to time. Comments fairly frequently in technical forums, and posts much less frequently, but when they are, they are either: 1) to show a project I did, or 2) to ask a technical question.
Basically all of these use cases are more and more an exercise in frustration. I've been using the site for at least a decade, but I can't remember having so much trouble using it until quite recently. The last several posts, let's say during 2023, I've made get either manually or auto-removed. Every single subreddit no matter how small has its own, different, set of "rules" and if you don't memorize them you get your post removed. These rules are often very antisocial, in my opinion.
For example, in one forum that I read very often, I never post anything because I only like to post my own work, as I consider such work to be "original content" -- I'm not one to spend my time scouring the internet for other people's work to share, instead I like to share when I've got something to share, right? Seems natural enough to me anyway. Well, I posted a project that I spent 2 months developing, yes as part of the startup I work for but it was a for-fun April-fools type project, intended to amuse. Banned. Immediately. For "self promotion". (There were literally no ads in it or anything, just a website with a fun interaction, and the startups logo in the corner.) Thanks guys. Guess I'll take my ball and go home. Apparently they prefer reposted nonsense to original contributions? Bizarre, backwards..
Another example, someone was asking where they could go for some discussions on a certain topic, so naturally I responded to point to some other subreddits. Immediate auto-remove due to "posting links to other subreddits". Really? So, like, they have rules against hyperlinking? That thing that is at the foundation of the web?
Similarly I posted a question to a Python forum, actually quite an advanced question about an interesting phenomenon I noticed related to async generators -- auto-removed. Told to repost it in LearnPython. Great. Did so, got a bunch of beginner replies, as I expected, instead of the in-depth discussion I was hoping for.
Now, I understand that these rules and bots exist for a reason .. mainly one reason actually, which is to fight spam. But enough is enough. At what point does spam fighting become intrusive to normal, community sharing of ideas? To be honest, this has gotten me so down regarding reddit that I'm considering just not using the site any more, as it's gotten quite boring because I can barely contribute without jumping through hoops. Trying to post or share something is just depressing because either it breaks some rule, or people jump all over it with negative comments. It just doesn't feel like it's worth the effort anymore.
Does anyone else have this experience, or is it just me?
But I have been soft-banned from the Raspberry Pi subreddit for years (which is rich!) for self promotion since I used to link to my blog posts about various Pi topics.
So I started doing text posts, and would have 3-5 paragraphs about the topic, then at the bottom a link for more info to my blog post. Nope, self-promotion.
I had similar issues in many other places, and in a lot of subs, even if you post a link, if you forget to also add a comment with specific points, or set flair after posting... all kinds of arcane rules, then your post will get deleted.
I haven't been banned from any sub AFAICT, but mods are swift to ban for almost any reason these days, especially for anyone who dares to challenge whatever the groupthink is (in the Apple sub, it was basically "if you dare put Apple in a bad light or question anything they do" for a time, I think I may have been banned there for posting a complaint about the Touch Bar!).
"I was banned from a subreddit for self promotion since I promoted my own blog"
Like, come on man.
But to be completely fair to him, it's Jeff Geerling.
Being hyperbolic here, but practically all the content in the Pi (and Homelab, and several other subreddits) is either directly his or in some way derivative of his work. He has just put in that much time and effort into this space.
So the same post that got deleted would have likely been reposted, with less context, minutes later. Likely multiple times by multiple different people.
And Reddit (and HN, and Digg, etc.) started out as link-sharing sites.
If not for "self-promotion", new blogs would never have been noticed once the era of blog rings died off and Google tried (and partially succeeded) killing RSS.
I think blatant self-promotion for selling things is wrong. But writing a blog post with information relevant to a community and sharing that seems like it's useful. If the community thinks it's spammy, then the community can flag it or downvote it.
I think it boils down to the sad fact that "writing a blog post with information relevant to a community and sharing that" has become somewhat of a minority case for blogs nowadays. They are generally either "self-promotion for selling things" (blatant or not) which you mentioned, or just straight up blogspam (almost always blatant). And when your job is to moderate a large community, you don't really have time to go in and evaluate whether each and every single post is the latter two or an earnest attempt at getting information across.
> If the community thinks it's spammy, then the community can flag it or downvote it.
In theory, yes. If everyone used the voting and reporting system appropriately, and people whose posts were reported took the judgement tactfully and with grace. But I've seen people constantly argue that "what they said wasn't against the rules" just because it wasn't explicitly listed as a rule.
When a moderator's job is already so loaded, they're going to push for making their lives easier. Blanket banning "self-promotion" means it's a simple decision when it does get reported and makes it harder to argue against a removal.
FWIW, I think the model you mentioned works a lot better here, where there's a bit more of a professional bias, and especially when people have linked their real-world professional identities with their accounts. It adds a level of courtesy and assumption of best intent that isn't as prevalent on Reddit.
Others have noticed the very same effect and felt disenfranchised by it.
In some subreddits your post gets removed because the title didn’t end in a period.
It results in subreddits full of boring recycled dreck, because the smart folks take their ball and go home.
Even if they wanted to actually be a useful community, the tools mods get on reddit are woefully unfit for purpose for communities of millions of people. You cannot have a public forum with that many people. The human brain is just not built for it. Perfect moderation is impossible
Some subreddits are notable exceptions, though—-those are the ones I’ll actually miss if this thing collapses. By and large, they’re small, very focused subreddits on particular topics; seems like once a subreddit reaches a certain size it just collapses into the above mess of behaviors.
It's usually a bunch of people making an inferior version of neofetch or whatever basic tool is well known to the community.
Weird, I've been put off of reddit because of the prevalence of transphobes, homophobes, and racists who inundate so many threads. I wish there were better mods to remove those folks from the site.
I have always been pretty left wing (have been a member of and organised for a range of left wing political parties) but Reddit was what very much moderated by belief in 99% of left wing politicians and would be politicians. If the kinds who rise to the top of subreddits ever saw power in our societies we would see the terror and widespread violence. There's a performative aesthetic idea of what being left wing is based on positions on issues, knowledge, rather than an actual mindset and series of real beliefs about what is the right thing to do.
It comes down to what I had always seen as the territory of the right but now realise that people of any political persuasion can do it:
1. Blame the system for your own problems
2. Other your enemies and make their problems personal failings
3. Claim that justice would be their destruction rather than their rehabilitation
And for social media companies these lonely, angry, miserable people drive huge amounts of engagement.
Reddit has huge governance issues as a community that stems from the fact that the corporate leadership cannot serve two masters. In retrospect when they did the big slow down on the "hot" algorithm was the moment it could not be saved.
It's less about the wokeness and more about the ability for a handful of mods to hijack popular topics and create an unecessarily unpleasant/unproductive experience for their communities.
I'll leave ineffective admins, lack of original content, spam, karma, bots, misinformation, automod, and monetization as separate points of discussion :P
Anyway, for me, "Narwhal baconed at midnight" was when I realized the site was overrun was kids. Slow decline while obsessively looking for alternatives since then.
Reddit was never good.
Digg's v4 release on August 25, 2010, was marred by site-wide bugs and glitches. Digg users reacted with hostile verbal opposition. Beyond the release, Digg faced problems due to so-called "power users" who would manipulate the article recommendation features to only support one another's postings, flooding the site with articles only from these users and making it impossible to have genuine content from non-power users appear on the front page.[citation needed] Frustrations with the system led to dwindling web traffic, exacerbated by heavy competition from Facebook, whose like buttons started to appear on websites next to Digg's.[19] High staff turnover included the departure of head of business development Matt Van Horn, shortly after v4's release.[20]
So familiar....
How on earth did such a well-known Python footgun ever make it into production? This is the kind of thing that should leap out of the screen for even a mid-level Python developer - and once you've been trained by bitter experience it's very easy to spot.
A junior developer creates a function with default of [] instead of (), but otherwise no mutations:
def get_user(unchecked_ids=[]):
ids = get_valid_ids(unchecked_ids)
if not ids: ids = [current_user_id]
return query_users(ids)
fa55099 - 45 minutes ago - Alice - Avoid creating unnecessary new list
def get_user(unchecked_ids=[]):
ids = get_valid_ids(unchecked_ids)
- if not ids: ids = [current_user_id]
+ if not ids: ids.append(current_user_id)
return query_users(ids)
f4e704c - 30 minutes ago - Bob - Fix caller who was sending invalid ids
+ def get_user(ids=[]):
- def get_user(unchecked_ids=[]):
- ids = get_valid_ids(unchecked_ids)
if not ids: ids = [current_user_id]
return query_users(ids)
def get_user(ids=[]):
if not ids: ids.append(current_user_id)
return query_users(ids)
Is it good code? No. Good version control hygiene? Also no. Should you crucify the developer who made this mistake? Of course not, especially once you add the boilerplate chaff that was omitted here. That's why it's called a footgun, it's easy to misuse.
Given this was 2010 I wouldn't be surprised if they had a less mature development process that doesn't use things people take for granted today, like linters, and pre-merge code reviews.
If you assume perfection of humans, maybe 95/100 times it works out and 4/100 it's a small oops, but 1/100 times you get something embarrassing like this
Around that time I was in the middle of the Java ecosystem though, which had tons of tooling for validation, linting, verification, books full of best practices, etc.
Still a far cry from what is normal these days, but we did do things like unit tests, end-to-end tests and code reviews back then. But, that was enterprise, the SF web companies I think weren't as enterprisey as the bank I worked for at the time.
It's ironic though; the old fashioned companies I've worked for adopted a lot of the more fast-and-loose-feeling practices from SF, think extreme programming, agile, taking a chance on rewriting the whole back-end to a new language, things like that.
They bet it all on this v4 thing, and lost.
Humans are good at designing processes and procedures that compensate for their lack of perfection. In this case that capability was not used apparently.
Anyone can make a mistake and that's fine, but a company would be expected to have processes and enough eyes to make sure that a bunch of other people need to make the same mistake before it makes its way into prod at which point the likelihood of mistake becomes really low...
These days I'd set up a linter that enforces these things do not happen, but it's easy to be smart after the fact. You say "once you've been trained by bitter experience it's very easy to spot", which I feel is true. You just need that bitter experience first, and for me it came in the form of a production issue.
What I don't get here is why they didn't simply use 'None' instead. If a parameter is optional then 'None' makes way more sense than an empty list.
The scoping of list comprehensions in Python 2 was far less justifiable, IMO.
I've been bitten by this exact thing. It's not strictly obvious IMO. Though it didn't make it through testing.
This post also mentions an update to google search which hit them hard, and a bunch of internal issues, senior staff leaving. They had a limited runway and the company was going to run out of money unless they did something.
The something they decided to do was "launch digg v4". It wasn't ready from a technical perspective. Worse, it really looks like they skipped the market research step used their once chance to throw a bunch of ideas at the wall to see what worked.
Revenue. Well, that's what they hoped.
At the expense of user experience.
Enshittification, but without the lock-in, which ended predictably
Tangentially related, just yesterday a rideshare company got into hot water for posting support on reddit where they used the persons real name instead of their username.
Or maybe I'm thinking of a different photo?
The worst part about that room was not the open feeling, but rather the silver walls and ceiling
Actually it would be nice if this was a browser feature. Click on a link on a site like HN or Reddit, browse to the new page as usual, but you have a little inconspicuous indicator in the toolbar that lets you vote or comment on the origin site easily.
The selfishness of it is obvious if you think through what would happen if someone posted one of these dig iframed urls to another digg-like site, which was then itself posted to a third digg-like site. 3 stacked headers, yay!
I agree that site owners shouldn't like this behavior. Still, we've seen cases where content owners have welcomed things against their interest in the name of engagement or hype.
For example, a lot of video producers started putting content on Facebook (where they received no revenue) because they were getting lots of views on Facebook compared to their own site. This eventually left them without the revenue they needed and they dwindled.
Yes, site owners shouldn't like these kinds of things, but we've seen sites chase a lot of crazy trends. The Oatmeal has a cartoon that kinda sums up some of this: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people.
Even today, you'd think brands would want to move to ActivityPub where they could run their own server and actually have control; you'd think influencers would want to move to ActivityPub where they wouldn't be beholden to Facebook looking for money to boost their reach or Musk's arbitrary moods. Instead, so many are sticking around on platforms they know are looking to gain an advantage over them. I'm not even suggesting abandoning those platforms, but cross-posting to ActivityPub would mean building a future you're more in control of.
There's a lot of platform behaviors that aren't good for sites that many sites end up being enthusiastic about.
Beyond second system syndrome, you really have no idea what your users actually like about your product vs your competitors. You’re too close to the product.
A rewrite that breaks users muscle memory and frustrates them is the perfect time for a jump to a competitor.
You are basically always better off mutating over time at a much more tolerable rate.
IIRC, it was a bunch of Penguin Computing boxes in an Equinix DC in San Jose. I think we probably retired the last of them in early 2015.
That's terrifying!
Digg was 3 webservers with 8 database slaves in 2006.
https://web.archive.org/web/20060412174457/http://www.oreill...
Digg even moved some processing from MySQL into PHP in 2009 to increase performance.
http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/3/23/digg-4000-performa...
Digg, Zero, etc.
It's just sad he's using his fame for NFT crap now.
Given how many users they have I suppose they know a thing or two about scale.
https://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/ladis2009/papers/lakshma...
Eventually most people remembered why SQL was so great, and they added Redis if they needed a cache. The Ruby people though still liked those NoSQL stuff, and I'll never understand them.
What people don't realize is Digg actually had four founders, depending on how you count them. Owen Byrne[0] has as his bio "The person who built digg for $1000 @ $10/hour, lol". Going by that, I don't think he shared in any equity.
The whole site was bootstrapped for apparently $6000 total.
People also think Digg turned down Google's $200 million offer, but it was the other way around. Google walked away after some due diligence.
Knowing all this, Digg's fall seems kind of inevitable. That said Reddit never really filled that hole IMO.
The real story is probably way more interesting than anyone really would guess. I'll summarise it as so:
What made Digg work really was one guy who was a machine. He would vet all the stories, infiltrate all the SEO networks, and basically keep subverting them to keep the Digg front-page usable. Digg had an algorithm, but it was basically just a simple algorithm that helped this one dude 10x his productivity and keep the quality up.
Google came to buy Digg, but figured out that really it's just a dude who works 22 hours a day that keeps the quality up, and all that talk of an algorithm was smoke and mirrors to trick the SEO guys into thinking it was something they could game (they could not, which is why front page was so high quality for so many years). Google walked.
Then the founders realised if they ever wanted to get any serious money out of this thing, they had to fix that. So they developed "real algorithms" that independently attempted to do what this one dude was doing, to surface good/interesting content.
They thought they'd succeeded, or market pressures forced their hand, whatever. So they rolled it along with a catastrophic UI/UX and back-end tech rewrite all rolled up into one.
It was a total shit-show. I was involved in the "old" MySQL stack, and watched them totally fuck it up with beta software that wasn't ready for production (Cassandra, at the time, was not what it is today).
The algorithm to figure out what's cool and what isn't wasn't as good as the dude who worked 22 hours a day, and without his very heavy input, it just basically rehashed all the shit that was popular somewhere else a few days earlier.
So you ended up with a site that was ugly, fuxed, no-one in the existing wanted, and with a bland boring bunch of stories on the front-page, which was not at all compelling for anyone new showing up to check stuff out.
Instead of taking this massive slap to the face constructively, the founders doubled-down. And now here we are.
To be clear, much of the tech behind Digg was very interesting, the work Owen and many other engineers did was very interesting. The algorithm was all smoke and mirrors, though. And Kevin and his little circle of buddies were all crap engineers that tanked the business with their hubris and inexperience.
Who I am referring to was named Amar (his name is common enough I don't think I'm outing him). He was the SEO whisperer and "algorithm." He was literally like a spy. He would infiltrate the awful groups trying to game the front page and trick them into giving him enough info that he could identify their campaigns early, and kill them. All the while pretending to be an SEO loser like them.
There were a few other amazing people behind the scenes. I'm actually leaving out myself and my group because who wants some dude to blow his own horn? But many of us did amazing things.
There were also literally dozens of guys super high-up that were useless. Not because they were dumb, but they were too full of hubris and thought they had expertise where they didn't. Like Kevin Rose should have realised being a nice guy was his strength, and stay out of engineering, because he started dabbling in it, promoting the wrong people and ideas for the wrong reasons, and the next thing you know... BOOM. Implosion.
I even catch myself calling some of the people who were in K.Rose's event horizon "idiots" or "stupid" but when I really think about it honestly, they were reasonably bright but just given poor incentives. Hey, this NoSQL thing is awesome! Let's replace the entire (functional) MySQL portion with Cassandra. Yeah! After seven beers and two joints, this sounds like an amazing idea. Let's do it!
No.
If you find yourself, or your company founder, doing things like this, sell your equity position for whatever it's worth at that moment. Do not HODL. SELL and SHORT.
I am in shock- amazing story. Thanks for sharing. This thread is blowing my mind.
Was that one dude owen? Lol.
When I was 13, I managed to watch TechTV for one straight day while on vacation. Then, TechTV promptly shut down. But learning about Leo Laporte, Kevin Rose, changed me. I wanted to move to San Francisco and get into tech. TWiT and Diggnation were totally foundational to me.
I remember still the excitement that on Digg you could upvote a story without reloading a page. AJAX! That was really what Web 2.0 was about, technologically.
I sometimes feel strange that almost no one talks about these days. Maybe it’s not long enough ago? I mean… it’s been almost 20 years.
still can't relate the failure of adding incremental value and foatering community... defends to again spending all the time on a full rewrite that wasn't even load tested.
the sad part is that the whole team did have success! most of them went to be leaders elsewhere spreading their cancerous big-and-bust with their layoff cycles.
techbro privilege is real. maybe similar to the political class. no other professions allow such reckless failures.
My memory of what happened was this. There was some infighting about the comment threads and how they should be implemented. A new approach got implemented. The site started crawling any time you clicked on a comment. Everyone was saying that of course it wasn’t going to work and a particular person’s approach shouldn’t have been used. The site became unusable. After that it became a blur, because I must have stopped using the site. I believe the downfall of Digg occurred around these changes.
I would be curious of other people’s timeline.
From a user perspective, this meant that there was already a subreddit for any topic you could conceive of, even if nobody had ever submitted a story to it. It was pretty magical.
Sadly, this whole system was axed in order to get the thing launched before we ran out of money. I bet you could do an even better version of it now with recommendations based on LLM prompts.
Stability, scalability and simplicity. Yes, you read correctly.
Whomever complains that Java is bloated or complex, needs only to look on who is writing that "piece" of code. Expert developers will write proper code that anyone can maintain and keep simple.
Too bad for Digg. Was a good site.
https://web.archive.org/web/20060412174457/http://www.oreill...
Digg even moved some processing from MySQL into PHP in 2009 to increase performance.
http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/3/23/digg-4000-performa...
Kind of difficult as you will always see those kids trying all kinds of magic with a language instead of razor sharp focus on the problem itself to be solved.
Anyways, I guess everyone passes through those phases of growth. Also unreasonable to remain like a dinosaur refusing to learn what else new is coming up.
These are not the adjectives I associate with Java...
Simplicity, you can code Java apps to be as simple as possible, unless you use a framework like spring, but that's true for any language. I used vert.X and it's expressJS of Java, very lean, basic but more batteries available if needed but still manages to be simple. Java doesn't have complicated concepts to understand nor does it have 100 ways to do the same thing.
Scalability, dockerize and scale to your heart's content or tweak the JVM params and max out your hardware.
What am I missing, not trying to be snarky, maybe you wrote more Java than me, may be for years, so genuinely curious to understand. For additional context, I coded in NodeJs, Python, Go, Swift and Java. and each have its own merits. So I'm not biased against Java.
Twitter would disagree[0].
> We now have the capacity to serve 10x the number of requests per machine. This means we can support the same number of requests with fewer servers, reducing our front-end service costs.
---
All phones since the last 30 years (including the famous Nokias) shipped with Java and apps that simply worked. Android is constructed on top of Java. What I build today with pure Java will run in 100 years from today without needing changes. Quite a different scenario for whatever other language that breaks stuff every couple of versions.
Using other languages is of course possible. In the same manner as building a wheel with stone is possible instead of using rubber.
Another pretty extreme view... there are plenty languages that can be used for complex projects.
Anything else is from startups that grew big and simultaneously polarized about their language decisions. Those decisions are tied to whatever lifestyle or political statement, more than a sane engineering decision that addresses technical debt in the future.
There was no place for users on Digg v4. And without users, it's hard to get revenue.
Was it unreliable at first? I didn't even notice. I just saw what they were aiming for, and noped out.
If the original reddit were introduced today with the exact same owners (RIP Aaron), rules, and layout, they'd be cut off by AWS, their IP provider, called Nazi's on CNN, etc.
On top of that, it's clear a site such as Reddit pushes their political viewpoints forward. Why would they give up such power for a more "balanced" and "fair" site. Look what happened in 2016 when the DNC leaks occurred and Trump stuff was on the frontpage day and night.
Personally I hope this does happen and would LOVE to see a few things defaulted in the new reddit.
1) Allow viewing of removed comments. 2) Give mods the ability to remove upvotes in comments (for a more OG message board vibe) 3) A different type of view for a political post. Maybe instead of just seeing the best comment, you'd get the ability to see the top comment + top rebuttal or something.