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Comment by citricsquid | Hacker News Reader

The biggest issue reddit has isn't the spam, it's how the site has become a "work safe" 4chan, it caters to the lowest common denominator. reddit used to be a great site and there are parts of it that still are, but the majority of the "visible" content (stuff that you don't have to search out) sucks.

The subreddit idea is fantastic but I don't understand why they aren't making this their focus. A netflix style recommendation system for subreddits would improve the quality of reddit 10 fold and give it a chance of lasting the next few years. I'm a fairly typical and regular reddit user and the sort of spam they're banning rarely (if ever) affects me, I've never seen a link on the front page and thought "what is this doing here?", focusing on this seems misguided.

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that's not reddit's problem, that's a people problem. the reason for the lowest common denominator winning is because it is the lowest common denomitator - it has the biggest ratio of upvotes vs downvotes. the answer isn't focus, it's moderation: see the great improvement in recent months in r/science, r/gaming vs r/games, r/askscience is something everyone on the internet should strive to be, etc. all those success stories have one thing in common: active, relentless, remorseless moderation. this is something pg understands well and is also the foundation of hacker news.

re recommendation system: it might work, but OTOH it might be too intrusive and/or too compute-intensive... a risk worth taking IMHO.

> see the great improvement in recent months in r/science, r/gaming vs r/games, r/askscience is something everyone on the internet should strive to be, etc.

That's exactly my point: I did not know that r/games existed until I saw a post in r/gaming recommending it, at which point I subscribed and my reddit gaming experience improved greatly and I have since submitted highly upvoted articles to that subreddit, thus improving the experience of other r/games subscribers (they got the sort of content they wanted to see).

If each individual reddit user is subscribed to 20 subreddits they care about vs. 10 default ones that are just content dumps with no real target audience then the individual redditors would have a much better experience which will in turn improve the experience of others.

I think GP comment mentioned the r/games vs. r/gaming example to emphasize the effect of moderation. For most topics, though, there's only 1 major subreddit so a recommendation system would be pretty much pointless.

>that's not reddit's problem, that's a people problem.

as such it's a problem reddit has to deal with?

did i imply that? it's up to the people using the site to deal with it.

  moderation. this is something pg understands well and is   
  also the foundation of hacker news.

This maybe a silly question but is HN moderated in the officially sanctioned sense? I have been here years and not noticed anything other than peer pressure. I would like to know if I am missing something obvious like meta.news

There was a top post today about a power user getting sort of banned for making a post about HN (I think it was along the lines of editing post titles). Both the post today and the one he was referring to were taken down.

If you turn on showdead, you'll occasionally see frontpaged posts and comments that have been killed by the mods. Visit the new queue, and you'll see an insane amount of spam that is mostly auto-culled.

>This maybe a silly question but is HN moderated in the officially sanctioned sense?

I am not sure what you mean by "officially sanctioned", but moderation on HN is among the most heavy-handed of any site with comments and upvotes and downvotes comments that I know of. And I tend to believe that that has a lot to do with its continued high quality.

Do you know how the moderation actually works? I beleive much is auto-modded - I am seeing dead links but no reasons for them. It would be nice to know.

(Google bot not telling me either)

This is mostly based on what I've seen personally, and hearsay around the community, perhaps PG would like to weigh in?

Mods have the ability to 'hellban' people, make it so all their submissions and posts are not seen by anyone except themselves, unless you turn on the "showdead" option in your profile. Users can become automatically hell banned if their comment karma is too negative.

Mods also have the ability to delete stories from the front page, (occasionally you will see popular, heavily commented stories about factually incorrect information, or just over hyped trolling disappear) or seemingly optionally send a story to the "depths" of the site via some kind of super down vote mechanism. This can also occur if a story is heavily flagged.

These actions are not transparent, or obvious, so it is easy to miss them occurring, perhaps lending to your perception there is no moderation.

Thank you. Kind of assumed we were all nice people. Anyone know if the mods are employed/ appointed / community members? Presumably a combination.

Just interested, mostly I suspect because stack overflow elections are on us and they are ultra upfront about it.

Whatever, it seems to be working.

>Anyone know if the mods are employed/ appointed / community members?

Someone implied that all founders accepted into YC are offered mod privileges although of course many will be too busy to do any moderation.

Also, I sort of got the impression that only founders of YC-backed companies and YC employees are mods.

ADDED. When reading with SHOWDEAD set, in order to get an accurate impression of moderation frequency, please keep in mind that if someone posts the same text twice as a comment, one of the comments is automatically killed (and in fact that is what happened to a dupe of the comment I am replying to). The autokilled dupe shows up as a dead comment.

Such is the paradox of "social". As a group gains more members from the general pool of people, the group by definition trends closer and closer to average. If you read a site because its content is exceptional and the readership decides what content is displayed, you almost necessarily get inferior content as more people join (unless you control the pool from which you are recruiting users).

With a recommendations system, obscure subreddits would have the opportunity/disaster of being blown up in a matter of days, which would destroy some communities. I think for some subreddits, it's better if they're spread with the word of mounth to keep their culture. It's also fairly easy to find subreddits of one's interest anyway and I also believe most active redditors already have unsubscribed to almost all of the top 100 subreddits.

To be fair, this already happens when a good, small subreddit is linked in one of the top comments on a popular post.

There was a recommendation system in place, 4 or 5 years ago, before even sub-reddits were introduced. The problem was that the recommendation engine wasn't very good, and that it was resource intensive as you suspected. For a long time there was talk about re-implementing it, but it's never re-appeared. I guess that's down to their growth rate and heavy reliance on cacheing.

Still I would love to see some sort of discovery mechanism for sub-reddits. The tools reddit provides for casual discovery and management are just laughably poor, but I suppose it's down to priorities a staff availability.

I personally like how it's not too easy to find subreddits, and how it happens mostly trough people mentioning them. It keeps many communities nice and small and protected from the 'lowest common denominator' effect.

Of course this means I may be missing out, but that doesn't bother me too much.

I found a couple of wonderful subreddits by just typing the most obvious subreddit address btw (r/piano ...). And once you have found one subreddit on a topic, most of them are kind enough to put links to related subreddits in their sidebar.

(only example I can think of now is r/drunk and r/cripplingalcoholics, though that's maybe not the ideal choice :-))

I've often wondered why no social news systems support a so called "smart vote." We could get a quick estimate from a user's comment history using a Flesch-Kincaid test (technically this guesses at writing grade level, but close enough) and then incorporate that into the voting system by over-weighting high scoring users vs other users. The important part in gathering top quality social news isn't that everyone has a say, it's that we simply get good content. Of course the whole 'your vote matters less than his' thing could be disastrous for an online community.

Reddit work safe? The front page of Reddit is mostly images these days with titles like ""I said, does he look like a bitch?" and "letter from conde nast to reddit - cover your genitals. Judging from that I'd say Reddit main audience is 13-year old boys.

>The biggest issue reddit has isn't the spam, it's how the site has become a "work safe" 4chan, it caters to the lowest common denominator.

Yeah, mainstream reddit sucks, but there's always smaller subreddits.

Still, you can create your own front page and leave all of that behind. I just watch math machinelearning askscience science and RealReddit pretty much.

The biggest issue is that people still think of reddit as a single community. It's not, and you can't stereotype all of reddit by looking at /r/pics and /r/politics. You have control over your home page and can remove noisy subreddits from it.

I addressed this in my comment. I am aware that each individual user controls their own reddit, my problem is it is very difficult to find good relevant subreddits without relying on third party tools (which very few users are aware exist) or randomly stumbling upon subreddits through comments or cross posts. If there was a reddit system that could match my voting preferences to specific subreddits (for example if I upvote Minecraft content in r/gaming it recommends r/minecraft) the quality of the site for each individual user would increase. If the quality of each individuals reddit experience increased the entire site would improve.

I agree that a recommendation system would be awesome but is it really that hard to find a new subreddit? The search feature at http://www.reddit.com/reddits/ seems fine.

The r/gaming example is a perfect example of why a search system doesn't solve the problem. I'm already subscribed to r/gaming so I don't think I need to search for another gaming subreddit. Another example would be r/battlestations, a subreddit for people to post their desks, I would never think to search for "battlestations" but it's a subreddit that I like a subscribe to (which I only found because someone recommended it elsewhere on reddit).

Search only helps you find what you're looking for, it doesn't help you find things you might be interested in.

The reason you wouldn't think to search for "battlestations" is presumably because you don't visit 4chan. That entire subreddit is actually an example of a part of 4chan leaking onto Reddit.

Why would you use a discussion about spam on reddit to specifically move away from discussing spam on reddit?

Honesty, I feel exactly the same way you do about the issue you raise. But it's not germane here.

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