blog.samaltman.com
blog.samaltman.com
I know there's great content there, and great people having great discussions, but it's not terribly easy to find. I'm thoroughly convinced that reddit could be an incredibly valuable source of reliable news, discussion, and entertainment, but the way it's structured highlights its more juvenile aspects.
And if it can find a way to establish legitimacy, it'll be worth far more than it is today.
This isn't helped by the fact that the majority of popular subreddits are moderated by the same people, resulting in a kind of weird cabal situation.
I'm not sure what the solution is. Personally I think no moderation, simply relying on up/down votes would be better, but without going to that extreme, perhaps only allowing one person to moderate one subreddit (or a small number) would help.
This is because moderating is a shitty job and hardly anyone wants to actually spend time doing it.
>Heavily moderated subreddits are Reddit's biggest problem.
The problem isn't heavy moderation, it's poor moderation. Moderation is basically a requirement for any community of a decent size (and becomes more important as the community grows).
But as I said above, moderating is a terrible job. It's generally unpaid, a time suck, and you spend all your time dealing with the worst members of the community (which sometimes funnily enough also includes tends some of the most popular members of the community).
In my experience in the past, the people most vocal against moderators/moderation were the people causing the most trouble in the community.
I don't know that the "one sub per mod" rule would be a net win; responsible volunteer moderators are hard to come by.
I've thought about this for a while on and off and I'm not sure how you could scale that up in terms of moderation, some of the defaults do well while others are just a wasteground (I've also wondered if that is partially intentional in the sense of give the idiots a subreddit as a decoy).
I like reddit but it has it's shares of trolls and typical online negativity (which I actually dislike far more than the trolls they at least are easily spotted, the constant negativity wears you down).
IMO subreddits like it are evidence that the Reddit macro model has been, and will continue to be a failure. The community is at its best when tone is actively directed by a dedicated mod team, and abusive behavior actively policed, in distinct contrast to the relative free-for-all that are the default subreddits.
Reddit's admins make a lot of noise about believing in the hands-off approach ("every man is responsible for his own soul"), but ultimately the hands-on approach create higher-quality communities (even at scale: see /r/iama) and curbs the abuse that has made the default subreddits complete intellectual wastelands. Not only that, Reddit itself has not been consistent on being hands-off, what with the banning of subreddits and whatnot.
Side shoutout to /r/movies - always good discussions. Things get more animated and sometimes less civil than /r/photography but the mod team does a good job keeping things from exploding.
http://reddit.com/r/hiphopheads
http://reddit.com/r/frugalmalefashion
http://reddit.com/r/javascript/
http://reddit.com/r/snowboarding/
I find these subs to be on topic, relatively positive, often receptive to the new and uninitiated, providing a wealth of FAQ/just starting out information and have interesting weekly events.
I especially enjoy the header with album release dates in hiphopheads, and there are a number of cool weekly events in frugalmalefashion (and its more expensive brother subreddit, http://reddit.com/r/malefashionadvice).
As with any sufficiently large group, you'll find groupthink. However, I've found that many smaller subreddits are more receptive of self-criticism when it gets too bad.
So I thought I'd take it into my own hands. Started posting content, inviting users who I thought would be interested, and almost 5 years later, turned into what it is today.
/r/mmfb
/r/leaves
/r/trichsters & /r/calmhands
/r/depression
/r/SuicideWatch
/r/futuresynth (no one comments but the stuff is great, nearly perfect ;))
/r/ada
/r/embedded
/r/raspberry_pi
/r/bicycling
/r/programming
/r/linux
/r/nottheonion
There are some subs I try to like /r/minimalism (which on any given day is either "I have nothing...but these apple products" or "Two arms..one too many?") and /r/zen which is mostly people arguing vehemently about what zen is (which is both ironic and often hilarious).
/r/diy
/r/mechanicalkeyboards
/r/woodworking
On the fence about categorizing /r/clojure and /r/ece as good. They're not awful, but they need more traffic to be "good". /r/ece is almost an informal 24x7 AMA for EE and CE and the rules are constantly being broken but not necessarily in a bad way (if that makes sense?)
There are subreddits I find interesting to read but probably miss the categorization of "good" by being rather subjective based on your personal opinions of the subject matter.
/r/Polandball (101,218 readers) is heavily moderated (important considering the jokes there easily invite real racism)
/r/ASoIAF (166,200 readers) and /r/gallifrey (38,643 readers) are examples of very good TV/book subreddits (A Song of Ice and Fire aka. Game of Thrones and Dr. Who). the mods work hard to keep the quality up but have the advantage of the "mainstream" subs /r/gameofthrones and /r/doctorwho which both gather most low-effort posts.
/r/motorcycles and /r/guns are good as well if you're into that sort of thing -- /r/guns is especially funny on the weekends ;)
Do we have any examples of large Internet communities with unilateral good discussion?
They way I've thought about it, the subreddits with better user content/discussion are primarily because:
* They attract fewer people, so only users more dedicated to the topic and more dedicated to finding a good community will find them. These users tend to be better contributors.
* Heavy-handed authoritarian moderation.
The first one only works so long as the subreddit is less popular. The more it will regress toward the mean of Internet contributions, which I believe to be inherently low.
The second one only works well when you have a specific topic with carefully defined rules and very active moderators with no regard for popular consensus and said moderators don't develop a power complex.
I don't think reddit has shown any interesting solutions to the problem of high quality contribution. At the risk of sounding elitist, we've seen how popularity kills quality discussion on countless communities over the years. Again, I think massive discussion tends toward being inherently low on average.
Edit: Beaten by noir_lord by a couple minutes listing the exact same two points.
I don't mean to belabor the obvious here, but do you consider HN a "large Internet community?"
No. I'm talking about the largest 30 or so Internet communities.
Though I do think the place can be a bit humorless and pedantic at times...
Also allows friends to say "I gawd, this place is terrible. Let's leave it all behind. I'll meet you in level 22?" They then hold hands and take the irreversible plunge into the unknown ;)
The somethingawful forums? With the exception of the forums expressly for bad discussions, every thread has high quality content.
Granted, this is subjective to some degree as what I consider "noise" might be considered "signal" by others. I think that it worked because their intention was to make the sort of community that they wanted whereas Reddit seems more interested in making a platform for everyone.
I can see the use for each approach and I still find it one of the best things about internet communities in general. If you want something different, it's relatively easy to take a shot at making something more to your liking.
I just think that same $10 or whatever that it costs to join the SA forums and motivates most members to avoid shitposting would also present a barrier to the sort of broad, mass appeal Reddit is shooting for.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080410190800/http://reddit.com...
reddit is a platform for communities like twitter is a platform for individuals. There are a half million communities now on reddit and our onboarding experience should do a better job exposing people to the communities they love (kinda like twitter does but less ham-fisted).
e.g., There are Cleveland Browns fans who've visited reddit every day for years and don't realize there's a r/clevelandbrowns community that they'd love, not to mention r/cleveland and r/foodporn or whatever other communities they'd dig.
That's the vast majority of reddit content but we're not doing a good job exposing it.
The core problem is people don't even understand how the site works (subscribe to communities you like). That's something the team is still working on improving in a non-annoying way. Mobile is going to be a big part of it, I think.
Given that new signups are plopped right back to the home page after registration I can see how they don't immediately get it. Hell, even redirect to /subreddits (which, I suppose IS what I described above, but less guided/interactive) after signup could help people get into the curation part more.
I'd love to see those related subreddit threads (possibly sorted by activity) be surfaced more visually when I visit a comments page to find our more about it. Just an anecdote but I feel like you guys have a lot of data to play with.
1) Thanks a ton for the site, I have enjoyed many hours on it and find that it has made my world better.
2)As with any growth, things will fall to the human norm. It's fine, but thank you for fighting the good fight, I know it's not said much, but thank you.
3)Best on the new round of funding, yall worked hard and you deserve it.
4)I came to HN to escape reddit, actually. Yes, I'm in a ton of subs and it helps, but I also like seeing what other people are talking about. I find the content here better, though it is falling behind too. It helps me escape my 'filter bubble'. I've no idea how to keep the rice and throw the husk, but keep working on it, I believe in you guys.
5)Quick note, everytime I try to post in a sub I like, I get autobanned for not reading some obscure rule I can't see in my browser. It is very discouraging and leads me to firmly stay in the lurker category. Please give the mods better stuff to manage with. Also, having to read for 10 minutes to post a EE or CompSci question is tough, i just go to StackOverflow then, it turns me off.
6) Advice: Your lurkers and your posters are very different populations. Make sure to reach out to the lurkers too, as I can guess the posters are the ones that you interact with most of the time.
7) Idea: Maybe limit the group size you are in. Read the IP and tag it into 1 group or another. Put visitors in different groups automatically. I'm not saying people in cleaveland are in one group. I mean limit the size of a group of frontpages. I remember hearing that people can't remember the names of more than 150 people close to them. My idea is based on that. Force people into smaller groups where they interact. And yes, lurkers would be a problem here. It makes a big site small.
"What should I use to do this?" - That question isn't inline with our format
"How do I do this?" - This question is a duplicate of <question asked 4 years ago with a few similar keywords>
"How do I do this exact thing with this version of this software?" - No response, because no one on SO uses that software with that version, which you would have known if you could have asked the "What should I use" question.
Don't get me wrong, I love stack exchange/overflow, but it can be quite frustrating.
Would decrease upvote/downvote bots, incentivizes good content (higher karma gives you slightly more voting power).
That will just make it more valuable to game the karma system. .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidan#Vote_Fraud
Is Wikipedia trying to be knowyourmeme.com?
WP is an extremely political place. I was a relatively early editor and co-founder of an early Wikiproject. Ridiculously unnotable things like Unidan can slide because nobody really cares, but if you try to put something notable and controversial, but not necessarily widely known, in, you're going to have a bad time fighting off deletion requests and vandals.
This is exactly what happened at Digg and was a huge reason for it's downfall -- combating this with the disaster of a total rewrite and eventually collapse of the card castle.
Watching that unfold made me realize... no matter how smart you are, people that can make money (or clicks or impressions) from your system are going to be smarter.
I mean the idea doesn't sound too bad, but the problem is that users with the most karma are usually those who post the most low-effort content. Memes, Lists, message-in-headline articles, etc.
Also focus. AH and AS are both focused on what they do which allows them to have pretty clear rules, that doesn't work for all subs. And bigger subs with subjective rules can easily end in revolting users and sinking quality.
Maybe use IP address geolocation to suggest subreddits during onboarding?
Edit: Actually, Kenya, Sweden, and Singapore. http://www.reddit.com/r/bugs/comments/27rxzs/strange_subredd...
Can you use retargeting to drive people on the frontpage to appropriate subreddits?
True moments of wonder are often discovered when linked to a subreddit that is a completely different world. /r/ooer, for example. (I'll add a nsfw warning for that page just to be cautious - I literally have no idea what's going on there).
I would never discover subreddits like that one without the help of other users.
The trending subreddits were a good idea and I think are along the right lines but usually only serve to expose some poor hobbyist subreddit to the drooling masses. There's been a ton of work on recommendation engines over the last decade or so, I think that personalizing the trending sr concept would not be so difficult and would be a fun project, possibly even a side project, based on your comment and submission history against some hand-picked baseline.
I just recently discovered /r/buddhism, and it's a pretty good and active sr, but I had seen and quickly dismissed /r/zen years ago and never thought to look further. Another case is that I develop an interest in something and just never think to check for an active subreddit, kind of like the Browns fan you mentioned. So even if you know what you're looking for you may not find it, even though it's right there, even though there may be a link for it right in front of you (the right sidebar is where information goes to die).
I'd like to filter out most of "easy consumption" content such as imgur images, and boost long-form, interesting reading articles, especially when they come with in-depth discussions. I am sure the reading level of a comment or article can be judged with machine learning, a way of scoring the "fluff-ness" can be devised and the feed cleaned up.
The biggest problem is that reddit has a personality. It doesn't just have a tendency or a leniency imposed by the fundamental platform constraints. You go to Twitter when you want short updates or broadcasts from any type of people. Everyone can use it and feel comfortable on Twitter. If someone doesn't want to hear what Alexis Ohanian or people like him think, they can simply unfollow (or not follow in the first place). But it doesn't work that way on reddit.
reddit has a very monotonous, uniform identity and archetype. The admins obviously know this and it's been a big part of reddit's success up to this point, but now, if reddit wants to continue to grow and influence other circles, it has to sanitize from any type of specific personality or affiliation.
It's more than just allowing ostracized subs as a matter of free speech. Yes, subs on reddit can exist for almost anything, but they're starved, brigraded, and slanted. The audience is very hostile and actively tries to intimidate and scare away people who don't match their intended philosophy. It's not like Twitter where you may upset a group and have to deal with some upset tweets. On reddit, if you earn the ire or attention of most redditors, you're going to be in deep shit and your community will be inoperable.
Show reddit to your mom and she'll be appalled by the front page, she'll be out of there by the time she gets to the second link and see that it's anti-Republican or has the "f-word" in it. That's all fine for what reddit has been so far (a place for left-leaning counter-culture nerds to talk about left-leaning counter-culture nerd stuff), but it's not fine for what reddit wants to be (a universal platform for communities of all types and affiliations).
Interestingly this conflicts with your larger point to some extent. Reddit doesn't just need to introduce more subreddits to users, it needs to introduce different users to the platform. The convention on reddit right now seems to be that rational conservatives or religious people or others don't exist, and you'll see stuff that's openly hostile to these groups all over the front page, but in reality, a huge amount of people are conservative, religious, or something else that reddit in general openly loathes.
reddit has to figure out how to make a community that is gentle and welcoming to these people, not hostile or intimidating, and I don't mean that as a general "your UI is not good enough", but I mean it in the very real sense that most people will be very upset at the hostility they encounter if they try to post anything to reddit, if you can even convince them to get that far.
The platform needs to enforce some type of natural separation. Twitter seems to accomplish this by asking the user what they want to see before they show them anything. That way, people who hate the Pope aren't subjected to his tweets, and people who hate Rachel Maddow aren't subjected to her tweets. Tweets are also discrete units, which makes it so that there is little forced intermingling between hostile parties, whereas reddit articles come with all of the comments and baggage attached, and you can't share them without sharing the comment thread, which invariably across practically every subreddit has a very specific slant that doesn't necessarily correlate with universal values.
One can't honestly or realistically generalize 130,000,000 people other than to say they have an internet connection and are literate.
As I said, there are half a million communities and the way it works (which sadly is lost on a lot of people -- our fault) is that one subscribes to communities (or unsubscribes) based on taste and interest. If someone doesn't want to hear from r/politics on an issue, unsubscribing (unfollows to use twitter's nomenclature) is exactly what one does.
Again, I'll point out that one can't generalize a platform with 130M people. One needn't look further than r/religion, r/christianity, r/conservative, r/islam, r/Judaism (I could go on) to find those communities.
I challenge anyone to actually use reddit for a week, subscribing to communities with content that most resonates with them (unsubscribing from the ones that don't) and not have a positive front page experience.
Have you done this?
The owners of pro-religious or pro-conservative subs are frequently harassed and frequently intimidated. I know this first-hand. I used to run a religion-positive subreddit. I started it five or six years ago and I closed it almost two years ago when I finally accepted that reddit was never going to be viable platform for our community and that we were causing more harm than good by pretending like there was a legitimate forum there.
Our community rarely gained members that reflected 90% of what the real-life community reflects. This was universally apparent anecdotally as well as statistically. Almost all of our semi-constructive members were theologically liberal neo-religionists who didn't believe in classical religious ideals, and that was the best you could hope to get out of reddit. I don't have anything against those people existing or having subs of their own, but this sub was supposed to be for persons to discuss conventional religious beliefs in a conventional context, and we found it was impossible to have that conversation.
We sometimes tried to bring in new people to the community and platform. Most of them were turned off after a quick glance at the front page, and most of our members, including the new-age people who were not really the audience we were targeting, were too embarrassed by reddit's content to even approach people they knew in real life about joining the community. This theme around secrecy and shame re: reddit profiles is common throughout the site, like in the memes and gifs that often show up on the front page about how one must delete everything when his reddit username is discovered.
We couldn't curate or control the content effectively. We were constantly brigaded and undermined by the corresponding r/ex____ sub. Any discussion that cultivated the principles we wanted to cultivate was downvoted to oblivion. People who posted that kind of content, which is what we actually wanted, would invariably stop posting. Reddit would force them to once their score dropped to a certain level. We couldn't do anything about the invisible downvote force there to undermine and destroy anything we tried to do to improve the community. Modposts would get forced to the bottom of the pile and people would never see them (before stickies). The /r/ex____ community grew many times faster than we did and this problem only became worse over the years.
I've watched as other faith-positive subs like /r/christianity were raided time and time again. I've seen the vicious downvote bots that follow anyone who expresses an orthodox view in any of the supposedly pro-religion subs. Matters without external relevance which are entirely appropriate for the forum in which they are expressed are often blasted across SubredditDrama, ShitRedditSays, or other forums, which results in hopelessly irredeemable vote manipulation and the acquisition of manifold downvote bots for users expressing POVs that reddit doesn't like (np.reddit.com is a relatively new thing, not that it really helps).
Some opposition and hostility, of course, is normal when sharing controversial views. The issue is that reddit amplified the hostility by orders of magnitude over what would be expected if we ran the site on our own platform (and I have experience with this too). reddit supplied an audience all right, but it was not anything like the audience we would have hoped for.
I could go on. I'm in touch with the owners of the successor sub and things haven't really changed. They just believe there's some value in having a forum on reddit controlled by favorable forces even if that forum has the problems I listed.
Yes, the communities you listed, and ones like it, exist, but that doesn't mean they're pleasant or actually useful for the cause espoused in the name. It just means some people really like having their name appear in the mod box.
As for 130 million uniques per month, believe your own bullshit if you want to, but we both know that number is not anywhere near representative of the actual active, contributing, redditing public, and even if we did accept that number, it wouldn't excuse the harassment and difficulty that completely mainstream causes experience when they try to "use reddit as a platform".
Conservative and pro-religious communities are starved and tiny in comparison to other subs. /r/atheism has 24x more subscribers than /r/christianity. /r/politics, essentially /r/dnc since it's US-centric and you get downvoted to hell and back and often banned for expressing conservative sentiments, has 1000x more subscribers than /r/conservative. Do you think that's reflective of real life?
Meanwhile on Twitter, Hannity has 1M and Maddow has 3M followers. Still a big difference, and twitter has its own biases that make it less reflective of the general populous, but not anything like what we see on reddit. ACLU has 210K and NRA has 230K followers.
Why does /r/traditionalmarriage have to be a closed, invite-only sub on reddit, when that's still an extremely mainstream POV, with 45%+ of the nation still polling as supporting it/opposing gay marriage? Shouldn't a major social topic like that be less of an echo chamber if reddit truly is the platform of the people? And yet, reddit, in a move of complete non-alienation, decks Snoo out in pro-gay garb when major political decisions are made in favor of reddit's preferred position. One may be able to see how that hurts the perception that reddit is a neutral place for any type of community or speech.
These aren't necessarily perfect analogs, but they are sufficient to show just how heavily skewed the reddit audience is. My concern is that reddit's ownership doesn't even realize that there is something outside of the bubble that is reddit's current participant base.
I'm commenting because I have some experience with the Christian archipelago of subreddits and because I've watched conservative elements of Christianity try to find a reddit home in several different stages. (Catacombs, TheArk...)
I don't think it is necessarily accurate to say that reddit is attempting to be a neutral place, overall, as I think it's rather impossible for a community to be a wholly neutral place (and question the existence of such a thing anyway).
What is attempted instead is the creation of policy that allows for any community to set its own parameters and assumptions for discussion while still allowing for the creation of a policy of anonymous and uncensored participation. There really isn't any point to having an Internet forum without attempting these, and as soon as one wishes to depart from these goals they're no longer really in tune with reddit.
> They just believe there's some value in having a forum on reddit controlled by favorable forces even if that forum has the problems I listed.
Which is an interesting statement about territory within a larger community, as well as a problem as old as discourse itself.
I think Alexis missed your point entirely, instead making a point about personal frontpages.
But I can't see it as a possibility for reddit to attempt to attract a different userbase or reddit administrators to try to neutralize reddit culture.
All they can really do is try is create tools for small communities to set their own culture, and I think that's where you're spot on; it's currently not possible to use reddit as a platform for an arbitrary community of people because reddit is already a large community.
The problem, though, is that there are no arbitrary communities.
You might have a chance if you imported a community, and expected patterns of behaviour, from outside.
It's weird that so many people building communities are unaware of places like Meatball or some of the better Usenet troll-diffusing techniques.
Or even good design to present information. A lot of subs just present a wall of text and expect people to read and obey.
You could have a single button with a big sign saying "PUSH BUTTON TO GET COFFEE" and you'd still get people asking how toget coffee. While it fails for some people you've at least reduced that number to as few as possible.
Reddit communities start with a wall of text, and then add extra rules as stuff happens. This means that fewer people read the rules and mods have more work to do.
I'd liken the search for 'smaller subreddits' to zooming to the 'bottom' of a fractal. Cool for a while, but eventually you either understand what you're dealing with or simply tire of the self-similarity.
I hope not. Freedom is too big of a price to pay for comfort. I'd rather deal with spontaneous witch hunts and despicable subreddits than see it all turn into the PR wet dream of 1-2 hours AMAs with celebrities that seem unable to read and type on their own.
In terms of racism, I've never seen racist or sexist content on the front page when I have visited.
I would love to see better moderation tools. Most of the shitty content I've had to deal with are from newer/multiple accounts, as well as the older accounts that are sick of the trolls. Our AutoModerator shadowban list and our ban list is so ridiculously long I can barely scroll it. It'd be amazing if we didn't have to rely on a bunch of other tools (toolbox, RES, AutoModerator) or consider building our own tools (subreddit history scraper). It'd also be amazing if there was some site-wide automatic action against certain throwaway accounts so we don't have to clean up _after_ the 4th attempt at some idiot trolling us.
I would also love to see a better take on Reddit 101 too. We still get comments like "I'm a male and why is this on my reddit page" and people that just barge in without reading rules to post things against our rules (like a ton of misogyny _and_ misandry). Some of this is inevitable but it's pretty annoying that there isn't much we can do here either other than deleting things after the fact.
I don't think that those two alone will improve the site significantly, but it would be a burden lifted for default mods, and that might help clean up parts of the front page. Maybe. I don't even want to think about how much time we spend on everything from figuring out trolls to writing warning notes for each other, to discussing some idiot user trying to dox one of the mods. It'd be time we can spend doing other things for the subreddit. That would be nice.
I think its asking way too much of someone who wants to join a casual site known for cat pics and meme jokes to read through the couple dozen default sub rules. There's no practical educational solution here. The volume of new users and the labor of understanding all these rules is huge and its impractical to expect people to digest it all, especially for a topic most users, being male, aren't into. Lets also not be ignorant of the massive feminist thought that dominates subs like 2x. To you, its mainstream, if not conservative, to others its very different from what they're used to. Why do you think subjecting random people to that and not expecting some kind of reaction?
Reddit's idea of default subs seems flawed to me. Perhaps it should have suggested defaults when you make an account and you choose what you're interested in. Non-logged in users should get, maybe, randomized top 500 or so subs. Hand-picking subs, many of which are instantly polarizing (atheism, worldnews, politics, 2X, etc) is really an insane way to run that site.
Worse, once a sub is made a default, its quantity goes up but its quality goes down. /r/writingprompts was once a fun place for authors to get some practice. The highest rated stories were usually good for a read, but now its a default sub, and its unreadable. The top comments tend to be half-assed efforts usually ending in a joke or even a reddit in-joke because the guy who posts something silly immediately will dominate while the guy still working on his story and posts after an hour of writing ends up being comment 78 and no one scrolls that far down to read. Heck, that sub is so bad, that if you want to read a decent story you start at the bottom, with the lowest ranked items, and scroll up. Talk about failure of design!
/r/books was an okay resource for the casual reader and now is dominated by items that are, imo, much more lowest common denominator. I'm sure there are more examples.
I really think reddit is about ready to have its disruptive MySpace moment when some Facebook-like competitor moves in. The default subs are unrreadable dreck, the politics a mix of the ugliest libertarian meets social justice warrior crap, and the mod policy a schizophrenic per sub mess that pleases no one. Most subs seem completely overwhelmed and just resort to strict rules and 'self post only' policies to keep some level of sanity. This isn't a sign of a healthy system.
But it's not asking too much of that same cat-and-meme based system to be a focusing point for decently written short-stories and a good place to discuss books?
I mean, you're saying that it's asking too much of people that they just click 'unsubscribe' on twox - and that having the barest understanding of how subreddits work is just too much.
And that's the community you're complaining about your seeming inability to farm quality prose from? I'm as tired of stories ending in the "tree-fiddy" in-joke as you are, but maybe there needs to be a higher barrier to entry than 'spends time on reddit' for voting, and while 'is able to read a couple dozen default sub rules' isn't that much higher, it might encourage people to at least read the rules before spouting off.
Reddit's management simply has an economic incentive to promote these gems to defaults to draw in users and make the site more attractive to those unwilling to dig down, but in the end this hurts those subreddits. I suspect this will be reddit's downfall. It curates some grass-roots communities that are self-managed, watches them grow, and then throws them to the wolves of Joe and Jane CasualAsshole. Now these gems have been thoroughly bro-ified, meme-ified, and politically-correctified with endless arguments web commentators like to get into (religion, politics, accusation of various 'isms', etc).
So yeah, I eat my own dogfood. I know writingprompts will never be good again the same way I know 2X suffers from the same thing with casual visitors. The difference is I know its a symptom of reddit default changes and don't think there's anything here regarding "education" that can fix this. Reddit's need for growth and popularity means decent subs become shitty subs over time. Heck, even when they remove defaults, the damage is done. /r/atheism will never be this philosophical-type sub, it'll always be meme-ish anti-Christian crap. Whatever mindshare they hoped to attract long left, the same way the writers I used to recognize on writingprompts are long gone now.
In other words I blame reddit management, but she blames reddit users. I think those are pretty different takes on the source of those problems. She seems to believe some heavy-handed "reddit 101" is going to fix everything. I believe that is hopeless once you reach the level of a default sub. Shitty users are always there, its how you manage them, compartmentalize them, incentivize them, etc that matters.
Management's economic incentive is purely to get more money from existing sponsors and to get more sponsors - and if they had to close down /r/writingprompts to achieve those ends, it'd happen. Look at how Reddit handled the celebrity nudes leaks were handled.
I think it's a good tradeoff to let these users run free on lax subreddits and moderate heavily on others, provided the moderating tools get better and make it easier on the mods.
This seems to be almost universally true for any online community. As a userbase widens, content quality and even social dynamics become diluted to some extent towards a general population baseline.
As a mod of /r/changemyview (153k subscribers), we have discussed opting out of becoming a default sub if we were approached by the reddit admins. We already continuously struggle to maintain sub quality, given 50k subscriber growth in the last 9 months, though we have seen some success with our small set of very well-defined, strict, and heavily enforced rules.
This seems to be almost universally true for any online community. As a userbase widens, content quality and even social dynamics become diluted to some extent towards a general population baseline.
Yes and no. I started spending time over on NeoGAF which has 141K members. Not nearly the size of some larger subs, but pretty good. The quality in content isn't massively scholarly, but it's far less juvenile than Reddit can be. This is largely due to the heavy moderation the forum uses. Which is likely the major flaw in Reddit. It can be a place for "good content" while also trying to be a more open form of discussion.
If, "In several years, I think reddit could have close to a billion users" then the quality of reddit will be just that. Hell, with a billion users, the average person will not even be fluent in your language. Alternatively it becomes a system where you very explicitly follow people and topics as one would do with Twitter. If so then can reddit be changed radically to accomplish this yet through small enough iterations as to not result in an exodus? There would be the challenge.
For now reddit remains a fairly good newswire for niche topics such as oculus.
The same is very often true of physical social spaces too. How often do you see a new, niche bar later attract a broader crowd and turn into the sort of place that attracts thugs? Or how often alcohol-fuelled violence starts around the larger venues because they attract a less thoughtful crowd?
Perhaps the early arrivals subscribe to the ethos while the late-comers are just there because their base needs are met. In the case of a social site: regular content, people to troll or others to upvote their jokes. In the case of a club: a reliable meat market and cheap drinks.
Part of the reason they've been successful is because the default subreddits draw people in. This isn't about some high and mighty "what is 'proper'", this is about what people find interesting to talk about. The default subreddits are not there to scratch the itch of those like you with their nose in up in the air about "quality".
As much as I like having a deep intellectual conversation, I always like enjoy my memes and inside jokes.
People like you lost that war long ago and as much as you'd like to "predict" the downfall of reddit, all signs point to no, you just fail to understand why. That isn't reddit's failing, it's yours.
What we're saying is that such low-effort content gets old. Users get bored after a while and want something thoughtful and novel. If reddit does not come up with a way to provide such content (without the constant slide toward the lowest common denominator), it may have trouble holding users.
Also, I've been a part of reddit for 7 years now, and was a part of digg before that. I've watched reddit grown.
about 3-4 years ago, IIRC, there was a rather large bucking back from the "old hands" onto the new because they viewed reddit as the "smart digg". uber great content, blah blah blah. They lost that fight and history has shown that reddit was right (it's still continuing to grow).
The post I was responding to is just another person from that era who is still salty about it. But here's the thing:
A large community cannot give that to you. That's the genius of subreddits. That experience is absolutely on reddit. I enjoy both types of content, and so I enjoy doing either. I think most people do as well.
It's only the pretentious pricks who really have a problem with reddit's lighter content.
loop
> reddit is "doin' it rong!", that's why their projected
> growth is so high
> much as you'd like to "predict" the downfall of reddit,
> all signs point to no
If an account is new, perhaps it would be worth pestering them with a modal with a "this is the first time you're posting to this sub, have you read the rules for it? Here they are. Oh, and if you're wondering why this is on your page, here's how to remove it: ..".
I hope the cleaning and injections don't change reddit too much.
I don't like it on HN either - I'd rather have a headline with a touch of editorializing than the complete lack of context they're often edited to...this very thread being a prime example).
i) diverse people have a spectrum of extreme but sincere opinions, so they look like they are provocative trolls even if they aren't.
ii) A sizable proportion of Reddit hates any even mild suggestion that maybe women don't have the easy life and the sub is a target for that rage
iii) with the watter nicely chummed trolls have an easy time.
iv) a lot of the posters are just viciously unpleasant unless your posts aligns exactly with theirs.
The reality is that your sub is the dead-corpse human-shield used to protect other less awful feminist subs.
I really hope you mod some other nicer subs so that you get some pleasure out of Reddit.
(I've been a bit vicious a out the sub, but this doesn't reflect on the moderation or (mostly) on the real users.)
Once you couple that with the general population skewing fairly male, young, not necessarily good with social norms, and a strong pseudo-libertarian streak, it just doesn't seem like a good combination with a sub that's supposed to be by and for women.
I'm curious why the mods decided to let it become a default.
This is one of the big weaknesses of Reddit right now. As far as I can tell, who gets to moderate powerful subreddits comes down the the accident of history of who happened to think of it first. Several of the subreddits I frequent have had moderators slam down rules that most of the community disagree with (just for example /r/Android has a rule that you cannot post "questions", it is only for "news about Android" ...). This leads to a high variability in the quality of the moderation and curation of various subreddits. I'm not sure what the best alternative idea woudl be, but something better than "whoever thought of it first" should be possible.
With Reddit, you at least have a chance of having a semi-decent group of moderators who can care for and foster their community without it turning into an anal retentive hell.
Seeing as reddit is just usenet of the 80s and early 90s on a web page in 2014, both in application, discussion topics, and more or less in culture, one lesson from usenet readers of the dark ages was there are or should be no default groups.
I don't remember any default usenet groups in nn, tin, gnus... The same social pressures that lead to no defaults then, most likely apply now, even if the tech is slightly different.
"a sub that's supposed to be by and for women."
I lurked there and read a lot. Interesting to see their opinions vs mine. Eventually it got boring. Encouraging half or more of the new user population to lurk before posting was another usenet thing. So looking at it that way, it might be a good idea to force noobs to read, at least till they learn how to remove a default subreddit.
So I've presented two arguments, one for and one against. I think the argument against is slightly stronger although I could appreciate a good alternative interpretation.
The news protocol specifically included a recommendation mechanism for "default subscribed groups", so that a news administrator could point new users to some important groups.
In Gnus that behaviour is triggered by the variable gnus-default-subscribed-newsgroups.
I'm certain that nn, tin and whatnot supported it, as well.
Granular abilities - like the ability to give someone only the power to delete comments, or only the power to tag titles or something.
Restrict posting from new accounts - force accounts to be X days old before they're allowed to comment in a given subreddit.
Exposing the IP's of users to the mods - Most trolls/spammers aren't going to with proxies/whatever to get that many IPs, so exposing this is the first step to bans, which leads to...
Better bannning tools - even 4chan has good banning tools, why can't Reddit?
I spent all of 5 minutes on this so I'm sure a good developer can come up with a super useful list of tools, and them write them.
They shouldn't need additional developers for these features (unless all the existing ones left?), seems to me that these things should be doable fairly quickly.
It makes me the "negative" one in meetings.
Makes me wonder how often this phenomenon happens in other industries.
I can say from experience it does happen in the design world. Back in my design days I can say I heard variations of the thought from time-to-time but not as often as I do now being a developer.
Hacker News does something like that you can't downvote till 1000 upvotes iirc.
That would stop the casual trolls at least (of course there are ways around it but then there always are).
If these bots could be used to auto-ban new users then Reddit would die very quickly.
I'd love to scrape my own posts (and the threads they were part of) as a personal log. I have been over 7 years a redditor and I can't reach past 1000 posts back in time, which is less than 10%.
Reddit guys, why can't users take their OWN content back?
Relative to what? Are YouTube and Yahoo bastions of intellectualism and racial tolerance?
If you really think that Reddit's issue is that the quality of discussion is too low, you need to take another look at any other site on the internet.
You think laws made to help people get up from the bottom tier should apply to everyone on the bottom tier and not just people of a certain color? Well you're racist.
Your favorite movie is blazing saddles? Well guess what: you're a racist.
/s
I think everyone should be able to use the same water fountain and no one should be able to cut in line solely based on the color of their skin, but on their level of thirstyness.
According to a lot of people on reddit (and HN) I'm a racist. I thought racism was discriminating against someone based on skin color.
But, this is a natural progression. Not sure what to do about it except to form exclusive communities. While the fact that reddit has hit the mainstream means that there are some interesting AMAs and experiences to be discovered, it also means that reddit got dumb -- because the main-stream is dumb.
>I think having the first few layers filled with terrible content and hive-minded, often racist/sexist discussion
You just described mainstream television and its appeal
This would then turn shenanigans into private subs... but at least it would be a start.
Some sort of "honor code between mods" could enforce that quite well. Be a jerk in /r/Y and get kicked out of /r/Y AND /r/X. Be a jerk in any sports subreddit and get tossed out of all of them. Some form of "shared blacklist" cross linked between subreddits could implement this. Assuming the source of the problem is just the users and not one of the mods themselves.
I just don't believe it's in Reddit's best financial interest to decrease the level of impact an individual user can have on its site.
I also don't believe moderators, as they're currently designed on Reddit, are capable of discerning signal from noise. The whole driving premise of Reddit is the upvote, and that's an incredibly powerful concept.
Legitimacy is established through adherence to core values, and Reddit's core values have always centered around what's popular, not what's "good" or "right", as judged by a few randomly selected people.
Reddit is the upvote, not the moderator, isn't it?
Edit: Sorry, this is a little rambling, but I'm torn between spending 20 minutes fleshing out this comment, and being a productive employee (aren't we all?).
The overall gist of what I'm saying is the idea of a more "curated" Reddit, a la HN, would be bad for the website, the Internet, and the company primarily because of the lack of any kind of vetting of those who would curate the various reddits. I think there's a place on the Internet for a very profitable website that doesn't have any particular "quality control" beyond what the users like and don't like (janitorial tasks, e.g. spam filtering and illegal content pruning aside).
In theory. In practice, strong moderators become more important the larger the community gets. And reddit is a very, very large community.
>The whole driving premise of Reddit is the upvote, and that's an incredibly powerful concept.
It's powerful, but not always in a good way.
I think one of the better examples is looking at the difference between /r/gaming (light moderation) and /r/games (heavier moderation). While I am sometimes entertained by the content on /r/gaming, in general, it's a terrible subreddit that does a good job of soaking up most of the crap discussions surrounding gaming (5 threads a day of "Has anyone else ever played Zelda?"). Whereas /r/games actually has content worth reading a vast majority of the time and it's not just a filtered versions of /r/all for threads that have "game" in the title.
That's how I see the design of Reddit -- it doesn't seem to me to be the place where every single link is supposed to be tailored specifically for you/the crowd. I think people come to Reddit expecting a finished product, where the front page is a curated listing of the most interesting things that the Internet has to offer, when in reality, the only way Reddit works is if YOU help push it in that direction.
You're not viewing a finished product, you're helping make the product! Push those up/down votes and use that voice that you've got to make your Reddit reflect more of what you want it to be. I think that's partially why Sam Altman is giving some of his shares to actual users, isn't it?
A ten minute conversation with the average voter will repel you from the idea that eveyone should want to listen to what 51% of most people would upvote, or should dislike what 51% of people would downvote. But your frontpage will be filled with the former, and you'll never be able to find the gems in the latter without serious time investment.
Upvote isn't enough. Hence, moderation.
The idea that you'd ever go to reddit.com or reddit.com/r/foo and see nothing but gems is a pipe dream. You're asking other people to do your work for you. You are the one who's supposed to contribute your up/downvote.
HN, on the other hand, seems much truer to the overall thrust of your argument, because there are no downvotes for submissions, and only two upvotes are needed for a story to reach the first or second page of HN. But HN only works because there are exceptionally smart and prudent moderators who are constantly curating the singular frontpage.
But Reddit doesn't have those kinds of moderators, because the moderation system is alarmingly broken on Reddit.
The folks who moderate the various reddits are there by no virtue other than the fact that they were either there first, or have some relationship to the person who was there first.
It keeps sounding like there's a crisis of identity happening over at Reddit HQ, and I really hope they come out the other side of it with an understanding of how damaging moderators have been to the website, as currently implemented.
The folks who moderate the various reddits are there by no virtue other than
the fact that they were either there first, or have some relationship to the
person who was there first.
Yes, I am.
>You are the one who's supposed to contribute your up/downvote.
But that's the problem. My upvote / downvote doesn't matter. If I'm in r/funny it doesn't matter how often I downvote unfunny things - the sub will still be inundated with garbage posts - subjectivity of humor aside. I don't mean "That joke didn't make me laugh", I mean there is nothing within the content of the post that indicates it's even an attempt at humor. The only thing left for me to do in the face of such a situation is to leave and go somewhere else. The only way for my vote (on posts themselves) to mean anything is moderator action.
I'm not (and I don't think anyone else is) arguing that every sub should have strict rules and moderation. But strict moderation is a necessary tool for many of the subreddits that I enjoy to exist. A lack of moderation would turn r/askHistorians into a swamp of ignorant hearsay, answers based solely on what one dude read on Wikipedia, and general misinformation in no time at all. The only vote that I have that matters on reddit is the vote for which subreddits I subscribe to, not the posts within those subreddits.
You're visiting a work in progress, not a completed product.
I don't find it that useful to argue for things that I don't like. And I am capable of making value judgments and having opinions.
How would you design a system in which everyone had the same amount of influence over a series of submissions?
The problem is where it comes down to implementation.
By not allowing for moderation, all of the content in reddit will gravitate to the same standard you see on the frontpage, just broken up by category, where the only deviation will be in the smaller sub-sections of the community that aren't yet subjected to the rot of the more mainstream communities.
So, for someone like me who desires content beyond the same dozen memes reposted in various forms everyday, there is little content for me to view when only the mob rules. Which means I would have little use for reddit as a whole, aside from the occasional time wasting when I had nothing better to do.
Moderation is what allows for decent content to exist outside of the trivially small sub-reddits. There are plenty of places on reddit to view shallow content (in fact, I would say the vast majority of the content on reddit is of the shallow variety). The existence of more heavily moderated sub-reddits doesn't prevent these places from existing, but it does allow for sub-reddits to deviate from the norm.
So, to summarize, moderation is what allows me to view the type of content on reddit that I would like to see. Remove the moderation and I would have little use for the site.
You're not grasping the concept that Reddit isn't a finished product, and you're not supposed to like everything you see.
You are excited (presumably) about Reddit and about the possibility that the community may be given the opportunity to own a piece of Reddit.
Yet, you find the actions of the majority of the Reddit community "detrimental" to the site's image.
Reddit is what it is. A bunch of people on the Internet. You are either excited about the community or you don't like most of them, which is it?
I'm excited to see what this new equity-share model will lead to, and hope that the value and quality I already get from reddit can be multiplied with this capital. You can be displeased with certain aspects of something while at the same time acknowledging the good and its potential, like with children, friends, your country, really any relationship or community.
In fact, reddit as a community is so huge that I think anyone would be hard pressed to like all of it.
Every time a subreddit gets added to the defaults, it goes one of two ways: The subreddit goes to total shit (r/funny, r/wtf), or the moderators are forced to combat an ever-rising tide of shit in order to maintain quality (r/science).
Neither of those scenarios seem tenable in the long term.
There needs to be a single default subreddit so that users can branch out from there on their own.
I feel that they need to make a choice of being the "home page" for everyone vs. a meaningful community. I do not see one site serving both needs, as the branding, culture, and even tools needed to manage those two goals just don't match up with each other.
Would this mean I couldn't launch this unintended pun into a long thread of puns that eventually winds up at "I did Nazi that coming"?
I hope posting this is not bad form, but highlighting these great voices has been the goal of my most recent project, http://www.reddthoughts.com.
A collection of insightful thoughts and stories from the minds and lives of redditors.
Sometimes we get trolls, but because of the rule structure they usually get bored pretty quickly. I have a handful of regular posters, too, who do a good job of posting every day and reporting spammers. It really has a true community feel, as was the intention of the site.
I'm confused. Reddit is one of the most anti-racist/sexist communities on the internet. That's the hivemind, so you'd expect anything that's racist or exist to quickly be deleted or pushed to the bottom of the thread where nobody can see it (on the large subreddits anyway).
I was surprised to find that out, too. Reasonable people unsubscribe from the worst defaults, and don't find out what the unreasonable people who are left there are up to.
We most subscribe to very different subs. I've never been a part of a community that had so much tolerance for racism. Some subs have rules against but most do not, and users take advantage of that. On most forums and other communities I've been a part of, you get instabanned for any whif of racism in your posts. On reddit you can pretty much say what you want (in most subs).
Increased level of quality in both content and discussion should come naturally by attracting and retaining intelligent individuals.
Every time the topic of a heavier moderation comes up people refuse to hear about it because "free speech".
The problem I have with Reddit is that I'm still unsure if it's a positive externality. There's a lot of good aspects of Reddit (discovery, community), but there's so much bad about Reddit that it's impossible to overlook it (abusive subreddits, abusive users, no administrator transparency, etc.)
There's free speech, and then there's the ethics of promoting and profiting off of abusive/illegal content.
My dream startup would be a Reddit-esque link aggregator, which favors the actual quality of submissions, instead of submissions which are lowest-common-denominator which are optimized for the hive mind.
Hopefully you publish some of your findings down the road. I'm interested to hear more.
> no administrator transparency,
admin transparency can lead to vociferous site-wide meta nonsense and it can also get toxic very quickly.
Case in point, during The Fappening, a large number were filled with conspiracy theories on why the administrators hadn't banned it yet before Wong's blog post, which was only made a week after the first incident.
Although, as of recently the reddit administrators started banning some of the more racist subreddits even though they didn't have any official change in policy.
Not completely sure, but IIRC those weren't banned because of racism but brigading/doxing. Which of course is bound to happen with subreddits catering to extremists.
How would you go about favoring quality?
For example, many popular subreddits support the making of image macros/memes. Many of the serious subreddits have a) banned the use of image macros/memes and/or b) forced the sub to use text posts only, which forces the submitter to add discussion, and also reduces the incentive for karma-gaining since text posts generate no karma.
Another approach is to promote original content [OC], which gives an incentive to submitters to submit unique content instead of just being the first to post a submission to a new article on TechCrunch for internet points. The subreddit /r/dataisbeautiful has done this very well. (I really wish Reddit would remove its 10:1 rule, which was made to punish self-promoters and is a different issue entirely)
And of course, the standard machine learning techniques can be used to predict the probability of a post being good given, for example, a) keywords in title b) quality of domain's previous submissions c) quality of user's previous submissions, etc.
But I still go on every day, because there probably isn't a single time I go on there that I don't learn something new and interesting. Not another site I can say that about, even HN.
It's not like all forum-software-innovation stopped in June 2005 when the 2 of us launched reddit to the world.
The hard part is going to be quantifying "quality of submissions" in a scalable way. We thought a lot about this and while it's not perfect, the vast majority of content on reddit across those half million communities is indeed good.
It's a fascinating problem that I hope someone can solve -- improve on Steve's hotness algorithm!
The issue is the people, not with Reddit.
That is always true, in fact I'd go as far as to formulate Waldens Law, "if the issue is either people or X, it's people" ;).
I guess my commentary would be that there's a lot of places for people to be pleasant to each other and to discuss their shared interests - be it enthusiasts forums or facebook. The risk is being the place people go to be abusive and share their degradation of other people, and it's difficult to just take the rough with the smooth in that respect, when other communities are held to account for that sort of behaviour.
Right now, the primary thing that causes something to succeed on reddit is the rate of upvotes. Anything that takes time to upvote will be less likely to succeed, because it will receive its initial upvotes at a lower rate. (It takes at least an hour to upvote a great new yorker article vs. something that will be voted based on the title alone or a 1 second click.)
To fix this, you need to track click -> upvote interval and correct for this.
This is the main reason why subreddit quality goes down with size. Only the extreme head of the "upvote rate" distribution has an opportunity to succeed when the subreddit is large, so the "upvote rate" drowns out the "upvote ratio" as a factor.
On that note there's definitely a potential market opening, one sites like hackernews cater to.
On top of that, if you are banned from a subreddit (even a default one) the moderators can basically choose to ignore you and you are SOL. There's the whole 90/10 rule where if you are posting something from the same source too often, you can be seen as a spammer and banned. It's very easy to break this rule. For example, if you make a few self posts, make tons of comments, post links to 5 different websites, then post 1 link to your website, you are breaking the rule and if a mod sees it you can be banned (comments/self posts don't count towards the 90/10 rule so your 5 posts to 1 self promotion post is breaking the rules). I wish they would just let the upvote/downvote system do its job and weed out content people don't want instead of forcing people to post a bunch of crap they wouldn't normally post just to make their profile look good so they can post about their own projects once in a while.
> For example, if you make a few self posts, make tons of comments, post links to 5 different websites, then post 1 link to your website, you are breaking the rule and if a mod sees it you can be banned (comments/self posts don't count towards the 90/10 rule so your 5 posts to 1 self promotion post is breaking the rules).
Some admin recently said that something like that has never happened. Only flagrant violators of that rule get shadowbanned by the admins.
So, you say "content creator", I say "people trying to sell me shit that I don't want".
I've got stuff to sell, websites I want to promote, etc. too. But, I accept that the cost of me having a nice community I want to be a part of, that isn't focused on consumption as the only purpose in our lives, means I shut up about it except when it's really relevant and someone else brought it up.
Also, it's perfectly fine if other people post that content it's just not okay if you are the one who wrote it and posted it so it doesn't stop the content from being posted just WHO can post it.
This touches an issue I'd like to elaborate on: the psychology of someone who is willing to moderate a Reddit subsection—or any similar site, like many mailing lists—is probably not good. It takes someone willing to spend a fair amount of time at a thankless task that is hard to do well and rarely if ever remunerative.
A lot of the people who start at that task do so optimistically but quit as their lives change or the task becomes more onerous. Who gets left? People with axes to grind; people with no sense of perspective; petty tyrants; and so on. I don't use Reddit much for many reasons, but one is the low quality of moderators. I don't bother messaging them anymore, ever, because doing so is largely a waste of time.
The problem with moderators is not dissimilar from the problem of users: people who regularly have something interesting to say and the means to say it well get blogs, as I wrote here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2013/06/05/social-news-sites-a... . Those who don't stay on Reddit.
Very rarely is it the kind-hearted entrepreneur showing off a new thing he built who gets hit with a shadowban. It happens, but it's rare. More common is people creating accounts to do nothing but advertise, usually neglecting to disclose their affiliation in any way. Even more common is spammers creating hundreds of throwaway accounts used to promote Youtube channels/affiliate links/click scams/article farms and other nonsense. If you use a regular ban they simply make a new account. So yes, there's a very good reason for shadowbans.
>There's the whole 90/10 rule
90/10 is a guideline, not a hard set rule. Moderators of a subreddit have wiggle room when it comes to defining spammers. Many subs allow self-promotion. If you're advertising in one that doesn't allow it, then you're in the wrong.
>I wish they would just let the upvote/downvote system do its job
Votes work decently to bubble up quality content (if you consider lowest-common-denominator "decent"), but ultimately it does nothing for preventing spam, trolls, doxers, spoilers and whatever else.
This is awesome. Curious to see how this plays out. What's the approximate timing for announcing if reddit is able to do this or not?
One of the founders (Alexis) has a PR firm, Antique Jetpack, which is on record [1] as cooperating with Stratfor of wikileaks fame. I can't quite see how the two are unconnected.
A couple of years ago, one of the admins there tacitly admitted that he was under a National Security letter complete with gag order to give up user information.
A few months ago, reddit changed its voting system in order to completely obfuscate user detection of large scale vote manipulation. The community was unanimously against this change, and has been overruled.
I don't see a great future for reddit, honestly. I'll continue to use it until whoaverse or another alternative is populated enough.
[1]: https://search.wikileaks.org/gifiles/?viewemailid=277352
comp.* – computer-related discussions (comp.software, comp.sys.amiga)
humanities.* – fine arts, literature, and philosophy (humanities.classics, humanities.design.misc)
misc.* – miscellaneous topics (misc.education, misc.forsale, misc.kids)
news.* – discussions and announcements about news (meaning Usenet, not current events) (news.groups, news.admin)
rec.* – recreation and entertainment (rec.music, rec.arts.movies)
sci.* – science related discussions (sci.psychology, sci.research)
soc.* – social discussions (soc.college.org, soc.culture.african)
talk.* – talk about various controversial topics (talk.religion, talk.politics, talk.origins)They frame it quite differently--they broadly want to support legal free speech, even ugly free speech. They do so up until the point it would be impossible to do so without damaging the company.
What do you prefer them to do?
When prioritizing what gets developed, does anybody think that not showing up/down votes will bring more users or would an option to disable downvote buttons on a breast cancer survivor support group sub so that it feels like a safer place to share make more sense?
Then there was that weird relationship with imgur (quickly becoming another major social network), where they were violating all kinds of content and promotion policies but were given free reign to do whatever and for the longest time nobody could figure out how imgur was funding itself. Oh, it turns out reddit is an investor in imgur.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/03/after-five-years-of-bootstr...
Then there's all kinds of weird censorship policies, where entire groups of users and subs discussing bad things are killed but lists of subs involving rape, death, beastiality and various other horrible things sit around just fine.
And you get half-assed explanations like https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2foivo/every_man_is_r...
Reddit's problem is that it doesn't really have a universal set of consistent policies, except for one, don't do anything to make us look bad in the press, everything else is random and capricious.
I think lots of users would like to go somewhere else, but the network effect on reddit is effectively acting as a network lock-in. There's plenty of other aggregator sites, but they can't get traction with the 9000 lb gorilla in the room. It would be very hard for another digg->reddit shift to happen unless reddit does something on the order of the digg debacle to piss off the entire userbase.
http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1l4aiq/reddit_is...
To be perfectly fair, any comment posted by a founder of Reddit would become a top-voted comment.
If someone tries to make a replacement that fixes all the issues they will have to forgo whatever small amount of profitability there is in making a digg-like website. And it would probably have to be hosted in Iceland or some other obscure location.
I'll admit that mods aren't always perfect, but they're (for the most part) regular users who are making communities the way they want to. I've very rarely seen people remove posts or ban users just to promote a particular agenda, and the ones that did were hated by their fellow mods. And I'd really like to see some good examples of admin censorship. The more common complaint I hear about the admins is that they're not active enough.
>government manipulation
I'd really like to see any sort of evidence whatsoever supporting this.
>corporate advertising/shilling
Again, I'd like to see some evidence. There have been a few high-profile cases like the Quickmeme guy, but I've never heard of large corporations wasting money on reddit. That's what Twitter and Facebook are for.
>The admin team has shown again and again that they're willing to tolerate anything until there's bad PR.
If you're talking about content, agreed. If you're talking about spammers and shilling, absolutely not. I think reddit is just about the best site of its kind around, in terms of software, users, and mods/admins when it comes to fighting spam.
>One of the founders (Alexis) has a PR firm, Antique Jetpack, which is on record [1] as cooperating with Stratfor of wikileaks fame. I can't quite see how the two are unconnected.
He released all of the emails he exchanged with them and it was never anything sinister.[1]
>A couple of years ago, one of the admins there tacitly admitted that he was under a National Security letter complete with gag order to give up user information.
Source? I don't remember this at all.
>A few months ago, reddit changed its voting system in order to completely obfuscate user detection of large scale vote manipulation. The community was unanimously against this change, and has been overruled.
No, the vote counts before, especially on popular posts, were almost completely wrong (intentionally). In exchange for taking away the individual vote counts, which were mostly bogus anyway, they made the "percent liked" statistic much more accurate. I dislike that they took away that ability completely from comments except for the "controversial" dagger, but I saw absolutely no sinister intent in what they were trying to do there.
Your whole comment reads like you've been taking what /r/conspiracy and /r/undelete tell you at face value and have never actually dealt with the mods or admins on reddit, or even taken the time to understand how it really works.
[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1l4aiq/reddit_is...
I agree with the rest of your comment but would like to qualify this, for reasons I wrote here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8391963 .
Reddit as a platform peaked in 2013- quantitatively[1] and qualitatively. It's mainstream now, and will soon be passe (something like SomethingAwful).
If reddit has any value as an investment, it's for advertising and personal (pseudonymous or not) data. Facebook peaked a few years ago in the way I've described, and since their IPO has grown in market value[2] but declined in cultural value[3] (even as its MAU continue to grow!). They are slowly selling off piece by piece, literally to the highest bidder, the equity, trust and attention that it has built up over the years. It's not a sustainable model, it's in a mature phase by now, and it generates a whole lot of cash while it lasts.
Wouldn't be surprised to watch reddit do the same.
[1] http://www.randalolson.com/2014/09/28/the-most-upvoted-post-... [2] http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=FB&t=2y&l=on&z=l&q=l&c= [3] https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=facebook
I'm confused as well. Is Advance Publications retaining a stake? Are they spinning it off? ???
As others have said some of the best contents is in the smaller sub-reddits, but they often struggle to get much content because people feel that to get any "attention" they have to post in a sub-reddit. I feel people would be encouraged to submit to smaller sub-reddits if there was a hierarchical structure whereby if a story did well in a sub-reddit, it would get to the front page of the next sub-reddit above it - so I might submit to /r/Dundee which leads to /r/Scotland which leans to /r/UnitedKingdom etc
I'm sure there would be some clever way to structure and control this. It would breathe life in to the smaller sub-reddits.
They don't want more attention, they feel it will decrease their quality, and they're probably right.
Now that they have dozens of employees I wish they'd put this high up on their roadmap. As a nearby comment points out, it would be the next step on reddit's journey toward reincarnating the golden age of Usenet.
https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2hwpmm/fundraising_fo...
How's that supposed to work? Reddit (the company) will own the shares? Some foundation? A bit more detail would be nice.
Yes, yes, trolls, hacked accounts, wall street manipulators, sock puppets, 4chan, 14 year olds, etc.
But, I mean, wow, just imagine the flame wars! It would be a beautiful fire of crazy. Have the insane fedora neckbeards actually try to get things together in a really real setting? The raw data files alone would be worth it. You'd glean so much, and in a Public setting. Yeah, Google does it already, but to let all of us join in on the analysis of the decision making process? I dare say it: You'd be able to determine how an internet-type true democracy would work. Hash out representatives, the whole deal.
Give it to the users, reveal just how dumb we all are in a herd.
it could be the first cryptocoin actively used based for rewards/sponsorships etc. See http://ltbcoin.com/ as an example.
While I have a real name account there, TBH 95% of the time I'm using an alias.
At the moment there are thousands of subreddits but the only way to find them is by playing with the 'random' button and hoping for a bit of serendipity.
As a daily reddit user for 4+ years, I'd wager that it'll just be an exaggerated amount of the same. With any internet community it seems, given enough time, you get saturated by users 'gaming' it for points/karma/post count/etc. So now the same small number of nothing-else-to-do reddit users trawling the archives for repostable karma material have one more incentive to keep up the high-karma-low-content submissions: money. Sorry for the cynicism.
It does more than bother me that community created value is captured by a few servers in SV - and it's going to take a lot of experimentation to get this right. I rather like the idea of licensing my location data to Google Traffic, and rather doubt giving equity to some but not all redditors will ever work out fairly, but hats off for actually acknowledging the problem publicly and trying something. I expect whatever the normal for community value will be in twenty years, none of the ideas on this thread even come close - in beginning to enjoy the ride though :-)
And lets not even start on banning /r/creepshots but not /r/CandidFashionPolice, which is THE SAME FUCKING THING. I mean shit, if you're going to have standards, at least be consistent.
And don't get me started on /r/netsec and it's shitty anti-disclosure philosophy.
But I still use reddit daily myself. Getting off some of the default subreddits and subscribing to ones focused on a specific topic (a video game, programming language, city, etc...) has replaced specialized/focused forums for me. It's definitely a great communication platform.
I don't know if there's a karma threshold after which one can downvote stories. If there is, I haven't hit it, at 2129 karma as of this writing.
downvote sounds like the opposite of upvote
flagging sounds like a reporting mechanism
they actually do the same thing, but they give totally different impressions to new users.
For what it is worth, I see plenty of stories drop off the HN front page by being overcommented on. HN seems to go for a 'controversial' rank rather than straight up scores. I'm not sure how that's any better. At least on reddit, you can pick the way you want to sort your stories and comments.
> So the new rule is that partners can only invest some amount of time after Demo Day (we’ll experiment a little to figure out exactly how long) or as part of a Series A.
Reddit seems to qualify under the "some amount of time after Demo Day" caveat. Does anyone know at what time period YC ended up setting?
http://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-investment-policy-and-email-l...
However one thing Quora does way, way, way, way better is your feed (home page on reddit). It's really smart and accurate and unearths lots of great content. Not all of it fresh. Some of it even really old.
reddit should copy that.
Yishan Wong is the biggest power user Quora has ever had, so he surely knows and understands this.
I just type in my address bar: site:reddit.com litecoin rig or site:reddit.com flask api, and open a half dozen tabs. Because of the compact layout, I can race through hundreds of comments really quickly and waste like milliseconds on trolls.
They've probably lost track of how many "How can this thing grow up, without becoming wack" discussions they've had. I think my answer remains, "it probably can't."
I have a few small subreddits I get on that seem to be free of that:
http://www.reddit.com/r/DiscordianHumanism/
http://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/
http://www.reddit.com/r/KindleFreebies/
http://www.reddit.com/r/ebookdeals/
http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/
http://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/
You will find better content on those Subreddits even if they don't have a lot of members on them like the others that are so popular that they get the low functioning trolls and attention seekers who cause only trouble.
The DiscordianHumanism subreddit was created because of the trolls on Atheism and SecurlarHumanism and sort of combines Discordianism with Humanism for a different take on the world, etc.
A lot of the subreddits where you ask for advice, you often get bad advice and a groupmind who votes up bad advice and votes down good advice. This is because the low functioning people outnumber the mid-functioning and high-functioning people. You will find a lot of the low-functioning people are under 18, and posting from their parent's basement with no supervision.
From another perspective, It´s just a good strategy to do your own IPO (go public) without the legal/bureaucratic way. It´s creating your own NY Stock Exchange with the idea to increase your value based on what your users are doing now (because it will be possible to buy, sell and trade between users).
So, beyond the message that it´s for “giving back to the community”, Is it more a clever strategy to increase the company value, and even more the stockholders value? or I´m incorrect?
I figured it would have been higher given the gravity.
"A subreddit for really great, insightful articles, reddiquette, reading before voting and the hope to generate intelligent discussion on the topics of these articles."
How do you prevent extrinsic motivation from undermining intrinsic motivation here?
Seems like a great idea in principle, and hard to make it work, but hopefully they'll come up with a structure that does.
*conflict of interest is pretty much the standard way of doing biz in the Valley as I understand it.
If it bothered you that much, you would let users publish their contributions as cc-by-sa !
> Yishan Wong has a big vision for what reddit can be. I’m excited to watch it play out.
Has anyone seen him set out his big vision? I'm not sure that I have.
the "reddit drama" always makes me curious but I don't really know the rules very well.
Ultimately mods can remove or approve any post they desire. Some mods are hands-off, and others curate content. It depends on their goals for the subreddit. If users are not happy with the content of the sub or the moderation style, they can subscribe to a competitor subreddit or start their own. It's very much an open system.
But yeah, seeing the phrase "First, it’s always bothered me that users ..." not end in a discussion of the toxic parts of Reddit's culture and the various high-profile cases of Reddit's admins ignoring ongoing problems of their most horrifying sub-reddits... that was a bit jarring.
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2hwr02/i_am_sam_altman...
Wow, seriously? He's talking about the guy who spewed this nonsense[0]:
We understand the harm that misusing our site does to the victims of this theft, and we deeply sympathize.
Having said that, we are unlikely to make changes to our existing site content policies in response to this specific event.
The reason is because we consider ourselves not just a company running a website where one can post links and discuss them, but the government of a new type of community.
If Sam wants to hitch his wagon to this wash-your-hands-of-responsibility-while-reaping-the-profits attitude, that's his business, but's it's fucking reprehensible.
0: http://www.redditblog.com/2014/09/every-man-is-responsible-f...
I'd love to get some feedback from the downvoters, because it's hard for me to reconcile Yishan Wong's statement with Sam's assertion that he's "excited to watch it play out".
It's clear that this is not happening in any meaningful way, so his lack of action is simply an admission that he can't or won't do anything to prevent abhorrent behavior on the site he's responsible for. If it's a government, it's a powerless one, enforcing no laws but collecting taxes regardless. There's nothing to admire there.
1. Reddit is site which promotes hatred. Radical men hatred is quite common to find out.
2. Almost all mods are SJWs. It is almost impossible to find or carry out rational discussion on reddit. This hatred is so strong that many FEMINAZIs recommend getting rid of men from planet.
3. Mods control everything. Free speech is illusion on reddit. #GamerGate proved that reddit collaborated with un-ethical journalists to promote hidden propoganda
4. Reddit ads are most useless things.
5. Reddit users are mostly illiterate or low wage earners or college students or BurgerLand workers or IT workers who are stuck at their job. Reddit will never achieve revenue it is expecting to achieve.
6. Reddit is owned by mainstream media powerhouse.
7. Reddit regularly participates in social experiments to modify user views and conducts social experiments.
If all such things are happening why a partner at YC, who in other posting talks about morals, ethics, equality would want to invest in something this filthy.
After all , Money changes everything, doesn't it ?
PS - You can downovote me as you wish, or moderate this post but it won't change fact that Reddit is shithole and you can't deny it. All interested parties in Reddit wants to create rage, modify or alter people's opinion/view in US and outside countries and profit.
Reddit is indeed a shithole, filled with an extremely radical left-wing hive mind that is completely devoid of critical thinking skills.
I support Gamergate and do not like SJWs or their movement, but Reddit is not run by or even heavily influenced by SJWs for the most part. The ruthless shadowbanning of people discussing Gamergate was mostly due to very poor research and reasoning by the admins, and the misinformed belief that some subreddits were being raided by 4chan.
SJWs are still mostly a fringe group. In fact, reddit actually fired one of its admins a few months ago for going full-SJW and being clearly very biased towards /r/SRS.
Now, some mods in some of the big subreddits lean a little more left or right politically. The userbase in general is not "extreme left" though, much more center left. Search reddit for IA's and thunderf00t's latest videos and you'll see serious support and upvotes in almost all subreddits.
No offense, but this conspiracy theory mongering just makes this whole thing even harder to debate.
Ofcourse I built it, so I am biased.
This will be a fun ride which currently feels like David vs Goliath, but boy is it fun :)
- built-in night mode (reddit does not have this)
- responsive design which works great on mobile out of the box (reddit does not have this)
- limited voting (new users need to gain a certain amount of points before they are able to vote without restrictions, reddit does not have this)
- limited number of owned subs (reddit does not have this, one person can and does moderate hundreds of subs)
- youtube-like score bar which graphically shows percentage of upvotes/downvotes (reddit does not have this)
- user profiles which show statistics about user activity, for example, submission distribution and highest-lowest rated submissions (reddit does not have this)
- better privacy, users can delete all data stored about them if they decide to leave and close their account (reddit does not have this, all data is kept and public even after user deletes his account)
- youtube-like revenue sharing model (in development) where community is rewarded with real money (reddit does not have this)
- based in Switzerland, no censorship policy as long as content is legal (reddit is like North Korea when it comes to this, censoring thefappening but leaving sexwithdogs)
- no blatant ad submissions posing as regular posts policy (examples: a photo of a starbucks cup with a cute kitten inside which frequently reaches reddit frontpage or a video titled "look what I filmed with my GoPro")
- ...constant dialog with community and very open to new ideas and improvement
I hope this answers your question.
Also I think you should go away a bit from the look-like-reddit because most people will probably go there, see yet another reddit clone and dismiss it.
This article suggests that in a "couple of years" reddit "could have close to a billion users". Are all these numbers just being pulled out of thin air? This person is talking about investing in reddit, a site with so many pageviews for such a long time which last I heard still somehow was not turning a profit.
This person is investing in reddit and giving 10% of their investment to purportedly a billion people. Which is a valuation of 1e-8 percent of his investment per person.
I don't want that? Can I not have it somehow.