How Reddit Sparked a Dialogue Between Scientists and the General Public | Hacker News Reader

How Reddit Sparked a Dialogue Between Scientists and the General Public

simonowens.net

73 pointszabramow28 comments

I did an AMA on /r/science early in 2014 when the paper I'd been working on for most of my PhD came out [1], and it was a very fun experience - lots of great questions, good back-and-forth, and it meant that massively more people read my paper than would have otherwise. (It drove about 60% of the overall views to the linked Stanford press-release, and the comment thread itself had about 60,000 unique visitors).

I can testify to the /r/science mods doing a great job at making the AMAs possible, but it's still by no means a perfect process. Some things that helped make ours work were 1) downvoting trolls early - threads that could have been derailed were instead kept pretty vibrant. 2) setting aside enough time to do it - we basically wrote off a day of lab work and typed furiously instead. 3) Responding to the more critical comments - ignoring comments _really_ doesn't work. It's much better to wade in with your point of view.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1ycd0l?sort=confide...

I'm surprised to see all the reddit hate here. The open, free-wheeling nature of that forum is far and away superior (in the sense of, more in the spirit of internet in general) to say, the clubby, autocratic way this site is run.

There are many great things about the open nature but it also leads to a very diverse experience, depending on which subreddit and thread you visit. Discussions range from asinine to profound, and casual visitors are often quick to generalize their limited evaluation to the whole site.

> I'm surprised to see all the reddit hate here.

I'm not. This place was spun off of Reddit and needs to define itself in terms of being Not-Reddit even now, apparently. The best way to do that is to play up how horrible Reddit is, and, implicitly, how we're not like that at all.

Which bits of reddit?

It's certainly more unregulated. That has massive downsides; generally subreddits have a high tolerance for profanity, including in usernames. Most are tolerant of various sorts of nastiness, racism and sexism.

That is still far far better than a forum site controlled by a few moderators. In those sites anything said that contradicts the moderators interests is deleted. Those places are terrible, especially if they are a main site for that topic.

This does not describe this site, to avoid any confusion.

Yes reddit is not a place for people who are easily offended, but what on the internet is?

It surprises me that something else hasn't come along as a more appropriate place for these AMA style sessions. Perhaps its the challenge of getting the audience, but theres many reasons why reddit really isn't ideal for these kinds of discussions. It works, sure - but the signal to noise ratio is really quite low and the politics of it mostly seem to just get in the way (see the Elon Musk AMA earlier this week where some of the highest voted questions were removed).

What questions were removed? How can I see them? Or were they just downvoted a lot?

Apparently the r/spacex community got together ahead of the AMA with Musk to come up with quality comments. During the AMA they worked together upvoting their questions to get the most visibility. The mods on r/AMA felt that this was against the rules, and crowded out the natural discussion, they subsequently deleted all posts from r/spacex. Sounds like a good idea, until you realize that they were very well thought out questions, head over heels better then the questions posed by the r/AMA community. I found the AMA to be underwhelming.

On the other hand it's difficult to make exceptions in these cases. How do you define a comment that is worth what is otherwise regarded as a vote manipulation?

Slight correction — it's r/IAmA.

How scientists created a dialogue using reddit is more like it. That site sure gets a lot of credit just for being a forum-of-the-moment.

I think the site deserves more credit than just "Well, it just happened to be there". Internet forums and discussion boards have been around for quite awhile. Before Facebook groups, there was USENET and phpBBs, some of which still have scientific discussion. And of course, scientists have the ability to use Facebook and other massive social networks to have discussions.

But of all these, Reddit's structure and philosophy (how many other massive sites don't have a shitton of JavaScript applets and social buttons, besides HN) facilitates both the ability to easily participate and moderate...which seems to be integral for these communities to be as active as they are.

My subjective and anecdotal contrbution : I agree. Reddit has a surprisingly nice balance of liveness and control.

Yup, Nathan Allen and the /r/science community (largely the moderators - most of whom are scientists by trade or graduate students) built a reputable community through actively engaging the community and heavily moderating the comments. Oh god the comments.

I became really unhappy with the moderation of r/science. To me it's highlighted the inadequacies of the old "peer reviewed journal" litmus test and shown how many value judgements it can help to hide.

Incredibly shaky research will get frontpaged because it resonates with popular political themes, and it receives the full clout of the name of science in the minds of reddit's userbase. For example this thread[0] which was peer reviewed in a journal that is openly written from a "feminist perspective"[1]. It may pass r/science's standards for being scientific but when a journal shares the same biases as the researchers they're reviewing that's a problem.

But if, say, Gerard t'Hooft were to write a great blog post about modern physics it's not welcome in r/science because it's not a peer reviewed paper, even though it probably has far more scientific merit than a lot of stories that r/science pushes to the default frontpage.

[0] - http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/22vbpp/barbie_expos... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_Roles_%28journal%29

The value of /r/science isn't much in the articles, but in the comments reviewing them. And for example in your link about barbie exposure[0], the second comment from the top, with 1257 points starts a thread with good, strong criticism of the lack of value in that research.

This is a common occurrence in /r/science.It even becomes common(and popular) whenever some article comes with a "breakthrough" to ask "why isn't this true, like the rest of the noise we hear from the news"-and get very good answers.

And the discussion is very good, with scientistcs chiming in, explaining the details, the implications, and how is it related to other research(for example to other disease).

And AFAIK, it's one of the best places on the web to get critique and review and discussion scientific research- that is available to layman.

[0]http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/22vbpp/barbie_expos...

I think it's (ballpark) safe to say a story that gets frontpaged for two days will have at least its title read by a million people.[0] Most of those people aren't going to attempt to wade through the comments section looking for insight, of those that do many won't find it. A decent chunk of casual readers will read the title, see it agrees with their social views and move on with the knowledge that their social activism has the backing of modern science. This may not seem like a big deal but remember that people thinking non-scientific things were science is how the anti-vax movement started.

Take the Barbie story as an example. Even when it was becoming clear that the study was weak, that the reviewing journal shared the same biases as the researchers, that the title was misleading, etc. the mods didn't do what's common for other large subs which is flair the title as "potentially misleading" or "early study, may not be reproducible" or just something to let the casual viewer know that this isn't science in the way that what's going on at CERN is science.

[0] - http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/about/traffic

Have you talked with the moderators about your concerns , and if so what did they say ?

Yes I have. I butted heads with them over this a while back. In their defense I probably could have handled myself better, I wasn't using bad language or all caps but few of us are at our best in the midst of an emotional argument.

It was a while ago, I think I called out some feminist bias in a thread (not the Barbie thread from above) and a few of my comments were deleted which I didn't think was called for. When I messaged the mods my concerns weren't addressed and I was stonewalled. When I was unhappy about being stonewalled I was threatened with the banhammer.

It's worth noting I've spent far more time in r/askscience and I have zero complaints there or in any of the other science/engineering subs.

On the plus side I have a better understanding for the complaints creationists and quantum mystics have about dealing with people who study science, which helps in dealing with friends and family.

Sorry, but any self-moderated forum is going to have content you don't like and lack content you like. That subreddit has the community's self-moderation, which scales, and moderators who don't. The moderators' aren't going to spend their day making judgment calls, they write clear rules[0] and let things take their course. “Must be peer-reviewed research” is pretty clear cut and the signal to noise is better than without it. Who cares if it's too strict; you have other subreddits.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_submission_...

You missed the point of my comment. I'm saying that much of the "science" is so soft that the process is still based on judgement calls. Not only do I disagree with some of those judgment calls, but I prefer transparent value judgements to hidden value judgements.

And that's the fatal flaw of Reddit. The more people it attracts the worse the content becomes. /r/iama used to be really good, but it has turned into a vapid wasteland of PR departments.

We changed "created" to "hosted" to try to be more neutral.

Disagree with that change, also the change from "world's largest dialogue" to "a dialogue" (though it looks like that bit of editorialization came from the original submitter).

IMO the original title of the article is the most accurate and is not linkbait. There absolutely is something about Reddit that has sparked an unprecedented direct line between "notable people" (for lack of a better term, but it applies to more than scientists) and the wider audience of their work, and that's what the article is about.

The current title is neutered to uselessness - how did Reddit "host a dialogue?" Well, simply by existing as a public web forum. And apparently to some that's all it is, no different from any other, but that pretty obtusely misses the cultural phenomenon that is undoubtedly happening there. It's been a few years since I visited Reddit regularly, so I'm not a fanboy, but I can still recognize that, whether intentionally or inadvertently, their platform has enabled something that didn't quite exist before (in a sociological sense, if not a technical one).

I notice you used the word "sparked". That seems like a fair medium between "created" and "hosted". Let's try it.

There is certainly no intention at HN HQ to slight the remarkable achievements of our senior sibling.

Couldn't one say being the forum it is at this moment - when the world is online and commercial pressures abound - is something more than what you imply.

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