Reddit: can anyone clean up the mess behind 'the front page of the internet'?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Great quote.
One thing I have noticed with subreddits is that whenever a subreddit passes a threshold of subscribers and gets more frontpage exposure, the quality gets worse and worse until everyone starts hating it, unless moderators take serious action. It happened to many of them, from /r/atheism to /r/gaming, to /r/adviceanimals. As you get more people into any community, it needs more policing and moderation. AskReddit and some others have stricter rules and seem to be doing better.
And even then, when moderators do take serious action, there is often an accompanying backlash against them. As if the very degradation of quality is a feature rather than a bug.
The other sad thing is that so many online communities die because the moderators aren't willing to resort to that, even though it works.
Yeah because collections of pictures of naked women are now so horrible they must be "cleaned up".
That's funny; I took the article seriously until it didn't classify, e.g., /r/ladybonersgw (male nudes mostly for a female audience) as "Reddit's dark side". Granted, they didn't list a thousand other NSFW subs, but to it still seemed like a pretty blatant omission and spin to only list NSFW subs with female nudes for a male audience. (See also Vaskivo's comment.)
And I needn't tell you what the majority of Redditors would say about an SRS mod speaking for Reddit.
Reddit's traditional approach has, for the most part, been to err on the side of freedom of speech with minimal rules. Aside from the core rules, subreddit fiefdoms are allowed to manage their domains as moderators see fit.
The fact that all of those models have failed miserably is a separate issue.
Well yeah... like SRS. These people are oblivious to irony.
Interesting that they mention goatsac. He helps moderate /r/cuttersgonewild - a sub reddit that reposts images from /r/selfharmpics and adds sexual language. Admins have been told, many times. They don't care. On Reddit it is fine to take a vulnerable person's image, add sexualising language, and repost it to a different sub.
To view /r/selfharmpics you need to change your settings to stop subs showing you custom CSS. For some reason /r/selfharmpics blanks the display.
See this example:
Original post to /r/selfharmpics
http://www.reddit.com/r/selfharmpics/comments/2zbipf/nsfw_br...
Repost to /r/cuttersgonewild
http://www.reddit.com/r/CuttersGoneWild/comments/2zef7c/dadd...
(The Imgur header text is confusing. It's a bug[1] caused by /r/selfharmpics blanking the display in CSS.)
I've seen users send multiple PMs to suicidal young people telling them to just kill themselves. The users report the PMs; they block the account; they take screenshots and message the admins -- nothing happens, even if that account has messaged multiple people telling them to kill themselves.
Ask someone to upvote a post in a different thread? Fucking instaban.
I guess that I just want something where I have a little more control as a user. Many times on reddit there is a huge thread of jokes or puns that is totally off-topic and I'd like to avoid them if I choose to. Many times I want zero moderation so I can see what everybody is saying without having to click "load more comments" on every sub-thread.
I can think of lots of variations on the basic idea of picking your own moderators. I like the idea of untying a subject from a specific set of moderators. So a sub-reddit would just be a subject, but not a set of moderators. There could be a moderator marketplace where individuals or teams of moderators who advertise their style and specify things like no-jokes, no-puns, etc. There could be robot moderators as well. I would also like to give my team of personal comment-curators more controls than just up and down-vote like tagging or like the slashdot system where you could mark things as funny/off-topic/etc.
(Crowd voting is a type of moderation too and I'd like to be able to ignore them because I don't always trust the alleged majority.)
Good job, Guardian!
The reason they bubble to the top of so many news articles is because SRS' brand of equality is so strongly polarized in a way which makes for great soundbites. Want to know what's "wrong" with Reddit? Grab a headline out of SRS. Want a view on how to "improve" Reddit? Talk to a SRS moderator.
If you're looking for satire, check out /r/circlejerk/. They do a great job at finding what's so wrong with the posts that hit the front page and satirizing them.
The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural
resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made.
When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-
-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.
-- Alan KayThe complete quote:
Binstock: One thing about jazz aficionados is that they take deep pleasure in knowing the history of jazz.
Kay: Yes! Classical music is like that, too. But pop culture holds a disdain for history. Pop culture is all about identity and feeling like you're participating. It has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future — it's living in the present. I think the same is true of most people who write code for money. They have no idea where [their culture came from] — and the Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.
Edit to add some context:
Kay: Go to a blog, go to any Wiki, and find one that's WYSIWYG like Microsoft Word is. Word was done in 1984. HyperCard was 1989. Find me Web pages that are even as good as HyperCard. The Web was done after that, but it was done by people who had no imagination. They were just trying to satisfy an immediate need. There's nothing wrong with that, except that when you have something like the Industrial Revolution squared, you wind up setting de facto standards — in this case, really bad de facto standards. Because what you definitely don't want in a Web browser is any features.
I happen to agree with him in theory: I think it's a huge missed opportunity to force the browser to be an application delivery mechanism instead of a content-delivery mechanism (or "object"-delivery as he puts it).
But of course in practice, there are historical and political reasons as to why web-as-an-app-delivery-mechanism happened, not least of which - if we took Kay's example of MS Word - is Microsoft's unwillingness to open up the platform (or proprietary software, in general). So we had to re-solve these problems in non-proprietary ways, while forcing proprietary app providers to conform to web standards that would ultimately and perhaps knowingly cannibalize their software sales.