Hacker News Reader

Comment by exstudent2 | Hacker News Reader

She went into more detail in the NYT:

> But Ms. Pao says that the most virulent detractors on the site are a vocal minority, and that the vast majority of Reddit users are uninterested in what unfolded over the past 48 hours.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/04/technology/reddit-moderato...

I think MOST Reddit users would disagree with how things have been handled and she does indeed seem out of touch with the user base. I don't see this turning around and instead see it as an opportunity for up and coming players to steal the user base (just like Reddit did to Digg).

View on HN

It might be true that "most" Reddit users are uninterested in this drama and will use the site anyway. The problem is, I suspect, that the core users who create, run, and curate good subreddit content are the ones that matter, and once those users leave it's a simply a matter of time until the good content snowballs away to the next site.

> it's a simply a matter of time until the good content snowballs away to the next site

And that "snowballing" movement could be created easily with https://www.iWouldDo.it

In any situation like this, the most vocal will be a minority of all users. But that is not a good way to measure the sentiment of the entire user base.

In addition, those that are most vocal are some of the most important users on Reddit. They make the community what it is. If you loose them, then rest will leave soon after.

Actually, the most vocal subreddits are also by far the subreddits least worth anything. My entire reddiy experience has been utterly unaffected by this drama and I don't know anyone who seriously thinks that Pao is bad for Reddit.

Actually a lot of those that participated in the blackout are some of the largest subs:

http://redditmetrics.com/top

In addition to the most broadly covered in the media. I think this individual is confusing their anecdotal experience with that of the Reddit user base.

That doesn't really contradict what duaneb said.

Most of these are the largest subs because new users are subscribed to them by default. Default subs are just faceless crowds that don't have much of a community. You're defining "value" in terms of the aggregated number of eyeballs looking at ads, which I suppose is one measure, but the value of a site to a user is what it shows to them. They get this value from the subs that they choose to subscribe to.

For example, the sub that was directly affected was IAmA, a default sub which in its current celebrity-focused incarnation is no more a community than the audience of The Tonight Show is a community.

But what about things like /r/askscience, which most people agree provides high value content?

That they're also unhappy and have the same list of complaints strongly suggests that reddit isn't doing a good job supporting their communities.

Look at /r/askhistorians, which is probably one of the highest quality subreddits on the site. They moderate the subreddits tightly and decline being a default subreddit. With effective mods the friction with Reddit goes away. It is easy for me to see that community mods are terrible, especially on the default or topic subreddits.

/r/askscience is comparatively poor quality. Wrong answers are often given with no repercussion. Answerers are often entirely unqualified to answer question. This is arguably worse than no answer at all. I would not consider it a quality subreddit.

What you see on reddit is: people blowing gossip out of proportion on the subreddits who allow it. Those that "went dark" are probably the reasonable ones to avoid to avoid poor content.

I don't think subreddits like r/askscience, r/art, r/history, r/books or the titular r/iama are not worth anything.

Some peole are doing what they can to make this incident appear as being the same as the fatpeoplehate banning outrage, but this is different.

Ask science is basically "ask someone who may think they know about science". I have never heard of /r/art. /r/history is a complete joke compared to /r/askhistorians. /r/books is "here is a meme about this book we all read in grade x".

So yes, I 100% see the shit collecting where the shit already is. I had literally no idea there was drama until I came to HN.

As a counterpoint, I don't know anyone who thinks she has any business running reddit. She has shown time and time again that she doesn't understand the reddit community, or even internet culture.

"least worth anything" on a personal level to you, but in terms of monetary value probably the most valuable?

I think it's easy to see the major outbreak of support for Victoria and the mods of the default subreddits, but I personally couldn't care less. Yes, it's clear Reddit has a significant number of difficult problems to work through with their unpaid non-employee volunteer moderators, but I, as a user who has long-since unsubscribed from the majority of the default subreddits, was unaffected and don't care.

I'd hazard a guess and say that even a large portion of the users who are constantly commenting in all of the major posts with things like "down with Pao!" and "let's go to voat.co!" probably don't care a fraction as much as their virulent comments would indicate.

She's probably right but it's such a tone deaf thing to say. Take some responsibility and apologize for more than not having all you mod tools in place already, blah blah.

It's worse than tone-deaf. It's a trueism. A platitude.

Without a "vocal minority" she's got no content. Does AOL have a "vocal minority?" Yahoo? They'd give their right arm for a "vocal minority."

This is what the vocal minority wanted to talk about: https://www.reddit.com/r/undelete/comments/38q8ew/reddit_int...

Of course they have to paint anyone dissatisfied as a vocal minority. I hope it's just damage control, but I suspect they believe their own bullshit. Alexis too thought it was just a vocal minority when he was posting to reddit publicly laughing when the first few subreddits went offline.

He has since apologized, I'd hope he's sorry for being out of touch with the userbase. But everything Reddit has done makes it look like he's sorry he got caught.

A lot of the moderators I've heard from aren't satisfied at the statements released to them as well. There was a lot of talk about getting better moderation tools out, but Reddit doesn't seem to realize that the clown-car toolset available to mods is just a concrete and undeniable example the mods can point to about how the admins entirely ignore the "community" the entire business is built upon.

I don't agree with your statement at all.

I suspect Pao is right. Most people who use reddit won't care about this. It's very easy to get in a Silicon Valley bubble thinking this stuff matters.

EDIT: Downvoting me as a way of saying "I disagree" is immature.

Most likely the lurkers don't care, but if a majority of mods or content producers care it could be a serious issue.

Content producers are a tiny minority of the site and mods are a tiny minority of that.

My thoughts exactly. The vocal minority are those that produce content and keep the site going.

True. But there is a large overlap between those that do care and those that create content, vote, comment, and are mods.

Thus, you are alienating exactly the class of users that you don't want to.

I am a heavy reddit user and think Moderators acted immature.

Remember just like mods have an issue with administrators, Many subreddit users have issues with moderators :). I am surprised this didn't come up.

Pao is right, if only because the majority of reddit users don't have an account. These people are simply annoyed by all the non and meta content. But who expects a tick to care about the health of deer?

I think it's a question of "important" users. If enough content mods and creators leave, will there be enough to fill the role immediately?

If not - i imagine it will be pretty visible to people on the fence, which will only snowball more. Just as with Digg, this can happen quite fast, and i think a snowball is the only true way this would happen.

With that said, i think the most important part of the equation will be another "player". If voat.co (or others) are not able to handle the immediate traffic, then i think it's much less likely to succeed. Reddit had a lot of troubles handling Diggs load, but they managed overall. Voat has been taken down multiple times due to Reddit's against-user actions - so it doesn't seem likely that Voat will be able to handle the traffic when Reddit users need/want it most.

Personally i'm hoping someone can find a way to distribute this whole social content idea - but in a UX friendly, web based way. I don't think Voat, or anyone else, will be able to handle taking in the Reddit userbase without falling into the same pitfalls as Digg and Reddit. Something decentralized seems like the only solution.

She's right that, as a lurker, I don't really care. But it seems like all of the moderators and content contributors do, and if they leave, what does it matter what the lurkers think?

by content contributes you mean the people who take 30 seconds posting a link, right? Or the ones who game the system for karma?

Very few people create content for reddit, they re-post shit the way they would on something like their facebook wall.

Most people would not have cared about the original firing, but many more do care about the way it was handled.

She should also not underestimate how quickly Reddit latches on to these kind of memes even when people might not personally care so much. That she's already widely known around Reddit as Chairman Pao is not exactly a good sign.

"EDIT: Downvoting me as a way of saying "I disagree" is immature."

Downvoting for disagreement is officially sanctioned on this site. It's annoying, but that's how it is.

If HN wanted to reserve Downvotes for something else than the opposite of an upvote, they shouldn't be graphically represented and placed and summed with upvotes like they are now.

I've complained about the culture that results from using downvotes for disagreement a number of times. I get zero response from the mods and numerous downvotes for my troubles.

I'm done fighting it. I just downvote anything I even slightly disagree with and move on. It's what the mods apparently want.

It's interesting that you see no room for nuance in the mod system. Definitely doesn't need to work the way you're expressing it here. In particular, your petulant tone makes me think you wield downvotes vengefully.

Downvotes work best with an emotionally mature community. Fortunately HN seems mature enough that discussion never really go off the rails, individuals with your attitude notwithstanding.

Downvotes derail conversations here several times a day, your condescending tone notwithstanding.

Apparently everyone is fine with that. So I see no reason not to be myself.

It's something that gets frequently discussed on HN. You might want to look back over the gajillion threads about it.

IMHO an upvote shouldn't mean "agree". I downvote lots of uninteresting, poorly articulated, or middlebrow comments with which I nominally agree.

It used to be that one could vote towards the score you felt a comment deserved - that felt much healthier IMO and gave what seemed like a much better view of the community opinion.

I upvote everything greyed out that is well articulated or makes a point or expresses an opinion that is not well represented elsewhere in the thread.

PG did also say this about how downvotes for disagreement are sub-optimal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057347

> EDIT: Downvoting me as a way of saying "I disagree" is immature.

Paul Graham has said he thinks it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement[1]

Also, you may want to familiarize yourself with HN's guidelines, which state Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.[2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com