Sports Bars and Biker Gangs – The Death of Reddit
chuqui.com
chuqui.com
> Don’t try to fix it. It’s broken. It can’t be fixed. Instead, it’s time to decide what the service you want is, and build that service out of the ashes of the failure of this Reddit.
First of all, this is garbage advice, an absolute fool's errand. The fact that you are ostensibly in control of Reddit as its management team does not mean that you have any chance in hell of parlaying that into a new community of any sort. A random 18-year-old in his dorm room has just as much chance of creating the next legitimate online community as Reddit management does.
Reddit is what it is. For all its warts, it's a tremendously successful community that evolved in a very particular way. Just because you're paying to keep the lights on doesn't mean you can control the nature of the community. Any attempts to overtly reshape Reddit into something that warms the heart of an investor is doomed to failure because it runs against the fundamental nature of Reddit, and thus can have no effect but to shed users—which of course is Reddit's only asset.
This is no doubt upsetting to shareholders, some elements of management, journalists, social activists and all manner of Reddit observers, but it's just the way online communities work. You can build tools and policies to nudge things this way or that a bit, but fundamentally you do not control it. For all self-stated credentials of the author, I would expect him to recognize this fact a bit more, and pile on his value judgements declaring "failure" a bit less.
The entire "sports bar and biker gang" premise is entirely flawed. The picture painted is that of some perfect place which gets bastardized and taken over by some unsavory group of people who are unsavory even if only because of their memborship in said group.
How does it make any sense to allegorize such a gigantic online community as "a good place that got stormed by shitty users"? Yes, there are definitely Reddit users that get off on spending their free time harassing others. However, they are not many, and, for every handful there are, there are 100x more content creators, blog authors submitting content, people campaigning for charities, and so on.
If the presence of a few foul people are enough to make you vacate an entire massive community and feel as though you cannot participate, then I might suggest that you grow up a bit, learn that there is literally no public place in the world that is all rainbows and puppies, and check whether you are being overly sensitive.
Aside from that, the author's view on how any of this works is obviously and completely incorrect. The suggestion of "taking what's there" and "moving it somewhere else where the bad people won't go" belies the incredibly and simplistic worldview behind this article - you cannot pick and and move a community of people to another place, you cannot raise a big banner that says "I don't like it here!" and bring all of your well-established users to another place. Your users do not take such a (frankly, whiny) take on the world. They appreciate the platform, what's been there, and so on.
As for bemoaning why the biggest subreddits aren't controlled by the admin? In the end this is perhaps the single defining comment in this article. "Why, oh why don't the admins exert draconion control over their users so that I don't have to hear and come across things I disagree with?!" Because that's not how communities work, because that's not how open discussion works, because that's now how any of this works at all.
Frankly, I find the author's mindset absolutely infuriating. Why is this incredibly naive, oversensitive, and whiny post getting any attention at all? Anyone that has been around online communities (and, frankly, life after college) for longer than a year can easily recognize this sort of bullshit.
Edit: To pre-empt some responses, no, I am not standing up and saying that harassing users should be left alone because of freedom of speech. There is obviously a limit - active and purposeful harm should be prevented as much as reasonably possible if one wants to maintain a large community with a positive public image. However, the "biker gang moving into my space" analogy is exactly the sort of analogy I would expect from the sort of person that is ready to cry victim at the slightest provocation - and those sorts of people, in fact, are exactly the ones that have had the most damage on online communities in the past few years.
Furthermore, am I the only one so far to comment on the fact that the "biker gang" image the author evokes is inherently judgmental and simple-minded? The hypocrisy in just that one analogy is astounding. Shame on this author and his/her cognitive dissonance, victim complex, and naivety.
I read a lot of specific reddits (sub-communities) like /r/programming, /r/cpp, /r/math, etc. Honestly? I'm completely unaffected by the "biker gangs" he's rambling about.
Some of the best communities (/AskHistorians and /AskScience) are already struggling with this. A mod from /AskHistorians:
https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3cxedn/i_am_steve_huff...
>To illustrate, without in any way intending to boast, it is clear that a number of current and past staff members at Reddit really enjoy AskHistorians. This has been made publicly clear a number of times. But the reality of Reddit is that AskHistorians was created by going against the grain, by struggling against Reddit's mechanisms rather than being organically created by them, and by quite frankly disregarding a number of statements about Reddit's underlying philosophy made by admins and CEOs alike. That mostly involves deleting an enormous quantity of comments, with the express purpose that they are not seen any more, that they are vanished into the aether.
>In addition, reddit's increasingly poor reputation on the internet might, for some people, be because of what they perceive as censorship. But in my experience, the majority of that poor reputation is garnered from the kind of communities that Reddit harbours, which have grown larger and increasingly restive. And so long as they're there and doing their thing we have to share a website with them. We have to share a website with communities that have racist slurs in their name, that spew raw bigotry like it's water for all the farms of China. A lot of our flaired users on AskHistorians are professionals in their fields, and at times it is pretty hard to keep convincing them to stay on a website like this. Most of that convincing consists of how much stuff we are able to keep out of our community. I don't see how that is remotely tenable if we're no longer able to actually leave seas of [deleted]
>A lot of our flaired users on AskHistorians are professionals in their fields, and at times it is pretty hard to keep convincing them to stay on a website like this.
Regardless, to stay on topic, out of "a lot" of people, then "at times" some will want to leave. Expecting a 100% retention rate all the time is unrealistic.
Maybe a few of them saw comments about atheism in /r/atheism, a very major subreddit, and weren't comfortable posting in a place that isn't a "safe space" for Christians? Maybe, maybe not - who knows? But if you want to define what's "safe" to allow in open discussion, then you're pointing your community towards the metaphorical grave. Whether there's a possibility of afterlife for a doomed community is an open question.
Look at your own comment of "go deal meth elsewhere." Is the irony lost on you?
Even past that, the analogy is flawed because it assumes an organized group of "bad people" that move into "my space". There is no such organized group, and it is no one person's space.
Even past that, there is no group of people on Reddit that "show up and destroy or dominate the entire conversation." I've been on Reddit actively for about seven years and while I definitely see the vitriolic individuals (and some specific toxic subreddits), I think it is incredibly childish to suggest that "my safe space is ruined by all these bad people!" The site has not been "dominated" by "the bad people". It feels ridiculous to have to say that about a place that gets, what, 7+ billion pageviews a month now?
Come on.
Yor're assuming that all users are equal and the important thing is raw eyeballs.
There are users and behavior that are driving people away. The whole 'we support FPH' and sexist comments about Pao in every story about her is turning people off.
Further more, if Reddit is an advertising supported company they're going to have a big problem selling ads against /r/coontown. It doesn't matter that's one little corner and you can turn your ads off against it. The story in the news will be 'P&G paid 30m to advertise on a site full of hate speech' and the story will be correct because it DID go to THE SITE not the sub.
And that's going to play really poorly for P&G (chosen as a big brand, don't know if they advertise).
Same thing applies to celebrities doing AMAs. The next time a democratic candidate does an AMA and Fox starts trumpeting the... ahem 'anti-PC'... elements of Reddit to make everyone look bad do you think that candidate will be happy? "They used to host child porn too! It was called /r/jailbait!"
They're getting a reputation that's going to make buying their ad platform untenable for many large advertisers.
I really don't get how you are taking that from what I said. Of course I don't think all users are equal or that users and advertisers won't be driven away by bad behavior. It would be ridiculous to suggest otherwise.
My point is that, if management comes in swinging a white sword they will inevitably suffer a net loss. As I said, the community can be nudged in one direction or another—quite significantly given sufficient understanding and guile on the part of management—but you can't declare Reddit "broken" and then "fix" it. Even if you assume Reddit has "failed" (which I don't, but even granting that), the changes you need to make will drive away many more users than it ever attracts, because the "good" potential users are already turned off by Reddit, and the existing users will be alienated. If management comes in with the mentality of needing to "fix" Reddit then they are damned if they do and damned if they don't. Fortunately such axiomatic pessimism in Reddit is unfounded—I get how it is not what a heavy-handed SV elite megalomaniacal MBA wants in his portfolio, but that doesn't mean it can't be a successful business on its own terms.
That's an assumption. Based on no data. I know plenty of people, myself included, that have no interest in Reddit as it is today. I know a few interesting sub-Reddits but I don't want to deal with that community right now.
If the community changes I would be more interested. I'm not going to spend my time contributing to a sub-Reddit if it's the kind of place that is shitty to people I'm friends with.
No thanks.
Yes it is, in fact it is more than just an assumption, it is my thesis.
Also you seem to be using "no data" as a pejorative, but I challenge you to produce any data on this topic period. Some things are intractable or at the very least incredibly expensive to conduct good science around, and if you refuse to consider a topic without data you will be paralyzed.
Like the OA I have been participating in online communities for a very long time (ran my first BBS starting in 1988), so I have a pretty strong sense of how they live and die. One of the things I've learned is that what people say they will do in the face of some future changes correlates terribly with what they actually end up doing when said change is put into effect. Therefore, the last thing I would do is throw a grenade into my community in the hopes of attracting you and your friends who are put off by the current state of affairs.
But if I were to find out about it recently? Knowing what's happened in the last year (or even few months) I would certainly stay away.
It seemed to me that you were suggesting that shedding users is bad for Reddit. I think shedding a very small select percentage of the users could be a huge benefit for the site.
Remove some of the worst who don't add anything positive to the site and make an example out of them. Draw the line in the sand clear and bold.
That will get rid of some of the worst elements, and encourage others to behave better. I'm sure you'll lose people at first but in the long run I think it would benefit the site and its growth.
Rather than the surfaced comments being a function of raw upvote count, the upvotes could count for or against you seeing the comment based on whether they came from someone who tends to deliver you read-worthy content. Racists would see all the racist comments they want; others not so much.
This could also decrease the influence of voting brigades and others trying to game the system.
But I use reddit mostly to follow news about my favorite sports teams and a few of my hobbies. For that, I don't care what the rest of reddit is saying.
In fact, I suspect allowing more isolation between factions would allow for a diversity of opinions to brew in those pockets, with the good ideas inevitably metastasizing to the whole network.
Getting better recommendations was even presented as the reason why you should upvote/downvote posts.
But recommendation engines are very hard. Just look how poorly Amazon's work, despite its central role in corralling gigantic amounts of cash, the manpower and the raw talent that Amazon possesses. Reddit's smart customized home page wasn't better than the generic one. Eventually, multiplying subreddits and letting people [un]subscribe to them solved the problem better than going all AI.
As for fighting voting brigades, I believe they continuously work very hard on this, but rely on secrecy to keep their measures effective.
As for Amazon, maybe its recommendations are intentionally unrefined, like how Target discovered it needed to obscure its direct mail campaigns aimed at newly pregnant women ( http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h... ). Granted, it's plausible Amazon just hasn't cracked the code yet.
Surely we are capable as a soviet of making these distinctions...?
Reddit's management has a ton of resources that an 18-year-old in his dorm does not. Depending on the choices they make and who is running the team, I'd say Reddit either has a much lower chance (right now), or a much higher chance (if we assume they get a good management team in place), than the hypothetical college student. But the same chance?
> Just because you're paying to keep the lights on doesn't mean you can control the nature of the community.
Actually, it does? It doesn't mean you can create whatever you want, but you can certainly destroy the bits you don't like, which is what the advice you're critiquing is suggesting. You say that means you'll shed users, but that's the point of the advice. The analogy the author is using is hiring some really strict bouncers to eject the "bikers". Which will absolutely cause the bar to "shed users" in the short term.
> For all self-stated credentials of the author, I would expect him to recognize this fact a bit more, and pile on his value judgements declaring "failure" a bit less.
I don't think you really understood his comments. Fundamentally you're responding to someone saying "Reddit can't be fixed" with "this guy is an idiot; doesn't he understand Reddit can't be fixed?".
You're ignoring the part where parent said
> it's a tremendously successful community ...
Reddit's built a large community of people who don't mind partying next to the biker bar. An anti-authoritarian community that wants free speech, is not politically correct, and isn't advertiser friendly.
It may not be an easy community to profit from, but does it need to be "fixed"?
> Reddit's built a large community of people who don't mind partying next to the biker bar.
Reddit has built a large community of people, large portions of whom absolutely detest each other and very much mind "partying next to each other". And as Reddit grows, the tensions are becoming more severe, not less.
> An anti-authoritarian community that wants free speech, is not politically correct, and isn't advertiser friendly.
No. A very, VERY small portion of the community could be described that way. Most people just want celebrity AMAs, cat videos, dank memes, swapping funny stories, and maybe some chat about their local city or favourite sports team. (Or relationship advice, or sex advice, or trading candy with people from other countries, or whatever it is that attracts them to Reddit.) The number of people who are ideologically committed to free speech (and not just for the things they personally like) on Reddit is, as in real life, tiny.
(Edit: If you disagree, feel free to cite a study or whatever. But I'm active on reddit, moderate a moderately popular subreddit, etc., and I don't think you're describing the Reddit community as it actually exists. I'm not even sure that a Reddit community could even be said to exist.)
> It may not be an easy community to profit from, but does it need to be "fixed"?
See point one. Absolutely, because Reddit will stop existing the moment Reddit Inc turns the lights off because it's too hard to profit from. (Yeah, sure, maybe they'll hand the domain name off to a non-profit that can try and cover costs with donations first. Assuming there's anything left by that point, the resulting website won't look much like the Reddit of today.)
For example, right now there are posts about cops shooting a pot dealer, YouTube bullying an app author, and employers reading employee's social media, all the top posts in different default subs.
People in general are selfish; the core Reddit demographic (males 18-29) is certainly no exception.
One of the paradoxes of Reddit is that the site can appear so monolithically left liberal, yet at the same time so militantly libertarian. Few politicians seem to engender such strong positive feelings as Ron Paul and Elizabeth Warren, often at the same time and from the same people.
The answer is that if Reddit has a vibe it's "freedom for me", closely followed by "fuck you, I've got mine". Redditor's don't like being censored, and they don't like content they like (mostly celebrity nudes) being censored. They don't like taxes that they might have to pay, and they don't like social programs for the poor, but they love taxes on the rich or spending on the middle class (and, especially, spending on student loans). They're anti-cop when the perceived victim looks like them, but pro-cop when it doesn't. They're very much pro-pot, and pro-civil-liberties if it involves their email being read, but otherwise they don't much care. The NSA reading their email is a true outrage and morally indefensible; the CIA torturing swarthy foreigners is a big yawn.
It's fair to call Reddit anti-authoritarian, but it's the anti-authoritarianism of someone in a dorm room bitching that the dorm monitor asked them to turn their stereo down. What there isn't, in my experience, is any deep reservoir of principle. The median Redditor will write outraged screeds about free speech if you suggest that the site shouldn't play host to links to celebrity nudes, or if you move to ban a subreddit they personally participate in. They might even follow along on a popular bandwagon (eg, making snide remarks about "Chairman Pao") even if they couldn't articulate why, exactly, Pao was meant to be bad.
So yes, cops shooting a pot dealer gets Reddit's attention (although I will note that as of right now, the top comment is critiquing the writing of the article, and the second-top-top comment is blaming the victim, and yes I do think that is in part because the victim is black, and thus harder for the average Redditor to empathise with). Youtube bullying an app author, or employers snooping on employees are also obvious examples of the stuff Reddit care about (ie, "bad stuff happening to people like me"). What I haven't seen is significant numbers of people who care about eg, free speech qua a universal human right.
(And thus ends my probably overly cynical digression.)
Mist of Reddit do not want free speech. When you ask anyone about the good bits of Reddit they mention /r/askscience, which has vigorous moderation, or the tiny subs that also have some amount of moderation. And when you ask what they don't like they mention the free speech stuff - they talk about the floods of shitty pun threads or image macros or juvenile dumb comments.
Have a look for some of the "what's the worst subreddit?" threads and you'll see all the usual vile subs mentioned as being the worst, and highly upvoted as being terrible.
Imagine that Reddit can get rid of all the FPH / etc subscribers overnight - let's say 250,000 people. The cast majority of them are worthless for Reddit. They produce nothing, they post no good content, they cause trouble. A reasonable portion of them are the scum of the Internet. Reddit loses nothing by getting rid of those people.
I don't intend that to be hair splitting about words, I think that attempts to address reddit users as a single community are a fools errand.
But seriously, it really isn't dead. And the whole post seems overly dramatic actually. Not to mention that the author starts by describing how he never uses Reddit and doesn't even have an account, but yet evidently thinks he has a very precise understanding of all its problems and clearly has very strong feelings about how they should be addressed. Sounds like a redditor to me!
All the premises are the same, and largely true: there's no strong central control, it's basically run by volunteers who have conflicting interests, and there's some abhorrent stuff out there.
The conclusion, that it's a failed experiment, doesn't seem to follow.
Reddit may die someday. Could happen, aggregators die, but I don't think a scandal means it's at death's door.
Even though I disagree with the conclusion, especially its forcefulness, the article has a fantastic collection of links. The links would be a great first place to catch the journalistic zeitgeist.
Maybe all our success stories need another look...
[1] http://blog.digg.com/post/109580738071/digg-by-the-numbers-2... (well, "consistent revenue"... couldn't find precise financials since 2008 or so)
[2] http://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-fo...
Communities are shut down when they don't stay inside their rooms.
There's a term for that, brigading. On 4chan the principle was called "anonymous isn't your army". Generally the people who build such "high amounts of free speech" places don't mind if literally everything is discussed, but they, and over time also the userbase, reacts strongly if sub-groups try to use the power of the crowd amassed to actively and negatively influence other people, be this other sub-groups on the site, places elsewhere on the internet, or even physical places or people.
Edit: He also says "tens of floors", which further demonstrates the ignorance, since Reddit would be better described as thousands of floors. ( 676,951 sub-reddits according to redditmetrics. )
It's an analogy between Reddit and a big community center building with different groups having rooms in the building. The point is the relationship between the groups in the above ground rooms, and the groups that are hidden away in basement rooms. The number of floors is completely irrelevant to the validity of the analogy as long as it is enough to qualify as a big community center by community center standards. Tens of floors is sufficient.
If he had said tens of thousands of floors so that the number of rooms would have more matched the number of sub-reddits, there would be people complaining that no building has tens of thousands of floors.
It is getting, slowly, worse. Not because of the number of people but the standards of behavior they keep pushing the line on without pushback.
I think the biker bar analogy is fantastic. Even when the bikers stay in their corner their large number is getting scarier and more creepy.
The mods should move everything to a non-profit org. The site is open-source already, and you could even use their Oauth to port user accounts over directly. My understanding is that they are just breaking even, which sounds bad for a for-profit but sounds great for a not-for-profit, especially if your executive director is getting CEO level pay.
Now, someone else will spend the time implementing my fantastic idea for me, right? /s
I've been on Reddit since near the beginning and still enjoy the site everyday. We regulars keep pointing out the great subreddits that exist, so I don't need to do that here. Unlike Chuq, I don't feel guilt by association because there are also terrible subreddits. I'm not one to condemn all of 4chan because of 4chan/b/, but I can understand those who think that way.
What I wanted to say is that Reddit has not changed, society has. If anything Reddit has improved by banning subreddits like jailbait and fatpeoplehate. The trend on Reddit is less toxicity, not more as Chuq implies.
America has been having a conversation the last few years about rape culture, sexual harrasement of women, micro-aggressions, exclusionary speech, gender fluidity, sexual objectification of women in video games, sexting, celebrity nudes, and so on. This new awareness has been applied to Reddit recently starting with 'the fappening' and continuing with gamergate. I think these conversations are worth having and I like some of the change as a result, but it's not fair to Reddit to say it is going downhill. We're just applying a new set of standards to it.
Could a site like Reddit or 4chan even become succesful today with all the new rules in place, or would they kill it in the crib? I'm not sure.
I'm struggling to think of any successful social network sites that are heavy-handed with moderation. Certainly twitter, facebook, ect. get the same accusations of harboring "unethical" groups.
31st most visited website. i hope to be this dead one day