Exciting news. One thing I sincerely hope reddit will do with the new injection is to increase the level of quality of content and discussion across the board. Often the advice given is "you've got to find the smaller subreddits" and while that's true, I think having the first few layers filled with terrible content and hive-minded, often racist/sexist discussion is incredibly detrimental to both the site's image and new user experiences.
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.
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'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
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.
> 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.
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.
My point is that the system at writingprompts worked fine before they were made a default sub. I imagine 2X was a better place before as well, but I'm not a reader of that sub, so I can't really comment.
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.
Exactly my thoughts. The polarizing subs are probably casual stopper-by register bait. Who leaves the most feedback in satisfaction surveys? The satisfied? No. The enraged and the incredibly pleased.
> Reddit's management simply has an economic incentive to promote these gems...
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 read the parent post as a plea for better tools to filter that, more than a rant on the type of people coming in. Users might or not get better over time, and as you point out they may have a completely different expectation of the site.
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.
For those of us who have run online communities, there certainly is a strong inverse relationship between age & size. A big community continually fractures off disgruntled users. There certainly are some exceptions to this, and examples to follow.
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.
"For those of us who have run online communities, there certainly is a strong inverse relationship between age & size."
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.
>Worse, once a sub is made a default, its quantity goes up but its quality goes down.
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.
the same effect can be had by making trending subs the defaults. Part of me thinks this could be the solution, but another part of me thinks there's no way they've gone nine years without having tried that already...
I think the problem with that is that subs like /r/thefappening popping up by default is kind of a PR nightmare. From the perspective of attracting new users it's great, though.
>>Worse, once a sub is made a default, its quantity goes up but its quality goes down.
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 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: ..".
right, reddit is "doin' it rong!", that's why their projected growth is so high.
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.
> reddit is "doin' it rong!", that's why their projected
> growth is so high
and then
> much as you'd like to "predict" the downfall of reddit,
> all signs point to no
While I think Reddit will go from strength to strength, I also remember how Digg pretty much went from (current) Reddit sized to almost nothing in about the course of two weeks. And I remember Myspace. Turns out internetters are fickle folk.
Memes, inside jokes and other fluff content are good for attracting new users and light entertainment. That makes sense.
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.
That wasn't the point. The point is the default reddits draw people in specifically by magnetizing them on an issue and getting them to discuss it vehemently.
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.
The word "feminist" is more commonly understood to mean a supporter of the modern women's advocacy movement, rather than anyone who believes in equality of the sexes.
Imagine a Republican telling you that "Republican" is defined as someone who supports natural human rights, and therefore anyone who truly supports natural human rights is a Republican.
The feminist definition of "feminism" is inaccurate for the same reason.
I think a closer analogy would be a Republican telling you that "Republican" is defined as someone who supports small government—and therefore libertarians are Republican (and most Republicans are, in fact, not Republican.)
There's an older version of this debate, regarding whether people who don't know or care about a given religion—but happen to follow all its tenets by coincidence—will get into the "good afterlife" of that religion. There are a lot of Christians who argue that to be "Christian" isn't a matter of faith, but rather a matter of acting the way Jesus would have one act. (And thus, in this model, there are atheist Christians.)
I believe the correct term is humanist. A humanist wants equal rights for all human beings and not just certain groups based on certain characteristics. Does not claim one group is superior to another.
Feminism used to be different, it used to be like humanism, now I see it as a tool to tear down white straight men and claim women are superior and deserve special treatment. I didn't always have that view, but after seeing a lot of Feminist groups attacking Hacker News using hoaxes and untrue statements I eventually came to that conclusion. I have never seen Hacker News or YC discriminate against women, and anyone who posts a sexist statement gets downvoted.
I think on 4Chan and Reddit a lot of these sexist men are really boys under 18 who are not mature yet and hide behind an anonymous name to lobby death and rape threats at women. I just don't see that in Hacker News or YC, when men are mature they don't do those sorts of things.
So yes sexism does exist and there are issues, but not everywhere. The word Feminism in itself is sexist because it only mentions the female gender and there are more than male and female genders out there. Hence Humanism would be a better name or Equalism because it does not mention gender.
I want to state that equal rights is different from special rights and entitlements. If anyone wants a career in IT, they have to study hard at math and science, they have to work for years to become an expert sometimes as many as 15 years. You can't just avoid studying hard, blow off math and science, and then study arts instead and then claim you are owned a job in IT because of your gender. If you want a job in IT, study math and science instead of art, keep learning and gaining experience over the years to become better so you can get a job. Communication is a key, and about 80% of the job. If you cannot communicate with others effectively and keep using the terms mansplaining when something is over your head and you need help with, it isn't going to help the team and make you look bad.
Admiral Grace Hopper, Ada Augusta Lovelace, Sister Mary Kenneth Keller, and many others studied hard, worked hard, developed the experience and skills they needed and didn't have anything handed to them, or were entitled to anything, or required special treatment. They just studied math and science, studied hard, worked hard, and reached their potential to develop the experience and skills they needed to do what they did.
I hate it when people give this definition of feminism. Feminism supports gender equality and there are ways that benefits everyone, but that's obviously not the whole of it, and I dislike the idea that men can only be sold on feminism if they think there's something in it for them.
There are enough highly vocal people calling themselves feminists who seem more interested in manufacturing outrage, scolding men, and pursuing self-promotional agendas that it's hard to make any generalisations that will ring true about what feminism is and isn't.
> I dislike the idea that men can only be sold on feminism
> if they think there's something in it for them
Try convincing a nerdy, overweight white male high-school student who's never kissed a girl that he occupies a position of privilege compared to the popular girls at school.
You'll do better if you wait ten years, and then try to explain to the software engineer he became that he has relative privilege compared to the sophisticated VP of Sales who dresses to kill, or girls he meets in bars, but still, you're going to have a bit of a struggle.
You and I can reel off 50 ways in which he's privileged, and the inherent advantages he has by being white, male, smart, etc, but what he knows is that he has a daily grind, and that he has a lot of relationships in his life with women where they hold /all/ the cards.
While people continue to be blind to their own privilege, and only see the highlight reels of other people's privilege (eg: forever), you're only going to be able to sell it on gender equality, rather than "women's rights need to increase beyond where they are now".
I dislike the idea that men can only be sold on feminism if they think there's something in it for them.
Dislike it all you want, doesn't change the reality that if you have one self-interested faction whose interests appear to conflict with a different self-interested faction, then the interests will need to be "sold" or else forced on the other faction.
Hence: appeals to shared principles like "equality." Even when the positions are demonstrably not about equality at all.
The point is only that "gender equality" is a belief while "feminism" (usually) means the activist movement. Why is that objectionable? What does it have to do with "selling men on feminism"?
I should have known better than to turn down a road that would inevitably lead to semantics.
Suffice to say, to me a feminist is a person who is actively part of the movement. I've never heard "feminist" used to mean "believes in gender equality".
It would seem that entirely depends on your definition of feminism. Considering what types of people call themselves feminist, it could mean anything from sane person to misandrist.
Last you checked, eh? Where did you do your checking?
Let's review some definitions for feminism:
"the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities"
"the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes"
Which part of that do you disagree with that makes you not a feminist?
And, if being a feminist means one supports gender equality (which is what it means), how do you believe it can ever follow that not being feminist doesn't make one sexist? Seems like believing that people should be treated differently based on their sex is the very definition of sexism.
It is not often practical to use dictionary definitions to describe political or social ideologies. If we go by definitions, both feminists and men's rights activities should believe the exact same things.
I don't identify with feminists or men's rights activists today because equality is not those specific group's goal.
Simply because one supports those goals does not mean that one must self-identify as a feminist. I happen to support those goals and I also happen to identify as a feminist.
I can imaging many people who have not studied feminist theory and yet still believe in the principles you listed. Can we legitimately ask that they self-identify as something of which they have little or no functional understanding?
Feminists calling other people "not _real_ feminists" is a full-time hobby for some people. Some people even consider watching the drama to be a spectator sport of sorts. There are entire subreddits dedicated to just observing this sort of drama.
Some people, having been accused of being "not _real_ feminists" one time to many, stop self-identifying as such (even though their views on gender equality have not changed).
This is an interesting take on it. I had a conversation here recently with someone who wanted feminists to call themselves something else (like "equalist") because "feminist" has a bad reputation. Which, I think is what is happening here, too, only from the other direction: Men saying, "I don't want to be called a feminist because I believe people who call themselves 'feminist' are extremists."
I suspect the bad reputation is primarily caused by bad actors who are actually anti-feminist, and who don't want us to continue to move toward equality. 4chan has frequently leaked made up "feminist" rants into the internet at large, right wing Christians very frequently paint an extremely negative view of feminism, etc. There are plenty of people who genuinely oppose gender equality who will say or do anything to stop feminism in its tracks.
I used to be squeamish about the term, too. But, then I spent some time reflecting on why. And, the reality is that all the negative connotations I have about feminism (other than the anti-trans so-called "radical feminists" that even feminists make fun of) come from things men who are demonstrably against equality of the sexes have said or done.
The feminists I know (and I know a lot of them; I helped start a pro-choice activist organization here in Texas when the bills that are forcing closure of all but six clinics in the entire state were making their way through the state house) are nothing like the picture Republicans paint of them, nor are they anything like the caricature that some redditors and HN participants seem to believe is the reality. I don't know where these ideas even come from, honestly. The feminists I know are regular people, who see some injustice in our society and are trying to do something about it. They may occasionally be wrong on the details of execution, but they aren't man-hating bitches from hell, and it's really counter-productive to take the most extreme examples of anything and decide that the entire movement can be ignored because a few said something obnoxious.
To be fair, though, I used to identify as Libertarian. But, the bad apples within that movement seemed to overwhelm the reasonable folks; and there seems to be a movement of extreme right wing nationalists calling themselves "libertarian" lately, which finally put the last nail in the coffin for me. When "libertarian" came to mean "we need paramilitary thugs patrolling our borders to keep those illegals out" to the majority of people, it was time for me to opt out completely from using that label (not to mention the idiotic positions on climate change many self-identified libertarians take). So, I understand where you're coming from. I feel as though I've been robbed of an identity by ignorant nationalist racists. And, I guess if I believed everyone saw feminism the way you, and some others seem to, I don't know if I'd be as comfortable using the term.
I don't know what the right thing here is, but I know that there is a strongly anti-woman bias among many participants on reddit, and on HN, and it shows itself in all sorts of subtle and not so subtle ways. My most downvoted comments on both reddit and Hacker News have frequently been about sexism or racism or privilege (and occasionally about Apple, but I'll happily take those lumps), and I find it pretty reactionary and disappointing, but not surprising.
If the people who self-identify as feminists in practice actually believed that, life would be easy.
As it is, the perception to the vast majority of people is such that I find it more effective to avoid the word and simply advance the equal rights part.
Wanting to avoid associating yourself with the general zeitgeist of thought generated by soi-disant feminists is, annoyingly, quite reasonable currently.
"With friends like these, who needs enemies" applies a lot more often than I might like :(
I'm just somewhat puzzled that twox is a default. It seems like a prime candidate not to be just due to these sorts of inevitable problems. Lots of people new to discussion boards tend not to understand there may be different rules, sets of expected behavior, or the like on different sub-boards, so making something a default is likely to attract lots of people who are new and don't understand the rules.
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.
"I'm curious why the mods decided to let it become a default."
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.
> I don't remember any default usenet groups in nn, tin, gnus
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.
This is true. I am a moderator for /r/mildlyinteresting and two weeks before we became a default, we were asked if we wanted to opt-out. It was hotly-debated between the moderators for about a week and any one of us could have answered the admin, but we put it to a vote and ended up becoming a default.
The mods were absolutely involved in the decision to make the subreddit a default. Unfortunately, moderators are not elected and they cannot be usurped. They have no obligations to their subscribers, and indeed in this case they made the decision behind closed doors.
> Unfortunately, moderators are not elected and they cannot be usurped. They have no obligations to their subscribers,
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.
The other end of the spectrum is the Stack Overflow method, which ends up with the most uptight and pedantic users ending up with all the control, who use their power to rain havoc upon those who might otherwise have been much better moderators.
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.
I was under the impression that the admins consulted with the mods before doing so, but I could be wrong; how the front page has worked has changed many times over the years, and I haven't been keeping very close track.
You can always opt out though. There's literally a check box you can change if you don't want it anymore. You don't uncheck that box without a lot of communication and deliberation generally, but it's there.
Yeah, Reddit's weakest link is its moderation tools or really, lack thereof. The mod tools were really written for a much smaller site, and hopefully this infusion of cash will let them hire devs who can make it their mission to make the mod tools useful.
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.
"hopefully this infusion of cash will let them hire devs …"
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.
These days I'm no longer shocked at the number of times I hear "this should be easy" from someone who has absolutely no experience in programming whatsoever. At this point I just smile, nod my head, and attempt to drag the discussion back to reality.
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.
I'm going to disagree here. It's giving the mods way too much power. There's already editable flair on posts to point out factual errors. (E.g. something claiming to be confirmed that isn't)
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).
Or at least not hitting the "you are doing that too much" limit for deleting and reposting when you realise you accidentally pasted the wrong link in and similar.
> consider building our own tools (subreddit history scraper)
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?
Shouldn't there be a rule that if posts from new accounts get reported by more than X number of people for Y reason they are automatically banned.
Would make life of moderators easier. Would be easier if the tools allowed moderators to customize these X values.
There's already plenty of instances of bot swarms that mass-downvote new posts, presumably in order to give their own posts greater chance of getting to the frontpage.
If these bots could be used to auto-ban new users then Reddit would die very quickly.
I was a founding moderator of /r/gamernews, which was founded with a seriously different mindset than that of r/gamingnews or r/gaming. When we started, we had a lot of people coming from the other communities trying to force in memes, rumors, blogspam, and other things that were against our founding principles. It took a few months before the submitted content matched the community we were looking for. Trolls realized they weren't welcome, and people who wanted news without rumors or other cruft felt comfortable there. If we didn't have heavy handed (and often controversial) moderation policies for the first few months, we never would have hit 100 subscribers, let alone 90,000.
Relying on a community to police itself is great for an open community (like /r/gaming), but if you want any kind of formal structure you need some moderation. Especially on such a sensitive subreddit as /r/twoxchromosomes where the potential for abuse, spam, and general hatred is so high. Although with that community, I seriously have to wonder why reddit would want it to be a default, or why the moderators agreed. Terrible, terrible decision to take a community of respect and trust and open the floodgates to the greater internet full of assholes and trolls. Oh well.
Voting in an open system only works to reenforce the viewpoints of the majority of voters, not the viewpoints of the specific community. That's why I can't vote in the elections of another country.
This is a really interesting idea. I wonder if there were a way to track per-reddit karma, and only allow redditors to vote in a certain subreddit once their karma reaches a threshold or account age. (Just like HN, but per-subreddit.)
> Although with that community, I seriously have to wonder why reddit would want it to be a default, or why the moderators agreed.
I assumed that reddit admins made /r/twoxchromosomes a default because it was a good subreddit and wanted to expose better content to the default users.
Also, I thought that subreddit moderators don't have input regarding whether the subreddit is made default.
Subreddit moderators do have input. The admins wanted to make AskHistorians a default and the moderators, who are already work overtime to ensure the posted answers are highly professional, said no. And some moderators have, I think, chosen to remove their subs as defaults.
Voting and karma is Reddit's biggest flaw because as you said "Voting in an open system only works to reenforce the viewpoints of the majority of voters." Subreddits can be ruined by any small influx of SRSers or whatever sub is annoyed for the day. The only subs that are actually good are the heavily moderated subs.
You do not want to see the cesspool that is moderated comments on 2xc.
Spam and hateful comments fall pretty fast anyway, but that doesn't mean that it should stay there. What would you prefer - a youtube page with all comments and some hidden due to a low score, or a page with all the shitty comments removed altogether? Someone is going to see that shit anyway and it's going to be awful as it involves everything from rape threats on support threads to someone that is trying to post something completely irrelevant to the subreddit.
And then there are comments that are really unpopular but they aren't hateful or spam, and even if it's buried we don't remove those. They would be mixed in with the hateful comments just because people don't like what the person is saying.
Some type of moderation is, in my opinion, a necessity. There are very few free-for-alls on the internet - if you have a good example of that working out, then I would like to know.
Feel free to start your own community with a hands off approach. :)
We have 1.1 million subscribers in an active and default subreddit. Related and private subreddits are growing too to meet the random niche demands of some of our users, and that's a great thing. Our users have options if they don't like our moderation style.
Great attitude, and don't let assholes convince you that responsible moderation is ever a bad thing. The "freedom of speech" thing is just another trolling approach. Someone has a right to say anything they want, but they don't have a right to say it anywhere they want. If you and your participants have built a community and a culture that is inclusive and respectful, anyone choosing not to participate within those guidelines is opting themselves out of your community.
And, it's worth nothing that HN is a moderated community, and while there are people who find that problematic, the reality is that a significant portion of the best contributors here wouldn't stick around if it were not reasonably moderated. I believe that's true of communities in general, but particularly communities that are controversial (I'm a mod at /r/occupywallstreet; I've seen some shit).
Precisely because, as alexis said (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8390156) reddit is a platform for communities as much as it is a platform for users, and the norms for communities are created through moderation. The moderator gets to create the community they want, and it's up to users to accept the standards of moderation or move to/start a different community
It doesn't work in practice and I don't know of any big reddit community that has managed to keep things clean without strict moderation. For example, one problem that happens very often is that image macros and other "lighetweight" content get more votes than longer articles. It only tkes seconds to look at a picture but ot everyone can take a couple of minutes to read an article and vote on it (not to mention that the "hotness" metric gives less weigth to votes after a few minutes than votes after a few seconds).
This kind of argument pops up all the time whenever a subreddit has a discussion about moderation but in my experience it doesn't work in practice. For starters, only are there technical disparities between what the rating algorithm considers hot and what the community actually likes (for example, images can get lots of quick votes soon after submission, which propells them to the front page). But perhaps even more importantly, there is the "eternal september problem": moderation lets a subreddit enforce their culture to the new users, which is very important. Something like /r/askscience would be impossible to maintain in its current state with just user voting.
As for tagging, it helps in some situations but its not an universal solution. The UI is kind of lacking (you need a 3rd party extantion to hide unwanted tags and it doesnt filter posts in the reddit.com frontpage) but it also doesnt do anything for passing users who havent configured their tags.
In a hypothetical world maybe its possible to create a smarter "hotness" algorithm that is less prone to these problems but in the current system I really don't think "just downvote the bad stuff" is a practical solution.
What if moderators had control of how posts are ranked in their subreddits? I think that would result in some very interesting subreddit specific ranking algorithms.
No, the point of reddit is that communities of people moderate themselves under the rules they make up. Voting is not a substitute for moderation- see memes, offtopic comments, trolls, or the middlebrow dismissal that plagues HN. The later is always sitting at the top of page and in the positive; HN would be better if mods removed the comments or punished the accounts who make them.
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.
I've been on the site for -- god, 8 years now? (I deleted my first account or I would know for sure..) I used to be happy with a lot of the default content, but the site has naturally changed a lot in that time. I personally find all the AdviceAnimals/meme stuff to be mind-numbing and it is the default now.
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 used to be happy with a lot of the default content, but the site has naturally changed a lot in that time
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.
I think my main issue is with the front page and default subs. They are so unrepresentative of the great quality that can be found, and yet that's the face reddit chooses to put on. Why have default subs at all? Why not rotate through a constantly changing set of high-quality subs throughout the front page? Or why emphasize individual stories on the front page and instead present snippets of entire subreddits, almost like a real newspaper?
The high quality subs are high quality because they have limited appeal. It's the same way HN keeps a reasonable level of quality, if there way an influx of people here who weren't interested in technology/programming and just wanted to talk about video games or politics then the quality would go down.
askhistorians and askscience have relatively broad appeal, have a very high level of quality and are extremely heavily moderated. In my experince (and it is extensive, I signed up in august 2006) the heavier you moderate a subreddit the better the quality, although a bad moderator can kill a subreddit fast.
> the heavier you moderate a subreddit the better the quality
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.
Avoiding a sort of Web 2.0 of the old usenet "Back to School newbie flood" certainly helps. It takes a really good mod team to stand up against the flood. See the decline of /r/books, for instance.
The vast majority (if not all) of subreddits I've discovered over the years has been because of getting linked to them by other users.
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.
> 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.
Maybe use IP address geolocation to suggest subreddits during onboarding?
They already do I think? At least the default subreddit list (or whatever it calls - the subreddits shown top of screen) includes swedish subreddits when I'm not logged on.
Yeah, when the new defaults were added 4-ish months ago, they experimented with some country-specific defaults. I think they only set it up for Sweden though.
Upvotes should be weighed by a metric. Just as an example: New users should have less voting power and users with more karma should have a larger voting power with their upvote.
Would decrease upvote/downvote bots, incentivizes good content (higher karma gives you slightly more voting power).
+1 to the slow and eventual consolidation of power into a few hands -- this sounds like an awesome idea, in theory, until you put it into practice.
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.
Really? Unidan has his own page? If ever there was a reason for Wikipedia's speedy deletion... Is /u/shittywatercolour notable enough too? Holy shit, he is.
Wikipedia is pretty confused about what it wants to be. On one hand, "the sum of all human knowledge" includes a lot of minutiae that WP doesn't consider worthy of its servers. WP expresses that with notability guidelines. On the other hand, the extant notability guidelines means that a media blackout on you or your cause can keep you out of an encyclopedia that you really deserve to be in.
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.
It's not that nobody cares, it's that all that you need to have a page is 'notability' and notability is defined as having media articles written about you. If I can get the New York Times and one other publication to write an article on the spider that lives outside my front door, I can create a Wikipedia article for that spider and nobody can take it down, per Wikipedia policy.
Maybe, but if not done carefully, this could also lead to a coterie of high karma "power users" who control the content regular users see. High potential for corruption and drama. This already happens (for example that "biologist here!" fellow who controlled a voting ring to promote his own content and downvote competing content), make karma worth something might make the problem even worse.
I disagree. This would simply skew the entire site towards content that nets high karma, and high karma users. I have seen no evidence that high karma users post content any better than a new user, and often times, they are worse - manipulative or egotistical.
Exactly what Reddit needs, more reasons to karmawhore.
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.
I think that how long the account has been around should have more of an effect to a cut off like 6 months or 1 year. It's pretty easy to accumulate karma by making garbage posts with memes and spamming those.
In my experience, users with high karma tend to post content which is reddit-referential. If that's the case, then this system would probably make the site less newbie-friendly.
Voting should be weighted. Poor people with less money should have less voting power, and rich people with lots of money should have larger voting power.
One nice thing would be a "Related Subreddit" spot on every post's comments. These can be user added and voted on based off of relevance. Page admins would be able to disable their subreddit from showing up in these if they are trying to maintain a smaller community, but otherwise anyone can add to the list. This could be a way to find new subreddits that are related to the content you are reading without having to sift through the comments hoping someone recommended the author to crosspost it there.
I think it just comes down to better placement of subreddit suggestions somewhere in the UI. Reddit is a very word heavy UI (which I like) but sometimes features (no matter how awesome at the core) get lost in the text or the pics/vids that standout so much on the front page.
reddit has a long way to go before it can function as a universal community platform like twitter functions as a universal individual broadcast platform.
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.
There are 130,000,000 people (40%+ outside the USA) using it every month.
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.
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.
The problem reddit faces is one of community identity and management of that identity, which manifests itself, basically, in never-ending moderator drama.
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.
> 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.
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 got excited when I saw that feature. It's a shame it's riding the meme of another platform, but people instantly "get it," at least.
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.
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.
Well, at least I can ask a question there. On reddit, your post just gets thrown away by a bot for not conforming to the rules that are buried somewhere. It's frustrating. On SO, even though it is likely that my ? won't be seen or read or answered, at least there is a chance as it is not auto-banned. Also, real quick: shadowbanning?! I mean, talk about terrible. You don't even know you are talking to no-one. Yes, yes, trolls, but still, it's just crazy what they have come up with to deal with them.
Just a heads up, we do that here too. Here it's a 'hellban'. You can see their posts if you go into your profile and set the showdead flag. You may already know that, but it's a very similar thing.
I've always thought the user flow that a lot of newsfeed apps use would work well for reddit. (ex: show a list/grid of communities/topics, check the ones that interest you, maybe show some recent posts from them as a preview).
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 most often discover new subreddits by clicking "Other discussions" on links that I particularly like. That's how I discovered /r/artisanvideos.
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.
> One thing I sincerely hope reddit will do with the new injection is to increase the level of quality of content and discussion across the board. Often the advice given is "you've got to find the smaller subreddits" and while that's true, I think having the first few layers filled with terrible content and hive-minded, often racist/sexist discussion is incredibly detrimental to both the site's image and new user experiences.
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.
How much of that is due to the (relatively token but non-zero) membership cost? I subscribed there years ago because I enjoyed the conversations and found it to have a good signal-to-noise ratio.
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.
I keep fantasizing about some sort of inception-like system where you could go "deeper" below each subreddit when you chose to, finding a smaller subset of people who'd also gone deeper out of dissatisfaction with convo quality. Maybe it would be one-way gate where you couldn't go back to participate on upper levela. Maybe you comments would still show up above, but the votes in the deeper level would be tallied relative to its users... I keep posting this when quality comes up in discussion, but no one ever bites :)
Fork? More like a dive? If /r/worldnews level 1 gets bad, you just click "go deeper" button. After confirmation, you're now in /r/worldnews level 2 whenever logged in. You don't see comments from level 1 folks, and their votes don't affect the conversation and order int level 2. Same for every subsequent level.
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 ;)
How would friends coordinate their simultaneous exit without being observed by the people they want to leave behind? Would you allow more than one group of friends to leave the same level, or do they first have to migrate to level 2, then immediately to level 3?
I don't consider it to be large. The (intentionally) mostly poor design and SEO helps with that. I think that's a good thing - really helps keep discussions mostly on-target and interesting, and promote the high-value content over the jokes.
Though I do think the place can be a bit humorless and pedantic at times...
> I guess the only website I can think of that allows comments and is super-popular with the general public is Facebook, but since it's sorta-non-anonymous, people don't spill hatred all over the place.
That's actually a very interesting point.
I think a lot of the stereotypical poor Internet comments only exist because the author is anonymous and is talking to a faceless account. (Not all of it, of course, some of it is probably due to the communications medium.) I can't find the original post that I liked, but this one[0] has some interesting information on allowing an attacker to identify with a victim. I would think that would apply in this case too some extent.
If you actually had to vouch for what you said and what you said online were associated with you as a person, and you had a ballpark idea of who you were talking to, I think people would add more filters to themselves. That kind of social pressure is largely self-policing. Jerks will be jerks, but hopefully fewer non-jerks would turn into jerks.
I like the option of anonymity, but in all honesty I think it mostly just helps the edge cases, not large-scale discussion. Is it any wonder that Facebook and Google have tried to enforce "real names" policies and the Play store now links all reviews to a G+ account? There are other reasons for those moves, but it can't hurt to encourage the civility that accountability brings. Anonymity can bring out both the best and worst in people.
Been using reddit for about 6 years, some of the smaller subs are amazing and I think it comes down to two major things, excellent moderation and community below a certain size (usually).
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).
/r/AskHistorians is one of my favorites. Mods are insanely hawkish about the rules which slightly turned me off when I first subscribed. But after a few months it started to make sense and the quality of contributions is superbly high.
I really enjoy /r/photography, the quality of discourse is high and there are very little nastiness. The mod team is also highly active and engages members - weekly discussions along directed topics, weekly writeups/discussions about famous works/photographers, etc.
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.
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.
Seriously. When I joined reddit there wasn't an active hip-hop board (which was the only major interest I had that reddit didn't have an active community for).
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.
As a mod of /r/javascript (for about 6 months now), I'm flattered. The sub really is easy to mod though; yes, we get a couple off-topic & spammy posts every once in awhile, but by-and-large, the JS community there runs itself really well.
Some of the communities around mental illness offer very caring communities. Obviously I think it is mostly because of very strict rules/admins. It is special to have an anonymous place to vent and have people understand you without trolling.
Most of the sports subreddits are pretty awesome. /r/cfb is my favorite, but /r/baseball, /r/hockey, and /r/fantasyfootball are all quite good as well. /r/nfl is probably the flagship sports subreddit, but it has been a little rough lately with the community and mods having some conflicts about the direction of the subreddit.
Lately I have had a sad feeling that r/nfl has reached an inflection point where it is quickly degrading into just another large subreddit. The firestorm surrounding the NFL's domestic violence issues this season seems to have had permanent effects on r/nfl.
/r/nba is also awesome, along with literally every individual NFL and NBA team sub I have ever visited. Most are quick to ban opposing team fans for anything resembling trolling though. Tread lightly.
I really find the various city subreddits to be quite useful, such as /r/chicago and /r/sanfrancisco, for local news, discussions and events. I've learned about many interesting activities this way and it also helps you stay in touch with the local culture when you're away.
/r/Fantasy (63,661 readers) is great. And sometimes it feels like half of it's users are (somewhat) well-known writers ;)
Seems to need less moderation than other subs of this size.
/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.
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.
Here's a plug for http://reddit.com/r/languagelearning. Most of the language related subreddits tend to be pretty good. There are also a couple decent computer science subreddits, but you can explore those yourself. http://reddit.com/r/wicked_edge will help you learn to be a better shaver and actually enjoy it! Those are a couple I like.
They'll be very person specific but sure I like these (some are less than perfect).
/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).
Every time this comes people complain and whine that it would ruin the sub. I'm on the side that posting images should be banned. In subs I've seen this implemented it's helped content a lot.
If you're into sports, /r/cfb and /r/nba are two excellent subreddits. /r/nfl is pretty good, but there's always some fights with the mods over what posts get removed, merged, etc. Nothing too bad, but there's a little more drama than the former two subreddits.
/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 ;)
The reddit admins are taking completely the wrong approach if their goal is to increase the quality of discussion on the site.
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 run a particular /r/ with a couple hundred thousand subscribers. What I would like to do is to be able to limit brigading. I havea controversial idea on how to do this: If you a subscriber to /r/X then you may not subscribe and vote in /r/Y. IF you're posting in /r/X you may not post in /r/Y
This would then turn shenanigans into private subs... but at least it would be a start.
I could swear /r/4chan had a no raiding other subreddits rule, but I checked and it does not as of right now, that I could find.
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.
Heavily moderated subreddits are another way to get great quality content. The only problem with this is that it relies on volunteer moderators who devote large amounts of their free time to making the site a better place.
Heavily moderated subreddits are Reddit's biggest problem. Time and again, the volunteer moderators prove that they cannot be impartial, and bias creeps in, inevitably culminating in a bizarre power struggle with the normal users. I've seen it so many times.
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 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.
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.
The other problem is that community gets to decide what content is on top of the page by upvoting. As the community gets larger some more quality in depth and technical submissions won't get the same upvotes as a simple meme post.
I generally agree that heavily moderating a subreddit is a bad idea, however for subreddits like http://www.reddit.com/r/science and http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience, they have been able to scale up to frontpage levels without a serious drop in content quality.
I disagree. I think responsible moderation is not only positive, but mandatory for a community to maintain any sort of quality. Hacker News is moderated (usually quite well), and it would be far worse without that moderation. Likewise, /r/science would be a shit show without moderation; and /r/science is perhaps the heaviest moderated subreddit I subscribe to, including some quite controversial ones.
I don't know that the "one sub per mod" rule would be a net win; responsible volunteer moderators are hard to come by.
The Reddit admins seem to be aware of moderation issues, but doing something to fix it would cause a shitstorm or require a major redesign of the site. A while back, they introduced a limit on the number of defaults subreddits you can mod (I think it's two or three). It's a start but it didn't do a whole lot.
>'Often the advice given is "you've got to find the smaller subreddits" and while that's true, I think having the first few layers filled with terrible content and hive-minded, often racist/sexist discussion is incredibly detrimental to both the site's image and new user experiences.'
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 moderate a medium sized Reddit community (r/mtb, ~32k), and the key for me has been enforcing a few basic rules: no memes, no rage comics, and all posts must follow reddiquette. (Okay, that 3rd rules is really a blanket for 10 rules, I admit.)
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.
Not to mention the entirely expected but entirely horrible response to /r/twoxchromosomes initially though they seem to have got that under control (again with excellent moderation).
You are correct, but from my (admittedly outsider) perspective, they are suffering from an identity crisis. They want to be a strong community where meaningful discussion takes place and drives real action. But their branding is still, "Hey, we're the front page of the internet!", which in practical terms means people go there for time-wasting entertainment.
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.
The popular parts of reddit are popular because they appeal to many people, it's the same as music. The most popular bands will have the broadest appeal. So most of the reddit front page is cat pictures and slapstick humour because that's what everyone can appreciate. If the front page was full of obscure stuff about haskell , less people would enjoy it.
In terms of racism, I've never seen racist or sexist content on the front page when I have visited.
I just looked and there's a "Chinese Army Drill" photoshop on the front page. The picture itself is one thing but things have contexts and given that this exists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_fire_drill
you gotta wonder where the artist is coming from.
You are right, here is wonderful content hiding just under the surface of reddit. It is often shed in a negative light (sometimes deserved), but it really does have so much to offer.
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.
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.
Obviously whatever reddit can do to deflect that type of stuff is a good idea. But I often wonder how much of this is simply taking how people (especially young men) are on the internet and ascribing that to the "reddit" brand name. Chase them off and they'll show up somewhere else while we're all still busy hating reddit. I dunno.
I have to disagree. 'Quality' is subjective. Trying to decide what should and should not be part of reddit goes against its overall 'democratic' mantra. It should remain open to all without much prejudice beyond the public's upvote/downvote.
Increased level of quality in both content and discussion should come naturally by attracting and retaining intelligent individuals.
I am of the opposing opinion. I think Reddit has an entirely separate purpose from a place like HN, and I think it hurts the bottom line of Reddit and makes the Internet a less interesting place if more moderation were to take place on Reddit.
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).
>Reddit is the upvote, not the moderator, isn't it?
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.
But don't you see how problematic your argument is? You more or less beg the entire question by saying, "/r/games actually has content worth reading" -- I mean this in a non-offensive way, but who are you to say that? What's "content worth reading" for you may not actually be content worth reading for anyone else.
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?
There are hundreds of thousands of voters participating on /r/all content. Your vote isn't going to matter whatsoever except in the critical time between when something is first submitted and when it falls off of the new submissions page (and rising page, and controversial page).
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.
Your vote isn't supposed to matter, not any more than anyone else's vote. That's the entire premise of democracy, in fact, a fact that's completely and utterly ruined by the arbitrary nature of 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.
>You're asking other people to do your work for you.
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.
Your vote matters exactly as much as it should matter. Why should you (or anyone else, including moderators) get any more of a say than anyone else? What have the moderators done to qualify themselves?
You're visiting a work in progress, not a completed product.
Most people go to reddit to hear about news or see what's popular, not to sift through new submissions for gems. If reddit cared only about democracy, it would solve the problem of an incredible submission being buried by a measly five to ten downvotes in its first twenty minutes regardless of how many people would have liked it overall. Personally, I have neither the time nor the incentive to try to influence groupthink. (I was very careful in my choice of "groupthink." A democratized frontpage that hundreds of thousands of people influence is almost equivalent to literal groupthink. And that's not terrible in and of itself, but if you're going to argue that mods should be stripped of their tools, then it becomes quite the dilemma.)
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.
If Reddit had the moderators that HN had (and the proportional quantity), there simply would be no problem. HN mods are a group of people selected specifically for the task of moderation. They were appointed.
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.
This is what I think the biggest problem with Reddit is. There needs to be a better system for picking moderators. I don't know what that would be but the current one is broken.
>I mean this in a non-offensive way, but who are you to say that? What's "content worth reading" for you may not actually be content worth reading for anyone else.
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.
That's a pretty self-centered world view, then. Why do you think your view should be the view as represented on any given Reddit page? Don't you see that everyone has views, just like you do, and should be allowed to express them, just as you do?
How would you design a system in which everyone had the same amount of influence over a series of submissions?
>Don't you see that everyone has views, just like you do, and should be allowed to express them, just as you do?
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.
It won't be tolerable until we weed out anyone who might say anything that anyone finds slightly offensive. No jokes allowed.
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.
Relative to what it was. I was on reddit at the beginning, and it was much higher quality than the default, now. It's like the eternal September all over again.
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.
> increase the level of quality of content and discussion across the board
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.
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).
>Reddit is one of the most anti-racist/sexist communities on the internet.
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).
At the point when /r/AdviceAnimals was removed from the defaults, it was basically "racist statement on top of Unpopular Opinion Puffin" all the time. People started referring to it as the "White Man's Birden".
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.
Maybe morally, but in practical terms that's not really contradiction. People on The Internet are thoroughly desensitized to the moral impact of things like that. Almost no one complains when we laugh at violent comedies, despite the fact that we all know murder is bad. There are a few more noises about Game of Thrones, but it's still extremely popular. Why are a few racist/sexist/etc jokes on r/funny any different? If you want to throw those out, you pretty much also have to throw out the other 95% of popular culture that derives entertainment from bad behavior. Of course that's what we fundamentalist Christians have been saying for about a millennium, but of course no one listened.
I like Reddit. I recently obtained a data dump of every single submission and comment so I could perform interesting data analysis and may just determine what make a post on Reddit viral.
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.
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!
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.
Isn't this an integral problem to the reddit model though, that you can point to half a million communities and say "Look, so many people doing so much good" while what many will point to is "look, you've made thousands of dollars from celebrity leaks" and "You've got huge communities of people sharing images of underage girls.
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.
I would agree with you that the vast majority of the content is indeed good unfortunately the bad is often concentrated into a few sub-reddits and at reddit scale that still is a lot of bad unfortunately.
I think it's an interesting issue because the primary issue is what interests people, not the website itself. If a majority of people want to concentrate on the bad, then the bad shows up more. If the mods or admins make the site such that it's impossible to concentrate on the bad, then that would involve some kind of censorship that could be very biased towards someone's definition of good.
This is a great point. There is a demand for violence. It's counter-intuituve and non-PC but people pay good money to see it. It has nothing to do with redit, IMHO its more of a media phenomena. Look at the middle east.
i didn't know reddit data dump's were available, other than crawling with the api. I have plenty of hardware, would love to play around with the data. Could you make it available on an amazon s3 bucket or something ?
I couldn't agree with you more. The bad parts of reddit are what push me away. Of course there are some smaller subreddits that actually value quality content, but if they somehow grow to 'default' subreddit status then things seem to go downhill quickly.
Hopefully you publish some of your findings down the road. I'm interested to hear more.
Reddit hit critical mass when Digg went under, and I think that was a short window when Reddit was both hugely popular without its toxic culture. It was kind of a "Reverse September" moment, I think. I mean obviously jailbait existed and other embarrassments, but they didn't have a heavy impact on reddit's culture like the current infighting about misogyny and the like does.
Yes, Reddit is certainly unique! I'm often aggravated at the terrible things I see on there, level of discourse, stupid snarky crap, etc.. Hive-mind indeed but that's up to each of us to deal with in ourselves.
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.
One way to promote quality is to crack down on low-quality content (which is something that HN does and you've done a good job at doing. :P).
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.
However, the lack of transparency can lead to baseless speculation, which can be just as toxic, if not worse.
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.
The problem with reddit right now is that community managers are rather ineffective at actually handling the community which leads to the other employees of reddit (engineers) to finally step in. The only time when reddit does usually act is when there are some serious legal implications. This is what often leads to the reddit administrator's actions to be labeled as arbitrary.
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.
The admins didn't want to ban /r/TheFappening but decided to after they got a flood of DMCA takedowns from the celebs lawyers. The sub actually broke the site because of how much traffic it was generating and that was almost 5 days before it got banned. They knew about the sub for several days and let it go because they have a hands-off policy and don't generally step in unless something drastic happens.
> Although, as of recently the reddit administrators started banning some of the more racist subreddits
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.
> 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.
On that note there's definitely a potential market opening, one sites like hackernews cater to.
As a long time Reddit user, I've been really disappointed lately with Reddits "battle" against content creators and the little recourse you have if you are marked as a spammer or shadow banned. See the recent /r/indiegaming debacle for example, where a subreddit where mainly indie devs would post about their games now allows very little self promotion ( http://redd.it/2fdwyv ). Some of these rules are Reddit wide so theres nothing they can do but it essentially discourages content creators from being close to their audience on Reddit.
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.
if you are banned from a subreddit (even a default one) the moderators can basically choose to ignore you and you are SOL
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.
You have an excellent point about who is willing to moderate versus someone who is actually fit for the job. I feel the concept it lost on a lot of people and too many look at it as another webforum or social media. There is something to be said about using curated link aggregation instead of a blog or forum. Ultimately expressing myself through other people's submissions is pretty cool and I like to think my ("my") subreddit has gradually reached that point.
Self-promotion is one of the really hard problems to solve. Some of my least favorite subs that I really want to like (/r/Entrepreneur is an especially egregious example) have this problem severely. If I see another self-aggrandizing blogger post a link promoting their system for making money on the internet with information products, I'm gonna catch their hair on fire.
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.
That's what the voting system is for though. If someone is abusing the system like getting fake upvotes then that's def. a problem but the spam system accounts for that. Otherwise if the highly upvoted content on /r/entrepreneur is a bunch of make money schemes then thats what the people subbed to that subreddit want and you should start/find a diff. subreddit closer to what you want.
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.
Not sure if you've been on the other side of the "battle", but there is a heck of a lot of genuine spammers on the site, and shadowbans are one of the few effective tools.
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.
> 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.
A mod can ban you from their subreddit and that happens a lot based on a fairly subjective basis. There are even times where you just get caught by moderating bots then if the moderators don't bother to reply to you, there is little recourse. I have heard of cases from friends who have been banned for fairly bizarre reasons. I'm not saying you will be banned the first time you break the rule but people who post about content they create have to be extremely careful or they can be banned either from a subreddit or globally. When you are a moderator of a subreddit that has millions of viewers, I think it shouldn't be so subjective.
I'm a mod of quite a few subs. We have to submit spammers to /r/spam. It is a bot run sub that basically does link counts from your history, if you hit a threshold, you will get shadowbanned. Submitting a user there who has been around for say 1 year with 250/250 karma, they probably will not get shadowbanned as they don't fit the algorithm. Mod a sub for long enough and you can instantly look at an account and tell whether or not they would get shadowbanned. There are tons of egregious spammers on the site who will never get banned because they don't fit the mold.
I understand the need to fight obvious spam and shadowbanning being a good tool for that, but shadowbanning regular users that are trying to contribute actual content is very disrespectful to the users.
"It’s always bothered me that users create so much of the value of sites like reddit but don’t own any of it. So, the Series B Investors are giving 10% of our shares in this round to the people in the reddit community, and I hope we increase community ownership over time. We have some creative thoughts about the mechanics of this, but it’ll take us awhile to sort through all the issues. If it works as we hope, it’s going to be really cool and hopefully a new way to think about community ownership."
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?
I don't understand this. How does "the reddit community" own shares in a company? What does that even mean? Are board votes going to be held on reddit posts or something?
Mod/admin censorship, government manipulation (out of Eglin AFB most likely), and corporate advertising/shilling are pretty blatantly huge in reddit right now, with many users openly looking for alternative websites. The admin team has shown again and again that they're willing to tolerate anything until there's bad PR.
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.
There's so much work being done on reddit right now that users don't like, don't won't or don't care about while things that users and mods need to effectively run their subs and enjoy the site (like better anti-spam measures, finer grained control on user behavior, disabled downvote buttons, logging of user activity so you can see who trolls are) aren't appearing.
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.
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.
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.
> The admin team has shown again and again that they're willing to tolerate anything until there's bad PR.
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.
Set a global policy and stick to it. When something gets banned it's because it violates the policy and not because of some half-hearted moralizing, while other clearly horrendous communities (like nightmare inducing) are allowed to sit around.
Unfortunately I don't think most people will care. The vast majority of users don't comment, and few ever figure out if they or their submissions are shadow banned.
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.
Usenet is the closest thing we've got to that. Although it lacks any voting or ranking system to filter content. Whether that's a bug or feature is debatable.
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.
The problem with modding, or really leadership roles in general, is that everyone says they want to do it, but very few of the people who say that will actually put in the necessary time, and even if they do, a large percentage of them will suck at it. You want to know why there's so much mod overlap in the large subreddits? That's why. The people in charge of adding more mods would much rather have someone they know is dependable than risk trusting their community with an unknown. I agree that diversity in moderators, especially between subreddits, is a good thing, but it's much easier said than done. Finding, vetting, and training new mods is hard work.
It's a good time to invest in reddit. Not because it will become cooler over the coming years, but because it will become more valuable as it monetizes itself and sells off it's goodwill/equity.
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.
I keep asking this, but it never gets much attention - but why can't reddit put more effort in to a hierarchical structure.
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.
I worked there from 2008-2011 and always wanted to implement exactly this, but at that time we only had 5 +/- 1 employees so nobody ever had the time.
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.
I'm wondering about the load of shareholder service work that has to be done when corporate stuff gets put up to a vote. They have to notify people, and that might be hard if someone uses a throwaway account and somehow ends up acquiring a share because of it.
While I have a real name account there, TBH 95% of the time I'm using an alias.
Lets hope for a subreddit controlling it. No really, have the users control it. Really.
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.
One simple way to improve the quality of posts is to remove default subreddits. Instead, have people pick from a list of common interests: programming, games, rap, etc. I think that by limiting interaction with trolls will, over time, reduce the total number of trolls. It is my assumption that the majority of trolls tend to stay on the default subreddits. This would also allow for smaller subreddits to grow by in a sense linking interests into categories rather than the current method of community discovery.
As a mod of two defaults, I agree that this might be a good way forward. Right now, adding a popular but non-default sub to the default set is a very quick way to decrease the quality of the posted content, and can nearly kill the community unless the mods are extremely proactive. I can't help but think that there must be a better way.
I think it's time we re-invented Usenet by making the subreddits tree-structured. Or at the least, by making a tree-structured list of subreddits.
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.
> I'm curious to see what sort of dynamic this creates in the site.
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.
Ok, Sam Altman, YC and reedit all just entered my personal mini-hero status for "we want to give 10% of shares to "the community"
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 :-)
They allow shit like /r/greatapes and a entire super racist network of subreddits like /r/ferguson and shit, but hoo boy if you're Jennifer Lawrence they'll bend over backwords to shut down /r/TheFappening to get rid of your nudes... While simultaneously ignoring /r/Photoplunder, which does the same thing but to people who aren't famous.
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.
I like to believe that due to the anonymity on reddit it provides a much better reflection of our society - and hence also exposes some of the deeply ingrained hypocrisy.
The one downside (as I see it) of Reddit that Facebook, G+, and HN all don't have is the ability to downvote. Downvoting makes it so larger subreddits will only have material on their front page that the majority of that group agrees with. This leads to certain subreddits (like /r/politics/) being heavily dominated by one side of the subject area.
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.
How is that any different from upvoting patterns? A lot of upvotes has a bigger impact than any downvotes, and given the mod mail for the default subreddit I mod... people are well aware of that but continue to complain like that's something we can change.
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.
There is another state: vote-banned, like me; basically you see the up/down arrows in every comment but they do nothing at all (upvoting submissions do works).
As others have said, you can downvote here to, but I know what you are saying. The majority always rules on reddit, and on the default subs, there are so many comments that you will never see anything but posts that agree with the majority. It's a tough problem to solve with community that big.
Not a YC investment, but I'm interested in how this relates to YC's mitigation of signaling risk.
> 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?
Quora looks like a nice iteration on Reddit. Reddit should just do a big rewrite to make it look and feel more like Quora. The data model should be able to remain mostly the same, with just some major interface changes, minor feature changes, and major backend updates. It could probably even be deployed in parallel to the existing implementation. Some items that'd be nice are email updates, weekly digests, topic suggestions, anonymous posts, related topics, etc.
I honestly don't think so. There is a lot of value on Reddit, but I bet that 90% of the visits and content are basically memes and imgur pictures. The part that could "become Quora" may die without the other.
I'm a heavy user of both and never made a connection between them. Them are very different I think.
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.
Just wanted to say that this is a fascinating thread. It's eye opening to see just how differently I use reddit than others. I have numerous 6+ year accounts and I don't know what the hell most of this stuff means: subscribing, moderator tools, banning, All I know is nearly anything I want to learn about, there is some passionate group of people on reddit discussing it.
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."
Actually the problem with Reddit are low-functioning people who join subreddits for the attention and trolling. Most of them a griefers and almost all of them are looking for porn and other stuff like that.
I have a few small subreddits I get on that seem to be free of that:
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.
I´ts interesting, however the idea of Reddit to allocate 10% of their shares back to the Reddit community for me it´s more than something "cool" as Sam Altman said, and beyond the "a new way to think about community ownership".
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?
"A subreddit for really great, insightful articles, reddiquette, reading before voting and the hope to generate intelligent discussion on the topics of these articles."
> First, it’s always bothered me that users create so much of the value of sites like reddit but don’t own any of it. So, the Series B Investors are giving 10% of our shares in this round to the people in the reddit community, and I hope we increase community ownership over time.
How do you prevent extrinsic motivation from undermining intrinsic motivation here?
The "giving equity to the community" is interesting -- I remember when VA Linux, Red Hat, etc. did something similar at IPO (to a much smaller number of developers, but still).
Seems like a great idea in principle, and hard to make it work, but hopefully they'll come up with a structure that does.
Not to be a prig, but I think Sam leading a VC round outside of Y Combinator while he's president of Y Combinator at the very least represents a conflict of interest* and at the worst is an abuse of power.
*conflict of interest is pretty much the standard way of doing biz in the Valley as I understand it.
I wonder if those community shares will benefit the people whose digital content is infringed upon for profit will be? Giving back to the community is interesting. Attempting to give back to the content creators upon whose backs Reddit is built would be even more interesting.
I agree that reddit drips in awesomeness. I talked with the co-founder Alexis Ohanian when he talked at Google last year: really interesting guy, not only with solid advice on entrepreneurship, but also he talked a lot about public service.
Does anybody know of a sub where stuff like this link would make the front page? And techmeme type stuff (fundraising etc)? I can't find anything like that. It certainly isn't /r/technology or /r/startups
This is excellent! Reddit is closer to the kind of online community I like to see and I'm happy to see what they have planned. Weren't they also giving away 10% of profits to charity?
The giving back to community approach would, in my opinion, be more deserved by a community like StackOverflow. I always feel grateful to and am amazed by the SO community.
Users can create their own communities called subreddits. If they do, they are the first and only moderator of that sub. A sub can be about anything, and if other users enjoy that type of content they can subscribe.
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.
I get that there's a lot to like about Reddit - it's absolutely an impressive platform and it definitely deserves investment. And I get the libertarian ideals of the admins, I do.
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.
I wish that Reddit would actually copy HN's about box and remove the 10:1 rule for submissions. This include killing Anonymity Rules from /r/talesfrom*.
Yishan Wong has a big vision for what reddit can be. I’m excited to watch it play out.
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.
I am against a site policy that says "we are aware that something horrible happened, but we aren't willing to make any changes to prevent it from potentially happening again".
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".
I think he is being very clear. For now, at least, he doesn't want to be the moral police - he expects each user to exercise their own moral judgement. I personally prefer reddit to leave moral choices to their users
he expects each user to exercise their own moral judgement
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.
I enjoy Sam's writing but I am wondering why is he doing this ? Of course, its his money and he has 100 % right to do with it whatever he wants but still --
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.
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.
We are in the process of raising first round of funds for http://whoaverse.com and things are starting to get interesting. We have major plans for both enterprise and private use of the platform and when it comes to giving back to the community - we plan to use the same model big players like YouTube and Twitch have for rewarding content creation (actual money).
This will be a fun ride which currently feels like David vs Goliath, but boy is it fun :)
Bing is a clone of Google and Yahoo is a clone of... DuckDuckGo? Call it what you want, here are just a few distinctions:
- 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
That sounds good. But what's your plan to convince me (and more) to change my daily website? I go to these sites for content, and despite reddit not having the nice features, it does have the content.
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.
Reddit has got to be one of the ugliest popular websites on the internet. And idealistic, gosh. How can you look at a toilet magazine largely being contributed to by people on their toilets and think "I bet all those people want to own a part of 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 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.