3 ms·

The top thread on the announcement is a great discussion of why it's so important to us to credit Redditors in every article, which folks seem to appreciate. h

by alexis 11y ago

The top thread on the announcement is a great discussion of why it's so important to us to credit Redditors in every article, which folks seem to appreciate. https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/3npxm4/introducing_upvoted_a_redditorial_publication/cvq6trw https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/3npxm4/introducing_up... As for Tom, here's what I posted on r/defaultmods addressing that concern. >> I ran those ads when I learned Tom was using the site. I did that because for the last few weeks more and more celebrities have been coming on or reaching out to use reddit as members of the community. And we've run sponsored headline to draw attention to it, these ads have been viewed over 14M times in the last couple of weeks without incident. They've also performed exceptionally well (Bill Gates' for instance had 368% higher CTR than average). +That moment when Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca) shows up to compliment your Rebel helmet patch +Oh, just Bill Gates hanging out on r/infographics +Lil Dicky drops a new music video, shows up in the comments of r/Music thread Admittedly, these ads all went up at least 24hrs after the celeb showed up and left, whereas I jumped on the Tom Hanks one as soon as I realized it was happening. We're not going to do that again. Those ads also performed very well (63% higher than site average) but were a really bad look. To be clear: we're not paying them. They're coming because we're actually making progress showing them the value of joining the community. Wynter (u/808sandhotcakes) has been doing a lot of great work, by virtue of her great reputation in the industry alone, people are genuinely reaching out to learn how to join the Reddit community. We're excited about that, because it clearly makes our users very happy and by every account the talent enjoys it, too. edit: (See, I'm already getting better: Arnold + Adam Savage stopped by since Tom and no obnoxious sponsored headlines.)

minimaxir 11y ago
Hi Alexis, thanks for the clarification regarding the ads. That said, I still have concerns about the power dynamic. I do see that users are credited for submissions, but Reddit is the one that mostly benefits from it, especially since ads are being run on the site. It's the same concern that people have with BuzzFeed that attribution alone won't solve. (There's also the issue of determining if Original Content on Reddit is actually OC, and that could lead to interesting problems.) As mentioned in the original image, Upvoting still does encourage brigading on submissions (https://www.reddit.com/r/Upvoted/comments/3ni1il/upvoted_weekly_vol_1_issue_24_hold_my_catnip_plus/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Upvoted/comments/3ni1il/upvoted_wee...), which can have fallout in the future.
- alexis 11y ago
  Sure thing. You'll see from the content on Upvoted.com that the OP is usually just the start of the story and we're following up to learn more. e.g., Omari Nyaega http://upvoted.com/2015/10/03/omari-nyaega-machete-kenya-orphanage/ http://upvoted.com/2015/10/03/omari-nyaega-machete-kenya-orp... 202M+ people can surface his story and raise a ton of money, but our team of reporters has a much easier time following up to close the loop. We're working on anti-brigading tools. That's on us to get right, because a lot of "brigading" is AKA "how social media works." It's long been a very fuzzy definition, which is on us (e.g., how is it OK for a celeb to tweet to his followers about an AMA -- it's both "brigading" and "required for verification") and there's a more obvious and negative brigading we can thwart better with technology so that mods have the ability to throttle when, say, one community wants to all pile into a thread and sway it.

by alexis 11y ago

minimaxir 11y ago

Hi Alexis, thanks for the clarification regarding the ads. That said, I still have concerns about the power dynamic. I do see that users are credited for submissions, but Reddit is the one that mostly benefits from it, especially since ads are being run on the site. It's the same concern that people have with BuzzFeed that attribution alone won't solve. (There's also the issue of determining if Original Content on Reddit is actually OC, and that could lead to interesting problems.) As mentioned in the original image, Upvoting still does encourage brigading on submissions (https://www.reddit.com/r/Upvoted/comments/3ni1il/upvoted_weekly_vol_1_issue_24_hold_my_catnip_plus/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Upvoted/comments/3ni1il/upvoted_wee...), which can have fallout in the future.

alexis 11y ago
Sure thing. You'll see from the content on Upvoted.com that the OP is usually just the start of the story and we're following up to learn more. e.g., Omari Nyaega http://upvoted.com/2015/10/03/omari-nyaega-machete-kenya-orphanage/ http://upvoted.com/2015/10/03/omari-nyaega-machete-kenya-orp... 202M+ people can surface his story and raise a ton of money, but our team of reporters has a much easier time following up to close the loop. We're working on anti-brigading tools. That's on us to get right, because a lot of "brigading" is AKA "how social media works." It's long been a very fuzzy definition, which is on us (e.g., how is it OK for a celeb to tweet to his followers about an AMA -- it's both "brigading" and "required for verification") and there's a more obvious and negative brigading we can thwart better with technology so that mods have the ability to throttle when, say, one community wants to all pile into a thread and sway it.