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This seems like the story of every great Internet site, ever. It's great until the lowest common denominator finds it then it goes to crap. Reddit is only spa

by surge 11y ago

This seems like the story of every great Internet site, ever. It's great until the lowest common denominator finds it then it goes to crap. Reddit is only spared because you can unsubscribe from default subreddit's and find more niche sub-reddit's that attract a niche audience or subset of users that are less likely to "sh#tpost" for lack of a better term. Not to say all new users are bad or don't contribute anything new, but the noise to signal ratio is way worse the more people pile on and start becoming an echo chamber. I've even seen it a little with HN as its gained popularity, but thankfully this site is so niche its not too bad. But I kind of wish I could do that with other community sites and social media. I know a lot of people loved twitter, or digg, or whatever back in the day before the celebrities, media, and extended relatives caught on.

CaptSpify 11y ago
There was a picture that I remember describing "The problem with social media" and it had a couple of people sharing something they thought interesting with friends. Then five more people joined and it got noisy. Then a bunch of people showed up, spouting irrelevant noise. Then the first group of people left. Unfortunately I think it's inevitable. If only there was a site where I could search for images like that |;)
- surge 11y ago
  Yeah, I've accepted that, and for the most part, usually something new comes along and replaces it. The trick is to find where people went after X site went to crap. Sometimes though, a suitable replacement doesn't always crop up. I haven't seen a good imgur replacement.
jnky 11y ago
Ah, yes. Eternal September. A problem almost as old as the WWW. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
CM30 11y ago
I'm not sure this is necessarily an unavoidable fate for internet sites, even communities. You can keep the signal to noise ratio decent if you've got an active team of moderators, fairly heavy pruning of content that doesn't add anything to the conversation and the willingness to say no, my site doesn't offer 'freedom of speech'. Unfortunately, most big sites seem to be built on the 'leave it as a complete free for all with no moderation whatsoever' model, which immediately stops working the minute the memberbase expands from early adopters to every Tom, Dick and Harry. That's why Reddit, Twitter, etc have had so many problems. They were built with the idea of 'anyone can say virtually anything' in mind, then realised it would lead to massive amounts of trolling and personal attacks and questionable content, then dug themselves an even deeper hole by trying to moderate the site in woefully biased ways.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  Twitter isn't really a single community, it's many (self-selecting) communities. This means that Twitter don't really need to moderate low-quality content or what have you, but they do need to solve harassment.

by surge 11y ago

CaptSpify 11y ago

There was a picture that I remember describing "The problem with social media" and it had a couple of people sharing something they thought interesting with friends. Then five more people joined and it got noisy. Then a bunch of people showed up, spouting irrelevant noise. Then the first group of people left. Unfortunately I think it's inevitable. If only there was a site where I could search for images like that |;)

surge 11y ago
Yeah, I've accepted that, and for the most part, usually something new comes along and replaces it. The trick is to find where people went after X site went to crap. Sometimes though, a suitable replacement doesn't always crop up. I haven't seen a good imgur replacement.

jnky 11y ago

Ah, yes. Eternal September. A problem almost as old as the WWW. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

CM30 11y ago

I'm not sure this is necessarily an unavoidable fate for internet sites, even communities. You can keep the signal to noise ratio decent if you've got an active team of moderators, fairly heavy pruning of content that doesn't add anything to the conversation and the willingness to say no, my site doesn't offer 'freedom of speech'. Unfortunately, most big sites seem to be built on the 'leave it as a complete free for all with no moderation whatsoever' model, which immediately stops working the minute the memberbase expands from early adopters to every Tom, Dick and Harry. That's why Reddit, Twitter, etc have had so many problems. They were built with the idea of 'anyone can say virtually anything' in mind, then realised it would lead to massive amounts of trolling and personal attacks and questionable content, then dug themselves an even deeper hole by trying to moderate the site in woefully biased ways.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
Twitter isn't really a single community, it's many (self-selecting) communities. This means that Twitter don't really need to moderate low-quality content or what have you, but they do need to solve harassment.