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While I definitely enjoy more nuanced and interesting discourse, I don't actually think that reddit has any problem. There is a self declared "elite" group of

by tensor 10y ago

While I definitely enjoy more nuanced and interesting discourse, I don't actually think that reddit has any problem. There is a self declared "elite" group of users on reddit who are always echoing exactly your sentiments to the point that it's almost a chant: groupthink, low quality comments, uniformed discourse! Of course, recognizing that there is a need and desire by some for a place to have more detailed and nuanced discussions is not bad in of itself. Arguably its' a very good thing. Where it turns bad is in their approach to a solution. Instead of "hey, people want a place where they can have more interesting discussions, let's go create one, promote, and moderate it!", they think "hm, these people with their memes and images, that's a problem. They shouldn't do that. We need to stop them and show them the right way to run a subreddit!" This latter thinking is incredibly intolerant, arrogant, and dangerous. It's the same type of thing that leads to laws being passed based on a particular religion or other philosophy that tries to ban thoughts different to theirs. This is why I say that reddit doesn't have a "problem" with low quality content. That's what a lot of people enjoy and they should have a place they can do that. If you want to change peoples minds, use words, not force. All that being said, I recognize that you didn't actually advocate that reddit be changed. More to your point, as others have said, one of the great things about reddit is that people are free to start their own subreddit and make it into whatever they wish. There are a lot of smaller more heavily moderated subreddits that have great discussion. People who are upset with the bigger subs should look for these or even create their own.

dogma1138 10y ago
My problem with Reddit is not not that COC and heavy moderation enabled group think and promotes censorship (both regular and self kind) is that it's conflict resolution model promotes segregation of ideas rather than discourse. Reddit is the place that instead of having /r/redvsblue you get /r/red and /r/blue 2 gated communities that simply live in their own little world happy with the perfect echo chamber they've created and that anyone who strays to post in the other camp's subreddit is automatically classified as a troll.
- jsprogrammer 10y ago
  It's not a perfect echo chamber as you can browser /r/all and see and contribute content from/to both communities.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - dogma1138 10y ago
    It's a perfect echo chamber because people who cross the line are downvoted and or banned on the account of being "trolls" quite often without any real justification for that, and the most common reply is you should go to /r/yourowntribe and stop "spamming" our sub Reddit. I truly miss the open forums (and even IRC, although that tended to be more focused) of the late 90's early 2000's yeah they could get vile some times but that's a bargain price for getting a public forum in which anyone can express their mind no matter how "wrong" or "offensive" some one can perceive that opinion to be. Today we get people claiming getting PTSD over twitter and every online community adopting a COC which often leaves no room for discourse that would make some one uncomfortable all and all forgetting that ideas that make some one uncomfortable are the ideas most worth discussing. 60 years ago it was "uncomfortable" for way to many people people to hear that blacks should be allowed to use the same bathroom as they are and thank cthulhu we didn't had Twitter and Reddit back then.
    - jsprogrammer 10y ago
      I think moderation should be done in the open. It's more an issue of people allowing their content to be filtered by others, I think. A downvote is only as powerful as the user's moderation privilege.
    - kwgardner 10y ago
      I'm curious, what do you think could make this better/possible? An obvious first step is removing downvotes so you can't completely obliterate someone who crosses sides to try to have a conversation, but after that, what else would help? In my mind, some kind of code of conduct would help further those conversations, because it doesn't prevent people from expressing their opinions, it just makes them express them civilly. And if they express an opposing view without being overly antagonistic, then hopefully the other side wouldn't start insult slinging, and if they do, then that's what the COC would be there for. I think there's a difference between having a "wrong" or "offensive" opinion, and expressing it in an offensive way. Do you think there's a way to achieve that balance, so that people can feel comfortable to express their opinions on either side, regardless of right or wrong, without it devolving into mudslinging and pure animosity on both sides? How do we accomplish that?
morgante 10y ago
> While I definitely enjoy more nuanced and interesting discourse, I don't actually think that reddit has any problem. You might not think it's a problem, but it's still a problem for Reddit: the conversation is generally inferior to the standards required for it to see mass adoption. A lot of people want to create and consume low quality content. I don't dispute that. But a lot of people don't want to and the way Reddit is organized unfortunately pushes the low quality to the top. Over the years, I have frequently tried to get into Reddit. I've found smaller subreddits and interesting communities, but even in them I'm confronted with low-effort comments too often. Structurally, the site just doesn't do enough to incentivize high quality contributions. It's fine for there to be places for low quality content. There's plenty of them on every social network. The problem for Reddit is that they're front and center, not at the fringes.
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago
  >Structurally, the site just doesn't do enough to incentivize high quality contributions. // As the parent intimated people don't all want your idea of quality. Reddit seems perfectly capable of quality within its structure - AskScience and AskHistorians seen like good examples. In other subs [SERIOUS] tags seem to work quite well. >The problem for Reddit is that they're front and center, not at the fringes. // It's primarily for entertainment the low SNR subreddits being most prominent seems to be a consequence of that.
  - morgante 10y ago
    > Reddit seems perfectly capable of quality within its structure - AskScience and AskHistorians seen like good examples. I've seen people point to specific subreddits as quality before, but I've never found it to be true. To verify, I just did a quick peruse through /r/AskScience. While the questions themselves are generally good and the SNR is definitely higher than Reddit overall, I hardly think it's an emblem of quality. There are plenty of drive-by comments with low substantive value and the combination of Reddits norms and algorithms don't seem to do a good job of burying those—even on the "best" subreddits.
    - 10y ago
Houshalter 10y ago
I upvoted you because for a moment I thought you were talking about the political censorship that happens on reddit. Which I agree is awful and I hate that. Mods censor opposing political opinions all the time and get away with it. But just standard moderation of content? That's absolutely necessary. Without moderations subreddits degrade into memes and low effort comments. You only need to look at web archive to see the quality of many subreddits vastly decline as they got big. As a mod of a default subreddit, we remove joke comments and image posts. And it's not like it's a new thing, we have always done that. And the quality is still far from perfect, but it's much better than other subs. Sometimes I click on the comments of a reddit post looking to see more discussion about it. And instead it's just a bunch of jokes. Often by a handful of people that lurk in the rising posts, and make sure they get their comments there first, and so beat all the other comments (reddit's comment sorting algorithm is god awful and easily exploited like that.) Even if they don't have anything to say, or any insight into the subject. Another problem is there are two different types of users. "Serious" users, for lack of a better name, and "entertainment" users. The users there for entertainment upvote images, jokes, etc. Serious users are looking for discussion and debate and whatever. These two categories aren't easily separated and often mix. The users looking for entertainment often take over subs about serious subjects, e.g. worldnews. The top posts become whatever pleases the lowest common denominator, or requires the least effort to read. Short articles are easier read the long articles, and images are even easier, and provocative headlines even easier. So image posts and headlines like "mildly important official says something politically unpopular" take over entirely.
- tensor 10y ago
  I'm not at all against moderation. I'm against the idea that subs that don't moderate out memes and jokes and images are somehow "bad" and should be removed. There have been more than one hostile takeovers of more popular subs, driven by the idea that these subs need to change. To me, this behaviour is wrong, these people should be making new subs instead. In short, we should stop saying that "low quality content subs" are a problem. They really are not. The problem is instead a lack of well moderated subs, and/or a lack of promoting these or inability to discover them.
empath75 10y ago
If Reddit has a problem, it's not the low quality content, which I'm totally fine with, depending on my mood. The problem it has is that it was targetted as a recruiting ground by hate groups. The red pill/gamer-gate types and stormfront guys are toxic. Also, for the first few years of its growth, the most popular search term that lead people to the site was 'jailbait'. That's the kind of community they nurtured and catered to.
basch 10y ago
You're right, people shouldnt be silenced for posting superficial content. At the same time, the ranking algorithms could be more flexible besides TOP, BEST, HOT, to let people more easily filter out what the types of posts they dont want to see. Reddit would benefit from some way to put it in "intellectual mode" or "picture mode" that weighed certain post types and subs heavier.
stcredzero 10y ago
This latter thinking is incredibly intolerant, arrogant, and dangerous. It's the same type of thing that leads to laws being passed based on a particular religion or other philosophy that tries to ban thoughts different to theirs. And that's the same type of thing as brigading. All the above is intolerance. We've forgotten as a society what that word really means.
yAnonymous 10y ago
Agreed. It seems beyond a certain amount of users, enforcing guidelines becomes almost impossible and the quality of content gets subjectively worse, if you belong to the original group of users. Reddit is a victim of its own success. The only real problems I see with Reddit are political censorship in default subs and corrupt mods. When you add all that together, Reddit (or at least the most visible part of it) really has become a bad place for open discussions.
brownbat 10y ago
The frustration comes from the fact these two types of users create a bimodal distribution of interest in posts. If you just separate upvote buttons into funny and intelligent/insightful, then let users sort by the type of comment/post they prefer, wouldn't it solve this? Slashdot does that, why hasn't that caught on? Complexity?
- criddell 10y ago
  I always think how sad it is that Reddit does so little with their users data. They know a lot about people who sign in - comments they vote up or down, subreddits they visit and subscribe to, types of comments they leave, and so on... and it seems like they do nothing with that data to make the individual experience better.
  - brownbat 10y ago
    Yeah, I was always waiting for prediction engines to kick into high gear on aggregators, recommending posts, subs, or even filtering comments based on what you seem to like. They could also harvest data on how often people click through a headline, how long they scroll through a comments page, how long until they move to the next item... So in addition to having more voting options on an aggregator, I also want a separate aggregator that's purely driven by behavioral data, like average clickthroughs and time on page.

by tensor 10y ago

dogma1138 10y ago

My problem with Reddit is not not that COC and heavy moderation enabled group think and promotes censorship (both regular and self kind) is that it's conflict resolution model promotes segregation of ideas rather than discourse. Reddit is the place that instead of having /r/redvsblue you get /r/red and /r/blue 2 gated communities that simply live in their own little world happy with the perfect echo chamber they've created and that anyone who strays to post in the other camp's subreddit is automatically classified as a troll.

jsprogrammer 10y ago
It's not a perfect echo chamber as you can browser /r/all and see and contribute content from/to both communities.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- dogma1138 10y ago
  It's a perfect echo chamber because people who cross the line are downvoted and or banned on the account of being "trolls" quite often without any real justification for that, and the most common reply is you should go to /r/yourowntribe and stop "spamming" our sub Reddit. I truly miss the open forums (and even IRC, although that tended to be more focused) of the late 90's early 2000's yeah they could get vile some times but that's a bargain price for getting a public forum in which anyone can express their mind no matter how "wrong" or "offensive" some one can perceive that opinion to be. Today we get people claiming getting PTSD over twitter and every online community adopting a COC which often leaves no room for discourse that would make some one uncomfortable all and all forgetting that ideas that make some one uncomfortable are the ideas most worth discussing. 60 years ago it was "uncomfortable" for way to many people people to hear that blacks should be allowed to use the same bathroom as they are and thank cthulhu we didn't had Twitter and Reddit back then.
  - jsprogrammer 10y ago
    I think moderation should be done in the open. It's more an issue of people allowing their content to be filtered by others, I think. A downvote is only as powerful as the user's moderation privilege.
  - kwgardner 10y ago
    I'm curious, what do you think could make this better/possible? An obvious first step is removing downvotes so you can't completely obliterate someone who crosses sides to try to have a conversation, but after that, what else would help? In my mind, some kind of code of conduct would help further those conversations, because it doesn't prevent people from expressing their opinions, it just makes them express them civilly. And if they express an opposing view without being overly antagonistic, then hopefully the other side wouldn't start insult slinging, and if they do, then that's what the COC would be there for. I think there's a difference between having a "wrong" or "offensive" opinion, and expressing it in an offensive way. Do you think there's a way to achieve that balance, so that people can feel comfortable to express their opinions on either side, regardless of right or wrong, without it devolving into mudslinging and pure animosity on both sides? How do we accomplish that?

morgante 10y ago

> While I definitely enjoy more nuanced and interesting discourse, I don't actually think that reddit has any problem. You might not think it's a problem, but it's still a problem for Reddit: the conversation is generally inferior to the standards required for it to see mass adoption. A lot of people want to create and consume low quality content. I don't dispute that. But a lot of people don't want to and the way Reddit is organized unfortunately pushes the low quality to the top. Over the years, I have frequently tried to get into Reddit. I've found smaller subreddits and interesting communities, but even in them I'm confronted with low-effort comments too often. Structurally, the site just doesn't do enough to incentivize high quality contributions. It's fine for there to be places for low quality content. There's plenty of them on every social network. The problem for Reddit is that they're front and center, not at the fringes.

pbhjpbhj 10y ago
>Structurally, the site just doesn't do enough to incentivize high quality contributions. // As the parent intimated people don't all want your idea of quality. Reddit seems perfectly capable of quality within its structure - AskScience and AskHistorians seen like good examples. In other subs [SERIOUS] tags seem to work quite well. >The problem for Reddit is that they're front and center, not at the fringes. // It's primarily for entertainment the low SNR subreddits being most prominent seems to be a consequence of that.
- morgante 10y ago
  > Reddit seems perfectly capable of quality within its structure - AskScience and AskHistorians seen like good examples. I've seen people point to specific subreddits as quality before, but I've never found it to be true. To verify, I just did a quick peruse through /r/AskScience. While the questions themselves are generally good and the SNR is definitely higher than Reddit overall, I hardly think it's an emblem of quality. There are plenty of drive-by comments with low substantive value and the combination of Reddits norms and algorithms don't seem to do a good job of burying those—even on the "best" subreddits.
  - 10y ago

Houshalter 10y ago

I upvoted you because for a moment I thought you were talking about the political censorship that happens on reddit. Which I agree is awful and I hate that. Mods censor opposing political opinions all the time and get away with it. But just standard moderation of content? That's absolutely necessary. Without moderations subreddits degrade into memes and low effort comments. You only need to look at web archive to see the quality of many subreddits vastly decline as they got big. As a mod of a default subreddit, we remove joke comments and image posts. And it's not like it's a new thing, we have always done that. And the quality is still far from perfect, but it's much better than other subs. Sometimes I click on the comments of a reddit post looking to see more discussion about it. And instead it's just a bunch of jokes. Often by a handful of people that lurk in the rising posts, and make sure they get their comments there first, and so beat all the other comments (reddit's comment sorting algorithm is god awful and easily exploited like that.) Even if they don't have anything to say, or any insight into the subject. Another problem is there are two different types of users. "Serious" users, for lack of a better name, and "entertainment" users. The users there for entertainment upvote images, jokes, etc. Serious users are looking for discussion and debate and whatever. These two categories aren't easily separated and often mix. The users looking for entertainment often take over subs about serious subjects, e.g. worldnews. The top posts become whatever pleases the lowest common denominator, or requires the least effort to read. Short articles are easier read the long articles, and images are even easier, and provocative headlines even easier. So image posts and headlines like "mildly important official says something politically unpopular" take over entirely.

tensor 10y ago
I'm not at all against moderation. I'm against the idea that subs that don't moderate out memes and jokes and images are somehow "bad" and should be removed. There have been more than one hostile takeovers of more popular subs, driven by the idea that these subs need to change. To me, this behaviour is wrong, these people should be making new subs instead. In short, we should stop saying that "low quality content subs" are a problem. They really are not. The problem is instead a lack of well moderated subs, and/or a lack of promoting these or inability to discover them.

empath75 10y ago

If Reddit has a problem, it's not the low quality content, which I'm totally fine with, depending on my mood. The problem it has is that it was targetted as a recruiting ground by hate groups. The red pill/gamer-gate types and stormfront guys are toxic. Also, for the first few years of its growth, the most popular search term that lead people to the site was 'jailbait'. That's the kind of community they nurtured and catered to.

basch 10y ago

You're right, people shouldnt be silenced for posting superficial content. At the same time, the ranking algorithms could be more flexible besides TOP, BEST, HOT, to let people more easily filter out what the types of posts they dont want to see. Reddit would benefit from some way to put it in "intellectual mode" or "picture mode" that weighed certain post types and subs heavier.

stcredzero 10y ago

This latter thinking is incredibly intolerant, arrogant, and dangerous. It's the same type of thing that leads to laws being passed based on a particular religion or other philosophy that tries to ban thoughts different to theirs. And that's the same type of thing as brigading. All the above is intolerance. We've forgotten as a society what that word really means.

yAnonymous 10y ago

Agreed. It seems beyond a certain amount of users, enforcing guidelines becomes almost impossible and the quality of content gets subjectively worse, if you belong to the original group of users. Reddit is a victim of its own success. The only real problems I see with Reddit are political censorship in default subs and corrupt mods. When you add all that together, Reddit (or at least the most visible part of it) really has become a bad place for open discussions.

brownbat 10y ago

The frustration comes from the fact these two types of users create a bimodal distribution of interest in posts. If you just separate upvote buttons into funny and intelligent/insightful, then let users sort by the type of comment/post they prefer, wouldn't it solve this? Slashdot does that, why hasn't that caught on? Complexity?

criddell 10y ago
I always think how sad it is that Reddit does so little with their users data. They know a lot about people who sign in - comments they vote up or down, subreddits they visit and subscribe to, types of comments they leave, and so on... and it seems like they do nothing with that data to make the individual experience better.
- brownbat 10y ago
  Yeah, I was always waiting for prediction engines to kick into high gear on aggregators, recommending posts, subs, or even filtering comments based on what you seem to like. They could also harvest data on how often people click through a headline, how long they scroll through a comments page, how long until they move to the next item... So in addition to having more voting options on an aggregator, I also want a separate aggregator that's purely driven by behavioral data, like average clickthroughs and time on page.