4 ms·

Thank you for this very well written response. I was struggling to say what you just explained so well. The reason I personally think it will destroy Reddit is

• InclinedPlane 10y ago
  A lot of the default sub-reddits are weakly moderated, and so very vulnerable to brigading, bullying, harassment, and boundary pushing. You see a lot of carefully crafted racism and "anti-sjw" posts in the default sub-reddits, for example. Bit by bit, drop by drop, they apply a consistent pressure. The mods of those sub-reddits are too dumb to figure out what's going on, or just don't care. Unfortunately, all of this slowly drives away people who are sensitive enough to care, or just ordinary people. For them, it's not worth it to "fight the good fight", is some dumb sub-reddit worth that cost? Of course not, so they leave and go somewhere else. This is a slow dynamics problem, and the "good" parts of reddit aren't strong enough to save the site. Realistically, if reddit itself does nothing then it's maybe a 50/50 chance whether or not these forces eventually poison the site for average users, and people just stop going there. For most people these things aren't super noticeable, yet, because they're still not the dominant aspect of the site, but they've driven away who knows how many people, and continue to do so, while the racists, homophobes, and misogynists still have their little clubs on the site. Some of the worst sub-reddits were banned a while back, but many horrid ones still exist. And the people who spend their time there spend their time posting and voting on other parts of reddit as well.
  • TeMPOraL 10y ago
    > Of course not, so they leave and go somewhere else. Somewhere else often being another subreddit. Topical subreddits are fine. But I guess all depends on what we mean by "saving the site". > Realistically, if reddit itself does nothing then it's maybe a 50/50 chance whether or not these forces eventually poison the site for average users, and people just stop going there. People won't stop going to topical subreddits because main Reddit is not the discovery mechanism - Google, word-of-mouth and websites linking to topical subreddits are. As for poisoning the site for average users - I think average users are the poison.
• VLM 10y ago
  As an honest reply its not a Reddit specific problem that any discussion of technology, news, or politics inevitably leads to scorched earth where-ever its tried. Its not doomed because its reddit, its doomed because those are really dumb discussion topics to have unless you want to watch the world burn. Now if everyone present likes a nice bonfire, then sitting around toasting our marshmallows is fun, but there's always some "smokey the bear" who sees his duty as saying "only you can prevent forest fires". On the other hand, /r/mechanicalkeyboards is pretty awesome. Some of the modded minecraft specific subreddits I read are pretty awesome (shout out to /r/feedthebeast) Because there's never anything really new under the sun, the ham radio guys figured out codes of conduct about a century ago that actually worked along the lines of forbidding politics, religion, and other issues, at least in civilized company, along with some basic protocol, etc.
  • tomjen3 10y ago
    News and politics make sense, but how does discussions of tech inevitably lead to a scorched earth?