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> it would have all the problems Reddit has: terrible people controlling the conversation. I take serious offense to this. I am a moderator on reddit and the c

> it would have all the problems Reddit has: terrible people controlling the conversation. I take serious offense to this. I am a moderator on reddit and the communities I help out in are amazing. He paints all of reddit with the same brush but reddit is too large for that -- it's now the 9th largest website in the U.S according to Alexa. Sure, there are some horrible & trash communities. Perhaps there's a lot of them, but there's also a lot of amazing subreddits run by fantastic mods. Reddit is what you make of it - if you subscribe to those shitty subreddits, then your experience will be shitty. If you subscribe to great subreddits, then your experience will be equally great. Reddit is like a snapshot of the internet as a whole; there's the bad, there's some meh, and there's also some amazing content out there. You just have to look for it and tailor your experience for those things. If reddit is terrible, it's because you're not using reddit correctly. My reddit experience is great.

et-al 10y ago
For Reddit users who know the site, they know it's more of a platform to easily create a community without asking users to sign up for yet another site. However, for the outside world, they view Reddit either by the front page posts (which do have a tendency to deteriorate to a bunch of tired memes) or by the controversies that pop up in the media. And fortunately the loudest people on Reddit end up being the ones that represent it for the general public.
- et-al 10y ago
  (Clearly that was supposed to read unfortunately.)
Brakenshire 10y ago
By far the worst mistake that reddit makes is the emphasis it gives to r/all, and the way that impacts its public reputation, and shapes its audience. Reddit's algorithms are nowhere near sophisticated enough to compare long form articles to memes, and at this stage it is a failure even to attempt to do so. The site should abandon r/all, and probably also default subreddits, and make itself a repository of independent communities, which each rise or fall organically, according to their utility to their readers, rather than according to their desire to evangelize to the general community. The current system is built for abuse, and it's not a surprise that it produces dystopian, evangelical idiocy like fatpeoplehate and god knows what else. I am so blunt because I think reddit in its current form risks doing genuine damage.
trowawee 10y ago
Except the front page is frequently full of trash and racism and sexism is rarely more than a click away, and is frequently upvoted. Congratulations on your own curated Reddit, but if an online community has to be carefully curated by individual members just to get to a point where participating doesn't feel like wading through 5 feet of shit for the occasional shiny piece of tin foil, it's in failure mode. ETA: I say this as a person who reads Reddit material frequently, but doesn't interact much on it. I don't hate the platform. But I do hate a lot of the people.
TarpitCarnivore 10y ago
> If reddit is terrible, it's because you're not using reddit correctly. My reddit experience is great. I think Matt's comment was more about the up vote/down vote and how it can be controlled by a group of people. As for your comment this is the common defense people turn to when defending Reddit. While it's true, Reddit itself doesn't do a good job of showing you how to use it. Logged out users see /r/all which more often than not is filled with advice animals, pics, gifs and (right now) the_donald subs. It comes across really poor. Even if you convert that user there is still not a ton of guidance to finding relevant subs to your interest. There's so many splintered subs (/r/game vs /r/games vs /r/truegaming) that it can be hard to find the one meeting your needs. You can sub to them all, but then you have this massive feed of subs. Some of which you may never see because your front page is being overwhelmed by some of the more popular subs.
- panic 10y ago
  Yeah, /r/all needs to die. The problem is finding and showing great stuff while not flooding niche communities with new members. If you send tons of people to /r/gaming, /r/gaming will stop being good, people will migrate to /r/games, and the cycle will repeat. Any replacement for /r/all will have to address this issue somehow.
  - brazzledazzle 10y ago
    Or they just need to build the process of changing what subreddits end up on the front page to account for shifts in quality.
    - panic 10y ago
      My point was that being on the front page causes a shift in quality. The challenge is to drive people to high-quality communities without ruining those communities.
      - SpacialSense 10y ago
        You're also insinuating that any subreddit that hits critical mass becomes low quality.
sudojudo 10y ago
I get what you're saying, and it's absolutely true. But, at one point I had to step back and look at Reddit as a whole, and decide if I wanted to be a part of the overall community. Do I want to actively ignore my neighbors by wearing blinders, or should I just move to a new neighborhood, where it doesn't hurt to look out my window? Ultimately, I decided to move. The overwhelming ugliness that has infected Reddit is a hassle that I'd rather not deal with, and that I don't want to be associated with. Bad users aside, there's also the matter of the warranty canary, rampant guerrilla marketing, bots, and admins messing with the algorithms and UI for monetary reasons. Circa 2010, I absolutely loved Reddit; I went to meet-ups, modded subs, spoke of narwhals baconing, the whole nine yards. That place is gone now though, and the proof is in the fact that you, an assumingly decent user, has to say ignore the defaults (i.e. the backbone of the site), it's still okay... in certain places! Again, you're on point; there's still no substitute for many its educational, enthusiast, and hobbyist subs, anywhere else online. But, the main decks are flooding with sewage, and many of us want to be clear of the ship, and the waters around it, before the whole thing goes down.
pjc50 10y ago
Reddit is quite capable of being terrible for people who aren't even using it at all. They made some concession to eliminating the worst of the hate groups, but those that remain still leak into the rest of the site.
1123581321 10y ago
You are an unpaid moderator. Metafilter pays its moderators. Reddit wouldn't be good if it had to pay its moderators because it would need so many. I'd definitely argue that reddit is making the smarter financial choice by not paying its mods and having more of them, but that's not an option that would work for Metafilter.
- joshmillard 10y ago
  Or to take it from another angle, Reddit couldn't be as large. Which is sort of at the heart of what Matt was talking about with scaling community -- it's not that large is bad or that profit is bad, per se, but if your goal is to have a sense community ethos and some degree of coherence to the spirit of what being a site member means, you have to say no to some of the things that make big userbases and ever-upwards biz growth doable. MetaFilter's major revenue growth up through 2012 was despite a lack of, not because of, any attempt to chase down big userbase growth. It was a ride on the AdSense wagon during a very big period of growth on that end, while the site maintained a reasonable slow increase of users. Likewise the AdSense crash (and the double whammy we got for the punitive misclassification) wasn't the result of shutting down or reversing user-growth measure. The site strategy of maintaining a community that doesn't grow or change too fast was consistent throughout that long stretch of years, and it's something that means we didn't explode by orders of magnitude but also that, even after a rough period, we also haven't collapsed under the weight of too much growth-chasing overleveraging our resources and debts and so on. Reddit is a big, complicated topic about which I have lots of thoughts but no real interest in digging in on here or now. But there are some very complicated differences in the implications of what community, userbase, and moderation mean as words and ideas for a site like MetaFilter and a site like Reddit that make casual straight-across comparisons using those words essentially useless. The difference between volunteer and paid moderation is a very good, very big example of that.
bmm6o 10y ago
I'm sure your little neighborhood is great and positive and welcoming, but you have to admit that's the exception and not the rule. As another poster phrases it, "Reddit is a thimbleful of awesome floating in a bucket of shit". I wouldn't go that far, but it's closer than the usual framing of Reddit as having "dark corners"; that is, the site is much more bad than good. The unevenness is a shortcoming, blaming it on the users is completely missing the point. On top of that, using the good parts provides support for the bad parts.

et-al 10y ago

For Reddit users who know the site, they know it's more of a platform to easily create a community without asking users to sign up for yet another site. However, for the outside world, they view Reddit either by the front page posts (which do have a tendency to deteriorate to a bunch of tired memes) or by the controversies that pop up in the media. And fortunately the loudest people on Reddit end up being the ones that represent it for the general public.

et-al 10y ago
(Clearly that was supposed to read unfortunately.)

Brakenshire 10y ago

By far the worst mistake that reddit makes is the emphasis it gives to r/all, and the way that impacts its public reputation, and shapes its audience. Reddit's algorithms are nowhere near sophisticated enough to compare long form articles to memes, and at this stage it is a failure even to attempt to do so. The site should abandon r/all, and probably also default subreddits, and make itself a repository of independent communities, which each rise or fall organically, according to their utility to their readers, rather than according to their desire to evangelize to the general community. The current system is built for abuse, and it's not a surprise that it produces dystopian, evangelical idiocy like fatpeoplehate and god knows what else. I am so blunt because I think reddit in its current form risks doing genuine damage.

trowawee 10y ago

Except the front page is frequently full of trash and racism and sexism is rarely more than a click away, and is frequently upvoted. Congratulations on your own curated Reddit, but if an online community has to be carefully curated by individual members just to get to a point where participating doesn't feel like wading through 5 feet of shit for the occasional shiny piece of tin foil, it's in failure mode. ETA: I say this as a person who reads Reddit material frequently, but doesn't interact much on it. I don't hate the platform. But I do hate a lot of the people.

TarpitCarnivore 10y ago

> If reddit is terrible, it's because you're not using reddit correctly. My reddit experience is great. I think Matt's comment was more about the up vote/down vote and how it can be controlled by a group of people. As for your comment this is the common defense people turn to when defending Reddit. While it's true, Reddit itself doesn't do a good job of showing you how to use it. Logged out users see /r/all which more often than not is filled with advice animals, pics, gifs and (right now) the_donald subs. It comes across really poor. Even if you convert that user there is still not a ton of guidance to finding relevant subs to your interest. There's so many splintered subs (/r/game vs /r/games vs /r/truegaming) that it can be hard to find the one meeting your needs. You can sub to them all, but then you have this massive feed of subs. Some of which you may never see because your front page is being overwhelmed by some of the more popular subs.

panic 10y ago
Yeah, /r/all needs to die. The problem is finding and showing great stuff while not flooding niche communities with new members. If you send tons of people to /r/gaming, /r/gaming will stop being good, people will migrate to /r/games, and the cycle will repeat. Any replacement for /r/all will have to address this issue somehow.
- brazzledazzle 10y ago
  Or they just need to build the process of changing what subreddits end up on the front page to account for shifts in quality.
  - panic 10y ago
    My point was that being on the front page causes a shift in quality. The challenge is to drive people to high-quality communities without ruining those communities.
    - SpacialSense 10y ago
      You're also insinuating that any subreddit that hits critical mass becomes low quality.

sudojudo 10y ago

I get what you're saying, and it's absolutely true. But, at one point I had to step back and look at Reddit as a whole, and decide if I wanted to be a part of the overall community. Do I want to actively ignore my neighbors by wearing blinders, or should I just move to a new neighborhood, where it doesn't hurt to look out my window? Ultimately, I decided to move. The overwhelming ugliness that has infected Reddit is a hassle that I'd rather not deal with, and that I don't want to be associated with. Bad users aside, there's also the matter of the warranty canary, rampant guerrilla marketing, bots, and admins messing with the algorithms and UI for monetary reasons. Circa 2010, I absolutely loved Reddit; I went to meet-ups, modded subs, spoke of narwhals baconing, the whole nine yards. That place is gone now though, and the proof is in the fact that you, an assumingly decent user, has to say ignore the defaults (i.e. the backbone of the site), it's still okay... in certain places! Again, you're on point; there's still no substitute for many its educational, enthusiast, and hobbyist subs, anywhere else online. But, the main decks are flooding with sewage, and many of us want to be clear of the ship, and the waters around it, before the whole thing goes down.

pjc50 10y ago

Reddit is quite capable of being terrible for people who aren't even using it at all. They made some concession to eliminating the worst of the hate groups, but those that remain still leak into the rest of the site.

1123581321 10y ago

You are an unpaid moderator. Metafilter pays its moderators. Reddit wouldn't be good if it had to pay its moderators because it would need so many. I'd definitely argue that reddit is making the smarter financial choice by not paying its mods and having more of them, but that's not an option that would work for Metafilter.

joshmillard 10y ago
Or to take it from another angle, Reddit couldn't be as large. Which is sort of at the heart of what Matt was talking about with scaling community -- it's not that large is bad or that profit is bad, per se, but if your goal is to have a sense community ethos and some degree of coherence to the spirit of what being a site member means, you have to say no to some of the things that make big userbases and ever-upwards biz growth doable. MetaFilter's major revenue growth up through 2012 was despite a lack of, not because of, any attempt to chase down big userbase growth. It was a ride on the AdSense wagon during a very big period of growth on that end, while the site maintained a reasonable slow increase of users. Likewise the AdSense crash (and the double whammy we got for the punitive misclassification) wasn't the result of shutting down or reversing user-growth measure. The site strategy of maintaining a community that doesn't grow or change too fast was consistent throughout that long stretch of years, and it's something that means we didn't explode by orders of magnitude but also that, even after a rough period, we also haven't collapsed under the weight of too much growth-chasing overleveraging our resources and debts and so on. Reddit is a big, complicated topic about which I have lots of thoughts but no real interest in digging in on here or now. But there are some very complicated differences in the implications of what community, userbase, and moderation mean as words and ideas for a site like MetaFilter and a site like Reddit that make casual straight-across comparisons using those words essentially useless. The difference between volunteer and paid moderation is a very good, very big example of that.

bmm6o 10y ago

I'm sure your little neighborhood is great and positive and welcoming, but you have to admit that's the exception and not the rule. As another poster phrases it, "Reddit is a thimbleful of awesome floating in a bucket of shit". I wouldn't go that far, but it's closer than the usual framing of Reddit as having "dark corners"; that is, the site is much more bad than good. The unevenness is a shortcoming, blaming it on the users is completely missing the point. On top of that, using the good parts provides support for the bad parts.