20 ms·

I think much of Reddit's problems with its userbase boil down to an early failure to manage expectations. It's pretty clear that the Reddit corporation doesn't

I think much of Reddit's problems with its userbase boil down to an early failure to manage expectations. It's pretty clear that the Reddit corporation doesn't want Reddit to be an anything-goes, absolute free speech zone with no moderation or anti-harassment policies -- but that's what the site actually was for many years. Now, when the company cracks down, users think their freedoms are being curtailed. The mistake was ever allowing that kind of freedom in the first place, because people developed an expectation that it would persist. Compounding that problem, the fact that the site was unregulated for so long caused it to attract the kind of people who need to be regulated the most. In other words, it's no surprise that the most tolerant communities attract people who are difficult to tolerate. I suspect Twitter is having similar issues dealing with harassment, after letting it happen for so long. If there is a lesson in this, it is that online communities which plan to implement anti-harassment policies ought to do so from the beginning, and develop the expectation among the users that such policies exist, and will continue to exist. Don't just tack them on after several years, and don't enforce them inconsistently and arbitrarily as Reddit has done. It will be difficult for Condé Nast to get its money's worth out of Reddit now. I doubt it will ever shake its negative reputation.

mindslight 10y ago
> The mistake was ever allowing that kind of freedom in the first place, because people developed an expectation that it would persist. Sure, and then we wouldn't be talking about reddit but rather whatever site was actually free at the time. The only reason web forums exist is because people are lazy about adopting decentralized Free software. Yet the owners of these centralized services, as well as paternalistic spectators, end up deluded that the communities they serve are "theirs" to mold and control. In reality these sites' power is but an epsilon, and they should be thankful they can at least exercise it to generate revenue by surveilling users who are too lazy to protect themselves.
- eropple 10y ago
  > The only reason web forums exist is because people are lazy about adopting decentralized Free software Or because that open-source software is user-hostile and has no serious argument for its use for 99% of people. When users don't do something you like, in almost every instance it's your failing rather than theirs.
  - Practicality 10y ago
    Probably because it's free software. "Beggars can't be choosers" There are very few open software engineers who like improving UX. Since it's free you have to like it to do it, so I don't know if this will ever change.
    - eropple 10y ago
      I fully agree with you. Damning the plebs for not being enlightened enough to use stuff that, if we're being real here, is worse by the metrics actual people use to decide what they're gonna use--that way leads to a really gross, insular mindset that doesn't help anybody.
    - apatters 10y ago
      Is it really that they don't like improving UX, or is it that they don't know how, or don't respect people who understand UX? I like improving UX but when I look at many open source projects from the outside they are run by cranky ubernerds who triumph technical merits above everything else and I can't imagine them being very cooperative with someone whose specialty was "UX."
      - jcbrand 10y ago
        > I can't imagine them being very cooperative with someone whose specialty was "UX." Sounds like you've never actually tried. I maintain an open source project (https://conversejs.org https://conversejs.org) that could benefit greatly from the expertise of a UX pro. However, to date no-one has approached me to help with this (specifically regarding UX). If you or any other UX people here are interested in helping out, hit me up at https://opkode.com/contact.html https://opkode.com/contact.html I definitely don't have a lack of respect for UX people, having been fortunate enough to work with someone whom I consider to be a brilliant UX designer.
        dbg31415 10y ago
        We can all have different experiences. Good software takes strategy, UX, visual design, solution architecture, software development, QA, DevOps, post-launch support, KPI monitoring & analysis, marketing... and probably a few other skill sets to really have it thrive. The trouble with many open source projects is that they are one-man endeavors, and the person who started it cares more about control than quality outcome. "This is MY pet project..." is a horrible mentality to take when shopping for a partner. The moment the dev thinks, "Gosh, I'd rather spend my free time watching a baseball game than making those 50 changes the UX guy asked me to make... especially since all I really wanted from him was a color pallet..." that's about when the partnership dissolves. (Misunderstanding about the different areas of expertise intentionally included.) One person can't think time is worth more than a teammate's. Good software requires compromise and horse trading and a lot of planning. You typically need money to keep everyone interested.
- Karunamon 10y ago
  You find that power dynamic a lot in linked-community sites like Reddit and image boards. I find that the most enjoyable communities to be in are the ones where the site staff wield their power to make the user experience more enjoyable, rather than treating their users as cattle to be corralled. Acting like they provide a service rather than allowing you in their garden, in other words. A few Reddit communities sprung up that track content deletions, like /r/undelete, and the sheer amount of stuff that winds up disappeared on arbitrary whims, rather than violation of a stated objective rule, is huge. Coincidentally, when the moderators of those places show up, the attitudes on display are the worst kind of toxic.
- lrem 10y ago
  I'm wondering what kind of revenue can actually be generated by surveiling users. Any numbers?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- AJ007 10y ago
  To be fair, a lot of web forums have run on free software. Centralization was what happened when usenet was over run with spam. Laziness is a poor explanation given one alternative exists and requires no maintenance, and the other takes a great deal of time, effort, and especially in the past, a lot of money to run.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > The only reason web forums exist is because people are lazy about adopting decentralized Free software. Well, other than the fact that a whole lot of the software involved in using web forums, on both the server and client end, is "decentralized free software". And the fact that other software (much, but not all, of it free) was adopted for discussions before web forums got popular. Web forums got popular because -- on both server and client end -- most people are going to have the tools anyway, so adopting a whole new software (free or otherwise) stack for discussions is unattractive.
  - mindslight 10y ago
    It ceases to be free software when it is adopted by many people beyond the administrator, as they lack the freedom to study and modify it. And it's certainly not decentralized - each instance of the software is its own walled garden. I can't install my own instance of say phpbb and use it to communicate with an existing forum.
gdwatson 10y ago
Part of the problem is that Reddit even more than Twitter is structured as a meta-community, and so any standards which are imposed will be external to a given sub-community. That means that they will be perceived as, and may sometimes be, social and political censorship.
- bloaf 10y ago
  I think this is a somewhat more recent (i.e. within the past 4 years) development on reddit. For a long time it seemed to me that the various sub-communities grew out of some shared sense of what it was to be a redditor (memes like the dumb "narwhal bacon" thing were expressions of that.) People were redditors first, and members of the various sub-communities second. But recently this has not been the case. People seem to want to be able to create their own gardens in which they can create their own "language of good and evil that their neighbor does not understand." People don't want to associate with reddit as a whole, only the parts they chose to incorporate into their little filter bubble.
  - xemdetia 10y ago
    I find myself blaming the some of the default sub choices from within the past 4 years. The choices made there created a really frustrating global reddit user experience- it used to be that when you first logged in there was only a dozen subreddits people were looking at. In the last four years the default experience is now up to like 50 subreddits which in my opinion take a very curated and particular view of all that's available which just does not match up to everyone. You just didn't have worldnews, pics, science, gaming and then what you were interested in to be a redditor, it's 50 things + what you are interested in. So the 'identity' of what was a redditor changed dramatically from the start, and it's left us worse since the a lot of the default subs aren't exposing what was good and are mostly mindless/bandwagon-y in operation. Not to mention that some of the default subreddits that got chosen were poisonous and it changed the tone. Here is a list of what changed: https://www.reddit.com/r/defaults/ https://www.reddit.com/r/defaults/
    - cookiecaper 10y ago
zarriak 10y ago
I think the biggest problem with it in general was how it greatly relied upon moderators of the individual subreddits. This inherently creates problems as they have to rely upon many individuals who have very different ideas and goals from the Reddit staff, both in terms of monetization and in moderation. It is inherent in social media, the more stuff you allow on your platform, the less able you are to generate revenue. I think that has been clearly demonstrated by Twitter, 8chan, 4chan, etc. never being able to generate large amounts of profit. Facebook realized that censoring is unfortunately profitable, and made a platform that is much more easily advertised upon. It is similar to the development of sports, where in the US all sports have commercial breaks, even in things like F1 that do not run commercials during the race, while ads are run over it in the US. I mean it even happens in soccer with showing ads during the game, as clearly demonstrated by the sprint ads during Copa America.
- brokenmachine 10y ago
  It is an interesting idea that it is the censoring that makes Facebook profitable, but I'm not sure that I agree with it. I would say that the "made a platform that is much more easily advertised upon" is the important part, combined with the massive data-gathering so the ads can be targeted better.
  - zarriak 10y ago
    Well I guess I should say that a part of the design is self censoring, as what one says with anonymity is varying ranges of difference from that which one says when they are sharing it with all of their friends and family.
    - brokenmachine 10y ago
      That's why I personally have self-censored myself from using Facebook at all. I've discovered that there are actually zero things that I want to announce to all my friends and family at once.
      - 10y ago
Esau 10y ago
I think what happens when we have truly anonymous free speech, on places such as Reddit, Twitter, and 4Chan, shows that we are nowhere as civilized as we like to think we are.
- gohrt 10y ago
  Are we more civilized when there is no anonymous free speech, and people are abusive only in semi-private situations?
  - twblalock 10y ago
    I think so. Actions toward others have a much larger societal impact than privately held beliefs. For example, if someone has racist beliefs which do not affect his actions in any way, his effect on other people in society would be exactly the same as it would be if he did not have racist beliefs. In other words, beliefs that are not acted on or expressed have no effect on society. There may be some social benefit to knowing who the racists are. But if they are anonymous, that benefit is probably lost. Their speech is protected by the first amendment either way, but Reddit is not required to enforce the constitution, so they can shut down the accounts if they want to.
    - brokenmachine 10y ago
      I can't imagine a situation where someone has beliefs that do not affect his actions in any way. I would agree that unexpressed values would propagate less.
      - twblalock 10y ago
        > I can't imagine a situation where someone has beliefs that do not affect his actions in any way. That was an extreme example used to illustrate the point I was making. Racism is also only an example; there are plenty of other beliefs that are bad for society. Personally, I suspect that sexism is probably far more prevalent on Reddit than racism, for example. Social stigma can prevent one's beliefs from affecting one's actions, or at least reduce the effect of those beliefs on one's actions. If it is shameful to be perceived as a racist, racists will attempt to hide their racism by not acting in racist ways toward others, at least when other people are looking. This does not obviate the effects of unconscious biases or eliminate racism, but the net result for society is fewer overtly racist actions, and that's a good thing. If racism becomes acceptable again, racists will feel freer to act on their beliefs, which will make life worse for the targets of their racism. So, there is a case to be made that if people repress their beliefs only partially, society is better off -- not as much better off as if certain people repressed their beliefs fully, but still better off. The danger of allowing racism to flourish in online communities, especially ones as large as Reddit and Twitter, is that it re-normalizes racism and makes it seem acceptable to be a racist. It can be more than merely acceptable -- it can even be a contrarian badge of pride, justified as a rebellion against political correctness. (That kind of justification for it is reinforced when anti-harassment policies are not uniformly and consistently enforced, because it can make moderation appear to be arbitrary or politically motivated.) When that kind of thing happens, it makes society worse.
beefsack 10y ago
> If there is a lesson in this, it is that online communities which plan to implement anti-harassment policies ought to do so from the beginning, and develop the expectation among the users that such policies exist, and will continue to exist. A few relatively popular programming languages have begun publishing official community code of conduct documents[1][2]. While initially I thought it was a bit overreaching, I can now see steering a community early is much easier than trying to change course later. [1] https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/conduct.html https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/conduct.html [2] https://golang.org/conduct https://golang.org/conduct
- favorited 10y ago
  To add to the list, Swift[1] had a code of conduct as soon as it was open-sourced. Mono even adopted one the same day[2] because they thought it was a good idea. The LLVM Project is in the final stages of adopting one[3] (after much discussion) as well. This will (once adopted) apply to the LLVM backend, the Clang (C, C++, & ObjC) front-end, libc++, the LLDB debugger, etc. [1] https://swift.org/community/#code-of-conduct https://swift.org/community/#code-of-conduct [2] https://twitter.com/migueldeicaza/status/672590341757927426 https://twitter.com/migueldeicaza/status/672590341757927426 [3] http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2016-June/101807.html http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2016-June/101807.ht...
- twblalock 10y ago
  It's a good way to cover your ass if you need to kick people out of the community later. They can't credibly accuse you of making up ad-hoc rules if your code of conduct has existed the entire time.
- InclinedPlane 10y ago
  Pretty much every community over a few hundred people in size will eventually be faced with a moment where the "powers that be" are forced to sit down and have the "what are we going to do about person X" talk. Every one of them. That's just the nature of human beings. If you find yourself in that position and the person is merely toxic to interact with, count yourself lucky, because it can often be a million times worse. If you are in a position of power with a community it's very important to look at codes of conduct, standards of behavior, and mechanisms for reporting/tracking/resolution early. Because building those systems early will make that "what are we gonna do" moment a zillion times easier to handle. It'll also usually mean that things get handled earlier than they would otherwise, possibly before they've escalated out of control and possibly avoiding a lot of damage that might have happened otherwise (to individuals and to the community).
munificent 10y ago
> Compounding that problem, the fact that the site was unregulated for so long caused it to attract the kind of people who need to be regulated the most. Is there any evidence that reddit has a greater fraction of asshats than the general population at large?
- vertex-four 10y ago
  The issue isn't really the amount of asshats. In the physical world, it's generally really unlikely that you'll get more than a couple of particularly egregious asshats with similar beliefs in the same place. When you do, it's often a news story. Online, just as people with good intentions can find each other, people with bad ones can find each other and band together. In other words, the unmoderated Internet is an amplification device for small groups of people who might otherwise not get a voice, and it doesn't actually matter what they're saying. Of course, it's a lot quicker and easier to cause damage than to do anything constructive, resulting in unmoderated spaces online probably doing a lot more harm than good in the near-term. Long-term? No idea.
  - tzs 10y ago
    > Online, just as people with good intentions can find each other, people with bad ones can find each other and band together. Yup. Besides egregious asshats, it has greatly helped conspiracy theorists to get together, fringe religious groups to get together, and fringe political groups to get together. > In other words, the unmoderated Internet is an amplification device for small groups of people who might otherwise not get a voice, and it doesn't actually matter what they're saying. I think that the amplification effect does vary, though, among different groups. Some groups already had worked out good ways to communicate before the internet, and to spread information. It wasn't as fast or as convenient as the internet, so things were slower than they are now, but it got the job done. An example of such a group would be those in STEM fields. We had big libraries of technical material extensively cataloged and indexed and cross referenced, an extensive system of mailed bulletins and journals to keep us informed of new developments in our fields. We had telephones for long distance real time person to person discussion, and the postal system for less urgent communication or for sending documents and photographs. The internet was a huge increase in the access to and speed of sending information for STEM people, but in some sense it was just a change in efficiency, not a fundamental change in what we could accomplish. I've compared it before to the printing press. We had books before the printing press, but it took a long time to make copies and they were expensive. The printing press made it faster and cheaper to make copies. For those groups that were not organized like this, which includes the random asshats, the conspiracy theorists, and so on, the internet was a fundamental change. For them it like the discovery of fire or the development of agriculture. It put them in a whole new world.
Fej 10y ago
It's not just that the site was that way, a free-speech zone, for many years. It was their official policy. They were quite pretentious about it as well, leading the reddit community to believe that this would be the permanent policy. To be honest, that is still mostly how it is; the admins only ban a subreddit when it generates a critical mass of bad press. They don't want to drive away their users. They know how Digg died. They're smart enough not to piss off the community enough such that any significant number of users will leave.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Quequau 10y ago
  I think something really important that doesn't get discussed very often when "free speech" comes up is that there really are categories of speech which most reasonable people expect and perhaps even prefer would not be 'protected' (or in the context of Reddit, permitted and perhaps celebrated). More importantly there are categories of speech which are not put forward in good faith but are instead intended to do damage to communities that host them. Among the various errors the administrators of Reddit may be guilty of, underestimating the damage & toxicity some categories of speech made in bad faith cause and having prepared no mechanisms to help their communities be resistant to or minimize that toxicity might be the most significant. Digg died because Reddit existed, so there was somewhere for disaffected Digg users to go to. In particular users who by & large were interested in good faith participation. There is no similar analog that exists today and because users who show tendencies to indulge in bad faith participation new alternative sites often struggle with dealing a level of toxic behavior which makes it extraordinarily difficult to maintain growth.
  - forgottenpass 10y ago
    I think something really important that doesn't get discussed very often when "free speech" comes up is that there really are categories of speech which most reasonable people expect and perhaps even prefer would not be 'protected' In a sense it always comes up. Without sticking my neck out to say what reddit should or shouldn't allow, I simply want to point out that principled positions only count when they're uncomfortable to uphold. We wouldn't be having a conversation about free speech in the first place unless the conversation has already turned to the topic of sweeping away uncomfortable speech. If someone wanted to make a convincing argument about speech which should be 'unprotected' there has to be a conflicting principle, or it's just lip service to the idea of "free speech" (because it's generally recognized as virtuous and they don't want to be seen as opposing it). "Fighting words" are unprotected in so far as they represent incitement to an immediate breach of the peace. Other principles raised to carve out exceptions to free speech should be similar in the obviousness that it's categorically not about suppressing ideas.
kickme444 10y ago
I have a thesis that is basically identical to yours about unmanaged expectations and community being the main root of the problem that reddit/twitter/etc are facing, which is part of the reason why we started Imzy https://www.imzy.com/imzy https://www.imzy.com/imzy We got some press early on that really told an untrue narrative of what we are trying to do, but we've made a ton of progress in a few months of our private beta and our communities and platform are really beginning to come together. The link I gave above is to our company community and if anyone wants to try Imzy out I will approve your request as soon as you make it.
- minimaxir 10y ago
  Self-promotion aside, you should disclose that you are ex-Reddit.
  - phyzome 10y ago
    To be fair, kickme444 was pretty well-known as a reddit employee! (But explicit disclosure is good too.)
    - pferde 10y ago
      Some of us rarely ever look at the username behind (above) a comment. I personally just don't care, if the content is interesting. And even if I did, there is just too many users, across various discussion sites, to keep all the pseudonyms and their comment history in one's head.
- Dylan16807 10y ago
  Would you care to give a true narrative of what you're trying to do? You linked to an empty page where I can request an invite, and the "about us" page just says you're "rethinking" communities online. What is the nature of moderation and communication on the site? I can glean a bit of info from news sites, but not very much if you say they're fundamentally misunderstanding you.
  - 10y ago
maxerickson 10y ago
Reddit is owned by Advance Publications and some other investors (there was a round a few years ago http://www.redditblog.com/2014/09/fundraising-for-reddit.html http://www.redditblog.com/2014/09/fundraising-for-reddit.htm... ). Advance also owns Conde Nast, but they restructured reddit out of Conde Nast in 2011.
empath75 10y ago
Reddit's main problem is that they spent years building their user base as a site to find 'jailbait' porn (it was by far the largest search result that brought people to Reddit for a long time). That created a toxic culture, which allowed stormfront and similar groups to use it as a recruitment ground for racists. Reddit still refuses to do anything about it. The 'quarantined' a bunch of truly vile subreddits but all that does is give them a place where they can coordinate brigades of the public subs out of view.
- adevine 10y ago
  This isn't how I remember the culture years ago. I looked at reddit every now and then, but I really came over six years ago during the big Digg v4 revolt when Digg fucked up their site. At the time, I remember being really impressed how many of the comments on reddit were more personally supportive, which I rarely saw elsewhere - for example, I learned a ton from r/fitness back then. Yes, there were the more odious subreddits, but it was perfectly possible to surf around reddit and never be bothered by those. The culture of reddit definitely seems to have gotten much worse over the past 5 years - to me, it just generally seems meaner, and there feels like there is more trolling overall. Even simple, seemingly straightforward posts seem more likely to spark some sort of vitriolic debate. Perhaps it was inevitable as reddit grew, but it still kind of sucks.
  - liotier 10y ago
    > This isn't how I remember the culture years ago The very nature of Reddit is that each person will have different experience & memories: the truth of Reddit is that thre is no Reddit - there are only subreddits. So, unsubscribe from most default subreddits, choose your communities and you'll be like me - having a 99% positive experience !
- jdminhbg 10y ago
  > (it was by far the largest search result that brought people to Reddit for a long time) I'm pretty skeptical of this. I can maybe see my way to believing that googling "jailbait" beats out any single one of ["pic" "pics" "funny" "joke" ...], but the normal SFW subreddits have always been vastly bigger than the porn subs. I'm also really skeptical of the causation chain that leads from jailbait -> Stormfront -> general toxic culture. Do you have any harder evidence of this? Edit: Sorry, "normal SFW," not "normal NSFW."
psyc 10y ago
I use Reddit heavily, and subscribe to a wide variety of different sized subs. AskReddit is the only one I'm aware of that's still remotely anything-goes. Every other sub is so heavily modded that I have no expectation of any given thread I start staying up more than a couple hours. It's going the way of Wikipedia - so policed, it's no longer worth the effort to contribute at all.
neotek 10y ago
>It will be difficult for Condé Nast to get its money's worth out of Reddit now. Condé Nast hasn't owned Reddit for half a decade now. Advance Publications owns both of them, and Reddit was split off as a separate entity with its own board and shareholders, one of which is Advance.
- uptown 10y ago
  Well then that will make it even more difficult!
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
kartickv 10y ago
I have a theory — to clean up a site, find and expel the most egregious offenders, like the people who engage in repeated name-calling ("You are a fucking asshole!") as opposed to constructive discussion. You can't police every user, but if you find and expel the worst offenders, I suspect it will have a significant effect on the quality of conversation.
- codezero 10y ago
  You'd be very surprised. The most abrasive people in a community do a very good job of building a positive reputation amongst other "power users" such that banning them causes a ripple effect in the community that _always_ makes the moderators look like one-sided haters.
  - kartickv 10y ago
    Sure, the moderators may end up looking one-sided, but it sends a clear signal as to what kind of behaviour is not tolerated. The other members can adjust to the new normal, and some will leave. Either way, you've cleaned up the site to some extent.
- duiker101 10y ago
  name calling is not even on the list of stuff that I would have placed in a list of bad things users of Reddit do. Unfortunately, while that could be applied to HN, reddit is another world. Much of the freedom of speech culture still exists and while not on the main page, there are a lot of communities dedicated to hate or just fighting each other and instigating rage.
  - kartickv 10y ago
    Name-calling was an example of bad behaviour you want to ban. I'm sure we can think of other, worse, types of behaviour. Whatever it is, find the most egregious offenders, and ban them.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  I think that works only when you set those expectations up front. This is an apples-to-oranges comparison, but: reddit started as no filters. That was one of it's main draws. Then suddenly started applying filters, and banning "toxic" members. Now a lot of people are mad at them. HN, afaik, has always had these rules in place. There's never been an expectation of free-speech here, and nobody minds, because they were presented up-front.
SixSigma 10y ago
It is only a certain kind of harrassment that Twitter has a problem with, that against its friends. [1] Celebrate cops being murdered, that's ok. When Condé Nast employees express death wishes https://i.sli.mg/XfKOEs.jpg https://i.sli.mg/XfKOEs.jpg Or Sony Film stars incite mob violence http://web.archive.org/web/20160721232327/https://twitter.com/Lesdoggg/status/755218642674020352 http://web.archive.org/web/20160721232327/https://twitter.co... There is a significant silence. [1] http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/07/20/twitters-history-censorship-bias/ http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/07/20/twitters-history-ce...
lumberjack 10y ago
>It's pretty clear that the Reddit corporation doesn't want Reddit to be an anything-goes, absolute free speech zone with no moderation or anti-harassment policies I think lots of webmasters actually believed in that but we all now realise that that simply doesn't work. I won't mention examples of lawless online communities but I'm sure all of us know of a few. In my experience they are all disasters.
- hugh4 10y ago
  Disasters? I'd say the chans are the only interesting and creative places on the internet.
jib 10y ago
I dunno, it seems weird to me to treat reddit as one community. I use reddit a lot, but really 99% of my interactions is on /r/cfb, which is a space far from the descriptions painted here. It is a community (and I do believe it is a community of its own) imo not far away from Hacker News in terms of creating and curating interesting content, and discussing it, for a focused group of interest, except rather than tech the interest happens to be college football. I imagine there are plenty of other spaces like that on reddit for people. I dabble a bit (mostly lurking) in /r/kettlebell too which seems to be similar except smaller.
- socket0 10y ago
  I think you've nailed it here. Viewed from the outside, Reddit is a very different place than when viewed from the inside. Outsiders tend to go to the default subs, which are the first subs you unsubscribe from when you choose to stay. Once people migrate to a topic-focused sub with decent moderators, they definitely become part of a community.
- GarrisonPrime 10y ago
  Agreed. Reddit is a very large, diverse group of separate communities. Trying to enforce a cohesive culture throughout reddit is doomed to fail, or at least will lead to a lot of strife and a loss of fringe groups. It's like how politicians and media in the USA are always trying (and failing) to impose upon the citizens some country-wide cohesive cultural identity and feeling of belonging. The USA is too big, with too many different regional cultures and ideals. Doomed to fail, and you'll just annoy everyone in the process.
- bbctol 10y ago
  I think that also reflects Reddit's issues with mission confusion. Reddit does present itself as a single entity: "the frontpage of the Internet," and it was founded as a single community, a group of users on one forum. The introduction of subreddits has very slowly shifted it towards being a platform, a piece of forum-hosting software--and as it grows larger, it becomes much more enjoyable to use it to browse small forums than deal with the mob on the defaults. IMO they should fully commit to being a platform for many different communities, but the site's founding ethos was the opposite.
CM30 10y ago
Twitter's problem isn't quite the same as Reddit's. It's because the site is incredibly inconsistent with its moderation. If you run a community, you need consistency. Members need to know where the boundaries are in regards to how you can act and what is/isn't acceptable. Twitter doesn't really do this well. If you agree with the staff political stances, you can basically get away with anything. If you're popular enough (or a large company), you can often get away with things that would get a less popular user banned. For example, contrast what happens when a left wing user breaks the rules and attacks people and what happens when a right wing one does it. It seems like the former will get punished a lot less harshly for the same offence. Twitter needs to stop this, and enforce the rules for everyone in every situation.
- makomk 10y ago
  Twitter's other problem is that they cannot be consistent in their moderation, because when they ban someone threatening violence against celebrities in the name of, say, feminism the campaign to reinstate them comes from people in the tech industry and press that they can't ignore.
  - CM30 10y ago
    Then they have to become like most large companies and be willing to take criticism from the press. I mean, it's not like Twitter's immune to it already. They're getting hammered from every angle over their platform and its attitudes towards harasment and trolls and moderation. Which brings me to a point about commmunity management I'd like to make: Don't even get into this field if you want people to always like you. Or if you're obsessed with your 'reputation'. Running a community site means making difficult decisions. It means losing friends over the community's rules and principles. It means you will get a very bad reputation from at least some part of society as a bully or dictator. This is what a community manager is perceived as by a banned member: http://www.managingcommunities.com/2012/12/03/community-manager-facebook-profile/ http://www.managingcommunities.com/2012/12/03/community-mana... Unfortunately, it seems Twitter (and a lot of such companies nowadays) seem more interested in keeping their friends in the media than they do running a decent community.
- 10y ago
CM30 10y ago
And yeah, you're right about Reddit. Problem is, they're in between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, users want more freedom than on most traditional community sites. There's a certain expectation that communities nowaday are basically the equivalent to a free speech zone in a local park, where near enough anything goes. And because social networks originally were really hands off about what people posted, that's become the baseline now. You need to claim your site is free speech friendly to get people using it. On the other hand, true freedom of speech is impossible on communities owned by companies and individuals. You'll get a lot of material that's extremely disturbing. Advertisers won't touch the site with a ten foot bargepole. And to some degree, a lot of normal users will actually be put off when the site draws in the less savoury users that freedom of speech often attracts most. So Reddit is kind of screwed. They either have to say 'there's no freedom of speech here, here are acceptable standards' (and watch their audience evaporate) or say that there is freedom of speech still (but have their audience gets more and more angry when stuff gets removed anyway).
- eric_h 10y ago
  > they're in between a rock and a hard place. This is completely OT, but I've always enjoyed the spanish version of that idiom: "entre una espada y la pared" (between a sword and the wall).
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  IMHO: They had a working solution, but they threw it out. When they were free-speech, they made it a policy to only throw out stuff that they were legally required to. That allowed them to keep their hands clean. As soon as they filter one thing for non-legal reasons, they become responsible for everything else on the site, otherwise it becomes a "why did you filter me, and not them" issue. The laissez-faire attitude worked for a long time, and arguably, that's why reddit grew as popular as it did. If they had made an announcement: "Hey, we're done with free speech. Here's our plan" then I think it would have been less of a problem. But like you said, they are trying to be on two sides at once: They want the benefits of free-speech, without the costs.
cLeEOGPw 10y ago
> the most tolerant communities attract people who are difficult to tolerate This is very insightful line. And it applies not just to internet communities, but any real life communities as well. > I suspect Twitter is having similar issues dealing with harassment, after letting it happen for so long. > Don't just tack them on after several years, and don't enforce them inconsistently and arbitrarily as Reddit has done. Twitter is well on the same path. The inconsistency is what makes many furious. When you ban harassment from one political end, but allow from other, it doesn't paint the company as fighting harassment. It paints a company as fighting one political end.
jules 10y ago
The problem with reddit isn't the admins, but that people who have managed to become moderators of prominent subreddits censor posts and thousands of rather innocent comments. For example the Orlando terrorist attack was censored from /r/news, and when they later allowed the posts to go through they deleted most of the comments, including all comments talking about the censorship of the previous posts. They even deleted comments giving info about where to donate blood for the victims. This strategy backfired immensely when the Donald Trump subreddit ended up being the only one reporting on the news.
- deadowl 10y ago
  The problems would be portrayed differently depending on different subsets of the userbase. I don't like all of /r/news moderation, but unfortunately it hasn't alienated enough people for another relevant news subreddit to take its place. A lot of the people that are alienated enough end up being people that I don't want to associate with, e.g. the kind of people that post in the Donald Trump subreddit, where I was banned for commenting on a topic that stated a subscription spike on the Bernie Sanders subreddit was a result of paid actors. All I said was "Isn't that when he held an AMA?" So yea, I question authority. I think it's great to question authority. I don't like when others question authority and then will not tolerate when their own authority being questioned. From my POV, the part of Reddit's userbase that conveys that attitude, such as users in the Donald Trump subreddit, is the heart of the problem.
  - jules 10y ago
    I don't agree that the Donald Trump subreddit is the heart of the problem. It's a symptom of the problem. I don't care what goes on in that subreddit. Let them have their echo chamber. The problem is huge default subreddits that purport to be neutral but actually are far from it. This is what pushes users to the extremes, one of which is the Donald Trump subreddit, which got a lot of subscribers because of this fiasco.
- ythl 10y ago
  > This strategy backfired immensely when the Donald Trump subreddit ended up being the only one reporting on the news. Say what you will about republicans, but they often end up being the biggest defenders of constitutional rights. Democrats on the other hand (aka "progressives") are always looking for ways to limit constitutional rights in order to create a "safer society" and stable "social climate". Just look at Europe - where "hate speech" can get you arrested or your door kicked down, and guns are completely banned.
yAnonymous 10y ago
Both Twitter's and Reddit's problem is that they are applying their rules very selectively. Twitter, for example, ban political trolls and populists, but tolerate terror organizations and their supporters. Like what the actual fuck...
- benmmurphy 10y ago
  to be fair twitter probably doesn't want them on the platform but the US government has probably asked them to leave them alone
  - Paul-ish 10y ago
    Why would the US govt ask twitter to leave them alone? Genuinely curious.
- hx87 10y ago
  It's because terror organizations tend to be quite civil on Twitter, whereas political trolls tend to be...trolls. The former isn't inimical to the proper functioning of the service, whereas the latter is.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
k__ 10y ago
They want to have the cake and eat it. I saw this so many times. First they make it free for all everything goes, then people come and use it and then they start moderation/cencorship to the max. Wikipedia, Stackoverflow, Reddit, etc. It's totally normal and okay for users to feel cheated, because they WERE cheated...
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  This is what made me angry, and why I left. I think things would have been better if they had openly said "Hey, we were free speech, but we're not anymore. Sorry, but we have to". It would have sucked, and I still probably would have left, but I would also have understood. Instead, they tried to keep holding onto both sides
gthtjtkt 10y ago
> much of Reddit's problems with its userbase boil down to a failure to manage. Removed some words to make this statement more accurate. Reddit itself doesn't manage the communities, and that's a problem because the Thought Police are now doing it for them. The idea that people should be allowed to create and manage their own communities is nice in theory, but why should Xx_JoeSchmoe123_xX be in control of the largest League of Legends community? Just because he hit the 'Create Subreddit' button before anyone else? That makes no sense, but it's how all of Reddit is run. Reddit probably thinks "This is great! We've got all these community managers (moderators) working for us and we don't even have to pay them!" But the quality of their moderation is often proportionate to their salary...
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  > Reddit itself doesn't manage the communities... That used to be true. But they've been stepping in and trying to clean up speech they don't like. As soon as you take on the responsibility of cleaning up one group, you take on the responsibility for every group. And reddit just doesn't have the manpower to do it.
  - twblalock 10y ago
    Nor do they have a consistent and rational policy to do it, which is why things aren't going very well.
- cynusx 10y ago
  It's an interesting point, I can imagine reddit being a platform for Gen Y politicians once subreddits are forced to elect their moderators.
bobdole1234 10y ago
No, I think the failure is to realize that you might have a huge userbase of assholes, but assholes still have money advertisers want. If you want to build a tolerant community, you build it. You don't take an existing one and try to put the screws to it until it becomes what you want. And if you want a diverse and female inclusive culture, you build one, you don't do it by taking an existing group and cracking down the cohesive elements they've developed.
bsg75 10y ago
Or perhaps the problem is that Reddit did not grow into its current userbase (with whatever problems that base brings with it) by being an advertiser friendly platform, which is what its current owner wants to try and mold it into.
dominotw 10y ago
>kind of people who need to be regulated the most. It is kind of disturbing that ordinary people think their peers in society need to be 'regulated' . Only egomaniacs overestimate their own virtuosity and underestimate everyone else's .
byuu 10y ago
But they very much did want it to be an anything-goes community when it started out. Anything that would raise their user counts. Now that the site is big and successful, they need to retroactively curtail the unsavory bits if they're to have any hope of selling the site for a big pay day. I think it's important that an actual, "say what you want as long as it's not illegal" site exists. A lot of the polarization in this country is due to both sides isolating themselves from the other 100% of the way. Such a site needs to exist somewhere. Now do I necessarily want that on Reddit or Twitter? I don't know. I'm extremely left-wing ('90s liberal; so pro free-speech over political correctness); and honestly Milo's tweets were appalling whenever some people I knew there would retweet him. I won't miss seeing a gay person defending a VP that supports conversion therapy. But I can clearly see that there's a liberal slant going on in these moderation policies. And I can imagine being on a site where the opposite were true, and know that I wouldn't like that very much myself. For that matter, there's another bias when it comes to celebrity status. I would bet good money that there is absolutely nothing Trump could say that would get Twitter to ban his account or remove his mark, even though he's in the extreme right. He's exempt from the rules that nobodies like us have to follow. What I'd rather see Reddit/Twitter working on are better tools to defend against harassment. I've had to write my own Greasemonkey scripts to filter out certain types of attacks, and I'm not even remotely relevant. I can't imagine how someone famous, let alone someone famous who can't code their own Javascript filters, can use these sites. And well, I think we saw the results of that lack of control over harassment with the Ghostbusters actress. But these scripts aren't hard to make. Give people the ability to filter out tweets that contain certain phrases from people you don't follow. Give them the ability to temporarily block all new notifications from people they don't follow for a few days after someone sics their followers upon them. Etc, etc. All very easy stuff to make.
stcredzero 10y ago
It's pretty clear that the Reddit corporation doesn't want Reddit to be an anything-goes, absolute free speech zone with no moderation or anti-harassment policies -- but that's what the site actually was for many years. Now, when the company cracks down, users think their freedoms are being curtailed. The change that came with moderation was very dramatic. It was basically cultural whiplash. It also accelerated the replacement of intellectualism and aesthetic freedom with groupthink and the same kind of web forum small mindedness you had in the early 2000's.
MichaelMoser123 10y ago
Is it possible to generalize for the whole of reddit? every reddit group is setting a different level of expectations - for instance reddit.com/r/askhistorians has quite strict guidelines - much stricter than most of reddit.
- jdmichal 10y ago
  There's routine swathes of [deleted] posts in /r/askscience also. In my experience though, having heavy-handed moderators is certainly an exception on Reddit.

mindslight 10y ago

> The mistake was ever allowing that kind of freedom in the first place, because people developed an expectation that it would persist. Sure, and then we wouldn't be talking about reddit but rather whatever site was actually free at the time. The only reason web forums exist is because people are lazy about adopting decentralized Free software. Yet the owners of these centralized services, as well as paternalistic spectators, end up deluded that the communities they serve are "theirs" to mold and control. In reality these sites' power is but an epsilon, and they should be thankful they can at least exercise it to generate revenue by surveilling users who are too lazy to protect themselves.

eropple 10y ago
> The only reason web forums exist is because people are lazy about adopting decentralized Free software Or because that open-source software is user-hostile and has no serious argument for its use for 99% of people. When users don't do something you like, in almost every instance it's your failing rather than theirs.
- Practicality 10y ago
  Probably because it's free software. "Beggars can't be choosers" There are very few open software engineers who like improving UX. Since it's free you have to like it to do it, so I don't know if this will ever change.
  - eropple 10y ago
    I fully agree with you. Damning the plebs for not being enlightened enough to use stuff that, if we're being real here, is worse by the metrics actual people use to decide what they're gonna use--that way leads to a really gross, insular mindset that doesn't help anybody.
  - apatters 10y ago
    Is it really that they don't like improving UX, or is it that they don't know how, or don't respect people who understand UX? I like improving UX but when I look at many open source projects from the outside they are run by cranky ubernerds who triumph technical merits above everything else and I can't imagine them being very cooperative with someone whose specialty was "UX."
    - jcbrand 10y ago
      > I can't imagine them being very cooperative with someone whose specialty was "UX." Sounds like you've never actually tried. I maintain an open source project (https://conversejs.org https://conversejs.org) that could benefit greatly from the expertise of a UX pro. However, to date no-one has approached me to help with this (specifically regarding UX). If you or any other UX people here are interested in helping out, hit me up at https://opkode.com/contact.html https://opkode.com/contact.html I definitely don't have a lack of respect for UX people, having been fortunate enough to work with someone whom I consider to be a brilliant UX designer.
      - dbg31415 10y ago
        We can all have different experiences. Good software takes strategy, UX, visual design, solution architecture, software development, QA, DevOps, post-launch support, KPI monitoring & analysis, marketing... and probably a few other skill sets to really have it thrive. The trouble with many open source projects is that they are one-man endeavors, and the person who started it cares more about control than quality outcome. "This is MY pet project..." is a horrible mentality to take when shopping for a partner. The moment the dev thinks, "Gosh, I'd rather spend my free time watching a baseball game than making those 50 changes the UX guy asked me to make... especially since all I really wanted from him was a color pallet..." that's about when the partnership dissolves. (Misunderstanding about the different areas of expertise intentionally included.) One person can't think time is worth more than a teammate's. Good software requires compromise and horse trading and a lot of planning. You typically need money to keep everyone interested.
Karunamon 10y ago
You find that power dynamic a lot in linked-community sites like Reddit and image boards. I find that the most enjoyable communities to be in are the ones where the site staff wield their power to make the user experience more enjoyable, rather than treating their users as cattle to be corralled. Acting like they provide a service rather than allowing you in their garden, in other words. A few Reddit communities sprung up that track content deletions, like /r/undelete, and the sheer amount of stuff that winds up disappeared on arbitrary whims, rather than violation of a stated objective rule, is huge. Coincidentally, when the moderators of those places show up, the attitudes on display are the worst kind of toxic.
lrem 10y ago
I'm wondering what kind of revenue can actually be generated by surveiling users. Any numbers?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
AJ007 10y ago
To be fair, a lot of web forums have run on free software. Centralization was what happened when usenet was over run with spam. Laziness is a poor explanation given one alternative exists and requires no maintenance, and the other takes a great deal of time, effort, and especially in the past, a lot of money to run.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> The only reason web forums exist is because people are lazy about adopting decentralized Free software. Well, other than the fact that a whole lot of the software involved in using web forums, on both the server and client end, is "decentralized free software". And the fact that other software (much, but not all, of it free) was adopted for discussions before web forums got popular. Web forums got popular because -- on both server and client end -- most people are going to have the tools anyway, so adopting a whole new software (free or otherwise) stack for discussions is unattractive.
- mindslight 10y ago
  It ceases to be free software when it is adopted by many people beyond the administrator, as they lack the freedom to study and modify it. And it's certainly not decentralized - each instance of the software is its own walled garden. I can't install my own instance of say phpbb and use it to communicate with an existing forum.

gdwatson 10y ago

Part of the problem is that Reddit even more than Twitter is structured as a meta-community, and so any standards which are imposed will be external to a given sub-community. That means that they will be perceived as, and may sometimes be, social and political censorship.

bloaf 10y ago
I think this is a somewhat more recent (i.e. within the past 4 years) development on reddit. For a long time it seemed to me that the various sub-communities grew out of some shared sense of what it was to be a redditor (memes like the dumb "narwhal bacon" thing were expressions of that.) People were redditors first, and members of the various sub-communities second. But recently this has not been the case. People seem to want to be able to create their own gardens in which they can create their own "language of good and evil that their neighbor does not understand." People don't want to associate with reddit as a whole, only the parts they chose to incorporate into their little filter bubble.
- xemdetia 10y ago
  I find myself blaming the some of the default sub choices from within the past 4 years. The choices made there created a really frustrating global reddit user experience- it used to be that when you first logged in there was only a dozen subreddits people were looking at. In the last four years the default experience is now up to like 50 subreddits which in my opinion take a very curated and particular view of all that's available which just does not match up to everyone. You just didn't have worldnews, pics, science, gaming and then what you were interested in to be a redditor, it's 50 things + what you are interested in. So the 'identity' of what was a redditor changed dramatically from the start, and it's left us worse since the a lot of the default subs aren't exposing what was good and are mostly mindless/bandwagon-y in operation. Not to mention that some of the default subreddits that got chosen were poisonous and it changed the tone. Here is a list of what changed: https://www.reddit.com/r/defaults/ https://www.reddit.com/r/defaults/
  - cookiecaper 10y ago

zarriak 10y ago

I think the biggest problem with it in general was how it greatly relied upon moderators of the individual subreddits. This inherently creates problems as they have to rely upon many individuals who have very different ideas and goals from the Reddit staff, both in terms of monetization and in moderation. It is inherent in social media, the more stuff you allow on your platform, the less able you are to generate revenue. I think that has been clearly demonstrated by Twitter, 8chan, 4chan, etc. never being able to generate large amounts of profit. Facebook realized that censoring is unfortunately profitable, and made a platform that is much more easily advertised upon. It is similar to the development of sports, where in the US all sports have commercial breaks, even in things like F1 that do not run commercials during the race, while ads are run over it in the US. I mean it even happens in soccer with showing ads during the game, as clearly demonstrated by the sprint ads during Copa America.

brokenmachine 10y ago
It is an interesting idea that it is the censoring that makes Facebook profitable, but I'm not sure that I agree with it. I would say that the "made a platform that is much more easily advertised upon" is the important part, combined with the massive data-gathering so the ads can be targeted better.
- zarriak 10y ago
  Well I guess I should say that a part of the design is self censoring, as what one says with anonymity is varying ranges of difference from that which one says when they are sharing it with all of their friends and family.
  - brokenmachine 10y ago
    That's why I personally have self-censored myself from using Facebook at all. I've discovered that there are actually zero things that I want to announce to all my friends and family at once.
    - 10y ago

Esau 10y ago

I think what happens when we have truly anonymous free speech, on places such as Reddit, Twitter, and 4Chan, shows that we are nowhere as civilized as we like to think we are.

gohrt 10y ago
Are we more civilized when there is no anonymous free speech, and people are abusive only in semi-private situations?
- twblalock 10y ago
  I think so. Actions toward others have a much larger societal impact than privately held beliefs. For example, if someone has racist beliefs which do not affect his actions in any way, his effect on other people in society would be exactly the same as it would be if he did not have racist beliefs. In other words, beliefs that are not acted on or expressed have no effect on society. There may be some social benefit to knowing who the racists are. But if they are anonymous, that benefit is probably lost. Their speech is protected by the first amendment either way, but Reddit is not required to enforce the constitution, so they can shut down the accounts if they want to.
  - brokenmachine 10y ago
    I can't imagine a situation where someone has beliefs that do not affect his actions in any way. I would agree that unexpressed values would propagate less.
    - twblalock 10y ago
      > I can't imagine a situation where someone has beliefs that do not affect his actions in any way. That was an extreme example used to illustrate the point I was making. Racism is also only an example; there are plenty of other beliefs that are bad for society. Personally, I suspect that sexism is probably far more prevalent on Reddit than racism, for example. Social stigma can prevent one's beliefs from affecting one's actions, or at least reduce the effect of those beliefs on one's actions. If it is shameful to be perceived as a racist, racists will attempt to hide their racism by not acting in racist ways toward others, at least when other people are looking. This does not obviate the effects of unconscious biases or eliminate racism, but the net result for society is fewer overtly racist actions, and that's a good thing. If racism becomes acceptable again, racists will feel freer to act on their beliefs, which will make life worse for the targets of their racism. So, there is a case to be made that if people repress their beliefs only partially, society is better off -- not as much better off as if certain people repressed their beliefs fully, but still better off. The danger of allowing racism to flourish in online communities, especially ones as large as Reddit and Twitter, is that it re-normalizes racism and makes it seem acceptable to be a racist. It can be more than merely acceptable -- it can even be a contrarian badge of pride, justified as a rebellion against political correctness. (That kind of justification for it is reinforced when anti-harassment policies are not uniformly and consistently enforced, because it can make moderation appear to be arbitrary or politically motivated.) When that kind of thing happens, it makes society worse.

beefsack 10y ago

> If there is a lesson in this, it is that online communities which plan to implement anti-harassment policies ought to do so from the beginning, and develop the expectation among the users that such policies exist, and will continue to exist. A few relatively popular programming languages have begun publishing official community code of conduct documents[1][2]. While initially I thought it was a bit overreaching, I can now see steering a community early is much easier than trying to change course later. [1] https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/conduct.html https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/conduct.html [2] https://golang.org/conduct https://golang.org/conduct

favorited 10y ago
To add to the list, Swift[1] had a code of conduct as soon as it was open-sourced. Mono even adopted one the same day[2] because they thought it was a good idea. The LLVM Project is in the final stages of adopting one[3] (after much discussion) as well. This will (once adopted) apply to the LLVM backend, the Clang (C, C++, & ObjC) front-end, libc++, the LLDB debugger, etc. [1] https://swift.org/community/#code-of-conduct https://swift.org/community/#code-of-conduct [2] https://twitter.com/migueldeicaza/status/672590341757927426 https://twitter.com/migueldeicaza/status/672590341757927426 [3] http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2016-June/101807.html http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2016-June/101807.ht...
twblalock 10y ago
It's a good way to cover your ass if you need to kick people out of the community later. They can't credibly accuse you of making up ad-hoc rules if your code of conduct has existed the entire time.
InclinedPlane 10y ago
Pretty much every community over a few hundred people in size will eventually be faced with a moment where the "powers that be" are forced to sit down and have the "what are we going to do about person X" talk. Every one of them. That's just the nature of human beings. If you find yourself in that position and the person is merely toxic to interact with, count yourself lucky, because it can often be a million times worse. If you are in a position of power with a community it's very important to look at codes of conduct, standards of behavior, and mechanisms for reporting/tracking/resolution early. Because building those systems early will make that "what are we gonna do" moment a zillion times easier to handle. It'll also usually mean that things get handled earlier than they would otherwise, possibly before they've escalated out of control and possibly avoiding a lot of damage that might have happened otherwise (to individuals and to the community).

munificent 10y ago

> Compounding that problem, the fact that the site was unregulated for so long caused it to attract the kind of people who need to be regulated the most. Is there any evidence that reddit has a greater fraction of asshats than the general population at large?

vertex-four 10y ago
The issue isn't really the amount of asshats. In the physical world, it's generally really unlikely that you'll get more than a couple of particularly egregious asshats with similar beliefs in the same place. When you do, it's often a news story. Online, just as people with good intentions can find each other, people with bad ones can find each other and band together. In other words, the unmoderated Internet is an amplification device for small groups of people who might otherwise not get a voice, and it doesn't actually matter what they're saying. Of course, it's a lot quicker and easier to cause damage than to do anything constructive, resulting in unmoderated spaces online probably doing a lot more harm than good in the near-term. Long-term? No idea.
- tzs 10y ago
  > Online, just as people with good intentions can find each other, people with bad ones can find each other and band together. Yup. Besides egregious asshats, it has greatly helped conspiracy theorists to get together, fringe religious groups to get together, and fringe political groups to get together. > In other words, the unmoderated Internet is an amplification device for small groups of people who might otherwise not get a voice, and it doesn't actually matter what they're saying. I think that the amplification effect does vary, though, among different groups. Some groups already had worked out good ways to communicate before the internet, and to spread information. It wasn't as fast or as convenient as the internet, so things were slower than they are now, but it got the job done. An example of such a group would be those in STEM fields. We had big libraries of technical material extensively cataloged and indexed and cross referenced, an extensive system of mailed bulletins and journals to keep us informed of new developments in our fields. We had telephones for long distance real time person to person discussion, and the postal system for less urgent communication or for sending documents and photographs. The internet was a huge increase in the access to and speed of sending information for STEM people, but in some sense it was just a change in efficiency, not a fundamental change in what we could accomplish. I've compared it before to the printing press. We had books before the printing press, but it took a long time to make copies and they were expensive. The printing press made it faster and cheaper to make copies. For those groups that were not organized like this, which includes the random asshats, the conspiracy theorists, and so on, the internet was a fundamental change. For them it like the discovery of fire or the development of agriculture. It put them in a whole new world.

Fej 10y ago

It's not just that the site was that way, a free-speech zone, for many years. It was their official policy. They were quite pretentious about it as well, leading the reddit community to believe that this would be the permanent policy. To be honest, that is still mostly how it is; the admins only ban a subreddit when it generates a critical mass of bad press. They don't want to drive away their users. They know how Digg died. They're smart enough not to piss off the community enough such that any significant number of users will leave.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Quequau 10y ago
I think something really important that doesn't get discussed very often when "free speech" comes up is that there really are categories of speech which most reasonable people expect and perhaps even prefer would not be 'protected' (or in the context of Reddit, permitted and perhaps celebrated). More importantly there are categories of speech which are not put forward in good faith but are instead intended to do damage to communities that host them. Among the various errors the administrators of Reddit may be guilty of, underestimating the damage & toxicity some categories of speech made in bad faith cause and having prepared no mechanisms to help their communities be resistant to or minimize that toxicity might be the most significant. Digg died because Reddit existed, so there was somewhere for disaffected Digg users to go to. In particular users who by & large were interested in good faith participation. There is no similar analog that exists today and because users who show tendencies to indulge in bad faith participation new alternative sites often struggle with dealing a level of toxic behavior which makes it extraordinarily difficult to maintain growth.
- forgottenpass 10y ago
  I think something really important that doesn't get discussed very often when "free speech" comes up is that there really are categories of speech which most reasonable people expect and perhaps even prefer would not be 'protected' In a sense it always comes up. Without sticking my neck out to say what reddit should or shouldn't allow, I simply want to point out that principled positions only count when they're uncomfortable to uphold. We wouldn't be having a conversation about free speech in the first place unless the conversation has already turned to the topic of sweeping away uncomfortable speech. If someone wanted to make a convincing argument about speech which should be 'unprotected' there has to be a conflicting principle, or it's just lip service to the idea of "free speech" (because it's generally recognized as virtuous and they don't want to be seen as opposing it). "Fighting words" are unprotected in so far as they represent incitement to an immediate breach of the peace. Other principles raised to carve out exceptions to free speech should be similar in the obviousness that it's categorically not about suppressing ideas.

kickme444 10y ago

I have a thesis that is basically identical to yours about unmanaged expectations and community being the main root of the problem that reddit/twitter/etc are facing, which is part of the reason why we started Imzy https://www.imzy.com/imzy https://www.imzy.com/imzy We got some press early on that really told an untrue narrative of what we are trying to do, but we've made a ton of progress in a few months of our private beta and our communities and platform are really beginning to come together. The link I gave above is to our company community and if anyone wants to try Imzy out I will approve your request as soon as you make it.

minimaxir 10y ago
Self-promotion aside, you should disclose that you are ex-Reddit.
- phyzome 10y ago
  To be fair, kickme444 was pretty well-known as a reddit employee! (But explicit disclosure is good too.)
  - pferde 10y ago
    Some of us rarely ever look at the username behind (above) a comment. I personally just don't care, if the content is interesting. And even if I did, there is just too many users, across various discussion sites, to keep all the pseudonyms and their comment history in one's head.
Dylan16807 10y ago
Would you care to give a true narrative of what you're trying to do? You linked to an empty page where I can request an invite, and the "about us" page just says you're "rethinking" communities online. What is the nature of moderation and communication on the site? I can glean a bit of info from news sites, but not very much if you say they're fundamentally misunderstanding you.
- 10y ago

maxerickson 10y ago

Reddit is owned by Advance Publications and some other investors (there was a round a few years ago http://www.redditblog.com/2014/09/fundraising-for-reddit.html http://www.redditblog.com/2014/09/fundraising-for-reddit.htm... ). Advance also owns Conde Nast, but they restructured reddit out of Conde Nast in 2011.

empath75 10y ago

Reddit's main problem is that they spent years building their user base as a site to find 'jailbait' porn (it was by far the largest search result that brought people to Reddit for a long time). That created a toxic culture, which allowed stormfront and similar groups to use it as a recruitment ground for racists. Reddit still refuses to do anything about it. The 'quarantined' a bunch of truly vile subreddits but all that does is give them a place where they can coordinate brigades of the public subs out of view.

adevine 10y ago
This isn't how I remember the culture years ago. I looked at reddit every now and then, but I really came over six years ago during the big Digg v4 revolt when Digg fucked up their site. At the time, I remember being really impressed how many of the comments on reddit were more personally supportive, which I rarely saw elsewhere - for example, I learned a ton from r/fitness back then. Yes, there were the more odious subreddits, but it was perfectly possible to surf around reddit and never be bothered by those. The culture of reddit definitely seems to have gotten much worse over the past 5 years - to me, it just generally seems meaner, and there feels like there is more trolling overall. Even simple, seemingly straightforward posts seem more likely to spark some sort of vitriolic debate. Perhaps it was inevitable as reddit grew, but it still kind of sucks.
- liotier 10y ago
  > This isn't how I remember the culture years ago The very nature of Reddit is that each person will have different experience & memories: the truth of Reddit is that thre is no Reddit - there are only subreddits. So, unsubscribe from most default subreddits, choose your communities and you'll be like me - having a 99% positive experience !
jdminhbg 10y ago
> (it was by far the largest search result that brought people to Reddit for a long time) I'm pretty skeptical of this. I can maybe see my way to believing that googling "jailbait" beats out any single one of ["pic" "pics" "funny" "joke" ...], but the normal SFW subreddits have always been vastly bigger than the porn subs. I'm also really skeptical of the causation chain that leads from jailbait -> Stormfront -> general toxic culture. Do you have any harder evidence of this? Edit: Sorry, "normal SFW," not "normal NSFW."

psyc 10y ago

I use Reddit heavily, and subscribe to a wide variety of different sized subs. AskReddit is the only one I'm aware of that's still remotely anything-goes. Every other sub is so heavily modded that I have no expectation of any given thread I start staying up more than a couple hours. It's going the way of Wikipedia - so policed, it's no longer worth the effort to contribute at all.

neotek 10y ago

>It will be difficult for Condé Nast to get its money's worth out of Reddit now. Condé Nast hasn't owned Reddit for half a decade now. Advance Publications owns both of them, and Reddit was split off as a separate entity with its own board and shareholders, one of which is Advance.

uptown 10y ago
Well then that will make it even more difficult!

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

kartickv 10y ago

I have a theory — to clean up a site, find and expel the most egregious offenders, like the people who engage in repeated name-calling ("You are a fucking asshole!") as opposed to constructive discussion. You can't police every user, but if you find and expel the worst offenders, I suspect it will have a significant effect on the quality of conversation.

codezero 10y ago
You'd be very surprised. The most abrasive people in a community do a very good job of building a positive reputation amongst other "power users" such that banning them causes a ripple effect in the community that _always_ makes the moderators look like one-sided haters.
- kartickv 10y ago
  Sure, the moderators may end up looking one-sided, but it sends a clear signal as to what kind of behaviour is not tolerated. The other members can adjust to the new normal, and some will leave. Either way, you've cleaned up the site to some extent.
duiker101 10y ago
name calling is not even on the list of stuff that I would have placed in a list of bad things users of Reddit do. Unfortunately, while that could be applied to HN, reddit is another world. Much of the freedom of speech culture still exists and while not on the main page, there are a lot of communities dedicated to hate or just fighting each other and instigating rage.
- kartickv 10y ago
  Name-calling was an example of bad behaviour you want to ban. I'm sure we can think of other, worse, types of behaviour. Whatever it is, find the most egregious offenders, and ban them.
CaptSpify 10y ago
I think that works only when you set those expectations up front. This is an apples-to-oranges comparison, but: reddit started as no filters. That was one of it's main draws. Then suddenly started applying filters, and banning "toxic" members. Now a lot of people are mad at them. HN, afaik, has always had these rules in place. There's never been an expectation of free-speech here, and nobody minds, because they were presented up-front.

SixSigma 10y ago

It is only a certain kind of harrassment that Twitter has a problem with, that against its friends. [1] Celebrate cops being murdered, that's ok. When Condé Nast employees express death wishes https://i.sli.mg/XfKOEs.jpg https://i.sli.mg/XfKOEs.jpg Or Sony Film stars incite mob violence http://web.archive.org/web/20160721232327/https://twitter.com/Lesdoggg/status/755218642674020352 http://web.archive.org/web/20160721232327/https://twitter.co... There is a significant silence. [1] http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/07/20/twitters-history-censorship-bias/ http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/07/20/twitters-history-ce...

lumberjack 10y ago

>It's pretty clear that the Reddit corporation doesn't want Reddit to be an anything-goes, absolute free speech zone with no moderation or anti-harassment policies I think lots of webmasters actually believed in that but we all now realise that that simply doesn't work. I won't mention examples of lawless online communities but I'm sure all of us know of a few. In my experience they are all disasters.

hugh4 10y ago
Disasters? I'd say the chans are the only interesting and creative places on the internet.

jib 10y ago

I dunno, it seems weird to me to treat reddit as one community. I use reddit a lot, but really 99% of my interactions is on /r/cfb, which is a space far from the descriptions painted here. It is a community (and I do believe it is a community of its own) imo not far away from Hacker News in terms of creating and curating interesting content, and discussing it, for a focused group of interest, except rather than tech the interest happens to be college football. I imagine there are plenty of other spaces like that on reddit for people. I dabble a bit (mostly lurking) in /r/kettlebell too which seems to be similar except smaller.

socket0 10y ago
I think you've nailed it here. Viewed from the outside, Reddit is a very different place than when viewed from the inside. Outsiders tend to go to the default subs, which are the first subs you unsubscribe from when you choose to stay. Once people migrate to a topic-focused sub with decent moderators, they definitely become part of a community.
GarrisonPrime 10y ago
Agreed. Reddit is a very large, diverse group of separate communities. Trying to enforce a cohesive culture throughout reddit is doomed to fail, or at least will lead to a lot of strife and a loss of fringe groups. It's like how politicians and media in the USA are always trying (and failing) to impose upon the citizens some country-wide cohesive cultural identity and feeling of belonging. The USA is too big, with too many different regional cultures and ideals. Doomed to fail, and you'll just annoy everyone in the process.
bbctol 10y ago
I think that also reflects Reddit's issues with mission confusion. Reddit does present itself as a single entity: "the frontpage of the Internet," and it was founded as a single community, a group of users on one forum. The introduction of subreddits has very slowly shifted it towards being a platform, a piece of forum-hosting software--and as it grows larger, it becomes much more enjoyable to use it to browse small forums than deal with the mob on the defaults. IMO they should fully commit to being a platform for many different communities, but the site's founding ethos was the opposite.

CM30 10y ago

Twitter's problem isn't quite the same as Reddit's. It's because the site is incredibly inconsistent with its moderation. If you run a community, you need consistency. Members need to know where the boundaries are in regards to how you can act and what is/isn't acceptable. Twitter doesn't really do this well. If you agree with the staff political stances, you can basically get away with anything. If you're popular enough (or a large company), you can often get away with things that would get a less popular user banned. For example, contrast what happens when a left wing user breaks the rules and attacks people and what happens when a right wing one does it. It seems like the former will get punished a lot less harshly for the same offence. Twitter needs to stop this, and enforce the rules for everyone in every situation.

makomk 10y ago
Twitter's other problem is that they cannot be consistent in their moderation, because when they ban someone threatening violence against celebrities in the name of, say, feminism the campaign to reinstate them comes from people in the tech industry and press that they can't ignore.
- CM30 10y ago
  Then they have to become like most large companies and be willing to take criticism from the press. I mean, it's not like Twitter's immune to it already. They're getting hammered from every angle over their platform and its attitudes towards harasment and trolls and moderation. Which brings me to a point about commmunity management I'd like to make: Don't even get into this field if you want people to always like you. Or if you're obsessed with your 'reputation'. Running a community site means making difficult decisions. It means losing friends over the community's rules and principles. It means you will get a very bad reputation from at least some part of society as a bully or dictator. This is what a community manager is perceived as by a banned member: http://www.managingcommunities.com/2012/12/03/community-manager-facebook-profile/ http://www.managingcommunities.com/2012/12/03/community-mana... Unfortunately, it seems Twitter (and a lot of such companies nowadays) seem more interested in keeping their friends in the media than they do running a decent community.
10y ago

CM30 10y ago

And yeah, you're right about Reddit. Problem is, they're in between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, users want more freedom than on most traditional community sites. There's a certain expectation that communities nowaday are basically the equivalent to a free speech zone in a local park, where near enough anything goes. And because social networks originally were really hands off about what people posted, that's become the baseline now. You need to claim your site is free speech friendly to get people using it. On the other hand, true freedom of speech is impossible on communities owned by companies and individuals. You'll get a lot of material that's extremely disturbing. Advertisers won't touch the site with a ten foot bargepole. And to some degree, a lot of normal users will actually be put off when the site draws in the less savoury users that freedom of speech often attracts most. So Reddit is kind of screwed. They either have to say 'there's no freedom of speech here, here are acceptable standards' (and watch their audience evaporate) or say that there is freedom of speech still (but have their audience gets more and more angry when stuff gets removed anyway).

eric_h 10y ago
> they're in between a rock and a hard place. This is completely OT, but I've always enjoyed the spanish version of that idiom: "entre una espada y la pared" (between a sword and the wall).
CaptSpify 10y ago
IMHO: They had a working solution, but they threw it out. When they were free-speech, they made it a policy to only throw out stuff that they were legally required to. That allowed them to keep their hands clean. As soon as they filter one thing for non-legal reasons, they become responsible for everything else on the site, otherwise it becomes a "why did you filter me, and not them" issue. The laissez-faire attitude worked for a long time, and arguably, that's why reddit grew as popular as it did. If they had made an announcement: "Hey, we're done with free speech. Here's our plan" then I think it would have been less of a problem. But like you said, they are trying to be on two sides at once: They want the benefits of free-speech, without the costs.

cLeEOGPw 10y ago

> the most tolerant communities attract people who are difficult to tolerate This is very insightful line. And it applies not just to internet communities, but any real life communities as well. > I suspect Twitter is having similar issues dealing with harassment, after letting it happen for so long. > Don't just tack them on after several years, and don't enforce them inconsistently and arbitrarily as Reddit has done. Twitter is well on the same path. The inconsistency is what makes many furious. When you ban harassment from one political end, but allow from other, it doesn't paint the company as fighting harassment. It paints a company as fighting one political end.

jules 10y ago

The problem with reddit isn't the admins, but that people who have managed to become moderators of prominent subreddits censor posts and thousands of rather innocent comments. For example the Orlando terrorist attack was censored from /r/news, and when they later allowed the posts to go through they deleted most of the comments, including all comments talking about the censorship of the previous posts. They even deleted comments giving info about where to donate blood for the victims. This strategy backfired immensely when the Donald Trump subreddit ended up being the only one reporting on the news.

deadowl 10y ago
The problems would be portrayed differently depending on different subsets of the userbase. I don't like all of /r/news moderation, but unfortunately it hasn't alienated enough people for another relevant news subreddit to take its place. A lot of the people that are alienated enough end up being people that I don't want to associate with, e.g. the kind of people that post in the Donald Trump subreddit, where I was banned for commenting on a topic that stated a subscription spike on the Bernie Sanders subreddit was a result of paid actors. All I said was "Isn't that when he held an AMA?" So yea, I question authority. I think it's great to question authority. I don't like when others question authority and then will not tolerate when their own authority being questioned. From my POV, the part of Reddit's userbase that conveys that attitude, such as users in the Donald Trump subreddit, is the heart of the problem.
- jules 10y ago
  I don't agree that the Donald Trump subreddit is the heart of the problem. It's a symptom of the problem. I don't care what goes on in that subreddit. Let them have their echo chamber. The problem is huge default subreddits that purport to be neutral but actually are far from it. This is what pushes users to the extremes, one of which is the Donald Trump subreddit, which got a lot of subscribers because of this fiasco.
ythl 10y ago
> This strategy backfired immensely when the Donald Trump subreddit ended up being the only one reporting on the news. Say what you will about republicans, but they often end up being the biggest defenders of constitutional rights. Democrats on the other hand (aka "progressives") are always looking for ways to limit constitutional rights in order to create a "safer society" and stable "social climate". Just look at Europe - where "hate speech" can get you arrested or your door kicked down, and guns are completely banned.

yAnonymous 10y ago

Both Twitter's and Reddit's problem is that they are applying their rules very selectively. Twitter, for example, ban political trolls and populists, but tolerate terror organizations and their supporters. Like what the actual fuck...

benmmurphy 10y ago
to be fair twitter probably doesn't want them on the platform but the US government has probably asked them to leave them alone
- Paul-ish 10y ago
  Why would the US govt ask twitter to leave them alone? Genuinely curious.
hx87 10y ago
It's because terror organizations tend to be quite civil on Twitter, whereas political trolls tend to be...trolls. The former isn't inimical to the proper functioning of the service, whereas the latter is.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

k__ 10y ago

They want to have the cake and eat it. I saw this so many times. First they make it free for all everything goes, then people come and use it and then they start moderation/cencorship to the max. Wikipedia, Stackoverflow, Reddit, etc. It's totally normal and okay for users to feel cheated, because they WERE cheated...

CaptSpify 10y ago
This is what made me angry, and why I left. I think things would have been better if they had openly said "Hey, we were free speech, but we're not anymore. Sorry, but we have to". It would have sucked, and I still probably would have left, but I would also have understood. Instead, they tried to keep holding onto both sides

gthtjtkt 10y ago

> much of Reddit's problems with its userbase boil down to a failure to manage. Removed some words to make this statement more accurate. Reddit itself doesn't manage the communities, and that's a problem because the Thought Police are now doing it for them. The idea that people should be allowed to create and manage their own communities is nice in theory, but why should Xx_JoeSchmoe123_xX be in control of the largest League of Legends community? Just because he hit the 'Create Subreddit' button before anyone else? That makes no sense, but it's how all of Reddit is run. Reddit probably thinks "This is great! We've got all these community managers (moderators) working for us and we don't even have to pay them!" But the quality of their moderation is often proportionate to their salary...

CaptSpify 10y ago
> Reddit itself doesn't manage the communities... That used to be true. But they've been stepping in and trying to clean up speech they don't like. As soon as you take on the responsibility of cleaning up one group, you take on the responsibility for every group. And reddit just doesn't have the manpower to do it.
- twblalock 10y ago
  Nor do they have a consistent and rational policy to do it, which is why things aren't going very well.
cynusx 10y ago
It's an interesting point, I can imagine reddit being a platform for Gen Y politicians once subreddits are forced to elect their moderators.

bobdole1234 10y ago

No, I think the failure is to realize that you might have a huge userbase of assholes, but assholes still have money advertisers want. If you want to build a tolerant community, you build it. You don't take an existing one and try to put the screws to it until it becomes what you want. And if you want a diverse and female inclusive culture, you build one, you don't do it by taking an existing group and cracking down the cohesive elements they've developed.

bsg75 10y ago

Or perhaps the problem is that Reddit did not grow into its current userbase (with whatever problems that base brings with it) by being an advertiser friendly platform, which is what its current owner wants to try and mold it into.

dominotw 10y ago

>kind of people who need to be regulated the most. It is kind of disturbing that ordinary people think their peers in society need to be 'regulated' . Only egomaniacs overestimate their own virtuosity and underestimate everyone else's .

byuu 10y ago

But they very much did want it to be an anything-goes community when it started out. Anything that would raise their user counts. Now that the site is big and successful, they need to retroactively curtail the unsavory bits if they're to have any hope of selling the site for a big pay day. I think it's important that an actual, "say what you want as long as it's not illegal" site exists. A lot of the polarization in this country is due to both sides isolating themselves from the other 100% of the way. Such a site needs to exist somewhere. Now do I necessarily want that on Reddit or Twitter? I don't know. I'm extremely left-wing ('90s liberal; so pro free-speech over political correctness); and honestly Milo's tweets were appalling whenever some people I knew there would retweet him. I won't miss seeing a gay person defending a VP that supports conversion therapy. But I can clearly see that there's a liberal slant going on in these moderation policies. And I can imagine being on a site where the opposite were true, and know that I wouldn't like that very much myself. For that matter, there's another bias when it comes to celebrity status. I would bet good money that there is absolutely nothing Trump could say that would get Twitter to ban his account or remove his mark, even though he's in the extreme right. He's exempt from the rules that nobodies like us have to follow. What I'd rather see Reddit/Twitter working on are better tools to defend against harassment. I've had to write my own Greasemonkey scripts to filter out certain types of attacks, and I'm not even remotely relevant. I can't imagine how someone famous, let alone someone famous who can't code their own Javascript filters, can use these sites. And well, I think we saw the results of that lack of control over harassment with the Ghostbusters actress. But these scripts aren't hard to make. Give people the ability to filter out tweets that contain certain phrases from people you don't follow. Give them the ability to temporarily block all new notifications from people they don't follow for a few days after someone sics their followers upon them. Etc, etc. All very easy stuff to make.

stcredzero 10y ago

It's pretty clear that the Reddit corporation doesn't want Reddit to be an anything-goes, absolute free speech zone with no moderation or anti-harassment policies -- but that's what the site actually was for many years. Now, when the company cracks down, users think their freedoms are being curtailed. The change that came with moderation was very dramatic. It was basically cultural whiplash. It also accelerated the replacement of intellectualism and aesthetic freedom with groupthink and the same kind of web forum small mindedness you had in the early 2000's.

MichaelMoser123 10y ago

Is it possible to generalize for the whole of reddit? every reddit group is setting a different level of expectations - for instance reddit.com/r/askhistorians has quite strict guidelines - much stricter than most of reddit.

jdmichal 10y ago
There's routine swathes of [deleted] posts in /r/askscience also. In my experience though, having heavy-handed moderators is certainly an exception on Reddit.