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Reddit is a swamp of filth wrt economics comments. Basically all the subreddits except /r/academiceconomics, /r/badeconomics, /r/econpapers are awful. I'm frie

Reddit is a swamp of filth wrt economics comments. Basically all the subreddits except /r/academiceconomics, /r/badeconomics, /r/econpapers are awful. I'm friends with the mods of /r/economics and they have a really hard time reigning in the masses of ideologues (on all sides) ruining what should remain pure economics discussions.

tptacek 10y ago
Reddit and HN make an interesting comparison. Reddit's highs are really high, far higher than HN's, often skirting the level of "so good as to be newsworthy". But Reddit's lows --- and I don't mean trolling and harassment, I mean the lower bounds of normal conversation there --- are much lower. I think the median HN comment is better, by a lot, than the median Reddit comment. I think you can extend the same judgement out to entire threads --- the best Reddit threads being so much better than HN's that it's hard to even imagine what HN could do differently to compete, and the median HN thread being better than the median Reddit thread. Another interesting thing is that the comparison would probably fall apart completely if not for the heavily-moderated subreddits that produce the best comments. If the Reddit comment cohorts included only the lightly moderated subreddits, HN would probably win on all metrics other than volume and diversity of topics.
- toxican 10y ago
  While I still think HN probably has the better median, the quality of what you're exposed to on reddit is mostly up to you. Ditch the defaults and Reddit's median skyrockets. Ditch some of the more popular non-defaults, it skyrockets some more. Start building a list of well-moderated subreddits with a strong sense of community, and it jumps some more. Not that you're doing this with your comment, but it has always struck me as odd to treat reddit like it's a single website with a single experience for all users. Yes, there's a base, universal experience, but it's truly up to the user to tailor that experience into what they want. You want memes and fart jokes? There are subs for that. You want to look at breathtaking photos? There are (poorly named) subs for that. You want to discuss why obscure Warcraft character A is behaving so oddly toward Warcraft character B? There's a sub for that. To me, that will always be Reddit's strength. No matter what reputation it gets, no matter how much shit goes on in the defaults, there's always my little specialty subreddits filled with meaningful content to consume.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    So that's the obvious response, and I agree, I think --- the comparison does get trickier if you take just, say, AskHistorians versus HN (there are casual Redditisms condoned even on well-moderated subreddits that are annoying enough to keep the comparison tricky). But if you compare the basket of subreddits relevant to HN --- programming, crypto, etc --- right now, I feel like HN is winning handily. Reddit only starts crushing HN when you broaden out into topics that aren't really in HN's bailiwick.
    - Ar-Curunir 10y ago
      I find /r/crypto much better than HN for crypto discussions; you have more than one crypto person there ( as opposed to essentially just you).
      - cpach 10y ago
        AFAIK HN has more than one qualified crypto persons.
  - whopa 10y ago
    > Ditch the defaults and Reddit's median skyrockets. Ditch some of the more popular non-defaults, it skyrockets some more. Start building a list of well-moderated subreddits with a strong sense of community, and it jumps some more. Honest question: What are some actual techniques to effectively find these gem subreddits? I see this sentiment expressed regularly, but nobody explains how actual effective discovery works. If the answer is spending hours wading through a bunch of noise only to find one or two gems, it's a completely rational response to just give up on Reddit itself, because the reward/time spent tradeoff is too low.
- jsmthrowaway 10y ago
  The problem with this analysis is that each Reddit subreddit is its own community. So "median Reddit {comment,thread}" is largely useless and misleading for purposes of the comparison. I sense that you know this, though.
- dsacco 10y ago
  I find it hard to agree with you, but I don't go on reddit much. Can you supply a few reddit threads you feel are exceptionally high caliber? I mostly consume /r/askscience and /r/askhistorians. One of the problems I have with reddit (and this might come from not working hard enough at it) is not knowing how to find active, high quality, specialty subreddits.
  - VodkaHaze 10y ago
    You want to find the niche expert subreddits. The ones you named are good. So is /r/badhistory, /r/badeconomics [1] which are generally hangouts of experts to make fun of people claiming things. /r/netsec is generally good, so is /r/machinelearning. Even niche job-specific subreddits (like meddit or /r/protectandserve) are interesting to observe. Because economics gets politicized so much, it's very rare to find sound discussion in popular forums. It's a ton of people cheering for their "team's" policies. [1] Full disclosure: I'm recently been made a mod there. /r/badeconomics is probably the highest signal/noise economics place on the internet at the moment though. I learned more there than in school in the years I've spent there.
    - tptacek 10y ago
      I didn't know about badeconomics, and I'm enjoying a lot, but I can already see ways in which its moderation reduces the average comment quality. For instance: there's a whole lot of insubstantial snark. A lot of it is funny, but you have to pick through it to find the actual information. That's not a criticism of badeconomics! Just an observation on how moderation choices can affect total thread quality in different ways. It is also totally legitimate to optimize for highest-possible-highs.
      - VodkaHaze 10y ago
        Yeah it's going through reforms in the next week or so, to improve overall quality. The subreddit has tripled in subscriber base over the last year, and growth like that can be harmful if you're aiming for a higher signal/noise ratio. Snark is not frowned upon as long as it's based on something meaningful. I'm guilty of snark, but I try to craft high quality posts. Making fun of people because they disagree with your viewpoint is not fine if you don't explain why in an objective manner, though. But the subreddit is such that a lot of people bring their personal ideology and hope for the regulars of that subreddit to back them up. So there's a balance to be struck.
- cableshaft 10y ago
  /r/boardgames is pretty much always a positive community, unless you proclaim your love of Munchkin. Anything interesting news or links about board games tends to get posted there too. But there's also people asking the same questions over and over again (I like blah and blah, and don't like blah, what should I buy next?), but I don't mind that personally. I remember specifically when GamerGate discussion was poisoning just about every video game community and someone tried to bring it to the board games subreddit and tie it in with board games, and the admins made an executive decision to squash it. Probably one of the best things they ever did, because the board has remained very civil and friendly since. I've had good experiences with /r/keto too. I almost never check anything else there anymore. But yeah, niche subreddits.
AlexCoventry 10y ago
What's an example of a pure economics discussion?
- VodkaHaze 10y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/58tf3h/the_gold_discussion_sticky_come_ask_questions_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/58tf3h/the_go...
ranit 10y ago
> Basically all the subreddits except /r/academiceconomics, /r/badeconomics, /r/econpapers are awful. You probably mean "Basically all the subreddits related to economics except ..."
B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
> they have a really hard time reigning in Reigning monarchs have it hard these days. Not that reining stubborn mules is much better. (Pet peeve, but really paying forward a good correction someone gifted me a few weeks ago. Otherwise quit, really ;)
yxhuvud 10y ago
Regarding /r/economics, if you find it bad now you should have seen it before. I for one doesn't miss the Austrian bullshit that used to be very common there.
kuschku 10y ago
> /r/badeconomics The subreddit arguing that it’s reasonable to give companies power over democratically legitimated governments? No thanks. This is a non-negotiable requirement, no non-democratic entity should have power over the highest democratic entity. That’s the fundamental issue that makes traditional ISDS problematic, and why ICS and the new ISDS alternative in CETA were created in the first place. But /r/badeconomics ignores that entire political problematic.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- VodkaHaze 10y ago
  This: > The subreddit arguing that it’s reasonable to give companies power over democratically legitimated governments Is a massive strawman if you're referring to ISDS (which is what it seems). If you want a trade agreement, the terms need enforcement to be unilateral. But political actors in each respective countries will be incentivized not to respect that by internal pressures. So there needs to be a way to settle those disputes, or else you might as well not have any trade agreement. You can dispute the merits of the current court system; I won't, I'm not an expert in that. But saying that this means "companies have power over democratic countries" is absurd. Go look at supreme court cases in any country. How many are "[person] vs [state]" or "entity vs country"? Democratically elected governments can act in ways just as abhorrent as any other entity; that's why the president doesn't have control over, say, what is constitutional or get to control monetary policy.
  - kuschku 10y ago
    > Go look at supreme court cases The supreme courts are democratically determined and justified. For ISDS courts, half of the judges are appointed by the company that is suing. For ICS courts, all the judges are appointed by the nations taking part. That’s why ICS is acceptable, but ISDS is not. > Democratically elected governments can act in ways just as abhorrent as any other entity Correct, but democratically elected governments are put under checks and balances to prevent them from doing so, foreign companies are not.

tptacek 10y ago

Reddit and HN make an interesting comparison. Reddit's highs are really high, far higher than HN's, often skirting the level of "so good as to be newsworthy". But Reddit's lows --- and I don't mean trolling and harassment, I mean the lower bounds of normal conversation there --- are much lower. I think the median HN comment is better, by a lot, than the median Reddit comment. I think you can extend the same judgement out to entire threads --- the best Reddit threads being so much better than HN's that it's hard to even imagine what HN could do differently to compete, and the median HN thread being better than the median Reddit thread. Another interesting thing is that the comparison would probably fall apart completely if not for the heavily-moderated subreddits that produce the best comments. If the Reddit comment cohorts included only the lightly moderated subreddits, HN would probably win on all metrics other than volume and diversity of topics.

toxican 10y ago
While I still think HN probably has the better median, the quality of what you're exposed to on reddit is mostly up to you. Ditch the defaults and Reddit's median skyrockets. Ditch some of the more popular non-defaults, it skyrockets some more. Start building a list of well-moderated subreddits with a strong sense of community, and it jumps some more. Not that you're doing this with your comment, but it has always struck me as odd to treat reddit like it's a single website with a single experience for all users. Yes, there's a base, universal experience, but it's truly up to the user to tailor that experience into what they want. You want memes and fart jokes? There are subs for that. You want to look at breathtaking photos? There are (poorly named) subs for that. You want to discuss why obscure Warcraft character A is behaving so oddly toward Warcraft character B? There's a sub for that. To me, that will always be Reddit's strength. No matter what reputation it gets, no matter how much shit goes on in the defaults, there's always my little specialty subreddits filled with meaningful content to consume.
- tptacek 10y ago
  So that's the obvious response, and I agree, I think --- the comparison does get trickier if you take just, say, AskHistorians versus HN (there are casual Redditisms condoned even on well-moderated subreddits that are annoying enough to keep the comparison tricky). But if you compare the basket of subreddits relevant to HN --- programming, crypto, etc --- right now, I feel like HN is winning handily. Reddit only starts crushing HN when you broaden out into topics that aren't really in HN's bailiwick.
  - Ar-Curunir 10y ago
    I find /r/crypto much better than HN for crypto discussions; you have more than one crypto person there ( as opposed to essentially just you).
    - cpach 10y ago
      AFAIK HN has more than one qualified crypto persons.
- whopa 10y ago
  > Ditch the defaults and Reddit's median skyrockets. Ditch some of the more popular non-defaults, it skyrockets some more. Start building a list of well-moderated subreddits with a strong sense of community, and it jumps some more. Honest question: What are some actual techniques to effectively find these gem subreddits? I see this sentiment expressed regularly, but nobody explains how actual effective discovery works. If the answer is spending hours wading through a bunch of noise only to find one or two gems, it's a completely rational response to just give up on Reddit itself, because the reward/time spent tradeoff is too low.
jsmthrowaway 10y ago
The problem with this analysis is that each Reddit subreddit is its own community. So "median Reddit {comment,thread}" is largely useless and misleading for purposes of the comparison. I sense that you know this, though.
dsacco 10y ago
I find it hard to agree with you, but I don't go on reddit much. Can you supply a few reddit threads you feel are exceptionally high caliber? I mostly consume /r/askscience and /r/askhistorians. One of the problems I have with reddit (and this might come from not working hard enough at it) is not knowing how to find active, high quality, specialty subreddits.
- VodkaHaze 10y ago
  You want to find the niche expert subreddits. The ones you named are good. So is /r/badhistory, /r/badeconomics [1] which are generally hangouts of experts to make fun of people claiming things. /r/netsec is generally good, so is /r/machinelearning. Even niche job-specific subreddits (like meddit or /r/protectandserve) are interesting to observe. Because economics gets politicized so much, it's very rare to find sound discussion in popular forums. It's a ton of people cheering for their "team's" policies. [1] Full disclosure: I'm recently been made a mod there. /r/badeconomics is probably the highest signal/noise economics place on the internet at the moment though. I learned more there than in school in the years I've spent there.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    I didn't know about badeconomics, and I'm enjoying a lot, but I can already see ways in which its moderation reduces the average comment quality. For instance: there's a whole lot of insubstantial snark. A lot of it is funny, but you have to pick through it to find the actual information. That's not a criticism of badeconomics! Just an observation on how moderation choices can affect total thread quality in different ways. It is also totally legitimate to optimize for highest-possible-highs.
    - VodkaHaze 10y ago
      Yeah it's going through reforms in the next week or so, to improve overall quality. The subreddit has tripled in subscriber base over the last year, and growth like that can be harmful if you're aiming for a higher signal/noise ratio. Snark is not frowned upon as long as it's based on something meaningful. I'm guilty of snark, but I try to craft high quality posts. Making fun of people because they disagree with your viewpoint is not fine if you don't explain why in an objective manner, though. But the subreddit is such that a lot of people bring their personal ideology and hope for the regulars of that subreddit to back them up. So there's a balance to be struck.
cableshaft 10y ago
/r/boardgames is pretty much always a positive community, unless you proclaim your love of Munchkin. Anything interesting news or links about board games tends to get posted there too. But there's also people asking the same questions over and over again (I like blah and blah, and don't like blah, what should I buy next?), but I don't mind that personally. I remember specifically when GamerGate discussion was poisoning just about every video game community and someone tried to bring it to the board games subreddit and tie it in with board games, and the admins made an executive decision to squash it. Probably one of the best things they ever did, because the board has remained very civil and friendly since. I've had good experiences with /r/keto too. I almost never check anything else there anymore. But yeah, niche subreddits.

AlexCoventry 10y ago

What's an example of a pure economics discussion?

VodkaHaze 10y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/58tf3h/the_gold_discussion_sticky_come_ask_questions_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/58tf3h/the_go...

ranit 10y ago

> Basically all the subreddits except /r/academiceconomics, /r/badeconomics, /r/econpapers are awful. You probably mean "Basically all the subreddits related to economics except ..."

B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago

> they have a really hard time reigning in Reigning monarchs have it hard these days. Not that reining stubborn mules is much better. (Pet peeve, but really paying forward a good correction someone gifted me a few weeks ago. Otherwise quit, really ;)

yxhuvud 10y ago

Regarding /r/economics, if you find it bad now you should have seen it before. I for one doesn't miss the Austrian bullshit that used to be very common there.

kuschku 10y ago

> /r/badeconomics The subreddit arguing that it’s reasonable to give companies power over democratically legitimated governments? No thanks. This is a non-negotiable requirement, no non-democratic entity should have power over the highest democratic entity. That’s the fundamental issue that makes traditional ISDS problematic, and why ICS and the new ISDS alternative in CETA were created in the first place. But /r/badeconomics ignores that entire political problematic.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
VodkaHaze 10y ago
This: > The subreddit arguing that it’s reasonable to give companies power over democratically legitimated governments Is a massive strawman if you're referring to ISDS (which is what it seems). If you want a trade agreement, the terms need enforcement to be unilateral. But political actors in each respective countries will be incentivized not to respect that by internal pressures. So there needs to be a way to settle those disputes, or else you might as well not have any trade agreement. You can dispute the merits of the current court system; I won't, I'm not an expert in that. But saying that this means "companies have power over democratic countries" is absurd. Go look at supreme court cases in any country. How many are "[person] vs [state]" or "entity vs country"? Democratically elected governments can act in ways just as abhorrent as any other entity; that's why the president doesn't have control over, say, what is constitutional or get to control monetary policy.
- kuschku 10y ago
  > Go look at supreme court cases The supreme courts are democratically determined and justified. For ISDS courts, half of the judges are appointed by the company that is suing. For ICS courts, all the judges are appointed by the nations taking part. That’s why ICS is acceptable, but ISDS is not. > Democratically elected governments can act in ways just as abhorrent as any other entity Correct, but democratically elected governments are put under checks and balances to prevent them from doing so, foreign companies are not.