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Washington Post launches a Reddit public profile
- losteverything 9y agoIs this just another way to link to articles? I do like the fact that a newspaper equates itself with any Joe with a resdit signon. How many steps in between wapo and "Average Joe and his facts and opinion?" maybe 3??
- curioussavage 9y agoThe point is if an average user wants to post something that doesnt fit in a community they know of they have a place to post it. It reallg sucks to try to post something and have the stupid moderators shut it down for violating one of their dozens of rules. It also can give more power from moderators back to yhe people who are providing the content. Moderators provide a good service to the community but they are way too powerful/influential as is
- danso 9y agoLooks like they just came on board as Reddit debuted the new user profile format [0]. I just got a message to turn it on as a user this past week. It seems like it'll be a nice feature for not just users, but brands/organizations as well. I hope it sticks to user engagement/meta-type posts (IAMAs) rather than being an account that acts as an auto-submitter of WaPo headlines to r/news/politics/worldnews. That said, one of the challenges of having an official Reddit account that constantly engages with users (it's been actively commenting and replying to users), I would imagine, would be having to be in IAMA mode 24/7. That's fun until something a controversial question/challenge comes up, in which case hours/days of silence will be seen as an admission of guilt/coverup (see r/AMADisasters). [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/6bu4vg/what_are_reddit_profiles/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/6bu4vg/what_a...
- aeleos 9y agoAs a news organization, I would hope they understand the implications of PR and how silence can be very damning. I can't see them falling for it especially considering how many times they have sen others do it and it not go very well for them.
- unityByFreedom 9y ago> That said, one of the challenges of having an official Reddit account that constantly engages with users (it's been actively commenting and replying to users), I would imagine, would be having to be in IAMA mode 24/7 Is that really different from Twitter? At first, for the first organization that does it, maybe. I have to believe that over time people will get over organizations' inability to respond immediately to things on Reddit just because it's Reddit.
- danso 9y agoYeah, I think community conventions are definitely a factor. But main differentiator will be the tone of the account, and the more personal/thoughtful it is (as it is now), the more users will expect it to be forthcoming when there's some controversy to answer for. I think interface plays a big deal too, though. Twitter threaded conversations/replies are still quite difficult to follow, and individual queries are easy to ignore/miss. Whereas in Reddit, top-upvoted replies (which is frequently calling-out-your-bullshit type questions) are going to be the first thing users see when reading your threads by default.
- minimaxir 9y agoI happen to have a spreadsheet of all Reddit AMA backfires (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DTCRqeQvjOZAyngC31knF49iANt48z9sPWZjx0smsMI/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DTCRqeQvjOZAyngC31kn...), and the common thread among AMA disasters is the original poster being genuinely unaware that they might be received negatively (or they are just trolls). I don't think that will be the case with the WaPo, anyways. (For posterity, here's a spreadsheet of all Reddit thread backfires in general: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bUSN7-nocMJz2Wo1KTIn_hPNJaURB05uHCNqrCoEuy0/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bUSN7-nocMJz2Wo1KTIn...)
- aeleos 9y agopretty interesting, seems like one of the first examples of news organizations "advertising" on reddit. I wonder how it will go down and if any others will follow.
- nolok 9y agoLooking at the comments on some on those stories, it feels like they are being swarmed by the pro-Trump accounts that permeates through a lot of reddit in an organized manner. I wonder what step online communities can do to protect against such brigading meant to alter and direct opinions, without sacrificing the freedom they offer their user to have an opinion and discuss it. Machine learning for automatic fact correction seems like a nice answer, until you realize it would definitely go wrong, or be used to control opinion in an even stronger way.
- 3ioewjkfljdksl 9y ago> Machine learning for automatic fact correction seems like a nice answer who determines the facts?
- rtx 9y agoPropaganda being countered by propaganda. Nothing to see there.
- angry-hacker 9y agoIs it brigading only if you don't accept the narrative? Half of the popular voted for the man, can't remember anyone complained when Obama was in the office.
- sanswork 9y agoYou can't remember anyone complaining about Obama when he was in office? You can't be serious.
- angry-hacker 9y agoYou misunderstood me, I'm talking about brigading. When he was popular did you call it Obama fans brigading again and how to stop them?
- sanswork 9y agoPeople in conservative forums pretty regularly complain about brigading. Check r/conservative sometime.
- sergiotapia 9y agoWill the admins also edit posts people make on their own profile?
- 6stringmerc 9y agoI wonder if Avi Selk can repeat his "trial by public opinion" success he had with spinning up the Ahmed Mohamed "Clock Boy" bullshit story that went viral to justify his promotion to WaPo from DMN. Yes, I'm clearly stating I think he rode a terrible lie to a promotion and I hope he enjoys writing about bird smuggling and diaper recycling until he realizes he's a shit journalist and should go find a different profession which he might be better qualified. Scrubbing toilets is a start. James Cameron was a janitor once.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sugarpile 9y agoPeople are unhappy with this comment but I think it speaks to Avi's (and extension wapo's) lack of credibility. Really disliked outside of the dc buro ever since the bezos acquisition. Furthering their misdirected"digital" push is hardly something to celebrate.
- pnathan 9y agoI downvoted because it's nasty. WaPo has a lot of credibility, particularly their long form investigative journalism.
- 3ioewjkfljdksl 9y agoIs that the kind where they cite anonymous sources as the basis for extravagant, sensational, hysterical news headlines?
- mythrwy 9y agoI disagree. Washington Post is very simply a naked piece of propaganda that plays a bit too fast and lose with facts for my tastes in journalism.
- dd36 9y ago
- cooper12 9y agoI can't see this ending well for them consider there are large communities like The_Donald known to brigade and use bots against anyone who criticizes their God Emperor. Facebook has groups, but none as large, coordinated, and malicious as on reddit, where the admins won't put on their big boy pants and ban them despite numerous rule violations. WaPo is just wading into a swamp of alligators.
- arca_vorago 9y agoI consider WaPo almost completely a modern mockingbird operation in full force.
- salimmadjd 9y agoever since the Hiatt(s)[0] (Fred Hiatt and his wife, Margaret Shapiro ) took over editorial position on Wapo. The paper has become a neoconservative/neoliberal operation. Bill Moyer did a nice episode showing the disproportionate number of report Wapo did in pushing fro a war in Iraq [1]. Among notable neoconservatives/neoliberals working at the post and using it as a pulpit are Robert Kagan [2] who worked on the "Project for the New American Century" that became the blueprint of Iraq war agenda. For me the nail in the coffin against the Post was when they used an unknown research firm to push for a neo-mccarthyism Russian connection to over 200 blogs and publishers [4],[5]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hiatt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hiatt [1] http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/citations.html http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/citations.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kagan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kagan [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C... [4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/russian-propaganda-effort-helped-spread-fake-news-during-election-experts-say/2016/11/24/793903b6-8a40-4ca9-b712-716af66098fe_story.html?utm_term=.3c6a553c5b0c https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/russian-prop... [5] https://theintercept.com/2016/11/26/washington-post-disgracefully-promotes-a-mccarthyite-blacklist-from-a-new-hidden-and-very-shady-group/ https://theintercept.com/2016/11/26/washington-post-disgrace...
- toss1941 9y agoIt was interesting to see how much of the media was cheering the cruise missile strike in Syria. I think socially and economically WaPo is very liberal but for some reason most of the media loves almost anything to do with war.
- salimmadjd 9y agoThat's why Robert Kagan calls himself a neoliberal. Socially liberal but a war hawk.
- bpodgursky 9y agoI hope they stick to subreddits that don't shadowban you for posting links to your own content.
- kuschku 9y agoThat's not up to subreddits — that's a site wide rule. You can only post links to your own blogspam on your own profile.
- teej 9y agoI'm surprised no one has commented on this. Reddit has 270m monthly actives? Doesn't that make it as large as twitter/instagram/Snapchat?
- alaskamiller 9y agoYes, it's a top 5 website in the US: http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/US http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/US After 10 years it's now as important to kids as Facebook. There posts getting 100k upvotes more often these days. And some are approaching even 200k. What's even crazier is the growth of the imgur subculture
- chipperyman573 9y agoUpvotes aren't an accurate representation of users. The higher a post's score, the more upvotes it needs to increase. For example, a post with a score of 7 would increase by 1 every time it receives an upvote, but may need 10 or 15 upvotes to increase by another point once it gets over 1000 points (made up numbers). A few months ago, the admins made a change to the algorithm to allow posts to gain much more points than before. Now, a post gets 1 point per upvote until, say, 10,000 upvotes, after which it only needs 5 upvotes per point.
- alaskamiller 9y agoThere was a point where after 6 years on Tumblr, when we started cracking thousand likes on a post. Then came when there were 100k likes on posts. Reddit reached that terminal velocity around year 8.
- yelnatz 9y agoThe increase in upvotes is due to the algorithm change back in December. [0] If you sort top, almost all 100k+ upvotes are after this switch. https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5gvd6b/scores_on_posts_are_about_to_start_going_up/ https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5gvd6b/score...
- hueving 9y ago
- mythrwy 9y agoWashington Post and Reddit. Now that's a match made in heaven. Or Hell. Or whatever. Now Washington Post will have another outlet to tell Millennials why we need to invade Iraq again. Or Syria. Or Ukraine. Or wherever they are stirring up the pot for.
- GetStrFromObj 9y agoAny current/future investors might be interested in the fact that a Reddit admin has been caught today testing a vote bot: http://archive.is/odx8z http://archive.is/odx8z
- spyhi 9y agoHour-old account, archive.is domain. I feel like that's a hint...
- mythrwy 9y agoAs opposed to an "aged" account with karma 4 that made a few vanilla comments a month ago and is now here promoting Washington Post on Reddit? :)
- spyhi 9y agoYeah, I made an account a while ago with the intent to participate and realized I wasn't nearly technical enough to add any value yet, but back now that I'm farther along with my CS degree. For once I had some relevant info! Shitload of Reddit, though, and easy to spot certain patterns from a mile away, just funny to see it here.
- anonred 9y agoIsn't it more likely that the admin is using the post to ferret out compromised reddit accounts in an upvote network?
- zakk 9y agoAs far as I remember that post received more than 4k upvotes in minutes, which is highly unusual for a post in a rather obscure subreddit.
- wink 9y agoInteresting, imho this clearly goes into the Twitter direction of following certain accounts, not "thematic subgroups". Not sure if a widespread use of this would encourage my reddit usage, I usually visit certain subreddits for certain topic - and that not very often. But then again following tweetstorms and hashtags on Twitter is pretty much useless to me, that's why I follow certain people.
- CM30 9y agoHmm, seems like they don't quite understand how Reddit is supposed to work. I mean yeah, they're not breaking the rules yet. Their articles are mostly being posted to their own profile rather than subreddits (though the way it's going now, the 10% rule will be shattered sooner rather than later). But they're making the usual company mistake on the site. Treating communities as a pure advertising platform rather than a place to engage with the members on their own merits. They could be commenting on threads that relate to their industry or topics they've wrote about with interesting answers or sharing things that help make them appear as more 'in touch' with the public (like say, Sonic the Hedgehog and Wendy's do on Twitter). Or moderating a Washington Post subreddit where they feature submissions they think help out their publication. But they're not. They're just advertising the site endlessly on their user page, and making sure every post they make outside said page is an ad for their publication. Honestly, they're lucky Reddit is going down Facebook/Twitter/whoever's route and trying to be a company friendly advertising platform at the expense of a community or community platform. Otherwise this kind of behaviour would have got them kicked out near immediately, especially on an old school forum or mailing list.
- thatguy0900 9y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/6bj5de/state_of_spam https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/6bj5de/state_of_sp... The 1 in 10 rule is no longer being enforced.
- CM30 9y agoHuh, interesting. Guess it's pretty logical, given how awkward the rule was (a promoter could easily get round it just by submitting a bunch of low effort stories for every one of their own they post) and how it kind of punished creators more than you'd expect. Hopefully this means more mods will take a good look at someone's profile and work out how much they're actually contributing to the community rather than running a bot against their submissions and counting them.
- criley2 9y agoI'm going to dissent here. I went to their page and it does not feel like one big "go to the website" WaPo advertisement. They're responding and engaging with users, even negative ones, they're posting stories, and they're giving an insiders view to the newsroom that they aren't offering anywhere else. I mean, here they are offering exclusive access to journalists for questions and posting exclusive newsroom info, and your criticism is that they're not posting stupid jokes on twitter like Wendy's? If it's all the same to you, I'll take the journalists acting like journalists instead of teenage social media managers!
- milquetoastaf 9y agojust google it you pedantic fuck it was literally front page news
- baq 9y ago...for a couple of days at least with Reddit threads totaling 10k+ (mostly worthless, but still) comments per day.
- Chris2048 9y ago1) google is not research 2) the burden is not on me to support the claim
- sctb 9y agoWe detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14387014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14387014 and banned this account for repeatedly violating the guidelines after we've asked you to stop.
- CSMastermind 9y agoI'd prefer reddit die and something replace it. I go to the website every day, mostly for sports and gaming subreddits, but as a platform, it's hopelessly mismanaged. They're technically lost. Look at the trouble they've had making a proper phone app (they still don't have a good one). The user interface is lacking at best (as evidenced by RES being needed to use the site for a long time now). People have been asking for better moderation tools for nearly a decade. The recent CSS dustup shows they don't even understand how people use their site. Then there's the lack what would be super helpful features (the ability to do a subreddit poll, vote for moderators, and access more than your last 100 posts easily). The leadership is completely tone-deaf to the userbase. Just look at the drama when they fired that AMA mod. Many times various CEOs from Ellen Pao to Steve Huffman have acted more like spoiled 6-year-olds than chief executives. That's before you start talking about them pushing their politics on the site. And spoiled 6-year-old isn't too far off from the truth. Keep in mind Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian were essentially gifted their success. They applied to y-combinator with no idea of what to make. They were given the idea for reddit. They couldn't make it work so they had Aaron Swartz forced on them (in what was by all accounts a strained relationship). Aaron fixed the site and made it what it is today then they all got paid. And those two have just been coasting on that ever since. It's nearly a "born on third and thought they hit a triple" situation. If I were a VC I'd be throwing money at a reddit replacement. It's not hard to envision a better platform, it just has a high barrier to entry because you're likely not going to be profitable for years while you grow your userbase. The payoff is huge though. Reddit is one of the largest websites in the world and makes next to no profit because of its management.
- dageshi 9y agoPersonally I've been using reddit for about a decade. It seems more or less the same site it always has been just a lot bigger and with some incremental improvements. 99% of the user base has no clue about who most of the people in your post are, they aren't up in arms about anything, they only care that the site continues to work, which it does. Additionally, I cannot see how a competitor can possibly compete with reddit, reddit offers everything most people want without charging anything, without excessive advertising and without demanding a lot of personal information. How do you build a competitor that matches those criteria and then makes a ton of money?
- darkmarmot 9y agoI had an 8 yr old Reddit account and was recently shadow-banned site-wide for criticizing AMC's video player on an AMC 'sponsored content' post. The Washington Post is sadly just another corporate nail in Reddit's free speech coffin.