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The problem is building a viable alternative community wise. That's what Voat.co tried to do and look where they are now. Reddit's leadership is beyond terribl

The problem is building a viable alternative community wise. That's what Voat.co tried to do and look where they are now. Reddit's leadership is beyond terrible- anyone remember their CEO shadow-editing users' posts? Where even Pao commented on it? Except no one cared because it was in /r/the_donald. Ever since Reddit made upvotes / downvotes hidden, and started fuzzing upvotes, it started going downhill rapidly. Why? Because it's basically become an advertising platform using the default / larger subs. Just follow /r/hailcorporate to see.

wutbrodo 9y ago
> The problem is building a viable alternative community wise. That's what Voat.co tried to do and look where they are now. Voat had a very specific adverse selection problem. Whenever a community is formed in reaction to viewpoint discrimination[1] move towards a stance of active moderation against certain viewpoints, your community is going to (initially) consist of a few principled, marketplace-of-ideas true believes and then a whole ton of the worst elements of the viewpoints being discriminated against. Or as I heard it put recently: "If you establish a witch-hunt-free zone, you'll attract tons of actual witches". The suggestion upthread here has no such downside. If anything, the better comparison would be Reddit vs Digg, back in the day. Digg had a far better network (and corresponding network effects) back in the day, but Reddit kept plugging away being quietly competent while Digg kept making changes that frustrated the userbase and over time pushed the people who cared the most about quality of conversation to another network. This is the exact _opposite_ problem that Voat had: the sample that was on the smaller site was higher-quality which allowed Reddit to hum along and continually gain users until Digg collapsed and Reddit got a flood of users. [1] I mean this in the descriptive sense, not the sense with a negative connotation
- CrystalLangUser 9y ago
  Yeah, it's unfortunate what happened with Voat. Eventually what happened to Digg will happen to Reddit. Even now people are questioning things like the new profiles and the direction Reddit is taking. I agree, and I've even thought about writing an alternative platform, but I'm worried about the exact same thing with Voat happening.

wutbrodo 9y ago

> The problem is building a viable alternative community wise. That's what Voat.co tried to do and look where they are now. Voat had a very specific adverse selection problem. Whenever a community is formed in reaction to viewpoint discrimination[1] move towards a stance of active moderation against certain viewpoints, your community is going to (initially) consist of a few principled, marketplace-of-ideas true believes and then a whole ton of the worst elements of the viewpoints being discriminated against. Or as I heard it put recently: "If you establish a witch-hunt-free zone, you'll attract tons of actual witches". The suggestion upthread here has no such downside. If anything, the better comparison would be Reddit vs Digg, back in the day. Digg had a far better network (and corresponding network effects) back in the day, but Reddit kept plugging away being quietly competent while Digg kept making changes that frustrated the userbase and over time pushed the people who cared the most about quality of conversation to another network. This is the exact _opposite_ problem that Voat had: the sample that was on the smaller site was higher-quality which allowed Reddit to hum along and continually gain users until Digg collapsed and Reddit got a flood of users. [1] I mean this in the descriptive sense, not the sense with a negative connotation

CrystalLangUser 9y ago
Yeah, it's unfortunate what happened with Voat. Eventually what happened to Digg will happen to Reddit. Even now people are questioning things like the new profiles and the direction Reddit is taking. I agree, and I've even thought about writing an alternative platform, but I'm worried about the exact same thing with Voat happening.