8 ms·

Reddit used to be a place where you could post links to anything on the internet (kind of like this place) and comment on it (without signing up with your email

Reddit used to be a place where you could post links to anything on the internet (kind of like this place) and comment on it (without signing up with your email). Now it's place more like Facebook with algorithms based on your personal taste, geolocation, forced email, shadow banning, banning of politically incorrect subreddits, endless political posts and "Futurology" and "Uplifting" news articles. Free speech on reddit died a long time ago.

klodolph 9y ago
I’ve also noticed recently that Reddit has gotten extremely aggressive towards people using it without an account or using it on mobile without installing the app. I’m addicted to it enough, thank you, without having a dedicated app for it.
skrowl 9y ago
Reddit only used free speech as a draw until it got enough user to make money by pushing agendas. It's been agenda-pushing high censorship for years now, but some people just started noticing around the 2016 US election where they didn't even try to hide their obvious bias anymore. In an age where any opposing opinions are consider "toxic" by some, I don't think trying to "detoxify" should be a goal. If you don't like the opinions of a subreddit, don't go to that one.
- taurath 9y ago
  Its been relatively rare that unpopular opinions offered in good faith are punished with anything other than downvotes on reddit. People don't post opinions with the intent to convince, they post with the intent to deceive or create a reaction, IE trolling. That has been the big wave that has taken over, its just taken the conservative political sphere over far quicker. The other wave is the circle-jerk - a relentless and all-encompassing embrace of confirmation bias, institutionalized to keep a fundamentalist purity of thought. This is beyond a normal echo chamber, these are high powered ideology amplifiers. We've never had the concept of unlimited freedom of speech, and most of the time that its been curtailed, it has been to protect against those who use it in bad faith (fire in a crowded theater, etc). That is the toxicity - IMO Reddit is going to learn this lesson far too late, and allow a group that doesn't want to be there anyway take down the whole site when they leave.
  - skrowl 9y ago
    It's not at all rare, and it's endorsed by the admins. They LITERALLY changed their algorithm to keep the Donald Trump fan subreddit from appearing in the /all filter and their posts from ever reaching the front page. When you change your searching and indexing algorithms to suppress fans of a specific politician but not fans of other politicians, that's not really good faith.
- intended 9y ago
  People attribute to malice what is best attributed to entropy The old reddit, allowed actual pedophiles to describe their issues in ask reddit threads. Theres even a dark ama where a relation which would make people ill, was discussed. ---- Unfortunately what social media is exposing, is weaknesses in how human beings agglomerate. If someone makes a forum for dead baby jokes - distasteful to many, but not harmful in private - it eventually attracts people who think that dead baby jokes are the norm. Or in worse terms - a sub for making offcolor jokes soon gets overrun by people who think off color jokes are not a risque deviation from normal behavior, but is actually normal behavior. ---- On top of this, the internet and social communities are extremely low on contextual information - which is critical for most people to understand a conversation in real life. This means that the only way someone can know what you mean when you are being vague, is if you make an constant effort for tonal and idea accuracy in your comments. Obviously this is challenging, leading to a cascade of misunderstandings, which only serve to polarize groups more. ---- Theres a lot of research being done on how people behave online, and its just a grim picture. How Community Feedback Shapes User Behavior (https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1429 https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1429) The spreading of misinformation online( http://www.pnas.org/content/113/3/554.full http://www.pnas.org/content/113/3/554.full) The effect of the ban on hate subs on reddit (http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf)
oblio 9y ago
> Reddit used to be a place where you could post links to anything on the internet (kind of like this place) and comment on it (without signing up with your email). There's no money to be made with that. HackerNews is different cause it's just a funnel and an online play ground for folks at YC. The day they decide that the signal to noise ratio has decreased past their threshold, this place will be gone faster than the Arc server can shut down.
- ddingus 9y ago
  Actually, there was money to be made with that. Reddit generates enough to continue being Reddit through the gold program. What happened was Reddit got sold, and that large amount of money raised expectations about "making money", in particular, equating massive traffic to massive potential dollars. Reddit would have been just fine, and would have seen few real financial issues had it not been burdened with providing a return for a rather large sale price. Just because it can be sold, may not mean it should be. There is an inherent conflict between users goals and how they derive value from a site like Reddit, and the builders who may or may not align with what attracted users in the first place. It's a difficult problem, and one that Aaron spoke to a few times. The idea of sustainable community discussion was solid, and clearly resonant with a lot of people and probably the broadest demographics around. Reddit appeals to everyone from teens on up. Kind of amazing. It's current owners paid a price high enough to remove the sustainable discussion idea from the table, favoring a more monetized model. That has had ripple effects. Not all good, though some are. Today, Reddit has factions. The vast majority use Reddit casually, often on mobile. The basic app works, but not well. There is a much harder core set, a good third or more, and I'm one of those, who just uses the old school browser interface, which works just fine on modern mobile. This third contains many of the community minded people. There is growing angst over changes and a steady divergence in directions, leaving many who understand Reddit, and it's users well, in an increasingly rough place. I don't see it ending well. Frankly, someone is going to do the sustainable discussion thing again, and maybe get it right. Making gazillions won't be in the cards, but a very nice living will be. Should that happen, whoever does it will own discussion big time. The strength in users funding user discussion comes from the absence of that inherent conflict that always manifests when money gets too big and expectations fail to align with what users see as the real value. Maybe people being the customers, in the sense of one another, not so much to deliver ADS, is worth exploring more. It won't be as sexy as something that sells, or that will IPO in a way that sets up founders for life, but it may well be the perfect place to deliver answers to some of the harder questions related to large group discussion dynamics. I have been experimenting with the idea of not making a bunch of rules that define how shitty people can be to one another. What is stated is being a good human is no risk. The more shitty someone is, the greater their costs and risks get. Risks include bans, time outs and such. Costs include various forms of enforced compliance being required to post. Remedies for being a good human are basically a return to normal peer status. In particular, a gradual escalation of cost to contribute long before a time out or ban happens, seems to signal to people. A lot more is recoverable. I see others modeling these things, demonstrating deescalation, and in general trying to recover things before any admin type action is taken. I also see them mentoring newbies toward the safe positive. Her important as that kind of distributed person to person action does not require tools, and cannot be bought. This very strongly suggests community norms can be used instead of explicit rules to manage things toward value and away from noise. Ever notice how alphas looking to start shit have a keen interest in the rules? Of course! They want to know what they can get away with. Take that away and their behavior does change. A secondary part of all this involves evaluating risk reward for trolls and others making noise. I'll not put it here, as my thoughts are incomplete and some work is in process, but I will say indirect means, including tools, automation, filters, rules are all indirect means, and do not address the risk reward inherent in causing grief. I will also say we can't do much about the low risk inherent in just making an account to chat, but we can definitely impact the reward. There are more ways to get at this than we see out there right now.
DanBC 9y ago
There's no forced email for Reddit accounts. New accounts are midly painful with some delays in posting built in.
- yammajr 9y ago
  I made a new account about a week or so ago. Their new user form looks very much like you need an email to create an account, but you can just press continue without adding one, despite there being no indication of that. If I hadn't already known I didn't need an email, I would have either given them one or left the site and not returned, depending on how I felt giving them my email address.
  - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
    As they request it they can probably claim that those not giving it are not authorised under the CMA/CFAA or appropriate act in whatever jurisdiction. Would be interesting to see that tested. Just because I have an honesty box for payments doesn't mean you're not obligated to pay for whatever goods/services.
gowld 9y ago
Reddit has a common frontpage (two, actually: /popular and /all) and user-customizable list of subreddits. > algorithms based on your personal taste, only for recommending subs to try > geolocation only for recommending subs to try > forced email no it does not > shadow banning extremely rare, and per-sub, not reddit-wide > banning of politically incorrect subreddits extremely rare; most of why Reddit is publicly despised is because it allows politically incorrect subreddits.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  How do you know the latter are rare, as they're not publicly disclosed. You only find out the former potentially if you're the a moderator, or perhaps the person banned. The banning of subs you find out if you're in the sub, or watch every sub to check for bans. Or is there a banlist from reddit I don't know about?
- fernandotakai 9y ago
  > extremely rare, and per-sub, not reddit-wide from your list, it's the only thing it's not correct: there's a site wide shadow-ban that is only done by admins. that means if you post something, nobody will see but for you everything will show up as normal. subreddit moderators can approve your comment and it will show up. this started as a measure against spammers but it seems like normal users get shadow banned too. now there's normal ban, where you can be banned from a subreddit (you can't post but you can browse) and there's a reddit-wide ban (your account gets basically deleted). and there's also AutoModerator "shadow-ban" which makes use of reddit's auto moderator to delete a user's comment as soon as it get posted.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

klodolph 9y ago

I’ve also noticed recently that Reddit has gotten extremely aggressive towards people using it without an account or using it on mobile without installing the app. I’m addicted to it enough, thank you, without having a dedicated app for it.

skrowl 9y ago

Reddit only used free speech as a draw until it got enough user to make money by pushing agendas. It's been agenda-pushing high censorship for years now, but some people just started noticing around the 2016 US election where they didn't even try to hide their obvious bias anymore. In an age where any opposing opinions are consider "toxic" by some, I don't think trying to "detoxify" should be a goal. If you don't like the opinions of a subreddit, don't go to that one.

taurath 9y ago
Its been relatively rare that unpopular opinions offered in good faith are punished with anything other than downvotes on reddit. People don't post opinions with the intent to convince, they post with the intent to deceive or create a reaction, IE trolling. That has been the big wave that has taken over, its just taken the conservative political sphere over far quicker. The other wave is the circle-jerk - a relentless and all-encompassing embrace of confirmation bias, institutionalized to keep a fundamentalist purity of thought. This is beyond a normal echo chamber, these are high powered ideology amplifiers. We've never had the concept of unlimited freedom of speech, and most of the time that its been curtailed, it has been to protect against those who use it in bad faith (fire in a crowded theater, etc). That is the toxicity - IMO Reddit is going to learn this lesson far too late, and allow a group that doesn't want to be there anyway take down the whole site when they leave.
- skrowl 9y ago
  It's not at all rare, and it's endorsed by the admins. They LITERALLY changed their algorithm to keep the Donald Trump fan subreddit from appearing in the /all filter and their posts from ever reaching the front page. When you change your searching and indexing algorithms to suppress fans of a specific politician but not fans of other politicians, that's not really good faith.
intended 9y ago
People attribute to malice what is best attributed to entropy The old reddit, allowed actual pedophiles to describe their issues in ask reddit threads. Theres even a dark ama where a relation which would make people ill, was discussed. ---- Unfortunately what social media is exposing, is weaknesses in how human beings agglomerate. If someone makes a forum for dead baby jokes - distasteful to many, but not harmful in private - it eventually attracts people who think that dead baby jokes are the norm. Or in worse terms - a sub for making offcolor jokes soon gets overrun by people who think off color jokes are not a risque deviation from normal behavior, but is actually normal behavior. ---- On top of this, the internet and social communities are extremely low on contextual information - which is critical for most people to understand a conversation in real life. This means that the only way someone can know what you mean when you are being vague, is if you make an constant effort for tonal and idea accuracy in your comments. Obviously this is challenging, leading to a cascade of misunderstandings, which only serve to polarize groups more. ---- Theres a lot of research being done on how people behave online, and its just a grim picture. How Community Feedback Shapes User Behavior (https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1429 https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1429) The spreading of misinformation online( http://www.pnas.org/content/113/3/554.full http://www.pnas.org/content/113/3/554.full) The effect of the ban on hate subs on reddit (http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf)

oblio 9y ago

> Reddit used to be a place where you could post links to anything on the internet (kind of like this place) and comment on it (without signing up with your email). There's no money to be made with that. HackerNews is different cause it's just a funnel and an online play ground for folks at YC. The day they decide that the signal to noise ratio has decreased past their threshold, this place will be gone faster than the Arc server can shut down.

ddingus 9y ago
Actually, there was money to be made with that. Reddit generates enough to continue being Reddit through the gold program. What happened was Reddit got sold, and that large amount of money raised expectations about "making money", in particular, equating massive traffic to massive potential dollars. Reddit would have been just fine, and would have seen few real financial issues had it not been burdened with providing a return for a rather large sale price. Just because it can be sold, may not mean it should be. There is an inherent conflict between users goals and how they derive value from a site like Reddit, and the builders who may or may not align with what attracted users in the first place. It's a difficult problem, and one that Aaron spoke to a few times. The idea of sustainable community discussion was solid, and clearly resonant with a lot of people and probably the broadest demographics around. Reddit appeals to everyone from teens on up. Kind of amazing. It's current owners paid a price high enough to remove the sustainable discussion idea from the table, favoring a more monetized model. That has had ripple effects. Not all good, though some are. Today, Reddit has factions. The vast majority use Reddit casually, often on mobile. The basic app works, but not well. There is a much harder core set, a good third or more, and I'm one of those, who just uses the old school browser interface, which works just fine on modern mobile. This third contains many of the community minded people. There is growing angst over changes and a steady divergence in directions, leaving many who understand Reddit, and it's users well, in an increasingly rough place. I don't see it ending well. Frankly, someone is going to do the sustainable discussion thing again, and maybe get it right. Making gazillions won't be in the cards, but a very nice living will be. Should that happen, whoever does it will own discussion big time. The strength in users funding user discussion comes from the absence of that inherent conflict that always manifests when money gets too big and expectations fail to align with what users see as the real value. Maybe people being the customers, in the sense of one another, not so much to deliver ADS, is worth exploring more. It won't be as sexy as something that sells, or that will IPO in a way that sets up founders for life, but it may well be the perfect place to deliver answers to some of the harder questions related to large group discussion dynamics. I have been experimenting with the idea of not making a bunch of rules that define how shitty people can be to one another. What is stated is being a good human is no risk. The more shitty someone is, the greater their costs and risks get. Risks include bans, time outs and such. Costs include various forms of enforced compliance being required to post. Remedies for being a good human are basically a return to normal peer status. In particular, a gradual escalation of cost to contribute long before a time out or ban happens, seems to signal to people. A lot more is recoverable. I see others modeling these things, demonstrating deescalation, and in general trying to recover things before any admin type action is taken. I also see them mentoring newbies toward the safe positive. Her important as that kind of distributed person to person action does not require tools, and cannot be bought. This very strongly suggests community norms can be used instead of explicit rules to manage things toward value and away from noise. Ever notice how alphas looking to start shit have a keen interest in the rules? Of course! They want to know what they can get away with. Take that away and their behavior does change. A secondary part of all this involves evaluating risk reward for trolls and others making noise. I'll not put it here, as my thoughts are incomplete and some work is in process, but I will say indirect means, including tools, automation, filters, rules are all indirect means, and do not address the risk reward inherent in causing grief. I will also say we can't do much about the low risk inherent in just making an account to chat, but we can definitely impact the reward. There are more ways to get at this than we see out there right now.

DanBC 9y ago

There's no forced email for Reddit accounts. New accounts are midly painful with some delays in posting built in.

yammajr 9y ago
I made a new account about a week or so ago. Their new user form looks very much like you need an email to create an account, but you can just press continue without adding one, despite there being no indication of that. If I hadn't already known I didn't need an email, I would have either given them one or left the site and not returned, depending on how I felt giving them my email address.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  As they request it they can probably claim that those not giving it are not authorised under the CMA/CFAA or appropriate act in whatever jurisdiction. Would be interesting to see that tested. Just because I have an honesty box for payments doesn't mean you're not obligated to pay for whatever goods/services.

gowld 9y ago

Reddit has a common frontpage (two, actually: /popular and /all) and user-customizable list of subreddits. > algorithms based on your personal taste, only for recommending subs to try > geolocation only for recommending subs to try > forced email no it does not > shadow banning extremely rare, and per-sub, not reddit-wide > banning of politically incorrect subreddits extremely rare; most of why Reddit is publicly despised is because it allows politically incorrect subreddits.

pbhjpbhj 9y ago
How do you know the latter are rare, as they're not publicly disclosed. You only find out the former potentially if you're the a moderator, or perhaps the person banned. The banning of subs you find out if you're in the sub, or watch every sub to check for bans. Or is there a banlist from reddit I don't know about?
fernandotakai 9y ago
> extremely rare, and per-sub, not reddit-wide from your list, it's the only thing it's not correct: there's a site wide shadow-ban that is only done by admins. that means if you post something, nobody will see but for you everything will show up as normal. subreddit moderators can approve your comment and it will show up. this started as a measure against spammers but it seems like normal users get shadow banned too. now there's normal ban, where you can be banned from a subreddit (you can't post but you can browse) and there's a reddit-wide ban (your account gets basically deleted). and there's also AutoModerator "shadow-ban" which makes use of reddit's auto moderator to delete a user's comment as soon as it get posted.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]