9 ms·

Reddit holds the secret to fixing Facebook

61 points by edward 9y ago

_aeneas 9y ago
Reddit and Facebook are completely different concepts. The former is a forum, the latter tries to digitize real-life friendships. The difference in MAUs might also be a hint, everything is easier at smaller scale.
- dangerlibrary 9y ago
  As businesses, both companies are trying to hold their audience’s attention and sell that attention to advertisers. Also, Reddit is a high traffic site, so the MAU argument doesn’t really hold water. Generously, maybe facebook’s popularity in more diverse international markets adds additional challenges?
WA 9y ago
tl;dr: Reddit's "secret" to fix Facebook is the ability to downvote stuff. Because Facebook only measures engagement and doesn't care if users like it or not. Reddit (or downvoting in general) provides a better filter. The article ends awkwardly with something that makes no sense at all: > On the same day that Mr Huffman appeared at SXSW, the web's inventor - Sir Tim Berners-Lee - published a letter. > "What was once a rich selection of blogs and websites has been compressed under the powerful weight of a few dominant platforms," he wrote. > Reddit has the power to help reverse this trend. By centralizing discussions on a single website? Odd.
- hliyan 9y ago
  Down voting on a real name network is going to be problematic, unless Facebook keeps down votes secret and uses them to decide where in the news feed to place posts...
- sureaboutthis 9y ago
  The problem with downvoting is you then wind up with one-minded users where diversity of opinions and interests aren't allowed.
- makecheck 9y ago
  Even with the downvoting option of Reddit, I found implementations like StackOverflow’s to be more interesting (at S.O., “down” doesn’t remove as many points as “up” adds, and it costs the downvoter personal points to do it).
  - acdha 9y ago
    The SO model seems tricky to generalize. I like that downvoting has a cost but for political topics that’s vulnerable to sock puppets & trolls unless there’s a very healthy karma threshold.
    - hycaria 9y ago
      Do we really need to put an idiotic comment at -150 points to make a point though ?
      - acdha 9y ago
        I was thinking more about the situation where a bunch of accounts are registered and upvote each other into prominence or coordinate downvotes. That can have a pronounced effect on community norms and many communities don’t have enough genuine participants with spare time to stay on top of even minor troll infestations much less a GamerGate, Russian political operation, etc.
- 283894 9y ago
  >"What was once a rich selection of blogs and websites has been compressed under the powerful weight of a few dominant platforms," he wrote. >Reddit has the power to help reverse this trend. Odd that they completely missed the point of this, Reddit is a major part of the consolidation of the internet. Reddit pretty much killed independent forum and community websites.
  - code_duck 9y ago
    In my experience, Facebook has replaced more independent online communities than reddit.
- intended 9y ago
  As the author points out that at least Reddit shunts you out of the website when yoU find an interesting link. Facebook wants you to react as long as you react within its walled garden.
anonytrary 9y ago
Reddit is trivial to get started with as it's a streamlined, modern online forum with pretty basic rules. I've tried signing up to Facebook recently, and it's very difficult to get started. There are too many things to do, too many buttons and too many questions. I feel like I'm visiting a different country and have been thrown into the middle of a foreign marketplace.
- code_duck 9y ago
  What I noticed about signing up on Facebook in 2018 is that I was immediately inundated with friend requests from Africa. I can’t imagine how that plays out for your average random older, non tech savvy American signing up for the first time.
nkkollaw 9y ago
What a weird article. Why comparing Facebook with Reddit? "Bikes hold the secret to fixing traffic jams". Ok, sure...
NietTim 9y ago
> In fact, I'd go as far as to say Reddit provides a model for how to create a more interesting, fairer web. A model that doesn't drag down other publishers in the process. No, instead it drags down users who don't follow the hivemind and bolsters power hungry mods who set the narrative. Reddit, and it's system, is in my opinion the very opposite of fixing anything, unless you think echo chambers are good thing. > With Reddit, though, it's right there on the homepage. As I write this, the top item on the site - about a person conquering drug addiction - is there because 49,600 people felt it worth my attention. And a number of posts you don't see because they're either removed or because the algorithm holds them back. Also, the upvotes you see are not how many people have upvoted that post... That number is much different. > Under Reddit's upvote/downvote system, clickbait headlines often sink quickly, while long, descriptive titles, leading to genuinely insightful information, thrive. How much time has this author spend on reddit? Clickbait is upvoted just as easily, as long as it goes along with what the hivemind thinks on that moment. And long descriptive titles do indeed thrive - because almost no one reads the article and most discussions that follow are bases solely on the title of the article. Sigh so much wrong with the article, so much wishful thinking towards reddit..
- mattmanser 9y ago
  Yeah, he really hasn't seen the darkside to Reddit has he? And it can get really dark. I deleted an account I had there a while back and started again, with a very different set of subreddits, switching from fun to serious sub-reddits. It's like a totally different website. I shudder to think what a racist or misogynist's reddit looks like.
  - code_duck 9y ago
    I tried that with Facebook and was surprised at how different the experience was, before they pigeonholed me and I started getting content and suggestions similar to my original account.
  - chakalakasp 9y ago
    Help me ObiWan Kenonbi, you’re my only hope. What’s a good list of serious subreddits? I’ve found a small handful, but there are surprisingly few I could find that had genuinely compelling content or commentary.
threeseed 9y ago
This is hilariously ignorant. Reddit just in the last few days banned /r/uncensorednews and /r/european for some of the most racist, xenophobic content you can find on the internet. And the admins allowed this behaviour to persist for months and years. Or maybe they should spend some time in /r/incel or /r/kotakuinaction to find disturbing sexist and mysognistic communities that again is unparalleled amongst the rest of the internet (4chan included). The depths of Reddit is truly an horrific and appalling place to be. And no self respecting website should ever follow what Reddit does to stop it (i.e. not very much).
- ppod 9y ago
  This is like complaining about the internet because it contains websites that you have no obligation to ever visit.
  - fredoliveira 9y ago
    It is not. In fact, OP states exactly how it is not, by saying that Reddit does very little to stop the toxicity of reddit. Are you shielded from the "bad parts" of reddit if you don't subscribe to that type of sub-reddit? Well, maybe, unless you hit /r/all in your top navigation. It's all right there lurking under the surface. Reddit gets very dark very fast and it is factual that they don't control it nearly as well as they should. So no, it is not like "complaining about the internet because it contains websites that you have no obligation to ever visit" because the internet has no mechanism to surface bad content on the whim of its users. All it takes on reddit to surface something terrible is coordination and hitting the upvote button.
    - anuddashoah 9y ago
      This is clearly coming from someone whose views generally align with the progressive/leftist/globalist reddit hivemind. As someone very much on the other end of the spectrum, it might be interesting that everyone in my circles loathes reddit for the censorship and manipulative propaganda. I hate how well they "control" it, and I despise your euphemistic use of the term.
vit05 9y ago
All Reddit users will disagree. I prefer to use Reddit, but he is not an example of anything right now. It is suffering as much as any other platform that offers a space for discussion. Besides being completely populated by Bots and groups that act in an orchestrated way.
John_KZ 9y ago
Reddit is much worse that Facebook. Yes, Facebook. Reddit is extremely fast to censor and hide opinions, even without the knowledge of the person silenced. Different opinions are not tolerated. Completely wrong and ignorant comments get thousands of upvotes and maintain very high visibility despite stating things that can be proven false by elementary textbooks or a single google query. There's a toxic pretend-academic mindset, based around "science" and "sources" as infallable, religious-type absolute proofs of opinions. Hundreds of the top thousand posts are covert advertisement, many with fake upvotes and comments, created by either PR companies, botnets, or Reddit's own ad services. And all that without going into the toxic environment of users mindset, corrupt moderators (yes, actually taking money from companies and scammers) and other problems. Reddit is very close to everything wrong with the internet. And on top of that, they're trying to turn into a facebook-like abomination, because the anonymous, free-for-all nature of the past Reddit has not been proven to be profitable or controllable enough.
intended 9y ago
I think the author missed the actual special trick that Reddit allows over other subs/forum systems - subreddits. Look Reddit is transparently similar to many forums that came before it, and most of the old farts from slash dot will know this. What major change Reddit enables is subreddit budding/splitting for forums. Forums had a terrible problem with the noise to signal ratio- sometimes the topic (say pictures) was too broad to deal with. How the heck do moderators of a forum on pictures deal with memes? Or just cute baby pics? Or nature pics- and so on. Well subreddits solves that - while giving you a single identity you can use to traverse all this stuff, with a relatively consistent set of functions over each subject domain. This is a pretty major function and any large scale forum will have to enable this functionality. Also subreddit creation is a snap. —- As for everyone who is bemoaning the state of Reddit - that’s the state of any forum after it starts attract the full attention of the internet populace. The truth is long since known. The net is generally an ugly place and assuming that the admins or mods are some how unusually responsible for this state of affairs is dismissive of reality. I Once modded at Reddit - I’ve gone from pro free speech to defining a whole new set of rules and conditionals for working with speech online. Free speech in the old net sense is long since gone, and it’s not implementable at scale. Trust me, we’ve tried. At best there’s networks of ideas and forums working with or against each other.
- commandlinefan 9y ago
  > Free speech in the old net sense is long since gone, and it’s not implementable at scale. This is the constant refrain from the pro-censorship crowd: "if we let people say distasteful things, they'll start thinking distasteful things!". Well, no - you have it backwards. They already think it, that's why they wrote it down. What you're trying to do instead is to make the people who believe X think that they're all alone in the world, being the only ones who believe X, which actually fails spectacularly - the people who believe X learn to speak and write in "dog whistles", and the fact that you're suppressing them in the first place helps convince them that they were actually right in the first place. Otherwise, why would you be so threatened by them?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
petraeus 9y ago
There are many major problems with reddit, the foremost being the abusive mods on each sub reddit who let their power delude themselves into forming a god complex, the second being the voting system where it costs nothing to down or up vote leading to extremely bigoted subreddits where those in opposition to the hivemind are quickly banned and their opinion suppressed. lets not even get started on the karama junkies who will repost anything of significance repeatedly if it means getting another 100 or 200 karma, reddit is a cesspool of spam and ignorance fueled by a failed system.
rapnie 9y ago
this recently appeared on HN and New Yorker article makes an interesting (though bit long) read on how Reddit manages its network behind the scenes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16569778 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16569778
aaron695 9y ago
> As I write this, the top item on the site - about a person conquering drug addiction - is there because 49,600 people felt it worth my attention. And it was click bait nonsense plus humanity at it's worst. Read the comments, both the posters success and the follow up were a cluster fuck of what's wrong with the internet. https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/8411bo/never_thought_id_make_it_this_far_and_wanted_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/8411bo/never_thought_...
intendedeffect 9y ago
Surprised and then not-surprised to see this discussion turn into a shitshow. I never spent much time on Reddit until relatively recently, but I think they're doing a pretty good job, and that's speaking as someone who ran an online community of a few thousand people for a while. A lot of my favorite corners of the internet are places where people obsessively talk about some fairly narrow niche, and for me assembling a stream out of such forums ends up being pretty delightful! Plumbers post plumbing in-jokes in /r/plumbing, but explain them to anyone who asks and help out the non-plumbers who wander in with questions. I never bump into the darkest corners, and I'm glad that they've been sweeping them out. Periodically I'll see a pile of [deleted]s, but generally in some thread clearly vulnerable to inappropriate comments or dumb yucks jokes. I'll assume all the "power hungry mods" people here aren't idiots having their "that's what she said" comments and race theories deleted. Is the mod dynamic significantly different in much larger subs than I frequent? Are people frustrated at having comments deleted, or are they running afoul of some subs' (sometimes very persnickety) posting requirements?
notacoward 9y ago
HAHAHAHA no. Reddit is not a good model for much of anything. To start with, they're solving a much simpler problem. A large percentage of their claimed 1.6B users per month are pure drive-bys - outsiders who followed one link one time and then left quickly. That's not the same as two billion users actively posting and interacting with content. Also, their data model is simpler. Even a hundred thousand subreddits are easy to model and manage compared to the "social graph" which is unique for each user. Even with that smaller scale and simpler model, they're not even trying to address some of the interesting problems such as privacy. You post something to a subreddit and it's visible or not - even to those casual visitors - according to the subreddit's settings. You don't get individual control of each post's visibility, which is essential for many people to control which sides of themselves they show to which groups of friends. Reddit is shouting in one of many town squares, and can be nothing else. Facebook can also be used that way, but for many it's more importantly a way to have more private interactions. Reddit doesn't even try to solve the interesting problems, so it could hardly be considered a model for solving them.
zombieprocesses 9y ago
The only reason he's saying that is because reddit has given BBC "special status" and BBC's social media team controls a bunch of subreddits. Reddit has turned into a crazy echo chamber - a crazy echo chamber that is in line with BBC's goals.
nikki-9696 9y ago
Does the author even know how reddit works? The vote numbers you see aren't real (sidebars and faq on the site itself explain this see https://www.reddit.com/wiki/faq https://www.reddit.com/wiki/faq ) and many subs don't let you downvote unless you join them. Reddit is no panacea or utopia and has plenty of issues of its own, as pointed out by many already.
- SippinLean 9y ago
  The numbers are fuzzed by generally a good indicator. There's no way to disable downvoting on reddit. Some subs try to hide the button using custom CSS, but this doesn't affect those with custom CSS disabled sitewide, per-subreddit (with RES) or mobile users (presumably the majority of traffic). Tangent rant: giving your sub some character with a custom banner is ok, but the ability to hide or change basic UI like the logout button or voting buttons is a huge flaw in the design of reddit.
ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
The problem with Reddit is this... not sure how to fix it. I like to play a game where I make up sort of believable 'true stories' about minor celebrities. I always make sure they are VERIFIABLE FALSE to someone who did the tiniest bit of fact checking. Sometimes they only receive a few up votes... but a lot of times they get thousands. Eventually someone will call bullshit, but that person is just crushed by the avalanche of up votes. Lying about minor things isn't something most MODS will ban you for, or even delete your comment, so most of them still stand. There has to be some mechanism where one person who can prove they know the truth, has more voting power than the general visitor who does not. It's just like something Sheryl Sandberg said to me at a women's leadership conference. "It takes a lot of people working together to build something great, but it only takes one asshole to fuck it up."
- intended 9y ago
  There's no way to do that because it relies on a naive understanding of truth. Sometimes the celebrity themselves may have selective recall of an event - so even a statement from the subject of the rumor could be false. Two video cameras catching the same event from different angles can imply vastly different stories. Basically the plot of rashomon unfolds everyday and at scale.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

61 points by edward 9y ago

Reddit and Facebook are completely different concepts. The former is a forum, the latter tries to digitize real-life friendships. The difference in MAUs might also be a hint, everything is easier at smaller scale.

dangerlibrary 9y ago
As businesses, both companies are trying to hold their audience’s attention and sell that attention to advertisers. Also, Reddit is a high traffic site, so the MAU argument doesn’t really hold water. Generously, maybe facebook’s popularity in more diverse international markets adds additional challenges?

WA 9y ago

tl;dr: Reddit's "secret" to fix Facebook is the ability to downvote stuff. Because Facebook only measures engagement and doesn't care if users like it or not. Reddit (or downvoting in general) provides a better filter. The article ends awkwardly with something that makes no sense at all: > On the same day that Mr Huffman appeared at SXSW, the web's inventor - Sir Tim Berners-Lee - published a letter. > "What was once a rich selection of blogs and websites has been compressed under the powerful weight of a few dominant platforms," he wrote. > Reddit has the power to help reverse this trend. By centralizing discussions on a single website? Odd.

hliyan 9y ago
Down voting on a real name network is going to be problematic, unless Facebook keeps down votes secret and uses them to decide where in the news feed to place posts...
sureaboutthis 9y ago
The problem with downvoting is you then wind up with one-minded users where diversity of opinions and interests aren't allowed.
makecheck 9y ago
Even with the downvoting option of Reddit, I found implementations like StackOverflow’s to be more interesting (at S.O., “down” doesn’t remove as many points as “up” adds, and it costs the downvoter personal points to do it).
- acdha 9y ago
  The SO model seems tricky to generalize. I like that downvoting has a cost but for political topics that’s vulnerable to sock puppets & trolls unless there’s a very healthy karma threshold.
  - hycaria 9y ago
    Do we really need to put an idiotic comment at -150 points to make a point though ?
    - acdha 9y ago
      I was thinking more about the situation where a bunch of accounts are registered and upvote each other into prominence or coordinate downvotes. That can have a pronounced effect on community norms and many communities don’t have enough genuine participants with spare time to stay on top of even minor troll infestations much less a GamerGate, Russian political operation, etc.
283894 9y ago
>"What was once a rich selection of blogs and websites has been compressed under the powerful weight of a few dominant platforms," he wrote. >Reddit has the power to help reverse this trend. Odd that they completely missed the point of this, Reddit is a major part of the consolidation of the internet. Reddit pretty much killed independent forum and community websites.
- code_duck 9y ago
  In my experience, Facebook has replaced more independent online communities than reddit.
intended 9y ago
As the author points out that at least Reddit shunts you out of the website when yoU find an interesting link. Facebook wants you to react as long as you react within its walled garden.

anonytrary 9y ago

Reddit is trivial to get started with as it's a streamlined, modern online forum with pretty basic rules. I've tried signing up to Facebook recently, and it's very difficult to get started. There are too many things to do, too many buttons and too many questions. I feel like I'm visiting a different country and have been thrown into the middle of a foreign marketplace.

code_duck 9y ago
What I noticed about signing up on Facebook in 2018 is that I was immediately inundated with friend requests from Africa. I can’t imagine how that plays out for your average random older, non tech savvy American signing up for the first time.

nkkollaw 9y ago

What a weird article. Why comparing Facebook with Reddit? "Bikes hold the secret to fixing traffic jams". Ok, sure...

NietTim 9y ago

> In fact, I'd go as far as to say Reddit provides a model for how to create a more interesting, fairer web. A model that doesn't drag down other publishers in the process. No, instead it drags down users who don't follow the hivemind and bolsters power hungry mods who set the narrative. Reddit, and it's system, is in my opinion the very opposite of fixing anything, unless you think echo chambers are good thing. > With Reddit, though, it's right there on the homepage. As I write this, the top item on the site - about a person conquering drug addiction - is there because 49,600 people felt it worth my attention. And a number of posts you don't see because they're either removed or because the algorithm holds them back. Also, the upvotes you see are not how many people have upvoted that post... That number is much different. > Under Reddit's upvote/downvote system, clickbait headlines often sink quickly, while long, descriptive titles, leading to genuinely insightful information, thrive. How much time has this author spend on reddit? Clickbait is upvoted just as easily, as long as it goes along with what the hivemind thinks on that moment. And long descriptive titles do indeed thrive - because almost no one reads the article and most discussions that follow are bases solely on the title of the article. Sigh so much wrong with the article, so much wishful thinking towards reddit..

mattmanser 9y ago
Yeah, he really hasn't seen the darkside to Reddit has he? And it can get really dark. I deleted an account I had there a while back and started again, with a very different set of subreddits, switching from fun to serious sub-reddits. It's like a totally different website. I shudder to think what a racist or misogynist's reddit looks like.
- code_duck 9y ago
  I tried that with Facebook and was surprised at how different the experience was, before they pigeonholed me and I started getting content and suggestions similar to my original account.
- chakalakasp 9y ago
  Help me ObiWan Kenonbi, you’re my only hope. What’s a good list of serious subreddits? I’ve found a small handful, but there are surprisingly few I could find that had genuinely compelling content or commentary.

threeseed 9y ago

This is hilariously ignorant. Reddit just in the last few days banned /r/uncensorednews and /r/european for some of the most racist, xenophobic content you can find on the internet. And the admins allowed this behaviour to persist for months and years. Or maybe they should spend some time in /r/incel or /r/kotakuinaction to find disturbing sexist and mysognistic communities that again is unparalleled amongst the rest of the internet (4chan included). The depths of Reddit is truly an horrific and appalling place to be. And no self respecting website should ever follow what Reddit does to stop it (i.e. not very much).

ppod 9y ago
This is like complaining about the internet because it contains websites that you have no obligation to ever visit.
- fredoliveira 9y ago
  It is not. In fact, OP states exactly how it is not, by saying that Reddit does very little to stop the toxicity of reddit. Are you shielded from the "bad parts" of reddit if you don't subscribe to that type of sub-reddit? Well, maybe, unless you hit /r/all in your top navigation. It's all right there lurking under the surface. Reddit gets very dark very fast and it is factual that they don't control it nearly as well as they should. So no, it is not like "complaining about the internet because it contains websites that you have no obligation to ever visit" because the internet has no mechanism to surface bad content on the whim of its users. All it takes on reddit to surface something terrible is coordination and hitting the upvote button.
  - anuddashoah 9y ago
    This is clearly coming from someone whose views generally align with the progressive/leftist/globalist reddit hivemind. As someone very much on the other end of the spectrum, it might be interesting that everyone in my circles loathes reddit for the censorship and manipulative propaganda. I hate how well they "control" it, and I despise your euphemistic use of the term.

vit05 9y ago

All Reddit users will disagree. I prefer to use Reddit, but he is not an example of anything right now. It is suffering as much as any other platform that offers a space for discussion. Besides being completely populated by Bots and groups that act in an orchestrated way.

John_KZ 9y ago

Reddit is much worse that Facebook. Yes, Facebook. Reddit is extremely fast to censor and hide opinions, even without the knowledge of the person silenced. Different opinions are not tolerated. Completely wrong and ignorant comments get thousands of upvotes and maintain very high visibility despite stating things that can be proven false by elementary textbooks or a single google query. There's a toxic pretend-academic mindset, based around "science" and "sources" as infallable, religious-type absolute proofs of opinions. Hundreds of the top thousand posts are covert advertisement, many with fake upvotes and comments, created by either PR companies, botnets, or Reddit's own ad services. And all that without going into the toxic environment of users mindset, corrupt moderators (yes, actually taking money from companies and scammers) and other problems. Reddit is very close to everything wrong with the internet. And on top of that, they're trying to turn into a facebook-like abomination, because the anonymous, free-for-all nature of the past Reddit has not been proven to be profitable or controllable enough.

intended 9y ago

I think the author missed the actual special trick that Reddit allows over other subs/forum systems - subreddits. Look Reddit is transparently similar to many forums that came before it, and most of the old farts from slash dot will know this. What major change Reddit enables is subreddit budding/splitting for forums. Forums had a terrible problem with the noise to signal ratio- sometimes the topic (say pictures) was too broad to deal with. How the heck do moderators of a forum on pictures deal with memes? Or just cute baby pics? Or nature pics- and so on. Well subreddits solves that - while giving you a single identity you can use to traverse all this stuff, with a relatively consistent set of functions over each subject domain. This is a pretty major function and any large scale forum will have to enable this functionality. Also subreddit creation is a snap. —- As for everyone who is bemoaning the state of Reddit - that’s the state of any forum after it starts attract the full attention of the internet populace. The truth is long since known. The net is generally an ugly place and assuming that the admins or mods are some how unusually responsible for this state of affairs is dismissive of reality. I Once modded at Reddit - I’ve gone from pro free speech to defining a whole new set of rules and conditionals for working with speech online. Free speech in the old net sense is long since gone, and it’s not implementable at scale. Trust me, we’ve tried. At best there’s networks of ideas and forums working with or against each other.

commandlinefan 9y ago
> Free speech in the old net sense is long since gone, and it’s not implementable at scale. This is the constant refrain from the pro-censorship crowd: "if we let people say distasteful things, they'll start thinking distasteful things!". Well, no - you have it backwards. They already think it, that's why they wrote it down. What you're trying to do instead is to make the people who believe X think that they're all alone in the world, being the only ones who believe X, which actually fails spectacularly - the people who believe X learn to speak and write in "dog whistles", and the fact that you're suppressing them in the first place helps convince them that they were actually right in the first place. Otherwise, why would you be so threatened by them?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

petraeus 9y ago

There are many major problems with reddit, the foremost being the abusive mods on each sub reddit who let their power delude themselves into forming a god complex, the second being the voting system where it costs nothing to down or up vote leading to extremely bigoted subreddits where those in opposition to the hivemind are quickly banned and their opinion suppressed. lets not even get started on the karama junkies who will repost anything of significance repeatedly if it means getting another 100 or 200 karma, reddit is a cesspool of spam and ignorance fueled by a failed system.

rapnie 9y ago

this recently appeared on HN and New Yorker article makes an interesting (though bit long) read on how Reddit manages its network behind the scenes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16569778 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16569778

aaron695 9y ago

> As I write this, the top item on the site - about a person conquering drug addiction - is there because 49,600 people felt it worth my attention. And it was click bait nonsense plus humanity at it's worst. Read the comments, both the posters success and the follow up were a cluster fuck of what's wrong with the internet. https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/8411bo/never_thought_id_make_it_this_far_and_wanted_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/8411bo/never_thought_...

intendedeffect 9y ago

Surprised and then not-surprised to see this discussion turn into a shitshow. I never spent much time on Reddit until relatively recently, but I think they're doing a pretty good job, and that's speaking as someone who ran an online community of a few thousand people for a while. A lot of my favorite corners of the internet are places where people obsessively talk about some fairly narrow niche, and for me assembling a stream out of such forums ends up being pretty delightful! Plumbers post plumbing in-jokes in /r/plumbing, but explain them to anyone who asks and help out the non-plumbers who wander in with questions. I never bump into the darkest corners, and I'm glad that they've been sweeping them out. Periodically I'll see a pile of [deleted]s, but generally in some thread clearly vulnerable to inappropriate comments or dumb yucks jokes. I'll assume all the "power hungry mods" people here aren't idiots having their "that's what she said" comments and race theories deleted. Is the mod dynamic significantly different in much larger subs than I frequent? Are people frustrated at having comments deleted, or are they running afoul of some subs' (sometimes very persnickety) posting requirements?

notacoward 9y ago

HAHAHAHA no. Reddit is not a good model for much of anything. To start with, they're solving a much simpler problem. A large percentage of their claimed 1.6B users per month are pure drive-bys - outsiders who followed one link one time and then left quickly. That's not the same as two billion users actively posting and interacting with content. Also, their data model is simpler. Even a hundred thousand subreddits are easy to model and manage compared to the "social graph" which is unique for each user. Even with that smaller scale and simpler model, they're not even trying to address some of the interesting problems such as privacy. You post something to a subreddit and it's visible or not - even to those casual visitors - according to the subreddit's settings. You don't get individual control of each post's visibility, which is essential for many people to control which sides of themselves they show to which groups of friends. Reddit is shouting in one of many town squares, and can be nothing else. Facebook can also be used that way, but for many it's more importantly a way to have more private interactions. Reddit doesn't even try to solve the interesting problems, so it could hardly be considered a model for solving them.

zombieprocesses 9y ago

The only reason he's saying that is because reddit has given BBC "special status" and BBC's social media team controls a bunch of subreddits. Reddit has turned into a crazy echo chamber - a crazy echo chamber that is in line with BBC's goals.

nikki-9696 9y ago

Does the author even know how reddit works? The vote numbers you see aren't real (sidebars and faq on the site itself explain this see https://www.reddit.com/wiki/faq https://www.reddit.com/wiki/faq ) and many subs don't let you downvote unless you join them. Reddit is no panacea or utopia and has plenty of issues of its own, as pointed out by many already.

SippinLean 9y ago
The numbers are fuzzed by generally a good indicator. There's no way to disable downvoting on reddit. Some subs try to hide the button using custom CSS, but this doesn't affect those with custom CSS disabled sitewide, per-subreddit (with RES) or mobile users (presumably the majority of traffic). Tangent rant: giving your sub some character with a custom banner is ok, but the ability to hide or change basic UI like the logout button or voting buttons is a huge flaw in the design of reddit.

ghostbrainalpha 9y ago

The problem with Reddit is this... not sure how to fix it. I like to play a game where I make up sort of believable 'true stories' about minor celebrities. I always make sure they are VERIFIABLE FALSE to someone who did the tiniest bit of fact checking. Sometimes they only receive a few up votes... but a lot of times they get thousands. Eventually someone will call bullshit, but that person is just crushed by the avalanche of up votes. Lying about minor things isn't something most MODS will ban you for, or even delete your comment, so most of them still stand. There has to be some mechanism where one person who can prove they know the truth, has more voting power than the general visitor who does not. It's just like something Sheryl Sandberg said to me at a women's leadership conference. "It takes a lot of people working together to build something great, but it only takes one asshole to fuck it up."

intended 9y ago
There's no way to do that because it relies on a naive understanding of truth. Sometimes the celebrity themselves may have selective recall of an event - so even a statement from the subject of the rumor could be false. Two video cameras catching the same event from different angles can imply vastly different stories. Basically the plot of rashomon unfolds everyday and at scale.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]