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I think there is a very important distinction that needs to be made. The popular reddit experience is vastly worse than the customized reddit. It took me a whil

by abnry 9y ago

I think there is a very important distinction that needs to be made. The popular reddit experience is vastly worse than the customized reddit. It took me a while to realize that my reddit experience was vastly improved once I was very picky about which subreddits I follow.

gcbw2 9y ago
reddit cannot be customized. You can subscribe to X subforums. and only ever see those same X subforums. But you can NOT see "All" excluding only things racist subforums for example. So it is either your little bubble, or the full blown promoted/paid xenophobic posts.
- palebluedot 9y ago
  > But you can NOT see "All" excluding only things racist subforums for example. So it is either your little bubble, or the full blown promoted/paid xenophobic posts. For /r/all, there is the ability (on the right sidebar) to filter subreddits. You can add whatever subreddits you wish to exclude when browsing "All".
wyldfire 9y ago
I think this is an important distinction. I could never quite understand what all the hub-bub was until I realized that. I've used my account to comment since before they added subreddits. And I never stumble across one of the "toxic" ones except for the rare occasions when one of the other subreddits links to those ones.
- ggregoire 9y ago
  Wait, how did it work before adding the subs? A single board like HN, but without any specific topics? It seems crazy. I can't imagine Reddit without subs.
  - 0xffff2 9y ago
    Yes. That was a long time ago. The total volume of reddit at that time was probably smaller than even a moderately larger subreddit today.
    - mercer 9y ago
      Seeing the 'average' number of upvotes rise steadily was a really strange experience for me. Hearing people in my various social groups talk about reddit though, was really strange, and sometimes it still feels strange how I can mention reddit to people with the assumption that at least they've heard of it and understand the basic concept.
  - david-gpu 9y ago
    Reddit back in 2005-2006 was a lot like HN, but smaller. No pictures, no memes. Lots of stuff about lisp, functional programming, etc. Many early users came from Slashdot. Some folks complain about the Digg debacle and how that negatively affected the Reddit userbase, but IMO what truly fucked Reddit as a tech news source was the introduction of images.
  - brandmeyer 9y ago
    Actually, it was very much like HN is today, or as /r/programming is today. As an ordinary user, I thought that the creation of subreddits was a clever solution to the Eternal September Problem. The initial pool of users were folks that were sniped away from Slashdot and Digg. There was quite a bit of frustration about the editorship of Slashdot, and having a system that was effectively user-edited was quite attractive. But as the readership grew, a wider array of material started showing up, frequently accompanied by the typical grumbling about relevance. The solution was to split off new user groups into more specialized subgroups. The initial set of subreddits were effectively curated by Reddit itself, based on the categories of stuff that was showing up in practice. User-generated subreddits didn't come until later.
    - fnord123 9y ago
      >The solution was to split off new user groups into more specialized subgroups. The initial set of subreddits were effectively curated by Reddit itself, based on the categories of stuff that was showing up in practice. User-generated subreddits didn't come until later. Everyone wanted tags for posts (myself included), and when they announced subreddits, there was a lot of belly aching. I thought the choice of using subreddits was a technical one to make the site more easily partitionable but they gussied up the reasoning behind the concept of communities. I think they made the right choice.
tptacek 9y ago
Is it the case that for the problems he's talking about, the popular experience is the only one that matters?
paulie_a 9y ago
I completely agree. There are some fantastic engaging subreddits with great people. I personally don't use it as much but I highly recommend finding those cult following subs.
123jay7 9y ago
I think you're wrong. Only follwing subreddits you like will not create a better experience, but a worse one. You will only be exposed to material that you already enjoy, which is kind of boring. It's like having a party but only inviting yourself. I love reading /r/all because I'm always surprised by the type of stuff that's upvoted.
jamiegreen 9y ago
Favourite subs you would recommend?
- psychometry 9y ago
  Ones about things you are interested in...
  - alehul 9y ago
    I'm interested in politics, however /r/politics has awful comment quality and isn't a great sub to visit. I'd also like to hear about people's favorite subreddits in terms of comment quality, as I'd happily read a passionate and informative stance on something I'm usually not interested in compared to what I read on /r/politics. Edit: I meant to use it as an example -- I'm actually interested in any type of subreddit, I meant to explain! So thank you for the suggestions and I'll definitely check them out :)
    - Woofles 9y ago
      /r/neutralpolitics - It's not necessarily trying to be completely neutral, but it's trying to be factual and requires sources to be posted. /r/christianity usually has fairly high quality comments and conversations among Christians and non-Christians. /r/netsec has high quality posts and comments. /r/hockeyplayers has a very helpful community but probably not of interest if you're not a hockey player. /r/goodyearwelt has awesome reviews and information about high quality footwear /r/malefashionadvice is one of the better run larger subreddits that has writers from major publications that post and comment /r/askhistorians is very heavily moderated which means a lot of the most interesting questions remain unanswered for a long time, but the answers that are provided are very well thought out and sourced /r/asksocialscience is similar to /r/askhistorians just different content
    - abritinthebay 9y ago
      This is bizarre to me - the average comment quality on /r/politics is both more informed and higher level than about 90% of subreddits. Granted it's center-left most of the time (from a US perspective anyhow - as a European it is at best centrist) but that's more a function of a reaction to the current climate than anything else. So I guess I'd ask: "what kind of comments are you looking for?" because outside of the science communities you're not going to find better discussion threads.
staplers 9y ago
The same could be said about the internet in general. Take a stroll away from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc and you can find some really interesting places with extremely insightful and meaningful content. The problem is that a majority of people are just absolutely manipulated by their emotions and dive head first into the feedback loop designed by social media to provide an addictive stream of never-ending engagement.
- agumonkey 9y ago
  Last month I was kicked from twitter, since I was trying to be more productive I didn't trigger the reset process. I did spend less time refreshing some timeline. But 1) I did miss some of my "audience" (feels like an audience more than friends, but I'm twisted) 2) I'm now way less aware of lots of news. Two days ago was the first time in years that I thought to myself "what ? I didn't know that" about an event. Not sure if this is bad or good, but it's an important difference.
  - coatmatter 9y ago
    > 2) I'm now way less aware of lots of news. Two days ago was the first time in years that I thought to myself "what ? I didn't know that" about an event. Not sure if this is bad or good, but it's an important difference. I would suggest it's good. Most news in my view is "junknews", even from reputable outlets (including independent media). Why? Very rarely is any news actionable in any way. It's likely that very little of what you and I see each day fundamentally changes how we live our daily lives. Most of it is entertainment and us humans just like to "know" things - there are more effective ways to be informed about the world if that is the honest objective. Spending an equivalent amount of time reading books or going outside into the streets/community is likely far more useful for nearly everyone. Outsource getting the most important updates to people you know; they'll enjoy knowing "stuff" and keeping you up-to-date. Catching up on news can always come later anyway (e.g., if you need to cram for an "exam"; i.e., voting).
    - agumonkey 9y ago
      I do agree to some extent, I mostly despise the mass medias. Especially when you're tech saavy and with the web, they're mostly blurry and late to everything. Also they do create emotional bubbles on stuff that do absolutely nothing (say greece debt, which was the end of the world, then onto the next fad). So I often wanted to disconnect from this. But still my surprise about that event I missed was high and genuine. Maybe I could "quantify" that as higher surprise newsfeed process :p
psychometry 9y ago
True, but The_Donald is always leaking. I've seen plenty of sexist/racist content on subreddits for cities, sports teams, memes, etc. Reddit has allowed itself to be a platform used in part for really despicable content, and the despicable people who generate that content regularly venture outside their cesspools.
- slg 9y ago
  This is the problem that so many people miss when they extol the virtues of a customized Reddit. If you make a site that is attractive to racists, bigots, sexists, and homophobes, those people are going to be using the whole site and not just their tiny vile corners. This phenomenon might be easier to understand with a specific example like the recent Ghostbusters remake. It was by most accounts a bad movie. If you browse any movie related subreddit you will see plenty of valid criticism of that movie. Mixed in with that are comments about how that movie never should have been made with an all female cast and that is what caused the movie to be unsuccessful because women aren't funny. It is easy for some naive kid to see that and think "yeah, I saw that movie and it wasn't funny, maybe that comment has a point". Meanwhile it might never occur to them the user who originally left that comment came to Reddit to be a member of an incel community that is notoriously sexist and anti-women. This allows these communities to grow their size by spreading hate and feeding off the rest of the site.
  - FeepingCreature 9y ago
    That's a lot of bad words to express "people I don't like have a social life."
  - quadrangle 9y ago
    I kinda think if the balance can be maintained instead of reaching a tipping point that the interactions between those bigots etc. and the rest of us may actually ward off their bigotry. A bigot having a conversation with a non-bigot in a context that doesn't start off adversarial is probably the best context we can get for people to slowly drop their bigotry. Sure, it can go the other way too, and that's scary. I was pretty much in the sunlight-best-disinfectant camp until I heard https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/08/25/546127444/episode-790-rough-translations-in-ukraine https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/08/25/546127444/epis... Now, I dunno. Clearly we can't expect independent well-meaning anti-racists to be as effective as extremely carefully crafted propaganda appealing to baser tribalist instincts. It's already uphill battle to get people to be open-minded. Those who argue for reinforcing people's existing biases have it easier. But if there's any chance of getting the bigots to change their views, it seems it will be in respectful conversation with others, which Reddit at least is capable of, though I guess it doesn't seem the trend, unfortunately…
Spooky23 9y ago
It’s not really relevant to what the author is trying to say at all. Actually, it’s the opposite. Because of the excess of disinterested capital that only values growth, a thing that could be a positive and productive thing is instead a cancer — it grows and grows without purpose. That’s why Reddit (and Tumblr) have massive porn sections that aren’t spoken about and Reddit is a watering hole for white supremacy and political propaganda. The porn thing is really interesting in other ways. Hosting images and video is mostly hands off, so it begs the question of what shady things are the third party media hosting people doing to make money and what is Reddit’s business relationship with them.
- belorn 9y ago
  Comparing porn to white supremacy is just that kind of political view that feels completely alien to me. It was not many years ago that Monty Python poked fun at a whole nations conservative view about nudity and porn, and it seems like globally we have taken a few new step backwards toward the 19th century views about those topics. The biggest porn section in reddit is currently ranked 61 of all subreddits. Cat picture section is ranked 6 and is 18 million subscriptions vs 1.4 for the porn. Do reddit have some 18 times more sinister business relationship with cat shops, veterinarians, and cat food, or should we just conclude that reddit reader are human with human interests and as that goes most people prefer looking at a cat picture while a smaller minority goes to reddit for a dose of nudity. Go to http://redditlist.com/all http://redditlist.com/all and look at what the people want to consume. Celebrate that science is where it is.
  - mizzack 9y ago
    Comparing the popularity of a default sub to a NSFW sub using subscriber counts is a horrible argument. New accounts get subscribed to the defaults automatically -- hence the top ~50 subreddits by sub count are or were defaults. "User Activity" is probably more accurate. Even then, how are they determining activity? Views? Comments? Up/downvotes?
    - belorn 9y ago
theguppydream 9y ago
That's important from a product point of view. I see redditors unhappy about a specific community, I'm always confused why they're visiting that community. It's a good distinction, but it doesn't solve the issue that problematic subreddits will continue to exist, even if I've customised Reddit to avoid them. I understood that was more Dan McComas's issue with Reddit, and with Twitter.
cookiecaper 9y ago
reddit has been in an identity crisis since they sold out to Conde Nast. They've made themselves too much of a factor. They should move to a behind-the-scenes operation and let communities bear responsibility for themselves.
projektir 9y ago
This only sort of works. Reddit being a combined system, subs tend to leak into each other. If you are into something very obscure, benign, and uncontroversial, like, fountain pens, you're probably fine. If you're into anything gaming related, good luck. I've been on some subreddits of popular games and it's basically just like the rest of Reddit. In particular, Reddit's system just doesn't work well when there's a lot of users. And the drawback is that these subreddits tend to dominate the space so people do not make private, limited gaming BBS boards as much anymore.
- Woofles 9y ago
  This is definitely the way to handle reddit. I mostly stick to local sports subreddits and a few general interest subreddits (i.e. not /r/funny, /r/pics, etc) and I think reddit is a great tool. I think it's the same thing with most social apps though. Small discord servers allow you to build up groups of online friends, but if you just go into the specific game ones you're going to end up with a mix of good and bad. Overall it's just an issue of popularity bringing out the worst in people.
  - projektir 9y ago
    > Overall it's just an issue of popularity bringing out the worst in people. I don't really agree, it's the issue of aggregating everything relevant to a subject, which makes the popularity relevant. BBS were not aggregated by subject. They're aggregated by the BBS itself. For a given game, there may be 10 BBS. That's how it was before. You'd go to the BBS with the community style you prefer. You have a choice. Now, you're just stuck with one subreddit/Discord server/etc., which just reduces the quality of it all. And given the poor organizational ability of those services, it becomes entirely driven by a mix of popularity and posting speed. [also no skin in the game for the BBS owner, as there is no BBS owner. No BBS competition] It's the same with most "social apps", yes, because discussion shouldn't occur on "social apps", it should occur on private moderated spaces.
siruncledrew 9y ago
That's sort of the inherent flaw of aggregators. There's a lot of shit that gets vacuumed up into the general site, but the onus is really on the user to dig through and find what's meaningful to them.
hasbroslasher 9y ago
I actually disagree with this. I find that customized Reddit leads to the same feedback loop/conveyer belt feeling that made me quit Facebook out of annoyance with always seeing the same ideas propagated out again and again. Browsing Reddit without an account lets you avoid the urge to comment on things and also turns you on to loads of new things that you otherwise might not've found on customized Reddit. Granted, I still have an account I use sometimes, I just get more enjoyment out of the front page when I don't have any control over what I'm seeing.
- mercer 9y ago
  Isn't there still a way to see that particular front page when you're not logged in? Either /r/popular or /r/all?
  - flying_kangaroo 9y ago
    /r/popular will come close to it, and includes a level of customization based on your general location (as the default front page does).
brandmeyer 9y ago
This is both a blessing and a curse. I think that fine-grained subreddits naturally tend towards echo chambers, because it has become easier and easier to find and interact with people that think just like we do.
simias 9y ago
I don't have a Reddit account but I lurk there regularly, in my experience that only works as long as the subreddits are very niche and not well known. As soon as they get popular since there's effectively no barrier of entry for the general Reddit population you effectively get the same community everywhere. Normally when people find a forum that interests them (like, say, HN) they need to bother creating an account, often validating an email etc... It only takes two minutes but that's enough friction to weed out the vast majority of the people who just stumble randomly on one of your posts. On Reddit once you have an account you just have to click a button to subscribe to any community you like. It's "eternal september" on steroids. 4chan had "lurk more", Reddit is "repost more". So your post sounds a bit to me like "Twitter is great if you know the hashtags to follow" and it's probably true but at this point is it really representative of the website? If you need to filter 99% of the content to make it usable, maybe there's a bit of a problem still? I just went to /r/all and had a look at the subreddits available there, I find 16 million accounts subscribed /r/gifs, 3 millions to /r/politics, 17 millions to /r/gaming, 18 millions to /r/pics etc... So yeah, I'd believe you if you told me that /r/common_lisp, /r/mongolia/ and /r/treepics/ are amazing communities but I don't think it's enough to redeem Reddit as a whole.
- crowbahr 9y ago
  /r/Polandball being a shining example to the contrary. There's a whole other discussion to be had about the importance of strict moderation and rules to improving a subreddit's quality.
  - FeepingCreature 9y ago
    Note that this is how Reddit is fundamentally supposed to work - there's a reason that founders get full control over rules and banning.
    - crowbahr 9y ago
      It's just not how the majority of subs shook out, unfortunately. Oh well.
- 9y ago
on_and_off 9y ago
This ! I am becoming more and more picky about which subreddits I follow. I have even unsubscribed from some that are partially interesting to me like androiddev (I work as an Android engineer) because they were 10% interesting information, 90% circlejerk/toxic.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Puer 9y ago
This is my filter list for Reddit using RES (not including keyword filters like Net Neutrality or meme filters): https://i.imgur.com/Ybmk6fZ.gifv https://i.imgur.com/Ybmk6fZ.gifv All the subreddits I want to see I subscribe to directly. For everything else I browse All with these filters.
intrasight 9y ago
I'm fine with the "Google Reddit Experience" - when I search for something and I end up reading an answer to my question on Reddit. I didn't actually know there was any other Reddit experience.
mschaef 9y ago
Funny you should mention that... my first exposure to reddit was exclusively through /r/programming. (To give a sense of the scale of the site at the time, I distinctly remember a post celebrating 65,536 subscribers.) At some point shortly after, they added the ability to create subreddits, the site blew up in overall scale, and I was completely oblivious to it all for years, being that I only read /r/programming. Point is, the site gives you a lot of useful ability to curate what you read.

by abnry 9y ago

gcbw2 9y ago

reddit cannot be customized. You can subscribe to X subforums. and only ever see those same X subforums. But you can NOT see "All" excluding only things racist subforums for example. So it is either your little bubble, or the full blown promoted/paid xenophobic posts.

palebluedot 9y ago
> But you can NOT see "All" excluding only things racist subforums for example. So it is either your little bubble, or the full blown promoted/paid xenophobic posts. For /r/all, there is the ability (on the right sidebar) to filter subreddits. You can add whatever subreddits you wish to exclude when browsing "All".

wyldfire 9y ago

I think this is an important distinction. I could never quite understand what all the hub-bub was until I realized that. I've used my account to comment since before they added subreddits. And I never stumble across one of the "toxic" ones except for the rare occasions when one of the other subreddits links to those ones.

ggregoire 9y ago
Wait, how did it work before adding the subs? A single board like HN, but without any specific topics? It seems crazy. I can't imagine Reddit without subs.
- 0xffff2 9y ago
  Yes. That was a long time ago. The total volume of reddit at that time was probably smaller than even a moderately larger subreddit today.
  - mercer 9y ago
    Seeing the 'average' number of upvotes rise steadily was a really strange experience for me. Hearing people in my various social groups talk about reddit though, was really strange, and sometimes it still feels strange how I can mention reddit to people with the assumption that at least they've heard of it and understand the basic concept.
- david-gpu 9y ago
  Reddit back in 2005-2006 was a lot like HN, but smaller. No pictures, no memes. Lots of stuff about lisp, functional programming, etc. Many early users came from Slashdot. Some folks complain about the Digg debacle and how that negatively affected the Reddit userbase, but IMO what truly fucked Reddit as a tech news source was the introduction of images.
- brandmeyer 9y ago
  Actually, it was very much like HN is today, or as /r/programming is today. As an ordinary user, I thought that the creation of subreddits was a clever solution to the Eternal September Problem. The initial pool of users were folks that were sniped away from Slashdot and Digg. There was quite a bit of frustration about the editorship of Slashdot, and having a system that was effectively user-edited was quite attractive. But as the readership grew, a wider array of material started showing up, frequently accompanied by the typical grumbling about relevance. The solution was to split off new user groups into more specialized subgroups. The initial set of subreddits were effectively curated by Reddit itself, based on the categories of stuff that was showing up in practice. User-generated subreddits didn't come until later.
  - fnord123 9y ago
    >The solution was to split off new user groups into more specialized subgroups. The initial set of subreddits were effectively curated by Reddit itself, based on the categories of stuff that was showing up in practice. User-generated subreddits didn't come until later. Everyone wanted tags for posts (myself included), and when they announced subreddits, there was a lot of belly aching. I thought the choice of using subreddits was a technical one to make the site more easily partitionable but they gussied up the reasoning behind the concept of communities. I think they made the right choice.

tptacek 9y ago

Is it the case that for the problems he's talking about, the popular experience is the only one that matters?

paulie_a 9y ago

I completely agree. There are some fantastic engaging subreddits with great people. I personally don't use it as much but I highly recommend finding those cult following subs.

123jay7 9y ago

I think you're wrong. Only follwing subreddits you like will not create a better experience, but a worse one. You will only be exposed to material that you already enjoy, which is kind of boring. It's like having a party but only inviting yourself. I love reading /r/all because I'm always surprised by the type of stuff that's upvoted.

jamiegreen 9y ago

Favourite subs you would recommend?

psychometry 9y ago
Ones about things you are interested in...
- alehul 9y ago
  I'm interested in politics, however /r/politics has awful comment quality and isn't a great sub to visit. I'd also like to hear about people's favorite subreddits in terms of comment quality, as I'd happily read a passionate and informative stance on something I'm usually not interested in compared to what I read on /r/politics. Edit: I meant to use it as an example -- I'm actually interested in any type of subreddit, I meant to explain! So thank you for the suggestions and I'll definitely check them out :)
  - Woofles 9y ago
    /r/neutralpolitics - It's not necessarily trying to be completely neutral, but it's trying to be factual and requires sources to be posted. /r/christianity usually has fairly high quality comments and conversations among Christians and non-Christians. /r/netsec has high quality posts and comments. /r/hockeyplayers has a very helpful community but probably not of interest if you're not a hockey player. /r/goodyearwelt has awesome reviews and information about high quality footwear /r/malefashionadvice is one of the better run larger subreddits that has writers from major publications that post and comment /r/askhistorians is very heavily moderated which means a lot of the most interesting questions remain unanswered for a long time, but the answers that are provided are very well thought out and sourced /r/asksocialscience is similar to /r/askhistorians just different content
  - abritinthebay 9y ago
    This is bizarre to me - the average comment quality on /r/politics is both more informed and higher level than about 90% of subreddits. Granted it's center-left most of the time (from a US perspective anyhow - as a European it is at best centrist) but that's more a function of a reaction to the current climate than anything else. So I guess I'd ask: "what kind of comments are you looking for?" because outside of the science communities you're not going to find better discussion threads.

staplers 9y ago

The same could be said about the internet in general. Take a stroll away from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc and you can find some really interesting places with extremely insightful and meaningful content. The problem is that a majority of people are just absolutely manipulated by their emotions and dive head first into the feedback loop designed by social media to provide an addictive stream of never-ending engagement.

agumonkey 9y ago
Last month I was kicked from twitter, since I was trying to be more productive I didn't trigger the reset process. I did spend less time refreshing some timeline. But 1) I did miss some of my "audience" (feels like an audience more than friends, but I'm twisted) 2) I'm now way less aware of lots of news. Two days ago was the first time in years that I thought to myself "what ? I didn't know that" about an event. Not sure if this is bad or good, but it's an important difference.
- coatmatter 9y ago
  > 2) I'm now way less aware of lots of news. Two days ago was the first time in years that I thought to myself "what ? I didn't know that" about an event. Not sure if this is bad or good, but it's an important difference. I would suggest it's good. Most news in my view is "junknews", even from reputable outlets (including independent media). Why? Very rarely is any news actionable in any way. It's likely that very little of what you and I see each day fundamentally changes how we live our daily lives. Most of it is entertainment and us humans just like to "know" things - there are more effective ways to be informed about the world if that is the honest objective. Spending an equivalent amount of time reading books or going outside into the streets/community is likely far more useful for nearly everyone. Outsource getting the most important updates to people you know; they'll enjoy knowing "stuff" and keeping you up-to-date. Catching up on news can always come later anyway (e.g., if you need to cram for an "exam"; i.e., voting).
  - agumonkey 9y ago
    I do agree to some extent, I mostly despise the mass medias. Especially when you're tech saavy and with the web, they're mostly blurry and late to everything. Also they do create emotional bubbles on stuff that do absolutely nothing (say greece debt, which was the end of the world, then onto the next fad). So I often wanted to disconnect from this. But still my surprise about that event I missed was high and genuine. Maybe I could "quantify" that as higher surprise newsfeed process :p

psychometry 9y ago

True, but The_Donald is always leaking. I've seen plenty of sexist/racist content on subreddits for cities, sports teams, memes, etc. Reddit has allowed itself to be a platform used in part for really despicable content, and the despicable people who generate that content regularly venture outside their cesspools.

slg 9y ago
This is the problem that so many people miss when they extol the virtues of a customized Reddit. If you make a site that is attractive to racists, bigots, sexists, and homophobes, those people are going to be using the whole site and not just their tiny vile corners. This phenomenon might be easier to understand with a specific example like the recent Ghostbusters remake. It was by most accounts a bad movie. If you browse any movie related subreddit you will see plenty of valid criticism of that movie. Mixed in with that are comments about how that movie never should have been made with an all female cast and that is what caused the movie to be unsuccessful because women aren't funny. It is easy for some naive kid to see that and think "yeah, I saw that movie and it wasn't funny, maybe that comment has a point". Meanwhile it might never occur to them the user who originally left that comment came to Reddit to be a member of an incel community that is notoriously sexist and anti-women. This allows these communities to grow their size by spreading hate and feeding off the rest of the site.
- FeepingCreature 9y ago
  That's a lot of bad words to express "people I don't like have a social life."
- quadrangle 9y ago
  I kinda think if the balance can be maintained instead of reaching a tipping point that the interactions between those bigots etc. and the rest of us may actually ward off their bigotry. A bigot having a conversation with a non-bigot in a context that doesn't start off adversarial is probably the best context we can get for people to slowly drop their bigotry. Sure, it can go the other way too, and that's scary. I was pretty much in the sunlight-best-disinfectant camp until I heard https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/08/25/546127444/episode-790-rough-translations-in-ukraine https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/08/25/546127444/epis... Now, I dunno. Clearly we can't expect independent well-meaning anti-racists to be as effective as extremely carefully crafted propaganda appealing to baser tribalist instincts. It's already uphill battle to get people to be open-minded. Those who argue for reinforcing people's existing biases have it easier. But if there's any chance of getting the bigots to change their views, it seems it will be in respectful conversation with others, which Reddit at least is capable of, though I guess it doesn't seem the trend, unfortunately…

Spooky23 9y ago

It’s not really relevant to what the author is trying to say at all. Actually, it’s the opposite. Because of the excess of disinterested capital that only values growth, a thing that could be a positive and productive thing is instead a cancer — it grows and grows without purpose. That’s why Reddit (and Tumblr) have massive porn sections that aren’t spoken about and Reddit is a watering hole for white supremacy and political propaganda. The porn thing is really interesting in other ways. Hosting images and video is mostly hands off, so it begs the question of what shady things are the third party media hosting people doing to make money and what is Reddit’s business relationship with them.

belorn 9y ago
Comparing porn to white supremacy is just that kind of political view that feels completely alien to me. It was not many years ago that Monty Python poked fun at a whole nations conservative view about nudity and porn, and it seems like globally we have taken a few new step backwards toward the 19th century views about those topics. The biggest porn section in reddit is currently ranked 61 of all subreddits. Cat picture section is ranked 6 and is 18 million subscriptions vs 1.4 for the porn. Do reddit have some 18 times more sinister business relationship with cat shops, veterinarians, and cat food, or should we just conclude that reddit reader are human with human interests and as that goes most people prefer looking at a cat picture while a smaller minority goes to reddit for a dose of nudity. Go to http://redditlist.com/all http://redditlist.com/all and look at what the people want to consume. Celebrate that science is where it is.
- mizzack 9y ago
  Comparing the popularity of a default sub to a NSFW sub using subscriber counts is a horrible argument. New accounts get subscribed to the defaults automatically -- hence the top ~50 subreddits by sub count are or were defaults. "User Activity" is probably more accurate. Even then, how are they determining activity? Views? Comments? Up/downvotes?
  - belorn 9y ago

theguppydream 9y ago

That's important from a product point of view. I see redditors unhappy about a specific community, I'm always confused why they're visiting that community. It's a good distinction, but it doesn't solve the issue that problematic subreddits will continue to exist, even if I've customised Reddit to avoid them. I understood that was more Dan McComas's issue with Reddit, and with Twitter.

cookiecaper 9y ago

reddit has been in an identity crisis since they sold out to Conde Nast. They've made themselves too much of a factor. They should move to a behind-the-scenes operation and let communities bear responsibility for themselves.

projektir 9y ago

This only sort of works. Reddit being a combined system, subs tend to leak into each other. If you are into something very obscure, benign, and uncontroversial, like, fountain pens, you're probably fine. If you're into anything gaming related, good luck. I've been on some subreddits of popular games and it's basically just like the rest of Reddit. In particular, Reddit's system just doesn't work well when there's a lot of users. And the drawback is that these subreddits tend to dominate the space so people do not make private, limited gaming BBS boards as much anymore.

Woofles 9y ago
This is definitely the way to handle reddit. I mostly stick to local sports subreddits and a few general interest subreddits (i.e. not /r/funny, /r/pics, etc) and I think reddit is a great tool. I think it's the same thing with most social apps though. Small discord servers allow you to build up groups of online friends, but if you just go into the specific game ones you're going to end up with a mix of good and bad. Overall it's just an issue of popularity bringing out the worst in people.
- projektir 9y ago
  > Overall it's just an issue of popularity bringing out the worst in people. I don't really agree, it's the issue of aggregating everything relevant to a subject, which makes the popularity relevant. BBS were not aggregated by subject. They're aggregated by the BBS itself. For a given game, there may be 10 BBS. That's how it was before. You'd go to the BBS with the community style you prefer. You have a choice. Now, you're just stuck with one subreddit/Discord server/etc., which just reduces the quality of it all. And given the poor organizational ability of those services, it becomes entirely driven by a mix of popularity and posting speed. [also no skin in the game for the BBS owner, as there is no BBS owner. No BBS competition] It's the same with most "social apps", yes, because discussion shouldn't occur on "social apps", it should occur on private moderated spaces.

siruncledrew 9y ago

That's sort of the inherent flaw of aggregators. There's a lot of shit that gets vacuumed up into the general site, but the onus is really on the user to dig through and find what's meaningful to them.

hasbroslasher 9y ago

I actually disagree with this. I find that customized Reddit leads to the same feedback loop/conveyer belt feeling that made me quit Facebook out of annoyance with always seeing the same ideas propagated out again and again. Browsing Reddit without an account lets you avoid the urge to comment on things and also turns you on to loads of new things that you otherwise might not've found on customized Reddit. Granted, I still have an account I use sometimes, I just get more enjoyment out of the front page when I don't have any control over what I'm seeing.

mercer 9y ago
Isn't there still a way to see that particular front page when you're not logged in? Either /r/popular or /r/all?
- flying_kangaroo 9y ago
  /r/popular will come close to it, and includes a level of customization based on your general location (as the default front page does).

brandmeyer 9y ago

This is both a blessing and a curse. I think that fine-grained subreddits naturally tend towards echo chambers, because it has become easier and easier to find and interact with people that think just like we do.

simias 9y ago

I don't have a Reddit account but I lurk there regularly, in my experience that only works as long as the subreddits are very niche and not well known. As soon as they get popular since there's effectively no barrier of entry for the general Reddit population you effectively get the same community everywhere. Normally when people find a forum that interests them (like, say, HN) they need to bother creating an account, often validating an email etc... It only takes two minutes but that's enough friction to weed out the vast majority of the people who just stumble randomly on one of your posts. On Reddit once you have an account you just have to click a button to subscribe to any community you like. It's "eternal september" on steroids. 4chan had "lurk more", Reddit is "repost more". So your post sounds a bit to me like "Twitter is great if you know the hashtags to follow" and it's probably true but at this point is it really representative of the website? If you need to filter 99% of the content to make it usable, maybe there's a bit of a problem still? I just went to /r/all and had a look at the subreddits available there, I find 16 million accounts subscribed /r/gifs, 3 millions to /r/politics, 17 millions to /r/gaming, 18 millions to /r/pics etc... So yeah, I'd believe you if you told me that /r/common_lisp, /r/mongolia/ and /r/treepics/ are amazing communities but I don't think it's enough to redeem Reddit as a whole.

crowbahr 9y ago
/r/Polandball being a shining example to the contrary. There's a whole other discussion to be had about the importance of strict moderation and rules to improving a subreddit's quality.
- FeepingCreature 9y ago
  Note that this is how Reddit is fundamentally supposed to work - there's a reason that founders get full control over rules and banning.
  - crowbahr 9y ago
    It's just not how the majority of subs shook out, unfortunately. Oh well.
9y ago

on_and_off 9y ago

This ! I am becoming more and more picky about which subreddits I follow. I have even unsubscribed from some that are partially interesting to me like androiddev (I work as an Android engineer) because they were 10% interesting information, 90% circlejerk/toxic.

deleted 9y ago

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Puer 9y ago

This is my filter list for Reddit using RES (not including keyword filters like Net Neutrality or meme filters): https://i.imgur.com/Ybmk6fZ.gifv https://i.imgur.com/Ybmk6fZ.gifv All the subreddits I want to see I subscribe to directly. For everything else I browse All with these filters.

intrasight 9y ago

I'm fine with the "Google Reddit Experience" - when I search for something and I end up reading an answer to my question on Reddit. I didn't actually know there was any other Reddit experience.

mschaef 9y ago

Funny you should mention that... my first exposure to reddit was exclusively through /r/programming. (To give a sense of the scale of the site at the time, I distinctly remember a post celebrating 65,536 subscribers.) At some point shortly after, they added the ability to create subreddits, the site blew up in overall scale, and I was completely oblivious to it all for years, being that I only read /r/programming. Point is, the site gives you a lot of useful ability to curate what you read.