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Wasn’t digg’s issue power users or something? Reddit was and can never be that bad simply due to subreddits. I think a more apt comparison is simply facebook an

by drb91 8y ago

Wasn’t digg’s issue power users or something? Reddit was and can never be that bad simply due to subreddits. I think a more apt comparison is simply facebook and twitter and instagram: make the UX shitty to promote ads.

nickysielicki 8y ago
> Reddit was and can never be that bad simply due to subreddits. Vote manipulation on reddit in 2018 is way worse than vote manipulation on Digg ever was. Due to the centralized categories of Digg, the userbase was unable to hide away from content they didn't like and that brought the community together to collectively take part in rejecting the influencers. On reddit, there isn't that same sense of a cohesive single community. In the past, there might have been a sort of collective identity of "redditors", but that's gone away as the site has grown. Nobody says, "Oh yeah, I go on reddit" anymore, they say that they are are active on a particular sub. I wonder if reddit could have done anything differently to maintain that "redditor" identity among their userbase, is it just a function of their growth? I think it's mostly just their growth, but they accelerated it by not being more careful with what subreddits were defaults and their responsibility to curate them. I remember when the frontpage of reddit transitioned from generally being longform content, to generally being shitty image-macro memes. I also remember when /r/politics used to be a relatively balanced source of news. If you do something that makes your happy and heavy users rescind from being globally active to just being active in their tiny niche subreddit, you can't expect your global sense of community to be maintained.
- drb91 8y ago
  I guess in the subreddits I visit, the prospect of vote manipulation doesn’t really matter because the content is evidently good. The shared subreddits are indeed trash. I wonder if banning commonly astroturfed topics would help and directing people to moderated subreddits for that content. As a long time redditor (since 2007 or so), the identity has been decohering (or transforming) since the beginning and at this point I don’t see much of value left to lose. The culture centers around memes (I don’t mean this in a pejorative sense), not shared values or interests. A common joke used to be: reddit’s been going downhill since they added comments. Now I doubt most remember at one point it lacked them. At this point I just view comments bemoanings its fresh demise as reactionary: reddit’s not going anywhere, and you can’t change its direction at all. It’s just not easy accepting the direction it is going.
newman8r 8y ago
I think the main issue is when they just completely revamped digg in a way that destroyed the community driven nature of the website - they tried to "personalize the front page to each user" or something like that. But people didn't want a personalized news feed, they just wanted the community, which the updates really screwed up. I think I logged into the "new digg" 3 or 4 times before completely abandoning it for reddit, and never looking back - this was as a daily user of several years at the time. I really dislike the "new reddit" as well - if they hadn't kept the option to use their old site, I would have stopped using reddit too.
gergles 8y ago
Subreddits don't help when there are "powermods" who moderate hundreds of large subreddits and coordinate offsite to run them all in the same way. They are basically Digg's power users but hidden from most normal folks on the site who don't go digging.
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
Can't it? Reddit has somehow become a parody of itself where most posts in most subs follow the exact same karma-chasing pattern. Which leaves a few gems and the draconianly moderated subs like /r/science etc. Frankly it got to be far to much work to get some signal in with the noise. The new UI and needing to stick with old.reddit.com is just icing on the cake.

by drb91 8y ago

nickysielicki 8y ago

> Reddit was and can never be that bad simply due to subreddits. Vote manipulation on reddit in 2018 is way worse than vote manipulation on Digg ever was. Due to the centralized categories of Digg, the userbase was unable to hide away from content they didn't like and that brought the community together to collectively take part in rejecting the influencers. On reddit, there isn't that same sense of a cohesive single community. In the past, there might have been a sort of collective identity of "redditors", but that's gone away as the site has grown. Nobody says, "Oh yeah, I go on reddit" anymore, they say that they are are active on a particular sub. I wonder if reddit could have done anything differently to maintain that "redditor" identity among their userbase, is it just a function of their growth? I think it's mostly just their growth, but they accelerated it by not being more careful with what subreddits were defaults and their responsibility to curate them. I remember when the frontpage of reddit transitioned from generally being longform content, to generally being shitty image-macro memes. I also remember when /r/politics used to be a relatively balanced source of news. If you do something that makes your happy and heavy users rescind from being globally active to just being active in their tiny niche subreddit, you can't expect your global sense of community to be maintained.

drb91 8y ago
I guess in the subreddits I visit, the prospect of vote manipulation doesn’t really matter because the content is evidently good. The shared subreddits are indeed trash. I wonder if banning commonly astroturfed topics would help and directing people to moderated subreddits for that content. As a long time redditor (since 2007 or so), the identity has been decohering (or transforming) since the beginning and at this point I don’t see much of value left to lose. The culture centers around memes (I don’t mean this in a pejorative sense), not shared values or interests. A common joke used to be: reddit’s been going downhill since they added comments. Now I doubt most remember at one point it lacked them. At this point I just view comments bemoanings its fresh demise as reactionary: reddit’s not going anywhere, and you can’t change its direction at all. It’s just not easy accepting the direction it is going.

newman8r 8y ago

I think the main issue is when they just completely revamped digg in a way that destroyed the community driven nature of the website - they tried to "personalize the front page to each user" or something like that. But people didn't want a personalized news feed, they just wanted the community, which the updates really screwed up. I think I logged into the "new digg" 3 or 4 times before completely abandoning it for reddit, and never looking back - this was as a daily user of several years at the time. I really dislike the "new reddit" as well - if they hadn't kept the option to use their old site, I would have stopped using reddit too.

gergles 8y ago

Subreddits don't help when there are "powermods" who moderate hundreds of large subreddits and coordinate offsite to run them all in the same way. They are basically Digg's power users but hidden from most normal folks on the site who don't go digging.

NeedMoreTea 8y ago

Can't it? Reddit has somehow become a parody of itself where most posts in most subs follow the exact same karma-chasing pattern. Which leaves a few gems and the draconianly moderated subs like /r/science etc. Frankly it got to be far to much work to get some signal in with the noise. The new UI and needing to stick with old.reddit.com is just icing on the cake.