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Reddit Terminal Viewer development is shutting down

140 points by pplonski86 7y ago

Flyingdeep 7y ago
> snew.notabug.io That's what the mod see probably? I wonder what's the accuracy of this algorithm
ralusek 7y ago
> More concerning, I no longer wish to support reddit as a platform. Widespread astroturfing, manufactured controversy, politics, bullying, incessant nitpicking and arguing. I don't like how people treat each other on the platform, and I don't like how it makes me feel when I use it. Don't think this has to do with Reddit so much as the way we interact with each other online, in general.
- ComputerGuru 7y ago
  Perhaps so, but it is not an axiomatic conflict. A website (or online community) can start off small, attracting attention of only fellow, well-meaning e-peers before regressing to the mean.
  - isoprophlex 7y ago
    Monetization I think was the biggest driver behind reddits' regression to the mean.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- axaxs 7y ago
  In a broader sense, sure. But I've witnessed very little of that here, which is mostly self moderated with a nudge from the admins. I've noticed this also in other smallish niche communities. Reddit has become so mainstream that everyone has a place. I think the big problems arise in the more general subs where all the miscreants from the web intersect. Same with YouTube, or any large community really. No amount of censorship or moderation can solve this, it's a problem for any sufficiently large userbase. If a solution can exist is doubtful, even.
  - thecatspaw 7y ago
    > In a broader sense, sure. But I've witnessed very little of that here, which is mostly self moderated with a nudge from the admins. I've noticed this also in other smallish niche communities. hn also seems to be more accepting of opinions which people disagree with. Here it seems to lead more to a civil debate about why you are wrong, whereas on reddit you would more often than not get downvoted and called names.
    - AmericanChopper 7y ago
      > hn also seems to be more accepting of opinions which people disagree with. More than reddit. But HN is much more homogeneous than reddit is. There’s plenty of perspectives that generally aren’t welcome for discussion here. HN also makes an effort to moderate against political flaming. You could argue that the moderation isn’t entirely unbiased, but it does keep the comment threads more civilized.
      - sdan 7y ago
        Yeah, HN is definitely a lot more homogeneous. Even CS centered subreddits have somewhat toxic cultures because of what anonymity sustains. I think HN has a lot fewer visitors than Reddit but has a lot more conscious, thoughtful, experienced, and extremely intelligent minds to think and discuss about topics in the tech field.
        AmericanChopper 7y ago
        That’s probably true (though I’m not sure we’re any more intelligent than any other internet community). My point was just that we shouldn’t mistake homogeny for tolerance of opposing views.
        kebman 7y ago
        Well, homogeny certainly makes a group far easier to lead, since disagreements will usually be on grounds that are way easier to reach a liveable compromise on.
- keyle 7y ago
  The barrier of entry for someone to go and write counter-productive / aggressive / abrasive comments online is very low now. In the past you had to have half a brain to even be online. I don't mean internet connection wise, I mean to set it up and find stuff. What scares me the most is "justice by social media". People felt wrong doing against them burning torches and calling for pitchforks online, instead of getting a lawyer and getting justice. It's a lot easier, but it then snowballs into a raging fury of everyone strongly or mildly related to the issue chiming in, demanding justice. Then is justice served? no.
  - ohyeshedid 7y ago
    "...but it then snowballs into a raging fury of everyone strongly or mildly related to the issue chiming in, demanding justice." I think mobs often mistake vengeance for justice.
    - dymk 7y ago
      Your average individual mistakes vengeance for justice. Read almost any thread in r/AmItheAsshole. The top comments will be the most vindictive, knee-jerk-y reaction you'll ever see.
      - maxheadroom 7y ago
        >Your average individual mistakes vengeance for justice. I think it's far graver than that, sadly: A cacophony of kangaroo courts, all yelling into echo chambers. Worse, though, is the failure to delineate between an individual's actions and those who have nothing to do with the 'x' thing in question. More egregiously, as a result of that aforementioned failure, even family members of those "suspected" for 'x' thing are ripe targets for abuse; which is entirely ignoring the premise that the individual in question could ultimately be innocent, in the end[0]. It seems that this group of individuals (en masse) demands its pound of flesh and its going to get it, no matter who it comes from. I'd say that's far worse than simply mistaking vengeance for justice. [0] - https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-falsely-accuses-sunil-tripathi-of-boston-bombing-2013-7?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-falsely-accuses-sunil...
- krtkush 7y ago
  Which is true. But when I discovered reddit about 7 years back it was nothing like this. Now the website leaves me feeling absolutely crap, angry and frustrated. Plus, it is addictive.
  - fastball 7y ago
    I started using Reddit around the same time (actually 9 years ago!) and I feel the same way about it now. Recently, I've gone totally cold-turkey on the platform. Where as previously I had been posting daily for 9 years!
    - petepete 7y ago
      I've used Reddit since almost the beginning and it started off how HN is, being more tech-focussed than general. The discussions were, like here, the main selling point. It can still be great, you just need to take a bit of time and subscribe to subs that interest you without being too popular. With popularity comes the inevitable drop in quality.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - tayo42 7y ago
      do you post anywhere else? traditional forums seem to have died with reddit getting big or I just can't find them anymore?
      - fastball 7y ago
        Here mostly. Generally just trying to spend less time on the internet than I used to. The place I post this most is in GitHub issues. ;)
  - GLjEI4YbnGD27LB 7y ago
    I still like reddit. I go to like r/fitness, leagueoflegends, themotte, askhistorians. I don't go to any of the political or news reddits, so whilst its fairly meme-heavy I still get that in-group feeling.
- JauntyHatAngle 7y ago
  I don't know I agree with you there. The platform used for discussion certainly has a large impact on the way people interact, and the culture that grows around it. I'm open to arguments that Reddit is better or worse than most, but for my own view, I think the majority of subreddits are not a good place to be interacting with and in general have poor discussion quality and a fair bit of bullying - which I think is largely because of the nature of the downvote/upvote system and comment chains/weighting reddit has in place. I personally think that reducing his particular gripe down to saying it's "a broader issue" isn't useful for narrowing down specific problems with particular methods of discourse.
- fastball 7y ago
  Eh, a big part of it is the karma system and upvotes / downvotes. They work great for things like "how do I fix this problem" or "recommend X", but it is a terrible format for political discussion / anything remotely controversial. It has a very noticeable polarizing effect in those cases.
  - toxik 7y ago
    I think in particular reddit has been gamed. Companies figured out that the way to do ads is good old plants in the audience; fake user to user interaction. ”I can confirm this, Pfizer’s HappyPill made my life much easier” is the new type of ad. Twitter isn’t much better, it too has been gamed. By simply having hordes of accounts saying whatever the message is, and replying to all.
    - dymk 7y ago
      I basically do not trust any claim or article that I read on Reddit, Hacker News, Facebook, or any other social media by default now, if it triggers the "this may be a controversial topic" flag in my brain. That means anything to do with recent events that would make the news, politics, even practically anything "science-y". HN, Reddit, Twitter and any other semi-anonymous social media site are just too easily gamed and astroturfed by anyone with a VPN and some time. Facebook and Twitter's "organic" content tends towards clickbait preying on people's anger responses.
- flukus 7y ago
  > Don't think this has to do with Reddit so much as the way we interact with each other online, in general. Having spent some (great) time in more traditional forums recently I think the algorithmic driven nature of reddit (and HN for that matter) along with it's centralization are the biggest contributors. The scoring systems have gamified online discussions to the point that you can't really have worthwhile discussions, most people with anything interesting to say (anything not mostly accepted by the group as a whole) will be punished by the algorithms, people with the most agreeable opinions will "win". Being centralized and gamified is also the ideal environment for astroturfing, you can have a big effect for minimal investment. If someone clicks on a topic you can easily control what the first comment they see is, with more traditional forums it's first in best dressed and a lot of people will skip straight to the latest entries.
  - jarfil 7y ago
    That highly depends on every subreddit's topic and how is it being moderated. Topics which invite populist responses in populist subreddits indeed behave like that, but other subreddits keep more of a Stack Exchange behavior, with out of topic discussion getting discouraged or directly removed, even if they were the most voted.
  - kebman 7y ago
    On the topic of gamification, I really like how Stack Overflow did it, with a focus on earned trust and good and dependable answers. For all its faults, I've never seen a site so great at solving actual problems, and not just within IT.
- dsl 7y ago
  Reddit brings together far more diverse communities than any other site, who then slam head on in to each other in the generic subreddits. You used to have to go actively seek out the toxic parts of the internet (except for the occasional raid of your forum by a rival, but you could usually ride that out). Now because they refuse to ban the like of The_Donald, it is like a Knitting website and Stormfront trying to share a single forum.
  - jarfil 7y ago
    I don't think that's really such a problem, it alleviates the echo chamber effect of personalized searches, ads, content, forums, etc. on most of today's internet. Some community intermingling is good, and afterwards everyone can go back to their own subreddits.
    - dymk 7y ago
      Why do you think "some community intermingling" is good, when the platform is fundamentally poor at encouraging thoughtful discussion? I have almost never seen a civil conversation between a Trump and non-Trump supporter on Reddit, but all the time I see nasty slapfights which simply divide the community further.
      - GoblinSlayer 7y ago
        Possibility of a thoughtful discussion depends more on education and human factor than technology. Realistically you're not going to have with general population, reducing the echo chamber effect is the best you can do.
  - ralusek 7y ago
    You think Reddit's problem is that they should ban The_Donald?
    - rat87 7y ago
      Without question The sub relentlessly breaks the rules, raids other subs, never engages in good faith, spreads racist propaganda, serves as a breeding ground for white supremacists, is incapable of civil conversation. Like the president they worship they are toxic to community And instead of banning them the admins engage in silly games like manipulating their comments(one of the admins changed db to change one of their comments). They've poisoned many subs. For instance it's incredibly rare to see an Immigration story in /r/news without the comments making you feel like you're in the middle of a kkk gathering.
- thought_alarm 7y ago
  > Don't think this has to do with Reddit so much as the way > we interact with each other online, in general. Welcome to 1989.
- thepangolino 7y ago
  I actually do blame the way Reddit has been managed. The decisions the admins made made it what it is today. I do still enjoy going on 4chan (hardly a heaven of civilized discussion) and this very website. So in my mind, it can't be just because of a general trend in online discussions.
- vortico 7y ago
  It certainly has to do with Reddit. It's unnatural for humans to communicate with priority of "most popular". If you walk in a room with strangers, meet two friends at their house, or talk in private with your mother, all of those discussions are "bump order", meaning that your most likely discussion to respond to is the most recent "thread" (or subject) that someone brought up. Online communication should function the same way. Reddit/HN/Facebook's algorithms based on voting and popularity are absolute garbage for carrying on normal human discussions. That's because discussion is not their purpose, it's addiction to horde bickering and engaging in popularity contests for content. The only natural/real-world scenario that you'd find "popularity" to sort discussions is a screaming fight, political campaign, or those dreaded high-school popularity years. And surprise, that's what Reddit feels like most of the time.
  - kkarakk 7y ago
    You can sort by new if you really believe that-and change default sort order in the settings. i've kept mine to controversial
    - vortico 7y ago
      It's one of those things that doesn't matter until everyone does it. The behavior of many Reddit users is based on the "popular" or "hot" order, and it truly does make a difference in the style of their conversation. GitHub Issues is another odd example. They sort by "newest thread", which I've never seen any other service use by default. It makes long difficult issues/proposals end sooner than they should, because a comment someone makes 2 seconds ago is still buried on page 12. It doesn't matter than I set the sorting mode to "most recent comment" because other people don't do it as well. Discourse is a fantastic example of a good community platform. You can "star" a post to give your appreciation, but that doesn't give your post any visibility boost by default. It treats all comments equal, as they should, and gives threads attention that is linearly proportional to the number of comments, which is how discussions/subjects work in real life.
  - ehnto 7y ago
    I hear you that it doesn't work the same way offline. But there is a good reason for the difference. If you had 1000 people in your house, bump order wouldn't work either. Even 30 active people in a chat room gets too hard to follow if everyone is talking. They are different mediums and have different requirements. I don't think real life conversation can be used as a good example for how online communication should work. I don't know that upvotes are the right answer either mind you, and I agree with your points about it. But it's just the best some platforms have come up with to combat the issues presented by large quantities of people talking all at once. As someone else suggested, sort a popular thread by "new" and you're right, you get the full spectrum of opinions. However you also get lots of "internet noise". The baseless claims, useless yelling and general spamming that all open internet communications are subjected to.
cubano 7y ago
I always marvel that Reddit has seemed not have learned even one lesson from Digg. They are literally making the same exact mistakes, and its leading to the same exact results...karma whoring, piling on, ingroup/outgroup ete etc. It seems beyond comprehension to me that they wouldn't have thoroughly looked at the rise and fall of Digg and not made every effort not to follow the same path.
- dymk 7y ago
  If I had to guess, this is what happens when you make your company data driven at all costs. All the dog-piling leads to higher engagement, more comments made faster as people get the last word in, and more gold/platinum/silver buying as people foam at the mouth to super-bump comments they agree with. Reddit has a strong incentive to make their website a platform where you shout into an abyss that echos back what you currently feel, where you can feel vindicated for downvoting and insulting the "other", and get that sweet dopamine kick for stealing (not sharing) content with no concept of attribution. All of that means higher engagement of the userbase. If they wanted to encourage thoughtful discussion? That would mean requiring long-form posts, or throttling how fast users could comment. Wanting high quality discussion would mean encouraging posting sources and taking time to read them, which drives users off the site. It would mean dis-incentivizing the emotion-based vector for buying gold as a means to super-bump arguments you agree with, or to spite the opposition.
  - kebman 7y ago
    Have you read Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman? If not, give it a read. ^^
- Angostura 7y ago
  > They are literally making the same exact mistakes, I haven't seen them make a formal system whereby publishers can pay to have their content autosubmitted and promoted to the front page. That was what killed Digg.
  - cubano 7y ago
kkarakk 7y ago
It's always sad when the original maintainer gets burnt out and refuses to put in the effort to transfer ownership but que sera sera - i'm glad forking exists as a concept in Code management
- tty2300 7y ago
  What would transfer ownership even mean? Its open source, anyone can continue maintaining it without asking permission.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - ycgeu 7y ago
    Not under the same name and URL.
    - y4mi 7y ago
      > Why not transfer ownership to someone else? > Frankly, I don't want to put the work into vetting a new maintainer or transferring ownership to an organization. Stuff like this scares me. he addressed why he chose not to transfer ownership.
- OskarS 7y ago
  I feel like the argument he put forth is entirely reasonable. He cannot possibly vet a new maintainer, so if the project is to live on, have people fork it and let the community decide which fork they want.
kuzehanka 7y ago
> More concerning, I no longer wish to support reddit as a platform. Widespread astroturfing, manufactured controversy, politics, bullying, incessant nitpicking and arguing. Ever since starting a project to collect and analyse the reddit firehose, I've had a series of eye opening experiences about just how manufactured the popular reddit content is. Every day, comments and posts with hundreds to thousands of upvotes get deleted by moderators because they don't fit the desired narrative. A small ring of moderators are in control of most default subs. A small ring of accounts make up for more than 50% of regular front-page content. If you ever want to take a glimpse at the amount of manipulation going on, point something like snew.notabug.io at a popular politics or askreddit thread. Reddit is a platform for pushing manufactured consent/controversy and guerilla advertising. It is not a platform for open speech. The reddit content that most users see often does not represent the views of the userbase. Here's a random post I picked from an old analysis notebook where most of top 10% of comments were deleted, and then the post itself was deleted when new comments started mentioning the censorship. Should give some idea about the magnitude and scope of what's going on https://imgur.com/a/2C5Kn2R https://imgur.com/a/2C5Kn2R
- amiga-workbench 7y ago
  What was a massive eye opener for me was the few days in the wake of Donald Trump's presidential win, that subreddit went back to normal, it was quiet, level-headed. After a few days the agenda pushing and blatant shilling began anew and it's been a non-stop screaming mess since.
- kebman 7y ago
  You just described the biggest problem with Wikipedia lol. :D
  - rajaganesh87 7y ago
    Atleast edit history is public in wikipedia
    - kabwj 7y ago
Trufa 7y ago
I wonder what the "next reddit" is going to look like...
- joelthelion 7y ago
  A strong candidate: https://tildes.net/ https://tildes.net/
- sprash 7y ago
  Decentralized and based on blockchain. Something like steem but with lower barrier of entry.
  - kebman 7y ago
    I just don't see it. I've tried Steem and some others experimenting with it, and I'm not really impressed. Could you please give me some pointers as to how it would work? On the other hand, have you tried IPFS?
    - sprash 7y ago
      > Could you please give me some pointers as to how it would work? What do you mean by work? It already works quiet well. Except for the entry barrier. > On the other hand, have you tried IPFS? I have tried it a while ago and it is very unreliable. There seems to be just one server which really keeps files. You have no transparency about who and how many have one particular file. Magnet links + torrents are essentially the same thing as IPFS but much more robust, transparent, reliable and established.
- thunderbird120 7y ago
  Probably not too much like reddit at all. So long as reddit exists its particular niche in the ecology of the internet is filled and websites which serve a very similar purpose can't really hope to gain significant numbers of users. Attention is a finite resource and sites with more content attract more of people's attention. For sites with user generated content, this means that the more users you have the more content is generated and the more of those user's attention is captured by one that one site. If there are two sites which both rely on user generated content but are more or less identical, the smaller one will inevitably hemorrhage users to the larger one. The larger the difference in number of users, and by extension the amount of content, the faster the hemorrhage. Sites need to differentiate themselves to survive, this can be through format, focus, moderation, or community but all of these options will effect the maximum possible number of people a site can appeal to. Sites basically need to justify their existence relative to other established sties. The question is "what do you do better and how many people does that matter to?". For most reddit alternatives, the answer is not much and not many. All of this is essentially the Competitive Exclusion Principle[1] applied to websites. It's why reddit clones will never gain significant market share so long as reddit exists in something resembling its current form. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_exclusion_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_exclusion_principl...
dredmorbius 7y ago
A phenomenaly good and useful app, though I agree completey as to Reddit's faults.

140 points by pplonski86 7y ago

> snew.notabug.io That's what the mod see probably? I wonder what's the accuracy of this algorithm

> More concerning, I no longer wish to support reddit as a platform. Widespread astroturfing, manufactured controversy, politics, bullying, incessant nitpicking and arguing. I don't like how people treat each other on the platform, and I don't like how it makes me feel when I use it. Don't think this has to do with Reddit so much as the way we interact with each other online, in general.

ComputerGuru 7y ago
Perhaps so, but it is not an axiomatic conflict. A website (or online community) can start off small, attracting attention of only fellow, well-meaning e-peers before regressing to the mean.
- isoprophlex 7y ago
  Monetization I think was the biggest driver behind reddits' regression to the mean.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
axaxs 7y ago
In a broader sense, sure. But I've witnessed very little of that here, which is mostly self moderated with a nudge from the admins. I've noticed this also in other smallish niche communities. Reddit has become so mainstream that everyone has a place. I think the big problems arise in the more general subs where all the miscreants from the web intersect. Same with YouTube, or any large community really. No amount of censorship or moderation can solve this, it's a problem for any sufficiently large userbase. If a solution can exist is doubtful, even.
- thecatspaw 7y ago
  > In a broader sense, sure. But I've witnessed very little of that here, which is mostly self moderated with a nudge from the admins. I've noticed this also in other smallish niche communities. hn also seems to be more accepting of opinions which people disagree with. Here it seems to lead more to a civil debate about why you are wrong, whereas on reddit you would more often than not get downvoted and called names.
  - AmericanChopper 7y ago
    > hn also seems to be more accepting of opinions which people disagree with. More than reddit. But HN is much more homogeneous than reddit is. There’s plenty of perspectives that generally aren’t welcome for discussion here. HN also makes an effort to moderate against political flaming. You could argue that the moderation isn’t entirely unbiased, but it does keep the comment threads more civilized.
    - sdan 7y ago
      Yeah, HN is definitely a lot more homogeneous. Even CS centered subreddits have somewhat toxic cultures because of what anonymity sustains. I think HN has a lot fewer visitors than Reddit but has a lot more conscious, thoughtful, experienced, and extremely intelligent minds to think and discuss about topics in the tech field.
      - AmericanChopper 7y ago
        That’s probably true (though I’m not sure we’re any more intelligent than any other internet community). My point was just that we shouldn’t mistake homogeny for tolerance of opposing views.
        kebman 7y ago
        Well, homogeny certainly makes a group far easier to lead, since disagreements will usually be on grounds that are way easier to reach a liveable compromise on.
keyle 7y ago
The barrier of entry for someone to go and write counter-productive / aggressive / abrasive comments online is very low now. In the past you had to have half a brain to even be online. I don't mean internet connection wise, I mean to set it up and find stuff. What scares me the most is "justice by social media". People felt wrong doing against them burning torches and calling for pitchforks online, instead of getting a lawyer and getting justice. It's a lot easier, but it then snowballs into a raging fury of everyone strongly or mildly related to the issue chiming in, demanding justice. Then is justice served? no.
- ohyeshedid 7y ago
  "...but it then snowballs into a raging fury of everyone strongly or mildly related to the issue chiming in, demanding justice." I think mobs often mistake vengeance for justice.
  - dymk 7y ago
    Your average individual mistakes vengeance for justice. Read almost any thread in r/AmItheAsshole. The top comments will be the most vindictive, knee-jerk-y reaction you'll ever see.
    - maxheadroom 7y ago
      >Your average individual mistakes vengeance for justice. I think it's far graver than that, sadly: A cacophony of kangaroo courts, all yelling into echo chambers. Worse, though, is the failure to delineate between an individual's actions and those who have nothing to do with the 'x' thing in question. More egregiously, as a result of that aforementioned failure, even family members of those "suspected" for 'x' thing are ripe targets for abuse; which is entirely ignoring the premise that the individual in question could ultimately be innocent, in the end[0]. It seems that this group of individuals (en masse) demands its pound of flesh and its going to get it, no matter who it comes from. I'd say that's far worse than simply mistaking vengeance for justice. [0] - https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-falsely-accuses-sunil-tripathi-of-boston-bombing-2013-7?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-falsely-accuses-sunil...
krtkush 7y ago
Which is true. But when I discovered reddit about 7 years back it was nothing like this. Now the website leaves me feeling absolutely crap, angry and frustrated. Plus, it is addictive.
- fastball 7y ago
  I started using Reddit around the same time (actually 9 years ago!) and I feel the same way about it now. Recently, I've gone totally cold-turkey on the platform. Where as previously I had been posting daily for 9 years!
  - petepete 7y ago
    I've used Reddit since almost the beginning and it started off how HN is, being more tech-focussed than general. The discussions were, like here, the main selling point. It can still be great, you just need to take a bit of time and subscribe to subs that interest you without being too popular. With popularity comes the inevitable drop in quality.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - tayo42 7y ago
    do you post anywhere else? traditional forums seem to have died with reddit getting big or I just can't find them anymore?
    - fastball 7y ago
      Here mostly. Generally just trying to spend less time on the internet than I used to. The place I post this most is in GitHub issues. ;)
- GLjEI4YbnGD27LB 7y ago
  I still like reddit. I go to like r/fitness, leagueoflegends, themotte, askhistorians. I don't go to any of the political or news reddits, so whilst its fairly meme-heavy I still get that in-group feeling.
JauntyHatAngle 7y ago
I don't know I agree with you there. The platform used for discussion certainly has a large impact on the way people interact, and the culture that grows around it. I'm open to arguments that Reddit is better or worse than most, but for my own view, I think the majority of subreddits are not a good place to be interacting with and in general have poor discussion quality and a fair bit of bullying - which I think is largely because of the nature of the downvote/upvote system and comment chains/weighting reddit has in place. I personally think that reducing his particular gripe down to saying it's "a broader issue" isn't useful for narrowing down specific problems with particular methods of discourse.
fastball 7y ago
Eh, a big part of it is the karma system and upvotes / downvotes. They work great for things like "how do I fix this problem" or "recommend X", but it is a terrible format for political discussion / anything remotely controversial. It has a very noticeable polarizing effect in those cases.
- toxik 7y ago
  I think in particular reddit has been gamed. Companies figured out that the way to do ads is good old plants in the audience; fake user to user interaction. ”I can confirm this, Pfizer’s HappyPill made my life much easier” is the new type of ad. Twitter isn’t much better, it too has been gamed. By simply having hordes of accounts saying whatever the message is, and replying to all.
  - dymk 7y ago
    I basically do not trust any claim or article that I read on Reddit, Hacker News, Facebook, or any other social media by default now, if it triggers the "this may be a controversial topic" flag in my brain. That means anything to do with recent events that would make the news, politics, even practically anything "science-y". HN, Reddit, Twitter and any other semi-anonymous social media site are just too easily gamed and astroturfed by anyone with a VPN and some time. Facebook and Twitter's "organic" content tends towards clickbait preying on people's anger responses.
flukus 7y ago
> Don't think this has to do with Reddit so much as the way we interact with each other online, in general. Having spent some (great) time in more traditional forums recently I think the algorithmic driven nature of reddit (and HN for that matter) along with it's centralization are the biggest contributors. The scoring systems have gamified online discussions to the point that you can't really have worthwhile discussions, most people with anything interesting to say (anything not mostly accepted by the group as a whole) will be punished by the algorithms, people with the most agreeable opinions will "win". Being centralized and gamified is also the ideal environment for astroturfing, you can have a big effect for minimal investment. If someone clicks on a topic you can easily control what the first comment they see is, with more traditional forums it's first in best dressed and a lot of people will skip straight to the latest entries.
- jarfil 7y ago
  That highly depends on every subreddit's topic and how is it being moderated. Topics which invite populist responses in populist subreddits indeed behave like that, but other subreddits keep more of a Stack Exchange behavior, with out of topic discussion getting discouraged or directly removed, even if they were the most voted.
- kebman 7y ago
  On the topic of gamification, I really like how Stack Overflow did it, with a focus on earned trust and good and dependable answers. For all its faults, I've never seen a site so great at solving actual problems, and not just within IT.
dsl 7y ago
Reddit brings together far more diverse communities than any other site, who then slam head on in to each other in the generic subreddits. You used to have to go actively seek out the toxic parts of the internet (except for the occasional raid of your forum by a rival, but you could usually ride that out). Now because they refuse to ban the like of The_Donald, it is like a Knitting website and Stormfront trying to share a single forum.
- jarfil 7y ago
  I don't think that's really such a problem, it alleviates the echo chamber effect of personalized searches, ads, content, forums, etc. on most of today's internet. Some community intermingling is good, and afterwards everyone can go back to their own subreddits.
  - dymk 7y ago
    Why do you think "some community intermingling" is good, when the platform is fundamentally poor at encouraging thoughtful discussion? I have almost never seen a civil conversation between a Trump and non-Trump supporter on Reddit, but all the time I see nasty slapfights which simply divide the community further.
    - GoblinSlayer 7y ago
      Possibility of a thoughtful discussion depends more on education and human factor than technology. Realistically you're not going to have with general population, reducing the echo chamber effect is the best you can do.
- ralusek 7y ago
  You think Reddit's problem is that they should ban The_Donald?
  - rat87 7y ago
    Without question The sub relentlessly breaks the rules, raids other subs, never engages in good faith, spreads racist propaganda, serves as a breeding ground for white supremacists, is incapable of civil conversation. Like the president they worship they are toxic to community And instead of banning them the admins engage in silly games like manipulating their comments(one of the admins changed db to change one of their comments). They've poisoned many subs. For instance it's incredibly rare to see an Immigration story in /r/news without the comments making you feel like you're in the middle of a kkk gathering.
thought_alarm 7y ago
> Don't think this has to do with Reddit so much as the way > we interact with each other online, in general. Welcome to 1989.
thepangolino 7y ago
I actually do blame the way Reddit has been managed. The decisions the admins made made it what it is today. I do still enjoy going on 4chan (hardly a heaven of civilized discussion) and this very website. So in my mind, it can't be just because of a general trend in online discussions.
vortico 7y ago
It certainly has to do with Reddit. It's unnatural for humans to communicate with priority of "most popular". If you walk in a room with strangers, meet two friends at their house, or talk in private with your mother, all of those discussions are "bump order", meaning that your most likely discussion to respond to is the most recent "thread" (or subject) that someone brought up. Online communication should function the same way. Reddit/HN/Facebook's algorithms based on voting and popularity are absolute garbage for carrying on normal human discussions. That's because discussion is not their purpose, it's addiction to horde bickering and engaging in popularity contests for content. The only natural/real-world scenario that you'd find "popularity" to sort discussions is a screaming fight, political campaign, or those dreaded high-school popularity years. And surprise, that's what Reddit feels like most of the time.
- kkarakk 7y ago
  You can sort by new if you really believe that-and change default sort order in the settings. i've kept mine to controversial
  - vortico 7y ago
    It's one of those things that doesn't matter until everyone does it. The behavior of many Reddit users is based on the "popular" or "hot" order, and it truly does make a difference in the style of their conversation. GitHub Issues is another odd example. They sort by "newest thread", which I've never seen any other service use by default. It makes long difficult issues/proposals end sooner than they should, because a comment someone makes 2 seconds ago is still buried on page 12. It doesn't matter than I set the sorting mode to "most recent comment" because other people don't do it as well. Discourse is a fantastic example of a good community platform. You can "star" a post to give your appreciation, but that doesn't give your post any visibility boost by default. It treats all comments equal, as they should, and gives threads attention that is linearly proportional to the number of comments, which is how discussions/subjects work in real life.
- ehnto 7y ago
  I hear you that it doesn't work the same way offline. But there is a good reason for the difference. If you had 1000 people in your house, bump order wouldn't work either. Even 30 active people in a chat room gets too hard to follow if everyone is talking. They are different mediums and have different requirements. I don't think real life conversation can be used as a good example for how online communication should work. I don't know that upvotes are the right answer either mind you, and I agree with your points about it. But it's just the best some platforms have come up with to combat the issues presented by large quantities of people talking all at once. As someone else suggested, sort a popular thread by "new" and you're right, you get the full spectrum of opinions. However you also get lots of "internet noise". The baseless claims, useless yelling and general spamming that all open internet communications are subjected to.

cubano 7y ago

I always marvel that Reddit has seemed not have learned even one lesson from Digg. They are literally making the same exact mistakes, and its leading to the same exact results...karma whoring, piling on, ingroup/outgroup ete etc. It seems beyond comprehension to me that they wouldn't have thoroughly looked at the rise and fall of Digg and not made every effort not to follow the same path.

dymk 7y ago
If I had to guess, this is what happens when you make your company data driven at all costs. All the dog-piling leads to higher engagement, more comments made faster as people get the last word in, and more gold/platinum/silver buying as people foam at the mouth to super-bump comments they agree with. Reddit has a strong incentive to make their website a platform where you shout into an abyss that echos back what you currently feel, where you can feel vindicated for downvoting and insulting the "other", and get that sweet dopamine kick for stealing (not sharing) content with no concept of attribution. All of that means higher engagement of the userbase. If they wanted to encourage thoughtful discussion? That would mean requiring long-form posts, or throttling how fast users could comment. Wanting high quality discussion would mean encouraging posting sources and taking time to read them, which drives users off the site. It would mean dis-incentivizing the emotion-based vector for buying gold as a means to super-bump arguments you agree with, or to spite the opposition.
- kebman 7y ago
  Have you read Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman? If not, give it a read. ^^
Angostura 7y ago
> They are literally making the same exact mistakes, I haven't seen them make a formal system whereby publishers can pay to have their content autosubmitted and promoted to the front page. That was what killed Digg.
- cubano 7y ago

kkarakk 7y ago

It's always sad when the original maintainer gets burnt out and refuses to put in the effort to transfer ownership but que sera sera - i'm glad forking exists as a concept in Code management

tty2300 7y ago
What would transfer ownership even mean? Its open source, anyone can continue maintaining it without asking permission.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ycgeu 7y ago
  Not under the same name and URL.
  - y4mi 7y ago
    > Why not transfer ownership to someone else? > Frankly, I don't want to put the work into vetting a new maintainer or transferring ownership to an organization. Stuff like this scares me. he addressed why he chose not to transfer ownership.
OskarS 7y ago
I feel like the argument he put forth is entirely reasonable. He cannot possibly vet a new maintainer, so if the project is to live on, have people fork it and let the community decide which fork they want.

kuzehanka 7y ago

> More concerning, I no longer wish to support reddit as a platform. Widespread astroturfing, manufactured controversy, politics, bullying, incessant nitpicking and arguing. Ever since starting a project to collect and analyse the reddit firehose, I've had a series of eye opening experiences about just how manufactured the popular reddit content is. Every day, comments and posts with hundreds to thousands of upvotes get deleted by moderators because they don't fit the desired narrative. A small ring of moderators are in control of most default subs. A small ring of accounts make up for more than 50% of regular front-page content. If you ever want to take a glimpse at the amount of manipulation going on, point something like snew.notabug.io at a popular politics or askreddit thread. Reddit is a platform for pushing manufactured consent/controversy and guerilla advertising. It is not a platform for open speech. The reddit content that most users see often does not represent the views of the userbase. Here's a random post I picked from an old analysis notebook where most of top 10% of comments were deleted, and then the post itself was deleted when new comments started mentioning the censorship. Should give some idea about the magnitude and scope of what's going on https://imgur.com/a/2C5Kn2R https://imgur.com/a/2C5Kn2R

amiga-workbench 7y ago
What was a massive eye opener for me was the few days in the wake of Donald Trump's presidential win, that subreddit went back to normal, it was quiet, level-headed. After a few days the agenda pushing and blatant shilling began anew and it's been a non-stop screaming mess since.
kebman 7y ago
You just described the biggest problem with Wikipedia lol. :D
- rajaganesh87 7y ago
  Atleast edit history is public in wikipedia
  - kabwj 7y ago

Trufa 7y ago

I wonder what the "next reddit" is going to look like...

joelthelion 7y ago
A strong candidate: https://tildes.net/ https://tildes.net/
sprash 7y ago
Decentralized and based on blockchain. Something like steem but with lower barrier of entry.
- kebman 7y ago
  I just don't see it. I've tried Steem and some others experimenting with it, and I'm not really impressed. Could you please give me some pointers as to how it would work? On the other hand, have you tried IPFS?
  - sprash 7y ago
    > Could you please give me some pointers as to how it would work? What do you mean by work? It already works quiet well. Except for the entry barrier. > On the other hand, have you tried IPFS? I have tried it a while ago and it is very unreliable. There seems to be just one server which really keeps files. You have no transparency about who and how many have one particular file. Magnet links + torrents are essentially the same thing as IPFS but much more robust, transparent, reliable and established.
thunderbird120 7y ago
Probably not too much like reddit at all. So long as reddit exists its particular niche in the ecology of the internet is filled and websites which serve a very similar purpose can't really hope to gain significant numbers of users. Attention is a finite resource and sites with more content attract more of people's attention. For sites with user generated content, this means that the more users you have the more content is generated and the more of those user's attention is captured by one that one site. If there are two sites which both rely on user generated content but are more or less identical, the smaller one will inevitably hemorrhage users to the larger one. The larger the difference in number of users, and by extension the amount of content, the faster the hemorrhage. Sites need to differentiate themselves to survive, this can be through format, focus, moderation, or community but all of these options will effect the maximum possible number of people a site can appeal to. Sites basically need to justify their existence relative to other established sties. The question is "what do you do better and how many people does that matter to?". For most reddit alternatives, the answer is not much and not many. All of this is essentially the Competitive Exclusion Principle[1] applied to websites. It's why reddit clones will never gain significant market share so long as reddit exists in something resembling its current form. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_exclusion_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_exclusion_principl...

dredmorbius 7y ago

A phenomenaly good and useful app, though I agree completey as to Reddit's faults.