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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 fri

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.
- flukus 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. If you've got 1000 people in your house you'll have a couple of conversations going on in the kitchen, a couple in the lounge room, a couple outside and people will be wandering between the different sections and conversations. This seems pretty familiar to traditional forums where you'll have specific sub forums, and topics in those sub-forums, if you wander from one forum to another you'll see the most recent topic/conversation taking place. Sort by new in reddit seems to be the opposite, you'll see the newest topic but you want see the active conversations, at the topic level you'll only see the latest top level post not any ongoing conversations. There is a limit where this breaks down of course, but perhaps the solution is to accept the limit and have many smaller communities instead of one big one.
  - ehnto 7y ago
    > There is a limit where this breaks down of course, but perhaps the solution is to accept the limit and have many smaller communities instead of one big one. I totally agree. My suspicion is that reddit and other community driven content feed sites are a symptom of the influx of people showing up online. They became popular as they're a shallow enough community to work with a large population of participants. More in depth community can only be sustained meaningfully up to a certain amount of participants. Even in teams, there is a limit to how many people can be part of a team effectively and humans naturally break up into smaller groups within larger ones.
iaml 7y ago
You are describing imageboard style sorting. Was 2channel/4chan getting it right all along?
- vortico 7y ago
  Bump order predates 2channel by maybe 15 years.
skohan 7y ago
There's not a "right way" or "wrong way" to organize online forums. Different interaction models result in different types of conversations, and there's room for variety there. In the case of small communities, I think it's actually beneficial to have a tool to rank order comments based on the perceived relevance to the collective. I would say that actually showing users vote numbers is probably counter-productive. It's probably too appealing to our primate brains to be able to assign precise values to social interactions, and I think we'll probably find out in time that gamified social media is in the category of things like sugar, slot machines and opiates which are just a net negative for many many people.
awfully 7y ago
I feel like karma/likes are one of the worse things ever invented in the history of software. I post on Something Awful, and while we have post counts nobody gives a damn about them. The only thing that is “impressive” is seeing an account with an old registration date, but it’s not a big deal other than light ribbing (“how can you be a member for 10 years and not know the rules?”). SA is organized into sub forums which are like subreddits I guess, and a lot of the discussion takes place inside what are essentially Reddit like megathreads. In the threads I follow and post in, sometimes sure it gets off topic but when it becomes a problem the mods usually step in and probate the offenders (6 hour posting ban), but normally after a warning. People don’t post low content low effort things like I see in every single Reddit post. I’m talking about things like inside jokes that people quote and run to the ground.

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.

flukus 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. If you've got 1000 people in your house you'll have a couple of conversations going on in the kitchen, a couple in the lounge room, a couple outside and people will be wandering between the different sections and conversations. This seems pretty familiar to traditional forums where you'll have specific sub forums, and topics in those sub-forums, if you wander from one forum to another you'll see the most recent topic/conversation taking place. Sort by new in reddit seems to be the opposite, you'll see the newest topic but you want see the active conversations, at the topic level you'll only see the latest top level post not any ongoing conversations. There is a limit where this breaks down of course, but perhaps the solution is to accept the limit and have many smaller communities instead of one big one.
- ehnto 7y ago
  > There is a limit where this breaks down of course, but perhaps the solution is to accept the limit and have many smaller communities instead of one big one. I totally agree. My suspicion is that reddit and other community driven content feed sites are a symptom of the influx of people showing up online. They became popular as they're a shallow enough community to work with a large population of participants. More in depth community can only be sustained meaningfully up to a certain amount of participants. Even in teams, there is a limit to how many people can be part of a team effectively and humans naturally break up into smaller groups within larger ones.

iaml 7y ago

You are describing imageboard style sorting. Was 2channel/4chan getting it right all along?

vortico 7y ago
Bump order predates 2channel by maybe 15 years.

skohan 7y ago

There's not a "right way" or "wrong way" to organize online forums. Different interaction models result in different types of conversations, and there's room for variety there. In the case of small communities, I think it's actually beneficial to have a tool to rank order comments based on the perceived relevance to the collective. I would say that actually showing users vote numbers is probably counter-productive. It's probably too appealing to our primate brains to be able to assign precise values to social interactions, and I think we'll probably find out in time that gamified social media is in the category of things like sugar, slot machines and opiates which are just a net negative for many many people.

awfully 7y ago

I feel like karma/likes are one of the worse things ever invented in the history of software. I post on Something Awful, and while we have post counts nobody gives a damn about them. The only thing that is “impressive” is seeing an account with an old registration date, but it’s not a big deal other than light ribbing (“how can you be a member for 10 years and not know the rules?”). SA is organized into sub forums which are like subreddits I guess, and a lot of the discussion takes place inside what are essentially Reddit like megathreads. In the threads I follow and post in, sometimes sure it gets off topic but when it becomes a problem the mods usually step in and probate the offenders (6 hour posting ban), but normally after a warning. People don’t post low content low effort things like I see in every single Reddit post. I’m talking about things like inside jokes that people quote and run to the ground.