5 ms·

> because that content can be a bit salty. AKA the fate of every site that is a collection of usergenerated content with an ad based business model. If you wan

> because that content can be a bit salty. AKA the fate of every site that is a collection of usergenerated content with an ad based business model. If you want to get serious about monetization then you need to actively curtail any content that is not "advertiser friendly" which in most cases means alienating your core content generators, case in point, Tumblr.

dmix 7y ago
I do believe Reddit admins heavily influence the culture of the hyper-modding but at the same time tons of subreddits go way beyond just moderating out the bad stuff and act like full blown newspaper editors who delete 75%+ of organically upvoted submitted content because it doesn't fit their view of what the subreddit should be. They really aren't legitimately user-generated subreddits anymore and there's always this constant tension between users and what gets allowed to be 'frontpaged' or commented about. I know people can create spin-off subs but when it starts happening everywhere it becomes a serious problem.
- vorpalhex 7y ago
  I still am very upset about /r/politics becoming super partisan. Reddit as a whole has always had biases, but there was a time when /r/politics was fairly centrist and genuinely useful as an aggregator with intelligent commentary. It's now a reposting of vox/buzzfeed more or less.
  - trts 7y ago
    I don't remember this time at all. But I've never found much value in the big subreddits because of the incentives to game them for karma and traffic. The most interesting communities have always seemed like the small ones since there are more people interested in a conversation vs. a popularity contest.
  - jahlove 7y ago
    agreed. I have voted Democrat for a long time, but I can't stand how partisan it's become. The comments are always so low-effort too. The top voted comment in almost any thread will be something like, "fuck trump".
    - Kye 7y ago
      Some people mistake catharsis for activism. It burns a lot of energy while not leading to any progress, or even to building a foundation for making progress.
    - retsibsi 7y ago
      It almost gives me an uncanny valley feeling. There's a certain pattern to every comments thread that makes me feel like I'm watching a 'conversation' between lazy teenagers, vote-manipulation bots and a handful of (paid?) adult political activists. (I know that sounds paranoid, but fwiw if I were an American I would vote Democrat, and if you applied a hundred randomly-chosen negative adjectives to Trump I would strongly agree with most of them. So this isn't a shocked reaction to seeing an echo chamber populated by the wrong team.)
  - retsibsi 7y ago
    I wouldn't necessarily mind it being partisan, if not for the extremely low quality commenting standard. I'm sure there's a causal link: most of us are less likely to call out bullshit from our own team, and when there's nobody to call you out on your bullshit (so long as it's directed at the correct targets), it's tempting to go ever cheaper and ever dumber in search of easy approval. But it would at least be possible to have a forum where people had a lot of opinions in common, but still cared about truth and intellectual integrity and basic logic.
- Cephalopterus 7y ago
  > at the same time tons of subreddits go way beyond just moderating out the bad stuff and act like full blown newspaper editors who delete 75%+ of organically upvoted submitted content While hyper active moderation and power mods pushing their agendas on Reddit is a major issue, a fair amount of moderation is key to maintaining the quality of content. r/MurderedByWords is an example when the mods bend a bit too backwards in allowing content, it delved from legitimate smackdowns to childish name calling on Twitter. The sub's a disgrace lately. Striking that balance is important, forcing your own views of what the sub should be will antogonize people but at the same time maintaining a bare minimum is also important. Even more so for subs that regularly hit r/all and r/popular. A lot of niche subs hit r/all with a thread or two causing a massive influx of users and the rules are relaxed to accommodate the lowest common denominator. The end result of doing that is usually the older regular content creators lose interest and leave the community.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  The moderators are just users though, oftentimes ones who just got there first. If you don't like the vision for any given subreddit you can create your own with more lax moderation. There's plenty of stories where subs split off because of moderation differences and ended up becoming bigger than their parent. See /r/gameofthrones vs /r/freefolk for an example. Personally I find that the more strictly a subreddit is moderated, the better it tends to be.
- s1artibartfast 7y ago
  I think /r/PoliticalDiscussion is a great example of this. Up until 2016 there was a lot of active debate and ~50k subscribers. Now there are ~750k subscribers and only ~2 posts allowed per day. Must be exhausting for the mods.
Chirael 7y ago
YouTube is starting to do this as well. For example they've made it so that accounts with less than 1000 subscribers can't do live streams any more. Not coincidentally, 1000 subscribers is the threshold for monetization (i.e., when ads start getting shown on all the account's videos). A lot of smaller channels are upset about it, since live streams were one of the ways they were /getting/ to 1000 subscribers in the first place, but you can't fight the platform :(
- Flozzin 7y ago
  I wonder how much it costs to get a thousand bot accounts to subscribe to your account.
  - Karunamon 7y ago
    About $90ish after some cursory searching. I wouldn't do it, though, seems like a great way to get a nasty surprise in the future when the bots get terminated.
    - Scoundreller 7y ago
      There’s also an hours of viewing requirement. The sad part about the sub requirement is that many forms of content are valuable but not sub-worthy. If you create a video on how to fix a ‘93 Hyundai’s brakes and next week how to fix your vintage garage door, I’m not going to sub. It’s not « feedable » content Maybe I would if it was entertaining in a time-wasting way, but that shouldn’t be a requirement. ChrisFix isn’t going to make a brake-change video for every car out there.
  - Analemma_ 7y ago
    That's playing with fire. If/when Google figures out what you're doing, they'll nuke your entire Google presence- YouTube, Gmail, everything- with no recourse.
- ken 7y ago
  YouTube is definitely doing this. If you watch a video without being signed in, it now displays a popover (over the video) that says "You're signed out of YouTube. Sign in to like videos, comment, and subscribe. [GOT IT]"
dandelo1953 7y ago
Just want to say I cannot agree with these sentiments more. Google turned a seemingly benign industry into something people now regularly refer to as "weaponized" messaging. The pen is mightier than the sword. The spoken word is mightier than both. We need to relearn how to talk to one another instead of relying on what used to be a useful heuristic shortcut in our day to day life. We got drunk on the convenience of industry automating massaging before we even realized tech would lead to automation could scale at such exponential rates. Our linear thinking in 3d space time is not able to keep up with all the degrees of separation in play anymore. Marketing is a joke and everyone knows it. This is the real industry that is "too big to fail". And that they pinned it on the penultimate boogey man (aka money) is just more fuel to that fire.

dmix 7y ago

I do believe Reddit admins heavily influence the culture of the hyper-modding but at the same time tons of subreddits go way beyond just moderating out the bad stuff and act like full blown newspaper editors who delete 75%+ of organically upvoted submitted content because it doesn't fit their view of what the subreddit should be. They really aren't legitimately user-generated subreddits anymore and there's always this constant tension between users and what gets allowed to be 'frontpaged' or commented about. I know people can create spin-off subs but when it starts happening everywhere it becomes a serious problem.

vorpalhex 7y ago
I still am very upset about /r/politics becoming super partisan. Reddit as a whole has always had biases, but there was a time when /r/politics was fairly centrist and genuinely useful as an aggregator with intelligent commentary. It's now a reposting of vox/buzzfeed more or less.
- trts 7y ago
  I don't remember this time at all. But I've never found much value in the big subreddits because of the incentives to game them for karma and traffic. The most interesting communities have always seemed like the small ones since there are more people interested in a conversation vs. a popularity contest.
- jahlove 7y ago
  agreed. I have voted Democrat for a long time, but I can't stand how partisan it's become. The comments are always so low-effort too. The top voted comment in almost any thread will be something like, "fuck trump".
  - Kye 7y ago
    Some people mistake catharsis for activism. It burns a lot of energy while not leading to any progress, or even to building a foundation for making progress.
  - retsibsi 7y ago
    It almost gives me an uncanny valley feeling. There's a certain pattern to every comments thread that makes me feel like I'm watching a 'conversation' between lazy teenagers, vote-manipulation bots and a handful of (paid?) adult political activists. (I know that sounds paranoid, but fwiw if I were an American I would vote Democrat, and if you applied a hundred randomly-chosen negative adjectives to Trump I would strongly agree with most of them. So this isn't a shocked reaction to seeing an echo chamber populated by the wrong team.)
- retsibsi 7y ago
  I wouldn't necessarily mind it being partisan, if not for the extremely low quality commenting standard. I'm sure there's a causal link: most of us are less likely to call out bullshit from our own team, and when there's nobody to call you out on your bullshit (so long as it's directed at the correct targets), it's tempting to go ever cheaper and ever dumber in search of easy approval. But it would at least be possible to have a forum where people had a lot of opinions in common, but still cared about truth and intellectual integrity and basic logic.
Cephalopterus 7y ago
> at the same time tons of subreddits go way beyond just moderating out the bad stuff and act like full blown newspaper editors who delete 75%+ of organically upvoted submitted content While hyper active moderation and power mods pushing their agendas on Reddit is a major issue, a fair amount of moderation is key to maintaining the quality of content. r/MurderedByWords is an example when the mods bend a bit too backwards in allowing content, it delved from legitimate smackdowns to childish name calling on Twitter. The sub's a disgrace lately. Striking that balance is important, forcing your own views of what the sub should be will antogonize people but at the same time maintaining a bare minimum is also important. Even more so for subs that regularly hit r/all and r/popular. A lot of niche subs hit r/all with a thread or two causing a massive influx of users and the rules are relaxed to accommodate the lowest common denominator. The end result of doing that is usually the older regular content creators lose interest and leave the community.
CydeWeys 7y ago
The moderators are just users though, oftentimes ones who just got there first. If you don't like the vision for any given subreddit you can create your own with more lax moderation. There's plenty of stories where subs split off because of moderation differences and ended up becoming bigger than their parent. See /r/gameofthrones vs /r/freefolk for an example. Personally I find that the more strictly a subreddit is moderated, the better it tends to be.
s1artibartfast 7y ago
I think /r/PoliticalDiscussion is a great example of this. Up until 2016 there was a lot of active debate and ~50k subscribers. Now there are ~750k subscribers and only ~2 posts allowed per day. Must be exhausting for the mods.

Chirael 7y ago

YouTube is starting to do this as well. For example they've made it so that accounts with less than 1000 subscribers can't do live streams any more. Not coincidentally, 1000 subscribers is the threshold for monetization (i.e., when ads start getting shown on all the account's videos). A lot of smaller channels are upset about it, since live streams were one of the ways they were /getting/ to 1000 subscribers in the first place, but you can't fight the platform :(

Flozzin 7y ago
I wonder how much it costs to get a thousand bot accounts to subscribe to your account.
- Karunamon 7y ago
  About $90ish after some cursory searching. I wouldn't do it, though, seems like a great way to get a nasty surprise in the future when the bots get terminated.
  - Scoundreller 7y ago
    There’s also an hours of viewing requirement. The sad part about the sub requirement is that many forms of content are valuable but not sub-worthy. If you create a video on how to fix a ‘93 Hyundai’s brakes and next week how to fix your vintage garage door, I’m not going to sub. It’s not « feedable » content Maybe I would if it was entertaining in a time-wasting way, but that shouldn’t be a requirement. ChrisFix isn’t going to make a brake-change video for every car out there.
- Analemma_ 7y ago
  That's playing with fire. If/when Google figures out what you're doing, they'll nuke your entire Google presence- YouTube, Gmail, everything- with no recourse.
ken 7y ago
YouTube is definitely doing this. If you watch a video without being signed in, it now displays a popover (over the video) that says "You're signed out of YouTube. Sign in to like videos, comment, and subscribe. [GOT IT]"

dandelo1953 7y ago

Just want to say I cannot agree with these sentiments more. Google turned a seemingly benign industry into something people now regularly refer to as "weaponized" messaging. The pen is mightier than the sword. The spoken word is mightier than both. We need to relearn how to talk to one another instead of relying on what used to be a useful heuristic shortcut in our day to day life. We got drunk on the convenience of industry automating massaging before we even realized tech would lead to automation could scale at such exponential rates. Our linear thinking in 3d space time is not able to keep up with all the degrees of separation in play anymore. Marketing is a joke and everyone knows it. This is the real industry that is "too big to fail". And that they pinned it on the penultimate boogey man (aka money) is just more fuel to that fire.