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Groupthink in recent years on Reddit has become a serious problem. Even in /r/television, people downvote discussion of television when they disagree with the

Groupthink in recent years on Reddit has become a serious problem. Even in /r/television, people downvote discussion of television when they disagree with the commenter's basic opinion of a television show. The downvote button is not meant to be an "I disagree with your opinion" button, but it is that now.

DenverCode 6y ago
I have completely moved over to https://tildes.net https://tildes.net, HN, and http://lobste.rs http://lobste.rs.
- robbyking 6y ago
  I've been trying to get a lobste.rs invite for years! It's a tough community to get into. I hadn't heard of Tildes before, but it looks cool, too. Reddit reached Eternal September a while ago, so the key is to find small (yet active) communities whose content doesn't make it to r/all. I moderate a cycling community there, but we're really strict about what type of content gets posted. It sucks that we as a mod team have to do that, but if we don't our community gets overrun with memes, image macros, and rage comics.
  - DenverCode 6y ago
    Shoot me an email - it's in my HN bio.
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  I've been on lobste.rs a while. It's even worse than HN.
  - DenverCode 6y ago
    This is an honest question so I hope it doesn't come off in the wrong light. If you don't like it here? Why do you continue to visit and interact?
    - eeZah7Ux 6y ago
      Because better platforms died off years ago (or have been killed).
      - jlokier 6y ago
        Which platforms did you find better than HN? And of those which were killed?
        eeZah7Ux 6y ago
        NNTP, some mailing lists and the peer-based resharing/voting in Google Reader
- spurgu 6y ago
  What are the advantages (or differences) of these compared to HN? From a quick glance they seem to be clones with a bit of glitter.
_red 6y ago
I think voting is the problem. The gamification attracts a certain type of person who for various reasons is willing to spend absurd amounts of time / effort to "acquire more points". This in turn warps the community as a result. I understand it was an attempt to police spam. However I still think that slashdot perhaps struck the right balance (the old slashdot I mean, I don't know how they do it now). Randomly a small percentage of users get mod ability when they read the threads which enables them to vote / classify / tag spam.
Dumblydorr 6y ago
People use the downvote on HN for disagreement all the time. People don't like critiques or dissenting views, and some fraction of OPs will downvote a critical response. Some other fraction will downvote maliciously or selfishly. I think the downvote should be for low-effort or low-contribution comments. I abhor "^this" or "lol", nevermind trolling or unfounded disinformation.
- spurgu 6y ago
  > People use the downvote on HN for disagreement all the time. To some extent yes, but I wouldn't say all the time - it's definitely a lot better here compared to places like Reddit.
cblconfederate 6y ago
I m starting to see the uselessness of down/upvote. Apart from reporting spam, maybe it's better to do away with them In HN, people tend to pile up on the topmost comment and create enormous trees of comments, just because the next top comment is way too far down
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
I can't count the number of times that some jerk de-railed some comment section on genuine good content because they couldn't resist trying to score a few cheap virtue points pointing out that leaving X leaning against Y in the background is technically an OSHA violation or that Z in the background needs to be cleaned.
myhandle 6y ago
Dang. This is one I can speak to. Back around 2008 or so I was at a friend's college dorm and we spent an entire day watching a Mad Men marathon on AMC. This was long before binge watching, when an actor was either in movies, on HBO, or on bleh cable, so it felt like a cultural shift to me that we were all so enamored by this show. When I got home I typed in /r/television to see if maybe this was something others were talking about, but I discovered it was an abandoned subreddit full of soap opera gossip. So I messaged the user that created it, who eventually came around and saw my message, and he let me take it over. He didn't leave the subreddit so he was always top in the hierarchy, but I personally took full ownership. I spent years designing and enforcing rules discouraging things like downvotes, requiring people to submit the source instead of blogspam/clickbait, disallowing memes/image posts, banning any form of hate speech, etc. This was _not_ the norm on Reddit at the time. This was the era of /r/pics. Most passerbys hated it, it really didn't even follow the whole idea of Reddit as a whole, but the ones that stayed were awesome and it seriously just grew and grew and grew. Critics like Alan Sepinwall were practically gods there and guided a lot of the discussion throughout those years, and the AV Club was largely ignored. I ended up taking a little hiatus from the Internet and left some mods I trusted in control, and when I went back after a few months I discovered the original mod had let Reddit take it over and install their own team to make it a default subreddit. Why wouldn't they? Now, it is what it is. Still, I look at it and know I designed that logo, I wrote the rules that have been repurposed and are buried in some wiki that nobody reads, and I wrote the stylesheet for the sidebar. Oh well.

DenverCode 6y ago

I have completely moved over to https://tildes.net https://tildes.net, HN, and http://lobste.rs http://lobste.rs.

robbyking 6y ago
I've been trying to get a lobste.rs invite for years! It's a tough community to get into. I hadn't heard of Tildes before, but it looks cool, too. Reddit reached Eternal September a while ago, so the key is to find small (yet active) communities whose content doesn't make it to r/all. I moderate a cycling community there, but we're really strict about what type of content gets posted. It sucks that we as a mod team have to do that, but if we don't our community gets overrun with memes, image macros, and rage comics.
- DenverCode 6y ago
  Shoot me an email - it's in my HN bio.
eeZah7Ux 6y ago
I've been on lobste.rs a while. It's even worse than HN.
- DenverCode 6y ago
  This is an honest question so I hope it doesn't come off in the wrong light. If you don't like it here? Why do you continue to visit and interact?
  - eeZah7Ux 6y ago
    Because better platforms died off years ago (or have been killed).
    - jlokier 6y ago
      Which platforms did you find better than HN? And of those which were killed?
      - eeZah7Ux 6y ago
        NNTP, some mailing lists and the peer-based resharing/voting in Google Reader
spurgu 6y ago
What are the advantages (or differences) of these compared to HN? From a quick glance they seem to be clones with a bit of glitter.

_red 6y ago

I think voting is the problem. The gamification attracts a certain type of person who for various reasons is willing to spend absurd amounts of time / effort to "acquire more points". This in turn warps the community as a result. I understand it was an attempt to police spam. However I still think that slashdot perhaps struck the right balance (the old slashdot I mean, I don't know how they do it now). Randomly a small percentage of users get mod ability when they read the threads which enables them to vote / classify / tag spam.

Dumblydorr 6y ago

People use the downvote on HN for disagreement all the time. People don't like critiques or dissenting views, and some fraction of OPs will downvote a critical response. Some other fraction will downvote maliciously or selfishly. I think the downvote should be for low-effort or low-contribution comments. I abhor "^this" or "lol", nevermind trolling or unfounded disinformation.

spurgu 6y ago
> People use the downvote on HN for disagreement all the time. To some extent yes, but I wouldn't say all the time - it's definitely a lot better here compared to places like Reddit.

cblconfederate 6y ago

I m starting to see the uselessness of down/upvote. Apart from reporting spam, maybe it's better to do away with them In HN, people tend to pile up on the topmost comment and create enormous trees of comments, just because the next top comment is way too far down

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

I can't count the number of times that some jerk de-railed some comment section on genuine good content because they couldn't resist trying to score a few cheap virtue points pointing out that leaving X leaning against Y in the background is technically an OSHA violation or that Z in the background needs to be cleaned.

myhandle 6y ago

Dang. This is one I can speak to. Back around 2008 or so I was at a friend's college dorm and we spent an entire day watching a Mad Men marathon on AMC. This was long before binge watching, when an actor was either in movies, on HBO, or on bleh cable, so it felt like a cultural shift to me that we were all so enamored by this show. When I got home I typed in /r/television to see if maybe this was something others were talking about, but I discovered it was an abandoned subreddit full of soap opera gossip. So I messaged the user that created it, who eventually came around and saw my message, and he let me take it over. He didn't leave the subreddit so he was always top in the hierarchy, but I personally took full ownership. I spent years designing and enforcing rules discouraging things like downvotes, requiring people to submit the source instead of blogspam/clickbait, disallowing memes/image posts, banning any form of hate speech, etc. This was _not_ the norm on Reddit at the time. This was the era of /r/pics. Most passerbys hated it, it really didn't even follow the whole idea of Reddit as a whole, but the ones that stayed were awesome and it seriously just grew and grew and grew. Critics like Alan Sepinwall were practically gods there and guided a lot of the discussion throughout those years, and the AV Club was largely ignored. I ended up taking a little hiatus from the Internet and left some mods I trusted in control, and when I went back after a few months I discovered the original mod had let Reddit take it over and install their own team to make it a default subreddit. Why wouldn't they? Now, it is what it is. Still, I look at it and know I designed that logo, I wrote the rules that have been repurposed and are buried in some wiki that nobody reads, and I wrote the stylesheet for the sidebar. Oh well.