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I should be happy that you have automated a process that I manually perform frequently, but instead it gives me anxiety. The set of incentives means the more s

I should be happy that you have automated a process that I manually perform frequently, but instead it gives me anxiety. The set of incentives means the more successful you are, the more you will directly be attacked in the form of bad faith posts. Reddit is not better because it is a better system or because it has better moderation. Reddit is better because there isn't an entire industry (SEO) devoted to corrupting Reddit posts yet. Even google hasn't done a stellar job of winning that arms race, and they have vastly more resources. You add value by performing the manual labor of finding and "reading" through posts, but the core value is generated by Reddit's abuse prevention team. If you were to be acquired by Reddit, my trust would go to zero. If you took outside investment, my trust would go to zero. My trust is already a little low because wirecutter specifically avoided items they couldn't get affiliate links for and now they are completely corrupted by new ownership. Wirecutter was the last review site that I used to make a purchase decision. More than anything, I am worried that the dark mirror of this website, the "reddit optimization" industry is probably just as advanced and validated by efforts like this.

Calamitous 4y ago
This was literally my first thought. If this works at all, it will quickly be ruined.
jvz 4y ago
Goodhart's Law in action. Any "product quality" metric will be gamed to the point of uselessness as soon as it gains traction. In other words, services like this one can only work as long as nobody knows about them. The only stable solution is for each person to curate and maintain their own set of sources, so that there are no high-value metrics for marketers to target. Exactly the opposite of what this service is trying to do.
rkangel 4y ago
You are obviously correct that the more value this tool has, the more work bad actors will do to take advantage of that, reducing the quality of the result. However, I do think Reddit is more resistant to it than some other platforms due to the large amount of distributed work done by the participants. Assuming that a given subreddit is moderated in such a way that the vast majority of participants are individuals interested in high quality products then the Reddit voting system does help to keep other stuff out.

Calamitous 4y ago

This was literally my first thought. If this works at all, it will quickly be ruined.

jvz 4y ago

Goodhart's Law in action. Any "product quality" metric will be gamed to the point of uselessness as soon as it gains traction. In other words, services like this one can only work as long as nobody knows about them. The only stable solution is for each person to curate and maintain their own set of sources, so that there are no high-value metrics for marketers to target. Exactly the opposite of what this service is trying to do.

rkangel 4y ago

You are obviously correct that the more value this tool has, the more work bad actors will do to take advantage of that, reducing the quality of the result. However, I do think Reddit is more resistant to it than some other platforms due to the large amount of distributed work done by the participants. Assuming that a given subreddit is moderated in such a way that the vast majority of participants are individuals interested in high quality products then the Reddit voting system does help to keep other stuff out.