4 ms·

While reddit's comment system is obviously an improvement over Slashdot's, I'm increasingly convinced that community makeup is far more important than the tool

by brett 19y ago

While reddit's comment system is obviously an improvement over Slashdot's, I'm increasingly convinced that community makeup is far more important than the tool it uses.

pg 19y ago
I agree, basically. Except I think customs are as important as or more important than makeup. That's why I try to discourage ad hominems. To be fair to the reddits, it wasn't their fault that the discussion on reddit sank down toward that of digg and slashdot. They have really strong beliefs against censorship. They were never going to jump into a discussion and tell people to stop being jerks. But empirically it looks as if you may have to. The optimistic way of phrasing this is: if you have good customs and existing users enforce them, you can probably survive the influx of 14 year olds when it comes.
- brett 19y ago
  That really interesting; your emphasis on community custom is not something I'd really thought about. You could even go so far as to classify reddit's innovations as an attempt to programatically encourage or enforce such customs. I wonder if you could take it further programatically. Off the top of my head you could go the email route and switch to a three button system for comments: "up", "down", and "troll". I'm guessing you can tell where I'm going from there: A Plan For Trolls?.
  - Jd 19y ago
    Clay Shirky has a couple good essays about this: http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://shirky.com/writings/broadcast_and_community.html http://shirky.com/writings/broadcast_and_community.html I agree with most of his points. Better technology can not substitute for better people, although I observe a strong correlation between mental acuity and humility and, hence, 133t hacker skills. One of the unfortunate things about communities (reddit included) is that they tend to gravitate towards a certain conformity of opinion which then rewards people who parrot the standard opinions and stifles innovation. I was reading a blog post recently on how someone creeped to the top of Y-Combinator karma by observing karma-award patterns and posting articles which he thought people would award karma for. This, obviously, is an effective way of winning prestige, but prestige has rarely been a very good correlate for anything. In fact, as Pg stated in his talk at Rails Conf, even at the individual level an increase in prestige frequently has a negative impact on innovation. Redditors have been observing the same pattern in their own community. As more people have become aware of the community (the prestige has increased), the quality of the postings and karma system has declined to the point where inane 'Bush resembles Chimpanzee'-type postings dominate the main page. There is ultimately only one solution to this problem - the creation of walls. The last online community I participated in went through a similar phase of evolution. The content was progressively diluted until a number of core members went and created their own community. This new forum/community now has a application for membership which requires applicants demonstrate writing proficiency prior to entry. Tie-ins to current political machinations could be articulated, but seem unnecessary at time.now
    - ryanmahoski 19y ago
      I wonder if there may be a way to build the wall you describe in the general-public site. Pretend you could rate commenters, not publicly but privately--for your own private use. If you spot a particularly dumb comment on reddit, you could blacklist the commenter--privately, so that your action would affect only you. Similarly, when you notice a brilliant comment you will want to permanently highlight its author so that for you--and only you--the author has an advantage on your attention in the future. Commenters you perceive as intolerable would never have another shot at your attention while commenters you view as geniuses would forever get artificially modded up--but only to your eyes. The same algorithm could work for postings. If I want more Ron Paul, peace be upon Him, I can privately champion those authors who celebrate his news items. You may have had enough of the distinguished doctor-representative from Texas, so you could exercise your prerogative to ignore (or artificially down-mod, just for you) submitters whom you view are overly sympathetic to Him. Further thoughts on reddit's comment system... Problem: Logical fallacies largely go unchecked. Just today, someone replying to my comment pulled a tautology so I reflexively linked to the appropriate Wikipedia page. As mentioned, ad hominem is a more popular sin and the list goes on. What if, when I clicked on the "Report" link, I could select from several logical fallacies? In this way, if enough others agreed with me, we could get an official-looking stamp on the offending comment--corresponding to what the community felt was the logical fallacy (e.g., straw man, false analogy, non sequitur). Problem: Today, if I submit a comment and I down-mod all other comments I increase my comment's visibility. I want my comment to have visibility (that is why I wrote it) and I suspect other redditors may employ the cheat. So I face an ethical dilemma. We can talk about real-life karma, but why tease commenters to begin with? Solution: If you comment you can't vote in the thread. Problem: I imagine a lot of redditors, like me, sort by top->flat and I suspect most of the remaining redditors sort by top->nested. So if I comment, I significantly increase my visibility odds if I reply to the front-runner comment. To the extent I care that people will read what I write, I will tend to favor the popular comments--even if they are not as worthy of a response as those nearer the bottom.
      - Jd 19y ago
        Your algorithm suggestion is interesting, but probably not sufficient. Although reddit trolls are one step up from internet spammers, the same principle applies. With sufficient quantity of trolls/spammers blocking each one individually becomes an incredibly time intensive task - enough to drive away all those who don't have tons of time on their hands. Pg speaks above about customs, but the problem with customers have to both (1) be educated about site customs (2) want to be educated about site customs. I think with any influx of 14 year olds of sufficient you will find both 1 & 2 problematic. Now, personally, I think there is a significant difference between a news aggregation site and a community site. In a community site persons actually develop relationships and relate to each other on this basis. I have no seen that happen much on reddit or here. One reason for this is the speed of discussion - most of the best online discussions I have been involved with have taken days or weeks to fully develop. In any news-blog-digg driven site the time frame is closer to 24 hrs. What I would favor is a multi-tiered system. For something like YC News there could be something like three tiers: (1) Old school hackers with experience in startups (2) Less experienced coders (3) Whoever wants to participate. Each conversation could be assigned a tier, and people of that tier and above tiers could participate. For example, a tier 3 discussion would accommodate people of tier 1,2 &3, a tier 2 discussion could accommodate tiers 1&2. In many ways this model is what we already do. We have low-tier sites like digg which we may check, we come to places like this for a free form discussion mostly among people of type 2, and type 1 discussions are mainly engaged in via email. So in some ways the only innovation I propose is that some of these type 1 discussions be viewable to the public, so we can see what cool lisp hackers talk about in private (and solicit them for advice). Response to other reddit comment comments: Fallacy - I don't think the fallacy thing will work simply because (as with the site customs described above) one has to be educated as to what any given fallacy means. Ethical dilemma - funny I never thought of doing that, although I think your solution would work. Popular comments - yes this is a big problem; I have noticed it.
- brlewis 19y ago
  Did anyone point out to the reddits that telling someone to stop being a jerk is not censorship?
- byrneseyeview 19y ago
  "They were never going to jump into a discussion and tell people to stop being jerks." Really? Isn't that more or less what they did with Pica when they requested that he stop using certain epithets?
  - pg 19y ago
    Did they? I didn't know about that, but I'm not surprised. Still, it shows how tolerant they were if it took him to make them say something.
    - steve 19y ago
      I really doubt that they did...
    - byrneseyeview 19y ago
      I remember reading something from spez (I think) to the effect of "We asked him to tone it down, and he did." And I think pica said he'd been told to say "n-word" instead of, well, the n-word. I have no idea why this was satisfactory to the reddits, since all it did was add a hilarious dash of ironic political correctness.
  - staunch 19y ago
    I believe richardkulisz was also dinged. His new username is "redditcensoredme". So it does seem to only be the most extreme cases. There are some very popular forum sites that have existed for years and maintained civility. Any Reddit-type site could learn a lot from them. They almost all have a group of core users who act as moderators and enforce a set of published rules. It's critical that they not make up the rules on the fly, otherwise users won't respect the decisions.
    - byrneseyeview 19y ago
      I think richardkulisz just misunderstood the reporting algorithm. He was a little less polite than pica, so people resented and reported him rather than downmodding and ignoring.
- bes 19y ago
  Lowtax (he runs somethingawful.com) gave a talk about web communities at UIUC a few years ago and he basically said without good moderation large sites will just degenerate into crap. The talk(http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/conference/2005/video/UIUC-ACM-RP05-Richard-Kyanka.wmv http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/conference/2005/video/UIUC-ACM-RP05-...) takes 15 minutes or so to get into anything serious, but I think there are some good lessons in there.

by brett 19y ago

While reddit's comment system is obviously an improvement over Slashdot's, I'm increasingly convinced that community makeup is far more important than the tool it uses.

pg 19y ago

I agree, basically. Except I think customs are as important as or more important than makeup. That's why I try to discourage ad hominems. To be fair to the reddits, it wasn't their fault that the discussion on reddit sank down toward that of digg and slashdot. They have really strong beliefs against censorship. They were never going to jump into a discussion and tell people to stop being jerks. But empirically it looks as if you may have to. The optimistic way of phrasing this is: if you have good customs and existing users enforce them, you can probably survive the influx of 14 year olds when it comes.

brett 19y ago
That really interesting; your emphasis on community custom is not something I'd really thought about. You could even go so far as to classify reddit's innovations as an attempt to programatically encourage or enforce such customs. I wonder if you could take it further programatically. Off the top of my head you could go the email route and switch to a three button system for comments: "up", "down", and "troll". I'm guessing you can tell where I'm going from there: A Plan For Trolls?.
- Jd 19y ago
  Clay Shirky has a couple good essays about this: http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://shirky.com/writings/broadcast_and_community.html http://shirky.com/writings/broadcast_and_community.html I agree with most of his points. Better technology can not substitute for better people, although I observe a strong correlation between mental acuity and humility and, hence, 133t hacker skills. One of the unfortunate things about communities (reddit included) is that they tend to gravitate towards a certain conformity of opinion which then rewards people who parrot the standard opinions and stifles innovation. I was reading a blog post recently on how someone creeped to the top of Y-Combinator karma by observing karma-award patterns and posting articles which he thought people would award karma for. This, obviously, is an effective way of winning prestige, but prestige has rarely been a very good correlate for anything. In fact, as Pg stated in his talk at Rails Conf, even at the individual level an increase in prestige frequently has a negative impact on innovation. Redditors have been observing the same pattern in their own community. As more people have become aware of the community (the prestige has increased), the quality of the postings and karma system has declined to the point where inane 'Bush resembles Chimpanzee'-type postings dominate the main page. There is ultimately only one solution to this problem - the creation of walls. The last online community I participated in went through a similar phase of evolution. The content was progressively diluted until a number of core members went and created their own community. This new forum/community now has a application for membership which requires applicants demonstrate writing proficiency prior to entry. Tie-ins to current political machinations could be articulated, but seem unnecessary at time.now
  - ryanmahoski 19y ago
    I wonder if there may be a way to build the wall you describe in the general-public site. Pretend you could rate commenters, not publicly but privately--for your own private use. If you spot a particularly dumb comment on reddit, you could blacklist the commenter--privately, so that your action would affect only you. Similarly, when you notice a brilliant comment you will want to permanently highlight its author so that for you--and only you--the author has an advantage on your attention in the future. Commenters you perceive as intolerable would never have another shot at your attention while commenters you view as geniuses would forever get artificially modded up--but only to your eyes. The same algorithm could work for postings. If I want more Ron Paul, peace be upon Him, I can privately champion those authors who celebrate his news items. You may have had enough of the distinguished doctor-representative from Texas, so you could exercise your prerogative to ignore (or artificially down-mod, just for you) submitters whom you view are overly sympathetic to Him. Further thoughts on reddit's comment system... Problem: Logical fallacies largely go unchecked. Just today, someone replying to my comment pulled a tautology so I reflexively linked to the appropriate Wikipedia page. As mentioned, ad hominem is a more popular sin and the list goes on. What if, when I clicked on the "Report" link, I could select from several logical fallacies? In this way, if enough others agreed with me, we could get an official-looking stamp on the offending comment--corresponding to what the community felt was the logical fallacy (e.g., straw man, false analogy, non sequitur). Problem: Today, if I submit a comment and I down-mod all other comments I increase my comment's visibility. I want my comment to have visibility (that is why I wrote it) and I suspect other redditors may employ the cheat. So I face an ethical dilemma. We can talk about real-life karma, but why tease commenters to begin with? Solution: If you comment you can't vote in the thread. Problem: I imagine a lot of redditors, like me, sort by top->flat and I suspect most of the remaining redditors sort by top->nested. So if I comment, I significantly increase my visibility odds if I reply to the front-runner comment. To the extent I care that people will read what I write, I will tend to favor the popular comments--even if they are not as worthy of a response as those nearer the bottom.
    - Jd 19y ago
      Your algorithm suggestion is interesting, but probably not sufficient. Although reddit trolls are one step up from internet spammers, the same principle applies. With sufficient quantity of trolls/spammers blocking each one individually becomes an incredibly time intensive task - enough to drive away all those who don't have tons of time on their hands. Pg speaks above about customs, but the problem with customers have to both (1) be educated about site customs (2) want to be educated about site customs. I think with any influx of 14 year olds of sufficient you will find both 1 & 2 problematic. Now, personally, I think there is a significant difference between a news aggregation site and a community site. In a community site persons actually develop relationships and relate to each other on this basis. I have no seen that happen much on reddit or here. One reason for this is the speed of discussion - most of the best online discussions I have been involved with have taken days or weeks to fully develop. In any news-blog-digg driven site the time frame is closer to 24 hrs. What I would favor is a multi-tiered system. For something like YC News there could be something like three tiers: (1) Old school hackers with experience in startups (2) Less experienced coders (3) Whoever wants to participate. Each conversation could be assigned a tier, and people of that tier and above tiers could participate. For example, a tier 3 discussion would accommodate people of tier 1,2 &3, a tier 2 discussion could accommodate tiers 1&2. In many ways this model is what we already do. We have low-tier sites like digg which we may check, we come to places like this for a free form discussion mostly among people of type 2, and type 1 discussions are mainly engaged in via email. So in some ways the only innovation I propose is that some of these type 1 discussions be viewable to the public, so we can see what cool lisp hackers talk about in private (and solicit them for advice). Response to other reddit comment comments: Fallacy - I don't think the fallacy thing will work simply because (as with the site customs described above) one has to be educated as to what any given fallacy means. Ethical dilemma - funny I never thought of doing that, although I think your solution would work. Popular comments - yes this is a big problem; I have noticed it.
brlewis 19y ago
Did anyone point out to the reddits that telling someone to stop being a jerk is not censorship?
byrneseyeview 19y ago
"They were never going to jump into a discussion and tell people to stop being jerks." Really? Isn't that more or less what they did with Pica when they requested that he stop using certain epithets?
- pg 19y ago
  Did they? I didn't know about that, but I'm not surprised. Still, it shows how tolerant they were if it took him to make them say something.
  - steve 19y ago
    I really doubt that they did...
  - byrneseyeview 19y ago
    I remember reading something from spez (I think) to the effect of "We asked him to tone it down, and he did." And I think pica said he'd been told to say "n-word" instead of, well, the n-word. I have no idea why this was satisfactory to the reddits, since all it did was add a hilarious dash of ironic political correctness.
- staunch 19y ago
  I believe richardkulisz was also dinged. His new username is "redditcensoredme". So it does seem to only be the most extreme cases. There are some very popular forum sites that have existed for years and maintained civility. Any Reddit-type site could learn a lot from them. They almost all have a group of core users who act as moderators and enforce a set of published rules. It's critical that they not make up the rules on the fly, otherwise users won't respect the decisions.
  - byrneseyeview 19y ago
    I think richardkulisz just misunderstood the reporting algorithm. He was a little less polite than pica, so people resented and reported him rather than downmodding and ignoring.
bes 19y ago
Lowtax (he runs somethingawful.com) gave a talk about web communities at UIUC a few years ago and he basically said without good moderation large sites will just degenerate into crap. The talk(http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/conference/2005/video/UIUC-ACM-RP05-Richard-Kyanka.wmv http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/conference/2005/video/UIUC-ACM-RP05-...) takes 15 minutes or so to get into anything serious, but I think there are some good lessons in there.