9 ms·

Reddit vs Hacker News vs Twitter

254 points by willvarfar 15y ago

rtisticrahul 15y ago
My experience with HN has been much better than with Reddit. In reddit, even good posts get down ratings a lot of time. The one thing i like about hacker news is your posts still have 1 point minimum even if others dont like it, whereas in reddit you fall down to 0 points which makes you feel discouraging sometimes.
- kijin 15y ago
  A lot of downvotes on reddit are actually inserted by the system, accompanied by the same number of upvotes to balance them out. This is supposed to be some sort of anti-spam anti-troll measure, though I'm not sure how that even works. Anyway, the upshot is that you never know the true number of downvotes you got. This can be discouraging for people who don't know about computer-generated phantom votes.
  - willvarfar 15y ago
    What bugs me more is that the numbers jump all over the place if you refresh the page. Even the number of comments seems out of sync. That CAP gets so much in the way is irritating. Its like stackoverflow used to be a while ago. You can make big sites that don't have such laggy BASE. I guess not with the reddit infrastructure perhaps.
radicalbyte 15y ago
> A comment on HN is going to be mature and reasoned; often expanding or exploring technical issues raised That's what I love about HN : the content of comments here are of a very high quality. It's something that I've noticed with my own posts - well reasoned comments attract a lot of positive karma. Even if you're taking a controversial stance on an issue.
- danssig 15y ago
  This is true. Historically, I've gotten the most points on posts I posted expecting massive downvotes on due to their controversial nature.
- stanmancan 15y ago
  At least 50% of the time I don't even read the article, I just read the comments. I tend to be more interested in the conversation the posts generate than the posts themselves.
  - erickhill 15y ago
    I would venture to guess I read the comments 90% more than the actual posts. The discussion (or the subject) will occasionally lead me to read the article in depth, but more often than not the discourse here is more enlightening overall. I can easily say HN is the only community where my behavior follows this model.
    - stanmancan 15y ago
      90% is actually a more realistic metric for myself as well. I was being generous leaving it at "over 50%"....
willvarfar 15y ago
According to my own mining, I should have waited a few hours before posting this :) Anyway, some time next week I'll be in a position to add a line describing the success of "deeply meta" posts like this one ;) We just have to get someone to post it to proggit too, I guess. And perhaps dzone...
- 18pfsmt 15y ago
  As an amateur, beginner programmer, I'm curious why you don't use something like Jekyll+S3 rather than tumblr. The dude that pulls my espresso shots uses tumblr...
  - willvarfar 15y ago
    Its a good question. Despite wishing they'd hire people to add features http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/18002362007/tumblr-fumblr http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/18002362007/tumbl... (note the comment there from someone using Google Pages + Jekyll), I'm generally happy enough not to invest time nor money in self-hosting or paid hosting.
- willvarfar 15y ago
  UPDATE: yeap, still on front-page when west-coast comes online, but without momentum :(
fool 15y ago
What I'd really like to see is some sort of "diffusion" system to let me know which link aggregation site found a URL first.
nikcub 15y ago
No mention of Techmeme? I'll add that the best way of getting picked up by other bloggers is first Techmeme (not the largest audience but definitely the most influential in tech) and second HN. I've had blog posts pick up their traffic peaks 2-3 days after they were posted as the route was techmeme -> other tech blogs -> mainstream media
- willvarfar 15y ago
  wow, never heard of it; thank you :) so what about dzone?
  - nikcub 15y ago
    I have never submitted my own posts to DZone, but they have been submitted by others. It isn't in my top10 referrers. My impression is that most of the audience there is Java developers looking for technical posts Being the first to submit it to delicious is also a good idea, with good tags. Whoever submits it first their title will be the prevailing title for the post with future re-posts, so it is a good idea to be the first to do it and set your own title before somebody bastardizes it (this is the reason why I submit my own posts to HN) Submitting to Google+ is also a good idea since it is a very good way to get the Google crawler to visit the page and index it. My own routine after I publish a post that I think may be interesting to others is HN, twitter, delicious and Google+.
- chrisacky 15y ago
  What's the proceedure for getting included on Techmeme?
  - nikcub 15y ago
    Good question. A combination of a few things: + Attach yourself to a story cluster if a relevant one is already there by linking to a source post + `tip @techmeme <url>` on twitter + Message the editors on twitter + Make sure your feed validates, can be autodiscovered etc. + Techmeme can discover stories based on retweet counts, so make sure the same canonical URL is being retweeted and favorited from the post, from twitter, disqus etc. + Post interesting things frequently enough that you become a source that is crawled by Techmeme
kijin 15y ago
> The per-page time is actually quite high; often over 5 minutes on average for a lot of my stories even when its a big crowd. I suspect some subtle misreading of Google Analytics on my part, or else people might actually be reading the whole thing carefully!? That might be because a lot of people do what I do: keep the article open while browsing comments on HN or Reddit, and switch back and forth between the two tabs while writing my own comment. In fact, I'm doing it right now. I don't know how Google Analytics would measure time spent on a page when the page sits idle in a background tab for the most part but brought to the foreground from time to time. [Edit] Things get even more complicated if you open 5 articles and 5 comment pages at the same time, and take 30+ minutes to go through all of them.
- Djehngo 15y ago
  I tend to have one window for recreation browsing and at the start of the day I will open HN and run down the front page middle clicking the link and the comments pages for anything that looks interesting or highly up-voted. This gives me a queue of stuff I can read in free time throughout the day but I imagine it really does skew the analytics.
- nikcub 15y ago
  This is why I wrote my own datapoint gathering script (I started it while at Techcrunch, curious about who scrolls down to comments, etc.). It measures body focus, number of times unfocused, total focus time, scroll position, scroll rate and a bunch of other things. It isn't completely working cross-browser yet, but it is close and useful enough where for Safari and Chrome visitors I can see how far down the page they are scrolling and how long the page is in focus for.
  - 18pfsmt 15y ago
    No doubt, this is part of the reason this noscript_using_reader stopped visiting TC. Call me a tinfoilhat-guy, but I simply would not consent to the collection of such data. It's ironic that I've learned so much from your analysis of data collection techniques elsewhere.
chrisacky 15y ago
Yesterday, I posted an article on HackerNews. Its received 62k views in total so far. HackerNews was the site that kicked off all of the view counts and it quickly jumped to the top spot #1. After it reached the top spot, I thought I would also post it on Reddit. It didn't get a single upvote. It's the third time that a story of mine has made it to the front page of HackerNews and then not received a single visitor on Reddit. In the future I don't think it is worth bothering. Ultimately, 100% of the traffic that I received, would not of happened if it weren't for the upvotes on HackerNews, because from these upvotes everyone started tweeting about it. It received 900 tweets in total. Here was some of the highlights. https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/files.chrisacky.com/github/trending.png https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/files.chrisacky.com/githu... (The highest it went to was 800 concurrent users). I'm guessing 60k for an article within 24 hours is a lot!
- nikcub 15y ago
  > It didn't get a single upvote. that is because it is in the spam filter. you need to message the moderators.
  - chrisacky 15y ago
    O right. How did you determine that? To be honest I'm not a redditor. It's not a site that I visit, so I don't understand how it works.
    - skeletonjelly 15y ago
      I check by opening a Chrome Incognito tab (so unauthenticated) and view the "new" page for that subreddit. So http://reddit.com/r/programming/new http://reddit.com/r/programming/new If it's not there I assume it's in the spam queue and message the mods. It's a pretty crap UX but it works to keep out spammers I suppose.
      - eogas 15y ago
        You shouldn't have to use incognito, unless you've got the "don't show stories that I've liked" preference checked.
18pfsmt 15y ago
I must admit I'm nauseated by the number of references to reddit on HN. I think reddit is powerful and fills a void, but the few times I've visited > cmnd+w. Twitter is also useful on occasion, but simply not my "cup of tea." These sites feel like eternal September, and make me consider suicide (not to over-dramatize...).
- leoedin 15y ago
  I think to a certain extent 3 or 4 years ago Reddit was very much like HN is now. When I first joined Reddit (2007) there was generally a lot of reasoned discussion, and the submissions were very much programmer orientated in a way that's long since passed. I'd imagine (although I suppose I have no real evidence for this) that the people who talk about Reddit and HN in the same context were active on Reddit a few years ago.
  - willvarfar 15y ago
    (blog author) yes I was rather hoping this blog post would turn up on proggit and, instead of hate-clicking, there'd be a discussion about rediscovering proggit's past. I've tried to think of solutions before too: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/15581427232/self-organizing-reddit http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/15581427232/self-... Being pro-content anti-community is not so popular over on proggit ;)
    - leoedin 15y ago
      It's nice to get confirmation! I did once get a lot of comment upvotes lambasting the poor quality of comments on the science reddit, but frankly I think the sheer size of the reddit community will make it very, very hard to return to how it was. The culture that seems to be pushed by a subset of (mostly non-technical) reddit users is largely incompatible with the culture that I (and I assume others) are looking for in a social news site. There are of course some areas of reddit which maintain a largely engaged user base willing to make in depth and interesting comments, but they tend to be rare, hard to find and often suffer from the mainstream reddit culture being dragged in by more casual visitors. Perhaps we have to simply resign ourselves to a migration between social news platforms every few years.
toadi 15y ago
On what data are these assumptions based? Don't see any reference. So for me he uses numbers to support his conclusions but I can't check them.
- willvarfar 15y ago
  They are based on my Google analytics account. I am not going to share it with you ;) Feel free to disbelieve my data or my conclusions.
joshuahedlund 15y ago
> Nobody actually follows the links in tweets though; click-through is often in the low digits per tweet Tweet click-through data is obscured in Google Analytics because anyone who clicks from a mobile app shows up as a "direct" hit because there is no referring URL. There's some speculation and evidence[1] that this, at least in some cases, shows up as "Mozilla Compatible Agent". [1] http://www.seo-theory.com/2012/02/15/why-simply-believing-seo-bloggers-is-dangerous/ http://www.seo-theory.com/2012/02/15/why-simply-believing-se...
- willvarfar 15y ago
  I've assigned the t.co domain trickle to Twitter. The 'reactions' thing on Disqus doesn't seem 100% sadly. Mouse-hovering over those reactions can be a nice pat on the back, when the reaction system works.
eogas 15y ago
FWIW, it's currently in /r/programming's spam filter, and it won't be coming out because it's not about programming. Sorry to be all stackoverflow about it, but that's how we operate.
- ExpiredLink 15y ago
  Is 'spam filter' nowadays an euphemism for 'moderators'?
  - eogas 15y ago
    This one was legitimately in the spam filter, however if it had not been, one of us probably would have taken it down for being off topic. EDIT: Right now that submission has 5 points, from people who must have clicked through on the blog post, and one comment complaining about how it's not about programming, also from someone who must have clicked through from the post.
  - blhack 15y ago
    Yes. Reddit's spam filter is completely broken with no apparent activity from the current group of admins towards fixing it. It seems that generally if you submit something to reddit, it will get caught in the spam filter, then you have to message a moderator to request that it get approved. [Again, it seems] that you're not so much voting on an assortment of links, you're voting on an assortment of links that moderators have deemed worthy.
    - socialist_coder 15y ago
      Yeah, I have always been puzzled about that. I will post extremely relevant content to various sub-reddits and they never show up in new/hot/whatever. It's like insta-spammed somehow. I don't even bother messaging the admin.
diminoten 15y ago
There is something systemically flawed with Reddit's moderator system which precludes it from ever being an unqualified success as a social news aggregator. The primary issue revolves around the selection process for moderation. To become a moderator for a subreddit, you need to have thought of the name of the subreddit. That's it. This nomenclature designation act grants any user absolute power within that domain space, and the ability to grant any other user the exact same powers. The person who created the "programming" subreddit has no qualifications, no resume by which to judge their aptitude for the moderation job, and no process exists by which to vet newly added moderators. A moderator can, for any or no reason, decide to activate the "spam filter" on any submitted article, removing it from public voting and view. This is the only tool by which Reddit moderators are given to modify their respective domains, and when used for reasons other than spam, it "teaches" the filter to remove non-spam results. This is the cause of the "broken" spam filter on Reddit - moderator abuse.
- TazeTSchnitzel 15y ago
  Personally, I dislike how the moderator system for subreddits uses a oldest-first hierarchy, where older moderators can always remove newer ones. Hence, a subreddit has no such thing as equal moderators. There is always one "on top", as such.
- eogas 15y ago
  I think you hit the nail on the head with your last point, though I wouldn't necessarily call it moderator abuse. The actions that moderators can take on reddit were built on a laissez faire model of moderation, where anything goes except blatant spam. This obviously doesn't work very well for moderators who choose to run their subreddits in a different manner, and this happens to be most of the big subreddits, because laissez faire moderation just doesn't work on a large scale. For example, the sole /r/truereddit moderator believes in a laissez faire moderation style, and the subreddit is slowly getting worse and worse as the userbase increases. Every time a /r/truereddit post makes it to the front page, a virtual swarm of idiocy surrounds the entire subreddit for a few days. But that's the only way the moderation system is designed to work. There's no way to remove/approve content without training the filter. If someone submits a codinghorror post to /r/programming that is completely off-topic, the moderators either have to remove it, effectively warning the filter that codinghorror might be spam, or hope that the userbase does the right thing and votes it down. Usually, they won't, especially the people who are voting from their customized front page, not paying attention to what subreddit something is in. It's broken, and the admins have never really expressed any concerns about this fact.

254 points by willvarfar 15y ago

My experience with HN has been much better than with Reddit. In reddit, even good posts get down ratings a lot of time. The one thing i like about hacker news is your posts still have 1 point minimum even if others dont like it, whereas in reddit you fall down to 0 points which makes you feel discouraging sometimes.

kijin 15y ago
A lot of downvotes on reddit are actually inserted by the system, accompanied by the same number of upvotes to balance them out. This is supposed to be some sort of anti-spam anti-troll measure, though I'm not sure how that even works. Anyway, the upshot is that you never know the true number of downvotes you got. This can be discouraging for people who don't know about computer-generated phantom votes.
- willvarfar 15y ago
  What bugs me more is that the numbers jump all over the place if you refresh the page. Even the number of comments seems out of sync. That CAP gets so much in the way is irritating. Its like stackoverflow used to be a while ago. You can make big sites that don't have such laggy BASE. I guess not with the reddit infrastructure perhaps.

radicalbyte 15y ago

> A comment on HN is going to be mature and reasoned; often expanding or exploring technical issues raised That's what I love about HN : the content of comments here are of a very high quality. It's something that I've noticed with my own posts - well reasoned comments attract a lot of positive karma. Even if you're taking a controversial stance on an issue.

danssig 15y ago
This is true. Historically, I've gotten the most points on posts I posted expecting massive downvotes on due to their controversial nature.
stanmancan 15y ago
At least 50% of the time I don't even read the article, I just read the comments. I tend to be more interested in the conversation the posts generate than the posts themselves.
- erickhill 15y ago
  I would venture to guess I read the comments 90% more than the actual posts. The discussion (or the subject) will occasionally lead me to read the article in depth, but more often than not the discourse here is more enlightening overall. I can easily say HN is the only community where my behavior follows this model.
  - stanmancan 15y ago
    90% is actually a more realistic metric for myself as well. I was being generous leaving it at "over 50%"....

willvarfar 15y ago

According to my own mining, I should have waited a few hours before posting this :) Anyway, some time next week I'll be in a position to add a line describing the success of "deeply meta" posts like this one ;) We just have to get someone to post it to proggit too, I guess. And perhaps dzone...

18pfsmt 15y ago
As an amateur, beginner programmer, I'm curious why you don't use something like Jekyll+S3 rather than tumblr. The dude that pulls my espresso shots uses tumblr...
- willvarfar 15y ago
  Its a good question. Despite wishing they'd hire people to add features http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/18002362007/tumblr-fumblr http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/18002362007/tumbl... (note the comment there from someone using Google Pages + Jekyll), I'm generally happy enough not to invest time nor money in self-hosting or paid hosting.
willvarfar 15y ago
UPDATE: yeap, still on front-page when west-coast comes online, but without momentum :(

fool 15y ago

What I'd really like to see is some sort of "diffusion" system to let me know which link aggregation site found a URL first.

nikcub 15y ago

No mention of Techmeme? I'll add that the best way of getting picked up by other bloggers is first Techmeme (not the largest audience but definitely the most influential in tech) and second HN. I've had blog posts pick up their traffic peaks 2-3 days after they were posted as the route was techmeme -> other tech blogs -> mainstream media

willvarfar 15y ago
wow, never heard of it; thank you :) so what about dzone?
- nikcub 15y ago
  I have never submitted my own posts to DZone, but they have been submitted by others. It isn't in my top10 referrers. My impression is that most of the audience there is Java developers looking for technical posts Being the first to submit it to delicious is also a good idea, with good tags. Whoever submits it first their title will be the prevailing title for the post with future re-posts, so it is a good idea to be the first to do it and set your own title before somebody bastardizes it (this is the reason why I submit my own posts to HN) Submitting to Google+ is also a good idea since it is a very good way to get the Google crawler to visit the page and index it. My own routine after I publish a post that I think may be interesting to others is HN, twitter, delicious and Google+.
chrisacky 15y ago
What's the proceedure for getting included on Techmeme?
- nikcub 15y ago
  Good question. A combination of a few things: + Attach yourself to a story cluster if a relevant one is already there by linking to a source post + `tip @techmeme <url>` on twitter + Message the editors on twitter + Make sure your feed validates, can be autodiscovered etc. + Techmeme can discover stories based on retweet counts, so make sure the same canonical URL is being retweeted and favorited from the post, from twitter, disqus etc. + Post interesting things frequently enough that you become a source that is crawled by Techmeme

kijin 15y ago

> The per-page time is actually quite high; often over 5 minutes on average for a lot of my stories even when its a big crowd. I suspect some subtle misreading of Google Analytics on my part, or else people might actually be reading the whole thing carefully!? That might be because a lot of people do what I do: keep the article open while browsing comments on HN or Reddit, and switch back and forth between the two tabs while writing my own comment. In fact, I'm doing it right now. I don't know how Google Analytics would measure time spent on a page when the page sits idle in a background tab for the most part but brought to the foreground from time to time. [Edit] Things get even more complicated if you open 5 articles and 5 comment pages at the same time, and take 30+ minutes to go through all of them.

Djehngo 15y ago
I tend to have one window for recreation browsing and at the start of the day I will open HN and run down the front page middle clicking the link and the comments pages for anything that looks interesting or highly up-voted. This gives me a queue of stuff I can read in free time throughout the day but I imagine it really does skew the analytics.
nikcub 15y ago
This is why I wrote my own datapoint gathering script (I started it while at Techcrunch, curious about who scrolls down to comments, etc.). It measures body focus, number of times unfocused, total focus time, scroll position, scroll rate and a bunch of other things. It isn't completely working cross-browser yet, but it is close and useful enough where for Safari and Chrome visitors I can see how far down the page they are scrolling and how long the page is in focus for.
- 18pfsmt 15y ago
  No doubt, this is part of the reason this noscript_using_reader stopped visiting TC. Call me a tinfoilhat-guy, but I simply would not consent to the collection of such data. It's ironic that I've learned so much from your analysis of data collection techniques elsewhere.

chrisacky 15y ago

Yesterday, I posted an article on HackerNews. Its received 62k views in total so far. HackerNews was the site that kicked off all of the view counts and it quickly jumped to the top spot #1. After it reached the top spot, I thought I would also post it on Reddit. It didn't get a single upvote. It's the third time that a story of mine has made it to the front page of HackerNews and then not received a single visitor on Reddit. In the future I don't think it is worth bothering. Ultimately, 100% of the traffic that I received, would not of happened if it weren't for the upvotes on HackerNews, because from these upvotes everyone started tweeting about it. It received 900 tweets in total. Here was some of the highlights. https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/files.chrisacky.com/github/trending.png https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/files.chrisacky.com/githu... (The highest it went to was 800 concurrent users). I'm guessing 60k for an article within 24 hours is a lot!

nikcub 15y ago
> It didn't get a single upvote. that is because it is in the spam filter. you need to message the moderators.
- chrisacky 15y ago
  O right. How did you determine that? To be honest I'm not a redditor. It's not a site that I visit, so I don't understand how it works.
  - skeletonjelly 15y ago
    I check by opening a Chrome Incognito tab (so unauthenticated) and view the "new" page for that subreddit. So http://reddit.com/r/programming/new http://reddit.com/r/programming/new If it's not there I assume it's in the spam queue and message the mods. It's a pretty crap UX but it works to keep out spammers I suppose.
    - eogas 15y ago
      You shouldn't have to use incognito, unless you've got the "don't show stories that I've liked" preference checked.

18pfsmt 15y ago

I must admit I'm nauseated by the number of references to reddit on HN. I think reddit is powerful and fills a void, but the few times I've visited > cmnd+w. Twitter is also useful on occasion, but simply not my "cup of tea." These sites feel like eternal September, and make me consider suicide (not to over-dramatize...).

leoedin 15y ago
I think to a certain extent 3 or 4 years ago Reddit was very much like HN is now. When I first joined Reddit (2007) there was generally a lot of reasoned discussion, and the submissions were very much programmer orientated in a way that's long since passed. I'd imagine (although I suppose I have no real evidence for this) that the people who talk about Reddit and HN in the same context were active on Reddit a few years ago.
- willvarfar 15y ago
  (blog author) yes I was rather hoping this blog post would turn up on proggit and, instead of hate-clicking, there'd be a discussion about rediscovering proggit's past. I've tried to think of solutions before too: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/15581427232/self-organizing-reddit http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/15581427232/self-... Being pro-content anti-community is not so popular over on proggit ;)
  - leoedin 15y ago
    It's nice to get confirmation! I did once get a lot of comment upvotes lambasting the poor quality of comments on the science reddit, but frankly I think the sheer size of the reddit community will make it very, very hard to return to how it was. The culture that seems to be pushed by a subset of (mostly non-technical) reddit users is largely incompatible with the culture that I (and I assume others) are looking for in a social news site. There are of course some areas of reddit which maintain a largely engaged user base willing to make in depth and interesting comments, but they tend to be rare, hard to find and often suffer from the mainstream reddit culture being dragged in by more casual visitors. Perhaps we have to simply resign ourselves to a migration between social news platforms every few years.

toadi 15y ago

On what data are these assumptions based? Don't see any reference. So for me he uses numbers to support his conclusions but I can't check them.

willvarfar 15y ago
They are based on my Google analytics account. I am not going to share it with you ;) Feel free to disbelieve my data or my conclusions.

joshuahedlund 15y ago

> Nobody actually follows the links in tweets though; click-through is often in the low digits per tweet Tweet click-through data is obscured in Google Analytics because anyone who clicks from a mobile app shows up as a "direct" hit because there is no referring URL. There's some speculation and evidence[1] that this, at least in some cases, shows up as "Mozilla Compatible Agent". [1] http://www.seo-theory.com/2012/02/15/why-simply-believing-seo-bloggers-is-dangerous/ http://www.seo-theory.com/2012/02/15/why-simply-believing-se...

willvarfar 15y ago
I've assigned the t.co domain trickle to Twitter. The 'reactions' thing on Disqus doesn't seem 100% sadly. Mouse-hovering over those reactions can be a nice pat on the back, when the reaction system works.

eogas 15y ago

FWIW, it's currently in /r/programming's spam filter, and it won't be coming out because it's not about programming. Sorry to be all stackoverflow about it, but that's how we operate.

ExpiredLink 15y ago
Is 'spam filter' nowadays an euphemism for 'moderators'?
- eogas 15y ago
  This one was legitimately in the spam filter, however if it had not been, one of us probably would have taken it down for being off topic. EDIT: Right now that submission has 5 points, from people who must have clicked through on the blog post, and one comment complaining about how it's not about programming, also from someone who must have clicked through from the post.
- blhack 15y ago
  Yes. Reddit's spam filter is completely broken with no apparent activity from the current group of admins towards fixing it. It seems that generally if you submit something to reddit, it will get caught in the spam filter, then you have to message a moderator to request that it get approved. [Again, it seems] that you're not so much voting on an assortment of links, you're voting on an assortment of links that moderators have deemed worthy.
  - socialist_coder 15y ago
    Yeah, I have always been puzzled about that. I will post extremely relevant content to various sub-reddits and they never show up in new/hot/whatever. It's like insta-spammed somehow. I don't even bother messaging the admin.

diminoten 15y ago

There is something systemically flawed with Reddit's moderator system which precludes it from ever being an unqualified success as a social news aggregator. The primary issue revolves around the selection process for moderation. To become a moderator for a subreddit, you need to have thought of the name of the subreddit. That's it. This nomenclature designation act grants any user absolute power within that domain space, and the ability to grant any other user the exact same powers. The person who created the "programming" subreddit has no qualifications, no resume by which to judge their aptitude for the moderation job, and no process exists by which to vet newly added moderators. A moderator can, for any or no reason, decide to activate the "spam filter" on any submitted article, removing it from public voting and view. This is the only tool by which Reddit moderators are given to modify their respective domains, and when used for reasons other than spam, it "teaches" the filter to remove non-spam results. This is the cause of the "broken" spam filter on Reddit - moderator abuse.

TazeTSchnitzel 15y ago
Personally, I dislike how the moderator system for subreddits uses a oldest-first hierarchy, where older moderators can always remove newer ones. Hence, a subreddit has no such thing as equal moderators. There is always one "on top", as such.
eogas 15y ago
I think you hit the nail on the head with your last point, though I wouldn't necessarily call it moderator abuse. The actions that moderators can take on reddit were built on a laissez faire model of moderation, where anything goes except blatant spam. This obviously doesn't work very well for moderators who choose to run their subreddits in a different manner, and this happens to be most of the big subreddits, because laissez faire moderation just doesn't work on a large scale. For example, the sole /r/truereddit moderator believes in a laissez faire moderation style, and the subreddit is slowly getting worse and worse as the userbase increases. Every time a /r/truereddit post makes it to the front page, a virtual swarm of idiocy surrounds the entire subreddit for a few days. But that's the only way the moderation system is designed to work. There's no way to remove/approve content without training the filter. If someone submits a codinghorror post to /r/programming that is completely off-topic, the moderators either have to remove it, effectively warning the filter that codinghorror might be spam, or hope that the userbase does the right thing and votes it down. Usually, they won't, especially the people who are voting from their customized front page, not paying attention to what subreddit something is in. It's broken, and the admins have never really expressed any concerns about this fact.