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They can through algorithms, which is something that is painfully lacking on most social media sites (including HN). Give users the ability to dislike somethin

They can through algorithms, which is something that is painfully lacking on most social media sites (including HN). Give users the ability to dislike something strongly enough that anyone who voted it up is excluded from all vote counts/rankings/recommendations as provided to that user for some period of time. While this leads to a filtered world, that is exactly what users expect from sites like these. Reddit is essentially falling apart for many users (while catering to a new audience) -- in /r/all as well as individual subreddits that see a constant cycle of abandonment as people try to ontologically solve the problem -- as it is increasingly dominated by teenagers. If I could strongly express a disinterest in every fictitious Facebook picture / iPhone message conversation, and that served as a quality indicator of people whose opinions I don't respect, that would be beautiful.

raldi 14y ago
Which subreddits do you subscribe to where you see that unwanted content?
- huggyface 14y ago
  Which subreddits do you subscribe to where you see that unwanted content? It shouldn't matter what subreddits I subscribe to (and the encroachment of certain trends keeps herding people to yet new subreddits. /r/gaming -> rage comics and DAE remember. Okay, everyone to /r/games...rinse repeat. /r/atheism -> ridiculous and obviously fake caricatures for people to knock down. /r/programming -> beginner material, so what, /r/notbeginnerprogramming?) That is a hack, manual solution for machine learning of the things I am interested in. Netflix uses strong algorithms and a lot of data crunching to suggest movies I might be interested in, rather than simply forcing me to subscribe to wholesale genres (you like Action movies so here's every movie that dropped in the Action bin). The eventually winner of the social news game will be those who effectively transfer that sort of learning to this genre. Note that you can take it beyond simply finding correlation indexes between users -- analyze the linked site to determine factors like is it image heavy, what is the grade level / complexity level of the writing, discern the subject matter, etc.
  - AlexanderZ 14y ago
    If you think that subreddits don't matter, then you are clearly expecting from Reddit something that it was not designed to have. The most popular subreddits are swarmed with teenagers and the quality has gone downhill, that's true. But the value of Reddit is in its (less popular) subreddits.
    - sp332 14y ago
      huggyface's point is that Reddit should hide uninteresting-for-me material and surface interesting-for-me material automatically. Subscribing to subreddits is a manual process that shouldn't be necessary.
      - AlexanderZ 14y ago
        How is subscribing to a subreddit fundamentally different from upvoting? To get recommendations, you need to somehow feed the recommendation engine with your interests. Look at it this way: when you upvote a fitness-related submission, you say "hey, I'm somewhat interested in fitness", when you subscribe to /r/fitness, you say "hey, I'm really interested in fitness." So, both upvoting and subscribing are actually manual actions.
        huggyface 14y ago
        you say "hey, I'm really interested in fitness." With which you also say -- or so Reddit believes in its current level of imperfection -- "and I have complete affinity with everyone else who happens to vote in /r/fitness". Is that true? Is there any subreddit where that is true? It perplexes me that this is being treated like an either/or. It is not. In reality subreddits see a constantly exploding entropy as users try to fix a broken mechanism of correlation -- the fact that I like gaming doesn't mean that I like the same thing as every other reader of /r/gaming, for instance. Just fix that by splitting off into /r/truegaming, or maybe /r/games, or maybe...
        sp332 14y ago
sp332 14y ago
Two things: trivially, you can change the subreddits you are subscribed to and remove the "fictitous FB pic" etc. posts. Second, and more interestingly: people have different facets that they show in different subreddits. As an example here on HN people prefer tech-oriented stuff. But not everyone here is that into tech. They just sort or organize the content, so they come to HN for in-depth stuff, and (say) Engadget for rumors, and sbnation for sports etc. So someone who upvotes a stupid FB pic in /r/funny might vote the same photo down in /r/politics. If the person is "sorting" content that's appropriate in different situations, it's not useful to discount their opinion entirely.
- jmduke 14y ago
  I see this argument a lot, and I have two counterpoints: 1. I don't want to have to spend time researching subreddits just to figure out what I'd like. Content aggregators are meant to remove steps from the process, not add them. 2. While the content of smaller subreddits are usually improved, the level of discourse in comments are not. Even if you say 'okay, no meme posts, no meme comments', the fact is that you're going to have a glut of commentors whose first impulse are to crack a joke or make a surface-level comment. The difference in comments between a post on here and a post on /TrueReddit/ are astounding. (The one pretty ready example to the above are < 100 member subreddits, but those usually have the issue of insufficient content.)
  - mnicole 14y ago
    Expecting one site's landing page to encompass everything for everyone is ridiculous and something a lot of user-generated content sites fail at understanding. You need to filter it to the extent that there's enough for everyone to at least recognize that there's content somewhere there for them, but not overwhelm them. Between being generically named, being linked in similar subreddit sidebars and showing up in the search, I think it's pretty easy to find what you're looking for or create it yourself and know that it will get more bites than a random website people would have to Google to get to. I would even say that in Reddit's case, there are just so many users from so many different walks of life that it is an easy bet to find a subreddit that suits your fancy in both content and personality. There's an exploratory phase that anyone who wants to delve into a community has to go through, and if that takes too much time, perhaps that's the user's problem, not the site's.
columbo 14y ago
I agree. Subreddits are nice but I want to see the equivalent of Netflix "other movies you may enjoy" on a social network. I want to be encouraged to upvote/downvote things because I know it will impact my experience, not because it will modify some arbitrary score to an unknown individual.
Sodaware 14y ago
It would be nice if Reddit could filter out content based on previous voting patterns. I know people suggest unsubscribing from the bigger subreddits, which helps a little, but rage comics/memes have a habit to leak across over time. The same goes for pun threads and other worthless (albeit amusing) comments. The experience would be more pleasant (for me at least) if it could cut out comments & stories I'm uninterested in, possibly with a summary of the article / conversation.
samstave 14y ago
That's an interesting idea. As it is I have a rather long RES filter list and it's like I need to add several new filters a day to get the crap from hitting my page. No matter how hard I try, rate comics and Facebook anything still hit my screen.

raldi 14y ago

Which subreddits do you subscribe to where you see that unwanted content?

huggyface 14y ago
Which subreddits do you subscribe to where you see that unwanted content? It shouldn't matter what subreddits I subscribe to (and the encroachment of certain trends keeps herding people to yet new subreddits. /r/gaming -> rage comics and DAE remember. Okay, everyone to /r/games...rinse repeat. /r/atheism -> ridiculous and obviously fake caricatures for people to knock down. /r/programming -> beginner material, so what, /r/notbeginnerprogramming?) That is a hack, manual solution for machine learning of the things I am interested in. Netflix uses strong algorithms and a lot of data crunching to suggest movies I might be interested in, rather than simply forcing me to subscribe to wholesale genres (you like Action movies so here's every movie that dropped in the Action bin). The eventually winner of the social news game will be those who effectively transfer that sort of learning to this genre. Note that you can take it beyond simply finding correlation indexes between users -- analyze the linked site to determine factors like is it image heavy, what is the grade level / complexity level of the writing, discern the subject matter, etc.
- AlexanderZ 14y ago
  If you think that subreddits don't matter, then you are clearly expecting from Reddit something that it was not designed to have. The most popular subreddits are swarmed with teenagers and the quality has gone downhill, that's true. But the value of Reddit is in its (less popular) subreddits.
  - sp332 14y ago
    huggyface's point is that Reddit should hide uninteresting-for-me material and surface interesting-for-me material automatically. Subscribing to subreddits is a manual process that shouldn't be necessary.
    - AlexanderZ 14y ago
      How is subscribing to a subreddit fundamentally different from upvoting? To get recommendations, you need to somehow feed the recommendation engine with your interests. Look at it this way: when you upvote a fitness-related submission, you say "hey, I'm somewhat interested in fitness", when you subscribe to /r/fitness, you say "hey, I'm really interested in fitness." So, both upvoting and subscribing are actually manual actions.
      - huggyface 14y ago
        you say "hey, I'm really interested in fitness." With which you also say -- or so Reddit believes in its current level of imperfection -- "and I have complete affinity with everyone else who happens to vote in /r/fitness". Is that true? Is there any subreddit where that is true? It perplexes me that this is being treated like an either/or. It is not. In reality subreddits see a constantly exploding entropy as users try to fix a broken mechanism of correlation -- the fact that I like gaming doesn't mean that I like the same thing as every other reader of /r/gaming, for instance. Just fix that by splitting off into /r/truegaming, or maybe /r/games, or maybe...
        sp332 14y ago

sp332 14y ago

Two things: trivially, you can change the subreddits you are subscribed to and remove the "fictitous FB pic" etc. posts. Second, and more interestingly: people have different facets that they show in different subreddits. As an example here on HN people prefer tech-oriented stuff. But not everyone here is that into tech. They just sort or organize the content, so they come to HN for in-depth stuff, and (say) Engadget for rumors, and sbnation for sports etc. So someone who upvotes a stupid FB pic in /r/funny might vote the same photo down in /r/politics. If the person is "sorting" content that's appropriate in different situations, it's not useful to discount their opinion entirely.

jmduke 14y ago
I see this argument a lot, and I have two counterpoints: 1. I don't want to have to spend time researching subreddits just to figure out what I'd like. Content aggregators are meant to remove steps from the process, not add them. 2. While the content of smaller subreddits are usually improved, the level of discourse in comments are not. Even if you say 'okay, no meme posts, no meme comments', the fact is that you're going to have a glut of commentors whose first impulse are to crack a joke or make a surface-level comment. The difference in comments between a post on here and a post on /TrueReddit/ are astounding. (The one pretty ready example to the above are < 100 member subreddits, but those usually have the issue of insufficient content.)
- mnicole 14y ago
  Expecting one site's landing page to encompass everything for everyone is ridiculous and something a lot of user-generated content sites fail at understanding. You need to filter it to the extent that there's enough for everyone to at least recognize that there's content somewhere there for them, but not overwhelm them. Between being generically named, being linked in similar subreddit sidebars and showing up in the search, I think it's pretty easy to find what you're looking for or create it yourself and know that it will get more bites than a random website people would have to Google to get to. I would even say that in Reddit's case, there are just so many users from so many different walks of life that it is an easy bet to find a subreddit that suits your fancy in both content and personality. There's an exploratory phase that anyone who wants to delve into a community has to go through, and if that takes too much time, perhaps that's the user's problem, not the site's.

columbo 14y ago

I agree. Subreddits are nice but I want to see the equivalent of Netflix "other movies you may enjoy" on a social network. I want to be encouraged to upvote/downvote things because I know it will impact my experience, not because it will modify some arbitrary score to an unknown individual.

Sodaware 14y ago

It would be nice if Reddit could filter out content based on previous voting patterns. I know people suggest unsubscribing from the bigger subreddits, which helps a little, but rage comics/memes have a habit to leak across over time. The same goes for pun threads and other worthless (albeit amusing) comments. The experience would be more pleasant (for me at least) if it could cut out comments & stories I'm uninterested in, possibly with a summary of the article / conversation.

samstave 14y ago

That's an interesting idea. As it is I have a rather long RES filter list and it's like I need to add several new filters a day to get the crap from hitting my page. No matter how hard I try, rate comics and Facebook anything still hit my screen.