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Exciting news. One thing I sincerely hope reddit will do with the new injection is to increase the level of quality of content and discussion across the board.

by kyro 12y ago

Exciting news. One thing I sincerely hope reddit will do with the new injection is to increase the level of quality of content and discussion across the board. Often the advice given is "you've got to find the smaller subreddits" and while that's true, I think having the first few layers filled with terrible content and hive-minded, often racist/sexist discussion is incredibly detrimental to both the site's image and new user experiences. I know there's great content there, and great people having great discussions, but it's not terribly easy to find. I'm thoroughly convinced that reddit could be an incredibly valuable source of reliable news, discussion, and entertainment, but the way it's structured highlights its more juvenile aspects. And if it can find a way to establish legitimacy, it'll be worth far more than it is today.

drmarianus 12y ago
The recent update of the default subreddits was nice, until it just decreased the level of discourse in those previously excellent subreddits.
- noir_lord 12y ago
  Not to mention the entirely expected but entirely horrible response to /r/twoxchromosomes initially though they seem to have got that under control (again with excellent moderation).
jn1234 12y ago
Heavily moderated subreddits are another way to get great quality content. The only problem with this is that it relies on volunteer moderators who devote large amounts of their free time to making the site a better place.
- LeoPanthera 12y ago
  Heavily moderated subreddits are Reddit's biggest problem. Time and again, the volunteer moderators prove that they cannot be impartial, and bias creeps in, inevitably culminating in a bizarre power struggle with the normal users. I've seen it so many times. This isn't helped by the fact that the majority of popular subreddits are moderated by the same people, resulting in a kind of weird cabal situation. I'm not sure what the solution is. Personally I think no moderation, simply relying on up/down votes would be better, but without going to that extreme, perhaps only allowing one person to moderate one subreddit (or a small number) would help.
  - jn1234 12y ago
    I generally agree that heavily moderating a subreddit is a bad idea, however for subreddits like http://www.reddit.com/r/science http://www.reddit.com/r/science and http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience, they have been able to scale up to frontpage levels without a serious drop in content quality.
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  - Goronmon 12y ago
    >This isn't helped by the fact that the majority of popular subreddits are moderated by the same people, resulting in a kind of weird cabal situation. This is because moderating is a shitty job and hardly anyone wants to actually spend time doing it. >Heavily moderated subreddits are Reddit's biggest problem. The problem isn't heavy moderation, it's poor moderation. Moderation is basically a requirement for any community of a decent size (and becomes more important as the community grows). But as I said above, moderating is a terrible job. It's generally unpaid, a time suck, and you spend all your time dealing with the worst members of the community (which sometimes funnily enough also includes tends some of the most popular members of the community). In my experience in the past, the people most vocal against moderators/moderation were the people causing the most trouble in the community.
    - jn1234 12y ago
      The other problem is that community gets to decide what content is on top of the page by upvoting. As the community gets larger some more quality in depth and technical submissions won't get the same upvotes as a simple meme post.
  - SwellJoe 12y ago
    I disagree. I think responsible moderation is not only positive, but mandatory for a community to maintain any sort of quality. Hacker News is moderated (usually quite well), and it would be far worse without that moderation. Likewise, /r/science would be a shit show without moderation; and /r/science is perhaps the heaviest moderated subreddit I subscribe to, including some quite controversial ones. I don't know that the "one sub per mod" rule would be a net win; responsible volunteer moderators are hard to come by.
noir_lord 12y ago
Been using reddit for about 6 years, some of the smaller subs are amazing and I think it comes down to two major things, excellent moderation and community below a certain size (usually). I've thought about this for a while on and off and I'm not sure how you could scale that up in terms of moderation, some of the defaults do well while others are just a wasteground (I've also wondered if that is partially intentional in the sense of give the idiots a subreddit as a decoy). I like reddit but it has it's shares of trolls and typical online negativity (which I actually dislike far more than the trolls they at least are easily spotted, the constant negativity wears you down).
- foobarqux 12y ago
  Can you give some examples of good quality subreddits?
  - potatolicious 12y ago
    I really enjoy /r/photography, the quality of discourse is high and there are very little nastiness. The mod team is also highly active and engages members - weekly discussions along directed topics, weekly writeups/discussions about famous works/photographers, etc. IMO subreddits like it are evidence that the Reddit macro model has been, and will continue to be a failure. The community is at its best when tone is actively directed by a dedicated mod team, and abusive behavior actively policed, in distinct contrast to the relative free-for-all that are the default subreddits. Reddit's admins make a lot of noise about believing in the hands-off approach ("every man is responsible for his own soul"), but ultimately the hands-on approach create higher-quality communities (even at scale: see /r/iama) and curbs the abuse that has made the default subreddits complete intellectual wastelands. Not only that, Reddit itself has not been consistent on being hands-off, what with the banning of subreddits and whatnot. Side shoutout to /r/movies - always good discussions. Things get more animated and sometimes less civil than /r/photography but the mod team does a good job keeping things from exploding.
  - jn1234 12y ago
    Try looking for a subreddit directed at a very specific niche. I find that the local and sports subreddits tend to be pretty good. Some other quality subreddits are http://www.reddit.com/r/syriancivilwar/ http://www.reddit.com/r/syriancivilwar/ and http://www.reddit.com/r/ukrainianconflict http://www.reddit.com/r/ukrainianconflict.
B-Con 12y ago
> One thing I sincerely hope reddit will do with the new injection is to increase the level of quality of content and discussion across the board. Often the advice given is "you've got to find the smaller subreddits" and while that's true, I think having the first few layers filled with terrible content and hive-minded, often racist/sexist discussion is incredibly detrimental to both the site's image and new user experiences. Do we have any examples of large Internet communities with unilateral good discussion? They way I've thought about it, the subreddits with better user content/discussion are primarily because: * They attract fewer people, so only users more dedicated to the topic and more dedicated to finding a good community will find them. These users tend to be better contributors. * Heavy-handed authoritarian moderation. The first one only works so long as the subreddit is less popular. The more it will regress toward the mean of Internet contributions, which I believe to be inherently low. The second one only works well when you have a specific topic with carefully defined rules and very active moderators with no regard for popular consensus and said moderators don't develop a power complex. I don't think reddit has shown any interesting solutions to the problem of high quality contribution. At the risk of sounding elitist, we've seen how popularity kills quality discussion on countless communities over the years. Again, I think massive discussion tends toward being inherently low on average. Edit: Beaten by noir_lord by a couple minutes listing the exact same two points.
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- avn2109 12y ago
  >> "Do we have any examples of large Internet communities with unilateral good discussion?" I don't mean to belabor the obvious here, but do you consider HN a "large Internet community?"
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    - dang 12y ago
      HN has never been purely tech-focused. You're right, of course, that it's a lot smaller than Reddit.
alexis 12y ago
We've been hamstrung by a UI/UX that made a lot more sense when we only had a dozen active subreddits https://web.archive.org/web/20080410190800/http://reddit.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20080410190800/http://reddit.com... reddit is a platform for communities like twitter is a platform for individuals. There are a half million communities now on reddit and our onboarding experience should do a better job exposing people to the communities they love (kinda like twitter does but less ham-fisted). e.g., There are Cleveland Browns fans who've visited reddit every day for years and don't realize there's a r/clevelandbrowns community that they'd love, not to mention r/cleveland and r/foodporn or whatever other communities they'd dig. That's the vast majority of reddit content but we're not doing a good job exposing it.
- lziz 12y ago
  Have you thought about making the "trending" feature more prominent/content-rich? I've found a bunch of new subs I've come to love through it.
  - alexis 12y ago
    I got excited when I saw that feature. It's a shame it's riding the meme of another platform, but people instantly "get it," at least. The core problem is people don't even understand how the site works (subscribe to communities you like). That's something the team is still working on improving in a non-annoying way. Mobile is going to be a big part of it, I think.
    - lziz 12y ago
      I've always thought the user flow that a lot of newsfeed apps use would work well for reddit. (ex: show a list/grid of communities/topics, check the ones that interest you, maybe show some recent posts from them as a preview). Given that new signups are plopped right back to the home page after registration I can see how they don't immediately get it. Hell, even redirect to /subreddits (which, I suppose IS what I described above, but less guided/interactive) after signup could help people get into the curation part more.
    - 12y ago
incision 12y ago
>'Often the advice given is "you've got to find the smaller subreddits" and while that's true, I think having the first few layers filled with terrible content and hive-minded, often racist/sexist discussion is incredibly detrimental to both the site's image and new user experiences.' I'd liken the search for 'smaller subreddits' to zooming to the 'bottom' of a fractal. Cool for a while, but eventually you either understand what you're dealing with or simply tire of the self-similarity.
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stefantalpalaru 12y ago
> increase the level of quality of content and discussion across the board I hope not. Freedom is too big of a price to pay for comfort. I'd rather deal with spontaneous witch hunts and despicable subreddits than see it all turn into the PR wet dream of 1-2 hours AMAs with celebrities that seem unable to read and type on their own.
jiggy2011 12y ago
The popular parts of reddit are popular because they appeal to many people, it's the same as music. The most popular bands will have the broadest appeal. So most of the reddit front page is cat pictures and slapstick humour because that's what everyone can appreciate. If the front page was full of obscure stuff about haskell , less people would enjoy it. In terms of racism, I've never seen racist or sexist content on the front page when I have visited.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
  I just looked and there's a "Chinese Army Drill" photoshop on the front page. The picture itself is one thing but things have contexts and given that this exists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_fire_drill http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_fire_drill you gotta wonder where the artist is coming from.
silencio 12y ago
I'm a default (twoxchromosomes) mod. I would love to see better moderation tools. Most of the shitty content I've had to deal with are from newer/multiple accounts, as well as the older accounts that are sick of the trolls. Our AutoModerator shadowban list and our ban list is so ridiculously long I can barely scroll it. It'd be amazing if we didn't have to rely on a bunch of other tools (toolbox, RES, AutoModerator) or consider building our own tools (subreddit history scraper). It'd also be amazing if there was some site-wide automatic action against certain throwaway accounts so we don't have to clean up _after_ the 4th attempt at some idiot trolling us. I would also love to see a better take on Reddit 101 too. We still get comments like "I'm a male and why is this on my reddit page" and people that just barge in without reading rules to post things against our rules (like a ton of misogyny _and_ misandry). Some of this is inevitable but it's pretty annoying that there isn't much we can do here either other than deleting things after the fact. I don't think that those two alone will improve the site significantly, but it would be a burden lifted for default mods, and that might help clean up parts of the front page. Maybe. I don't even want to think about how much time we spend on everything from figuring out trolls to writing warning notes for each other, to discussing some idiot user trying to dox one of the mods. It'd be time we can spend doing other things for the subreddit. That would be nice.
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  - MBlume 12y ago
    No. Precisely because, as alexis said (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8390156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8390156) reddit is a platform for communities as much as it is a platform for users, and the norms for communities are created through moderation. The moderator gets to create the community they want, and it's up to users to accept the standards of moderation or move to/start a different community
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ebfe 12y ago
>I think having the first few layers filled with terrible content and hive-minded, often racist/sexist discussion. Relative to what? Are YouTube and Yahoo bastions of intellectualism and racial tolerance? If you really think that Reddit's issue is that the quality of discussion is too low, you need to take another look at any other site on the internet.
- danford 12y ago
  It won't be tolerable until we weed out anyone who might say anything that anyone finds slightly offensive. No jokes allowed. You think laws made to help people get up from the bottom tier should apply to everyone on the bottom tier and not just people of a certain color? Well you're racist. Your favorite movie is blazing saddles? Well guess what: you're a racist. /s I think everyone should be able to use the same water fountain and no one should be able to cut in line solely based on the color of their skin, but on their level of thirstyness. According to a lot of people on reddit (and HN) I'm a racist. I thought racism was discriminating against someone based on skin color.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
  If the best you can say about your site is that it's not as bad as youtube comments you've got problems.
- JabavuAdams 12y ago
  Relative to what it was. I was on reddit at the beginning, and it was much higher quality than the default, now. It's like the eternal September all over again. But, this is a natural progression. Not sure what to do about it except to form exclusive communities. While the fact that reddit has hit the mainstream means that there are some interesting AMAs and experiences to be discovered, it also means that reddit got dumb -- because the main-stream is dumb.
josu 12y ago
While I totally agree with you... >I think having the first few layers filled with terrible content and hive-minded, often racist/sexist discussion You just described mainstream television and its appeal
samstave 12y ago
I run a particular /r/ with a couple hundred thousand subscribers. What I would like to do is to be able to limit brigading. I havea controversial idea on how to do this: If you a subscriber to /r/X then you may not subscribe and vote in /r/Y. IF you're posting in /r/X you may not post in /r/Y This would then turn shenanigans into private subs... but at least it would be a start.
- VLM 12y ago
  I could swear /r/4chan had a no raiding other subreddits rule, but I checked and it does not as of right now, that I could find. Some sort of "honor code between mods" could enforce that quite well. Be a jerk in /r/Y and get kicked out of /r/Y AND /r/X. Be a jerk in any sports subreddit and get tossed out of all of them. Some form of "shared blacklist" cross linked between subreddits could implement this. Assuming the source of the problem is just the users and not one of the mods themselves.
- Semaphor 12y ago
  I assume you report brigades to the admins already?
diminoten 12y ago
I am of the opposing opinion. I think Reddit has an entirely separate purpose from a place like HN, and I think it hurts the bottom line of Reddit and makes the Internet a less interesting place if more moderation were to take place on Reddit. I just don't believe it's in Reddit's best financial interest to decrease the level of impact an individual user can have on its site. I also don't believe moderators, as they're currently designed on Reddit, are capable of discerning signal from noise. The whole driving premise of Reddit is the upvote, and that's an incredibly powerful concept. Legitimacy is established through adherence to core values, and Reddit's core values have always centered around what's popular, not what's "good" or "right", as judged by a few randomly selected people. Reddit is the upvote, not the moderator, isn't it? Edit: Sorry, this is a little rambling, but I'm torn between spending 20 minutes fleshing out this comment, and being a productive employee (aren't we all?). The overall gist of what I'm saying is the idea of a more "curated" Reddit, a la HN, would be bad for the website, the Internet, and the company primarily because of the lack of any kind of vetting of those who would curate the various reddits. I think there's a place on the Internet for a very profitable website that doesn't have any particular "quality control" beyond what the users like and don't like (janitorial tasks, e.g. spam filtering and illegal content pruning aside).
- Goronmon 12y ago
  >Reddit is the upvote, not the moderator, isn't it? In theory. In practice, strong moderators become more important the larger the community gets. And reddit is a very, very large community. >The whole driving premise of Reddit is the upvote, and that's an incredibly powerful concept. It's powerful, but not always in a good way. I think one of the better examples is looking at the difference between /r/gaming (light moderation) and /r/games (heavier moderation). While I am sometimes entertained by the content on /r/gaming, in general, it's a terrible subreddit that does a good job of soaking up most of the crap discussions surrounding gaming (5 threads a day of "Has anyone else ever played Zelda?"). Whereas /r/games actually has content worth reading a vast majority of the time and it's not just a filtered versions of /r/all for threads that have "game" in the title.
  - diminoten 12y ago
frogpelt 12y ago
I find your post ironic. You are excited (presumably) about Reddit and about the possibility that the community may be given the opportunity to own a piece of Reddit. Yet, you find the actions of the majority of the Reddit community "detrimental" to the site's image. Reddit is what it is. A bunch of people on the Internet. You are either excited about the community or you don't like most of them, which is it?
- kyro 12y ago
  Thanks for asking the hard questions. I'm excited to see what this new equity-share model will lead to, and hope that the value and quality I already get from reddit can be multiplied with this capital. You can be displeased with certain aspects of something while at the same time acknowledging the good and its potential, like with children, friends, your country, really any relationship or community.
- IneffablePigeon 12y ago
  That's a false dichotomy, you can be excited about parts of the community without liking everything about it. In fact, reddit as a community is so huge that I think anyone would be hard pressed to like all of it.
na85 12y ago
The reddit admins are taking completely the wrong approach if their goal is to increase the quality of discussion on the site. Every time a subreddit gets added to the defaults, it goes one of two ways: The subreddit goes to total shit (r/funny, r/wtf), or the moderators are forced to combat an ever-rising tide of shit in order to maintain quality (r/science). Neither of those scenarios seem tenable in the long term. There needs to be a single default subreddit so that users can branch out from there on their own.
- arfliw 12y ago
  I like /r/funny =/
- mithras 12y ago
  They got rid of the 'reddit.com' subreddit that used to serve that purpose. (It was from the time before subreddits existed.)
squidmccactus 12y ago
Whoa whoa whoa whoa. Reddit is full of racism and sexism? Are you sure? That sounds like reverse sexism to me.
serve_yay 12y ago
Obviously whatever reddit can do to deflect that type of stuff is a good idea. But I often wonder how much of this is simply taking how people (especially young men) are on the internet and ascribing that to the "reddit" brand name. Chase them off and they'll show up somewhere else while we're all still busy hating reddit. I dunno.
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codingdave 12y ago
You are correct, but from my (admittedly outsider) perspective, they are suffering from an identity crisis. They want to be a strong community where meaningful discussion takes place and drives real action. But their branding is still, "Hey, we're the front page of the internet!", which in practical terms means people go there for time-wasting entertainment. I feel that they need to make a choice of being the "home page" for everyone vs. a meaningful community. I do not see one site serving both needs, as the branding, culture, and even tools needed to manage those two goals just don't match up with each other.
embolalia 12y ago
> increase the level of quality of content and discussion across the board. Would this mean I couldn't launch this unintended pun into a long thread of puns that eventually winds up at "I did Nazi that coming"?
deleted 12y ago
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Uffizi 12y ago
You are right, here is wonderful content hiding just under the surface of reddit. It is often shed in a negative light (sometimes deserved), but it really does have so much to offer. I hope posting this is not bad form, but highlighting these great voices has been the goal of my most recent project, http://www.reddthoughts.com http://www.reddthoughts.com. A collection of insightful thoughts and stories from the minds and lives of redditors.
robbyking 12y ago
I moderate a medium sized Reddit community (r/mtb, ~32k), and the key for me has been enforcing a few basic rules: no memes, no rage comics, and all posts must follow reddiquette. (Okay, that 3rd rules is really a blanket for 10 rules, I admit.) Sometimes we get trolls, but because of the rule structure they usually get bored pretty quickly. I have a handful of regular posters, too, who do a good job of posting every day and reporting spammers. It really has a true community feel, as was the intention of the site.
hellodevnull 12y ago
>often racist/sexist discussion I'm confused. Reddit is one of the most anti-racist/sexist communities on the internet. That's the hivemind, so you'd expect anything that's racist or exist to quickly be deleted or pushed to the bottom of the thread where nobody can see it (on the large subreddits anyway).
- jberryman 12y ago
  /r/funny is super sexist, and some days there'll be two or three racist jokes on the front page.
  - andrewflnr 12y ago
    Maybe morally, but in practical terms that's not really contradiction. People on The Internet are thoroughly desensitized to the moral impact of things like that. Almost no one complains when we laugh at violent comedies, despite the fact that we all know murder is bad. There are a few more noises about Game of Thrones, but it's still extremely popular. Why are a few racist/sexist/etc jokes on r/funny any different? If you want to throw those out, you pretty much also have to throw out the other 95% of popular culture that derives entertainment from bad behavior. Of course that's what we fundamentalist Christians have been saying for about a millennium, but of course no one listened.
- rspeer 12y ago
  At the point when /r/AdviceAnimals was removed from the defaults, it was basically "racist statement on top of Unpopular Opinion Puffin" all the time. People started referring to it as the "White Man's Birden". I was surprised to find that out, too. Reasonable people unsubscribe from the worst defaults, and don't find out what the unreasonable people who are left there are up to.
- arfliw 12y ago
  >Reddit is one of the most anti-racist/sexist communities on the internet. We most subscribe to very different subs. I've never been a part of a community that had so much tolerance for racism. Some subs have rules against but most do not, and users take advantage of that. On most forums and other communities I've been a part of, you get instabanned for any whif of racism in your posts. On reddit you can pretty much say what you want (in most subs).
rezashirazian 12y ago
I have to disagree. 'Quality' is subjective. Trying to decide what should and should not be part of reddit goes against its overall 'democratic' mantra. It should remain open to all without much prejudice beyond the public's upvote/downvote. Increased level of quality in both content and discussion should come naturally by attracting and retaining intelligent individuals.
icantthinkofone 12y ago
This is why it's a totally losing situation. Personally, I have no respect for reddit or its users where most are kids under 18.
baby 12y ago
> often racist/sexist discussion is incredibly detrimental to both the site's image and new user experiences. Every time the topic of a heavier moderation comes up people refuse to hear about it because "free speech".

by kyro 12y ago

drmarianus 12y ago

The recent update of the default subreddits was nice, until it just decreased the level of discourse in those previously excellent subreddits.

noir_lord 12y ago
Not to mention the entirely expected but entirely horrible response to /r/twoxchromosomes initially though they seem to have got that under control (again with excellent moderation).

jn1234 12y ago

Heavily moderated subreddits are another way to get great quality content. The only problem with this is that it relies on volunteer moderators who devote large amounts of their free time to making the site a better place.

LeoPanthera 12y ago
Heavily moderated subreddits are Reddit's biggest problem. Time and again, the volunteer moderators prove that they cannot be impartial, and bias creeps in, inevitably culminating in a bizarre power struggle with the normal users. I've seen it so many times. This isn't helped by the fact that the majority of popular subreddits are moderated by the same people, resulting in a kind of weird cabal situation. I'm not sure what the solution is. Personally I think no moderation, simply relying on up/down votes would be better, but without going to that extreme, perhaps only allowing one person to moderate one subreddit (or a small number) would help.
- jn1234 12y ago
  I generally agree that heavily moderating a subreddit is a bad idea, however for subreddits like http://www.reddit.com/r/science http://www.reddit.com/r/science and http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience, they have been able to scale up to frontpage levels without a serious drop in content quality.
  - deleted 12y ago
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- Goronmon 12y ago
  >This isn't helped by the fact that the majority of popular subreddits are moderated by the same people, resulting in a kind of weird cabal situation. This is because moderating is a shitty job and hardly anyone wants to actually spend time doing it. >Heavily moderated subreddits are Reddit's biggest problem. The problem isn't heavy moderation, it's poor moderation. Moderation is basically a requirement for any community of a decent size (and becomes more important as the community grows). But as I said above, moderating is a terrible job. It's generally unpaid, a time suck, and you spend all your time dealing with the worst members of the community (which sometimes funnily enough also includes tends some of the most popular members of the community). In my experience in the past, the people most vocal against moderators/moderation were the people causing the most trouble in the community.
  - jn1234 12y ago
    The other problem is that community gets to decide what content is on top of the page by upvoting. As the community gets larger some more quality in depth and technical submissions won't get the same upvotes as a simple meme post.
- SwellJoe 12y ago
  I disagree. I think responsible moderation is not only positive, but mandatory for a community to maintain any sort of quality. Hacker News is moderated (usually quite well), and it would be far worse without that moderation. Likewise, /r/science would be a shit show without moderation; and /r/science is perhaps the heaviest moderated subreddit I subscribe to, including some quite controversial ones. I don't know that the "one sub per mod" rule would be a net win; responsible volunteer moderators are hard to come by.

noir_lord 12y ago

Been using reddit for about 6 years, some of the smaller subs are amazing and I think it comes down to two major things, excellent moderation and community below a certain size (usually). I've thought about this for a while on and off and I'm not sure how you could scale that up in terms of moderation, some of the defaults do well while others are just a wasteground (I've also wondered if that is partially intentional in the sense of give the idiots a subreddit as a decoy). I like reddit but it has it's shares of trolls and typical online negativity (which I actually dislike far more than the trolls they at least are easily spotted, the constant negativity wears you down).

foobarqux 12y ago
Can you give some examples of good quality subreddits?
- potatolicious 12y ago
  I really enjoy /r/photography, the quality of discourse is high and there are very little nastiness. The mod team is also highly active and engages members - weekly discussions along directed topics, weekly writeups/discussions about famous works/photographers, etc. IMO subreddits like it are evidence that the Reddit macro model has been, and will continue to be a failure. The community is at its best when tone is actively directed by a dedicated mod team, and abusive behavior actively policed, in distinct contrast to the relative free-for-all that are the default subreddits. Reddit's admins make a lot of noise about believing in the hands-off approach ("every man is responsible for his own soul"), but ultimately the hands-on approach create higher-quality communities (even at scale: see /r/iama) and curbs the abuse that has made the default subreddits complete intellectual wastelands. Not only that, Reddit itself has not been consistent on being hands-off, what with the banning of subreddits and whatnot. Side shoutout to /r/movies - always good discussions. Things get more animated and sometimes less civil than /r/photography but the mod team does a good job keeping things from exploding.
- jn1234 12y ago
  Try looking for a subreddit directed at a very specific niche. I find that the local and sports subreddits tend to be pretty good. Some other quality subreddits are http://www.reddit.com/r/syriancivilwar/ http://www.reddit.com/r/syriancivilwar/ and http://www.reddit.com/r/ukrainianconflict http://www.reddit.com/r/ukrainianconflict.

B-Con 12y ago

> One thing I sincerely hope reddit will do with the new injection is to increase the level of quality of content and discussion across the board. Often the advice given is "you've got to find the smaller subreddits" and while that's true, I think having the first few layers filled with terrible content and hive-minded, often racist/sexist discussion is incredibly detrimental to both the site's image and new user experiences. Do we have any examples of large Internet communities with unilateral good discussion? They way I've thought about it, the subreddits with better user content/discussion are primarily because: * They attract fewer people, so only users more dedicated to the topic and more dedicated to finding a good community will find them. These users tend to be better contributors. * Heavy-handed authoritarian moderation. The first one only works so long as the subreddit is less popular. The more it will regress toward the mean of Internet contributions, which I believe to be inherently low. The second one only works well when you have a specific topic with carefully defined rules and very active moderators with no regard for popular consensus and said moderators don't develop a power complex. I don't think reddit has shown any interesting solutions to the problem of high quality contribution. At the risk of sounding elitist, we've seen how popularity kills quality discussion on countless communities over the years. Again, I think massive discussion tends toward being inherently low on average. Edit: Beaten by noir_lord by a couple minutes listing the exact same two points.

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avn2109 12y ago
>> "Do we have any examples of large Internet communities with unilateral good discussion?" I don't mean to belabor the obvious here, but do you consider HN a "large Internet community?"
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  - dang 12y ago
    HN has never been purely tech-focused. You're right, of course, that it's a lot smaller than Reddit.

alexis 12y ago

We've been hamstrung by a UI/UX that made a lot more sense when we only had a dozen active subreddits https://web.archive.org/web/20080410190800/http://reddit.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20080410190800/http://reddit.com... reddit is a platform for communities like twitter is a platform for individuals. There are a half million communities now on reddit and our onboarding experience should do a better job exposing people to the communities they love (kinda like twitter does but less ham-fisted). e.g., There are Cleveland Browns fans who've visited reddit every day for years and don't realize there's a r/clevelandbrowns community that they'd love, not to mention r/cleveland and r/foodporn or whatever other communities they'd dig. That's the vast majority of reddit content but we're not doing a good job exposing it.

lziz 12y ago
Have you thought about making the "trending" feature more prominent/content-rich? I've found a bunch of new subs I've come to love through it.
- alexis 12y ago
  I got excited when I saw that feature. It's a shame it's riding the meme of another platform, but people instantly "get it," at least. The core problem is people don't even understand how the site works (subscribe to communities you like). That's something the team is still working on improving in a non-annoying way. Mobile is going to be a big part of it, I think.
  - lziz 12y ago
    I've always thought the user flow that a lot of newsfeed apps use would work well for reddit. (ex: show a list/grid of communities/topics, check the ones that interest you, maybe show some recent posts from them as a preview). Given that new signups are plopped right back to the home page after registration I can see how they don't immediately get it. Hell, even redirect to /subreddits (which, I suppose IS what I described above, but less guided/interactive) after signup could help people get into the curation part more.
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incision 12y ago

>'Often the advice given is "you've got to find the smaller subreddits" and while that's true, I think having the first few layers filled with terrible content and hive-minded, often racist/sexist discussion is incredibly detrimental to both the site's image and new user experiences.' I'd liken the search for 'smaller subreddits' to zooming to the 'bottom' of a fractal. Cool for a while, but eventually you either understand what you're dealing with or simply tire of the self-similarity.

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stefantalpalaru 12y ago

> increase the level of quality of content and discussion across the board I hope not. Freedom is too big of a price to pay for comfort. I'd rather deal with spontaneous witch hunts and despicable subreddits than see it all turn into the PR wet dream of 1-2 hours AMAs with celebrities that seem unable to read and type on their own.

jiggy2011 12y ago

The popular parts of reddit are popular because they appeal to many people, it's the same as music. The most popular bands will have the broadest appeal. So most of the reddit front page is cat pictures and slapstick humour because that's what everyone can appreciate. If the front page was full of obscure stuff about haskell , less people would enjoy it. In terms of racism, I've never seen racist or sexist content on the front page when I have visited.

GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
I just looked and there's a "Chinese Army Drill" photoshop on the front page. The picture itself is one thing but things have contexts and given that this exists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_fire_drill http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_fire_drill you gotta wonder where the artist is coming from.

silencio 12y ago

I'm a default (twoxchromosomes) mod. I would love to see better moderation tools. Most of the shitty content I've had to deal with are from newer/multiple accounts, as well as the older accounts that are sick of the trolls. Our AutoModerator shadowban list and our ban list is so ridiculously long I can barely scroll it. It'd be amazing if we didn't have to rely on a bunch of other tools (toolbox, RES, AutoModerator) or consider building our own tools (subreddit history scraper). It'd also be amazing if there was some site-wide automatic action against certain throwaway accounts so we don't have to clean up _after_ the 4th attempt at some idiot trolling us. I would also love to see a better take on Reddit 101 too. We still get comments like "I'm a male and why is this on my reddit page" and people that just barge in without reading rules to post things against our rules (like a ton of misogyny _and_ misandry). Some of this is inevitable but it's pretty annoying that there isn't much we can do here either other than deleting things after the fact. I don't think that those two alone will improve the site significantly, but it would be a burden lifted for default mods, and that might help clean up parts of the front page. Maybe. I don't even want to think about how much time we spend on everything from figuring out trolls to writing warning notes for each other, to discussing some idiot user trying to dox one of the mods. It'd be time we can spend doing other things for the subreddit. That would be nice.

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- MBlume 12y ago
  No. Precisely because, as alexis said (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8390156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8390156) reddit is a platform for communities as much as it is a platform for users, and the norms for communities are created through moderation. The moderator gets to create the community they want, and it's up to users to accept the standards of moderation or move to/start a different community
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ebfe 12y ago

>I think having the first few layers filled with terrible content and hive-minded, often racist/sexist discussion. Relative to what? Are YouTube and Yahoo bastions of intellectualism and racial tolerance? If you really think that Reddit's issue is that the quality of discussion is too low, you need to take another look at any other site on the internet.

danford 12y ago
It won't be tolerable until we weed out anyone who might say anything that anyone finds slightly offensive. No jokes allowed. You think laws made to help people get up from the bottom tier should apply to everyone on the bottom tier and not just people of a certain color? Well you're racist. Your favorite movie is blazing saddles? Well guess what: you're a racist. /s I think everyone should be able to use the same water fountain and no one should be able to cut in line solely based on the color of their skin, but on their level of thirstyness. According to a lot of people on reddit (and HN) I'm a racist. I thought racism was discriminating against someone based on skin color.
GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
If the best you can say about your site is that it's not as bad as youtube comments you've got problems.
JabavuAdams 12y ago
Relative to what it was. I was on reddit at the beginning, and it was much higher quality than the default, now. It's like the eternal September all over again. But, this is a natural progression. Not sure what to do about it except to form exclusive communities. While the fact that reddit has hit the mainstream means that there are some interesting AMAs and experiences to be discovered, it also means that reddit got dumb -- because the main-stream is dumb.

josu 12y ago

While I totally agree with you... >I think having the first few layers filled with terrible content and hive-minded, often racist/sexist discussion You just described mainstream television and its appeal

samstave 12y ago

I run a particular /r/ with a couple hundred thousand subscribers. What I would like to do is to be able to limit brigading. I havea controversial idea on how to do this: If you a subscriber to /r/X then you may not subscribe and vote in /r/Y. IF you're posting in /r/X you may not post in /r/Y This would then turn shenanigans into private subs... but at least it would be a start.

VLM 12y ago
I could swear /r/4chan had a no raiding other subreddits rule, but I checked and it does not as of right now, that I could find. Some sort of "honor code between mods" could enforce that quite well. Be a jerk in /r/Y and get kicked out of /r/Y AND /r/X. Be a jerk in any sports subreddit and get tossed out of all of them. Some form of "shared blacklist" cross linked between subreddits could implement this. Assuming the source of the problem is just the users and not one of the mods themselves.
Semaphor 12y ago
I assume you report brigades to the admins already?

diminoten 12y ago

I am of the opposing opinion. I think Reddit has an entirely separate purpose from a place like HN, and I think it hurts the bottom line of Reddit and makes the Internet a less interesting place if more moderation were to take place on Reddit. I just don't believe it's in Reddit's best financial interest to decrease the level of impact an individual user can have on its site. I also don't believe moderators, as they're currently designed on Reddit, are capable of discerning signal from noise. The whole driving premise of Reddit is the upvote, and that's an incredibly powerful concept. Legitimacy is established through adherence to core values, and Reddit's core values have always centered around what's popular, not what's "good" or "right", as judged by a few randomly selected people. Reddit is the upvote, not the moderator, isn't it? Edit: Sorry, this is a little rambling, but I'm torn between spending 20 minutes fleshing out this comment, and being a productive employee (aren't we all?). The overall gist of what I'm saying is the idea of a more "curated" Reddit, a la HN, would be bad for the website, the Internet, and the company primarily because of the lack of any kind of vetting of those who would curate the various reddits. I think there's a place on the Internet for a very profitable website that doesn't have any particular "quality control" beyond what the users like and don't like (janitorial tasks, e.g. spam filtering and illegal content pruning aside).

Goronmon 12y ago
>Reddit is the upvote, not the moderator, isn't it? In theory. In practice, strong moderators become more important the larger the community gets. And reddit is a very, very large community. >The whole driving premise of Reddit is the upvote, and that's an incredibly powerful concept. It's powerful, but not always in a good way. I think one of the better examples is looking at the difference between /r/gaming (light moderation) and /r/games (heavier moderation). While I am sometimes entertained by the content on /r/gaming, in general, it's a terrible subreddit that does a good job of soaking up most of the crap discussions surrounding gaming (5 threads a day of "Has anyone else ever played Zelda?"). Whereas /r/games actually has content worth reading a vast majority of the time and it's not just a filtered versions of /r/all for threads that have "game" in the title.
- diminoten 12y ago

frogpelt 12y ago

I find your post ironic. You are excited (presumably) about Reddit and about the possibility that the community may be given the opportunity to own a piece of Reddit. Yet, you find the actions of the majority of the Reddit community "detrimental" to the site's image. Reddit is what it is. A bunch of people on the Internet. You are either excited about the community or you don't like most of them, which is it?

kyro 12y ago
Thanks for asking the hard questions. I'm excited to see what this new equity-share model will lead to, and hope that the value and quality I already get from reddit can be multiplied with this capital. You can be displeased with certain aspects of something while at the same time acknowledging the good and its potential, like with children, friends, your country, really any relationship or community.
IneffablePigeon 12y ago
That's a false dichotomy, you can be excited about parts of the community without liking everything about it. In fact, reddit as a community is so huge that I think anyone would be hard pressed to like all of it.

na85 12y ago

The reddit admins are taking completely the wrong approach if their goal is to increase the quality of discussion on the site. Every time a subreddit gets added to the defaults, it goes one of two ways: The subreddit goes to total shit (r/funny, r/wtf), or the moderators are forced to combat an ever-rising tide of shit in order to maintain quality (r/science). Neither of those scenarios seem tenable in the long term. There needs to be a single default subreddit so that users can branch out from there on their own.

arfliw 12y ago
I like /r/funny =/
mithras 12y ago
They got rid of the 'reddit.com' subreddit that used to serve that purpose. (It was from the time before subreddits existed.)

squidmccactus 12y ago

Whoa whoa whoa whoa. Reddit is full of racism and sexism? Are you sure? That sounds like reverse sexism to me.

serve_yay 12y ago

Obviously whatever reddit can do to deflect that type of stuff is a good idea. But I often wonder how much of this is simply taking how people (especially young men) are on the internet and ascribing that to the "reddit" brand name. Chase them off and they'll show up somewhere else while we're all still busy hating reddit. I dunno.

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codingdave 12y ago

You are correct, but from my (admittedly outsider) perspective, they are suffering from an identity crisis. They want to be a strong community where meaningful discussion takes place and drives real action. But their branding is still, "Hey, we're the front page of the internet!", which in practical terms means people go there for time-wasting entertainment. I feel that they need to make a choice of being the "home page" for everyone vs. a meaningful community. I do not see one site serving both needs, as the branding, culture, and even tools needed to manage those two goals just don't match up with each other.

embolalia 12y ago

> increase the level of quality of content and discussion across the board. Would this mean I couldn't launch this unintended pun into a long thread of puns that eventually winds up at "I did Nazi that coming"?

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Uffizi 12y ago

You are right, here is wonderful content hiding just under the surface of reddit. It is often shed in a negative light (sometimes deserved), but it really does have so much to offer. I hope posting this is not bad form, but highlighting these great voices has been the goal of my most recent project, http://www.reddthoughts.com http://www.reddthoughts.com. A collection of insightful thoughts and stories from the minds and lives of redditors.

robbyking 12y ago

I moderate a medium sized Reddit community (r/mtb, ~32k), and the key for me has been enforcing a few basic rules: no memes, no rage comics, and all posts must follow reddiquette. (Okay, that 3rd rules is really a blanket for 10 rules, I admit.) Sometimes we get trolls, but because of the rule structure they usually get bored pretty quickly. I have a handful of regular posters, too, who do a good job of posting every day and reporting spammers. It really has a true community feel, as was the intention of the site.

hellodevnull 12y ago

>often racist/sexist discussion I'm confused. Reddit is one of the most anti-racist/sexist communities on the internet. That's the hivemind, so you'd expect anything that's racist or exist to quickly be deleted or pushed to the bottom of the thread where nobody can see it (on the large subreddits anyway).

jberryman 12y ago
/r/funny is super sexist, and some days there'll be two or three racist jokes on the front page.
- andrewflnr 12y ago
  Maybe morally, but in practical terms that's not really contradiction. People on The Internet are thoroughly desensitized to the moral impact of things like that. Almost no one complains when we laugh at violent comedies, despite the fact that we all know murder is bad. There are a few more noises about Game of Thrones, but it's still extremely popular. Why are a few racist/sexist/etc jokes on r/funny any different? If you want to throw those out, you pretty much also have to throw out the other 95% of popular culture that derives entertainment from bad behavior. Of course that's what we fundamentalist Christians have been saying for about a millennium, but of course no one listened.
rspeer 12y ago
At the point when /r/AdviceAnimals was removed from the defaults, it was basically "racist statement on top of Unpopular Opinion Puffin" all the time. People started referring to it as the "White Man's Birden". I was surprised to find that out, too. Reasonable people unsubscribe from the worst defaults, and don't find out what the unreasonable people who are left there are up to.
arfliw 12y ago
>Reddit is one of the most anti-racist/sexist communities on the internet. We most subscribe to very different subs. I've never been a part of a community that had so much tolerance for racism. Some subs have rules against but most do not, and users take advantage of that. On most forums and other communities I've been a part of, you get instabanned for any whif of racism in your posts. On reddit you can pretty much say what you want (in most subs).

rezashirazian 12y ago

I have to disagree. 'Quality' is subjective. Trying to decide what should and should not be part of reddit goes against its overall 'democratic' mantra. It should remain open to all without much prejudice beyond the public's upvote/downvote. Increased level of quality in both content and discussion should come naturally by attracting and retaining intelligent individuals.

icantthinkofone 12y ago

This is why it's a totally losing situation. Personally, I have no respect for reddit or its users where most are kids under 18.

baby 12y ago

> often racist/sexist discussion is incredibly detrimental to both the site's image and new user experiences. Every time the topic of a heavier moderation comes up people refuse to hear about it because "free speech".