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It's kindof astonishing what is happening over at reddit right now. "The internet" has it's own culture, and the people running reddit right now (one of the pl

by blhack 11y ago

It's kindof astonishing what is happening over at reddit right now. "The internet" has it's own culture, and the people running reddit right now (one of the places where this culture is the strongest, imo), seem to have no idea how to interface with it. It honestly feels like it got taken over by silicon valley middle management marketing types or something, and now they just can't seem to figure out why the users keep getting pissed off at them. I know there are still people like kn0thing over there, but...what else is going on? Is there anybody over there without a business degree? Because it really doesn't feel like it.

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forgottenpass 11y ago
It honestly feels like it got taken over by silicon valley middle management marketing types or something, and now they just can't seem to figure out why the users keep getting pissed off at them. I can't agree more, back in the jedberg/HueyPreist days the staff felt like reddit users, now you get the feeling the office just looks at the community as a magic box of unpaid labor. Anyone putting in real effort is better served doing things under their own brand, the handful of people who put in effort under reddit's brand are in an exploitative relationship. This has moved beyond a reaction to the firing, this is a huge vote of "no confidence" towards the admins in general (see some of the more specific gripes in the reddit threads covering it).
- lingben 11y ago
  reddit is one of the simplest and easiest sites for a new user to learn to use. Somehow, Ellen Pao doesn't know how to use reddit, nevermind what the culture and community that has built over a decade truly means. She meant to send someone a pm but did a selfpost instead and then hurriedly erased it and banned everyone that responded to the selfpost: https://archive.is/9RFIp https://archive.is/9RFIp Reminds me of my grandmother sending me a picture by sending the c:/ link in the email.
  - flashman 11y ago
    That link also illustrates how utterly hateful some parts of the Reddit community is. Being a Reddit admin must be really frustrating.
    - lingben 11y ago
      It is a 2 way street. The community can be nasty but they do not treat every admin this way. Consider Victoria who was just fired. The whole shenanigan today isn't really about her but about the way the mods are being treated. But my point is that the community really appreciated her work and her approach. When you come in and right off the bat are condescending, haughty, and tone-deaf, as well as non-transparent, then don't be surprised if the internet is harsh. This is not to say I condone in any way shape or form the hateful things being said about Pao or others. I do however understand the dynamic and see how they had a very active role in creating the reaction. For example, consider if she had admitted her mistake and gasp! appeared human and asked for some patience while she learned the ropes. Imagine for a moment that instead, she didn't censor or remove the comments but relished the mistake, laughed at herself, posted a funny selfie and didn't try to hide it. Just a hypothetical scenario, that's all. She would appear normal, human and worthy of empathy. But when she doubles down and erases it, censors and bans people and doesn't address it. Are you surprised that the worst elements see these qualities and judge her harshly as a non-symapthetic figure who holds massive power over them with opacity, arbitrariness and condescension? Consider this analogy, if you don't know anything about bees and see a swarm on your tree branch, do you go apeshit and start screaming and swinging at the bees with a stick? and then go inside crying about how you are a 'victim' because the bees stung you hundreds of times? Another approach would be to learn a bit about beekeeping or hire a beekeeper who would know what to do. They would come in, treat the bees with the due attention and care, give them a new nuc [1] as a home and then enjoy years of delicious honey. An intelligent person would make their choice. A person who is driven by a cocktail of incompetence, entitlement and playing the victim would also make their choice. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuc TL;DR reddit needs a 'bee whisperer'
      - rodgerd 11y ago
- vonklaus 11y ago
  > basically everything you said It isn't about the firing. It is about subverting posts, subverting ideologies, deleting subs, limiting free speech in general and having an ambiguous morality/decision making process that is impossible to trust. Hiring Pao was so stupid. Leaving aside whether she was qualified, you can't lead a team that doesn't respect or relate to you. > this is a huge vote of "no confidence" towards the admins in general I couldn't agree more
  - rodgerd 11y ago
    You forgot ethics in game journalism.
    - vonklaus 11y ago
      People caring to much about bullshit like ethics in game journalism are missing the forest for the trees. Pleasing special interest groups in a massively diverse community isn't possible, that's why democracy is typically favored over this bullypulpit nonsense.
      - tehwebguy 11y ago
        I think they were being sarcastic
        rodgerd 11y ago
        Quite. It's like a sea lion colony in here.
      - scrollaway 11y ago
        So what you're saying is "Caring about any single little/domain-specific problem is bad because there's war, cancer and starvation"? Fallacy of relative privation, much?
        vonklaus 11y ago
        > begging the question but seriously, it was my snarky way of saying that: 1)Creating a system level heuristic to deal with types of problems is a more transparent, consistent and efficient way forward than simply tackling problems as they come up arbitrarily. 2)I am sick of this boys vs. girls/pc/whatever tropic bullshit, and the failure to enact a codified set of principals within reddit has allowed for groups with opposing views to discretely exert influence against one another. This murky climate lead to all sides entrenching and leveraging the influence they had acquired. >content has been sliding >doxxing has gone up >several of the largest sections of the site are literally closed down >community is faltering >no side wants to compromise tl;dr Flame wars are why this happened. Gaming is one of the stupid tropes that lead to this. I got #triggered.
- olefoo 11y ago
  > Anyone putting in real effort is better served doing things under their own brand This. It doesn't matter if you're talking reddit, facebook or instagram. Building on a platform means you are benefitting the platform's owners rather than yourself. There is no excuse for being a creative talent who uses social media for anything beyond lead generation without building direct links to your own audience.
- Frozenlock 11y ago
  >the handful of people who put in effort under reddit's brand are in an exploitative relationship. In some ways, it feels like Twitch.tv. I'm a little sad when I think of all these people making an 'exception' with twitch.tv by turning off their ad-blocks, by gladly giving $5 per month PER subscription (and some people subscribe multiple times on the same channel), by excusing a streaming website that still uses Flash and has a terrible, TERRIBLE user interface. But it's all forgiven, because of the 'community'. Well, that 'community' sold for a billion and you won't see a nickel for it. Remember when Twitch was so much better than Youtube? Yeah... but the service is slowly changing to please corporate, and you won't have any say in it. New subscribe buttons no longer remove ads, they've added some music detection stuff that mutes videos, they no longer keep videos forever, they decide to ban 'cleavages', then games... It's a one way relationship. The naive viewers are doing all these concessions for a company in which they have no equities. Edit: Forgot to mention the new gamification of subscriptions "X suscribed for Y months in row!". That's pure genius. Evil, but still genius.
  - ep4d4s 11y ago
    The music detection stuff I feel was probably bigger than them. DMCA and whatnot. You forget YouTube follows suite in this regard. Not keeping videos forever honestly made sense to me. They were very scientific about it in their blog post and showed that honestly, nobody is really watching these archives. If at most they're there to watch a certain clip (which can be highlighted which ARE kept forever). Banning cleavages again makes sense... Otherwise the site would turn into a softcore cam site with gamers. I'm not saying you're wrong; Twitch can certainly go down that route, but most of your examples are in my opinion exaggerated.
    - Frozenlock 11y ago
      How are they exaggerated? Some of these can be 'good', but they still are all unilateral changes, which is precisely the problem with the false sentiment of community.
    - rjaco31 11y ago
      > Banning cleavages again makes sense... Otherwise the site would turn into a softcore cam site with gamers. Wait what? I've never seen or heard of anything remotely close to "softcore cam" on Twitch, I find it extremely stupid and rather discriminatory to ban cleavage for female gamers. It's a very bad omen for further possible restrictions imho.
- ljk 11y ago
  > back in the jedberg/HueyPreist days the staff felt like reddit users some would go back even further and talk about the Aaron Swartz days...
- joshlegs 11y ago
  What's really funny though, is that this was prompted by someone who seems to have been excellent at marketing, given her stellar reputation among the reddit userbase and universal praise from all of her AMA collaborators. I can't help but think all this will end up in her netting some really swank job. I've seen some post that claimed insider knowledge that Taylor was fired because she resisted further monetization of the AMA series. Given some of the decisions over there I don't find that implausible in the least. Best wishes to Taylor in all she does. She seemed like a very competent gal.
mhomde 11y ago
Recommended reading :) http://www.amazon.com/The-Starfish-Spider-Unstoppable-Organizations/dp/1591841836 http://www.amazon.com/The-Starfish-Spider-Unstoppable-Organi...
keithy 11y ago
Sometimes the best thing to do is to do nothing at all. Reddit is OK already, but the new management seems to want to change it more and more. These new CEO's want to always push their "vision" for what reddit should be despite what the userbase wants and the backlash for that is already showing. The thing is, the power doesn't rest on the CEO or the company, it rests on the user base. Redditors can migrate to any other website they choose to, just like Digg users migrated to reddit some years ago. The people have the power in the end.
- arprocter 11y ago
  Think it's a coincidence that now the legal case is pretty much over there are suddenly a lot of 'adjustments' being made?
  - spiralpolitik 11y ago
    More likely investors are getting restless and want to see some return. In these cases management feels it needs to have things under its control and starts removing power bases from lower down the org chart so that everything stays on message. AMA is Reddit's only viable asset so having it under control of someone who isn't part of the management clique is unthinkable. Usually these attempts fail and the company is dead within 24 months having burned the village in an attempt to save the village.
    - _red 11y ago
      I agree. However a counter-point is that its quite possible that they are trying to pivot reddit into a mainstream site, and thus are more than willing to burn most of the current user base. They don't need/want hard-hitting questions during AMA's, nor do they want freaky fetish subreddits, nor long winded post describing the intricacies of the Federal Reserve. They want cat pictures, pictures of freshly baked cakes, celebrity soundbites, and lots of comments that go "that cake looks delish!" and "Love you Miley!" In short, an internet version of "The View". Regardless, I think it will fail, if thats even the case. However, ideas such as these are the exact type that tone-deaf MBA types think up lots of times.
thisisdallas 11y ago
>The internet" has it's own culture, and the people running reddit right now (one of the places where this culture is the strongest, imo), seem to have no idea how to interface with it. The first rule of the internet is you don't censor the internet.
- go1dfish 11y ago
  kn0thing knows better http://live.fastcompany.com/Event/Chat_with_reddit_co-founder_Alexis_Ohanian?Page=0 http://live.fastcompany.com/Event/Chat_with_reddit_co-founde...
- vonklaus 11y ago
  Reddit it's founders/community/company have been against PIPA/CISPA/TPP and pro EFF . Freedom on the site and an anti-censorship policy is "that one thing you need to get right", and will allow you to survive through getting a lot of other things wrong.
- _delirium 11y ago
  Eh, I have trouble extending the concept of "censorship" of the internet to private websites deciding what can go on their own sites. HN flags and kills threads too. That's not censorship, because HN is Y Combinator's website, so they can pick and choose what kind of content they do and don't want discussed on their site. I could imagine saying, "[HN | Reddit | Slashdot | whatever] is running their site in a way I disagree with", but it's hard for me to imagine complaining that they are censoring me, and getting on some kind of high horse about "free speech", as a bunch of people on this subject seem to be doing. If something really becomes a central medium of communication such that it's hard to avoid it, like the telephone system, internet infrastructure (backbones, DNS, etc.), and so on, then it starts to be a different issue imo. Then regulation as some kind of content-neutral common carrier might be in order. But does Reddit really play such a role? Twitter or Facebook seem closer to filling such a role, if we were going to pick one of those platforms.
  - adventured 11y ago
    It probably would have been better to frame it as: you can have open communities (old Reddit), or controlled communities (new Reddit) - but you can't have a controlled community that pretends to be an open community (not for very long, the contradiction destroys itself).
eclipxe 11y ago
Pao ruined reddit unfortunately. Time for an alternative.
- nols 11y ago
  Spare us, Reddit's been mismanaged for long before Ms Pao started there. Just look at Alexis Ohanian's (kn0thing) comments[0]. Not to mention the celeb nudes debacle, which was allowed then disallowed and announced by a sysadmin [1]. And the then CEO Yishan Wong publicly fighting with a former employee [2]. Then we can go way back to /r/jailbait and the Violentacrez affair, the only mod to be awarded a golden trophy [3]. I could keep going but I think we're good. 0. https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riama_set_to_private_over_mod_firing/csqg24d https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riam... 1. https://np.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/2fpdax/time_to_talk/ https://np.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/2fpdax/time_t... 2. http://www.fastcompany.com/3036716/fast-feed/how-meta-reddit-ceo-chews-out-former-reddit-employee-on-reddit http://www.fastcompany.com/3036716/fast-feed/how-meta-reddit... 3. http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/18/3523434/violentacrez-michael-brutsch-apologizes-cnn http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/18/3523434/violentacrez-mich...
  - zobzu 11y ago
    im not sure if it matters what happened in the past per se... its the amount, the type, etc.: once something start to be massively as "bad" and the content is generated by those users seeing it as "bad" it just stops being what it was. It's like saying Firefox or IE aren't good browser. IE is a pretty good browser nowaday, but that's an unpopular opinion. It feels like reddit is going to reach this point now...
    - nols 11y ago
      For years all it would've taken is a solid competitor with good technology and management and Reddit is gone. Right now Reddit's really the only game in town. If someone were to come along with technology that wouldn't regularly crash and tools to help the moderators moderate and allow the community managers to quickly and effectively respond to problems; and a solid management team to be proactive and keep improving the site (not to mention make a few bucks) then Reddit would be in real trouble.
drspacemonkey 11y ago
According to kn0thing, it's a shame, "but so it goes". And then there's the implication that they're all sitting back and enjoying popcorn while Reddit consumes itself. http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riama_set_to_private_over_mod_firing/csqg24d?context=3 http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riama...
- calbear81 11y ago
  I think it's more like a "haters gonna hate" type of comment. Whatever kn0thing says, it won't be good enough to placate the masses with their pitchforks so the best thing to do is sit back and wait till it all blows over. Generally, reddit has very short term institutional memory, by next week new users and admins will be like "Victoria who?!"
  - MBCook 11y ago
    Seems very tone deaf. He had to know saying something like that would only stoke things more.
  - drspacemonkey 11y ago
    Didn't people say similar things about Digg's short-term collective memory right before their ... "mishap"?
    - sanswork 11y ago
      I'd say people who think Diggs change was anything similar to the current reddit changes has a very short memory.
      - drspacemonkey 11y ago
        Nature of the changes != collective memory span of the community.
        sanswork 11y ago
go1dfish 11y ago
I've been saying that the Scarlet Letter Administration of Pao are "paper tigers swimming in a barrel of incompetence" But today's tone deafness astounds even me. They have no allies left. They also immediately destroyed the narrative that reddit just hates Pao because she's a woman. Victoria was one of the most popular and well respected admins ever. Even the tinfoil hats at /r/conspiracy trusted her not to manipulate. Is there anyone left NOT mad at reddit now? Maybe SubredditDrama.... http://i.imgur.com/6qa9K4R.jpg http://i.imgur.com/6qa9K4R.jpg
- Akkuma 11y ago
  In the spirit of Reddit and /r/conspiracy, maybe Pao wants to be the only successful woman there, so she can make her narrative more believable that the tech world hates women by pointing out how there aren't women at Reddit.
- adaml_623 11y ago
  Your post seems quite accurate but I'd like to point out that one thing often mentioned about misogyny on the internet is that it's 'powerful' women that get the most hate. 'Powerful' women and authority figures get grief. And women in helper roles do not. So your statement is correct but perhaps people's attitudes to gender still influences their response to Pao. Food for thought
  - spangry 11y ago
    Wouldn't a simpler explanation be that powerful/authority figures, regardless of gender, always get the most grief? I think there's a misattribution error occurring here: the amount of grief one receives is not a function of gender, it is a function of 'power'. That seems more logical to me. If you're in a powerful position, you have to 'own' unpopular decisions. And the decisions of those higher up affect larger numbers of people. Meaning that there's a higher probability of receiving a hateful email from the 1 crank in a group affected by a decision you made.
    - tedks 11y ago
nothis 11y ago
Honestly, though... isn't this just a total overreaction? I get that Victoria getting fired was bad for /r/IAMA (which once WASN'T a celebrity PR stop) but how does setting the whole damn subreddit to private help anyone? Like, I'm seriously asking. How? The "solidarity" thing also makes my eyes roll because I don't fully get how a place like /r/AskReddit is affected by this, at all. Reddit's admins have always taken a stance of not interfering with the community above an absolute minimum, a policy that caused them much trouble in the past when assholes of course abused this freedom by posting disturbing garbage. They stepped in and stomped out the biggest fires, people got mad about "censorship", now they're suddenly not involved enough? It's a mess. It has this smell of "people on the internet getting excited because they can participate in something without leaving their chairs" to it. There's no substance to any of this.
- Kranar 11y ago
  Victoria being fired is basically the last straw in what has been close to a year of friction between the people who volunteer to provide and manage reddit's content (the moderators) and the people who profit off of their work (reddit the corporation). This event basically exemplified the fact that reddit as a corporation doesn't care one bit about their volunteers/moderators and the subs going private is basically the one and only way that moderators have to express that enough is enough. Firing Victoria on the spot for what seems to have been an AMA gone wrong (Jesse Jackson's) without warning and without considering what the consequences of this termination would be on the moderators was poor form.
  - geofft 11y ago
    It's always struck me as weird that Reddit moderators are volunteers. While this may or may not have been justifiable, I'm not sure it was ever tenable that IAmA had a dedicated, paid staff member to make the subreddit run, answerable to Reddit the corporation and not to the subreddit moderators. (To what extent are the subreddit moderators answerable to Reddit the corporation, or vice versa? Remember that time that one of the IAmA mods went "It's been a good run, I'm shutting it down?") So in retrospect, maybe all the other straws should have been obvious from the start.
orthoganol 11y ago
Well, Sam Altman wants Reddit to have a billion users. To me, that means preserving Reddit's culture isn't a top priority. I mean they'll nod at it and say they're trying to keep the culture yada yada, but push come to shove, they really aren't going to defer to it.
- zzleeper 11y ago
  That was a bit what Digg tried, to forget about their current users and think about their potential ones... (and foursquare, etc.)
- Taek 11y ago
  Reddit is actively driving away their core users. This is a disaster for any product, regardless of where the potential lies. Until they are no longer your core users, you still need them. On the other hand, this does remind me of all the pleas and hate that Facebook got about their permissive privacy policies. As much bad publicity that resulted, Facebook is still the king of social media. To quote a reddit comment chain: > Fuck Pao. I'm leaving Reddit. > > No you aren't.
- quadrature 11y ago
  Could you elaborate on what you mean?. The core users are the ones that vote and comment, If they don't vote and comment then posters dont get karma, If they don't get karma they don't post and if they don't post then Reddit really isn't going to have a user base of any kind. So it's in everyone's best interest to preserve the culture.
ljk 11y ago
Another important contributors of reddit: Aaron Swartz A documentary about him - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vz06QO3UkQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vz06QO3UkQ
kefka 11y ago
Reddit has gone from someone who understood 'The Internet' : “We will not ban questionable subreddits,” Reddit’s CEO, Yishan Wong, wrote in the aftermath of that catastrophe. “You choose what to post. You choose what to read. You choose what kind of subreddit to create and what kind of rules you will enforce. We will try not to interfere — not because we don’t care, but because we care that you make your choices between right and wrong.” To the current CEO, Ellen Pao: It's not our site's goal to be a completely free-speech platform. We want to be a safe platform and we want to be a platform that also protects privacy at the same time.
- alayne 11y ago
  Numerous subreddits were closed on Yishan Wong's watch.
  - dwmtm 11y ago
    Lip service is the first step.
  - Houshalter 11y ago
    As far as I know it was just for stuff that broke the ToS. Not just because they didn't like them.
- deleted 11y ago
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- geofft 11y ago
  Hrm, well, Yishan supports Ellen's recent actions: http://www.quora.com/Reddit-Strengthens-Moderation-Spring-and-Summer-2015/What-does-Yishan-Wong-think-of-Reddits-new-anti-harassment-policy?share=1 http://www.quora.com/Reddit-Strengthens-Moderation-Spring-an...
- natrius 11y ago
  As someone who loves reddit, this dichotomy is the clearest sign that it has no future. Anyone who values freedom of expression and knows how to program can help build a decentralized reddit that no one controls on top of platforms like IPFS and Ethereum's Swarm. Every attempt at building a reddit clone fails because reddit enjoys tremendous network effects. But decentralization yields its own network effects—you don't have to start your own site to see your changes in the wild, you just fork the codebase and tell people about it. The useful changes thrive, the useless ones are forgotten, and everyone's still contributing to the core stream of submissions, comments, and votes that make the system work regardless of which fork they're using. reddit's competitive advantage isn't their technology, it's their community. Ironically, technology is going to find a way to take that advantage away.
engi_nerd 11y ago
Actually a significant group of people are upset with kn0thing about this whole thing, because he commented about this whole mess [0] and gave what many called a "non-answer". [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bw39q/why_has_riama_been_set_to_private/csq6ekp https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bw39q/why_ha... The current Reddit management doesn't seem to be handling this well.
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JoshTriplett 11y ago
> "The internet" has it's own culture, and the people running reddit right now (one of the places where this culture is the strongest, imo), seem to have no idea how to interface with it. Some portions of the Internet have culture in much the same way that food you forget at the back of your fridge grows culture. And they should be treated much the same way.
InclinedPlane 11y ago
I think it's a bit of a "google" mindset, which has become pervasive in the industry really. The idea of concentrating on managing a product, a platform, a system, etc. and giving short shrift to the community and interfacing with your user base. This is aggravated by the preponderance of free services, such as reddit, which make it all the easier to write off such interactions as non-productive. Instead there's an attempt to interact with the "community" and the "user base" as a conglomerate whole, but ultimately that's a weak method of interacting, at some point the rubber has to meet the road and that means person to person interactions and relationships. This is why sales people are so damned valuable, because that sort of interaction is hugely important. P.S. To clear up any confusion, I support reddit's recent closure of hateful sub-reddits, there should be limits to the kind of behavior reddit tolerates. But that's an entirely different issue from their problem of engaging with mods of popular sub-reddits. It seems like there are a lot of people around who want to stir up ill will against reddit because they enjoyed playing in the cess-pool parts of it.
Aerance 11y ago
The Problem is that, as reddit grows as a company it has been starting to put more of it's corporate influence onto the community it is so famous for. Reddit has always been a play of internet culture and freedom and though some of these changes have been, arguably, good a lot of it has been bad with communication errors between the company and the community leading to the problems we are seeing now. Reddit Corporate is learning a lesson in not biting the hand that feeds it. For so long they thought that they were the hand but it seems that it was the other way around.
return0 11y ago
"The internet" will route itself around reddit then.
fit2rule 11y ago
We've seen this happen time and time again : USENET, Compuserve, to some degree .. AOL .. slashdot .. kuro5hin .. etc. etc. Those who fail to study their Internet history are doomed to repeat it, it seems. I've never been content with the centralized nature of Reddit as an Internet forum - for me this moment of truth has been bound to occur.
- pervycreeper 11y ago
  >We've seen this happen time and time again : USENET, Compuserve, to some degree .. AOL .. slashdot .. kuro5hin What exactly is the same about what happened to those forums? All I can think of is that they declined in popularity, but maybe I'm missing some history.
  - kefka 11y ago
    Usenet died because the ISPs no longer offer newsgroup access. Back in the dialup days, services like this were standard, and they made the internet truly awesome. Once high speed (DSL, cable) took over they axed all Usenet servers. Unless you had Hampster continuously scouring for insecure and open servers, you had to pay for a SuperNews account. That's how Usenet died.
  - fit2rule 11y ago
    These realms all started off as great communities with people who were mostly in it to participate and contribute to the discussion. But over time the zeitgeist became cool, and as soon as that happens, the bean-counters arrive. And once that happens, it is pretty much game over for the community, no matter what technology is being used to sustain it. Fundamentally there isn't much difference between your reddits and slashdots and USENETS .. and HN's .. in the end, the community is only as valuable as it perceives itself to have value. And then when the value becomes something that is co-opted by others who desire to exploit that value, a self-awareness of that value by the collective becomes its own worst fault. Reddit is clearly being invalidated by people who don't want the value they create to be valued differently by people who have what they consider to be differing values. So it goes. I hope the next forum where people can creatively contribute to the dialog is not centralized. But that's hard - you have to have somewhere to meet, after all ..
Fede_V 11y ago
This is probably the clearest explanation I've seen. The reddit community has always been a very proudly geeky bunch that enthusiastically embraced internet culture. It's really hard to describe internet culture to someone for whom it isn't endogenous - at its best, it combines a commitment to free expression, a geeky pride in understanding how things work, a strong appreciation for authenticity, a pushback against attention seeking, and an embrace of a multitude of interests. At its worse, well, it's really bad - you get the opinions of minorities dismissed, and you can have people doing all sorts of heinous stuff (revenge porn, etc) under the guise of free speech. However, to horribly paraphrase Whitman.. it contains multitudes. Watching what used to be a beloved site being run by people who don't seem to even understand the ideals of their users is very grating. As an analogy, imagine if the editor of the NYRB somehow ended up as the director of the organization that runs Nascar. Personally, I've never watched a Nascar race in my life and I doubt I ever will - but there are people that are fanatical about that culture, who would resent having a complete outsider who looks upon their hobby with contempt running the show.
thomasrossi 11y ago
"Is there anybody over there without a business degree?" Amen.
qq66 11y ago
Reddit management is somewhat between a rock and a hard place. They have a very free-for-all culture now, with the norms of the site driven largely by the community. As expected, these norms do not drive a lot of monetization -- the community is not constantly pushing for ways to make Reddit profitable. So management is trying to wrest control over the huge community in order to take it towards some more profitable territory, but at least to date they don't seem to be able to do so in a way that doesn't trigger a strong immune response.
baby 11y ago
I think no one really knows why the community is getting pissed off constantly. Right now it's just acting as an angry mob with no brain. And if you follow all this drama, you will see that they bring a lot of golds (so a lot of money to reddit) and that they die out in a day or two. Personally this was my cue to unsubscribe of most default subs that did the black out today.

by blhack 11y ago

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forgottenpass 11y ago

It honestly feels like it got taken over by silicon valley middle management marketing types or something, and now they just can't seem to figure out why the users keep getting pissed off at them. I can't agree more, back in the jedberg/HueyPreist days the staff felt like reddit users, now you get the feeling the office just looks at the community as a magic box of unpaid labor. Anyone putting in real effort is better served doing things under their own brand, the handful of people who put in effort under reddit's brand are in an exploitative relationship. This has moved beyond a reaction to the firing, this is a huge vote of "no confidence" towards the admins in general (see some of the more specific gripes in the reddit threads covering it).

lingben 11y ago
reddit is one of the simplest and easiest sites for a new user to learn to use. Somehow, Ellen Pao doesn't know how to use reddit, nevermind what the culture and community that has built over a decade truly means. She meant to send someone a pm but did a selfpost instead and then hurriedly erased it and banned everyone that responded to the selfpost: https://archive.is/9RFIp https://archive.is/9RFIp Reminds me of my grandmother sending me a picture by sending the c:/ link in the email.
- flashman 11y ago
  That link also illustrates how utterly hateful some parts of the Reddit community is. Being a Reddit admin must be really frustrating.
  - lingben 11y ago
    It is a 2 way street. The community can be nasty but they do not treat every admin this way. Consider Victoria who was just fired. The whole shenanigan today isn't really about her but about the way the mods are being treated. But my point is that the community really appreciated her work and her approach. When you come in and right off the bat are condescending, haughty, and tone-deaf, as well as non-transparent, then don't be surprised if the internet is harsh. This is not to say I condone in any way shape or form the hateful things being said about Pao or others. I do however understand the dynamic and see how they had a very active role in creating the reaction. For example, consider if she had admitted her mistake and gasp! appeared human and asked for some patience while she learned the ropes. Imagine for a moment that instead, she didn't censor or remove the comments but relished the mistake, laughed at herself, posted a funny selfie and didn't try to hide it. Just a hypothetical scenario, that's all. She would appear normal, human and worthy of empathy. But when she doubles down and erases it, censors and bans people and doesn't address it. Are you surprised that the worst elements see these qualities and judge her harshly as a non-symapthetic figure who holds massive power over them with opacity, arbitrariness and condescension? Consider this analogy, if you don't know anything about bees and see a swarm on your tree branch, do you go apeshit and start screaming and swinging at the bees with a stick? and then go inside crying about how you are a 'victim' because the bees stung you hundreds of times? Another approach would be to learn a bit about beekeeping or hire a beekeeper who would know what to do. They would come in, treat the bees with the due attention and care, give them a new nuc [1] as a home and then enjoy years of delicious honey. An intelligent person would make their choice. A person who is driven by a cocktail of incompetence, entitlement and playing the victim would also make their choice. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuc TL;DR reddit needs a 'bee whisperer'
    - rodgerd 11y ago
vonklaus 11y ago
> basically everything you said It isn't about the firing. It is about subverting posts, subverting ideologies, deleting subs, limiting free speech in general and having an ambiguous morality/decision making process that is impossible to trust. Hiring Pao was so stupid. Leaving aside whether she was qualified, you can't lead a team that doesn't respect or relate to you. > this is a huge vote of "no confidence" towards the admins in general I couldn't agree more
- rodgerd 11y ago
  You forgot ethics in game journalism.
  - vonklaus 11y ago
    People caring to much about bullshit like ethics in game journalism are missing the forest for the trees. Pleasing special interest groups in a massively diverse community isn't possible, that's why democracy is typically favored over this bullypulpit nonsense.
    - tehwebguy 11y ago
      I think they were being sarcastic
      - rodgerd 11y ago
        Quite. It's like a sea lion colony in here.
    - scrollaway 11y ago
      So what you're saying is "Caring about any single little/domain-specific problem is bad because there's war, cancer and starvation"? Fallacy of relative privation, much?
      - vonklaus 11y ago
        > begging the question but seriously, it was my snarky way of saying that: 1)Creating a system level heuristic to deal with types of problems is a more transparent, consistent and efficient way forward than simply tackling problems as they come up arbitrarily. 2)I am sick of this boys vs. girls/pc/whatever tropic bullshit, and the failure to enact a codified set of principals within reddit has allowed for groups with opposing views to discretely exert influence against one another. This murky climate lead to all sides entrenching and leveraging the influence they had acquired. >content has been sliding >doxxing has gone up >several of the largest sections of the site are literally closed down >community is faltering >no side wants to compromise tl;dr Flame wars are why this happened. Gaming is one of the stupid tropes that lead to this. I got #triggered.
olefoo 11y ago
> Anyone putting in real effort is better served doing things under their own brand This. It doesn't matter if you're talking reddit, facebook or instagram. Building on a platform means you are benefitting the platform's owners rather than yourself. There is no excuse for being a creative talent who uses social media for anything beyond lead generation without building direct links to your own audience.
Frozenlock 11y ago
>the handful of people who put in effort under reddit's brand are in an exploitative relationship. In some ways, it feels like Twitch.tv. I'm a little sad when I think of all these people making an 'exception' with twitch.tv by turning off their ad-blocks, by gladly giving $5 per month PER subscription (and some people subscribe multiple times on the same channel), by excusing a streaming website that still uses Flash and has a terrible, TERRIBLE user interface. But it's all forgiven, because of the 'community'. Well, that 'community' sold for a billion and you won't see a nickel for it. Remember when Twitch was so much better than Youtube? Yeah... but the service is slowly changing to please corporate, and you won't have any say in it. New subscribe buttons no longer remove ads, they've added some music detection stuff that mutes videos, they no longer keep videos forever, they decide to ban 'cleavages', then games... It's a one way relationship. The naive viewers are doing all these concessions for a company in which they have no equities. Edit: Forgot to mention the new gamification of subscriptions "X suscribed for Y months in row!". That's pure genius. Evil, but still genius.
- ep4d4s 11y ago
  The music detection stuff I feel was probably bigger than them. DMCA and whatnot. You forget YouTube follows suite in this regard. Not keeping videos forever honestly made sense to me. They were very scientific about it in their blog post and showed that honestly, nobody is really watching these archives. If at most they're there to watch a certain clip (which can be highlighted which ARE kept forever). Banning cleavages again makes sense... Otherwise the site would turn into a softcore cam site with gamers. I'm not saying you're wrong; Twitch can certainly go down that route, but most of your examples are in my opinion exaggerated.
  - Frozenlock 11y ago
    How are they exaggerated? Some of these can be 'good', but they still are all unilateral changes, which is precisely the problem with the false sentiment of community.
  - rjaco31 11y ago
    > Banning cleavages again makes sense... Otherwise the site would turn into a softcore cam site with gamers. Wait what? I've never seen or heard of anything remotely close to "softcore cam" on Twitch, I find it extremely stupid and rather discriminatory to ban cleavage for female gamers. It's a very bad omen for further possible restrictions imho.
ljk 11y ago
> back in the jedberg/HueyPreist days the staff felt like reddit users some would go back even further and talk about the Aaron Swartz days...
joshlegs 11y ago
What's really funny though, is that this was prompted by someone who seems to have been excellent at marketing, given her stellar reputation among the reddit userbase and universal praise from all of her AMA collaborators. I can't help but think all this will end up in her netting some really swank job. I've seen some post that claimed insider knowledge that Taylor was fired because she resisted further monetization of the AMA series. Given some of the decisions over there I don't find that implausible in the least. Best wishes to Taylor in all she does. She seemed like a very competent gal.

mhomde 11y ago

Recommended reading :) http://www.amazon.com/The-Starfish-Spider-Unstoppable-Organizations/dp/1591841836 http://www.amazon.com/The-Starfish-Spider-Unstoppable-Organi...

keithy 11y ago

Sometimes the best thing to do is to do nothing at all. Reddit is OK already, but the new management seems to want to change it more and more. These new CEO's want to always push their "vision" for what reddit should be despite what the userbase wants and the backlash for that is already showing. The thing is, the power doesn't rest on the CEO or the company, it rests on the user base. Redditors can migrate to any other website they choose to, just like Digg users migrated to reddit some years ago. The people have the power in the end.

arprocter 11y ago
Think it's a coincidence that now the legal case is pretty much over there are suddenly a lot of 'adjustments' being made?
- spiralpolitik 11y ago
  More likely investors are getting restless and want to see some return. In these cases management feels it needs to have things under its control and starts removing power bases from lower down the org chart so that everything stays on message. AMA is Reddit's only viable asset so having it under control of someone who isn't part of the management clique is unthinkable. Usually these attempts fail and the company is dead within 24 months having burned the village in an attempt to save the village.
  - _red 11y ago
    I agree. However a counter-point is that its quite possible that they are trying to pivot reddit into a mainstream site, and thus are more than willing to burn most of the current user base. They don't need/want hard-hitting questions during AMA's, nor do they want freaky fetish subreddits, nor long winded post describing the intricacies of the Federal Reserve. They want cat pictures, pictures of freshly baked cakes, celebrity soundbites, and lots of comments that go "that cake looks delish!" and "Love you Miley!" In short, an internet version of "The View". Regardless, I think it will fail, if thats even the case. However, ideas such as these are the exact type that tone-deaf MBA types think up lots of times.

thisisdallas 11y ago

>The internet" has it's own culture, and the people running reddit right now (one of the places where this culture is the strongest, imo), seem to have no idea how to interface with it. The first rule of the internet is you don't censor the internet.

go1dfish 11y ago
kn0thing knows better http://live.fastcompany.com/Event/Chat_with_reddit_co-founder_Alexis_Ohanian?Page=0 http://live.fastcompany.com/Event/Chat_with_reddit_co-founde...
vonklaus 11y ago
Reddit it's founders/community/company have been against PIPA/CISPA/TPP and pro EFF . Freedom on the site and an anti-censorship policy is "that one thing you need to get right", and will allow you to survive through getting a lot of other things wrong.
_delirium 11y ago
Eh, I have trouble extending the concept of "censorship" of the internet to private websites deciding what can go on their own sites. HN flags and kills threads too. That's not censorship, because HN is Y Combinator's website, so they can pick and choose what kind of content they do and don't want discussed on their site. I could imagine saying, "[HN | Reddit | Slashdot | whatever] is running their site in a way I disagree with", but it's hard for me to imagine complaining that they are censoring me, and getting on some kind of high horse about "free speech", as a bunch of people on this subject seem to be doing. If something really becomes a central medium of communication such that it's hard to avoid it, like the telephone system, internet infrastructure (backbones, DNS, etc.), and so on, then it starts to be a different issue imo. Then regulation as some kind of content-neutral common carrier might be in order. But does Reddit really play such a role? Twitter or Facebook seem closer to filling such a role, if we were going to pick one of those platforms.
- adventured 11y ago
  It probably would have been better to frame it as: you can have open communities (old Reddit), or controlled communities (new Reddit) - but you can't have a controlled community that pretends to be an open community (not for very long, the contradiction destroys itself).

eclipxe 11y ago

Pao ruined reddit unfortunately. Time for an alternative.

nols 11y ago
Spare us, Reddit's been mismanaged for long before Ms Pao started there. Just look at Alexis Ohanian's (kn0thing) comments[0]. Not to mention the celeb nudes debacle, which was allowed then disallowed and announced by a sysadmin [1]. And the then CEO Yishan Wong publicly fighting with a former employee [2]. Then we can go way back to /r/jailbait and the Violentacrez affair, the only mod to be awarded a golden trophy [3]. I could keep going but I think we're good. 0. https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riama_set_to_private_over_mod_firing/csqg24d https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riam... 1. https://np.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/2fpdax/time_to_talk/ https://np.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/2fpdax/time_t... 2. http://www.fastcompany.com/3036716/fast-feed/how-meta-reddit-ceo-chews-out-former-reddit-employee-on-reddit http://www.fastcompany.com/3036716/fast-feed/how-meta-reddit... 3. http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/18/3523434/violentacrez-michael-brutsch-apologizes-cnn http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/18/3523434/violentacrez-mich...
- zobzu 11y ago
  im not sure if it matters what happened in the past per se... its the amount, the type, etc.: once something start to be massively as "bad" and the content is generated by those users seeing it as "bad" it just stops being what it was. It's like saying Firefox or IE aren't good browser. IE is a pretty good browser nowaday, but that's an unpopular opinion. It feels like reddit is going to reach this point now...
  - nols 11y ago
    For years all it would've taken is a solid competitor with good technology and management and Reddit is gone. Right now Reddit's really the only game in town. If someone were to come along with technology that wouldn't regularly crash and tools to help the moderators moderate and allow the community managers to quickly and effectively respond to problems; and a solid management team to be proactive and keep improving the site (not to mention make a few bucks) then Reddit would be in real trouble.

drspacemonkey 11y ago

According to kn0thing, it's a shame, "but so it goes". And then there's the implication that they're all sitting back and enjoying popcorn while Reddit consumes itself. http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riama_set_to_private_over_mod_firing/csqg24d?context=3 http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riama...

calbear81 11y ago
I think it's more like a "haters gonna hate" type of comment. Whatever kn0thing says, it won't be good enough to placate the masses with their pitchforks so the best thing to do is sit back and wait till it all blows over. Generally, reddit has very short term institutional memory, by next week new users and admins will be like "Victoria who?!"
- MBCook 11y ago
  Seems very tone deaf. He had to know saying something like that would only stoke things more.
- drspacemonkey 11y ago
  Didn't people say similar things about Digg's short-term collective memory right before their ... "mishap"?
  - sanswork 11y ago
    I'd say people who think Diggs change was anything similar to the current reddit changes has a very short memory.
    - drspacemonkey 11y ago
      Nature of the changes != collective memory span of the community.
      - sanswork 11y ago

go1dfish 11y ago

I've been saying that the Scarlet Letter Administration of Pao are "paper tigers swimming in a barrel of incompetence" But today's tone deafness astounds even me. They have no allies left. They also immediately destroyed the narrative that reddit just hates Pao because she's a woman. Victoria was one of the most popular and well respected admins ever. Even the tinfoil hats at /r/conspiracy trusted her not to manipulate. Is there anyone left NOT mad at reddit now? Maybe SubredditDrama.... http://i.imgur.com/6qa9K4R.jpg http://i.imgur.com/6qa9K4R.jpg

Akkuma 11y ago
In the spirit of Reddit and /r/conspiracy, maybe Pao wants to be the only successful woman there, so she can make her narrative more believable that the tech world hates women by pointing out how there aren't women at Reddit.
adaml_623 11y ago
Your post seems quite accurate but I'd like to point out that one thing often mentioned about misogyny on the internet is that it's 'powerful' women that get the most hate. 'Powerful' women and authority figures get grief. And women in helper roles do not. So your statement is correct but perhaps people's attitudes to gender still influences their response to Pao. Food for thought
- spangry 11y ago
  Wouldn't a simpler explanation be that powerful/authority figures, regardless of gender, always get the most grief? I think there's a misattribution error occurring here: the amount of grief one receives is not a function of gender, it is a function of 'power'. That seems more logical to me. If you're in a powerful position, you have to 'own' unpopular decisions. And the decisions of those higher up affect larger numbers of people. Meaning that there's a higher probability of receiving a hateful email from the 1 crank in a group affected by a decision you made.
  - tedks 11y ago

nothis 11y ago

Honestly, though... isn't this just a total overreaction? I get that Victoria getting fired was bad for /r/IAMA (which once WASN'T a celebrity PR stop) but how does setting the whole damn subreddit to private help anyone? Like, I'm seriously asking. How? The "solidarity" thing also makes my eyes roll because I don't fully get how a place like /r/AskReddit is affected by this, at all. Reddit's admins have always taken a stance of not interfering with the community above an absolute minimum, a policy that caused them much trouble in the past when assholes of course abused this freedom by posting disturbing garbage. They stepped in and stomped out the biggest fires, people got mad about "censorship", now they're suddenly not involved enough? It's a mess. It has this smell of "people on the internet getting excited because they can participate in something without leaving their chairs" to it. There's no substance to any of this.

Kranar 11y ago
Victoria being fired is basically the last straw in what has been close to a year of friction between the people who volunteer to provide and manage reddit's content (the moderators) and the people who profit off of their work (reddit the corporation). This event basically exemplified the fact that reddit as a corporation doesn't care one bit about their volunteers/moderators and the subs going private is basically the one and only way that moderators have to express that enough is enough. Firing Victoria on the spot for what seems to have been an AMA gone wrong (Jesse Jackson's) without warning and without considering what the consequences of this termination would be on the moderators was poor form.
- geofft 11y ago
  It's always struck me as weird that Reddit moderators are volunteers. While this may or may not have been justifiable, I'm not sure it was ever tenable that IAmA had a dedicated, paid staff member to make the subreddit run, answerable to Reddit the corporation and not to the subreddit moderators. (To what extent are the subreddit moderators answerable to Reddit the corporation, or vice versa? Remember that time that one of the IAmA mods went "It's been a good run, I'm shutting it down?") So in retrospect, maybe all the other straws should have been obvious from the start.

orthoganol 11y ago

Well, Sam Altman wants Reddit to have a billion users. To me, that means preserving Reddit's culture isn't a top priority. I mean they'll nod at it and say they're trying to keep the culture yada yada, but push come to shove, they really aren't going to defer to it.

zzleeper 11y ago
That was a bit what Digg tried, to forget about their current users and think about their potential ones... (and foursquare, etc.)
Taek 11y ago
Reddit is actively driving away their core users. This is a disaster for any product, regardless of where the potential lies. Until they are no longer your core users, you still need them. On the other hand, this does remind me of all the pleas and hate that Facebook got about their permissive privacy policies. As much bad publicity that resulted, Facebook is still the king of social media. To quote a reddit comment chain: > Fuck Pao. I'm leaving Reddit. > > No you aren't.
quadrature 11y ago
Could you elaborate on what you mean?. The core users are the ones that vote and comment, If they don't vote and comment then posters dont get karma, If they don't get karma they don't post and if they don't post then Reddit really isn't going to have a user base of any kind. So it's in everyone's best interest to preserve the culture.

ljk 11y ago

Another important contributors of reddit: Aaron Swartz A documentary about him - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vz06QO3UkQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vz06QO3UkQ

kefka 11y ago

Reddit has gone from someone who understood 'The Internet' : “We will not ban questionable subreddits,” Reddit’s CEO, Yishan Wong, wrote in the aftermath of that catastrophe. “You choose what to post. You choose what to read. You choose what kind of subreddit to create and what kind of rules you will enforce. We will try not to interfere — not because we don’t care, but because we care that you make your choices between right and wrong.” To the current CEO, Ellen Pao: It's not our site's goal to be a completely free-speech platform. We want to be a safe platform and we want to be a platform that also protects privacy at the same time.

alayne 11y ago
Numerous subreddits were closed on Yishan Wong's watch.
- dwmtm 11y ago
  Lip service is the first step.
- Houshalter 11y ago
  As far as I know it was just for stuff that broke the ToS. Not just because they didn't like them.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
geofft 11y ago
Hrm, well, Yishan supports Ellen's recent actions: http://www.quora.com/Reddit-Strengthens-Moderation-Spring-and-Summer-2015/What-does-Yishan-Wong-think-of-Reddits-new-anti-harassment-policy?share=1 http://www.quora.com/Reddit-Strengthens-Moderation-Spring-an...
natrius 11y ago
As someone who loves reddit, this dichotomy is the clearest sign that it has no future. Anyone who values freedom of expression and knows how to program can help build a decentralized reddit that no one controls on top of platforms like IPFS and Ethereum's Swarm. Every attempt at building a reddit clone fails because reddit enjoys tremendous network effects. But decentralization yields its own network effects—you don't have to start your own site to see your changes in the wild, you just fork the codebase and tell people about it. The useful changes thrive, the useless ones are forgotten, and everyone's still contributing to the core stream of submissions, comments, and votes that make the system work regardless of which fork they're using. reddit's competitive advantage isn't their technology, it's their community. Ironically, technology is going to find a way to take that advantage away.

engi_nerd 11y ago

Actually a significant group of people are upset with kn0thing about this whole thing, because he commented about this whole mess [0] and gave what many called a "non-answer". [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bw39q/why_has_riama_been_set_to_private/csq6ekp https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bw39q/why_ha... The current Reddit management doesn't seem to be handling this well.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

JoshTriplett 11y ago

> "The internet" has it's own culture, and the people running reddit right now (one of the places where this culture is the strongest, imo), seem to have no idea how to interface with it. Some portions of the Internet have culture in much the same way that food you forget at the back of your fridge grows culture. And they should be treated much the same way.

InclinedPlane 11y ago

I think it's a bit of a "google" mindset, which has become pervasive in the industry really. The idea of concentrating on managing a product, a platform, a system, etc. and giving short shrift to the community and interfacing with your user base. This is aggravated by the preponderance of free services, such as reddit, which make it all the easier to write off such interactions as non-productive. Instead there's an attempt to interact with the "community" and the "user base" as a conglomerate whole, but ultimately that's a weak method of interacting, at some point the rubber has to meet the road and that means person to person interactions and relationships. This is why sales people are so damned valuable, because that sort of interaction is hugely important. P.S. To clear up any confusion, I support reddit's recent closure of hateful sub-reddits, there should be limits to the kind of behavior reddit tolerates. But that's an entirely different issue from their problem of engaging with mods of popular sub-reddits. It seems like there are a lot of people around who want to stir up ill will against reddit because they enjoyed playing in the cess-pool parts of it.

Aerance 11y ago

The Problem is that, as reddit grows as a company it has been starting to put more of it's corporate influence onto the community it is so famous for. Reddit has always been a play of internet culture and freedom and though some of these changes have been, arguably, good a lot of it has been bad with communication errors between the company and the community leading to the problems we are seeing now. Reddit Corporate is learning a lesson in not biting the hand that feeds it. For so long they thought that they were the hand but it seems that it was the other way around.

return0 11y ago

"The internet" will route itself around reddit then.

fit2rule 11y ago

We've seen this happen time and time again : USENET, Compuserve, to some degree .. AOL .. slashdot .. kuro5hin .. etc. etc. Those who fail to study their Internet history are doomed to repeat it, it seems. I've never been content with the centralized nature of Reddit as an Internet forum - for me this moment of truth has been bound to occur.

pervycreeper 11y ago
>We've seen this happen time and time again : USENET, Compuserve, to some degree .. AOL .. slashdot .. kuro5hin What exactly is the same about what happened to those forums? All I can think of is that they declined in popularity, but maybe I'm missing some history.
- kefka 11y ago
  Usenet died because the ISPs no longer offer newsgroup access. Back in the dialup days, services like this were standard, and they made the internet truly awesome. Once high speed (DSL, cable) took over they axed all Usenet servers. Unless you had Hampster continuously scouring for insecure and open servers, you had to pay for a SuperNews account. That's how Usenet died.
- fit2rule 11y ago
  These realms all started off as great communities with people who were mostly in it to participate and contribute to the discussion. But over time the zeitgeist became cool, and as soon as that happens, the bean-counters arrive. And once that happens, it is pretty much game over for the community, no matter what technology is being used to sustain it. Fundamentally there isn't much difference between your reddits and slashdots and USENETS .. and HN's .. in the end, the community is only as valuable as it perceives itself to have value. And then when the value becomes something that is co-opted by others who desire to exploit that value, a self-awareness of that value by the collective becomes its own worst fault. Reddit is clearly being invalidated by people who don't want the value they create to be valued differently by people who have what they consider to be differing values. So it goes. I hope the next forum where people can creatively contribute to the dialog is not centralized. But that's hard - you have to have somewhere to meet, after all ..

Fede_V 11y ago

This is probably the clearest explanation I've seen. The reddit community has always been a very proudly geeky bunch that enthusiastically embraced internet culture. It's really hard to describe internet culture to someone for whom it isn't endogenous - at its best, it combines a commitment to free expression, a geeky pride in understanding how things work, a strong appreciation for authenticity, a pushback against attention seeking, and an embrace of a multitude of interests. At its worse, well, it's really bad - you get the opinions of minorities dismissed, and you can have people doing all sorts of heinous stuff (revenge porn, etc) under the guise of free speech. However, to horribly paraphrase Whitman.. it contains multitudes. Watching what used to be a beloved site being run by people who don't seem to even understand the ideals of their users is very grating. As an analogy, imagine if the editor of the NYRB somehow ended up as the director of the organization that runs Nascar. Personally, I've never watched a Nascar race in my life and I doubt I ever will - but there are people that are fanatical about that culture, who would resent having a complete outsider who looks upon their hobby with contempt running the show.

thomasrossi 11y ago

"Is there anybody over there without a business degree?" Amen.

qq66 11y ago

Reddit management is somewhat between a rock and a hard place. They have a very free-for-all culture now, with the norms of the site driven largely by the community. As expected, these norms do not drive a lot of monetization -- the community is not constantly pushing for ways to make Reddit profitable. So management is trying to wrest control over the huge community in order to take it towards some more profitable territory, but at least to date they don't seem to be able to do so in a way that doesn't trigger a strong immune response.

baby 11y ago

I think no one really knows why the community is getting pissed off constantly. Right now it's just acting as an angry mob with no brain. And if you follow all this drama, you will see that they bring a lot of golds (so a lot of money to reddit) and that they die out in a day or two. Personally this was my cue to unsubscribe of most default subs that did the black out today.