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Sports Bars and Biker Gangs – The Death of Reddit

60 points by ed 11y ago

dlandis 11y ago
> But seriously, Reddit may be functional, but it’s dead. But seriously, it really isn't dead. And the whole post seems overly dramatic actually. Not to mention that the author starts by describing how he never uses Reddit and doesn't even have an account, but yet evidently thinks he has a very precise understanding of all its problems and clearly has very strong feelings about how they should be addressed. Sounds like a redditor to me!
Mithaldu 11y ago
It's interesting how all these people arguing against Reddit are unaware of the prime principle by which Reddit decides to shut down communities. To reuse his analogy: Communities are shut down when they don't stay inside their rooms. There's a term for that, brigading. On 4chan the principle was called "anonymous isn't your army". Generally the people who build such "high amounts of free speech" places don't mind if literally everything is discussed, but they, and over time also the userbase, reacts strongly if sub-groups try to use the power of the crowd amassed to actively and negatively influence other people, be this other sub-groups on the site, places elsewhere on the internet, or even physical places or people. Edit: He also says "tens of floors", which further demonstrates the ignorance, since Reddit would be better described as thousands of floors. ( 676,951 sub-reddits according to redditmetrics. )
- tzs 11y ago
  > Edit: He also says "tens of floors", which further demonstrates the ignorance, since Reddit would be better described as thousands of floors. ( 676,951 sub-reddits according to redditmetrics. ) It's an analogy between Reddit and a big community center building with different groups having rooms in the building. The point is the relationship between the groups in the above ground rooms, and the groups that are hidden away in basement rooms. The number of floors is completely irrelevant to the validity of the analogy as long as it is enough to qualify as a big community center by community center standards. Tens of floors is sufficient. If he had said tens of thousands of floors so that the number of rooms would have more matched the number of sub-reddits, there would be people complaining that no building has tens of thousands of floors.
  - Mithaldu 11y ago
    It's relevant because the cost and responsibility of closely managing something of "community center" size is wildly different from something of "arcology" size. Also see problems faced by: Youtube, almost every ISP ever.
brownbat 11y ago
Imagine the article rewritten as "The Death of the Internet." All the premises are the same, and largely true: there's no strong central control, it's basically run by volunteers who have conflicting interests, and there's some abhorrent stuff out there. The conclusion, that it's a failed experiment, doesn't seem to follow. Reddit may die someday. Could happen, aggregators die, but I don't think a scandal means it's at death's door. Even though I disagree with the conclusion, especially its forcefulness, the article has a fantastic collection of links. The links would be a great first place to catch the journalistic zeitgeist.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- smacktoward 11y ago
  Except that nobody's trying to operate "The Internet, Inc.", a centralized, for-profit business encompassing the whole of the network. That's what Reddit-the-company has been trying to do with Reddit-the-community, and it doesn't work very well.
  - brownbat 11y ago
    Fair. And to that point, Digg's making money and Youtube is struggling. Maybe all our success stories need another look... [1] http://blog.digg.com/post/109580738071/digg-by-the-numbers-2015-edition http://blog.digg.com/post/109580738071/digg-by-the-numbers-2... (well, "consistent revenue"... couldn't find precise financials since 2008 or so) [2] http://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-for-youtube-1424897967 http://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-fo...
TD-Linux 11y ago
If you aren't a Reddit user, how can you judge what is causing the death of Reddit? It's your personal anecdote of why you don't use Reddit, but clearly there is an enormous userbase that was using Reddit despite the low amount of global moderation.
- MBCook 11y ago
  As a longtime Reddit user, this post struck a real chord with me. Horrible crap on Reddit does exist, and sexist/racist/hateful/uncalled-for-jackassery comments seem to be more and more common in the defaults and other places where the mods don't keep REALLY tight control. It is getting, slowly, worse. Not because of the number of people but the standards of behavior they keep pushing the line on without pushback. I think the biker bar analogy is fantastic. Even when the bikers stay in their corner their large number is getting scarier and more creepy.
  - _delirium 11y ago
    I've seen this in the European-focused subreddits lately. Places like /r/europe are usually pretty "normal" discussion boards considering that their demographics are English-speaking, internet-using young people of those regions. But periodically the comments (and comment scores) end up very uncharacteristic in a thread or sub-thread, especially if it has to do with immigration, Islam, or nationalism. Not just in the sense that some people have conservative or nativist views on those subjects, but that suddenly the discussion seems to be totally dominated by extreme versions of those views, anything vaguely liberal said about the subject is downvoted to infinity, etc. And the reason in that case if you dig around usually turns out to be that someone in a far-right/xenophobic subreddit linked there and caused an influx of people with those views.
  - ameister14 11y ago
    I haven't noticed it getting worse; I have noticed people complaining about it more, though. The up-vote down-vote system turns everything into an echo chamber anyway, so whatever racist or objectionable comment you see will probably go away unless the majority agrees with it.
dasil003 11y ago
There are certainly a lot of accurate observations in here, but the entire lens is mis-focused. Consider: > Don’t try to fix it. It’s broken. It can’t be fixed. Instead, it’s time to decide what the service you want is, and build that service out of the ashes of the failure of this Reddit. First of all, this is garbage advice, an absolute fool's errand. The fact that you are ostensibly in control of Reddit as its management team does not mean that you have any chance in hell of parlaying that into a new community of any sort. A random 18-year-old in his dorm room has just as much chance of creating the next legitimate online community as Reddit management does. Reddit is what it is. For all its warts, it's a tremendously successful community that evolved in a very particular way. Just because you're paying to keep the lights on doesn't mean you can control the nature of the community. Any attempts to overtly reshape Reddit into something that warms the heart of an investor is doomed to failure because it runs against the fundamental nature of Reddit, and thus can have no effect but to shed users—which of course is Reddit's only asset. This is no doubt upsetting to shareholders, some elements of management, journalists, social activists and all manner of Reddit observers, but it's just the way online communities work. You can build tools and policies to nudge things this way or that a bit, but fundamentally you do not control it. For all self-stated credentials of the author, I would expect him to recognize this fact a bit more, and pile on his value judgements declaring "failure" a bit less.
- 78666cdc 11y ago
  While I agree with everything you said after the quote you cited, I disagree with the suggestion that there are really any accurate observations in this article. The entire "sports bar and biker gang" premise is entirely flawed. The picture painted is that of some perfect place which gets bastardized and taken over by some unsavory group of people who are unsavory even if only because of their memborship in said group. How does it make any sense to allegorize such a gigantic online community as "a good place that got stormed by shitty users"? Yes, there are definitely Reddit users that get off on spending their free time harassing others. However, they are not many, and, for every handful there are, there are 100x more content creators, blog authors submitting content, people campaigning for charities, and so on. If the presence of a few foul people are enough to make you vacate an entire massive community and feel as though you cannot participate, then I might suggest that you grow up a bit, learn that there is literally no public place in the world that is all rainbows and puppies, and check whether you are being overly sensitive. Aside from that, the author's view on how any of this works is obviously and completely incorrect. The suggestion of "taking what's there" and "moving it somewhere else where the bad people won't go" belies the incredibly and simplistic worldview behind this article - you cannot pick and and move a community of people to another place, you cannot raise a big banner that says "I don't like it here!" and bring all of your well-established users to another place. Your users do not take such a (frankly, whiny) take on the world. They appreciate the platform, what's been there, and so on. As for bemoaning why the biggest subreddits aren't controlled by the admin? In the end this is perhaps the single defining comment in this article. "Why, oh why don't the admins exert draconion control over their users so that I don't have to hear and come across things I disagree with?!" Because that's not how communities work, because that's not how open discussion works, because that's now how any of this works at all. Frankly, I find the author's mindset absolutely infuriating. Why is this incredibly naive, oversensitive, and whiny post getting any attention at all? Anyone that has been around online communities (and, frankly, life after college) for longer than a year can easily recognize this sort of bullshit. Edit: To pre-empt some responses, no, I am not standing up and saying that harassing users should be left alone because of freedom of speech. There is obviously a limit - active and purposeful harm should be prevented as much as reasonably possible if one wants to maintain a large community with a positive public image. However, the "biker gang moving into my space" analogy is exactly the sort of analogy I would expect from the sort of person that is ready to cry victim at the slightest provocation - and those sorts of people, in fact, are exactly the ones that have had the most damage on online communities in the past few years. Furthermore, am I the only one so far to comment on the fact that the "biker gang" image the author evokes is inherently judgmental and simple-minded? The hypocrisy in just that one analogy is astounding. Shame on this author and his/her cognitive dissonance, victim complex, and naivety.
hiou 11y ago
Reddit isn't a single community site. Its what ning thought it could be.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
smaili 11y ago
Starting to get tired of all these people complaining about Reddit, and yet when I put it out there to build something better I barely get any responses.
byerley 11y ago
It's hard to not view this as whining about the failed gentrification of Reddit (especially with the biker bar analogy). I'm struggling to think of any successful social network sites that are heavy-handed with moderation. Certainly twitter, facebook, ect. get the same accusations of harboring "unethical" groups.
hoopd 11y ago
Having somebody throwing chairs will ruin your dinner party, so is the person who's only going to look for an excuse to police how others speak.
ScootyPuff3000 11y ago
tl;dr "I don't use Reddit, I don't even have an account. Here's how to fix it." There is one thing he gets right though: there's a good chance "reddit" is simply not a business. I like Reddit, but there's no reason for a Big Media Company to own such a thing. They should cut their losses and sell it. Maybe someone can figure out how to run it with a small enough staff (say 10 people) so the $5MM/year revenue is enough for them.
bbbbnnnn 11y ago
Reddit is a cesspool. It's /r/coontown and /r/jailbait. Do we really have to keep talking about them? I don't understand how any decent person would want their name associated with that excrement.
- 78666cdc 11y ago
  Reddit is also /r/haskell, /r/emacs, /r/AskScience, /r/AskHistorians, /r/puremathematics, /r/compsci, /r/art, and many, many others. Notwithstanding that /r/jailbait got banned years ago, sounds like you're being pretty selective here. If you want to talk about "that excrement", let's talk about the sort of selection bias and language you're using right here.
  - bbbbnnnn 11y ago
    Jailbait was banned years ago, and now there's coontown. There's always something. Always has been since the early days. You're welcome to hang around /r/haskell and pretend you don't feel the smell, but it still rubs on to you.
    - 78666cdc 11y ago
      18,000 subscribed user accounts out of about 36,000,000. That's .05%, or 1 in 2,000. Except that it's localized in one subreddit that doesn't make the frontpage and is universally reviled on the rest of Reddit. By all means, leave. People that will leave a public forum because "someone over there is someone I really, really don't like and that every else around me also thinks is vile, but who I am not forced to talk to at any point in time" are generally not valuable users in a forum that is dedicated to open discussion.
      - feld 11y ago
        I'm not going to go to a pub full of rapists and pedophiles just because the local Linux User Group sets up shop at the corner table. You might think that's a bad analogy, but that's the reputation Reddit has garnered and I don't think it's insane to not want to be associated with it.
wanderer2323 11y ago
The author is scared by the reddit 'basement' and he wants us to think that his position is in such a majority that reddit is doomed. Sorry, Chuq Von Rospach, that's just false-consensus effect talking.
nraynaud 11y ago
I am a bit skeptical, if maximizing shareholder value at any cost is stupid, then aligning the mods with money seems a bit stupid too.
EarlPoncho 11y ago
> reddit is dead 31st most visited website. i hope to be this dead one day
RALaBarge 11y ago
I think the reports of Reddit's death is greatly exaggerated. The death certificate isn't usually granted until you produce a dead body, and it seems that Reddit, good and bad, is still very much alive.
callil 11y ago
Tons of problems yes, but in 6 months this will be all but forgotten. It will become a part of internet lore. Reddit is not dead, reddit will live on and evolve slowly as its community changes and adapts.
ScootyPuff4000 11y ago
tl;dr "I don't use Reddit, I don't even have an account. Here's how to fix it." There is one thing he gets right though: there's a good chance "reddit" is simply not a business. I like Reddit, but there's no reason for a Big Media Company to own such a thing. They should cut their losses and sell it. Maybe someone can figure out how to run it with a small enough staff (say 10 people) so the $5MM/year revenue is enough for them.
fab13n 11y ago
The fixing strategy somehow reminds me how Digg has been "fixed", not long before the user base massively migrated to Reddit.
whoisthemachine 11y ago
Perhaps the problem is that a company is trying to monetize a fully democratic social network? A network like this deserves to be open-source and non-profit, that's the only way the organization that runs the forum can reasonably hope to remain appearing as a neutral actor in the forum. Also, they do need some self-governance rules, as only to remove liability (which they do [1]). [1] https://www.reddit.com/rules/ https://www.reddit.com/rules/
- theodorewiles 11y ago
  I think the real threat is the investors demanding outsize returns. I have read elsewhere that Pao might have been a sacrificial lamb - make some changes, get fired, changes stay in place. I'm sure that the board has significant changes around monetization in mind. The mods should move everything to a non-profit org. The site is open-source already, and you could even use their Oauth to port user accounts over directly. My understanding is that they are just breaking even, which sounds bad for a for-profit but sounds great for a not-for-profit, especially if your executive director is getting CEO level pay. Now, someone else will spend the time implementing my fantastic idea for me, right? /s
michaelwww 11y ago
"there comes a time with communities that go toxic where the only real answer is to take them out behind the barn and Old Yeller them. That time has come for Reddit." I've been on Reddit since near the beginning and still enjoy the site everyday. We regulars keep pointing out the great subreddits that exist, so I don't need to do that here. Unlike Chuq, I don't feel guilt by association because there are also terrible subreddits. I'm not one to condemn all of 4chan because of 4chan/b/, but I can understand those who think that way. What I wanted to say is that Reddit has not changed, society has. If anything Reddit has improved by banning subreddits like jailbait and fatpeoplehate. The trend on Reddit is less toxicity, not more as Chuq implies. America has been having a conversation the last few years about rape culture, sexual harrasement of women, micro-aggressions, exclusionary speech, gender fluidity, sexual objectification of women in video games, sexting, celebrity nudes, and so on. This new awareness has been applied to Reddit recently starting with 'the fappening' and continuing with gamergate. I think these conversations are worth having and I like some of the change as a result, but it's not fair to Reddit to say it is going downhill. We're just applying a new set of standards to it. Could a site like Reddit or 4chan even become succesful today with all the new rules in place, or would they kill it in the crib? I'm not sure.

60 points by ed 11y ago

> But seriously, Reddit may be functional, but it’s dead. But seriously, it really isn't dead. And the whole post seems overly dramatic actually. Not to mention that the author starts by describing how he never uses Reddit and doesn't even have an account, but yet evidently thinks he has a very precise understanding of all its problems and clearly has very strong feelings about how they should be addressed. Sounds like a redditor to me!

Mithaldu 11y ago

It's interesting how all these people arguing against Reddit are unaware of the prime principle by which Reddit decides to shut down communities. To reuse his analogy: Communities are shut down when they don't stay inside their rooms. There's a term for that, brigading. On 4chan the principle was called "anonymous isn't your army". Generally the people who build such "high amounts of free speech" places don't mind if literally everything is discussed, but they, and over time also the userbase, reacts strongly if sub-groups try to use the power of the crowd amassed to actively and negatively influence other people, be this other sub-groups on the site, places elsewhere on the internet, or even physical places or people. Edit: He also says "tens of floors", which further demonstrates the ignorance, since Reddit would be better described as thousands of floors. ( 676,951 sub-reddits according to redditmetrics. )

tzs 11y ago
> Edit: He also says "tens of floors", which further demonstrates the ignorance, since Reddit would be better described as thousands of floors. ( 676,951 sub-reddits according to redditmetrics. ) It's an analogy between Reddit and a big community center building with different groups having rooms in the building. The point is the relationship between the groups in the above ground rooms, and the groups that are hidden away in basement rooms. The number of floors is completely irrelevant to the validity of the analogy as long as it is enough to qualify as a big community center by community center standards. Tens of floors is sufficient. If he had said tens of thousands of floors so that the number of rooms would have more matched the number of sub-reddits, there would be people complaining that no building has tens of thousands of floors.
- Mithaldu 11y ago
  It's relevant because the cost and responsibility of closely managing something of "community center" size is wildly different from something of "arcology" size. Also see problems faced by: Youtube, almost every ISP ever.

brownbat 11y ago

Imagine the article rewritten as "The Death of the Internet." All the premises are the same, and largely true: there's no strong central control, it's basically run by volunteers who have conflicting interests, and there's some abhorrent stuff out there. The conclusion, that it's a failed experiment, doesn't seem to follow. Reddit may die someday. Could happen, aggregators die, but I don't think a scandal means it's at death's door. Even though I disagree with the conclusion, especially its forcefulness, the article has a fantastic collection of links. The links would be a great first place to catch the journalistic zeitgeist.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
smacktoward 11y ago
Except that nobody's trying to operate "The Internet, Inc.", a centralized, for-profit business encompassing the whole of the network. That's what Reddit-the-company has been trying to do with Reddit-the-community, and it doesn't work very well.
- brownbat 11y ago
  Fair. And to that point, Digg's making money and Youtube is struggling. Maybe all our success stories need another look... [1] http://blog.digg.com/post/109580738071/digg-by-the-numbers-2015-edition http://blog.digg.com/post/109580738071/digg-by-the-numbers-2... (well, "consistent revenue"... couldn't find precise financials since 2008 or so) [2] http://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-for-youtube-1424897967 http://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-fo...

TD-Linux 11y ago

If you aren't a Reddit user, how can you judge what is causing the death of Reddit? It's your personal anecdote of why you don't use Reddit, but clearly there is an enormous userbase that was using Reddit despite the low amount of global moderation.

MBCook 11y ago
As a longtime Reddit user, this post struck a real chord with me. Horrible crap on Reddit does exist, and sexist/racist/hateful/uncalled-for-jackassery comments seem to be more and more common in the defaults and other places where the mods don't keep REALLY tight control. It is getting, slowly, worse. Not because of the number of people but the standards of behavior they keep pushing the line on without pushback. I think the biker bar analogy is fantastic. Even when the bikers stay in their corner their large number is getting scarier and more creepy.
- _delirium 11y ago
  I've seen this in the European-focused subreddits lately. Places like /r/europe are usually pretty "normal" discussion boards considering that their demographics are English-speaking, internet-using young people of those regions. But periodically the comments (and comment scores) end up very uncharacteristic in a thread or sub-thread, especially if it has to do with immigration, Islam, or nationalism. Not just in the sense that some people have conservative or nativist views on those subjects, but that suddenly the discussion seems to be totally dominated by extreme versions of those views, anything vaguely liberal said about the subject is downvoted to infinity, etc. And the reason in that case if you dig around usually turns out to be that someone in a far-right/xenophobic subreddit linked there and caused an influx of people with those views.
- ameister14 11y ago
  I haven't noticed it getting worse; I have noticed people complaining about it more, though. The up-vote down-vote system turns everything into an echo chamber anyway, so whatever racist or objectionable comment you see will probably go away unless the majority agrees with it.

dasil003 11y ago

There are certainly a lot of accurate observations in here, but the entire lens is mis-focused. Consider: > Don’t try to fix it. It’s broken. It can’t be fixed. Instead, it’s time to decide what the service you want is, and build that service out of the ashes of the failure of this Reddit. First of all, this is garbage advice, an absolute fool's errand. The fact that you are ostensibly in control of Reddit as its management team does not mean that you have any chance in hell of parlaying that into a new community of any sort. A random 18-year-old in his dorm room has just as much chance of creating the next legitimate online community as Reddit management does. Reddit is what it is. For all its warts, it's a tremendously successful community that evolved in a very particular way. Just because you're paying to keep the lights on doesn't mean you can control the nature of the community. Any attempts to overtly reshape Reddit into something that warms the heart of an investor is doomed to failure because it runs against the fundamental nature of Reddit, and thus can have no effect but to shed users—which of course is Reddit's only asset. This is no doubt upsetting to shareholders, some elements of management, journalists, social activists and all manner of Reddit observers, but it's just the way online communities work. You can build tools and policies to nudge things this way or that a bit, but fundamentally you do not control it. For all self-stated credentials of the author, I would expect him to recognize this fact a bit more, and pile on his value judgements declaring "failure" a bit less.

78666cdc 11y ago
While I agree with everything you said after the quote you cited, I disagree with the suggestion that there are really any accurate observations in this article. The entire "sports bar and biker gang" premise is entirely flawed. The picture painted is that of some perfect place which gets bastardized and taken over by some unsavory group of people who are unsavory even if only because of their memborship in said group. How does it make any sense to allegorize such a gigantic online community as "a good place that got stormed by shitty users"? Yes, there are definitely Reddit users that get off on spending their free time harassing others. However, they are not many, and, for every handful there are, there are 100x more content creators, blog authors submitting content, people campaigning for charities, and so on. If the presence of a few foul people are enough to make you vacate an entire massive community and feel as though you cannot participate, then I might suggest that you grow up a bit, learn that there is literally no public place in the world that is all rainbows and puppies, and check whether you are being overly sensitive. Aside from that, the author's view on how any of this works is obviously and completely incorrect. The suggestion of "taking what's there" and "moving it somewhere else where the bad people won't go" belies the incredibly and simplistic worldview behind this article - you cannot pick and and move a community of people to another place, you cannot raise a big banner that says "I don't like it here!" and bring all of your well-established users to another place. Your users do not take such a (frankly, whiny) take on the world. They appreciate the platform, what's been there, and so on. As for bemoaning why the biggest subreddits aren't controlled by the admin? In the end this is perhaps the single defining comment in this article. "Why, oh why don't the admins exert draconion control over their users so that I don't have to hear and come across things I disagree with?!" Because that's not how communities work, because that's not how open discussion works, because that's now how any of this works at all. Frankly, I find the author's mindset absolutely infuriating. Why is this incredibly naive, oversensitive, and whiny post getting any attention at all? Anyone that has been around online communities (and, frankly, life after college) for longer than a year can easily recognize this sort of bullshit. Edit: To pre-empt some responses, no, I am not standing up and saying that harassing users should be left alone because of freedom of speech. There is obviously a limit - active and purposeful harm should be prevented as much as reasonably possible if one wants to maintain a large community with a positive public image. However, the "biker gang moving into my space" analogy is exactly the sort of analogy I would expect from the sort of person that is ready to cry victim at the slightest provocation - and those sorts of people, in fact, are exactly the ones that have had the most damage on online communities in the past few years. Furthermore, am I the only one so far to comment on the fact that the "biker gang" image the author evokes is inherently judgmental and simple-minded? The hypocrisy in just that one analogy is astounding. Shame on this author and his/her cognitive dissonance, victim complex, and naivety.

hiou 11y ago

Reddit isn't a single community site. Its what ning thought it could be.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

smaili 11y ago

Starting to get tired of all these people complaining about Reddit, and yet when I put it out there to build something better I barely get any responses.

byerley 11y ago

It's hard to not view this as whining about the failed gentrification of Reddit (especially with the biker bar analogy). I'm struggling to think of any successful social network sites that are heavy-handed with moderation. Certainly twitter, facebook, ect. get the same accusations of harboring "unethical" groups.

hoopd 11y ago

Having somebody throwing chairs will ruin your dinner party, so is the person who's only going to look for an excuse to police how others speak.

ScootyPuff3000 11y ago

tl;dr "I don't use Reddit, I don't even have an account. Here's how to fix it." There is one thing he gets right though: there's a good chance "reddit" is simply not a business. I like Reddit, but there's no reason for a Big Media Company to own such a thing. They should cut their losses and sell it. Maybe someone can figure out how to run it with a small enough staff (say 10 people) so the $5MM/year revenue is enough for them.

bbbbnnnn 11y ago

Reddit is a cesspool. It's /r/coontown and /r/jailbait. Do we really have to keep talking about them? I don't understand how any decent person would want their name associated with that excrement.

78666cdc 11y ago
Reddit is also /r/haskell, /r/emacs, /r/AskScience, /r/AskHistorians, /r/puremathematics, /r/compsci, /r/art, and many, many others. Notwithstanding that /r/jailbait got banned years ago, sounds like you're being pretty selective here. If you want to talk about "that excrement", let's talk about the sort of selection bias and language you're using right here.
- bbbbnnnn 11y ago
  Jailbait was banned years ago, and now there's coontown. There's always something. Always has been since the early days. You're welcome to hang around /r/haskell and pretend you don't feel the smell, but it still rubs on to you.
  - 78666cdc 11y ago
    18,000 subscribed user accounts out of about 36,000,000. That's .05%, or 1 in 2,000. Except that it's localized in one subreddit that doesn't make the frontpage and is universally reviled on the rest of Reddit. By all means, leave. People that will leave a public forum because "someone over there is someone I really, really don't like and that every else around me also thinks is vile, but who I am not forced to talk to at any point in time" are generally not valuable users in a forum that is dedicated to open discussion.
    - feld 11y ago
      I'm not going to go to a pub full of rapists and pedophiles just because the local Linux User Group sets up shop at the corner table. You might think that's a bad analogy, but that's the reputation Reddit has garnered and I don't think it's insane to not want to be associated with it.

wanderer2323 11y ago

The author is scared by the reddit 'basement' and he wants us to think that his position is in such a majority that reddit is doomed. Sorry, Chuq Von Rospach, that's just false-consensus effect talking.

nraynaud 11y ago

I am a bit skeptical, if maximizing shareholder value at any cost is stupid, then aligning the mods with money seems a bit stupid too.

EarlPoncho 11y ago

> reddit is dead 31st most visited website. i hope to be this dead one day

RALaBarge 11y ago

I think the reports of Reddit's death is greatly exaggerated. The death certificate isn't usually granted until you produce a dead body, and it seems that Reddit, good and bad, is still very much alive.

callil 11y ago

Tons of problems yes, but in 6 months this will be all but forgotten. It will become a part of internet lore. Reddit is not dead, reddit will live on and evolve slowly as its community changes and adapts.

ScootyPuff4000 11y ago

fab13n 11y ago

The fixing strategy somehow reminds me how Digg has been "fixed", not long before the user base massively migrated to Reddit.

whoisthemachine 11y ago

Perhaps the problem is that a company is trying to monetize a fully democratic social network? A network like this deserves to be open-source and non-profit, that's the only way the organization that runs the forum can reasonably hope to remain appearing as a neutral actor in the forum. Also, they do need some self-governance rules, as only to remove liability (which they do [1]). [1] https://www.reddit.com/rules/ https://www.reddit.com/rules/

theodorewiles 11y ago
I think the real threat is the investors demanding outsize returns. I have read elsewhere that Pao might have been a sacrificial lamb - make some changes, get fired, changes stay in place. I'm sure that the board has significant changes around monetization in mind. The mods should move everything to a non-profit org. The site is open-source already, and you could even use their Oauth to port user accounts over directly. My understanding is that they are just breaking even, which sounds bad for a for-profit but sounds great for a not-for-profit, especially if your executive director is getting CEO level pay. Now, someone else will spend the time implementing my fantastic idea for me, right? /s

michaelwww 11y ago

"there comes a time with communities that go toxic where the only real answer is to take them out behind the barn and Old Yeller them. That time has come for Reddit." I've been on Reddit since near the beginning and still enjoy the site everyday. We regulars keep pointing out the great subreddits that exist, so I don't need to do that here. Unlike Chuq, I don't feel guilt by association because there are also terrible subreddits. I'm not one to condemn all of 4chan because of 4chan/b/, but I can understand those who think that way. What I wanted to say is that Reddit has not changed, society has. If anything Reddit has improved by banning subreddits like jailbait and fatpeoplehate. The trend on Reddit is less toxicity, not more as Chuq implies. America has been having a conversation the last few years about rape culture, sexual harrasement of women, micro-aggressions, exclusionary speech, gender fluidity, sexual objectification of women in video games, sexting, celebrity nudes, and so on. This new awareness has been applied to Reddit recently starting with 'the fappening' and continuing with gamergate. I think these conversations are worth having and I like some of the change as a result, but it's not fair to Reddit to say it is going downhill. We're just applying a new set of standards to it. Could a site like Reddit or 4chan even become succesful today with all the new rules in place, or would they kill it in the crib? I'm not sure.