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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 fixe

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.
- banachtarski 11y ago
  Exactly. The op doesn't understand reddit. I read a lot of specific reddits (sub-communities) like /r/programming, /r/cpp, /r/math, etc. Honestly? I'm completely unaffected by the "biker gangs" he's rambling about.
- KVFinn 11y ago
  >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. Some of the best communities (/AskHistorians and /AskScience) are already struggling with this. A mod from /AskHistorians: https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3cxedn/i_am_steve_huffman_the_new_ceo_of_reddit_ama/ct07q5k?context=3 https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3cxedn/i_am_steve_huff... >To illustrate, without in any way intending to boast, it is clear that a number of current and past staff members at Reddit really enjoy AskHistorians. This has been made publicly clear a number of times. But the reality of Reddit is that AskHistorians was created by going against the grain, by struggling against Reddit's mechanisms rather than being organically created by them, and by quite frankly disregarding a number of statements about Reddit's underlying philosophy made by admins and CEOs alike. That mostly involves deleting an enormous quantity of comments, with the express purpose that they are not seen any more, that they are vanished into the aether. >In addition, reddit's increasingly poor reputation on the internet might, for some people, be because of what they perceive as censorship. But in my experience, the majority of that poor reputation is garnered from the kind of communities that Reddit harbours, which have grown larger and increasingly restive. And so long as they're there and doing their thing we have to share a website with them. We have to share a website with communities that have racist slurs in their name, that spew raw bigotry like it's water for all the farms of China. A lot of our flaired users on AskHistorians are professionals in their fields, and at times it is pretty hard to keep convincing them to stay on a website like this. Most of that convincing consists of how much stuff we are able to keep out of our community. I don't see how that is remotely tenable if we're no longer able to actually leave seas of [deleted]
  - 11y ago
MBCook 11y ago
> and thus can have no effect but to shed users—which of course is Reddit's only asset Yor're assuming that all users are equal and the important thing is raw eyeballs. There are users and behavior that are driving people away. The whole 'we support FPH' and sexist comments about Pao in every story about her is turning people off. Further more, if Reddit is an advertising supported company they're going to have a big problem selling ads against /r/coontown. It doesn't matter that's one little corner and you can turn your ads off against it. The story in the news will be 'P&G paid 30m to advertise on a site full of hate speech' and the story will be correct because it DID go to THE SITE not the sub. And that's going to play really poorly for P&G (chosen as a big brand, don't know if they advertise). Same thing applies to celebrities doing AMAs. The next time a democratic candidate does an AMA and Fox starts trumpeting the... ahem 'anti-PC'... elements of Reddit to make everyone look bad do you think that candidate will be happy? "They used to host child porn too! It was called /r/jailbait!" They're getting a reputation that's going to make buying their ad platform untenable for many large advertisers.
- dasil003 11y ago
  > Yor're assuming that all users are equal and the important thing is raw eyeballs. I really don't get how you are taking that from what I said. Of course I don't think all users are equal or that users and advertisers won't be driven away by bad behavior. It would be ridiculous to suggest otherwise. My point is that, if management comes in swinging a white sword they will inevitably suffer a net loss. As I said, the community can be nudged in one direction or another—quite significantly given sufficient understanding and guile on the part of management—but you can't declare Reddit "broken" and then "fix" it. Even if you assume Reddit has "failed" (which I don't, but even granting that), the changes you need to make will drive away many more users than it ever attracts, because the "good" potential users are already turned off by Reddit, and the existing users will be alienated. If management comes in with the mentality of needing to "fix" Reddit then they are damned if they do and damned if they don't. Fortunately such axiomatic pessimism in Reddit is unfounded—I get how it is not what a heavy-handed SV elite megalomaniacal MBA wants in his portfolio, but that doesn't mean it can't be a successful business on its own terms.
Lazare 11y ago
I don't think that's entirely true. Reddit's management has a ton of resources that an 18-year-old in his dorm does not. Depending on the choices they make and who is running the team, I'd say Reddit either has a much lower chance (right now), or a much higher chance (if we assume they get a good management team in place), than the hypothetical college student. But the same chance? > Just because you're paying to keep the lights on doesn't mean you can control the nature of the community. Actually, it does? It doesn't mean you can create whatever you want, but you can certainly destroy the bits you don't like, which is what the advice you're critiquing is suggesting. You say that means you'll shed users, but that's the point of the advice. The analogy the author is using is hiring some really strict bouncers to eject the "bikers". Which will absolutely cause the bar to "shed users" in the short term. > 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. I don't think you really understood his comments. Fundamentally you're responding to someone saying "Reddit can't be fixed" with "this guy is an idiot; doesn't he understand Reddit can't be fixed?".
- leereeves 11y ago
  > Fundamentally you're responding to someone saying "Reddit can't be fixed" with "this guy is an idiot; doesn't he understand Reddit can't be fixed?". You're ignoring the part where parent said > it's a tremendously successful community ... Reddit's built a large community of people who don't mind partying next to the biker bar. An anti-authoritarian community that wants free speech, is not politically correct, and isn't advertiser friendly. It may not be an easy community to profit from, but does it need to be "fixed"?
  - Lazare 11y ago
    First, a reminder: Reddit is the commercial product of a for profit company which is currently losing a significant amount of money operating Reddit. Last I heard they were being valued at $500m based on the expectation that they would be able to figure out how to profit from Reddit. The people who run Reddit won't just shrug and walk away if it turns out getting "their" slice of that $500m is harder than they expected. > Reddit's built a large community of people who don't mind partying next to the biker bar. Reddit has built a large community of people, large portions of whom absolutely detest each other and very much mind "partying next to each other". And as Reddit grows, the tensions are becoming more severe, not less. > An anti-authoritarian community that wants free speech, is not politically correct, and isn't advertiser friendly. No. A very, VERY small portion of the community could be described that way. Most people just want celebrity AMAs, cat videos, dank memes, swapping funny stories, and maybe some chat about their local city or favourite sports team. (Or relationship advice, or sex advice, or trading candy with people from other countries, or whatever it is that attracts them to Reddit.) The number of people who are ideologically committed to free speech (and not just for the things they personally like) on Reddit is, as in real life, tiny. (Edit: If you disagree, feel free to cite a study or whatever. But I'm active on reddit, moderate a moderately popular subreddit, etc., and I don't think you're describing the Reddit community as it actually exists. I'm not even sure that a Reddit community could even be said to exist.) > It may not be an easy community to profit from, but does it need to be "fixed"? See point one. Absolutely, because Reddit will stop existing the moment Reddit Inc turns the lights off because it's too hard to profit from. (Yeah, sure, maybe they'll hand the domain name off to a non-profit that can try and cover costs with donations first. Assuming there's anything left by that point, the resulting website won't look much like the Reddit of today.)
maxerickson 11y ago
I think reddit overall is more comparable to a festival. There are groups and communities there interacting with each other and within themselves, but there is not all that much that they all have in common that they don't also have in common with their neighbor who isn't sure about computers being good for anything. I don't intend that to be hair splitting about words, I think that attempts to address reddit users as a single community are a fools errand.

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.

banachtarski 11y ago
Exactly. The op doesn't understand reddit. I read a lot of specific reddits (sub-communities) like /r/programming, /r/cpp, /r/math, etc. Honestly? I'm completely unaffected by the "biker gangs" he's rambling about.
KVFinn 11y ago
>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. Some of the best communities (/AskHistorians and /AskScience) are already struggling with this. A mod from /AskHistorians: https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3cxedn/i_am_steve_huffman_the_new_ceo_of_reddit_ama/ct07q5k?context=3 https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3cxedn/i_am_steve_huff... >To illustrate, without in any way intending to boast, it is clear that a number of current and past staff members at Reddit really enjoy AskHistorians. This has been made publicly clear a number of times. But the reality of Reddit is that AskHistorians was created by going against the grain, by struggling against Reddit's mechanisms rather than being organically created by them, and by quite frankly disregarding a number of statements about Reddit's underlying philosophy made by admins and CEOs alike. That mostly involves deleting an enormous quantity of comments, with the express purpose that they are not seen any more, that they are vanished into the aether. >In addition, reddit's increasingly poor reputation on the internet might, for some people, be because of what they perceive as censorship. But in my experience, the majority of that poor reputation is garnered from the kind of communities that Reddit harbours, which have grown larger and increasingly restive. And so long as they're there and doing their thing we have to share a website with them. We have to share a website with communities that have racist slurs in their name, that spew raw bigotry like it's water for all the farms of China. A lot of our flaired users on AskHistorians are professionals in their fields, and at times it is pretty hard to keep convincing them to stay on a website like this. Most of that convincing consists of how much stuff we are able to keep out of our community. I don't see how that is remotely tenable if we're no longer able to actually leave seas of [deleted]
- 11y ago

MBCook 11y ago

> and thus can have no effect but to shed users—which of course is Reddit's only asset Yor're assuming that all users are equal and the important thing is raw eyeballs. There are users and behavior that are driving people away. The whole 'we support FPH' and sexist comments about Pao in every story about her is turning people off. Further more, if Reddit is an advertising supported company they're going to have a big problem selling ads against /r/coontown. It doesn't matter that's one little corner and you can turn your ads off against it. The story in the news will be 'P&G paid 30m to advertise on a site full of hate speech' and the story will be correct because it DID go to THE SITE not the sub. And that's going to play really poorly for P&G (chosen as a big brand, don't know if they advertise). Same thing applies to celebrities doing AMAs. The next time a democratic candidate does an AMA and Fox starts trumpeting the... ahem 'anti-PC'... elements of Reddit to make everyone look bad do you think that candidate will be happy? "They used to host child porn too! It was called /r/jailbait!" They're getting a reputation that's going to make buying their ad platform untenable for many large advertisers.

dasil003 11y ago
> Yor're assuming that all users are equal and the important thing is raw eyeballs. I really don't get how you are taking that from what I said. Of course I don't think all users are equal or that users and advertisers won't be driven away by bad behavior. It would be ridiculous to suggest otherwise. My point is that, if management comes in swinging a white sword they will inevitably suffer a net loss. As I said, the community can be nudged in one direction or another—quite significantly given sufficient understanding and guile on the part of management—but you can't declare Reddit "broken" and then "fix" it. Even if you assume Reddit has "failed" (which I don't, but even granting that), the changes you need to make will drive away many more users than it ever attracts, because the "good" potential users are already turned off by Reddit, and the existing users will be alienated. If management comes in with the mentality of needing to "fix" Reddit then they are damned if they do and damned if they don't. Fortunately such axiomatic pessimism in Reddit is unfounded—I get how it is not what a heavy-handed SV elite megalomaniacal MBA wants in his portfolio, but that doesn't mean it can't be a successful business on its own terms.

Lazare 11y ago

I don't think that's entirely true. Reddit's management has a ton of resources that an 18-year-old in his dorm does not. Depending on the choices they make and who is running the team, I'd say Reddit either has a much lower chance (right now), or a much higher chance (if we assume they get a good management team in place), than the hypothetical college student. But the same chance? > Just because you're paying to keep the lights on doesn't mean you can control the nature of the community. Actually, it does? It doesn't mean you can create whatever you want, but you can certainly destroy the bits you don't like, which is what the advice you're critiquing is suggesting. You say that means you'll shed users, but that's the point of the advice. The analogy the author is using is hiring some really strict bouncers to eject the "bikers". Which will absolutely cause the bar to "shed users" in the short term. > 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. I don't think you really understood his comments. Fundamentally you're responding to someone saying "Reddit can't be fixed" with "this guy is an idiot; doesn't he understand Reddit can't be fixed?".

leereeves 11y ago
> Fundamentally you're responding to someone saying "Reddit can't be fixed" with "this guy is an idiot; doesn't he understand Reddit can't be fixed?". You're ignoring the part where parent said > it's a tremendously successful community ... Reddit's built a large community of people who don't mind partying next to the biker bar. An anti-authoritarian community that wants free speech, is not politically correct, and isn't advertiser friendly. It may not be an easy community to profit from, but does it need to be "fixed"?
- Lazare 11y ago
  First, a reminder: Reddit is the commercial product of a for profit company which is currently losing a significant amount of money operating Reddit. Last I heard they were being valued at $500m based on the expectation that they would be able to figure out how to profit from Reddit. The people who run Reddit won't just shrug and walk away if it turns out getting "their" slice of that $500m is harder than they expected. > Reddit's built a large community of people who don't mind partying next to the biker bar. Reddit has built a large community of people, large portions of whom absolutely detest each other and very much mind "partying next to each other". And as Reddit grows, the tensions are becoming more severe, not less. > An anti-authoritarian community that wants free speech, is not politically correct, and isn't advertiser friendly. No. A very, VERY small portion of the community could be described that way. Most people just want celebrity AMAs, cat videos, dank memes, swapping funny stories, and maybe some chat about their local city or favourite sports team. (Or relationship advice, or sex advice, or trading candy with people from other countries, or whatever it is that attracts them to Reddit.) The number of people who are ideologically committed to free speech (and not just for the things they personally like) on Reddit is, as in real life, tiny. (Edit: If you disagree, feel free to cite a study or whatever. But I'm active on reddit, moderate a moderately popular subreddit, etc., and I don't think you're describing the Reddit community as it actually exists. I'm not even sure that a Reddit community could even be said to exist.) > It may not be an easy community to profit from, but does it need to be "fixed"? See point one. Absolutely, because Reddit will stop existing the moment Reddit Inc turns the lights off because it's too hard to profit from. (Yeah, sure, maybe they'll hand the domain name off to a non-profit that can try and cover costs with donations first. Assuming there's anything left by that point, the resulting website won't look much like the Reddit of today.)

maxerickson 11y ago

I think reddit overall is more comparable to a festival. There are groups and communities there interacting with each other and within themselves, but there is not all that much that they all have in common that they don't also have in common with their neighbor who isn't sure about computers being good for anything. I don't intend that to be hair splitting about words, I think that attempts to address reddit users as a single community are a fools errand.