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Question: How comfortable are you with well-upvoted and -participated-in discussion threads -- like the one we are participating in here -- suddenly dropping ou

Question: How comfortable are you with well-upvoted and -participated-in discussion threads -- like the one we are participating in here -- suddenly dropping out of visibility on a community you contribute to in a matter of minutes, without explicit explanation and behaving other than how you might expect from the published details of the local ranking algorithm and official moderation policies, as this one has? Your answer to this question might relate to the "popular" perception of the leader of reddit in the past ~year, whether honestly and solely earned by them or not.

tptacek 11y ago
Very. I have pet issues that I'll participate in, but HN is not a forum for resolving the tech industry's controversies. To me, the most important moderation goal for HN is ensuring that members remain collegial and capable of discussion, even though we wildly different backgrounds and experiences. "Hot" controversies --- Reddit is one, most political stories also --- can harm that goal. People get nasty in them. If dropping hot stories off the front page reduces nastiness, I am all for it. Reddit is not HN. I have no idea how Reddit should be moderated. I try to minimize my participation on Reddit, because it's not moderated in a way that I find compatible with how I want to interact with people. That doesn't make Reddit evil, just, not for me. (I am a semi-avid consumer of the "good" stuff on Reddit, though).
- jewbacca 11y ago
  Fair enough, I appreciate your perspective. Here is an attempt to communicate my own, as someone "closer" to Reddit: For very many habitual users of Reddit, the way in which it is probably most valuable is as the canonical general discussion forum of the web. An important part of the infrastructure of their perception and interpretation of the world around them, for pretty much any domain beyond the most incommunicably personal. To read Reddit can be, in a surprisingly real way, like participating in a collective consciousness -- with all the addictive dependence [I say that in a non-judgemental way, not being able to come up with a less negative way to characterize it at the moment] that the type of speculative fiction which imagines such living arrangements usually predicts. The practical side of this is that, for any given news event, cultural phenomenon, popularly-circulating idea, whatever: for these users it is instinctive to consult the reddit threads on the topic, as a deeply-ingrained part of their process for digesting and interpreting it. That those reddit threads will exist and have an active discussion on any given topic is a given. Even if the local source of a news piece has a forum/thread of its own, it is fundamentally not the same thing. It's been, in a hazy golden age that may have never actually existed, something close a total function for processing the events of the world, big and small. One day, there was an event, a dumb internet drama event, but one for which the primary Reddit discussion thread was displaying a count of 20 thousand comments -- but on inspection, every single last one of those was showing up as [deleted]. That was the start of it for most users. Many have fixated on the specific topic of that initial drama as the source of the problem with Reddit, and many others have fixated on this fixation as the source of the problem with Reddit. But there is a general sense that this is growing, spreading, and mutating, and seems to be cropping up in places that are not strictly predictable. For example, there are persistent rumours that several of the more popular subreddits for which the news would be directly and explicitly on-topic, are systematically removing discussions about various global trade agreements currently being negotiated. Is it true? Maybe, maybe not, but the trust is broken. ---- The main thing is (the perception that): Now there is a partial function where before there was a total function. That is disastrous damage in an information processing system. ---- To these users, this is a very profound and frightening piece of damage, having extended a part of their cognition into this machinery that now seems to be failing. Panic sets in, which obviously means wild flailing at anything that pops its head up and can be in any way seen as responsible for the damage. Hence, the reaction to Ellen Pao. Especially after she made public statements of purpose that were easily interpretable by these users to the effect of "whatever else might be the source of the damage to your extended cognition, we intent to start deliberately doing some more damage to areas we don't consider important". In the end, I very strongly suspect that the problem is much deeper and probably well beyond any control of the central management. If there were a way to, I would put money down on the prediction that the Reddit crisis, a direct continuation of the exact same crisis that's currently associated with Ellen Pao, will continue.
  - jewbacca 11y ago
    Also important to understanding this: To the users I'm talking about, the "cognitive value" of Reddit is not entirely about directly being fed opinions to take up as one's own. Many of these users find great value to being exposed to, they deliberately seek out for their own enrichment: idiocy, malice, counterfactuals, cognitive dissonance, debate (honest and otherwise), the whole range of perceptions and opinions. To them, being exposed to these things is just as much of the value of Reddit as the "good stuff". And that seems to be the aspect of Reddit most strongly and immediately under threat. Anyone who does not value this kind of experience (which seems to be a very large proportion of the people participating in this conversation at the most visible levels) is going to see any attempt to frame this type of content as valuable in any way as totally incomprehensible, evil, and malicious itself. So this part of things is pretty close to an impossible conversation to have in public.
MichaelGG 11y ago
As much as I like these drama threads (I get to enjoy them while viewing myself superior to those who watch the Kardashians), and I like seeing reddit have problems purely for the lulz-factor, such threads are typically low quality. It's not like we have a great discussion about how to manage online communities. Some of the comments are even spreading obviously incorrect rumors. Same applies to "political" issues, like antigay CTOs, or nearly every gender related thread. It'd be great if there was a way to get high quality discussion, I'll settle for just burying the crap. Even if it's fun and ostensibly relevant.

tptacek 11y ago

Very. I have pet issues that I'll participate in, but HN is not a forum for resolving the tech industry's controversies. To me, the most important moderation goal for HN is ensuring that members remain collegial and capable of discussion, even though we wildly different backgrounds and experiences. "Hot" controversies --- Reddit is one, most political stories also --- can harm that goal. People get nasty in them. If dropping hot stories off the front page reduces nastiness, I am all for it. Reddit is not HN. I have no idea how Reddit should be moderated. I try to minimize my participation on Reddit, because it's not moderated in a way that I find compatible with how I want to interact with people. That doesn't make Reddit evil, just, not for me. (I am a semi-avid consumer of the "good" stuff on Reddit, though).

jewbacca 11y ago
Fair enough, I appreciate your perspective. Here is an attempt to communicate my own, as someone "closer" to Reddit: For very many habitual users of Reddit, the way in which it is probably most valuable is as the canonical general discussion forum of the web. An important part of the infrastructure of their perception and interpretation of the world around them, for pretty much any domain beyond the most incommunicably personal. To read Reddit can be, in a surprisingly real way, like participating in a collective consciousness -- with all the addictive dependence [I say that in a non-judgemental way, not being able to come up with a less negative way to characterize it at the moment] that the type of speculative fiction which imagines such living arrangements usually predicts. The practical side of this is that, for any given news event, cultural phenomenon, popularly-circulating idea, whatever: for these users it is instinctive to consult the reddit threads on the topic, as a deeply-ingrained part of their process for digesting and interpreting it. That those reddit threads will exist and have an active discussion on any given topic is a given. Even if the local source of a news piece has a forum/thread of its own, it is fundamentally not the same thing. It's been, in a hazy golden age that may have never actually existed, something close a total function for processing the events of the world, big and small. One day, there was an event, a dumb internet drama event, but one for which the primary Reddit discussion thread was displaying a count of 20 thousand comments -- but on inspection, every single last one of those was showing up as [deleted]. That was the start of it for most users. Many have fixated on the specific topic of that initial drama as the source of the problem with Reddit, and many others have fixated on this fixation as the source of the problem with Reddit. But there is a general sense that this is growing, spreading, and mutating, and seems to be cropping up in places that are not strictly predictable. For example, there are persistent rumours that several of the more popular subreddits for which the news would be directly and explicitly on-topic, are systematically removing discussions about various global trade agreements currently being negotiated. Is it true? Maybe, maybe not, but the trust is broken. ---- The main thing is (the perception that): Now there is a partial function where before there was a total function. That is disastrous damage in an information processing system. ---- To these users, this is a very profound and frightening piece of damage, having extended a part of their cognition into this machinery that now seems to be failing. Panic sets in, which obviously means wild flailing at anything that pops its head up and can be in any way seen as responsible for the damage. Hence, the reaction to Ellen Pao. Especially after she made public statements of purpose that were easily interpretable by these users to the effect of "whatever else might be the source of the damage to your extended cognition, we intent to start deliberately doing some more damage to areas we don't consider important". In the end, I very strongly suspect that the problem is much deeper and probably well beyond any control of the central management. If there were a way to, I would put money down on the prediction that the Reddit crisis, a direct continuation of the exact same crisis that's currently associated with Ellen Pao, will continue.
- jewbacca 11y ago
  Also important to understanding this: To the users I'm talking about, the "cognitive value" of Reddit is not entirely about directly being fed opinions to take up as one's own. Many of these users find great value to being exposed to, they deliberately seek out for their own enrichment: idiocy, malice, counterfactuals, cognitive dissonance, debate (honest and otherwise), the whole range of perceptions and opinions. To them, being exposed to these things is just as much of the value of Reddit as the "good stuff". And that seems to be the aspect of Reddit most strongly and immediately under threat. Anyone who does not value this kind of experience (which seems to be a very large proportion of the people participating in this conversation at the most visible levels) is going to see any attempt to frame this type of content as valuable in any way as totally incomprehensible, evil, and malicious itself. So this part of things is pretty close to an impossible conversation to have in public.

MichaelGG 11y ago

As much as I like these drama threads (I get to enjoy them while viewing myself superior to those who watch the Kardashians), and I like seeing reddit have problems purely for the lulz-factor, such threads are typically low quality. It's not like we have a great discussion about how to manage online communities. Some of the comments are even spreading obviously incorrect rumors. Same applies to "political" issues, like antigay CTOs, or nearly every gender related thread. It'd be great if there was a way to get high quality discussion, I'll settle for just burying the crap. Even if it's fun and ostensibly relevant.