I wonder how much more this will happen with the current controversy surrounding Reddit’s funding and uncertain future. They are doing surprisingly well after a horrid redesign and everything else that’s happened over there.
Reddit is transitioning to a Facebook model to suck up all the users that are hemorrhaging from over there. There's a new concentration on posting to personal profiles, integrating commercial entities (ie, u/washingtonpost) as "users" to blend in their ads seemlessly, and gentrifying to appease these new adertisers that don't want to be next to potentially controversial content.
These are all things that don't bother the new users at all and the loss of the founding population of redditors isn't causing any tears at corporate.
Of course they go after the scoundrels first in this quest but as the frog slowly boils more and more mainstream 'controversial' subreddits like changemyview will get pushed out.
I think that was inevitable the moment they started taking big VC money. There's most proven way to become massively profitable is trading your user's attention for ad money.
There are two problems that you will have to deal with:
- auto-discovery and growth through r/all - no longer will you have people popping in because you made it to Reddit's front page
- loss of the great number of current subscribers who (before) can go to their reddit homepage and see your top posts automatically, but (now) would have to go to a totally new website to see your posts. I subscribe to about 40 subreddits but only visit deliberately about 3 of those.
Good luck (sincerely), but I would not be surprised if r/CMV stays larger than your new independent website.
They could solve both issues by federating with Mastodon instead. No, they wouldn't be on Reddit specifically, but they'd be interacting with a fairly sizeable userbase nonetheless.
Mastodon has a character limit, but the protocol underlying Mastodon (ActivityPub: http://activitypub.rocks/) doesn't.
Adding a character limit was just a design decision on the part of the Mastodon developers to make their app more Twitter-like. There's nothing stopping others from building apps that don't have a character limit, and they would be able to federate with Mastodon and other AP-enabled apps just fine.
There’s patches floating around to change the limit on Masto, too. My instance limits you to 7777, and requires you to put it behind a CW if it’s more than 777. I know of an instance that gives you unlimited text if it’s behind a CW.
It'd be not-that-difficult, technology wise, to integrate with Reddit, with submissions instead going to changeaview.com instead of reddit.com's comment section.
Reddit doesn't really care what their subreddits are used for. If they did then they would just delete the numerous hate/death/gore/revengeporn/etc. subs that have persisted for years.
I'm sure people who used to use Slashdot and Digg thought the same thing.
I enjoy being a bystander to efforts to break free from platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc; Stackoverflow, for example, pushes their data dumps into the Internet Archive [1] and that data will never be locked up. Even if unsuccessful, efforts to break free of closed platforms are necessary, otherwise we're burning up untold amounts of human effort for data that will be lost to time in the name of VC and shareholder profits.
I don't like the subreddit but if I did, I would be interested in participating in their community on a separate website. To each their own, I guess.
Why I don't like it: a big part of it is people taking troll posts seriously. The third post down on changeaview.com when I visited it is "To be transgender or to condone it is nothing short of a lie". Then the author goes through a bunch of talking points. They're not there to give people a fair chance to change their view but to get people to read their garbage. Still, people argue posts like these and get to feel good about it, when they're really just helping to provide attention to trolls.
I'm interested in how this taxonomy of discussion works... can you define the lines between what is "fair" discussion, "talking points" "trolling" and "garbage"? Like, where does criticism of Israeli military aggression against Palestinians fall? If that's an easy one, what about Ilhan Omar's views on the government's influence in geopolitical affairs? Whatever your answers, would many people not disagree?
It'll be interesting to see if this works. If it does, it means that Reddit mods can gain full ownership of their communities and do something more than just run a volunteer subreddit. If you run a popular sub, I think it's reasonable to ask why you are spending countless unpaid hours tending to a community when someone else reaps all the profit. It's natural to say: "Okay, I have hundreds of thousands of users here on Reddit. That's gotta be worth something."
This does open the Pandora's box of monetizing a group of people that really dislike getting monetized. (Reddit users, that is.) And if it does work, maybe Reddit communities will start to be seen as a way to start community-based businesses/organizations.
I mod a large-ish subreddit and I disagree with moderators "gaining full ownership of their communities". Not every mod was around since the very beginning or did most of these mods spend considerable effort marketing their communities like one would do in an actual company. Even for communities with a clear theme and set of behavioural rules (e.g. r/CMV), a lot of that is enforceable via AutoMod. Most of what moderators do are barely more than Internet janitors.
A volunteer position is voluntary. There is no contract or minimum time commitment (though some subs have minimum mod action requirements). If a moderator no longer likes to commit their time, they can either go on a hiatus or leave.
Monetizing individual Reddit communities or paying moderators will create a whole plethora of financial and ethical issues which Reddit HQ is obviously unwilling to address at the moment. I'm pretty sure they've thought about this and decided keeping the status quo is the best choice for the time being.
Good for them. I honestly and truly hope they succeed.
I have a small sub (30-40k =/- subscribers)and thought about doing this. I have the infrastructure for my personal projects but don't know if I wanna deal with the upkeep and some of the few mods we have.
We're not political, we just wanna help people learn something and tell someone to bugger off when it's needed. Would open up a lot of possibilities and we would just use the Reddit sub as a link farm back to our site. It's horrible UI and other inabilities aren't the experiences we want for our users.
That's not a small sub, that's almost large imo. Small is anything up to a few hundred, assuming not more than 1% is active daily (a few hundred subscribers is therefore a handful of users afaict). But 35k is probably hundreds of people on there every day. Imagine all those people meeting in real life, that's a decent company.
Is there a decentralized version of Reddit that allows you to own your subreddit? I recently got burned where a sub I created was taken from me without explanation or warning and when I reached out to the admins, it fell on deaf ears. The idea that you have no ownership over your subreddit is bearable until you get burned and realize how crazy it is. Same thing goes for YouTube.
I created the subreddit and brought on moderators I watched over for years, then about 8 months ago I was removed suddenly without any warning or reason. When I reached out to the admins they replied with an automated response. It truly pisses me off because this was a good will project for me and I was an archangel of the sub. It only started to bother me that they did this when the usurper mods started supporting a third party platform in an effort to potentially move people off the sub, which I found to be suspicious and now I can do nothing about it. It really left a terrible taste in my mouth.
Any moderator who is inactive for 60 days can have their moderated/owned reddits reclaimed.
As an example, Tales by Toxlab (https://old.reddit.com/r/TalesByToxlab) is a subreddit of personal stories by a single person ... who died in 2016. By Reddit's rules, anybody could claim that sub for any purpose.
I've maintained a sub since five years, and yet haave now ownership in it. For a sub that's merely topical that might be acceptable, but this sub is not.
Funnily enough, it also implements some of the stuff mentioned here, like public visibility of moderation log so the users can see what mods are doing, and with which justification.
Very cool. We need things like this. Maybe to help with on boarding you could make a part of it be a reddit interface so I can just use Aether like a superset of reddit. Just a thought. Good luck with the project!
I had to go search in some reddit thread to find it since if you search for aether you get a legacy project from Eclipse.
Also the source on github does not appear to be up to date with the version that is download from the site. (2.0.0-dev.6+1811211332.746ec27e.d on git hub and the one I downloaded is 2.0.0-dev.11+1903010147.3fd391a3)
It's not really an open source project (at least right now.) He's developing in a private repo and pushing releases to github every now and then. I don't want to speak for rolleiflex but he has mentioned in other threads that he is working full time on it and isn't really interested in public contributions or the politics involved of maintaining an open source project at the moment.
Link to aether thread: aether://board/86e782e80681ac580b4d6d102b12e787c066e59f194fee57bb0bf83cc1e42fc6/thread/e4871294ed115310e029a3b4c37b378ffefa7de490ef5b58bb1aeb1b1cbbea1e
Ironically, the discoverability reddit provides was originally as a link sharing site. Says a lot about how reddit has changed that this isn't considered as true anymore.
When I first saw the subreddit, I thought it was a neat idea. I like the idea of digging into a tough subject and challenging our beliefs.
I couldn't put my finger on it for the longest time, but what I eventually realized was that I didn't like how inauthentic the whole thing felt. Changing a deeply held belief just isn't that easy, yet almost every thread has the OP giving a delta.
How it appears to me is that people have beliefs that they realize are either unpopular or controversial, and so they use the subreddit to learn what they "should" believe or at least a rationalization for ignoring their true beliefs.
Beliefs usually aren't changed by one conversation, but that doesn't mean that a single conversation can't contribute to a person changing their view. If it's part a gradual process it can still have value.
When the OP's view has somehow changed, or they find a compelling argument, they "award" a delta. It's a message with the delta letter that acknowledges the change of view.
The problem is that getting the OP to change their mind on a portion of their submission statement counts as worthy of a delta, even if it makes no material difference to their opinion. For instance, many posters that are not careful with their words might say "most people are bad at ___" but have no supporting data for "most", and so then will simply award a delta and amend their opinion to "too many" or something of that nature.
People probably don’t use it to question their closely held beliefs. Like me, they probably used it when they had a loosely held opinion that they weren’t sure the validity of.
I think the main use of CMV is for people to post things they disagree with because they want to crowdsource an argument against it. There's definitely been times when my counterargument to a point was much better articulated on CMV than I could have ever come up with on my own.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were political operatives from both parties crowdsourcing arguments that agree with their point of view by posting the opposite point of view.
> How it appears to me is that people have beliefs that they realize are either unpopular or controversial, and so they use the subreddit to learn what they "should" believe or at least a rationalization for ignoring their true beliefs.
A large portion of Reddit in general (especially the front page and popular subreddits) is people making up stories/opinions/content created specifically to illicit as many replies and argument as possible, as that's what gets more votes and attention. It's a popularity contest, not a place for genuine discussion.
You see it here too, to a lesser extent. You see it everywhere there's likes/upvotes tied to accounts. People compete for the high score.
I still personally think forums were/are a better format for discussion. Just a flowing conversation where general activity in a thread bumps it up and not votes.
Even the traditional PHP forum has all kinds of senseless 'flare' on each post. Post counts, signup dates, eye catching signatures, etc. A large portion of the screen space on your typical forum is still dedicated to attention seeking behavior.
IRC is better. There is very little on screen besides the discussion itself. IRC nicks can be used to grab attention, but there are only a few characters to work with so usually it's just a bit quirky but not really distracting.
I wouldn't call HackerNews just a chat. It's articles, then some chat in the comments. That wouldn't work well with Discord I don't think? The main goal of HackerNews (for me) is to load it up, scroll, consume posts from the day, contribute/collaborate/ask questions/ etc. Discord is more about being engaged in the conversation as it is happening
No, but Slack arguably serves as a "web-browser-accessible persistent IRC with threads and no scores." I suspect what that describes wouldn't serve the same niche as Reddit/HN, either. It could, but the vibe would be very different.
And 4chan theoretically is better still, because the anonymity means posters are not rewarded at all for their contributions. Even the same poster, posting twice in the thread is not identifiable on most boards, allowing the discussion to be the primary focus. On the other hand, the culture of most *chans is to be abusive and confrontational, so who knows if it is any better.
In my experience 4chan has more attention seeking behavior than IRC (inline images facilitate it moreso than nicks), and on IRC users tend to be more friendly and aware of each other's humanity.
4chan style threads with account names might actually be better. You can have really good discussions in imageboards (in the smaller boards) because you don't have a bunch of non-participants butting in with their upvotes and downvotes.
Even Metafilter with their very low key favorites "voting system" gives rise to a contest for getting the most favorites.
It's not popular on 4chan, but there are other smaller imageboards on which it's popular to use usernames (tripcodes in their parlance.) I can't say I'm a big fan.
I actually think it’s the opposite. On traditional social media a mediocre post will still get a few likes. On 4chan a new thread needs to achieve quick popularity or it’ll get deleted within 5 minutes.
I think that is part of what fules the negative culture. The anonymity and lack of moderation surely helps but outrageous threads simply have a higher chance of surviving on 4chan.
Serious question here- but how do I go about finding irc channels for stuff I’m interested in? When I was younger I loved irc but my warez days are long gone and I literally have no idea where to start looking anymore.
This conversation reads like an xkcd strip. "Reddit style threads are the best." "Forums are ideal." "IRC is better." Half expecting this to progress to ARPANET or written letters.
This seems to be a thing developer-type people struggle with a lot, and I really think it is an engineering mindset issue. We tend to like the things we have control over or understand completely, and technologies that have hidden parts (like Reddit or certain controversial programming languages) are disliked for their perceived dishonesty.
IRC’s problem for deep conversations is that conversations in a chat medium are more ephemeral and that the shorter is better, not unlike Twitter, a format that exemplifies why shorter conversations do not give a great medium for longer/deeper conversations.
With forums, posts aren’t generally deleted except by maybe an admin if someone has been violating rules, and due to the permanence, people generally spend more time thinking what what they post.
With forums you often get a topic that has 500 posts, 480 of which are pure "me too / works for me" noise. Those 500 posts are split into 50 pages of 10 posts each, and page one has the oldest posts. The post with the answer is on page 46 and the pages after that are just 30-40 comments thanking whoever came up with the answer. So if you jump straight to the end then start working backwards, you're looking at maybe 10 or so page loads before you actually find the answer you're looking for.
Some forums aren't shit, but all of those cookie cutter PHP forums all seem to be shit.
QA forums are trash and they were totally replaced by stack exchange but general talk forums are still quite good. Private torrent trackers always have forums attached and the quality is usually quite good because its very hard to get a new account if you get banned.
From what I have seen, private forums are much more civil but its tough to actually build a community when its so much effort to join.
This is exactly why HN/Reddit format of tree-structured discussions is superior to linear phpBB forums. They allow for segregating subtopics (on a long forum thread, there are always subtopics and offtopics), letting you ignore the things that are not relevant to you.
Were I setting up a discussion forum today, I'd immediately look for something halfway between HN and Reddit. Reddit itself is too much of a PITA to host (we tried in our Hackerspace, but didn't go too far); HN has too little markup and no built-in functionality for storing notifications about replies.
IRC deep conversations do happen and indeed you want persistence for those. Communities which rely on IRC use IRC logs for that. Perl projects use IRC that way and I think the Mozilla guys too.
> Even the traditional PHP forum has all kinds of senseless 'flare' on each post. Post counts, signup dates, eye catching signatures, etc. A large portion of the screen space on your typical forum is still dedicated to attention seeking behavior.
This is what drives me up a wall with forums. All. The. Visual. Noise. So much crap that obfuscates what I really want to look at.
Realistically signal/noise ratio of 0.05 to 0.01 is good enough in open forum comments. It's still possible to scan comments and find the signal from the noise.
Usenet was incredible before the eternal September. There was noise, trolls, flame wars and mentally instable people and good and bad moderation decisions, but the good was really good. Party due to the higher quality of the users and from the inability to make money from it. Top people were reading and lurking in relevant newsgroups and commented sometimes or sent private comment via email.
HN has two things common with Usenet, good moderation and higher than average users. What has changed is the motives. There are many users who are self promoting or marketing with pseudo-informative submissions. They push blog posts that are just written to increase visibility and "what I experienced when doing business", many of those stories made up.
With all this negative stuff, HN has still good singal/noise ratio and you can learn from comments and discussions.
Ask for an invite. That's how I got my account there. Be ready to supply an email address and be aware that at least some of thise who sends invites dig through posting history before sending an invite.
Also note that posting and commenting guidelines might be experienced as somewhat stricter than here.
Even imageboards like 4chan, in the smaller boards at least, you can get a decent discussion as there is no concept of upvotes nor automatic hiding of posts and replies are always in chronological order. The only main difference between them and a traditional forum is anonymity.
Back before the far right started getting really bad in the US (2004-2008ish) I even enjoyed /b/ on 4chan. There were several experiments that would be run on the board, with one eliminating IDs even within individual threads. The effect is that, every idea and comment is judged as-is, with no BS authority. Granted, still being in general a cesspool, and only a few years past its childporn heydays, often very negative ideas are given honest support.
But in the end, everything expires after a few hours anyway, no matter how popular, which I always thought was the true value of 4chan
For better or worse, the "delta" concept has become to mean "you made a good point on the opposite side that I hadn't considered" and still serves a useful function in that context.
"Following on from the previous segment, we therefore believe that a change in view simply means a new perspective. Perhaps, in the example of literally looking at something, you've taken a step to the side; or a few steps; or you've moved around and now stand behind it. Maybe you haven't 'moved', but it looks slightly different to you now; in a new light.
A change in view need not be a reversal. It can be tangential, or takes place on a new axis altogether."
A friend built https://arguman.org/ a few years ago. It's a platform for structured discussions ("argument analysis") which uses a different (IMHO better) approach to discussions than unstructured text.
Woah, it looks great! Reminds me of Kialo (https://www.kialo.com/), but there are only two ways to recursively split an argument there ("agree" / "disagree") vs. three here, and I also like Arguman's layout more. Pass my thanks to your friend, as I've wanted for a long time to see discussions represented in this kind of tree layout.
(Another thing I'd really love to see would be an extension of this: a DAG of arguments, not a tree. This would most likely make sense only when arguments solidified, and could be rearranged and deduplicated to form a graph.)
They will rapidly find that 90% of their traffic continues to exist within the subreddit, therefore anyone wanting a good thread will post it there rather than on the website, and the website will rapidly atrophy and be abandoned.
What's funniest to me about this is how reddit spent a bunch of money creating their own image hosting service, but somehow imgur is still often the better choice.
I've been following this community and it's what inspired me over the last year to build Dinnertable.chat, live matchmaking conversation platform that we released just a few weeks ago:
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/dinnertable-chat-3
Let's be honest about a different factor here - even if ChangeAView doesn't take off, I doubt CMR has much of a future. There are few places on Reddit where any sort of divergent view is accepted by the board, by the mods, and the community in general. Maybe CMV continues to stick around, but given how polarized it reddit has become, it's doubtful that there is room for a subreddit that encourages open, critical thought..
(I say this, after finally throwing in the towel and unsubscribing from /politics today. Even as a nevertrumper, the daily drumbeat of vitriol against anyone who doesn't exhibit perfect ideological conformance is staggering)..
This feels wrong. I created a niche sub that currently has ~10k users, but I consider the members of the community to be as much the "owners" of it as I am.
Just as I work to keep spammers and self-promoters at bay, I'd find it pretty scummy to form a startup around the sub and make money out of the contributions of thousands of community members.
Separately, I like that at Reddit I know what I get now and very likely to get in the future. But what if ChangeAView pulls a Quora and starts making it harder to view content, like requiring login, etc.
Yup. Were I a member of that community, I'd feel wronged too.
> Just as I work to keep spammers and self-promoters at bay, I'd find it pretty scummy to form a startup around the sub and make money out of the contributions of thousands of community members.
Exactly. As you said, you may have created a community and technically own the forum, but you're not the community. The community is its own thing, and the founder demanding it move somewhere else so they can monetize it would be no different than an invasion of spammers - just another attempt at profiting off the community.
The idea that people’s important opinions can be changed by some sort of silver bullet mega-argument is naive and immature, and frankly a great example of what’s wrong with discourse on the internet.
In this light, the fact that CMV has the hubris to think their ‘experiment’ is significant outside reddit is not surprising, but no less laughable.
> The idea that people’s important opinions can be changed by some sort of silver bullet mega-argument is naive and immature, and frankly a great example of what’s wrong with discourse on the internet.
Even more naive and immature is the idea that conversations either lead to epiphany or do nothing. Comments are read several orders of magnitude more than they're responded to. You might not change that person's mind right now, but that kind of discourse is a part of how other people form or reinforce their opinions, and the OP might be more willing to change their mind in the future upon having other interactions and experiences that challenge their views, especially if someone has shown them a good-faith argument in the past.
> Even more naive and immature is the idea that conversations either lead to epiphany or do nothing.
Ah yes, where ever did I get that idea when forming my opinion about a site titled change my view, where you literally get a whole separate level of fake internet points for giving people deltas, cough, epiphanies?
Except CMV itself doesn't claim that that "whole separate level of fake internet points" are
epiphanies, or even full changes of position
>The definition of 'change' (verb) is "make or become different."
>Following on from the previous segment, we therefore believe that a change in view simply means a new perspective. Perhaps, in the example of literally looking at something, you've taken a step to the side; or a few steps; or you've moved around and now stand behind it. Maybe you haven't 'moved', but it looks slightly different to you now; in a new light.
>A change in view need not be a reversal. It can be tangential, or takes place on a new axis altogether.
I guarantee you with 100% certainty that this will fail. No one will care about it. You will try to use your sub to force traffic to your site and it won’t work the way you hope. Your domain will be banned on reddit soon and marked as spam. You will be removed as moderators of your own subreddit because your accounts will be banned too. This has literally happened before even when the site connected to the sub already existed before the sub itself did (LifeProTips for example). When this happens, you will kick and scream and demand justice but no one will listen to you. NO ONE. You are about to spend months or years on an idea that WILL fail. You really need to give up this idea immediately and do something else.
This won’t work. Here is why: I tried the same thing with /r/lifeprotips.
I created that subreddit YEARS ago and initially wanted to build the website for it.
I populated all the good life hacks that I found throughout the internet initially to the subreddit and the community naturally grew — but I also invested time and money into it (by giving gold to top members).
Then when I launched the website, I had an auto moderator rule that removed a post from anyone who submitted a link-based post and PM’d them telling them to submit to the new website (@lifeprotips.com).
Well, guess what happened? Someone got upset and reported me. Because I had Adsense on it, that went to “justify” their case saying I was monetizing the subreddit.
It resulted in a subsequent shadow ban which eventually led to the removal of my reddit account (pretty old account with lots of history).
The mod who did this is /u/krispykrackers.
Good luck, though. I’m rooting for you, because Reddit doesn’t reward or appreciate creators, and without them, they’d be nothing.
The mistake you made was allowing posts at all on Reddit. You should have changed the CSS to point people at lifeprotips.com, and just created submissions for posts on lifeprotips.com.
The mistake was thinking they owned a community. They may have started it, but once grown, the community is its own thing. A successful migration to an external website would require a wide buy-in from the prominent community members, and cannot be done by fiat by whoever technically controls the means of discussion.
Reddit communities aren't the same as in person social communities, they don't have any real structure beyond the moderation class. The "buy in" you're talking about is the fact that this site was built.
I don't think this will "succeed", but not because of anything related to migration; it's just not that good of an idea, from a business standpoint. If they redefine success as something other than growth and user retention, maybe they can create a fake kind of success, but this site will not grow users or any of the things a normal startup looks for when launching a product, and the monetization will never be worth anything of value, but simply because the idea isn't that great.
WRT. communities - no, there really is more to it than "moderation class", just like there's more to HN than pg, dang and sctb. Regular submitters, regular commenters and people voting are what creates a community, what makes visitors go there, what makes one subreddit better than another on the same topic. They're the soul of a subreddit. Despite what the subreddit creator or moderators want, nothing can prevent those regulars from deciding to stay, or to move elsewhere. 'fourstar built a site and wanted to migrate the community by fiat, but people didn't move, and instead reported him.
> it's just not that good of an idea, from a business standpoint. If they redefine success as something other than growth and user retention, maybe they can create a fake kind of success, but this site will not grow users or any of the things a normal startup looks for when launching a product (...)
Here is a thing: nobody in the community cares. The regular posters, commenters and voters don't care about "growth and user retention" beyond "people like it in here". Lurkers and irregular visitors don't care about it either, they're interested in actual content the community curates. Communities like subreddits exist so that people with like interest can exchange thoughts and media about those interests together. That somebody monetizes them indirectly through ads is an artifact of hosted platforms, but nobody will be willing to abandon a perfectly good one just because someone related to the community wants to take this money for themselves instead.
Imagine this: a guy got together some people and started organizing regular open poetry evenings in a coffee shop in the center of a city. The event became successful, grew quite an audience; the coffee shop wanted it there (as it drove foot traffic), so it kind of kept organizing itself. Fast forward couple years, the original organizer suddenly announces that from now on, the meetings will take place in a coffee shop he just opened on the outskirts. How do you think the regular guests and performers would react? I imagine they'd laugh the guy out of a room - it's ridiculous to leave a perfectly good meeting place and move to the middle of nowhere just because one person really really wants to make money off them. I imagine if the guy was telling the guests to go elsewhere next time, the coffee shop itself would step in and kick the guy out.
Reddit and HN are entirely unrelated, and any sense of community that you think exists in a subreddit is your own perception, not reality. Sorry, it just isn't there, because the platform doesn't allow for it.
My personal experience strongly disagree with yours. Not every subreddit develops a community where people recognize each other, but many do. Or, as you say, I'm imagining it.
Regardless, my argument still holds. Whatever semblance of community there is, it's obvious it won't appreciate someone disrupting it in order to make a buck.
Sorry, you're completely imagining it, and no your argument doesn't hold.
Also, I hate to break it to you, but Reddit is making more than a buck on your little "community". Nothing whatsoever is different or special about Reddit vs. this website.
You're not part of anything, you're not building anything, the people you think of as "friends" on Reddit aren't, and you need to realize that. That site isn't for what you think it's for.
To paraphrase : "We have been looking to find a way to monetise community involvement and we think that moving it to somewhere that we control will let us do that."
I myself am keen on big houses, fun parties and fast cars, so I can see the attraction for the founders, I'm not sure what's in it for anyone else though.
This seem fair, why should community moderators not get paid for their work? Reddit gets everyone else to do the work and then scoops up the ad views at the end.
Jesus fucking Christ, this site is just the purest toxic waste.
The assholes that now populate the internet are kind of fucking sickening.
Everything is wrong with the world. I used to lay blame, and throw shade at certain people in particular (people I know personally), but you know what? It's the whole fucking planet. Someone out there has royally screwed the pooch, somehow, somewhere around the mid-1990's, and there's no going back.
>CMV: Asking peopel to stop using the "OK Hand" gesture because racists use it, just gives power to that hand sign and legitimizes the white power movement.
Holy crap, some people actually discuss something like this?
What's worse, people actually believe such stuff. Then you get people on the media accused of being supporters of $evil-ideology because they scratched their nose the wrong way at a conference.
Honestly, I don't see what's wrong with that discussion topic. I personally haven't come to a conclusion myself.
On one hand, knowing it's associated with racists makes me hesitate to ever use it. On the other hand, why should I let them change my behavior when a minuscule bit of research would show that I'm clearly not a racist? Like with many such things, it mostly depends on the context, but would be interested in the conversation and not so quick to dismiss it as pointless.
Really? For me it sounds like this - "Should we castrate men because some men are rapists?".
>On one hand, knowing it's associated with racists
I'm pretty sure this is just west's or even a certain number of countries problem. This topic is the second time I've personally ever heard\read that somebody uses this sign as something other than an "ok" sign. The first time I've read about it in someone's tweet - I even decided to call out to my friends\readers\etc and one guy from Canada new about this.
Anyhow - no, nobody should stop using some sign just because a small, even if very vocal group of people started using in for whatever reason they have. Next time they will start to wear some color and what? We should stop wearing it? Last time I checked people are pretty damn good with wearing brown coats from Hugo Boss despite the obvious history facts.
This is like building a cage around yourself just because there are a few stray dogs with rabies in the town.
>dismiss
I'm not saying it should be dismissed, if someone have questions or doubts - one should feel free to voice them, sure. I'm just amazed by the topic, or rather by the fact that some people haven't found an answer to this after so many years. If this helps them to find one - I'm glad.
a subreddit behaving as its own website? sounds like HN.
honestly i wish them luck. reddit has a bit too much power imo, making a lot of money off of volunteers. I am also concerned about the data available at their fingertips. They could build profiles on people like few others could, comparable to facebook, with some differences regarding the pseudo-anonymity. I only access it via throwaways and vpn.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 220 ms ] threadThese are all things that don't bother the new users at all and the loss of the founding population of redditors isn't causing any tears at corporate.
Of course they go after the scoundrels first in this quest but as the frog slowly boils more and more mainstream 'controversial' subreddits like changemyview will get pushed out.
r/DarkNetMarkets has https://www.gwern.net/DNM-archives
r/TheRedPill has https://trpbackup.com/
Reddit got rid of the "post view count" and has decided to " restrict access to sub-reddit traffic pages to mods only".
source : https://redd.it/6atvgi
- auto-discovery and growth through r/all - no longer will you have people popping in because you made it to Reddit's front page
- loss of the great number of current subscribers who (before) can go to their reddit homepage and see your top posts automatically, but (now) would have to go to a totally new website to see your posts. I subscribe to about 40 subreddits but only visit deliberately about 3 of those.
Good luck (sincerely), but I would not be surprised if r/CMV stays larger than your new independent website.
Adding a character limit was just a design decision on the part of the Mastodon developers to make their app more Twitter-like. There's nothing stopping others from building apps that don't have a character limit, and they would be able to federate with Mastodon and other AP-enabled apps just fine.
It's not a tiny userbase, but it's quite small by present social media standards.
http://sp3r4z.fr/mastodon/general
https://www.redditinc.com/press
http://redditmetrics.com/
And not necessarily by suing, Reddit could save itself some trouble and simply delete the subreddit.
I'd be surprised if Reddit liked that.
Reddit offers an extensive API to do just that: https://www.reddit.com/dev/api/
It makes tons of business sense to let things like that happen. It is in no way a legal can of worms or in fact any trouble at all.
"with submissions [ALSO] going to changeaview.com [AND] reddit.com's comment section" ?
If the replies only went to changeaview.com the entire comment section would be blank when browsing via Reddit.
https://trademarks.justia.com/869/44/ama-86944696.html
Update: they didn't, but they did trademark "nosleep."
(They did reach out to us to try and organize a live, in-person r/nosleep Halloween event, only to eventually ghost us about it. Twice.)
https://trademarks.justia.com/880/64/nosleep-88064058.html
https://trademarks.justia.com/880/64/r-88064059.html
I enjoy being a bystander to efforts to break free from platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc; Stackoverflow, for example, pushes their data dumps into the Internet Archive [1] and that data will never be locked up. Even if unsuccessful, efforts to break free of closed platforms are necessary, otherwise we're burning up untold amounts of human effort for data that will be lost to time in the name of VC and shareholder profits.
[1] https://archive.org/details/stackexchange
https://www.reddit.com/wiki/rss
Why I don't like it: a big part of it is people taking troll posts seriously. The third post down on changeaview.com when I visited it is "To be transgender or to condone it is nothing short of a lie". Then the author goes through a bunch of talking points. They're not there to give people a fair chance to change their view but to get people to read their garbage. Still, people argue posts like these and get to feel good about it, when they're really just helping to provide attention to trolls.
If it sounds like astroturfed content then it’s likely to be so, whether intentional or not.
This does open the Pandora's box of monetizing a group of people that really dislike getting monetized. (Reddit users, that is.) And if it does work, maybe Reddit communities will start to be seen as a way to start community-based businesses/organizations.
A volunteer position is voluntary. There is no contract or minimum time commitment (though some subs have minimum mod action requirements). If a moderator no longer likes to commit their time, they can either go on a hiatus or leave.
Monetizing individual Reddit communities or paying moderators will create a whole plethora of financial and ethical issues which Reddit HQ is obviously unwilling to address at the moment. I'm pretty sure they've thought about this and decided keeping the status quo is the best choice for the time being.
I have a small sub (30-40k =/- subscribers)and thought about doing this. I have the infrastructure for my personal projects but don't know if I wanna deal with the upkeep and some of the few mods we have.
We're not political, we just wanna help people learn something and tell someone to bugger off when it's needed. Would open up a lot of possibilities and we would just use the Reddit sub as a link farm back to our site. It's horrible UI and other inabilities aren't the experiences we want for our users.
As an example, Tales by Toxlab (https://old.reddit.com/r/TalesByToxlab) is a subreddit of personal stories by a single person ... who died in 2016. By Reddit's rules, anybody could claim that sub for any purpose.
The xkcd sub was taken over by Holocaust-denying neo-nazis (https://www.dailydot.com/news/xkcd-reddit-moderator-drama/). That was eventually recovered.
I've maintained a sub since five years, and yet haave now ownership in it. For a sub that's merely topical that might be acceptable, but this sub is not.
Funnily enough, it also implements some of the stuff mentioned here, like public visibility of moderation log so the users can see what mods are doing, and with which justification.
(Disclosure: I’m the creator - prior HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18370208 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19161171)
I had to go search in some reddit thread to find it since if you search for aether you get a legacy project from Eclipse.
Also the source on github does not appear to be up to date with the version that is download from the site. (2.0.0-dev.6+1811211332.746ec27e.d on git hub and the one I downloaded is 2.0.0-dev.11+1903010147.3fd391a3)
Link to aether thread: aether://board/86e782e80681ac580b4d6d102b12e787c066e59f194fee57bb0bf83cc1e42fc6/thread/e4871294ed115310e029a3b4c37b378ffefa7de490ef5b58bb1aeb1b1cbbea1e
[0] https://github.com/reddit
That's actually good. The new Reddit design is a dumpster fire, and something I would not myself want to inflict on other human beings.
There are othr issues.
See:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/8rq08y/i_wont_...
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/20yhxc/reddit_...
https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/acg9zf/alternativ...
I couldn't put my finger on it for the longest time, but what I eventually realized was that I didn't like how inauthentic the whole thing felt. Changing a deeply held belief just isn't that easy, yet almost every thread has the OP giving a delta.
How it appears to me is that people have beliefs that they realize are either unpopular or controversial, and so they use the subreddit to learn what they "should" believe or at least a rationalization for ignoring their true beliefs.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were political operatives from both parties crowdsourcing arguments that agree with their point of view by posting the opposite point of view.
A large portion of Reddit in general (especially the front page and popular subreddits) is people making up stories/opinions/content created specifically to illicit as many replies and argument as possible, as that's what gets more votes and attention. It's a popularity contest, not a place for genuine discussion.
You see it here too, to a lesser extent. You see it everywhere there's likes/upvotes tied to accounts. People compete for the high score.
I still personally think forums were/are a better format for discussion. Just a flowing conversation where general activity in a thread bumps it up and not votes.
IRC is better. There is very little on screen besides the discussion itself. IRC nicks can be used to grab attention, but there are only a few characters to work with so usually it's just a bit quirky but not really distracting.
OpenStreetMap-US has a slack with ~1400 people.
I wouldn't call HackerNews just a chat. It's articles, then some chat in the comments. That wouldn't work well with Discord I don't think? The main goal of HackerNews (for me) is to load it up, scroll, consume posts from the day, contribute/collaborate/ask questions/ etc. Discord is more about being engaged in the conversation as it is happening
I have been on IRC since 1993 but this is news to me.
Even Metafilter with their very low key favorites "voting system" gives rise to a contest for getting the most favorites.
I think that is part of what fules the negative culture. The anonymity and lack of moderation surely helps but outrageous threads simply have a higher chance of surviving on 4chan.
There's not that many networks:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Internet_Relay_Chat_n...
You can also go in the other direction, checking if the stuff you are interested in lists a channel (which I realize is sort of obvious, whatever).
This seems to be a thing developer-type people struggle with a lot, and I really think it is an engineering mindset issue. We tend to like the things we have control over or understand completely, and technologies that have hidden parts (like Reddit or certain controversial programming languages) are disliked for their perceived dishonesty.
With forums, posts aren’t generally deleted except by maybe an admin if someone has been violating rules, and due to the permanence, people generally spend more time thinking what what they post.
Some forums aren't shit, but all of those cookie cutter PHP forums all seem to be shit.
From what I have seen, private forums are much more civil but its tough to actually build a community when its so much effort to join.
Were I setting up a discussion forum today, I'd immediately look for something halfway between HN and Reddit. Reddit itself is too much of a PITA to host (we tried in our Hackerspace, but didn't go too far); HN has too little markup and no built-in functionality for storing notifications about replies.
This is what drives me up a wall with forums. All. The. Visual. Noise. So much crap that obfuscates what I really want to look at.
Usenet was incredible before the eternal September. There was noise, trolls, flame wars and mentally instable people and good and bad moderation decisions, but the good was really good. Party due to the higher quality of the users and from the inability to make money from it. Top people were reading and lurking in relevant newsgroups and commented sometimes or sent private comment via email.
HN has two things common with Usenet, good moderation and higher than average users. What has changed is the motives. There are many users who are self promoting or marketing with pseudo-informative submissions. They push blog posts that are just written to increase visibility and "what I experienced when doing business", many of those stories made up. With all this negative stuff, HN has still good singal/noise ratio and you can learn from comments and discussions.
Also note that posting and commenting guidelines might be experienced as somewhat stricter than here.
Even imageboards like 4chan, in the smaller boards at least, you can get a decent discussion as there is no concept of upvotes nor automatic hiding of posts and replies are always in chronological order. The only main difference between them and a traditional forum is anonymity.
But in the end, everything expires after a few hours anyway, no matter how popular, which I always thought was the true value of 4chan
The aim is modest: just to change op’s view on a topic of their choice, not completely reverse it like the priests in age of empires do.
It doesn't mean strictly that you've changed your opinion entirely to agree with them, but that you can appreciate a new perspective.
From https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/index#wiki_what_i...
"Following on from the previous segment, we therefore believe that a change in view simply means a new perspective. Perhaps, in the example of literally looking at something, you've taken a step to the side; or a few steps; or you've moved around and now stand behind it. Maybe you haven't 'moved', but it looks slightly different to you now; in a new light.
A change in view need not be a reversal. It can be tangential, or takes place on a new axis altogether."
> til with flair
as most people are just learning something exists, and it falls foul of the 'right here, right now" fallacy
(Another thing I'd really love to see would be an extension of this: a DAG of arguments, not a tree. This would most likely make sense only when arguments solidified, and could be rearranged and deduplicated to form a graph.)
If the option is to successfully monetize a portion of the flow vs nothing, it may turn out to be a net positive for the subreddit admins.
(I say this, after finally throwing in the towel and unsubscribing from /politics today. Even as a nevertrumper, the daily drumbeat of vitriol against anyone who doesn't exhibit perfect ideological conformance is staggering)..
"Jimmy graduated from college." Not "Jimmy graduated college."
Alternately acceptable exception that proves the rule: "State College graduated 1500 students this year."
See also: "Oil needs to be changed." Not "Oil needs changed."
People are afraid of "to be" these days.
Correct (I think) alternatives: "Oil needs change", "Oil needs changing".
The oil needs to be changed
The oil needs changing
Not great. It’s very common, but it’s gerund abuse. In a lot of places it’s considered hillbilly talk.
Just as I work to keep spammers and self-promoters at bay, I'd find it pretty scummy to form a startup around the sub and make money out of the contributions of thousands of community members.
Separately, I like that at Reddit I know what I get now and very likely to get in the future. But what if ChangeAView pulls a Quora and starts making it harder to view content, like requiring login, etc.
Well, that's one of the many many problems with Reddit's moderation.
> Just as I work to keep spammers and self-promoters at bay, I'd find it pretty scummy to form a startup around the sub and make money out of the contributions of thousands of community members.
Exactly. As you said, you may have created a community and technically own the forum, but you're not the community. The community is its own thing, and the founder demanding it move somewhere else so they can monetize it would be no different than an invasion of spammers - just another attempt at profiting off the community.
In this light, the fact that CMV has the hubris to think their ‘experiment’ is significant outside reddit is not surprising, but no less laughable.
Even more naive and immature is the idea that conversations either lead to epiphany or do nothing. Comments are read several orders of magnitude more than they're responded to. You might not change that person's mind right now, but that kind of discourse is a part of how other people form or reinforce their opinions, and the OP might be more willing to change their mind in the future upon having other interactions and experiences that challenge their views, especially if someone has shown them a good-faith argument in the past.
Ah yes, where ever did I get that idea when forming my opinion about a site titled change my view, where you literally get a whole separate level of fake internet points for giving people deltas, cough, epiphanies?
>The definition of 'change' (verb) is "make or become different."
>Following on from the previous segment, we therefore believe that a change in view simply means a new perspective. Perhaps, in the example of literally looking at something, you've taken a step to the side; or a few steps; or you've moved around and now stand behind it. Maybe you haven't 'moved', but it looks slightly different to you now; in a new light.
>A change in view need not be a reversal. It can be tangential, or takes place on a new axis altogether.
https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/index#wiki_what_i...
I created that subreddit YEARS ago and initially wanted to build the website for it.
I populated all the good life hacks that I found throughout the internet initially to the subreddit and the community naturally grew — but I also invested time and money into it (by giving gold to top members).
Then when I launched the website, I had an auto moderator rule that removed a post from anyone who submitted a link-based post and PM’d them telling them to submit to the new website (@lifeprotips.com).
Well, guess what happened? Someone got upset and reported me. Because I had Adsense on it, that went to “justify” their case saying I was monetizing the subreddit.
It resulted in a subsequent shadow ban which eventually led to the removal of my reddit account (pretty old account with lots of history).
The mod who did this is /u/krispykrackers.
Good luck, though. I’m rooting for you, because Reddit doesn’t reward or appreciate creators, and without them, they’d be nothing.
I don't think this will "succeed", but not because of anything related to migration; it's just not that good of an idea, from a business standpoint. If they redefine success as something other than growth and user retention, maybe they can create a fake kind of success, but this site will not grow users or any of the things a normal startup looks for when launching a product, and the monetization will never be worth anything of value, but simply because the idea isn't that great.
WRT. communities - no, there really is more to it than "moderation class", just like there's more to HN than pg, dang and sctb. Regular submitters, regular commenters and people voting are what creates a community, what makes visitors go there, what makes one subreddit better than another on the same topic. They're the soul of a subreddit. Despite what the subreddit creator or moderators want, nothing can prevent those regulars from deciding to stay, or to move elsewhere. 'fourstar built a site and wanted to migrate the community by fiat, but people didn't move, and instead reported him.
> it's just not that good of an idea, from a business standpoint. If they redefine success as something other than growth and user retention, maybe they can create a fake kind of success, but this site will not grow users or any of the things a normal startup looks for when launching a product (...)
Here is a thing: nobody in the community cares. The regular posters, commenters and voters don't care about "growth and user retention" beyond "people like it in here". Lurkers and irregular visitors don't care about it either, they're interested in actual content the community curates. Communities like subreddits exist so that people with like interest can exchange thoughts and media about those interests together. That somebody monetizes them indirectly through ads is an artifact of hosted platforms, but nobody will be willing to abandon a perfectly good one just because someone related to the community wants to take this money for themselves instead.
Imagine this: a guy got together some people and started organizing regular open poetry evenings in a coffee shop in the center of a city. The event became successful, grew quite an audience; the coffee shop wanted it there (as it drove foot traffic), so it kind of kept organizing itself. Fast forward couple years, the original organizer suddenly announces that from now on, the meetings will take place in a coffee shop he just opened on the outskirts. How do you think the regular guests and performers would react? I imagine they'd laugh the guy out of a room - it's ridiculous to leave a perfectly good meeting place and move to the middle of nowhere just because one person really really wants to make money off them. I imagine if the guy was telling the guests to go elsewhere next time, the coffee shop itself would step in and kick the guy out.
Regardless, my argument still holds. Whatever semblance of community there is, it's obvious it won't appreciate someone disrupting it in order to make a buck.
Also, I hate to break it to you, but Reddit is making more than a buck on your little "community". Nothing whatsoever is different or special about Reddit vs. this website.
You're not part of anything, you're not building anything, the people you think of as "friends" on Reddit aren't, and you need to realize that. That site isn't for what you think it's for.
I myself am keen on big houses, fun parties and fast cars, so I can see the attraction for the founders, I'm not sure what's in it for anyone else though.
The assholes that now populate the internet are kind of fucking sickening.
Everything is wrong with the world. I used to lay blame, and throw shade at certain people in particular (people I know personally), but you know what? It's the whole fucking planet. Someone out there has royally screwed the pooch, somehow, somewhere around the mid-1990's, and there's no going back.
The sooner I escape this nightmare, the better.
Holy crap, some people actually discuss something like this?
On one hand, knowing it's associated with racists makes me hesitate to ever use it. On the other hand, why should I let them change my behavior when a minuscule bit of research would show that I'm clearly not a racist? Like with many such things, it mostly depends on the context, but would be interested in the conversation and not so quick to dismiss it as pointless.
>On one hand, knowing it's associated with racists
I'm pretty sure this is just west's or even a certain number of countries problem. This topic is the second time I've personally ever heard\read that somebody uses this sign as something other than an "ok" sign. The first time I've read about it in someone's tweet - I even decided to call out to my friends\readers\etc and one guy from Canada new about this.
Anyhow - no, nobody should stop using some sign just because a small, even if very vocal group of people started using in for whatever reason they have. Next time they will start to wear some color and what? We should stop wearing it? Last time I checked people are pretty damn good with wearing brown coats from Hugo Boss despite the obvious history facts.
This is like building a cage around yourself just because there are a few stray dogs with rabies in the town.
>dismiss
I'm not saying it should be dismissed, if someone have questions or doubts - one should feel free to voice them, sure. I'm just amazed by the topic, or rather by the fact that some people haven't found an answer to this after so many years. If this helps them to find one - I'm glad.
honestly i wish them luck. reddit has a bit too much power imo, making a lot of money off of volunteers. I am also concerned about the data available at their fingertips. They could build profiles on people like few others could, comparable to facebook, with some differences regarding the pseudo-anonymity. I only access it via throwaways and vpn.