> More concerning, I no longer wish to support reddit as a platform. Widespread astroturfing, manufactured controversy, politics, bullying, incessant nitpicking and arguing. I don't like how people treat each other on the platform, and I don't like how it makes me feel when I use it.
Don't think this has to do with Reddit so much as the way we interact with each other online, in general.
Perhaps so, but it is not an axiomatic conflict. A website (or online community) can start off small, attracting attention of only fellow, well-meaning e-peers before regressing to the mean.
In a broader sense, sure. But I've witnessed very little of that here, which is mostly self moderated with a nudge from the admins. I've noticed this also in other smallish niche communities.
Reddit has become so mainstream that everyone has a place. I think the big problems arise in the more general subs where all the miscreants from the web intersect. Same with YouTube, or any large community really. No amount of censorship or moderation can solve this, it's a problem for any sufficiently large userbase. If a solution can exist is doubtful, even.
> In a broader sense, sure. But I've witnessed very little of that here, which is mostly self moderated with a nudge from the admins. I've noticed this also in other smallish niche communities.
hn also seems to be more accepting of opinions which people disagree with. Here it seems to lead more to a civil debate about why you are wrong, whereas on reddit you would more often than not get downvoted and called names.
> hn also seems to be more accepting of opinions which people disagree with.
More than reddit. But HN is much more homogeneous than reddit is. There’s plenty of perspectives that generally aren’t welcome for discussion here. HN also makes an effort to moderate against political flaming. You could argue that the moderation isn’t entirely unbiased, but it does keep the comment threads more civilized.
Yeah, HN is definitely a lot more homogeneous. Even CS centered subreddits have somewhat toxic cultures because of what anonymity sustains. I think HN has a lot fewer visitors than Reddit but has a lot more conscious, thoughtful, experienced, and extremely intelligent minds to think and discuss about topics in the tech field.
That’s probably true (though I’m not sure we’re any more intelligent than any other internet community). My point was just that we shouldn’t mistake homogeny for tolerance of opposing views.
Well, homogeny certainly makes a group far easier to lead, since disagreements will usually be on grounds that are way easier to reach a liveable compromise on.
Not to mention that flags on HN are much more powerful for suppression discussion than downvotes are on Reddit. I find discussion on this website pretty unrewarding because a story can go from hundreds of upvotes and top of the front page to discoverable only through search in a matter of minutes--just from a handful of flags and an extremely opaque weighting system. I also dislike that moderators here can arbitrarily rearrange the comment tree. I've seen several good responses and rebuttals get buried or get taken out of context unfairly as a result of this heavy handed moderation, which also often comes without warning or acknowledgement.
> I've several good responses and rebuttals get buried or get taken out of context unfairly as a result of this heavy handed moderation, which also often comes without warning or acknowledgement.
The comments that get detached are marked as such in a direct reply, with a link to the context.
> The comments that get detached are marked as such in a direct reply, with a link to the context.
Not true, or not (always) true. My comment here was a response to the top comment in the thread, but it was detached without context, warning, or comment and for seemingly no reason.
The solution in my mind is simple (and therefore entirely possibly wrong): keep autonomous communities small.
I like to think of this as the "Tower of Babel" problem, where basically all the world's people cooperated on one monumental task, and God "confused their language" so they couldn't complete it. We see this pattern any time people form a critical mass: fragments form, there's a falling out, and the whole thing comes apart. Take any sufficiently old group of people and the pattern asserts itself.
The great thing about the internet is even if all the primary communities are small, it's trivial for members to inter-mix on their choice of small communities, self-selecting for culture fit rather than requiring armies of moderators to keep the conversation on track (though some moderation is still necessary).
The barrier of entry for someone to go and write counter-productive / aggressive / abrasive comments online is very low now.
In the past you had to have half a brain to even be online. I don't mean internet connection wise, I mean to set it up and find stuff.
What scares me the most is "justice by social media". People felt wrong doing against them burning torches and calling for pitchforks online, instead of getting a lawyer and getting justice. It's a lot easier, but it then snowballs into a raging fury of everyone strongly or mildly related to the issue chiming in, demanding justice. Then is justice served? no.
Your average individual mistakes vengeance for justice. Read almost any thread in r/AmItheAsshole. The top comments will be the most vindictive, knee-jerk-y reaction you'll ever see.
>Your average individual mistakes vengeance for justice.
I think it's far graver than that, sadly: A cacophony of kangaroo courts, all yelling into echo chambers.
Worse, though, is the failure to delineate between an individual's actions and those who have nothing to do with the 'x' thing in question.
More egregiously, as a result of that aforementioned failure, even family members of those "suspected" for 'x' thing are ripe targets for abuse; which is entirely ignoring the premise that the individual in question could ultimately be innocent, in the end[0].
It seems that this group of individuals (en masse) demands its pound of flesh and its going to get it, no matter who it comes from.
I'd say that's far worse than simply mistaking vengeance for justice.
I agree with the second point emphatically. I enjoy that the barrier to entry with places like IRC are higher because it's directly correlated with the quality of discussion, in my experience at least.
Regarding the other points, we may well look back at things like Myspace as Halcyon days of somewhat pure Social Media usage. It's a pity we can't still have a social media platform that isn't mined to hell for analytics, ads and GPS stalking but it seems that the tide is turning and people in the Western world are getting over the hype cycle and caring less about being a part of it. Tellingly I had cause to listen to a focus group this week that had privacy concerns about Facebook; before then I assumed it was only the HN crowd who thought that! I look forward to the next 5 years in tech but if I were to lay odds, I wouldn't bet on Facebook weathering well.
> I enjoy that the barrier to entry with places like IRC are higher because it's directly correlated with the quality of discussion, in my experience at least.
Opposite experience here. Examples: the #archlinux channel on Freenode I had on autojoin for ages but never saw that higher quality discussion there. The #Fedora channel is pretty good but not so much chatting there.
Last I used IRC was over a year ago, so maybe things changed.
Unfortunately, a lot of people have been switching over to using Discord, and that's splitting up a lot of the IRC community who doesn't want to move to a closed, corporate controlled system.
It was not the quantity, it was the quality of especially the arch channel. But it is understandable that people move away from IRC, since, let’s be honest it’s not something you’d want to start with nowadays. Discord isn’t great, but it is easy and there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of alternatives.
The internet used to be the preserve of people with money or a real desire to be on the internet, which either meant a desire to engage with ideas or later, a desire for variety in porn they couldn’t satisfy offline. Money and intellectualism both select for more highly educated populations.
> And if the Anglophone internet is ::gestures:: like this now maybe it’s cause it’s less of a professional-class preserve? The dividing line maybe being smartphones where “people on the internet” went from “people who specifically spend $X/mo on it as luxury” to “people with telephone service”? That’s a real possibility, that for all the “Global Village” stuff the wondrous effect of the ‘90s internet was to create a cultural space that was MORE gatekept by wealth and education.
> That’s… kind of depressing, though. “Haha you thought the world was getting better because you were eliminating elitist barriers but actually it’s cause you were making them higher, which is good because the poor and non-elite are disproportionately idiots with worthless ideas and to the extent they’re on top of things the thing they’re on top of is undermining the basis of a good society, and anyway those times were a phenomenon of a narrow early adopter base and you’ll never ever get them back unless you make the non-elite economically and politically irrelevant.” Depressing but very well precedented, that’s exactly the arc newsprint, radio, and TV followed before.
> What scares me the most is "justice by social media".
I think a big part of the problem is that somewhere along the line "real world" entities started to capitulate to the demands of social media mobs.
Like there was that case of the young woman who made a joke in poor taste to her dozen twitter followers on a trip to Africa, and somehow it blew up into a front-page story on traditional media and I believe she was fired from her job.
Her employer, and indeed all of us, could choose not to react to this kind of outrage storm, and then it would have no consequences besides perhaps some passing embarrassment until the internet chooses to move on to something else. Social media only has power because we give it power.
Which is true. But when I discovered reddit about 7 years back it was nothing like this. Now the website leaves me feeling absolutely crap, angry and frustrated. Plus, it is addictive.
I've used Reddit since almost the beginning and it started off how HN is, being more tech-focussed than general. The discussions were, like here, the main selling point.
It can still be great, you just need to take a bit of time and subscribe to subs that interest you without being too popular.
With popularity comes the inevitable drop in quality.
I still like reddit. I go to like r/fitness, leagueoflegends, themotte, askhistorians. I don't go to any of the political or news reddits, so whilst its fairly meme-heavy I still get that in-group feeling.
The platform used for discussion certainly has a large impact on the way people interact, and the culture that grows around it.
I'm open to arguments that Reddit is better or worse than most, but for my own view, I think the majority of subreddits are not a good place to be interacting with and in general have poor discussion quality and a fair bit of bullying - which I think is largely because of the nature of the downvote/upvote system and comment chains/weighting reddit has in place.
I personally think that reducing his particular gripe down to saying it's "a broader issue" isn't useful for narrowing down specific problems with particular methods of discourse.
Eh, a big part of it is the karma system and upvotes / downvotes.
They work great for things like "how do I fix this problem" or "recommend X", but it is a terrible format for political discussion / anything remotely controversial.
It has a very noticeable polarizing effect in those cases.
I think in particular reddit has been gamed. Companies figured out that the way to do ads is good old plants in the audience; fake user to user interaction. ”I can confirm this, Pfizer’s HappyPill made my life much easier” is the new type of ad.
Twitter isn’t much better, it too has been gamed. By simply having hordes of accounts saying whatever the message is, and replying to all.
I basically do not trust any claim or article that I read on Reddit, Hacker News, Facebook, or any other social media by default now, if it triggers the "this may be a controversial topic" flag in my brain. That means anything to do with recent events that would make the news, politics, even practically anything "science-y".
HN, Reddit, Twitter and any other semi-anonymous social media site are just too easily gamed and astroturfed by anyone with a VPN and some time. Facebook and Twitter's "organic" content tends towards clickbait preying on people's anger responses.
> Don't think this has to do with Reddit so much as the way we interact with each other online, in general.
Having spent some (great) time in more traditional forums recently I think the algorithmic driven nature of reddit (and HN for that matter) along with it's centralization are the biggest contributors. The scoring systems have gamified online discussions to the point that you can't really have worthwhile discussions, most people with anything interesting to say (anything not mostly accepted by the group as a whole) will be punished by the algorithms, people with the most agreeable opinions will "win".
Being centralized and gamified is also the ideal environment for astroturfing, you can have a big effect for minimal investment. If someone clicks on a topic you can easily control what the first comment they see is, with more traditional forums it's first in best dressed and a lot of people will skip straight to the latest entries.
That highly depends on every subreddit's topic and how is it being moderated. Topics which invite populist responses in populist subreddits indeed behave like that, but other subreddits keep more of a Stack Exchange behavior, with out of topic discussion getting discouraged or directly removed, even if they were the most voted.
On the topic of gamification, I really like how Stack Overflow did it, with a focus on earned trust and good and dependable answers. For all its faults, I've never seen a site so great at solving actual problems, and not just within IT.
Reddit brings together far more diverse communities than any other site, who then slam head on in to each other in the generic subreddits.
You used to have to go actively seek out the toxic parts of the internet (except for the occasional raid of your forum by a rival, but you could usually ride that out). Now because they refuse to ban the like of The_Donald, it is like a Knitting website and Stormfront trying to share a single forum.
I don't think that's really such a problem, it alleviates the echo chamber effect of personalized searches, ads, content, forums, etc. on most of today's internet. Some community intermingling is good, and afterwards everyone can go back to their own subreddits.
Why do you think "some community intermingling" is good, when the platform is fundamentally poor at encouraging thoughtful discussion?
I have almost never seen a civil conversation between a Trump and non-Trump supporter on Reddit, but all the time I see nasty slapfights which simply divide the community further.
Possibility of a thoughtful discussion depends more on education and human factor than technology. Realistically you're not going to have with general population, reducing the echo chamber effect is the best you can do.
The sub relentlessly breaks the rules, raids other subs, never engages in good faith, spreads racist propaganda, serves as a breeding ground for white supremacists, is incapable of civil conversation. Like the president they worship they are toxic to community
And instead of banning them the admins engage in silly games like manipulating their comments(one of the admins changed db to change one of their comments).
They've poisoned many subs. For instance it's incredibly rare to see an Immigration story in /r/news without the comments making you feel like you're in the middle of a kkk gathering.
I think Reddit's problem is they think they can allow toxic communities to co-exist beside communities filled with normal people, and expect everyone to have a positive experience.
They have half admitted the issue by the new subreddit quarantine process, but members of those communities are still allowed to be toxic in the general subs.
I actually do blame the way Reddit has been managed. The decisions the admins made made it what it is today.
I do still enjoy going on 4chan (hardly a heaven of civilized discussion) and this very website. So in my mind, it can't be just because of a general trend in online discussions.
It certainly has to do with Reddit. It's unnatural for humans to communicate with priority of "most popular". If you walk in a room with strangers, meet two friends at their house, or talk in private with your mother, all of those discussions are "bump order", meaning that your most likely discussion to respond to is the most recent "thread" (or subject) that someone brought up.
Online communication should function the same way. Reddit/HN/Facebook's algorithms based on voting and popularity are absolute garbage for carrying on normal human discussions. That's because discussion is not their purpose, it's addiction to horde bickering and engaging in popularity contests for content.
The only natural/real-world scenario that you'd find "popularity" to sort discussions is a screaming fight, political campaign, or those dreaded high-school popularity years. And surprise, that's what Reddit feels like most of the time.
It's one of those things that doesn't matter until everyone does it. The behavior of many Reddit users is based on the "popular" or "hot" order, and it truly does make a difference in the style of their conversation.
GitHub Issues is another odd example. They sort by "newest thread", which I've never seen any other service use by default. It makes long difficult issues/proposals end sooner than they should, because a comment someone makes 2 seconds ago is still buried on page 12. It doesn't matter than I set the sorting mode to "most recent comment" because other people don't do it as well.
Discourse is a fantastic example of a good community platform. You can "star" a post to give your appreciation, but that doesn't give your post any visibility boost by default. It treats all comments equal, as they should, and gives threads attention that is linearly proportional to the number of comments, which is how discussions/subjects work in real life.
I hear you that it doesn't work the same way offline. But there is a good reason for the difference. If you had 1000 people in your house, bump order wouldn't work either. Even 30 active people in a chat room gets too hard to follow if everyone is talking.
They are different mediums and have different requirements. I don't think real life conversation can be used as a good example for how online communication should work. I don't know that upvotes are the right answer either mind you, and I agree with your points about it. But it's just the best some platforms have come up with to combat the issues presented by large quantities of people talking all at once.
As someone else suggested, sort a popular thread by "new" and you're right, you get the full spectrum of opinions. However you also get lots of "internet noise". The baseless claims, useless yelling and general spamming that all open internet communications are subjected to.
> I hear you that it doesn't work the same way offline. But there is a good reason for the difference. If you had 1000 people in your house, bump order wouldn't work either. Even 30 active people in a chat room gets too hard to follow if everyone is talking.
If you've got 1000 people in your house you'll have a couple of conversations going on in the kitchen, a couple in the lounge room, a couple outside and people will be wandering between the different sections and conversations. This seems pretty familiar to traditional forums where you'll have specific sub forums, and topics in those sub-forums, if you wander from one forum to another you'll see the most recent topic/conversation taking place. Sort by new in reddit seems to be the opposite, you'll see the newest topic but you want see the active conversations, at the topic level you'll only see the latest top level post not any ongoing conversations.
There is a limit where this breaks down of course, but perhaps the solution is to accept the limit and have many smaller communities instead of one big one.
> There is a limit where this breaks down of course, but perhaps the solution is to accept the limit and have many smaller communities instead of one big one.
I totally agree. My suspicion is that reddit and other community driven content feed sites are a symptom of the influx of people showing up online. They became popular as they're a shallow enough community to work with a large population of participants. More in depth community can only be sustained meaningfully up to a certain amount of participants. Even in teams, there is a limit to how many people can be part of a team effectively and humans naturally break up into smaller groups within larger ones.
>If you had 1000 people in your house, bump order wouldn't work either
It definitely does, and it works better than "popular" sorting, here's how. You walk by rooms and overhear people talking. You hear a lot of small conversations, sorted by most recently heard. You find one you're interested in, and you're welcomed into the room of 2-20 people. You continue having a discussion, and it's less likely for it to turn "heated" because everyone in the group knows each other a bit.
You argue that it's "too hard to follow if everyone is talking". But the point is that you don't try to follow every thread/room. The alternative is worse: On Reddit, there are only a few ballrooms (posts on the front page of a subreddit), but they each have a couple keynote speakers (comments upvoted 2,000 times). But if you try to talk to anyone in the ballroom, they'll won't pay attention because the speaker they came to listen to is at the podium.
On Hacker News, it's not as bad because it's small. Instead of walking into ballrooms, you're walking into seminars at a university. There's a designated speaker, but anyone can interrupt the speaker at any time to offer helpful comments.
Well your solution sounds a lot like a traditional chat network or forum, and I agree that they work better for community building. So I think we're probably on the same page there. However I don't think they would work unmodified, as a replacement for the much higher populations of the internet now.
Community driven content feed sites are not great at fostering close communities, but they are great at offering a more shallow community experience to more people at once. I want to blame feed style sites for the downfall of community online, but they are likely just a symptom of an influx of people online and needing a different way to accommodate that. Imagine a global chat network where #science had 20,000 chatters, how would you chat about anything meaningfully? So you can see feed sites as inverting the dynamic of community to cater for larger numbers, which matches your analogy with the ballroom and keynote speakers and also what happens in real life.
Community driven content feed sites definitely offer something that chatrooms or threaded discourse can't, which is discoverability of information over a broad range of topics in a short time period. But it does this at the expense of depth and community, and also at the expense of breadth of opinion.
Threaded chatrooms are actually a pretty cool alternative, and I would love for them to have more wide spread usage. You can enter some.network/#science for general chatter amongst friends, and then when a topic you care about comes up you and all the people who care can dive into a thread to talk about it.
Slack actually has threaded chat, which was really useful when you needed to dig deeper into a topic but it wouldn't be relevant for everyone in the room at the time.
When you say it does work, do you mean it work well?
Because there might be a very good discussion, but the latest comments could be "my peepee is very big" and "no, your peepee is small!". And the good discussion would be overshadowed by garbage comments.
When there are hundreds or thousand of people talking, I do believe popularity is better than recency.
There's not a "right way" or "wrong way" to organize online forums. Different interaction models result in different types of conversations, and there's room for variety there. In the case of small communities, I think it's actually beneficial to have a tool to rank order comments based on the perceived relevance to the collective.
I would say that actually showing users vote numbers is probably counter-productive. It's probably too appealing to our primate brains to be able to assign precise values to social interactions, and I think we'll probably find out in time that gamified social media is in the category of things like sugar, slot machines and opiates which are just a net negative for many many people.
I feel like karma/likes are one of the worse things ever invented in the history of software. I post on Something Awful, and while we have post counts nobody gives a damn about them. The only thing that is “impressive” is seeing an account with an old registration date, but it’s not a big deal other than light ribbing (“how can you be a member for 10 years and not know the rules?”).
SA is organized into sub forums which are like subreddits I guess, and a lot of the discussion takes place inside what are essentially Reddit like megathreads. In the threads I follow and post in, sometimes sure it gets off topic but when it becomes a problem the mods usually step in and probate the offenders (6 hour posting ban), but normally after a warning. People don’t post low content low effort things like I see in every single Reddit post.
I’m talking about things like inside jokes that people quote and run to the ground.
I always marvel that Reddit has seemed not have learned even one lesson from Digg.
They are literally making the same exact mistakes, and its leading to the same exact results...karma whoring, piling on, ingroup/outgroup ete etc.
It seems beyond comprehension to me that they wouldn't have thoroughly looked at the rise and fall of Digg and not made every effort not to follow the same path.
If I had to guess, this is what happens when you make your company data driven at all costs. All the dog-piling leads to higher engagement, more comments made faster as people get the last word in, and more gold/platinum/silver buying as people foam at the mouth to super-bump comments they agree with.
Reddit has a strong incentive to make their website a platform where you shout into an abyss that echos back what you currently feel, where you can feel vindicated for downvoting and insulting the "other", and get that sweet dopamine kick for stealing (not sharing) content with no concept of attribution. All of that means higher engagement of the userbase.
If they wanted to encourage thoughtful discussion? That would mean requiring long-form posts, or throttling how fast users could comment. Wanting high quality discussion would mean encouraging posting sources and taking time to read them, which drives users off the site. It would mean dis-incentivizing the emotion-based vector for buying gold as a means to super-bump arguments you agree with, or to spite the opposition.
> They are literally making the same exact mistakes,
I haven't seen them make a formal system whereby publishers can pay to have their content autosubmitted and promoted to the front page. That was what killed Digg.
Ok..yes I'll admit I never even knew that Digg did that.
I thought Digg's vote system was simply being gamed by bad actors. The idea that someone at Digg thought it would be even a reasonably good thing to have the system you describe is totally bonkers.
It's always sad when the original maintainer gets burnt out and refuses to put in the effort to transfer ownership but que sera sera - i'm glad forking exists as a concept in Code management
I feel like the argument he put forth is entirely reasonable. He cannot possibly vet a new maintainer, so if the project is to live on, have people fork it and let the community decide which fork they want.
> More concerning, I no longer wish to support reddit as a platform. Widespread astroturfing, manufactured controversy, politics, bullying, incessant nitpicking and arguing.
Ever since starting a project to collect and analyse the reddit firehose, I've had a series of eye opening experiences about just how manufactured the popular reddit content is. Every day, comments and posts with hundreds to thousands of upvotes get deleted by moderators because they don't fit the desired narrative. A small ring of moderators are in control of most default subs. A small ring of accounts make up for more than 50% of regular front-page content.
If you ever want to take a glimpse at the amount of manipulation going on, point something like snew.notabug.io at a popular politics or askreddit thread.
Reddit is a platform for pushing manufactured consent/controversy and guerilla advertising. It is not a platform for open speech. The reddit content that most users see often does not represent the views of the userbase.
Here's a random post I picked from an old analysis notebook where most of top 10% of comments were deleted, and then the post itself was deleted when new comments started mentioning the censorship. Should give some idea about the magnitude and scope of what's going on https://imgur.com/a/2C5Kn2R
What was a massive eye opener for me was the few days in the wake of Donald Trump's presidential win, that subreddit went back to normal, it was quiet, level-headed.
After a few days the agenda pushing and blatant shilling began anew and it's been a non-stop screaming mess since.
I have very similar feelings about this site at least recently. There appears to be significant effort from moderators here to squash outside opinions, I've noticed a lot of posts that I've commented on have become flagged even though they did not break the rules and in fact had positive responses from other users (not downvoted).
Do you think HN owners have contracts with some companies to keep them on the front page? I always see these links to BBC, New York Times, Reuters, Techcrunch, theregister.co.uk, etc. on the front page. Who upvotes this crap? These are regular news that don't belong on HN.
I think it's unlikely, but still it's annoying to see stuff like this here. I'm not against it, but it's always there. It got to the point that I started thinking about rtv like program for HN that has built-in recommendation system based on my favorites. Strong filters too. I know there is haxor-news, but it's not that. I want to be able to get a listing of stuff only related to my favorites and favorites of HN users I whitelisted.
deleted by moderators
because they don't fit the
desired narrative. A small
ring of moderators are
in control...
Here on HN, it's pretty much the same. You aren't reading the opinions of authentic people. All you get is the selected filtration of a small group of paid staff, compounded by default themes already set in motion by the wider media outlets.
To preface: I have over 650,000 reddit karma, mostly collected from 2014-2017. Roughly 150,000 of this is from posts, the rest comments.
I completely agree that mods can push their own agenda about their subreddits; they have almost completely unfettered control of their subreddits, and the admins almost never intervene. But I don't agree that there's an argument to be made for the actual posters of content; it's simply a numbers game, as well as a good amount of "gaming" the system; e.g. posting during high-volume times, crossposting content, etc. I think the calls of shilling on Reddit are significantly more pronounced than shilling itself actually is, as I myself have posted content on multiple occasions and then been called a shill, when in reality I simply found whatever product interesting or useful or otherwise. On one occasion I was offered a free product _after_ making a post about it (I declined). I've never made a post that I've received any kind of compensation for, but I have made posts advertising non-profit events that I organized as a volunteer.
I have a group of friends that I've been on Reddit, and all of them have 100,000+ karma, and a couple with over a million, and they have somewhat shared the sentiment. I don't want to sound like I'm saying there's no astroturfing at all, because there definitely is, but there's this culture of calling anything with any kind of recognizable product in it an advertisement, when it can be explained much less conspiratorially.
What are your thoughts about accounts such as u/mvea consistently hitting the front page on a daily basis, often with links that were posted by other accounts earlier but only gained traction when posted by this account?
What are your thoughts on accusations that admins are able to adorn comments with gold/silver for free and manipulate comment priority? What are your thoughts on the fact that any discussion about this on default reddit gets nuked?
There are broadly two kinds of manipulation on reddit. One is by outsider parties - the state sponsored propaganda, the guerilla ad campaigns, etc. The other is by the core moderation and admin team who appear to be actively shaping front page content through selective promotion of desirable and deletion of undesirable content even if it does not break rules. My above screenshot of a 50k upvote post being nuked due to anti-chinese sentiment is an example of #2, I think you're talking about #1 which is not so prevalent lately.
> What are your thoughts about accounts such as u/mvea consistently hitting the front page on a daily basis, often with links that were posted by other accounts earlier but only gained traction when posted by this account?
Not the guy you replied to but here's my take on this. Users like gallowboob and mvea have been known to post and repost the same content multiple times. If it doesn't get traction within the first few minutes, they delete that and try again. On some other subreddits like EvilBuildings, the mods frequently prune the subreddit's front page which lets posts with a lower number of upvotes hit /r/all more easily. This kind of manipulation was also being done by some other subreddits which led the admins to step in and stop them from showing up on the front page
It's this; I'm guilty of doing it, and I believe there is a comment from /u/GallowBoob of him admitting it, but I can't find it. Sometimes a post just doesn't take off simply by bad luck, and it's easier to try again rather than to comb for new content.
I broke a major news story on my own blog years ago on Reddit. It was the top story for a few minutes. Within 20 minutes it was magically deleted, I was shadowbanned, and an identical story from one of the biggest news publications in the world was suddenly #1 up there.
The information we live and breathe every day is bought and paid for.
I just don't see it. I've tried Steem and some others experimenting with it, and I'm not really impressed. Could you please give me some pointers as to how it would work? On the other hand, have you tried IPFS?
> Could you please give me some pointers as to how it would work?
What do you mean by work? It already works quiet well. Except for the entry barrier.
> On the other hand, have you tried IPFS?
I have tried it a while ago and it is very unreliable. There seems to be just one server which really keeps files. You have no transparency about who and how many have one particular file.
Magnet links + torrents are essentially the same thing as IPFS but much more robust, transparent, reliable and established.
Probably not too much like reddit at all. So long as reddit exists its particular niche in the ecology of the internet is filled and websites which serve a very similar purpose can't really hope to gain significant numbers of users. Attention is a finite resource and sites with more content attract more of people's attention. For sites with user generated content, this means that the more users you have the more content is generated and the more of those user's attention is captured by one that one site. If there are two sites which both rely on user generated content but are more or less identical, the smaller one will inevitably hemorrhage users to the larger one. The larger the difference in number of users, and by extension the amount of content, the faster the hemorrhage. Sites need to differentiate themselves to survive, this can be through format, focus, moderation, or community but all of these options will effect the maximum possible number of people a site can appeal to. Sites basically need to justify their existence relative to other established sties. The question is "what do you do better and how many people does that matter to?". For most reddit alternatives, the answer is not much and not many.
All of this is essentially the Competitive Exclusion Principle[1] applied to websites. It's why reddit clones will never gain significant market share so long as reddit exists in something resembling its current form.
Probably completely different but will have the same slice of anarchy that made Reddit popular to begin with. Reality is people didn't swarm to that site for pictures of dogs and "AMAs".
Hopefully we go back to forums, where the format is more conducive to conversation rather than snarky one-liners and memes.
This whole nested comment format becomes completely unreadable once you have more than two people involved in a comment thread, and the fact that submissions can't survive more than 36 hours guarantees that no deeper conversations would ever happen even if the comment format could support them.
On forums, there are discussion threads that last for years and the format makes them much easier to read from start to finish.
There's a happy size for subreddits, ballpark less than 200k subs. Otherwise, like you said, its overwhelming. Any less than 30k subs and the subreddit is pretty desolate though, which might be good for some topics.
What forums do you peruse? The ones I run through are generally okay, but mechanisms of voting, liking, and rewarding post count of users, seem to increase low effort posting.
109 comments
[ 6.4 ms ] story [ 193 ms ] threadDon't think this has to do with Reddit so much as the way we interact with each other online, in general.
Reddit has become so mainstream that everyone has a place. I think the big problems arise in the more general subs where all the miscreants from the web intersect. Same with YouTube, or any large community really. No amount of censorship or moderation can solve this, it's a problem for any sufficiently large userbase. If a solution can exist is doubtful, even.
hn also seems to be more accepting of opinions which people disagree with. Here it seems to lead more to a civil debate about why you are wrong, whereas on reddit you would more often than not get downvoted and called names.
More than reddit. But HN is much more homogeneous than reddit is. There’s plenty of perspectives that generally aren’t welcome for discussion here. HN also makes an effort to moderate against political flaming. You could argue that the moderation isn’t entirely unbiased, but it does keep the comment threads more civilized.
> homogeny certainly makes a group far easier to lead
What about the value of diversity?
The comments that get detached are marked as such in a direct reply, with a link to the context.
But speaking of that, I wonder what happened here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20040963...
Not true, or not (always) true. My comment here was a response to the top comment in the thread, but it was detached without context, warning, or comment and for seemingly no reason.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19809432
I like to think of this as the "Tower of Babel" problem, where basically all the world's people cooperated on one monumental task, and God "confused their language" so they couldn't complete it. We see this pattern any time people form a critical mass: fragments form, there's a falling out, and the whole thing comes apart. Take any sufficiently old group of people and the pattern asserts itself.
The great thing about the internet is even if all the primary communities are small, it's trivial for members to inter-mix on their choice of small communities, self-selecting for culture fit rather than requiring armies of moderators to keep the conversation on track (though some moderation is still necessary).
In the past you had to have half a brain to even be online. I don't mean internet connection wise, I mean to set it up and find stuff.
What scares me the most is "justice by social media". People felt wrong doing against them burning torches and calling for pitchforks online, instead of getting a lawyer and getting justice. It's a lot easier, but it then snowballs into a raging fury of everyone strongly or mildly related to the issue chiming in, demanding justice. Then is justice served? no.
I think mobs often mistake vengeance for justice.
I think it's far graver than that, sadly: A cacophony of kangaroo courts, all yelling into echo chambers.
Worse, though, is the failure to delineate between an individual's actions and those who have nothing to do with the 'x' thing in question.
More egregiously, as a result of that aforementioned failure, even family members of those "suspected" for 'x' thing are ripe targets for abuse; which is entirely ignoring the premise that the individual in question could ultimately be innocent, in the end[0].
It seems that this group of individuals (en masse) demands its pound of flesh and its going to get it, no matter who it comes from.
I'd say that's far worse than simply mistaking vengeance for justice.
[0] - https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-falsely-accuses-sunil...
Regarding the other points, we may well look back at things like Myspace as Halcyon days of somewhat pure Social Media usage. It's a pity we can't still have a social media platform that isn't mined to hell for analytics, ads and GPS stalking but it seems that the tide is turning and people in the Western world are getting over the hype cycle and caring less about being a part of it. Tellingly I had cause to listen to a focus group this week that had privacy concerns about Facebook; before then I assumed it was only the HN crowd who thought that! I look forward to the next 5 years in tech but if I were to lay odds, I wouldn't bet on Facebook weathering well.
Opposite experience here. Examples: the #archlinux channel on Freenode I had on autojoin for ages but never saw that higher quality discussion there. The #Fedora channel is pretty good but not so much chatting there.
Last I used IRC was over a year ago, so maybe things changed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
> And if the Anglophone internet is ::gestures:: like this now maybe it’s cause it’s less of a professional-class preserve? The dividing line maybe being smartphones where “people on the internet” went from “people who specifically spend $X/mo on it as luxury” to “people with telephone service”? That’s a real possibility, that for all the “Global Village” stuff the wondrous effect of the ‘90s internet was to create a cultural space that was MORE gatekept by wealth and education.
> That’s… kind of depressing, though. “Haha you thought the world was getting better because you were eliminating elitist barriers but actually it’s cause you were making them higher, which is good because the poor and non-elite are disproportionately idiots with worthless ideas and to the extent they’re on top of things the thing they’re on top of is undermining the basis of a good society, and anyway those times were a phenomenon of a narrow early adopter base and you’ll never ever get them back unless you make the non-elite economically and politically irrelevant.” Depressing but very well precedented, that’s exactly the arc newsprint, radio, and TV followed before.
https://kontextmaschine.tumblr.com/post/185164859368/your-gr...
I think a big part of the problem is that somewhere along the line "real world" entities started to capitulate to the demands of social media mobs.
Like there was that case of the young woman who made a joke in poor taste to her dozen twitter followers on a trip to Africa, and somehow it blew up into a front-page story on traditional media and I believe she was fired from her job.
Her employer, and indeed all of us, could choose not to react to this kind of outrage storm, and then it would have no consequences besides perhaps some passing embarrassment until the internet chooses to move on to something else. Social media only has power because we give it power.
Recently, I've gone totally cold-turkey on the platform. Where as previously I had been posting daily for 9 years!
It can still be great, you just need to take a bit of time and subscribe to subs that interest you without being too popular.
With popularity comes the inevitable drop in quality.
The place I post this most is in GitHub issues. ;)
The platform used for discussion certainly has a large impact on the way people interact, and the culture that grows around it.
I'm open to arguments that Reddit is better or worse than most, but for my own view, I think the majority of subreddits are not a good place to be interacting with and in general have poor discussion quality and a fair bit of bullying - which I think is largely because of the nature of the downvote/upvote system and comment chains/weighting reddit has in place.
I personally think that reducing his particular gripe down to saying it's "a broader issue" isn't useful for narrowing down specific problems with particular methods of discourse.
They work great for things like "how do I fix this problem" or "recommend X", but it is a terrible format for political discussion / anything remotely controversial.
It has a very noticeable polarizing effect in those cases.
Twitter isn’t much better, it too has been gamed. By simply having hordes of accounts saying whatever the message is, and replying to all.
HN, Reddit, Twitter and any other semi-anonymous social media site are just too easily gamed and astroturfed by anyone with a VPN and some time. Facebook and Twitter's "organic" content tends towards clickbait preying on people's anger responses.
Having spent some (great) time in more traditional forums recently I think the algorithmic driven nature of reddit (and HN for that matter) along with it's centralization are the biggest contributors. The scoring systems have gamified online discussions to the point that you can't really have worthwhile discussions, most people with anything interesting to say (anything not mostly accepted by the group as a whole) will be punished by the algorithms, people with the most agreeable opinions will "win".
Being centralized and gamified is also the ideal environment for astroturfing, you can have a big effect for minimal investment. If someone clicks on a topic you can easily control what the first comment they see is, with more traditional forums it's first in best dressed and a lot of people will skip straight to the latest entries.
You used to have to go actively seek out the toxic parts of the internet (except for the occasional raid of your forum by a rival, but you could usually ride that out). Now because they refuse to ban the like of The_Donald, it is like a Knitting website and Stormfront trying to share a single forum.
I have almost never seen a civil conversation between a Trump and non-Trump supporter on Reddit, but all the time I see nasty slapfights which simply divide the community further.
The sub relentlessly breaks the rules, raids other subs, never engages in good faith, spreads racist propaganda, serves as a breeding ground for white supremacists, is incapable of civil conversation. Like the president they worship they are toxic to community
And instead of banning them the admins engage in silly games like manipulating their comments(one of the admins changed db to change one of their comments).
They've poisoned many subs. For instance it's incredibly rare to see an Immigration story in /r/news without the comments making you feel like you're in the middle of a kkk gathering.
They have half admitted the issue by the new subreddit quarantine process, but members of those communities are still allowed to be toxic in the general subs.
I do still enjoy going on 4chan (hardly a heaven of civilized discussion) and this very website. So in my mind, it can't be just because of a general trend in online discussions.
Online communication should function the same way. Reddit/HN/Facebook's algorithms based on voting and popularity are absolute garbage for carrying on normal human discussions. That's because discussion is not their purpose, it's addiction to horde bickering and engaging in popularity contests for content.
The only natural/real-world scenario that you'd find "popularity" to sort discussions is a screaming fight, political campaign, or those dreaded high-school popularity years. And surprise, that's what Reddit feels like most of the time.
GitHub Issues is another odd example. They sort by "newest thread", which I've never seen any other service use by default. It makes long difficult issues/proposals end sooner than they should, because a comment someone makes 2 seconds ago is still buried on page 12. It doesn't matter than I set the sorting mode to "most recent comment" because other people don't do it as well.
Discourse is a fantastic example of a good community platform. You can "star" a post to give your appreciation, but that doesn't give your post any visibility boost by default. It treats all comments equal, as they should, and gives threads attention that is linearly proportional to the number of comments, which is how discussions/subjects work in real life.
They are different mediums and have different requirements. I don't think real life conversation can be used as a good example for how online communication should work. I don't know that upvotes are the right answer either mind you, and I agree with your points about it. But it's just the best some platforms have come up with to combat the issues presented by large quantities of people talking all at once.
As someone else suggested, sort a popular thread by "new" and you're right, you get the full spectrum of opinions. However you also get lots of "internet noise". The baseless claims, useless yelling and general spamming that all open internet communications are subjected to.
If you've got 1000 people in your house you'll have a couple of conversations going on in the kitchen, a couple in the lounge room, a couple outside and people will be wandering between the different sections and conversations. This seems pretty familiar to traditional forums where you'll have specific sub forums, and topics in those sub-forums, if you wander from one forum to another you'll see the most recent topic/conversation taking place. Sort by new in reddit seems to be the opposite, you'll see the newest topic but you want see the active conversations, at the topic level you'll only see the latest top level post not any ongoing conversations.
There is a limit where this breaks down of course, but perhaps the solution is to accept the limit and have many smaller communities instead of one big one.
I totally agree. My suspicion is that reddit and other community driven content feed sites are a symptom of the influx of people showing up online. They became popular as they're a shallow enough community to work with a large population of participants. More in depth community can only be sustained meaningfully up to a certain amount of participants. Even in teams, there is a limit to how many people can be part of a team effectively and humans naturally break up into smaller groups within larger ones.
The OP is talking about a situation where there are a thousand people in a room all talking at the same time.
I don’t see an easy way to split interaction on a forum like Reddit in the same way as a thousand people in a house.
It definitely does, and it works better than "popular" sorting, here's how. You walk by rooms and overhear people talking. You hear a lot of small conversations, sorted by most recently heard. You find one you're interested in, and you're welcomed into the room of 2-20 people. You continue having a discussion, and it's less likely for it to turn "heated" because everyone in the group knows each other a bit.
You argue that it's "too hard to follow if everyone is talking". But the point is that you don't try to follow every thread/room. The alternative is worse: On Reddit, there are only a few ballrooms (posts on the front page of a subreddit), but they each have a couple keynote speakers (comments upvoted 2,000 times). But if you try to talk to anyone in the ballroom, they'll won't pay attention because the speaker they came to listen to is at the podium.
On Hacker News, it's not as bad because it's small. Instead of walking into ballrooms, you're walking into seminars at a university. There's a designated speaker, but anyone can interrupt the speaker at any time to offer helpful comments.
Community driven content feed sites are not great at fostering close communities, but they are great at offering a more shallow community experience to more people at once. I want to blame feed style sites for the downfall of community online, but they are likely just a symptom of an influx of people online and needing a different way to accommodate that. Imagine a global chat network where #science had 20,000 chatters, how would you chat about anything meaningfully? So you can see feed sites as inverting the dynamic of community to cater for larger numbers, which matches your analogy with the ballroom and keynote speakers and also what happens in real life.
Community driven content feed sites definitely offer something that chatrooms or threaded discourse can't, which is discoverability of information over a broad range of topics in a short time period. But it does this at the expense of depth and community, and also at the expense of breadth of opinion.
Threaded chatrooms are actually a pretty cool alternative, and I would love for them to have more wide spread usage. You can enter some.network/#science for general chatter amongst friends, and then when a topic you care about comes up you and all the people who care can dive into a thread to talk about it.
Is there any practical prototype or example of threaded real time chats?
Because there might be a very good discussion, but the latest comments could be "my peepee is very big" and "no, your peepee is small!". And the good discussion would be overshadowed by garbage comments.
When there are hundreds or thousand of people talking, I do believe popularity is better than recency.
I would say that actually showing users vote numbers is probably counter-productive. It's probably too appealing to our primate brains to be able to assign precise values to social interactions, and I think we'll probably find out in time that gamified social media is in the category of things like sugar, slot machines and opiates which are just a net negative for many many people.
SA is organized into sub forums which are like subreddits I guess, and a lot of the discussion takes place inside what are essentially Reddit like megathreads. In the threads I follow and post in, sometimes sure it gets off topic but when it becomes a problem the mods usually step in and probate the offenders (6 hour posting ban), but normally after a warning. People don’t post low content low effort things like I see in every single Reddit post. I’m talking about things like inside jokes that people quote and run to the ground.
They are literally making the same exact mistakes, and its leading to the same exact results...karma whoring, piling on, ingroup/outgroup ete etc.
It seems beyond comprehension to me that they wouldn't have thoroughly looked at the rise and fall of Digg and not made every effort not to follow the same path.
Reddit has a strong incentive to make their website a platform where you shout into an abyss that echos back what you currently feel, where you can feel vindicated for downvoting and insulting the "other", and get that sweet dopamine kick for stealing (not sharing) content with no concept of attribution. All of that means higher engagement of the userbase.
If they wanted to encourage thoughtful discussion? That would mean requiring long-form posts, or throttling how fast users could comment. Wanting high quality discussion would mean encouraging posting sources and taking time to read them, which drives users off the site. It would mean dis-incentivizing the emotion-based vector for buying gold as a means to super-bump arguments you agree with, or to spite the opposition.
I haven't seen them make a formal system whereby publishers can pay to have their content autosubmitted and promoted to the front page. That was what killed Digg.
I thought Digg's vote system was simply being gamed by bad actors. The idea that someone at Digg thought it would be even a reasonably good thing to have the system you describe is totally bonkers.
> Frankly, I don't want to put the work into vetting a new maintainer or transferring ownership to an organization. Stuff like this scares me.
he addressed why he chose not to transfer ownership.
Ever since starting a project to collect and analyse the reddit firehose, I've had a series of eye opening experiences about just how manufactured the popular reddit content is. Every day, comments and posts with hundreds to thousands of upvotes get deleted by moderators because they don't fit the desired narrative. A small ring of moderators are in control of most default subs. A small ring of accounts make up for more than 50% of regular front-page content.
If you ever want to take a glimpse at the amount of manipulation going on, point something like snew.notabug.io at a popular politics or askreddit thread.
Reddit is a platform for pushing manufactured consent/controversy and guerilla advertising. It is not a platform for open speech. The reddit content that most users see often does not represent the views of the userbase.
Here's a random post I picked from an old analysis notebook where most of top 10% of comments were deleted, and then the post itself was deleted when new comments started mentioning the censorship. Should give some idea about the magnitude and scope of what's going on https://imgur.com/a/2C5Kn2R
After a few days the agenda pushing and blatant shilling began anew and it's been a non-stop screaming mess since.
I think it's unlikely, but still it's annoying to see stuff like this here. I'm not against it, but it's always there. It got to the point that I started thinking about rtv like program for HN that has built-in recommendation system based on my favorites. Strong filters too. I know there is haxor-news, but it's not that. I want to be able to get a listing of stuff only related to my favorites and favorites of HN users I whitelisted.
Tech news is still tech.
Seems like /r/news, /r/worldnews and many other hyper-popular subs are carefully crafted propaganda machines.
The best way around it to stay subscribed to smaller, more niche subs.
I completely agree that mods can push their own agenda about their subreddits; they have almost completely unfettered control of their subreddits, and the admins almost never intervene. But I don't agree that there's an argument to be made for the actual posters of content; it's simply a numbers game, as well as a good amount of "gaming" the system; e.g. posting during high-volume times, crossposting content, etc. I think the calls of shilling on Reddit are significantly more pronounced than shilling itself actually is, as I myself have posted content on multiple occasions and then been called a shill, when in reality I simply found whatever product interesting or useful or otherwise. On one occasion I was offered a free product _after_ making a post about it (I declined). I've never made a post that I've received any kind of compensation for, but I have made posts advertising non-profit events that I organized as a volunteer.
I have a group of friends that I've been on Reddit, and all of them have 100,000+ karma, and a couple with over a million, and they have somewhat shared the sentiment. I don't want to sound like I'm saying there's no astroturfing at all, because there definitely is, but there's this culture of calling anything with any kind of recognizable product in it an advertisement, when it can be explained much less conspiratorially.
What are your thoughts on accusations that admins are able to adorn comments with gold/silver for free and manipulate comment priority? What are your thoughts on the fact that any discussion about this on default reddit gets nuked?
There are broadly two kinds of manipulation on reddit. One is by outsider parties - the state sponsored propaganda, the guerilla ad campaigns, etc. The other is by the core moderation and admin team who appear to be actively shaping front page content through selective promotion of desirable and deletion of undesirable content even if it does not break rules. My above screenshot of a 50k upvote post being nuked due to anti-chinese sentiment is an example of #2, I think you're talking about #1 which is not so prevalent lately.
Not the guy you replied to but here's my take on this. Users like gallowboob and mvea have been known to post and repost the same content multiple times. If it doesn't get traction within the first few minutes, they delete that and try again. On some other subreddits like EvilBuildings, the mods frequently prune the subreddit's front page which lets posts with a lower number of upvotes hit /r/all more easily. This kind of manipulation was also being done by some other subreddits which led the admins to step in and stop them from showing up on the front page
The information we live and breathe every day is bought and paid for.
What do you mean by work? It already works quiet well. Except for the entry barrier.
> On the other hand, have you tried IPFS?
I have tried it a while ago and it is very unreliable. There seems to be just one server which really keeps files. You have no transparency about who and how many have one particular file.
Magnet links + torrents are essentially the same thing as IPFS but much more robust, transparent, reliable and established.
All of this is essentially the Competitive Exclusion Principle[1] applied to websites. It's why reddit clones will never gain significant market share so long as reddit exists in something resembling its current form.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_exclusion_principl...
This whole nested comment format becomes completely unreadable once you have more than two people involved in a comment thread, and the fact that submissions can't survive more than 36 hours guarantees that no deeper conversations would ever happen even if the comment format could support them.
On forums, there are discussion threads that last for years and the format makes them much easier to read from start to finish.
I wonder what's the accuracy of this algorithm