The risk within the “internet chat” sector is huge. Many popular discussion platforms disappear almost overnight. Slashdot, Digg, MySpace. I wouldn’t put a big bet on this leadership team in such an unstable environment.
They are both effectively threaded chats. Discord a bit more real time than Reddit and lower volume. But definitely can see people migrating from Reddit to Discord. Especially for smaller subs.
They are both popular forums to discuss games. If you want to join an online community around a game you play, reddit is an obvious choice. Discord has become some kind of awful de facto standard filling the same use case.
That's not a difference in what they do or even in how they're used. There are plenty of subreddits that rely on real-time interaction between posters; arranging pokemon trades is an obvious example.
If I make a comment in a large Discord server, and then put my phone back in my pocket and continue my day, I am very unlikely to actually see any responses to what I said.
Discord will alert you to their existence, highlight them for you, navigate you straight to them, and jump you back to your original comment so you can read forward from there. That last option doesn't even require your responses to be marked as responses to you.
If you don't see the responses, that's because you didn't want to.
But "Read forward from there" is often just way too much text, with no clear delineation between different topics other than reading it. Reddit encapsulates topics into their own spaces that can live outside of an ever-increasingly long scrolling text screen.
I regularly get so far behind on channels in an 11 person server that I just give up on reading whatever I missed that day. If Discord and Reddit can serve functionally identical purposes in your life, that's fine, but to deny that they have any functional differences to anyone is just provably false.
But at the same time, Discord is also built with Ventrilo-like features, which I think helped them gain foothold among many gamers. Lots of people are on voice chat in Discord while playing games together, just like people used to use Ventrilo. And Discord is more like IRC than like Reddit, except unlike IRC it has native rich text and media embeds. But what I mean by how it’s more like IRC is that it’s rooms with text conversations happening in a timeline, instead of mainly threads with comments. Reddit sorts comments by votes by default.
Additionally, Discord has private rooms suitable for small groups. Reddit as a platform is not so suitable for small groups of friends, even though it supports private subreddits.
And speaking of IRC, even some games like the original Quake used IRC for in game chat right? And Twitch the video streaming platform used to have its chat built on IRC but I don’t know if it still is. Either way, it’s evident that it is more suitable for real time conversation.
Reddit meanwhile made a half-assed attempt at real time chat, and it’s not good. I kind of wish they had just stuck with being what they were but I suppose at least trying is a good idea even so. But I don’t think their real time text chat is compelling nor competitive with Discord text chat.
> And speaking of IRC, even some games like the original Quake used IRC for in game chat right? And Twitch the video streaming platform used to have its chat built on IRC but I don’t know if it still is. Either way, it’s evident that it is more suitable for real time conversation.
Sure, IRC is all delivery and no permanence. But Discord is the opposite of that; it's all permanent forum posts.
"More suitable" is a weird thing to say. They refer to different things. IRC is a transport protocol. Discord is a website. The logical comparison would be between IRC and HTTP.
Lots of subreddits have a discord community, but i dont think vice-versa. communities are overlapping, and at some point admins will have to make a choice which one they will put their energy into. Some fringe subjects have moved from one to the other.
People assume reddit is just the "reddit homepage", but its actually a series of long tail discussion groups. Want to discuss Ubiquiti wifi appliances and configurations? Guess what there's a whole community on reddit that is active there.
Discord essentially has this too but actually much more privately/invite only style. I could probably find an Ubiquiti owners group there too.
I completely agree. The fact that major subreddits all have Discord servers definitely speaks to Discord addressing some community need that Reddit is not.
Reddit Chat is my prime example of a Product Development Vice President rushing out a feature-clone of a complementary business to try and juke the stats for their OKRs. Buggy, annoying, pushy, rude. Reddit Chat is why I now visit Incognito and interact less.
Reddit literally destroyed independent forums. That's such a huge swath of the internet and they effectively have a monopoly. Additionally, they top Google results for so many different subjects. I don't understand why they can't monetize that more.
They shouldn't also need to half heartedly try to compete with Discord. They should drill down on what they excel at.
Even though I am a daily Reddit user, it's mostly because there are no other alternatives. I definitely would not buy their stock.
I feel like every year in the past decade there has been some new Reddit clone. Reddit itself was open source for a while, so it used to be really easy. They never catch on.
I’m hoping some of these catch on but it seems those who are entrenched with power over social communications keep deplatforming these or character attacking them as some kind of extremist haven when most aren’t: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/oioeot/...
Tildes has been around a few years now I believe. I tried it in its early days, and checked it out again just now. Both times I’ve been impressed - it tends to have higher-quality comments and feel less… generally vapid that modern Reddit.
I used tildes for the better part of a year, unfortunately for me the cliquish nature and the fact that there are 12-15 power users with half the posts, who also congregate on the offsite discord, really ruined the website for me. I respect deimos and his goals greatly, but his community quickly became stressful to deal with.
I keep running into niche areas where the discussion group is on Facebook. Which annoys me to no end as I hate Facebook, but that's where the action is. It's not obvious to me that Facebook couldn't eat reddit's lunch.
It does sort of make me wonder what community need Reddit fulfills - discoverability/searchability? Single login? - because it's sort of a weird halfway house between forums (differing in that not searching, and duplicating an old thread is somewhat necessarily okay) and chat.
What I mean is, Reddit to me seems a step closer to something like Discord. And yet Discord is apparently still necessary; so why Reddit, and not traditional forum + Discord?
I added 'single login' as an after thought, because it didn't occur to me at first, but I think that must be a big reason. But even then there's Discourse, with not single but much easier and OAuth (signup/)login.
The default state of a Discord is hidden. You need an invite link to join a "server." It is set up in a way that your meeting point is outside of Discord, usually real life, at least per their marketing material (irl groups are probably the most value in terms of ad revenue).
Reddit has a standardized layout, you don't have to learn a new interface. It has single sign on, so you don't have to create a new account to participate in a community (low friction) and it has the people. Also, it has the voting concept which helps filter content so you aren't having to do that yourself by scanning topics.
A "classic forum" trying to get off the ground would be competing with all of that. You could also argue, "why Discord? Why not IRC?" for much the same reasons.
Yes, that is exactly what I suggested in comment previous to (up-thread of) the one you replied to.
As I said there, there is also Discourse, with only slightly more multi-community friction really, making it far easier and more standardised to do initial sign-up.
1. Relatively easy to create a subforum.
2. Someplace you can post [pseudo]anonymously.
3. Has a critical mass of people.
4. Is accessible to anyone on the web.
There's a subreddit for all sorts of topics, and if there isn't one, it's fairly easy to just start one. You don't have to deal with setting up forum software or paying someone for it, and if you want to you can create a post with a pseudoanonymous throwaway account. It's really easy to come and go, and there's enough moderation that it hasn't in general devolved into a *chan-style environment, but not so much it's alienating.
Pseudoanonymity is maybe underappreciated in social networking I think. It's really a key feature. Once you reach some mainstream critical mass, having that feature really moves things along.
If you could replicate those four things in a decentralized way, it might take off. But there's a chicken-and-egg issue with network effects.
I disagree, it's a totally different market, and your remark only makes sense in a myopic "everything is a competing social network" sort of way.
2 core features of Discord are voice chat and access control, both of which are necessary for groups like a guild in a video game. Adoption in small groups like that was huge, competitors like Teamspeak and Mumble had incredible friction.
Even if you focus specifically on text communications, access control is a major feature. One example is the integration with Twitch, where there are servers limited to subscribers. Reddit focused on "the whole site is a community" rather than Discord's "start your own community, limited to very specific people."
I'd argue that the overlap you see is Discord monopolizing a disjoint market and then encroaching into Reddit's market due to userbase size. "Why isn't there a Discord server?" is the sort of question that gets asked when everyone there is also on Discord.
Personally, what amazes me is that Discord allowed Slack to grow to what it is. I was very surprised when they doubled down on gaming focus.
Discord is a solution that fits between the vastly better voice solutions in Teamspeak & Mumble/Murmur, and the much more enterprise features of Slack. As a pure chat solution it is way inferior to IRC or XMPP, however it has greater interactivity ala Slack. What it does really well is blend enough features from each into a coherent product that can replace them all in one go.
Moderators have the most to lose by moving, it will be the people who don't post who have nothing to lose.
We are seeing a consolidation of moderators of the major subreddits. The number of moderators on reddit is incredibly tiny, sub-sub-sub pareto level of control.
These subreddits are losing diversity of who moderates them and it's suspected by some that many full time moderators are fully paid up employees of PR firms. Even volunteer mods admit that its basically like a full time job. It makes total sense if I was in a marketing firm for Netflix to have an employee being a moderator on the largest internet forum about movies. This pull moves away from the organic, disorganized and diverse nature of reddit to a kind of centralization and conformity. I suppose recent events have also shown the power of these power moderators in shaping the platform to the will of those moderators, come to think of it. Interesting times!
I agree for the vast majority of users it costs nothing to move, and they will if there#s something better which there isn't anything yet
But, as before with all the other cases, those who move will be the early adopters. moderators are the old guard, stuffy, controlling, professional, they will be the last to move as they have to protect their investment. Those who move first will be the more independent and chaotic riding the wave. I look forward to it.
People forget (or never noticed) all the credible tech press running articles questioning the future of the internet as recently as the early 2000s. Then the 2008 election happened and a lot of tech-hesitant people got online to tweet and blog about it until 2012 when Obama's victory tweet set record numbers that are now routine. Nobody seems to question it anymore, but the internet's future is no more certain. At least the open internet's future.
Digg was a big fish in a tiny pond even as late as 2010 when it launched v4. Most people in the English-speaking world Digg targeted were some kind of online, but usage jumped as smartphones became normal. Twitter took most of that growth in use.
It's survivor bias to only look at existing incumbents. Reddit absorbed Digg users almost overnight, as one quick example. Another slower one is how AIM, ICQ, or MySpace lost the war of attrition.
Not just that. Once we all have GPT-n power in our back pocket, it will become trivial to flood Reddit and all other forms of social media with absolute time wasting drivel.
Platforms will start to require government IDs. But these will also be falsified with thispersondoesnot exist.
And then we'll have to verify with a trusted identity provider or phone number. And that will be required for and stick to everything we do online.
Short text-based social media, long government tracking.
Suppose, as a thought experiment, you could create the ideal, perfect, social network or discussion board. Say, with 40 of the smartest, most creative, quirkiest, considerate people you knew. Hell: the 40 top exemplars of this on the whole planet. It would be a pretty awesome network.
(I know this because I accidentally created something like this, just by creating a small group with smart and interesting people in it. It really was surprisingly good.)
It can only get worse.
Because if you've already got the best, then anyone else you can add will be less smart, less creative, less quirky, less considerate, than who's already in the group.
And at some point you'll notice. Maybe at 50 people, or 500, or 5,000, or 50k, or 500k, or 5m, or ....
For a few reasons.
- Gradation of capabilities. These are ordinalities, not cardinalities.
- Limits to common experience and interest.
- Differences of opinion. Or morals. Or philosophy.
Ultimately, the original founding cohort starts looking for a fresh platform / greenfield with smaller scale, fewer problems, and a higher S/N ratio --- this is classical "clue flight" (or brain drain in an earlier metaphor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_drain).
Reddit started off as a quirky, self-selected, geek-heavy crowd. It's anything but that now. At small scale, a free-speech free-for-all was tolerable. At large, it's harmful at international scale.
A key problem is what I call Woozle's Epistemic Paradox:
Our present epistemic systems are undergoing kind of the same shock that the online community underwent when transitioning from BBSs and Usenet to the commercial web to social media.
We were used to a very high content-to-BS ratio because it took a certain amount of intelligence and intense domain-interest for people to be there in the first place -- and we've now transitioned to a situation where many people are there more or less accidentally and (the worst part), because of a high percentage of the population being present, there is now substantial power to be had by influencing the discussions that take place.
This is why the "it's just the Internet" or "just delete your Facebook" is not only an inadequate response, it's false. It fails to recognise that even for those not actively participating or engaging with those platforms, their lives are profoundly affected. The Arab Spring, genocide in Myanmar, the Hong Kong democracy protests, and the January 6 insurrection being four specific cases in point.
>I wouldn’t put a big bet on this leadership team in such an unstable environment.
As far as the big internet companies go, it is hard to think of any company whose leaders have so routinely been criticized as out of touch with their users and downright incompetent with the one exception maybe being Yahoo. It is a almost a miracle that Reddit has survived it all mostly for the better, but I wouldn't put money on that continuing forever.
I’d say it’s because they have kept the core platform unchanged. In other words, they haven’t really done anything. Heading on over to old.reddit.com is pretty much the same as it was 15 years ago (more or less). As soon as it’s actually impossible to avoid their push to their terrible ‘new’ site and app, I’m jumping ship. Classic Reddit is like Craigslist, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Just keep the servers running and DO NOTHING ELSE. It’s a sweet gig if you can get it.
> Just keep the servers running and DO NOTHING ELSE.
That doesn't appear to be what users or mods want. Lots of people want more active development and moderation. Just this week there were large scale protest across the platform regarding Reddit admins not doing enough to stop the spread of dangerous COVID misinformation. Then Reddit released a rather bad statement refusing to give into user demands. They almost immediately went back on that statement and banned a big misinformation subreddit. It almost feels like they make decisions in a way to ensure they piss everyone off.
Thats invisible stuff in the background. Yes it matters a lot, but the point still stands. Reddit struck a goldmine with their original UI, but that goldmine cant really be monetized to the extent their investors want, so they are trying their best to fix what isnt broken and failing.
Are you kidding? The main site renders itself completely useless within 2 clicks if you are unathenticated. Reddit has become a case study in dark patterns.
Not sure why you're getting the down arrow. 10-15 years ago you could use reddit practically any which way you wanted and it was never an issue. Nowadays I can hardly load a page without stock Chrome.
I used to be a hard core Reddit user for probably 10 years. I havent used it in maybe 2 years; I have no interest. People like me are probably showing up in their user data and the writing is on the wall internally. Thats when you go public to dump the bag.
Their biggest mistake maybe?...controversy and discussion sells and they essentially banned that subreddit by subreddit. People dont like information platforms with information gaps.
> People dont like information platforms with information gaps.
Is there evidence of this? I want to believe this is true but the era of cancel culture and deplatforming suggests people want information gaps and echo chambers.
Get ready for the degradation of Reddit to accelerate when this happens. Right now Reddit is almost still usable if you use third-party apps on mobile and Old Reddit Redirect on the desktop; both of those are going to be cut off for a quick jolt to revenue when the market demands it.
With what reddit has become, both from a leadership and a userbase standpoint, its fall can't happen soon enough. It is so toxic and manipulated nowadays that I won't mourn for it.
That is true about large parts, but for me I can easily avoid those. There are truly good communities there that are great resources for various problems (technical and not).
Probably. The evidence speaks for itself. Most of the reddit homepage is a hatefest of [ingroup] screaming hate at [outgroup]. It's so toxic as to beggar belief. Facebook and Twitter seems like prim decorum in comparison.
The article says revenue, not profit. Though you’d think it wouldn’t cost $100M per quarter to run an HN clone with little to no first party moderation.
I don’t expect it to pass, but I see some weird proposals sometimes that have no chance of passing, like human rights obligations for a defence contractor.
With all due respect, “How expensive could it possibly be to run $popular_site?” is a fairly common HN trope. Reddit has core product development, mobile apps, marketing, ad sales, anti-botting, high-level moderation, new product r&d, etc that all need paid staff. I suspect it’s much more expensive that you think to run all that - and yeah, you could kill most of that and keep just the core product intact, but investors don’t want “lean and humble” they want “go big or go home”. The promise of growth and fending off new entrants is what justifies the sky high valuation, but that can’t happen with a minimalist organization that only maintains an MVP.
>Reddit has core product development, mobile apps, marketing, ad sales, anti-botting, high-level moderation, new product r&d, etc that all need paid staff
Ok, and while this is slightly facetious, it is actually a bit serious: Most of those things have resulted in downslides to quality and increased controversy. Essentially all of reddit's product R&D has been terrible and nearly universally criticized by users. I'd say that's mostly added a ton of risk that the whole site gets abandoned a la digg.
Except most of Reddit’s most valuable users (the ones who spend time and contribute) don’t use any of that because the experience is terrible. Pretty much everyone uses the old.reddit.com that doesn’t really need product development and performs way better than the new site. All of their innovation and product dev is going into the new site, where few people see it.
I look at reddit and see a company that has built a product that it’s users like, but they can’t monetize that product. Everything they try the users either revolt over or ignore completely, and the politics of running the site are becoming untenable.
I wouldn’t touch this IPO with a mile long stick. There is no upside at any valuation that would be worth an IPO.
I actually run a medium-sized sub - our traffic stats show about 50/50 old vs new, and this is the sort of sub that caters to a tech savvy, older userbase - the sort of people I’d imagine would be the core demo for old Reddit. I suspect way more people are using new Reddit than you think, especially on the more general use subs.
Or put another way: the people running Reddit aren’t trying to lose money, and they have more detailed traffic stats than we do. I think things like RPAN are silly, but there always seem to be lots of people active on it.
Edit: apparently site-wide two years ago 60% of traffic was exclusively new Reddit, 30% was old Reddit, and 10% was a mix.
Reddit's most valuable users are the ones that don't use adblockers and use the native app. I'm not sure that's the same group that is contributing and spending time.
> Except most of Reddit’s most valuable users (the ones who spend time and contribute) don’t use any of that because the experience is terrible. Pretty much everyone uses the old.reddit.com that doesn’t really need product development and performs way better than the new site
That's revenue. Are their 1400 tech salaries and benefits they have to pay, plus their infrastructure and overhead costs more than $33 million a month?
Honestly I think nowhere that is that big. I think it will federate a bit again into Discord/forums. It's kind of a last bastion of sorts for Alexandria type news and content aggregators with pseudonymous social features.
Look what happened to big subs that where playing cat and mouse with the mods, they all just scattered after trying other platforms like Voat or whatever.
Some kind of dark-horse platform will emerge and catch on like wildfire. I do not think a mere reddit clone will pull anyone away. There would have to be something new about it's UX.
> There would have to be something new about it's UX
Mobile first would be enough. I'm a little bit older and still do not understand the appeal of snapchat, tiktok, etc. I understand FB/twitter/instagram (I just don't like using it). But making a mobile version of a small feature fuel the hype storm needed
Reddit is absolutely a mobile first company. Most of their users use adblock, so having a desktop site is just a way for them to gain mobile users.
Their mobile app being awful is pretty hilarious given all this, but they're certainly trying very hard to improve the experience on mobile(while also showing as many ads as possible).
Reddit is trying to be a mobile first company. I don't think they are successful. I know many people who use reddit, almost always either on desktop browsers or using 3rd party apps for mobile, because their first party one is so clunky.
They never will be. The ship sailed. They’re trying to increase engagement by having a mobile product/audience. But. The browser is a great tool for media consumption it turns out.
Decentralization and strong moderation are mutually exclusive. You can't simply have a single source of authority for content moderation and decentralize it too. It's either decentralized with variable rate of moderation quality, or have it centralized. There's no way inbetween.
Users can't vote out a content, they can only downvote it which doesn't affect its visibility, only its sort order. There are even people who love that kind of content and read Reddit sorted by "controversial". Curation has some censorship effects but moderation power trumps it. Reporting is advisory too, it's not a power per se. If subreddit mods don't read any of the reports, nothing would happen. No consequences.
"Strong moderation" is vague, and can mean a variety of levels of involvement, from commonsense weeding out of spam and malicious trolling (what I will look for), to heavy handed and blatant attempts to steer conversation toward a particular point of view and to "combat" even reasonable disagreement and skepticism on important topics. Covid is the perfect example of this. I get it, some mods on my local subreddit fancy themselves Responsible And Important People On A Mission To Fight Misinformation (in their own minds). I don't care about their precious opinions on what constitutes Evil Covid Misinformation though, I just want an adult discussion that doesn't get siderailed by trolls. That's it, nothing else. Keep the sermonizing to yourselves thanks. So whatever reddit successor gives me that, I'll go to.
Could also mean "No controversial subjects", sort of like Tik Tok where any kind of political conversation, Covid related subject, etc. is taken down or ignored by the algorithm. Lots of people already think of reddit from a content consumption POV instead of a forum
I've thought about this a lot. I really should start working on it.
> 1. pseudo-anonymity, gives people freedom to speak their minds
Making an influential account should be exceptionally difficult. All submissions and comments should be, by default, anonymous, with users only taking an identity when relevant (ie: if you're a scientist on something like r/askscience, or a developer on r/programming). Nobody should have to make a throwaway account to be anonymous, it should just be a flag on the server. Throwaway account comments should not be possible, you should need to build reputation to make a comment that is seen by most.
> 2. moderation ensures people know that they are in a controlled space
Moderation, if granted special powers, will always be taken over by "powerusers" with an agenda. Moderation should be done exclusively through comment and post scoring, not through individual named users. If downvoting and upvoting worked correctly, moderation would be entirely unnecessary. That's the whole point of curation, isn't it?
My main idea is to take a known set of good voters (ie: myself, some friends, early contributors, etc.) who exclusively follow the etiquette and can pick a substantial post from a bad one, and then based on user similarity to the known good set, you can grant a multiplier or a decimation to those that seem to vote similarly or dissimilarity. Essentially, you'll have fractional voting/scoring.
> 3. Ensures that spaces have a branding, shared identity between them but are not being controlled from without, but only within
I don't like the idea of anyone being able to create a namespace. It fractures things too significantly and you get echochambers for each party or each viewpoint. The usenet hierarchy was better, and it should be combined with subscriptions to #tags to get more granularity for individual user interests.
> (1a) All submissions and comments should be, by default, anonymous, with users only taking an identity when relevant
This honestly sounds awfully similar to 4chan.
> (1b) Throwaway account comments should not be possible [...] build reputation to make a comment that is seen by most.
Reddit is already sort of like this, honestly. That's why high karma accounts are often sold.
> (2) grant a multiplier or a decimation to those that seem to vote similarly or dissimilarity.
This will be slowly (or swiftly) shifted by brigading bots.
> (3) I don't like the idea of anyone being able to create a namespace. It fractures things too significantly and you get echochambers for each party or each viewpoint.
You'll still get echochambers for each viewpoint. There will just be fewer of them. Based on point 2, the majority will choose the viewpoints of the echochamber.
> [Anonymous by default] honestly sounds awfully similar to 4chan.
That seems shallow to me, it's only true insofar as 4chan is a well-known forum that allows for anonymous posting. 4chan is ephemeral, the site I'm imagining is not. 4chan is image based, the site I'm imagining is not. 4chan doesn't have threaded comments, the site I'm imagining would.
Most importantly, 4chan allows for anonymous posting that isn't tied to a central identity (there's nothing tying anonymous posts to tripcoded posts), the site I'm imagining would. There would be no throwaways, you would only be able to post anonymously on an account with a profile behind it.
> Reddit is already sort of like this, honestly. That's why high karma accounts are often sold.
As far as I know, there's no bias given to high karma accounts in terms of default comment sorting or post visibility. The only reason I can imagine that someone would purchase a high karma account is to use them to gain outsized influence by applying for mod positions on big subreddits.
> [Vote biasing] will be slowly (or swiftly) shifted by brigading bots.
If they can accurately upvote good content and accurately filter bad content, so what? They will never be able to get a bot into the good pool of known benevolent actors, and if they're always voting similarly to the known-good actors, then they're indistinguishable from good participants. Everything would be derived from being similar to the known-good actors, or similar to those that are most similar to known-good actors, and so on.
> You'll still get echochambers for each viewpoint. There will just be fewer of them. Based on [the shifting of vote biasing by bots], the majority will choose the viewpoints of the echochamber.
The pool of known-good (possibly paid) voters/editors should thwart this.
Anything that promotes meaningful content discovery.
Everyone is projecting their need for anonymity in response to this question, but ultimately it comes down to frequency of dopamine hits. Think TikTok but more formats than just video.
I think it will just die off like the communities surrounding extinct forums and irc and usenet. Demographically reddit skews millennial and other platforms like tiktok are more popular among gen z. At least for me if reddit hits the fan I won't be hunting for another time sink, I'll probably just spend that time on more real life stuff instead which certainly carries my attention more as I get older than spending time on reddit.
This should be interesting as it will inevitably increase pressure on reddit's leadership to monetise their users better. But it has always been part of that site's DNA to avoid the kind of extreme data mining that Google and FB are performing. This, on the other hand, has led to a situation where reddit, despite its size, is consistently underperforming financially relative to what would be possible. How are they going to balance that?
What would be possible with less monetization of users and a decent-sized support staff?
Or are we talking the bullshit SV-style possibilities where you monetize the living shit out of everyone and everything and give a big middle finger to your customers with a skeleton human support crew?
'Management involvement' has always been heavily free-speech at all costs. Reddit is one of the last bastions of this style of management and have yet to succumb to zoomers' whimsical emotional fragility.
They were ground zero for The Fappening, remember? And all sorts of other nasty stuff that they only cracked down on because of intense pressure.
People need to remember that they are calling for CENSORSHIP, and reddit's policy for the longest time was to avoid that at all costs.
If there's one thing I respected about Reddit it was their ability to stand up to those whiners.
I am so ashamed of the latest generation -- for all our differences that I have no choice but to accept, the one thing I cannot forgive is how they seem to have forgotten what free speech means.
This is a fantasy. Reddit management has always paid lip service to "free speech at all costs", until reddit itself has to bear even the smallest of those costs at which point the principle is rapidly jettisoned. There are so many examples I don't even know where to start, from the perverted (jailbait) to the political (the_donald) to the offended zoomers (fatpeoplehate).
Before Ellen Chao and gamergate they had a really hands-off policy on content moderation, but it was that controversy that seems to have changed their course
I don't see how not wanting people to be radicalized is emotional fragility. It's extremely paternalistic, but idk about fragile. Reddit's community has never really been interested in cancelling.
I'm not sure this argument really has any weight. You could say the same thing about using neopronouns is a low-cost, simple, and "kind" thing to do... but then completely disregard the centuries (if not millenia) of social convention and programming that has to be unwound for many before such a thing feels natural and simple.
Does gen Z not want people to be radicalized? Or do they just want people to be radicalized to their dogma?
And Reddit is a big community. For certain there are factions that are all about cancelling those that offend them.
I clearly have no idea what is going on or how business works because the only question plaguing my mind is how on earth reddit manages to be valued at $10B. Does low-key shilling and banner ads really make that much money? I know it doesn't work this way but they'd have to collect $192 from their 52M daily users to earn that kind of cash. Honestly I got the impression reddit stopped being cool like 5 years ago and other than this year's entertaining stock market shenanigans it's largely a novelty. Even when I was using it I could hardly imagine my eyes were worth $192 to anybody. Not to mention last time I looked at reddit the incel and children under 18 vibes were intense. What do I know? FB somehow manages to be relevant. Am I missing something or are we just printing monopoly money based on increasingly loose pretexts nowadays? Do you even need a business model to make money anymore, or is it all based on speculative user counts and growth?
This isn't even a joke, it's just true. "reddit [my actual search]" is the only way I know to sort of get at all kinds of info that Google is no longer any good whatsoever at finding. I guess if that stops being useful, for some reason, I'll have to resort to one of those long queries that tries to limit searches to independent forums (which used to be visible without that kind of thing, when they were relevant, but are now nearly impossible to find otherwise). Twitter might be a partial replacement, but they seem dedicated to making searching their site, by any means, as useless as possible.
Switched browsers, ended up using bing for a while... It was even worse. SEO has destroyed the Internet, it's pretty hard to find anything relevant anymore... Outside a very few sites like Reddit, Stack Overflow and Wikipedia. And each of those has it own host of issue. Somethings kinda still work like technical information. Now to think might it be that some engineers at Google actually try to keep that section somewhat usable?
I yearn for a curated search engine that only looks at a small section of the internet and completely omits notorious SEO abusing sites. Most of the time, I am not trying to search through the corpus of human knowledge (google's old goal), but rather, to perform a very specific kind of search in a specific problem domain.
I'm working on something like this for code search (https://ask.moe/search/code), which currently consist of about 150 sites that I will continue to expand whenever I discover a useful site missing (e.g. official website of some package that contain good documentation).
I decided to start with code because it's something I personally use every day, and I got fed up with the spammy sites that just present an answer (or often only the question itself) extracted from StackOverflow, but plan to do something similar with other categories in the future. I'm curious to hear how you'd approach this problem, as in which categories you'd support and how you'd break it down?
I've got a suggestion, I queried "C# ?." and my results were mostly generic about C# documentation. I wanted to get more information about how to use the null conditional operator.
I suspect the query is ignoring the '?.' because it thinks of it as unimportant symbols. Would it be possible to modify the search engine to treat punctuation as operators, or terms in-and-of-themselves?
Thanks, I'm afraid there's little I can do as it's just using Google Custom Search Engine with whitelisted dev sites, but it should work if you type out the meaning of the symbols, e.g. "C# null conditional" instead of "C# ?." (or "C# question mark dot" to figure out what the symbols mean).
And it's unfortunate if you have the Reddit app installed and try doing this, because every link is going to jump you to the app, and you have to switch back to the browser to do another search.
Shhh don't tell anyone, the advertisers will start trying to defeat this.
But seriously, I don't understand how Google has let their results become such trash. If you actually want community sentiment (what's generally accepted as the least shitty X you can buy) you have to dig through reddit results. If you don't it's AI generated blogspam for days
It's pretty sad actually. Especially if I'm trying to look up anything that might be related to a buying decision. What's fun is reddit's search feature is kinda garbage so they really need each other.
I’ve been unimpressed by google, but the feature that’s finally catalyzed me to explore other search engines is the way they now take up precious mobile browser screen space when one searches with a frozen pane of the search. Terrible ui decision.
There are so many sleights of hand type maneuvers you can pull to moderate sitewide. Tiktok, for example, bans LBTQ content not outright but just sets some flag in their database that ascertains the posts never go viral.
The social aspect of Reddit is a massive enhancement of this. It's one thing to see a headline on WaPo or NYT. It's another to see that on Reddit, with dozens of commenters all posting takes that advance the same frame or line of reasoning, upvoting each other, congratulating each other on how smart they are, etc. What you don't see are the interlocking moderators on all the top subs or the fact that people are frequently banned from completely unrelated subs for political reasons based on their posting history. The result is an echo-chamber that is a 90% match for the editorial stance of WaPo or NYT at all times, except it looks social and organic, and therefore extremely convincing to onlookers.
It's an interesting study in human self-organizing behavior. We like to see our opinions confirmed, so we like sites like reddit, which breeds this exact behavior. This leads to the groupthink or hivemind as reddit users call it.
It isn't really worth $192 per user. It's worth, say, $40 per user if there was an absolute certainty that they wouldn't grow their user base and just stay at fifty million users for the next hundred years. But with tech, there is a non-trival chance (say 5%) that they 10x their user base and 5x the amount of income they receive per user per year. You never know how these things will go, but the downside of a stock is limited. The upside isn't.
As an aside, Reddit is great if you're in the right subreddits and clear out the junk that appeals to the broad public or is frequently gamed by political actors.
> As an aside, Reddit is great if you're in the right subreddits and clear out the junk that appeals to the broad public or is frequently gamed by political actors.
I disagree. To me, going hyperbolic to make a point, this is like saying there were some really great bars in 1930s Germany.
It kinda doesn’t mean much if you bury your head in the sand here. It’s a bad company that does bad things. That’s cool you like some people who agree with you, but these people would be cool elsewhere too.
>Does low-key shilling and banner ads really make that much money.
I genuinely believe Reddit's real value proposition is manipulating the content shown to the masses. As a propaganda tool, it's incredibly powerful to saturate people's feeds with consistent and coordinated messaging.
At any given time, the feed of r/all and r/popular has several agenda-posts and submissions designed to be derisive and derisive. The nature of the subreddits themselves can also be co-opted, as r/facepalm, r/insanepeoplefacebook, and r/publicfreakout are basically used to mock conservative pundits and politicians. "Niche" criticism subreddits - made specifically to mock the other side - also pop up from time to time, like r/HermanCainAward and r/LeopardsAteMyFace. There are, of course, constantly submissions from obviously leftist subreddits like r/LateStageCapitalism, r/PoliticalHumor, and r/AntiWork. But screenshots of tweets posted there inevitably end up on both r/WhitePeopleTwitter, r/BlackPeopleTwitter.
That being said, I think r/pics has the most subtle manipulation. If Donald Trump was in the headlines for doing something bad, you would see pleasant photographs of Obama with tens of thousands of up votes. Something about Antifa in the news? Plenty of d-day and patriotic Nazi fighting images. Right now there is protest art against the Texas abortion decision. Lots of things on r/pics are harmless, of course. But you will also see odd things where the post has 50k point score, with a 50% approval score, and the comments are all overwhelmingly negative. I recently saw this on a post comparing Taliban forces in technical trucks with a bunch of rednecks in Toyotas with Trump flags. Make of that what you will.
I could go on and on, but if you wanted to persuade people on a near subconscious level, Reddit is nearly the perfect avenue to do so.
"Leftist communities on Reddit often implore the company to ban The_Donald. So far, Huffman has demurred. “There are arguments on both sides,” he said, “but, ultimately, my view is that their anger comes from feeling like they don’t have a voice, so it won’t solve anything if I take away their voice.” He thought of something else to say, but decided against it. Then he took a swig of beer and said it anyway. “I’m confident that Reddit could sway elections,” he told me. “We wouldn’t do it, of course. And I don’t know how many times we could get away with it. But, if we really wanted to, I’m sure Reddit could have swayed at least this election, this once.” That’s a terrifying thought. It’s also almost certainly true."
I think that's a misuse of the term Leftist - I remember the most outspoken voices calling for banning The_Donald coming from centrist liberals. These types are die-hard liberal supporters who "vote blue no matter who" and celebrate partisanship like a team sports event. Leftists viewed the rise of Trump as more of a denouncement of HRC's neoliberal politics and lack of integrity rather than based on the rise of a bigoted irredeemable white working class. Liberals want to silence Trump supporters and shame them into submission, while leftists mostly want to convert them via class consciousness to fight for lower- and middle-class empowerment.
Leftism is about socialism, worker empowerment, anti-corporate power. Subreddits around Bernie, socialism, stupidpol, etc. They didn't like Trump, but were mostly critical of the lack of focus and results from democrats. We (I count myself in this group) thought Trump was a dangerous idiot, but ineffective democrats who paid lip service to noble goals while stifling progress were the main topic of discussion.
Liberals, who were most vocally pushing for deplatforming trump supporters, were more the types who lurk (and mod) /r/politics and /r/liberal. They viewed everything Trump did as evil, while absolving democrats who had done the same things for the 4 years previous.
Hardcore ride-or-die liberals != leftists - these are two groups with distinct ideologies. In particular to this context, leftists are much more apprehensive about censorship because they don't have deep institutional power.
Most of the time now I see the left used as a term for the woke, or race and gender aware folks. It's unfortunate, because race and gender are divisive topics, and class based discussions could potentially pull a lot of white people back into the leftist fold.
Which is not to say poc and lgbtq folks haven't gotten fucked historically, they totally have, but we could all be allies if we focused our messaging differently.
A lot of this is probably due to the urban rural divide. Urban folks can see poc and lgbtq people around them every day, but they don't see the lower class white people living outside urban areas.
This is pretty much it. Liberation means liberation of all the people I don't like, too, and it doesn't happen by going full Blue Team and further alienating them with useless slogans.
I've been dragged on Twitter by the same kind of Blue Team ideologue I've been accused of being by people who don't have enough resolution on me to see the difference, so I can at least empathize with them. If I were someone like that, I'd call me a useless twit too.
Joe Rogan might be a human weather vane, but there's a reason millions of people who otherwise consider themselves apolitical listen to him. Treating them as dismissible is why most of half the country doesn't vote. All the most effective voter suppression efforts of the Republican party, which barely gets half of the voting half in a good year for them, wouldn't mean anything if the other half weren't so alienating. The few points the Comey letter cost Clinton wouldn't have meant anything if the party wasn't run by smug fools.
> I think r/pics has the most subtle manipulation.
Absolutely, and entirely intentional.
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN CONTEXT!? It’s just a picture, relax, stupid conservative is triggered by a simple picture.”
The common person there seems to have no concept that this is the goal. To offer a picture and tells NONE of the real story; then to “talk amongst yourselves” and find that they all agree with each other. Just ignore all the [deleted] comments, probably just spam.
> how on earth reddit manages to be valued at $10B
Reddit is ~16 years old and was in one of YC's first batches (first batch ever?). This is an absolute dinosaur in "startup" age. It's been acquired, traded, and recap'd multiple times for (presumably) sub-$1B value. For all intents and purposes it's a distressed asset in "enchanted forest" terms (note - this is not a criticism per se, many distressed assets can be very valuable).
I'm convinced (with limited evidence as an outsider) the following drives their valuation:
- Record valuations of FB, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, etc. that have comparable features and "industry metrics" (DAU, MAU, etc.) that can be easily parsed by public analysts. The latest round of investors probably got a great insider deal so they could prep it for IPO and pass it off to the next sucker.
- Reddit started to receive more and more M&A attention when mobile biz models went public (Snap, Uber, etc.). The key to any financial success for Reddit is simply mobile. This an incredibly risky, because (1) reddit allows 3p mobile apps where they can't control ads/tracking and (2) their conversion to their own Reddit mobile app is extremely user hostile. But this is essentially it - you can track and sell ads on Reddit via it's native mobile apps. If somehow (I'm personally not convinced) they can get everyone on to their native mobile app, then sure, they will be as valuable as Snap/Twitter.
- It's essentially a "cost of doing business" for YC. If Reddit became essentially not valuable or not as valuable in the public eye it undermines YC's brand. This has become less and less an issue overtime as more successes have come out of YC, but during those time periods when it wasn't the value had to be continually projected as being valued (thereby creating steam that never fizzeld out). Think of this like saying one of your clients in the 90's was Bear Stearns, which gave you social proof to work with Goldman Sachs, etc. you'll hold on to that Bear Stearns logo on your sales deck until it ultimately fails, but now you have Goldman, Morgan, etc. to show your social proof.
It's crazy to me that Reddit isn't a mark on YC's brand. I can't think of a worse site to use today. It makes it clear to me that YC's business model doesn't really care about quality because Reddit has only degraded year by year.
I mean if you want to make money, cool, but if your startup is based out of YC, I don't trust you.
r/worldnews has become the default news aggregator of the world. Journalists around the world use that subreddit to gauge which topics interests people.
That is why it's concerning that the modding and mod selection process on big subreddits like r/worldnews is so opaque.
It's a pretty poor pulse on whats actually interesting to people honestly. Might as well just subscribe to publishers RSS feeds, you will get about the same content. Look at the post histories of these accounts that make these top posts. Very strange post histories, sometimes only making posts to worldnews. It's not exactly rocket science to operate a botnet that posts your articles all over relevant subreddits, even operate a ring of accounts to upvote a post enough to get it rolling in hot and upvoted organically from there on by users who tend to just roll with whats slightly upvoted.
We desperately need news aggregators and social media services like Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, that are NOT run by for profit enterprises. There are a lot of terrific open source platforms out there and saddened that none of them have gained much traction.
At least, not venture-scale businesses. I can see some community and membership-driven Hacker News clones for niches being possibly sustainable (isn't that kind of what Reddit started out as, anyway?), but can't see any VCs wanting to back that.
That's not bad though — They'd probably be something more like Gumroad — independent and run by a small team, and fairly profitable, but hard to grow and IPO.
How come services like Digg and Slashdot weren't able to make sustainable revenue off of membership fees?
Agreed, I really wish Lemmy and similar would get more love. There are so many awesome federated projects.
Maybe ot but it seems like the federated services are doing a really good job of keeping the crazies away. Nobody will link with hate groups so they can't recruit from the wider user base. Meanwhile Facebook and Reddit just leave hate groups alone and allow them to game algorithmic feeds for rage-engagement such that they have no trouble pulling vulnerable people from the wider community and radicalizing them.
I'd actually love to see companies, especially ones in winner-take-all/network-effect types of tech start out with some sort of unbreakable guarantee of being cool forever. All young platform providers wants to appear open and free and interoperable and trustworthy, but incentives will have their way with them once the valuation gets high enough.
Is there a legal or moral vehicle that could prevent this? Has anyone tried it? Would the invisible hand get pissed and remove the magic that makes growth happen?
Yes. You’d also require a user generated content license similar to CC0 (waive all rights Creative Commons license) along with open sourcing the code to run the platform. If Reddit was Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap.
This ensures there is no IP to capture, nor can you hold the audience hostage.
Reddit (at least the version of it that created its popularity today) died ages ago, and now it's just being propped up weekend-at-Bernie's style while the owners suck out every possible cent they can before losing the final remaining iota of user-devotion.
Reddit is toxic. They can't please anyone. You'll either find people upset because they banned covid alternative information subs or upset they didn't do it sooner. hen there are subs that celebrate people dying.
Reddit has a long, long history of denying that they have an issue and then once the media shines a light on it, realizes jailbait is yikes. Then they reverse course.
Reddit is a bunch of hatred and disinformation today. What happened SPEZ? Your tech is even worse than the disinfo. I thought you were about more than money.
Fun fact, Reddit admins are very light on the moderation, allowing you to make these genuine comments, while the volunteer moderators run the subreddits how ever they like, most of the subreddits censor extensively.
The scam by which reddit's remaining founders reacquired itself out from under conde-nast is pretty hilarious if it isn't illegal (I have no idea if it was illegal).
As more old people use it reddit will probably honestly get more valuable per user. These people tend to click that junk and give their social security number to random people on the phone and other such scams. Very lucrative population in some peoples eyes.
Reddit already has investors, Chinese censorship champion Tencent among others. I don't see what public ownership could do that would make things worse than they already are. See for example: https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...
This seems like they're cashing out. They were never able to properly monetize the site for whatever reason, now they're pushing their shares off to anyone naive enough to buy into it. I'd stay far far away.
I got banned from /r/korea few months ago, for using the term "moonies"(President Moon has a cult-like following in Korea, celebrity-power based politics) in a cheeky, teasing manner to call out pro-gov dudes that try to continue to advocate for Mayor of Seoul that committed suicide to prevent from being investigated after being accused of sexual harassment by his secretary.
Basically all evidence points to him admitting his guilt more or less by his action, but Pro gov/ Pro president Moon people continue to frame the accuser as someone with a political agenda, and continue to advocate for Mr. Park's innocence due to...you can't be guilty if you're dead before courts.
The mods applied "No overly inflammatory, sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic or offensive language." to ban my account, and when I protested, the ban stayed, as they got to define what that meant exactly.
I made a new account to circumvent the ban when Korean Gov recently came out with new media censorship law, akin to the one passed in Japan few years ago that grants gov much power to censor media for "security" reasons.
edit: can't link direct to the comment, so I linked parent comment, following was the actual comment that they flagged me for
"I have 0 interest in proving anything to you, as you clearly have your bias.
I'm just replying for others to hear what the recommendations of one of the most prestigious newspapers to ever be founded are, and one of the best non-partial media rights organizations has to say on the topic."
now my ip is shadowbanned for circumventing the reddit policy of not creating new account to post on subs you are banned from.
That's an epidemic among other subreddits too. My banning story from r/Conservative is similar. I got banned for reminding a Trump quote, that was about it. I also got the same "we owe you nothing more than that" attitude when I objected. https://twitter.com/esesci/status/1432377896903925760
Aren’t these Subreddit rules? They’re nothing to do with Reddit the company are they? Can’t you go to another Subreddit if you don’t like the rules in one?
Isn't this the feature/point of Reddit though? Reddit itself having little moderation/rules (though, they're moderate the whole site more and more), and lets communities moderate themselves to impose whatever rules they want to?
> now my ip is shadowbanned for circumventing the reddit policy of not creating new account to post on subs you are banned from.
That's frustrating. You wanted to politely share your opinion on local politics in a popular forum and now you can't even create a new subreddit. I made reveddit [1] to allow users to review moderator actions on reddit. Maybe you can use that to research how you think that subreddit is biased and then share your analysis on another site. The history [2] and subreddit [3] pages may be helpful.
I'm really glad you made this and posted it here, it's massively important to shine light on how much social engineering power rests with a handful of users:
Even if subs all had different moderators, reddit's secret removal system [1] gives them more influence over discourse than I think most people realize.
Consider, would you want someone to do this to you? I can't imagine any regular reddit users agreeing to allow everyone to secretly remove each other's content.
just wanted to thank you again. I'm just on the verge of diving into studying coding as a career, and seeing what you did with your skills to make an entire product to "fight the powers be" truly inspired me to learn to build things.
Haha great! You'll be glad you got into it. You can do a lot with a little effort. This project began as a 100-line tampermonkey script.
There are a surprising number of things you can work on that nobody else is doing, or that could be improved with your unique point of view. Of course you need to spend some time building your skills, but the tools are improving which makes it easier to build useful things. It can be hard to get your ideas heard while working for someone else, and having a side project can let you explore your creative side. My take on "fighting the powers" is we are all susceptible to bias, greed, etc, and we can put our faith in open systems that allow us to see when these human factors have run amuck.
/r/india (and /r/indiaspeaks) also bans even mildly opposing view points.
I got banned from /r/india for saying that the sub is out of touch with the real world.
> using the term "moonies"(President Moon has a cult-like following in Korea, celebrity-power based politics) in a cheeky, teasing manner
I mean, referring to Koreans by the name of a maligned cult they are not necessarily affiliated with (Moonies = Unification Movement) is racism, even if you think you're being "cheeky" about it.
I'm Korean... and I feel perfectly justified in calling people out for cult-like adherence to their party politicians to the extent of accusing a victim of sexual harassment as political agents.
You sound like those people that think weed should be illegal because gov said so.
I spent 2017-2019 posting/arguing with people on /r/korea almost every day, and I was really... inflammatory sometimes. Never got banned. As someone else points out, you probably deserved at least a temp ban for the "moonies" thing. It's a bit different than your average political sneer word.
The shadowban sucks, though. Usually, the trick is to come back on a new account, and keep your head down for a while (and, if appropriate, try not to do the things you were banned for). That goes for all the subreddits I've been on. People will notice if you're a single-purpose commenter, back on a new account.
Also... (oh god, this is like smoking a cigarette after years off them)... it has always been so funny to me that this flag of "censorship" has suddenly been taken up by certain elements/people in the Korean political discourse, in light of the fact that there has never been a time when there was no censorship of Korean media. Lee Myung-bak? The removal of all those Daum comments? Every Korean administration has used the KCSC and attendant powers like a cudgel.
Your comments in that thread show either an unintentional or deliberate ignorance of the history of this stuff in the ROK.
"Free speech" type arguments currently being levelled at the Moon administration are a joke in the Korean political context. There is no free speech in the ROK and there never has been. Remember PGH's blacklists of artists etc for being pro-North? Remember that guy who had his house raided for using NK propaganda posters in memes? There has never been any free speech, freedom from censorship, etc, in the ROK. And most people there actually don't seem to mind. Or else they do mind, but it depends on who's in power. That's their business. They're the polity. But these claims of sudden "censorship" are lies by omission, because there is literally no time in the history of the ROK state at which the press has been anything like "free" in the western sense. It's all political ebb and flow.
Unless Moon Jae-in's critics would be willing to join me in calling for the KCSC to remove the internet blocks on North Korean content (or the ones on porn for that matter), any claims of censorship/free access to information/free speech will just look like political opportunism. It's "do as I say, not as I do" stuff. The election of every new president brings legal trials for the previous one, or at least for members of the previous president's administration. And so it goes...
so RSF/UNHRC/Le Monde all just being ignorant I take it? lol
I have no interest in debating someone that thinks SK shouldn't be blocking NK contents, a sorry piece of dystopian communist-authoritarian country SK is still in war with? are you kidding me?
You'll find that those types of foreign concerns about freedom of the press in Korea go back a really long way, and are not limited to the current administration.
>I have no interest in debating someone that thinks SK shouldn't be blocking NK contents, a sorry piece of dystopian communist-authoritarian country SK is still in war with?
Okay, so you do believe in censorship, correct? But only for your political opponents.
>Censorship vs countries you are in war with is basic self-defense.
You think that people in Seoul, eating their 삼겹살, will look at some North Korean site and suddenly decide that what they really want is to go eat grass in the north during the next famine? As I'm sure you're aware, censorship of northern stuff in the ROK isn't just for NK ip addresses, it's for information in libraries. Where's the basic self-defence in denying historians access to primary sources?
You do believe in censorship, just for ideas that you disagree with.
edit: I recognise your username from the old days on /r/korea now actually... One of the mods on there must have finally had enough. You've been single-issue posting for like four years now, bro.
I find it hilarious that the ones who do all the real work to make Reddit what it is, ie the mods and the communities, make zilch from this. The mods are doing their best to make their subreddits the best it can be, for free. Meanwhile the engineers and the execs and investors at Reddit make billions.
Mods get a lot from moderation other than money, maybe money too in some cases. If it was truly without any returns, nobody would do it. They have disproportionate power to ban anyone immediately. They can strut around with their pinned posts, "warnings" to the communities, content deletion. They get to play the community lead despite having unknown credentials for it. Because of that, the quality of moderation is very low, unbalanced, and disproportionate. I think Reddit's moderation structure is cost efficient but suffers from quality and consistency.
Is there even a viable way to compensate mods financially? It seems like it'd be far too expensive, excepting a few major subreddits, which doesn't even get into other issues. You'd have to eventually evaluate and manage mods, which is difficult since the evaluators would have to be good enough subject matter experts to evaluate a mod, then you'd have the problem of communities getting split because they don't like the "man" policing them, even if they are doing a good job. There are also so many subreddits already that look like tribal echo chambers utilizing a "you're either with us or against us" frame of mind that you'd just have to shut them down.
I'm willing to bet that the biggest threat to reddit is facebook groups. If you check facebook groups, it's slowly becoming reddit. The only things they're doing wrong is:
- Discoverability. It's hard to find groups on Facebook, whereas reddit puts a lot of effort into this. It's also somewhat of a culture on reddit to mention other subreddits.
- UI. Facebook is copying the news feed UI for its groups instead of going with more customizable (or perhaps closer to reddit) UIs.
- Discussions. Comments in a FB group still suck massively compared to reddit comments.
- Curation. You still can't upvote, or see what posts are trending, etc. on FB Groups. They need to give more options to group moderators for creating different kind of spaces.
I'm convinced that if FB would allow group admins to make their group look like reddit, reddit would die overnight.
Reddit does a good job curating the content from its groups to its front page. Facebook no such facility, no r/all. Also, there are too many duplicate groups on Reddit, causing a lot of noise. Reddit managed to keep mostly one sub per topic which adds to the curation quality.
Good point, r/all is a good gateway to discovering more subreddits. I think FB could emulate that by showing you a default frontpage based on your location. They really ought to have a separation between a "friends" newsfeed and a "local" newsfeed.
I think the number of people who are unwilling to share funny videos or local tips because they want to use a pseudonym are in the minority. Hell, people are discovering internet nowadays by creating an account with their real name.
Try going to the front page when you’re not signed in.
There are several posts focusing on the woke cause of the week (usually attacking the out group). Then the rest are things you’d imagine would pander to the typical redditor but they’re oddly trying too hard.
The idea of reddit is amazing and we had a great fifteen years!
Sadly it’s now a swamp of censorship and intolerance to opposing viewpoints. Constant virtue signaling by attacking the other side. It wouldn’t be surprised if it was 95% bots right now.
(I was just told I’m not allowed to have opinions on any subjects I don’t have a PhD in.)
I do see your point but I’d accuse any side of virtue signaling. Both sides do it for sure but it’s just been really in your face on reddit and reddit is pretty one sided at this point.
298 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 458 ms ] threadYou could argue Reddit missed the opportunity to spot that, buy a younger Discord, and integrate it better.
Groups have to go off platform to trade/sell gear between subreddit users.
The difference is purely branding.
If I make a comment in a large Discord server, and then put my phone back in my pocket and continue my day, I am very unlikely to actually see any responses to what I said.
If you don't see the responses, that's because you didn't want to.
I regularly get so far behind on channels in an 11 person server that I just give up on reading whatever I missed that day. If Discord and Reddit can serve functionally identical purposes in your life, that's fine, but to deny that they have any functional differences to anyone is just provably false.
Additionally, Discord has private rooms suitable for small groups. Reddit as a platform is not so suitable for small groups of friends, even though it supports private subreddits.
And speaking of IRC, even some games like the original Quake used IRC for in game chat right? And Twitch the video streaming platform used to have its chat built on IRC but I don’t know if it still is. Either way, it’s evident that it is more suitable for real time conversation.
Reddit meanwhile made a half-assed attempt at real time chat, and it’s not good. I kind of wish they had just stuck with being what they were but I suppose at least trying is a good idea even so. But I don’t think their real time text chat is compelling nor competitive with Discord text chat.
Sure, IRC is all delivery and no permanence. But Discord is the opposite of that; it's all permanent forum posts.
"More suitable" is a weird thing to say. They refer to different things. IRC is a transport protocol. Discord is a website. The logical comparison would be between IRC and HTTP.
Sorry if that part was unclear but I was saying that Discord and IRC are more suitable to real time communication than Reddit is.
Discord essentially has this too but actually much more privately/invite only style. I could probably find an Ubiquiti owners group there too.
But to be honest, before subreddits had Discords they had IRC channels. This has always been a thing.
They shouldn't also need to half heartedly try to compete with Discord. They should drill down on what they excel at.
Even though I am a daily Reddit user, it's mostly because there are no other alternatives. I definitely would not buy their stock.
and that most active & upvoted redditors on a sub mostly don't use its discord
I added 'single login' as an after thought, because it didn't occur to me at first, but I think that must be a big reason. But even then there's Discourse, with not single but much easier and OAuth (signup/)login.
So, yeah, reddit is the searchability.
A "classic forum" trying to get off the ground would be competing with all of that. You could also argue, "why Discord? Why not IRC?" for much the same reasons.
As I said there, there is also Discourse, with only slightly more multi-community friction really, making it far easier and more standardised to do initial sign-up.
1. Relatively easy to create a subforum. 2. Someplace you can post [pseudo]anonymously. 3. Has a critical mass of people. 4. Is accessible to anyone on the web.
There's a subreddit for all sorts of topics, and if there isn't one, it's fairly easy to just start one. You don't have to deal with setting up forum software or paying someone for it, and if you want to you can create a post with a pseudoanonymous throwaway account. It's really easy to come and go, and there's enough moderation that it hasn't in general devolved into a *chan-style environment, but not so much it's alienating.
Pseudoanonymity is maybe underappreciated in social networking I think. It's really a key feature. Once you reach some mainstream critical mass, having that feature really moves things along.
If you could replicate those four things in a decentralized way, it might take off. But there's a chicken-and-egg issue with network effects.
2 core features of Discord are voice chat and access control, both of which are necessary for groups like a guild in a video game. Adoption in small groups like that was huge, competitors like Teamspeak and Mumble had incredible friction.
Even if you focus specifically on text communications, access control is a major feature. One example is the integration with Twitch, where there are servers limited to subscribers. Reddit focused on "the whole site is a community" rather than Discord's "start your own community, limited to very specific people."
I'd argue that the overlap you see is Discord monopolizing a disjoint market and then encroaching into Reddit's market due to userbase size. "Why isn't there a Discord server?" is the sort of question that gets asked when everyone there is also on Discord.
Personally, what amazes me is that Discord allowed Slack to grow to what it is. I was very surprised when they doubled down on gaming focus.
We are seeing a consolidation of moderators of the major subreddits. The number of moderators on reddit is incredibly tiny, sub-sub-sub pareto level of control.
These subreddits are losing diversity of who moderates them and it's suspected by some that many full time moderators are fully paid up employees of PR firms. Even volunteer mods admit that its basically like a full time job. It makes total sense if I was in a marketing firm for Netflix to have an employee being a moderator on the largest internet forum about movies. This pull moves away from the organic, disorganized and diverse nature of reddit to a kind of centralization and conformity. I suppose recent events have also shown the power of these power moderators in shaping the platform to the will of those moderators, come to think of it. Interesting times!
I agree for the vast majority of users it costs nothing to move, and they will if there#s something better which there isn't anything yet
But, as before with all the other cases, those who move will be the early adopters. moderators are the old guard, stuffy, controlling, professional, they will be the last to move as they have to protect their investment. Those who move first will be the more independent and chaotic riding the wave. I look forward to it.
Time will tell how long tiktok lasts. I find as time goes on the internet is less fluid than it used to be.
Digg was a big fish in a tiny pond even as late as 2010 when it launched v4. Most people in the English-speaking world Digg targeted were some kind of online, but usage jumped as smartphones became normal. Twitter took most of that growth in use.
Not just that. Once we all have GPT-n power in our back pocket, it will become trivial to flood Reddit and all other forms of social media with absolute time wasting drivel.
Platforms will start to require government IDs. But these will also be falsified with thispersondoesnot exist.
And then we'll have to verify with a trusted identity provider or phone number. And that will be required for and stick to everything we do online.
Short text-based social media, long government tracking.
Suppose, as a thought experiment, you could create the ideal, perfect, social network or discussion board. Say, with 40 of the smartest, most creative, quirkiest, considerate people you knew. Hell: the 40 top exemplars of this on the whole planet. It would be a pretty awesome network.
(I know this because I accidentally created something like this, just by creating a small group with smart and interesting people in it. It really was surprisingly good.)
It can only get worse.
Because if you've already got the best, then anyone else you can add will be less smart, less creative, less quirky, less considerate, than who's already in the group.
And at some point you'll notice. Maybe at 50 people, or 500, or 5,000, or 50k, or 500k, or 5m, or ....
For a few reasons.
- Gradation of capabilities. These are ordinalities, not cardinalities.
- Limits to common experience and interest.
- Differences of opinion. Or morals. Or philosophy.
- Just plain scale.
See: https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/1058991
Ultimately, the original founding cohort starts looking for a fresh platform / greenfield with smaller scale, fewer problems, and a higher S/N ratio --- this is classical "clue flight" (or brain drain in an earlier metaphor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_drain).
Reddit started off as a quirky, self-selected, geek-heavy crowd. It's anything but that now. At small scale, a free-speech free-for-all was tolerable. At large, it's harmful at international scale.
A key problem is what I call Woozle's Epistemic Paradox:
Our present epistemic systems are undergoing kind of the same shock that the online community underwent when transitioning from BBSs and Usenet to the commercial web to social media.
We were used to a very high content-to-BS ratio because it took a certain amount of intelligence and intense domain-interest for people to be there in the first place -- and we've now transitioned to a situation where many people are there more or less accidentally and (the worst part), because of a high percentage of the population being present, there is now substantial power to be had by influencing the discussions that take place.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5wg0hp/when_ep...
This is why the "it's just the Internet" or "just delete your Facebook" is not only an inadequate response, it's false. It fails to recognise that even for those not actively participating or engaging with those platforms, their lives are profoundly affected. The Arab Spring, genocide in Myanmar, the Hong Kong democracy protests, and the January 6 insurrection being four specific cases in point.
As far as the big internet companies go, it is hard to think of any company whose leaders have so routinely been criticized as out of touch with their users and downright incompetent with the one exception maybe being Yahoo. It is a almost a miracle that Reddit has survived it all mostly for the better, but I wouldn't put money on that continuing forever.
That doesn't appear to be what users or mods want. Lots of people want more active development and moderation. Just this week there were large scale protest across the platform regarding Reddit admins not doing enough to stop the spread of dangerous COVID misinformation. Then Reddit released a rather bad statement refusing to give into user demands. They almost immediately went back on that statement and banned a big misinformation subreddit. It almost feels like they make decisions in a way to ensure they piss everyone off.
If you don't know why your platform works, for the love of all that is holy don't mess with it!
Reddit “pays” moderators through cachet to do unreasonable amounts of work.
Then, Reddit runs ads between all the highly curated posts, earning revenue off the backs of these mods.
It wasn’t so bad a few years back. The ads were mild and there were zero dark patterns.
Today, the setup seems more off balance than Amazon delivery driving was this spring.
It makes sense an IPO would be planned, they are pumping revenue.
I remember when I got the first "Chat", I was confused then immediately went to figure out how to disable it.
I wonder if it ever got traction.
Their biggest mistake maybe?...controversy and discussion sells and they essentially banned that subreddit by subreddit. People dont like information platforms with information gaps.
Is there evidence of this? I want to believe this is true but the era of cancel culture and deplatforming suggests people want information gaps and echo chambers.
Ok, and while this is slightly facetious, it is actually a bit serious: Most of those things have resulted in downslides to quality and increased controversy. Essentially all of reddit's product R&D has been terrible and nearly universally criticized by users. I'd say that's mostly added a ton of risk that the whole site gets abandoned a la digg.
I look at reddit and see a company that has built a product that it’s users like, but they can’t monetize that product. Everything they try the users either revolt over or ignore completely, and the politics of running the site are becoming untenable.
I wouldn’t touch this IPO with a mile long stick. There is no upside at any valuation that would be worth an IPO.
Or put another way: the people running Reddit aren’t trying to lose money, and they have more detailed traffic stats than we do. I think things like RPAN are silly, but there always seem to be lots of people active on it.
Edit: apparently site-wide two years ago 60% of traffic was exclusively new Reddit, 30% was old Reddit, and 10% was a mix.
Source?
Look what happened to big subs that where playing cat and mouse with the mods, they all just scattered after trying other platforms like Voat or whatever.
Mobile first would be enough. I'm a little bit older and still do not understand the appeal of snapchat, tiktok, etc. I understand FB/twitter/instagram (I just don't like using it). But making a mobile version of a small feature fuel the hype storm needed
Their mobile app being awful is pretty hilarious given all this, but they're certainly trying very hard to improve the experience on mobile(while also showing as many ads as possible).
1. pseudo-anonymity, gives people freedom to speak their minds
2. moderation ensures people know that they are in a controlled space
3. Ensures that spaces have a branding, shared identity between them but are not being controlled from without, but only within
Could also mean "No controversial subjects", sort of like Tik Tok where any kind of political conversation, Covid related subject, etc. is taken down or ignored by the algorithm. Lots of people already think of reddit from a content consumption POV instead of a forum
> 1. pseudo-anonymity, gives people freedom to speak their minds
Making an influential account should be exceptionally difficult. All submissions and comments should be, by default, anonymous, with users only taking an identity when relevant (ie: if you're a scientist on something like r/askscience, or a developer on r/programming). Nobody should have to make a throwaway account to be anonymous, it should just be a flag on the server. Throwaway account comments should not be possible, you should need to build reputation to make a comment that is seen by most.
> 2. moderation ensures people know that they are in a controlled space
Moderation, if granted special powers, will always be taken over by "powerusers" with an agenda. Moderation should be done exclusively through comment and post scoring, not through individual named users. If downvoting and upvoting worked correctly, moderation would be entirely unnecessary. That's the whole point of curation, isn't it?
My main idea is to take a known set of good voters (ie: myself, some friends, early contributors, etc.) who exclusively follow the etiquette and can pick a substantial post from a bad one, and then based on user similarity to the known good set, you can grant a multiplier or a decimation to those that seem to vote similarly or dissimilarity. Essentially, you'll have fractional voting/scoring.
> 3. Ensures that spaces have a branding, shared identity between them but are not being controlled from without, but only within
I don't like the idea of anyone being able to create a namespace. It fractures things too significantly and you get echochambers for each party or each viewpoint. The usenet hierarchy was better, and it should be combined with subscriptions to #tags to get more granularity for individual user interests.
> (1b) Throwaway account comments should not be possible [...] build reputation to make a comment that is seen by most. Reddit is already sort of like this, honestly. That's why high karma accounts are often sold.
> (2) grant a multiplier or a decimation to those that seem to vote similarly or dissimilarity. This will be slowly (or swiftly) shifted by brigading bots.
> (3) I don't like the idea of anyone being able to create a namespace. It fractures things too significantly and you get echochambers for each party or each viewpoint. You'll still get echochambers for each viewpoint. There will just be fewer of them. Based on point 2, the majority will choose the viewpoints of the echochamber.
That seems shallow to me, it's only true insofar as 4chan is a well-known forum that allows for anonymous posting. 4chan is ephemeral, the site I'm imagining is not. 4chan is image based, the site I'm imagining is not. 4chan doesn't have threaded comments, the site I'm imagining would.
Most importantly, 4chan allows for anonymous posting that isn't tied to a central identity (there's nothing tying anonymous posts to tripcoded posts), the site I'm imagining would. There would be no throwaways, you would only be able to post anonymously on an account with a profile behind it.
> Reddit is already sort of like this, honestly. That's why high karma accounts are often sold.
As far as I know, there's no bias given to high karma accounts in terms of default comment sorting or post visibility. The only reason I can imagine that someone would purchase a high karma account is to use them to gain outsized influence by applying for mod positions on big subreddits.
> [Vote biasing] will be slowly (or swiftly) shifted by brigading bots.
If they can accurately upvote good content and accurately filter bad content, so what? They will never be able to get a bot into the good pool of known benevolent actors, and if they're always voting similarly to the known-good actors, then they're indistinguishable from good participants. Everything would be derived from being similar to the known-good actors, or similar to those that are most similar to known-good actors, and so on.
> You'll still get echochambers for each viewpoint. There will just be fewer of them. Based on [the shifting of vote biasing by bots], the majority will choose the viewpoints of the echochamber.
The pool of known-good (possibly paid) voters/editors should thwart this.
Everyone is projecting their need for anonymity in response to this question, but ultimately it comes down to frequency of dopamine hits. Think TikTok but more formats than just video.
- actual communities centred around a topic, like knitting or a particular video game.
- just general memes and funny photos/videos
That second use case can be supplanted by basically anyone and anywhere.
https://www.datalounge.com/threads
Or are we talking the bullshit SV-style possibilities where you monetize the living shit out of everyone and everything and give a big middle finger to your customers with a skeleton human support crew?
I mean that describes the situation today. The management involvement in Reddit is for the CEO to support ivermectin conspiracy and GamerGate subs.
They were ground zero for The Fappening, remember? And all sorts of other nasty stuff that they only cracked down on because of intense pressure.
People need to remember that they are calling for CENSORSHIP, and reddit's policy for the longest time was to avoid that at all costs.
If there's one thing I respected about Reddit it was their ability to stand up to those whiners.
I am so ashamed of the latest generation -- for all our differences that I have no choice but to accept, the one thing I cannot forgive is how they seem to have forgotten what free speech means.
I don't see how not wanting people to be radicalized is emotional fragility. It's extremely paternalistic, but idk about fragile. Reddit's community has never really been interested in cancelling.
Does gen Z not want people to be radicalized? Or do they just want people to be radicalized to their dogma?
And Reddit is a big community. For certain there are factions that are all about cancelling those that offend them.
Removing privacy opt-outs to "reduce confusion"
Now you need to login or use the app to even read most threads unless you use old.reddit or a 3rd party site.
So they're going to get more and more aggressive here.
I decided to start with code because it's something I personally use every day, and I got fed up with the spammy sites that just present an answer (or often only the question itself) extracted from StackOverflow, but plan to do something similar with other categories in the future. I'm curious to hear how you'd approach this problem, as in which categories you'd support and how you'd break it down?
I've got a suggestion, I queried "C# ?." and my results were mostly generic about C# documentation. I wanted to get more information about how to use the null conditional operator.
I suspect the query is ignoring the '?.' because it thinks of it as unimportant symbols. Would it be possible to modify the search engine to treat punctuation as operators, or terms in-and-of-themselves?
But seriously, I don't understand how Google has let their results become such trash. If you actually want community sentiment (what's generally accepted as the least shitty X you can buy) you have to dig through reddit results. If you don't it's AI generated blogspam for days
Control the medium, control the message.
As an aside, Reddit is great if you're in the right subreddits and clear out the junk that appeals to the broad public or is frequently gamed by political actors.
I disagree. To me, going hyperbolic to make a point, this is like saying there were some really great bars in 1930s Germany.
It kinda doesn’t mean much if you bury your head in the sand here. It’s a bad company that does bad things. That’s cool you like some people who agree with you, but these people would be cool elsewhere too.
I genuinely believe Reddit's real value proposition is manipulating the content shown to the masses. As a propaganda tool, it's incredibly powerful to saturate people's feeds with consistent and coordinated messaging.
At any given time, the feed of r/all and r/popular has several agenda-posts and submissions designed to be derisive and derisive. The nature of the subreddits themselves can also be co-opted, as r/facepalm, r/insanepeoplefacebook, and r/publicfreakout are basically used to mock conservative pundits and politicians. "Niche" criticism subreddits - made specifically to mock the other side - also pop up from time to time, like r/HermanCainAward and r/LeopardsAteMyFace. There are, of course, constantly submissions from obviously leftist subreddits like r/LateStageCapitalism, r/PoliticalHumor, and r/AntiWork. But screenshots of tweets posted there inevitably end up on both r/WhitePeopleTwitter, r/BlackPeopleTwitter.
That being said, I think r/pics has the most subtle manipulation. If Donald Trump was in the headlines for doing something bad, you would see pleasant photographs of Obama with tens of thousands of up votes. Something about Antifa in the news? Plenty of d-day and patriotic Nazi fighting images. Right now there is protest art against the Texas abortion decision. Lots of things on r/pics are harmless, of course. But you will also see odd things where the post has 50k point score, with a 50% approval score, and the comments are all overwhelmingly negative. I recently saw this on a post comparing Taliban forces in technical trucks with a bunch of rednecks in Toyotas with Trump flags. Make of that what you will.
I could go on and on, but if you wanted to persuade people on a near subconscious level, Reddit is nearly the perfect avenue to do so.
- Reddit CEO Steve Huffman source https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/19/reddit-and-the...
Leftism is about socialism, worker empowerment, anti-corporate power. Subreddits around Bernie, socialism, stupidpol, etc. They didn't like Trump, but were mostly critical of the lack of focus and results from democrats. We (I count myself in this group) thought Trump was a dangerous idiot, but ineffective democrats who paid lip service to noble goals while stifling progress were the main topic of discussion.
Liberals, who were most vocally pushing for deplatforming trump supporters, were more the types who lurk (and mod) /r/politics and /r/liberal. They viewed everything Trump did as evil, while absolving democrats who had done the same things for the 4 years previous.
Hardcore ride-or-die liberals != leftists - these are two groups with distinct ideologies. In particular to this context, leftists are much more apprehensive about censorship because they don't have deep institutional power.
Which is not to say poc and lgbtq folks haven't gotten fucked historically, they totally have, but we could all be allies if we focused our messaging differently.
A lot of this is probably due to the urban rural divide. Urban folks can see poc and lgbtq people around them every day, but they don't see the lower class white people living outside urban areas.
I've been dragged on Twitter by the same kind of Blue Team ideologue I've been accused of being by people who don't have enough resolution on me to see the difference, so I can at least empathize with them. If I were someone like that, I'd call me a useless twit too.
Joe Rogan might be a human weather vane, but there's a reason millions of people who otherwise consider themselves apolitical listen to him. Treating them as dismissible is why most of half the country doesn't vote. All the most effective voter suppression efforts of the Republican party, which barely gets half of the voting half in a good year for them, wouldn't mean anything if the other half weren't so alienating. The few points the Comey letter cost Clinton wouldn't have meant anything if the party wasn't run by smug fools.
Absolutely, and entirely intentional.
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN CONTEXT!? It’s just a picture, relax, stupid conservative is triggered by a simple picture.”
The common person there seems to have no concept that this is the goal. To offer a picture and tells NONE of the real story; then to “talk amongst yourselves” and find that they all agree with each other. Just ignore all the [deleted] comments, probably just spam.
Reddit is ~16 years old and was in one of YC's first batches (first batch ever?). This is an absolute dinosaur in "startup" age. It's been acquired, traded, and recap'd multiple times for (presumably) sub-$1B value. For all intents and purposes it's a distressed asset in "enchanted forest" terms (note - this is not a criticism per se, many distressed assets can be very valuable).
I'm convinced (with limited evidence as an outsider) the following drives their valuation:
- Record valuations of FB, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, etc. that have comparable features and "industry metrics" (DAU, MAU, etc.) that can be easily parsed by public analysts. The latest round of investors probably got a great insider deal so they could prep it for IPO and pass it off to the next sucker.
- Reddit started to receive more and more M&A attention when mobile biz models went public (Snap, Uber, etc.). The key to any financial success for Reddit is simply mobile. This an incredibly risky, because (1) reddit allows 3p mobile apps where they can't control ads/tracking and (2) their conversion to their own Reddit mobile app is extremely user hostile. But this is essentially it - you can track and sell ads on Reddit via it's native mobile apps. If somehow (I'm personally not convinced) they can get everyone on to their native mobile app, then sure, they will be as valuable as Snap/Twitter.
- It's essentially a "cost of doing business" for YC. If Reddit became essentially not valuable or not as valuable in the public eye it undermines YC's brand. This has become less and less an issue overtime as more successes have come out of YC, but during those time periods when it wasn't the value had to be continually projected as being valued (thereby creating steam that never fizzeld out). Think of this like saying one of your clients in the 90's was Bear Stearns, which gave you social proof to work with Goldman Sachs, etc. you'll hold on to that Bear Stearns logo on your sales deck until it ultimately fails, but now you have Goldman, Morgan, etc. to show your social proof.
I mean if you want to make money, cool, but if your startup is based out of YC, I don't trust you.
That is why it's concerning that the modding and mod selection process on big subreddits like r/worldnews is so opaque.
That's not bad though — They'd probably be something more like Gumroad — independent and run by a small team, and fairly profitable, but hard to grow and IPO.
How come services like Digg and Slashdot weren't able to make sustainable revenue off of membership fees?
Maybe ot but it seems like the federated services are doing a really good job of keeping the crazies away. Nobody will link with hate groups so they can't recruit from the wider user base. Meanwhile Facebook and Reddit just leave hate groups alone and allow them to game algorithmic feeds for rage-engagement such that they have no trouble pulling vulnerable people from the wider community and radicalizing them.
I'd actually love to see companies, especially ones in winner-take-all/network-effect types of tech start out with some sort of unbreakable guarantee of being cool forever. All young platform providers wants to appear open and free and interoperable and trustworthy, but incentives will have their way with them once the valuation gets high enough.
Is there a legal or moral vehicle that could prevent this? Has anyone tried it? Would the invisible hand get pissed and remove the magic that makes growth happen?
Wouldn't a 501(c)(3) [in the US] work for this case?
(Or are there a lot of shady ways that companies work around being able to acquire one?)
This ensures there is no IP to capture, nor can you hold the audience hostage.
News flash: you can't.
R.I.P. to what's left of reddit
This is gonna be interesting! And yeah, would be nice to see one of the SPACs get in on it!
Reddit has a long, long history of denying that they have an issue and then once the media shines a light on it, realizes jailbait is yikes. Then they reverse course.
Reddit is a bunch of hatred and disinformation today. What happened SPEZ? Your tech is even worse than the disinfo. I thought you were about more than money.
https://teddit.net/r/news/comments/pg0jv4/reddit_bans_active...
https://teddit.net/r/HermanCainAward
This last sub is not something Reddit wants people to find in a few years.
Reddit's funding rounds tells you everything you need to know about the company. Ballooning costs, growth at all costs mindset.
Partly because they are in effect one of the most unmoderated large scale sites on the internet, which results in the toxic people going there.
But if you know how to find subs well, Reddit emerges as one of the best content sources.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3048521/ellen-pao-part-of-a-long...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/pbmy5y/debat...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/redditsecurity/comments/pfyqqn/covi...
How many reddit users are actually clicking on those dumb ads they display?
This seems like they're cashing out. They were never able to properly monetize the site for whatever reason, now they're pushing their shares off to anyone naive enough to buy into it. I'd stay far far away.
Basically all evidence points to him admitting his guilt more or less by his action, but Pro gov/ Pro president Moon people continue to frame the accuser as someone with a political agenda, and continue to advocate for Mr. Park's innocence due to...you can't be guilty if you're dead before courts.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/27/asia/south-korea-mayor-sexual...
The mods applied "No overly inflammatory, sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic or offensive language." to ban my account, and when I protested, the ban stayed, as they got to define what that meant exactly.
I made a new account to circumvent the ban when Korean Gov recently came out with new media censorship law, akin to the one passed in Japan few years ago that grants gov much power to censor media for "security" reasons.
The pro-gov mods nuked the new account within a day, ironically for this post. https://www.reddit.com/r/korea/comments/perv0j/south_korean_...
edit: can't link direct to the comment, so I linked parent comment, following was the actual comment that they flagged me for
"I have 0 interest in proving anything to you, as you clearly have your bias.
I'm just replying for others to hear what the recommendations of one of the most prestigious newspapers to ever be founded are, and one of the best non-partial media rights organizations has to say on the topic."
now my ip is shadowbanned for circumventing the reddit policy of not creating new account to post on subs you are banned from.
Definitely 1984 vibes.
Subreddit rules against name calling seem fine if that’s what they want to do in their own space.
What’s the big deal?
That's frustrating. You wanted to politely share your opinion on local politics in a popular forum and now you can't even create a new subreddit. I made reveddit [1] to allow users to review moderator actions on reddit. Maybe you can use that to research how you think that subreddit is biased and then share your analysis on another site. The history [2] and subreddit [3] pages may be helpful.
[1] https://www.reveddit.com/about/faq
[2] https://www.reveddit.com/v/korea/top/
[3] https://www.reveddit.com/v/korea/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28312261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173018
Consider, would you want someone to do this to you? I can't imagine any regular reddit users agreeing to allow everyone to secretly remove each other's content.
[1] https://www.reveddit.com/about/faq/#need
https://www.reddit.com/r/reveddit
There are a surprising number of things you can work on that nobody else is doing, or that could be improved with your unique point of view. Of course you need to spend some time building your skills, but the tools are improving which makes it easier to build useful things. It can be hard to get your ideas heard while working for someone else, and having a side project can let you explore your creative side. My take on "fighting the powers" is we are all susceptible to bias, greed, etc, and we can put our faith in open systems that allow us to see when these human factors have run amuck.
They ban inflammatory comments like this. No wonder you got banned for circumventing the ban.
If you didn't follow the subreddit rules, you deserved it.
I mean, referring to Koreans by the name of a maligned cult they are not necessarily affiliated with (Moonies = Unification Movement) is racism, even if you think you're being "cheeky" about it.
> I made a new account to circumvent the ban
And you're certainly not supposed to do that.
> Definitely 1984 vibes
Not even a tiny bit.
You sound like those people that think weed should be illegal because gov said so.
The shadowban sucks, though. Usually, the trick is to come back on a new account, and keep your head down for a while (and, if appropriate, try not to do the things you were banned for). That goes for all the subreddits I've been on. People will notice if you're a single-purpose commenter, back on a new account.
Also... (oh god, this is like smoking a cigarette after years off them)... it has always been so funny to me that this flag of "censorship" has suddenly been taken up by certain elements/people in the Korean political discourse, in light of the fact that there has never been a time when there was no censorship of Korean media. Lee Myung-bak? The removal of all those Daum comments? Every Korean administration has used the KCSC and attendant powers like a cudgel.
Your comments in that thread show either an unintentional or deliberate ignorance of the history of this stuff in the ROK.
"Free speech" type arguments currently being levelled at the Moon administration are a joke in the Korean political context. There is no free speech in the ROK and there never has been. Remember PGH's blacklists of artists etc for being pro-North? Remember that guy who had his house raided for using NK propaganda posters in memes? There has never been any free speech, freedom from censorship, etc, in the ROK. And most people there actually don't seem to mind. Or else they do mind, but it depends on who's in power. That's their business. They're the polity. But these claims of sudden "censorship" are lies by omission, because there is literally no time in the history of the ROK state at which the press has been anything like "free" in the western sense. It's all political ebb and flow.
Unless Moon Jae-in's critics would be willing to join me in calling for the KCSC to remove the internet blocks on North Korean content (or the ones on porn for that matter), any claims of censorship/free access to information/free speech will just look like political opportunism. It's "do as I say, not as I do" stuff. The election of every new president brings legal trials for the previous one, or at least for members of the previous president's administration. And so it goes...
I have no interest in debating someone that thinks SK shouldn't be blocking NK contents, a sorry piece of dystopian communist-authoritarian country SK is still in war with? are you kidding me?
>I have no interest in debating someone that thinks SK shouldn't be blocking NK contents, a sorry piece of dystopian communist-authoritarian country SK is still in war with?
Okay, so you do believe in censorship, correct? But only for your political opponents.
I don't advocate censorship vs politics I disagree with. I have no idea how you came to that conclusion, given my entire post lol.
You think that people in Seoul, eating their 삼겹살, will look at some North Korean site and suddenly decide that what they really want is to go eat grass in the north during the next famine? As I'm sure you're aware, censorship of northern stuff in the ROK isn't just for NK ip addresses, it's for information in libraries. Where's the basic self-defence in denying historians access to primary sources?
You do believe in censorship, just for ideas that you disagree with.
edit: I recognise your username from the old days on /r/korea now actually... One of the mods on there must have finally had enough. You've been single-issue posting for like four years now, bro.
Have a good one.
You sound terribly naive about nature of PsyOPs NK runs in SK. They are smarter and more subtle than that.
most recently: https://www.bbc.com/korean/news-58112280
p.s) "So What you are saying is.." lol great tactic.
- Discoverability. It's hard to find groups on Facebook, whereas reddit puts a lot of effort into this. It's also somewhat of a culture on reddit to mention other subreddits.
- UI. Facebook is copying the news feed UI for its groups instead of going with more customizable (or perhaps closer to reddit) UIs.
- Discussions. Comments in a FB group still suck massively compared to reddit comments.
- Curation. You still can't upvote, or see what posts are trending, etc. on FB Groups. They need to give more options to group moderators for creating different kind of spaces.
I'm convinced that if FB would allow group admins to make their group look like reddit, reddit would die overnight.
There are several posts focusing on the woke cause of the week (usually attacking the out group). Then the rest are things you’d imagine would pander to the typical redditor but they’re oddly trying too hard.
Sadly it’s now a swamp of censorship and intolerance to opposing viewpoints. Constant virtue signaling by attacking the other side. It wouldn’t be surprised if it was 95% bots right now.
(I was just told I’m not allowed to have opinions on any subjects I don’t have a PhD in.)
The website seems to encourage extremes of people screaming at each other and having fringe views from which dissension is forbidden.
It's a hellhole. Some of the smaller specialist subreddits are high quality though.