Like outlook.com, the best thing Digg has going for it is that people really want an alternative to the incumbent who sits on most of the market, which in this case is reddit.
Digg at its highest peak was a grossly imperfect product. If project success depended upon trivia like type="text/javascript", the internet world would be a very different place.
They can through algorithms, which is something that is painfully lacking on most social media sites (including HN).
Give users the ability to dislike something strongly enough that anyone who voted it up is excluded from all vote counts/rankings/recommendations as provided to that user for some period of time. While this leads to a filtered world, that is exactly what users expect from sites like these.
Reddit is essentially falling apart for many users (while catering to a new audience) -- in /r/all as well as individual subreddits that see a constant cycle of abandonment as people try to ontologically solve the problem -- as it is increasingly dominated by teenagers.
If I could strongly express a disinterest in every fictitious Facebook picture / iPhone message conversation, and that served as a quality indicator of people whose opinions I don't respect, that would be beautiful.
Which subreddits do you subscribe to where you see that unwanted content?
It shouldn't matter what subreddits I subscribe to (and the encroachment of certain trends keeps herding people to yet new subreddits. /r/gaming -> rage comics and DAE remember. Okay, everyone to /r/games...rinse repeat. /r/atheism -> ridiculous and obviously fake caricatures for people to knock down. /r/programming -> beginner material, so what, /r/notbeginnerprogramming?)
That is a hack, manual solution for machine learning of the things I am interested in.
Netflix uses strong algorithms and a lot of data crunching to suggest movies I might be interested in, rather than simply forcing me to subscribe to wholesale genres (you like Action movies so here's every movie that dropped in the Action bin). The eventually winner of the social news game will be those who effectively transfer that sort of learning to this genre.
Note that you can take it beyond simply finding correlation indexes between users -- analyze the linked site to determine factors like is it image heavy, what is the grade level / complexity level of the writing, discern the subject matter, etc.
If you think that subreddits don't matter, then you are clearly expecting from Reddit something that it was not designed to have. The most popular subreddits are swarmed with teenagers and the quality has gone downhill, that's true. But the value of Reddit is in its (less popular) subreddits.
huggyface's point is that Reddit should hide uninteresting-for-me material and surface interesting-for-me material automatically. Subscribing to subreddits is a manual process that shouldn't be necessary.
How is subscribing to a subreddit fundamentally different from upvoting? To get recommendations, you need to somehow feed the recommendation engine with your interests.
Look at it this way: when you upvote a fitness-related submission, you say "hey, I'm somewhat interested in fitness", when you subscribe to /r/fitness, you say "hey, I'm really interested in fitness."
So, both upvoting and subscribing are actually manual actions.
With which you also say -- or so Reddit believes in its current level of imperfection -- "and I have complete affinity with everyone else who happens to vote in /r/fitness".
Is that true? Is there any subreddit where that is true?
It perplexes me that this is being treated like an either/or. It is not. In reality subreddits see a constantly exploding entropy as users try to fix a broken mechanism of correlation -- the fact that I like gaming doesn't mean that I like the same thing as every other reader of /r/gaming, for instance. Just fix that by splitting off into /r/truegaming, or maybe /r/games, or maybe...
the fact that I like gaming doesn't mean that I like the same thing as every other reader of /r/gaming, for instance.
So, the site should be unique for each user, right? But if you take the tactic you mentioned in a previous post: "Give users the ability to dislike something strongly enough that anyone who voted it up is excluded from all vote counts/rankings/recommendations as provided to that user for some period of time." You'll pretty quickly run out of any other users to interact with.
While I'm being extreme, in practical application it would be a simple reduced weighting of negative correlation users. e.g. if five people I correlate heavily with liked a /r/programming entry, that will rise above a post liked by one hundred people I have a poor correlation with. Rinse/repeat.
Heavy math/statistical analysis that can be tuned to create a productive enjoyable experience, with the side benefit that it reduces gaming and exploitation.
With which you also say -- or so Reddit believes in its current level of imperfection -- "and I have complete affinity with everyone else who happens to vote in /r/fitness".
No. With that I tell Reddit to show me different opinions on fitness coming from people who aren't morons (since the submission was not downvoted). You seem to think that if a person subscribes to /r/fitness, he surely has the same opinions as the hivemind. That's not true at all.
Good subreddits allow all kinds of opinions. And by allow I mean they aren't being downvoted automatically. Of course, there is the hivemind and a dominating opinion, but other opinions are not repressed, that's my point.
And I think most users of reddit would disagree. Sometimes I visit /r/gaming or even gasp /r/all knowing what I'm going to get. Likewise, I visit /r/games knowing I'm not going to get the same content as /r/gaming.
Trying to make everything automatic seems like a job for a different site entirely.
Categorization does still matter (in the Netflix example they can competently recommend and rank for me, but they still allow me to filter into specific categories). Subreddits are useful.
However subreddits are a very coarse, manual solution to what I described.
To the comment about what reddit is designed for, it started sans subreddits. Indeed, an original focus was recommendations, but either the algorithms or the hardware wasn't there to support it, the result being a bit of a disaster. So they went down the manual binning approach.
Manual binning is more than the "hack", it's the reason Reddit is successful and the reason why Digg will not be (unless they emulate).
Manual binning does something magical: each bin is a separate community run by moderators. Each one has different rules, different posters, different content and different discussion.
If you automatically sort into bins, then you will automatically lose the distinction between bins.
You cannot get your users to respect the difference between communities if you are unwilling to show them that each community is different, and deserves individual attention.
Sure, find a better algorithm for the front page and logged out users.
But to destroy the autonomy of the subreddit would be to destroy the very thing that makes reddit successful.
Why do you think they can't coexist? In fact my actual suggestion is that they should coexist. But the "just subscribe appropriately" response is fundamentally broken, and only provides a partial solution. This approach absolutely benefits any subreddit as well.
What exactly is fundamentally broken in subscribing to subreddits? If you are interested in fitness, you subscribe to /r/fitness. Fitness materials won't all of a sudden be posted to /r/gaming where you (if you are not subscribed) will miss them.
So, what's the point of automatic recommendations on Reddit? If there is any fitness-related material on Reddit, I'll see it in /r/fitness anyway.
Besides, how are you going to train the recommendation engine? By analyzing what submissions people upvoted?
What exactly is fundamentally broken in subscribing to subreddits?
"I like action movies"
"Here's Megashark vs 747. You like action movies, so you like this"
How is any given subreddit any different? Being into fitness does not mean you share an identical interest/taste/discernment with everyone else who is into fitness. Further social news sites are subject to the tyranny of the minority -- aka the lowest common denominator. When people are more likely to express approval than disapproval, a small percentage of users with a common interest will tend to dominate.
Being into fitness does not mean you share an identical interest/taste/discernment with everyone else who is into fitness.
I think you are missing the point of subreddits. They are not for finding people that agree with you, they are for creating communities with all kinds of opinions. I go to /r/fitness exactly because I don't share most of the ideas there. I go there to learn something new.
If I want to know everything that happens in the world of fitness, I subscribe to /r/fitness. With automatic recommendations (and without subscribing to /r/fitness) I'd never see stuff that I didn't know I was interested in.
That's the problem with automatic recommendations - paradoxically, you can't discover new interests with their help. You can discover what's happening inside your sphere of interests, but you can't discover new interests.
I'm not missing the point of subreddits at all, and I would suggest that you are so far down the rabbit hole of the cure all subreddit that you refuse to acknowledge the point.
I have never said that subreddits should go away. Ever. Each post that again argues one versus the other is tossing up a distraction.
They are not for finding people that agree with you
Correlation isn't about agreement: An upvote does not mean "I agree with this". It means "I found this interesting/useful/enjoyable/educational", whereas a downvote should mean "I find this uninteresting/not useful/unenjoyable/not educational".
In no universe does that preclude learning new things. Quite the contrary, in fact.
If you say "Reddit is essentially falling apart for many users" then you do miss the point of subreddits.
There is no Reddit, there are communities united by the same platform.
In fact, I see this complaint all the time and it is usually coming from people who didn't discover the beauty of subreddits.
Again, there is no Reddit. There is nothing to fall apart.
That's unless you refer to the default front page as Reddit. The front page is falling apart because the default subreddits are being swarmed with teenagers. But the front page is not Reddit, subreddits are Reddit.
The default state of almost every subreddit is endless meta discourse about the subreddit itself. Then there is the inevitable fracturing when some participants disagree, while the original sub descends into the most vapid of the commons.
/r/atheism is the pinnacle example (this is a trend that becomes exaggerated the larger the sub).
The subreddit approach alone does not scale. Or rather it does scale by endless manual fracturing, which is a half-assed, luddite solution.
No, I'm not. The fact that you're a former reddit employee is entirely irrelevant, and if anything undermines your perspective on the merits of subreddits.
Was it really the reason reddit is successful? Or was that a combination of the creation of imgur, reddit moderators allowing any and all meme posts (low-investment content) in most of their subreddits, and Digg's v4 disaster?
Sure, there are users who adjust their subreddits, but (if I'm remembering this correctly) jedberg has stated the vast majority— some 90%— of users never make an account. I'm betting subreddits aren't the main reason reddit attracts so many people.
The front page of Reddit that is seen by the 90% of lurkers is content from the top 20 subreddits by activity. They come to see the content that 20 individual communities curate.
All content on Reddit -- all of it, comes from these individualized communities.
Also the 90% number -- that's true of almost any site, it's the "1% Rule"[1] (or a rule by a number of other names). Instead of focusing on the 90% lurkers, realize that it's the 1% of creators and 9% of contributors that create/submit and curate the content that brings the 90% to the front page.
So how do you attract the best 10%, the best curators, the best original creators?
In my opinion: individual communities dedicated to any topic they choose. Decentralized power that makes the 90%'s front page nothing more than the best-of-the-biggest subreddits. Sure, many subreddits will not be worthy of the 90%'s front page -- but then again, many communities don't want on the front page (and the massive influx of 'eternal september' users that it brings!)
Some subreddits, like /r/askscience, have over half a million users and maintain a rigid, empirical comment section that actively prevents layman speculation. Think about that, 600,000 users and they run a community with very little to no layman speculation.
Other subreddits, like /r/f7u13 (or /r/circlejerk) run very anarchistic comment sections where ridiculousness is supported and mods abusing power is par the course.
The beauty of Reddit is the freedom the subreddits have and the wonderful communities that create and curate the content that makes the 90%'s front page as good as it is.
I do not understand how you can emulate the result of a strong, engaged community by preventing communities from forming at all.
> So how do you attract the best 10%, the best curators, the best original creators?
You don't; at least, reddit doesn't. Reddit aggregates "original" content from other places (scare quotes due to that content often times being a repost itself.)
Did you happen to see the week f7u12 decided to have no moderation aside from blatantly illegal content? Meaning, they didn't remove reposts/off-topic material? The very first day, an image that wasn't even a rage comic hit the front page with 300+ upvotes. The meta subreddits were quick to point to that as proof that most redditors don't vote based on category. Reddit users don't care about subreddits, and they don't care about granular curation. As long as they like it, it could be in any subreddit— as is what happened when /r/funny became a dumping ground for off-topic content when the admins removed /r/reddit.com.
> 600,000 users and they run a community with very little to no layman speculation.
There are loads of off-topic, speculative, and joke comments in /r/askscience. Loads! The mods, however, rule with an iron fist, and only in the first hour of a thread's existence will you see them littered throughout the comments. Take a look at this thread[0], pulled from the current front page of /r/askscience. Do you see the top comment? It's an official mod statement about a certain joke. In most threads that get 100+ comments, you'll see this same type of comment near the top.
> Other subreddits, like /r/f7u13 (or /r/circlejerk) run very anarchistic comment sections where ridiculousness is supported and mods abusing power is par the course.
I'd hardly call anything the f7u12 or /r/circlejerk mods have done as an abuse of power. 99.99% of the time, the users are pitchforking over what amounts to either a misunderstanding or something that Just Doesn't Matter. Oh my word, BEP changed the CSS for 10 minutes to prank the subreddit? How dare he! Downvote every comment he's ever made to prove how important this is!
That's beside the point, though. Excuse my digression.
> I do not understand how you can emulate the result of a strong, engaged community by preventing communities from forming at all.
I'm saying the community doesn't exist in the first place. It's a bunch of kids online who like to think they're part of a secret club of close friends. It's easy to point to the most prominent feature of reddit, the micro-communities, as the reason it has become successful, but the real bread and butter is probably the crap that clogs /r/all.
I'm not sure machine learning algorithms are the right approach. Crowd curation mechanisms (i.e. the upvote/downvote systems but one could imagine other systems) have the advantage of quickly adapting to the ever changing tastes of a community. I don't think machine learning approaches can be simultaneously good and flexible in such a diverse environment. The Netflix analogy isn't the best because Netflix deals with a pretty structured problem in comparison to the "recommend me things on the internet that I will like" problem.
I will also claim that subreddits are by no means a hack. They are THE key feature of Reddit that allows users to join together on the basis of common interests. There's no replacing subreddits because they are a killer feature in their own right.
Let me welcome you to the modern era. While you might have once had your content dictated by the radio station you listened to, or the one channel your TV could receive, here in the 21st century we have other, slightly more refined mechanisms. "I like NBC" or "I enjoy the Top 40 station" are no longer the limits of your filtering mechanism.
Right, because trying to use an algorithm to filter a firehose will never end up with a firehose blasting through that particular kleenex.
If you want to see a bad job of filtering, by all means rely on an algorithm that is designed to give minimal acceptable performance because anything else would soak up too much CPU. I'll stick to moderation and subfora.
Alternately, you're just entirely too dense to have any participation in this conversation, completely miss the point in your haste to post "witty" and hilariously inappropriate analogies.
Two things: trivially, you can change the subreddits you are subscribed to and remove the "fictitous FB pic" etc. posts.
Second, and more interestingly: people have different facets that they show in different subreddits. As an example here on HN people prefer tech-oriented stuff. But not everyone here is that into tech. They just sort or organize the content, so they come to HN for in-depth stuff, and (say) Engadget for rumors, and sbnation for sports etc. So someone who upvotes a stupid FB pic in /r/funny might vote the same photo down in /r/politics. If the person is "sorting" content that's appropriate in different situations, it's not useful to discount their opinion entirely.
I see this argument a lot, and I have two counterpoints:
1. I don't want to have to spend time researching subreddits just to figure out what I'd like. Content aggregators are meant to remove steps from the process, not add them.
2. While the content of smaller subreddits are usually improved, the level of discourse in comments are not. Even if you say 'okay, no meme posts, no meme comments', the fact is that you're going to have a glut of commentors whose first impulse are to crack a joke or make a surface-level comment. The difference in comments between a post on here and a post on /TrueReddit/ are astounding.
(The one pretty ready example to the above are < 100 member subreddits, but those usually have the issue of insufficient content.)
Expecting one site's landing page to encompass everything for everyone is ridiculous and something a lot of user-generated content sites fail at understanding. You need to filter it to the extent that there's enough for everyone to at least recognize that there's content somewhere there for them, but not overwhelm them.
Between being generically named, being linked in similar subreddit sidebars and showing up in the search, I think it's pretty easy to find what you're looking for or create it yourself and know that it will get more bites than a random website people would have to Google to get to. I would even say that in Reddit's case, there are just so many users from so many different walks of life that it is an easy bet to find a subreddit that suits your fancy in both content and personality.
There's an exploratory phase that anyone who wants to delve into a community has to go through, and if that takes too much time, perhaps that's the user's problem, not the site's.
And how are you going to tell content aggregators what you like? By upvoting/liking? Doesn't it count as spending time?
I don't want to spend time upvoting 50 submissions to tell the recommendation engine what my interests are (and with the current state of technology it will get my interests wrong anyway). I just want to click one button (subscribe to a subreddit) and that's it.
And when I become less interested in a certain topic (fitness, starcraft) I can just press the unsubscribe button once and never see submissions for that topic again.
Ideally -- and take this with a huge caveat, as I'm not exactly in the aggregation business -- measure it by clicks, comments made, and time spent on page/bounce.
Overall, I'd like to see aggregators move to the Pandora model, rather than the Hype Machine one. With Pandora, I can specify a jumping off point (genre, artist, song) but it still refines my tastes from there.
Hype Machine, I've 'liked' hundreds of songs but I still need to manually peruse through specific blogs to find new songs I like. It's unideal.
I believe that in the future that's the way to do it, but not right now.
Besides, I'm not a fan of automatic recommendations as they have a lot of drawbacks. Their major problem is: they won't help you find something you didn't know you liked.
Are you talking about any existing recommendation engine that I can try out to prove myself wrong?
Just how exactly will they do it? I'm really interested, maybe I'm missing something?
Simply speaking, if a system knows all I listen to is classical music, it can recommend me a new classical composition, but it cannot all of a sudden recommend me dubstep (which I might actually like).
We're talking about Digg doing this as a differentiation. It is not commonly used because it is very heavy in IO and CPU for individual users (though a site like reddit could take a shortcut just by periodically ramping up some spot high CPU instances and batch generation correlations between users on every subreddit, then staling that until the next run), and sites like Reddit and previously Digg ran on stacks that greatly limited their ability to scale for this.
Regarding music taste, if the system knows that you have a strong correlation with a number of users who like classical but periodically explore new music, what they like will likely be something you might be interested in. This, in practice, is exactly how music discovery happens in the real world (that the discoveries of the people you share musical tastes with are more likely to interest you).
What you are talking about is still incapable of recommending (with a high chance of the recommendation being spot-on) new things. In music a new thing would be a completely different genre, not a new song in your favorite genre.
The system you are describing will find people who have a strong correlation with me and who also like:
1) Classical music and Justin Bieber.
2) Classical music and Metallica.
3) Classical music and Dubstep.
And it will recommend me Bieber, Metallica and Dubstep. I might like Dubstep, but I won't like Bieber and Metallica. How is it better than listening to random songs?
I agree. Subreddits are nice but I want to see the equivalent of Netflix "other movies you may enjoy" on a social network.
I want to be encouraged to upvote/downvote things because I know it will impact my experience, not because it will modify some arbitrary score to an unknown individual.
It would be nice if Reddit could filter out content based on previous voting patterns. I know people suggest unsubscribing from the bigger subreddits, which helps a little, but rage comics/memes have a habit to leak across over time. The same goes for pun threads and other worthless (albeit amusing) comments.
The experience would be more pleasant (for me at least) if it could cut out comments & stories I'm uninterested in, possibly with a summary of the article / conversation.
That's an interesting idea. As it is I have a rather long RES filter list and it's like I need to add several new filters a day to get the crap from hitting my page.
No matter how hard I try, rate comics and Facebook anything still hit my screen.
It's not even out properly yet and these articles are already starting to pop out?
In its current state definitely not. If they can build even better algorithms and communities than Reddit, maybe. But that's a huge if. And they've got nothing right now.
I do like its design though, which is very different from Reddit, and that means it might serve a different market.
Reddit is far from being a link aggregator right now. Reddit is all about the community. I'd call Reddit a community of communities, I feel like this is what describes it the best (in its current state).
But their algorithms for aggregating are very different. Reddit is primarily based on submitted links. Digg is primarily based on links shared on social networks.
True. However, at the end of the day, both of these sites revolve around the content "submitted" by users (either directly on the site or across social networks), and they need this content to thrive/survive. So while their purpose/methods may be very different, both sites co-exist in the same ecosystem?
... not with 504 Gateway Timeouts. I did get a chance to see it last night and it certainly looked nice, but I'd already seen all the news stories on the front page at that moment, so I haven't quite gotten the point yet.
I'm not sure that FB and Twitter shares are the same as "diggs".
I've enjoyed Reddit for years, but I'm about at my limit. Incessant memes, novelty accounts, meta-commentary about novelty accounts, reposts, complaints about reposts, kitten pics, and a million other annoyances that trace back to karma whoring make the site difficult to tolerate. If the new Digg could successfully counteract this trend, I'd be on board.
The really interesting thing about the redesign of Digg, is in a way it's kind of the first example, of the possibility of seeing gentrification ported to the internet.
I don't think they will be successful, but its a really interesting concept.
One of the hardest parts of any kind of community driven website is to generate the community in the first place. Of course, as the idea of eternal september demonstrates communities deteriorates in quality over time as the community grows to a broader variety of people.
Its interesting then, to try to take an existing community that has settled at the lowest common denominator of content and to try to revitalize it.
If you take the metaphor further, if you think of artists as the cultivators of culture in a city. And the first step of gentrification is an increase in artists (typically seeking lower rent) who is the cultivators of culture in an internet community. Money doesn't really exist on the internet... well at least the classism associated with it (and rent) so what attracts these culture cultivators back?
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[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] threadblauwbilgorgel gave some good reasons why this prospect seems ridiculous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4322197.
Like outlook.com, the best thing Digg has going for it is that people really want an alternative to the incumbent who sits on most of the market, which in this case is reddit.
Digg at its highest peak was a grossly imperfect product. If project success depended upon trivia like type="text/javascript", the internet world would be a very different place.
Give users the ability to dislike something strongly enough that anyone who voted it up is excluded from all vote counts/rankings/recommendations as provided to that user for some period of time. While this leads to a filtered world, that is exactly what users expect from sites like these.
Reddit is essentially falling apart for many users (while catering to a new audience) -- in /r/all as well as individual subreddits that see a constant cycle of abandonment as people try to ontologically solve the problem -- as it is increasingly dominated by teenagers.
If I could strongly express a disinterest in every fictitious Facebook picture / iPhone message conversation, and that served as a quality indicator of people whose opinions I don't respect, that would be beautiful.
It shouldn't matter what subreddits I subscribe to (and the encroachment of certain trends keeps herding people to yet new subreddits. /r/gaming -> rage comics and DAE remember. Okay, everyone to /r/games...rinse repeat. /r/atheism -> ridiculous and obviously fake caricatures for people to knock down. /r/programming -> beginner material, so what, /r/notbeginnerprogramming?)
That is a hack, manual solution for machine learning of the things I am interested in.
Netflix uses strong algorithms and a lot of data crunching to suggest movies I might be interested in, rather than simply forcing me to subscribe to wholesale genres (you like Action movies so here's every movie that dropped in the Action bin). The eventually winner of the social news game will be those who effectively transfer that sort of learning to this genre.
Note that you can take it beyond simply finding correlation indexes between users -- analyze the linked site to determine factors like is it image heavy, what is the grade level / complexity level of the writing, discern the subject matter, etc.
Look at it this way: when you upvote a fitness-related submission, you say "hey, I'm somewhat interested in fitness", when you subscribe to /r/fitness, you say "hey, I'm really interested in fitness."
So, both upvoting and subscribing are actually manual actions.
With which you also say -- or so Reddit believes in its current level of imperfection -- "and I have complete affinity with everyone else who happens to vote in /r/fitness".
Is that true? Is there any subreddit where that is true?
It perplexes me that this is being treated like an either/or. It is not. In reality subreddits see a constantly exploding entropy as users try to fix a broken mechanism of correlation -- the fact that I like gaming doesn't mean that I like the same thing as every other reader of /r/gaming, for instance. Just fix that by splitting off into /r/truegaming, or maybe /r/games, or maybe...
So, the site should be unique for each user, right? But if you take the tactic you mentioned in a previous post: "Give users the ability to dislike something strongly enough that anyone who voted it up is excluded from all vote counts/rankings/recommendations as provided to that user for some period of time." You'll pretty quickly run out of any other users to interact with.
Heavy math/statistical analysis that can be tuned to create a productive enjoyable experience, with the side benefit that it reduces gaming and exploitation.
No. With that I tell Reddit to show me different opinions on fitness coming from people who aren't morons (since the submission was not downvoted). You seem to think that if a person subscribes to /r/fitness, he surely has the same opinions as the hivemind. That's not true at all.
Good subreddits allow all kinds of opinions. And by allow I mean they aren't being downvoted automatically. Of course, there is the hivemind and a dominating opinion, but other opinions are not repressed, that's my point.
Trying to make everything automatic seems like a job for a different site entirely.
Categorization does still matter (in the Netflix example they can competently recommend and rank for me, but they still allow me to filter into specific categories). Subreddits are useful.
However subreddits are a very coarse, manual solution to what I described.
To the comment about what reddit is designed for, it started sans subreddits. Indeed, an original focus was recommendations, but either the algorithms or the hardware wasn't there to support it, the result being a bit of a disaster. So they went down the manual binning approach.
Manual binning does something magical: each bin is a separate community run by moderators. Each one has different rules, different posters, different content and different discussion.
If you automatically sort into bins, then you will automatically lose the distinction between bins.
You cannot get your users to respect the difference between communities if you are unwilling to show them that each community is different, and deserves individual attention.
Sure, find a better algorithm for the front page and logged out users.
But to destroy the autonomy of the subreddit would be to destroy the very thing that makes reddit successful.
So, what's the point of automatic recommendations on Reddit? If there is any fitness-related material on Reddit, I'll see it in /r/fitness anyway.
Besides, how are you going to train the recommendation engine? By analyzing what submissions people upvoted?
"I like action movies" "Here's Megashark vs 747. You like action movies, so you like this"
How is any given subreddit any different? Being into fitness does not mean you share an identical interest/taste/discernment with everyone else who is into fitness. Further social news sites are subject to the tyranny of the minority -- aka the lowest common denominator. When people are more likely to express approval than disapproval, a small percentage of users with a common interest will tend to dominate.
I think you are missing the point of subreddits. They are not for finding people that agree with you, they are for creating communities with all kinds of opinions. I go to /r/fitness exactly because I don't share most of the ideas there. I go there to learn something new.
If I want to know everything that happens in the world of fitness, I subscribe to /r/fitness. With automatic recommendations (and without subscribing to /r/fitness) I'd never see stuff that I didn't know I was interested in.
That's the problem with automatic recommendations - paradoxically, you can't discover new interests with their help. You can discover what's happening inside your sphere of interests, but you can't discover new interests.
I have never said that subreddits should go away. Ever. Each post that again argues one versus the other is tossing up a distraction.
They are not for finding people that agree with you
Correlation isn't about agreement: An upvote does not mean "I agree with this". It means "I found this interesting/useful/enjoyable/educational", whereas a downvote should mean "I find this uninteresting/not useful/unenjoyable/not educational".
In no universe does that preclude learning new things. Quite the contrary, in fact.
There is no Reddit, there are communities united by the same platform.
In fact, I see this complaint all the time and it is usually coming from people who didn't discover the beauty of subreddits.
Again, there is no Reddit. There is nothing to fall apart.
That's unless you refer to the default front page as Reddit. The front page is falling apart because the default subreddits are being swarmed with teenagers. But the front page is not Reddit, subreddits are Reddit.
/r/atheism is the pinnacle example (this is a trend that becomes exaggerated the larger the sub).
The subreddit approach alone does not scale. Or rather it does scale by endless manual fracturing, which is a half-assed, luddite solution.
Yes you are.
-former reddit employee
Sure, there are users who adjust their subreddits, but (if I'm remembering this correctly) jedberg has stated the vast majority— some 90%— of users never make an account. I'm betting subreddits aren't the main reason reddit attracts so many people.
All content on Reddit -- all of it, comes from these individualized communities.
Also the 90% number -- that's true of almost any site, it's the "1% Rule"[1] (or a rule by a number of other names). Instead of focusing on the 90% lurkers, realize that it's the 1% of creators and 9% of contributors that create/submit and curate the content that brings the 90% to the front page.
So how do you attract the best 10%, the best curators, the best original creators?
In my opinion: individual communities dedicated to any topic they choose. Decentralized power that makes the 90%'s front page nothing more than the best-of-the-biggest subreddits. Sure, many subreddits will not be worthy of the 90%'s front page -- but then again, many communities don't want on the front page (and the massive influx of 'eternal september' users that it brings!)
Some subreddits, like /r/askscience, have over half a million users and maintain a rigid, empirical comment section that actively prevents layman speculation. Think about that, 600,000 users and they run a community with very little to no layman speculation.
Other subreddits, like /r/f7u13 (or /r/circlejerk) run very anarchistic comment sections where ridiculousness is supported and mods abusing power is par the course.
The beauty of Reddit is the freedom the subreddits have and the wonderful communities that create and curate the content that makes the 90%'s front page as good as it is.
I do not understand how you can emulate the result of a strong, engaged community by preventing communities from forming at all.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
You don't; at least, reddit doesn't. Reddit aggregates "original" content from other places (scare quotes due to that content often times being a repost itself.)
Did you happen to see the week f7u12 decided to have no moderation aside from blatantly illegal content? Meaning, they didn't remove reposts/off-topic material? The very first day, an image that wasn't even a rage comic hit the front page with 300+ upvotes. The meta subreddits were quick to point to that as proof that most redditors don't vote based on category. Reddit users don't care about subreddits, and they don't care about granular curation. As long as they like it, it could be in any subreddit— as is what happened when /r/funny became a dumping ground for off-topic content when the admins removed /r/reddit.com.
> 600,000 users and they run a community with very little to no layman speculation.
There are loads of off-topic, speculative, and joke comments in /r/askscience. Loads! The mods, however, rule with an iron fist, and only in the first hour of a thread's existence will you see them littered throughout the comments. Take a look at this thread[0], pulled from the current front page of /r/askscience. Do you see the top comment? It's an official mod statement about a certain joke. In most threads that get 100+ comments, you'll see this same type of comment near the top.
[0]: http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/xhyhr/is_there_a...
> Other subreddits, like /r/f7u13 (or /r/circlejerk) run very anarchistic comment sections where ridiculousness is supported and mods abusing power is par the course.
I'd hardly call anything the f7u12 or /r/circlejerk mods have done as an abuse of power. 99.99% of the time, the users are pitchforking over what amounts to either a misunderstanding or something that Just Doesn't Matter. Oh my word, BEP changed the CSS for 10 minutes to prank the subreddit? How dare he! Downvote every comment he's ever made to prove how important this is!
That's beside the point, though. Excuse my digression.
> I do not understand how you can emulate the result of a strong, engaged community by preventing communities from forming at all.
I'm saying the community doesn't exist in the first place. It's a bunch of kids online who like to think they're part of a secret club of close friends. It's easy to point to the most prominent feature of reddit, the micro-communities, as the reason it has become successful, but the real bread and butter is probably the crap that clogs /r/all.
If doubling your traffic every 8-12 months for seven years is a disaster...
Reddit has the inertia effect right now. The potential upside shrinks while the potential downside explodes.
I will also claim that subreddits are by no means a hack. They are THE key feature of Reddit that allows users to join together on the basis of common interests. There's no replacing subreddits because they are a killer feature in their own right.
Also, it shouldn't matter what Usenet newsgroups I read and what TV channels I watch.
Enjoy your stay.
If you want to see a bad job of filtering, by all means rely on an algorithm that is designed to give minimal acceptable performance because anything else would soak up too much CPU. I'll stick to moderation and subfora.
Second, and more interestingly: people have different facets that they show in different subreddits. As an example here on HN people prefer tech-oriented stuff. But not everyone here is that into tech. They just sort or organize the content, so they come to HN for in-depth stuff, and (say) Engadget for rumors, and sbnation for sports etc. So someone who upvotes a stupid FB pic in /r/funny might vote the same photo down in /r/politics. If the person is "sorting" content that's appropriate in different situations, it's not useful to discount their opinion entirely.
1. I don't want to have to spend time researching subreddits just to figure out what I'd like. Content aggregators are meant to remove steps from the process, not add them. 2. While the content of smaller subreddits are usually improved, the level of discourse in comments are not. Even if you say 'okay, no meme posts, no meme comments', the fact is that you're going to have a glut of commentors whose first impulse are to crack a joke or make a surface-level comment. The difference in comments between a post on here and a post on /TrueReddit/ are astounding.
(The one pretty ready example to the above are < 100 member subreddits, but those usually have the issue of insufficient content.)
Between being generically named, being linked in similar subreddit sidebars and showing up in the search, I think it's pretty easy to find what you're looking for or create it yourself and know that it will get more bites than a random website people would have to Google to get to. I would even say that in Reddit's case, there are just so many users from so many different walks of life that it is an easy bet to find a subreddit that suits your fancy in both content and personality.
There's an exploratory phase that anyone who wants to delve into a community has to go through, and if that takes too much time, perhaps that's the user's problem, not the site's.
I don't want to spend time upvoting 50 submissions to tell the recommendation engine what my interests are (and with the current state of technology it will get my interests wrong anyway). I just want to click one button (subscribe to a subreddit) and that's it.
And when I become less interested in a certain topic (fitness, starcraft) I can just press the unsubscribe button once and never see submissions for that topic again.
Overall, I'd like to see aggregators move to the Pandora model, rather than the Hype Machine one. With Pandora, I can specify a jumping off point (genre, artist, song) but it still refines my tastes from there.
Hype Machine, I've 'liked' hundreds of songs but I still need to manually peruse through specific blogs to find new songs I like. It's unideal.
Besides, I'm not a fan of automatic recommendations as they have a lot of drawbacks. Their major problem is: they won't help you find something you didn't know you liked.
This is patently untrue. It is more likely to find you stuff that you didn't know you like than the lowest common denominator strategy.
Just how exactly will they do it? I'm really interested, maybe I'm missing something?
Simply speaking, if a system knows all I listen to is classical music, it can recommend me a new classical composition, but it cannot all of a sudden recommend me dubstep (which I might actually like).
Regarding music taste, if the system knows that you have a strong correlation with a number of users who like classical but periodically explore new music, what they like will likely be something you might be interested in. This, in practice, is exactly how music discovery happens in the real world (that the discoveries of the people you share musical tastes with are more likely to interest you).
The system you are describing will find people who have a strong correlation with me and who also like:
1) Classical music and Justin Bieber.
2) Classical music and Metallica.
3) Classical music and Dubstep.
And it will recommend me Bieber, Metallica and Dubstep. I might like Dubstep, but I won't like Bieber and Metallica. How is it better than listening to random songs?
I want to be encouraged to upvote/downvote things because I know it will impact my experience, not because it will modify some arbitrary score to an unknown individual.
The experience would be more pleasant (for me at least) if it could cut out comments & stories I'm uninterested in, possibly with a summary of the article / conversation.
No matter how hard I try, rate comics and Facebook anything still hit my screen.
In its current state definitely not. If they can build even better algorithms and communities than Reddit, maybe. But that's a huge if. And they've got nothing right now.
I do like its design though, which is very different from Reddit, and that means it might serve a different market.
I associate reddit more with close discussion communities, as broader-versions of forums.
I associate reddit more with close discussion communities, as broader-versions of forums.
I'm not sure that FB and Twitter shares are the same as "diggs".
* dysfunctional, but community nonetheless.
I don't think they will be successful, but its a really interesting concept.
One of the hardest parts of any kind of community driven website is to generate the community in the first place. Of course, as the idea of eternal september demonstrates communities deteriorates in quality over time as the community grows to a broader variety of people.
Its interesting then, to try to take an existing community that has settled at the lowest common denominator of content and to try to revitalize it.
If you take the metaphor further, if you think of artists as the cultivators of culture in a city. And the first step of gentrification is an increase in artists (typically seeking lower rent) who is the cultivators of culture in an internet community. Money doesn't really exist on the internet... well at least the classism associated with it (and rent) so what attracts these culture cultivators back?