> More concerning, I no longer wish to support reddit as a platform. Widespread astroturfing, manufactured controversy, politics, bullying, incessant nitpicking and arguing.
Ever since starting a project to collect and analyse the reddit firehose, I've had a series of eye opening experiences about just how manufactured the popular reddit content is. Every day, comments and posts with hundreds to thousands of upvotes get deleted by moderators because they don't fit the desired narrative. A small ring of moderators are in control of most default subs. A small ring of accounts make up for more than 50% of regular front-page content.
If you ever want to take a glimpse at the amount of manipulation going on, point something like snew.notabug.io at a popular politics or askreddit thread.
Reddit is a platform for pushing manufactured consent/controversy and guerilla advertising. It is not a platform for open speech. The reddit content that most users see often does not represent the views of the userbase.
Here's a random post I picked from an old analysis notebook where most of top 10% of comments were deleted, and then the post itself was deleted when new comments started mentioning the censorship. Should give some idea about the magnitude and scope of what's going on https://imgur.com/a/2C5Kn2R
To preface: I have over 650,000 reddit karma, mostly collected from 2014-2017. Roughly 150,000 of this is from posts, the rest comments.
I completely agree that mods can push their own agenda about their subreddits; they have almost completely unfettered control of their subreddits, and the admins almost never intervene. But I don't agree that there's an argument to be made for the actual posters of content; it's simply a numbers game, as well as a good amount of "gaming" the system; e.g. posting during high-volume times, crossposting content, etc. I think the calls of shilling on Reddit are significantly more pronounced than shilling itself actually is, as I myself have posted content on multiple occasions and then been called a shill, when in reality I simply found whatever product interesting or useful or otherwise. On one occasion I was offered a free product _after_ making a post about it (I declined). I've never made a post that I've received any kind of compensation for, but I have made posts advertising non-profit events that I organized as a volunteer.
I have a group of friends that I've been on Reddit, and all of them have 100,000+ karma, and a couple with over a million, and they have somewhat shared the sentiment. I don't want to sound like I'm saying there's no astroturfing at all, because there definitely is, but there's this culture of calling anything with any kind of recognizable product in it an advertisement, when it can be explained much less conspiratorially.
What are your thoughts about accounts such as u/mvea consistently hitting the front page on a daily basis, often with links that were posted by other accounts earlier but only gained traction when posted by this account?
What are your thoughts on accusations that admins are able to adorn comments with gold/silver for free and manipulate comment priority? What are your thoughts on the fact that any discussion about this on default reddit gets nuked?
There are broadly two kinds of manipulation on reddit. One is by outsider parties - the state sponsored propaganda, the guerilla ad campaigns, etc. The other is by the core moderation and admin team who appear to be actively shaping front page content through selective promotion of desirable and deletion of undesirable content even if it does not break rules. My above screenshot of a 50k upvote post being nuked due to anti-chinese sentiment is an example of #2, I think you're talking about #1 which is not so prevalent lately.
I have very similar feelings about this site at least recently. There appears to be significant effort from moderators here to squash outside opinions, I've noticed a lot of posts that I've commented on have become flagged even though they did not break the rules and in fact had positive responses from other users (not downvoted).
Do you think HN owners have contracts with some companies to keep them on the front page? I always see these links to BBC, New York Times, Reuters, Techcrunch, theregister.co.uk, etc. on the front page. Who upvotes this crap? These are regular news that don't belong on HN.
I think it's unlikely, but still it's annoying to see stuff like this here. I'm not against it, but it's always there. It got to the point that I started thinking about rtv like program for HN that has built-in recommendation system based on my favorites. Strong filters too. I know there is haxor-news, but it's not that. I want to be able to get a listing of stuff only related to my favorites and favorites of HN users I whitelisted.
I broke a major news story on my own blog years ago on Reddit. It was the top story for a few minutes. Within 20 minutes it was magically deleted, I was shadowbanned, and an identical story from one of the biggest news publications in the world was suddenly #1 up there.
The information we live and breathe every day is bought and paid for.
What was a massive eye opener for me was the few days in the wake of Donald Trump's presidential win, that subreddit went back to normal, it was quiet, level-headed.
After a few days the agenda pushing and blatant shilling began anew and it's been a non-stop screaming mess since.
> More concerning, I no longer wish to support reddit as a platform. Widespread astroturfing, manufactured controversy, politics, bullying, incessant nitpicking and arguing. I don't like how people treat each other on the platform, and I don't like how it makes me feel when I use it.
Don't think this has to do with Reddit so much as the way we interact with each other online, in general.
It certainly has to do with Reddit. It's unnatural for humans to communicate with priority of "most popular". If you walk in a room with strangers, meet two friends at their house, or talk in private with your mother, all of those discussions are "bump order", meaning that your most likely discussion to respond to is the most recent "thread" (or subject) that someone brought up.
Online communication should function the same way. Reddit/HN/Facebook's algorithms based on voting and popularity are absolute garbage for carrying on normal human discussions. That's because discussion is not their purpose, it's addiction to horde bickering and engaging in popularity contests for content.
The only natural/real-world scenario that you'd find "popularity" to sort discussions is a screaming fight, political campaign, or those dreaded high-school popularity years. And surprise, that's what Reddit feels like most of the time.
I hear you that it doesn't work the same way offline. But there is a good reason for the difference. If you had 1000 people in your house, bump order wouldn't work either. Even 30 active people in a chat room gets too hard to follow if everyone is talking.
They are different mediums and have different requirements. I don't think real life conversation can be used as a good example for how online communication should work. I don't know that upvotes are the right answer either mind you, and I agree with your points about it. But it's just the best some platforms have come up with to combat the issues presented by large quantities of people talking all at once.
As someone else suggested, sort a popular thread by "new" and you're right, you get the full spectrum of opinions. However you also get lots of "internet noise". The baseless claims, useless yelling and general spamming that all open internet communications are subjected to.
There's not a "right way" or "wrong way" to organize online forums. Different interaction models result in different types of conversations, and there's room for variety there. In the case of small communities, I think it's actually beneficial to have a tool to rank order comments based on the perceived relevance to the collective.
I would say that actually showing users vote numbers is probably counter-productive. It's probably too appealing to our primate brains to be able to assign precise values to social interactions, and I think we'll probably find out in time that gamified social media is in the category of things like sugar, slot machines and opiates which are just a net negative for many many people.
I feel like karma/likes are one of the worse things ever invented in the history of software. I post on Something Awful, and while we have post counts nobody gives a damn about them. The only thing that is “impressive” is seeing an account with an old registration date, but it’s not a big deal other than light ribbing (“how can you be a member for 10 years and not know the rules?”).
SA is organized into sub forums which are like subreddits I guess, and a lot of the discussion takes place inside what are essentially Reddit like megathreads. In the threads I follow and post in, sometimes sure it gets off topic but when it becomes a problem the mods usually step in and probate the offenders (6 hour posting ban), but normally after a warning. People don’t post low content low effort things like I see in every single Reddit post.
I’m talking about things like inside jokes that people quote and run to the ground.
The barrier of entry for someone to go and write counter-productive / aggressive / abrasive comments online is very low now.
In the past you had to have half a brain to even be online. I don't mean internet connection wise, I mean to set it up and find stuff.
What scares me the most is "justice by social media". People felt wrong doing against them burning torches and calling for pitchforks online, instead of getting a lawyer and getting justice. It's a lot easier, but it then snowballs into a raging fury of everyone strongly or mildly related to the issue chiming in, demanding justice. Then is justice served? no.
The internet used to be the preserve of people with money or a real desire to be on the internet, which either meant a desire to engage with ideas or later, a desire for variety in porn they couldn’t satisfy offline. Money and intellectualism both select for more highly educated populations.
> And if the Anglophone internet is ::gestures:: like this now maybe it’s cause it’s less of a professional-class preserve? The dividing line maybe being smartphones where “people on the internet” went from “people who specifically spend $X/mo on it as luxury” to “people with telephone service”? That’s a real possibility, that for all the “Global Village” stuff the wondrous effect of the ‘90s internet was to create a cultural space that was MORE gatekept by wealth and education.
> That’s… kind of depressing, though. “Haha you thought the world was getting better because you were eliminating elitist barriers but actually it’s cause you were making them higher, which is good because the poor and non-elite are disproportionately idiots with worthless ideas and to the extent they’re on top of things the thing they’re on top of is undermining the basis of a good society, and anyway those times were a phenomenon of a narrow early adopter base and you’ll never ever get them back unless you make the non-elite economically and politically irrelevant.” Depressing but very well precedented, that’s exactly the arc newsprint, radio, and TV followed before.
> What scares me the most is "justice by social media".
I think a big part of the problem is that somewhere along the line "real world" entities started to capitulate to the demands of social media mobs.
Like there was that case of the young woman who made a joke in poor taste to her dozen twitter followers on a trip to Africa, and somehow it blew up into a front-page story on traditional media and I believe she was fired from her job.
Her employer, and indeed all of us, could choose not to react to this kind of outrage storm, and then it would have no consequences besides perhaps some passing embarrassment until the internet chooses to move on to something else. Social media only has power because we give it power.
I agree with the second point emphatically. I enjoy that the barrier to entry with places like IRC are higher because it's directly correlated with the quality of discussion, in my experience at least.
Regarding the other points, we may well look back at things like Myspace as Halcyon days of somewhat pure Social Media usage. It's a pity we can't still have a social media platform that isn't mined to hell for analytics, ads and GPS stalking but it seems that the tide is turning and people in the Western world are getting over the hype cycle and caring less about being a part of it. Tellingly I had cause to listen to a focus group this week that had privacy concerns about Facebook; before then I assumed it was only the HN crowd who thought that! I look forward to the next 5 years in tech but if I were to lay odds, I wouldn't bet on Facebook weathering well.
> Don't think this has to do with Reddit so much as the way we interact with each other online, in general.
Having spent some (great) time in more traditional forums recently I think the algorithmic driven nature of reddit (and HN for that matter) along with it's centralization are the biggest contributors. The scoring systems have gamified online discussions to the point that you can't really have worthwhile discussions, most people with anything interesting to say (anything not mostly accepted by the group as a whole) will be punished by the algorithms, people with the most agreeable opinions will "win".
Being centralized and gamified is also the ideal environment for astroturfing, you can have a big effect for minimal investment. If someone clicks on a topic you can easily control what the first comment they see is, with more traditional forums it's first in best dressed and a lot of people will skip straight to the latest entries.
That highly depends on every subreddit's topic and how is it being moderated. Topics which invite populist responses in populist subreddits indeed behave like that, but other subreddits keep more of a Stack Exchange behavior, with out of topic discussion getting discouraged or directly removed, even if they were the most voted.
On the topic of gamification, I really like how Stack Overflow did it, with a focus on earned trust and good and dependable answers. For all its faults, I've never seen a site so great at solving actual problems, and not just within IT.
Eh, a big part of it is the karma system and upvotes / downvotes.
They work great for things like "how do I fix this problem" or "recommend X", but it is a terrible format for political discussion / anything remotely controversial.
It has a very noticeable polarizing effect in those cases.
I think in particular reddit has been gamed. Companies figured out that the way to do ads is good old plants in the audience; fake user to user interaction. ”I can confirm this, Pfizer’s HappyPill made my life much easier” is the new type of ad.
Twitter isn’t much better, it too has been gamed. By simply having hordes of accounts saying whatever the message is, and replying to all.
In a broader sense, sure. But I've witnessed very little of that here, which is mostly self moderated with a nudge from the admins. I've noticed this also in other smallish niche communities.
Reddit has become so mainstream that everyone has a place. I think the big problems arise in the more general subs where all the miscreants from the web intersect. Same with YouTube, or any large community really. No amount of censorship or moderation can solve this, it's a problem for any sufficiently large userbase. If a solution can exist is doubtful, even.
> In a broader sense, sure. But I've witnessed very little of that here, which is mostly self moderated with a nudge from the admins. I've noticed this also in other smallish niche communities.
hn also seems to be more accepting of opinions which people disagree with. Here it seems to lead more to a civil debate about why you are wrong, whereas on reddit you would more often than not get downvoted and called names.
The solution in my mind is simple (and therefore entirely possibly wrong): keep autonomous communities small.
I like to think of this as the "Tower of Babel" problem, where basically all the world's people cooperated on one monumental task, and God "confused their language" so they couldn't complete it. We see this pattern any time people form a critical mass: fragments form, there's a falling out, and the whole thing comes apart. Take any sufficiently old group of people and the pattern asserts itself.
The great thing about the internet is even if all the primary communities are small, it's trivial for members to inter-mix on their choice of small communities, self-selecting for culture fit rather than requiring armies of moderators to keep the conversation on track (though some moderation is still necessary).
Reddit brings together far more diverse communities than any other site, who then slam head on in to each other in the generic subreddits.
You used to have to go actively seek out the toxic parts of the internet (except for the occasional raid of your forum by a rival, but you could usually ride that out). Now because they refuse to ban the like of The_Donald, it is like a Knitting website and Stormfront trying to share a single forum.
I don't think that's really such a problem, it alleviates the echo chamber effect of personalized searches, ads, content, forums, etc. on most of today's internet. Some community intermingling is good, and afterwards everyone can go back to their own subreddits.
I actually do blame the way Reddit has been managed. The decisions the admins made made it what it is today.
I do still enjoy going on 4chan (hardly a heaven of civilized discussion) and this very website. So in my mind, it can't be just because of a general trend in online discussions.
Which is true. But when I discovered reddit about 7 years back it was nothing like this. Now the website leaves me feeling absolutely crap, angry and frustrated. Plus, it is addictive.
I still like reddit. I go to like r/fitness, leagueoflegends, themotte, askhistorians. I don't go to any of the political or news reddits, so whilst its fairly meme-heavy I still get that in-group feeling.
The platform used for discussion certainly has a large impact on the way people interact, and the culture that grows around it.
I'm open to arguments that Reddit is better or worse than most, but for my own view, I think the majority of subreddits are not a good place to be interacting with and in general have poor discussion quality and a fair bit of bullying - which I think is largely because of the nature of the downvote/upvote system and comment chains/weighting reddit has in place.
I personally think that reducing his particular gripe down to saying it's "a broader issue" isn't useful for narrowing down specific problems with particular methods of discourse.
Perhaps so, but it is not an axiomatic conflict. A website (or online community) can start off small, attracting attention of only fellow, well-meaning e-peers before regressing to the mean.
I always marvel that Reddit has seemed not have learned even one lesson from Digg.
They are literally making the same exact mistakes, and its leading to the same exact results...karma whoring, piling on, ingroup/outgroup ete etc.
It seems beyond comprehension to me that they wouldn't have thoroughly looked at the rise and fall of Digg and not made every effort not to follow the same path.
If I had to guess, this is what happens when you make your company data driven at all costs. All the dog-piling leads to higher engagement, more comments made faster as people get the last word in, and more gold/platinum/silver buying as people foam at the mouth to super-bump comments they agree with.
Reddit has a strong incentive to make their website a platform where you shout into an abyss that echos back what you currently feel, where you can feel vindicated for downvoting and insulting the "other", and get that sweet dopamine kick for stealing (not sharing) content with no concept of attribution. All of that means higher engagement of the userbase.
If they wanted to encourage thoughtful discussion? That would mean requiring long-form posts, or throttling how fast users could comment. Wanting high quality discussion would mean encouraging posting sources and taking time to read them, which drives users off the site. It would mean dis-incentivizing the emotion-based vector for buying gold as a means to super-bump arguments you agree with, or to spite the opposition.
> They are literally making the same exact mistakes,
I haven't seen them make a formal system whereby publishers can pay to have their content autosubmitted and promoted to the front page. That was what killed Digg.
Ok..yes I'll admit I never even knew that Digg did that.
I thought Digg's vote system was simply being gamed by bad actors. The idea that someone at Digg thought it would be even a reasonably good thing to have the system you describe is totally bonkers.
Hopefully we go back to forums, where the format is more conducive to conversation rather than snarky one-liners and memes.
This whole nested comment format becomes completely unreadable once you have more than two people involved in a comment thread, and the fact that submissions can't survive more than 36 hours guarantees that no deeper conversations would ever happen even if the comment format could support them.
On forums, there are discussion threads that last for years and the format makes them much easier to read from start to finish.
What forums do you peruse? The ones I run through are generally okay, but mechanisms of voting, liking, and rewarding post count of users, seem to increase low effort posting.
There's a happy size for subreddits, ballpark less than 200k subs. Otherwise, like you said, its overwhelming. Any less than 30k subs and the subreddit is pretty desolate though, which might be good for some topics.
Probably not too much like reddit at all. So long as reddit exists its particular niche in the ecology of the internet is filled and websites which serve a very similar purpose can't really hope to gain significant numbers of users. Attention is a finite resource and sites with more content attract more of people's attention. For sites with user generated content, this means that the more users you have the more content is generated and the more of those user's attention is captured by one that one site. If there are two sites which both rely on user generated content but are more or less identical, the smaller one will inevitably hemorrhage users to the larger one. The larger the difference in number of users, and by extension the amount of content, the faster the hemorrhage. Sites need to differentiate themselves to survive, this can be through format, focus, moderation, or community but all of these options will effect the maximum possible number of people a site can appeal to. Sites basically need to justify their existence relative to other established sties. The question is "what do you do better and how many people does that matter to?". For most reddit alternatives, the answer is not much and not many.
All of this is essentially the Competitive Exclusion Principle[1] applied to websites. It's why reddit clones will never gain significant market share so long as reddit exists in something resembling its current form.
Probably completely different but will have the same slice of anarchy that made Reddit popular to begin with. Reality is people didn't swarm to that site for pictures of dogs and "AMAs".
I just don't see it. I've tried Steem and some others experimenting with it, and I'm not really impressed. Could you please give me some pointers as to how it would work? On the other hand, have you tried IPFS?
It's always sad when the original maintainer gets burnt out and refuses to put in the effort to transfer ownership but que sera sera - i'm glad forking exists as a concept in Code management
I feel like the argument he put forth is entirely reasonable. He cannot possibly vet a new maintainer, so if the project is to live on, have people fork it and let the community decide which fork they want.
Readit News
Ever since starting a project to collect and analyse the reddit firehose, I've had a series of eye opening experiences about just how manufactured the popular reddit content is. Every day, comments and posts with hundreds to thousands of upvotes get deleted by moderators because they don't fit the desired narrative. A small ring of moderators are in control of most default subs. A small ring of accounts make up for more than 50% of regular front-page content.
If you ever want to take a glimpse at the amount of manipulation going on, point something like snew.notabug.io at a popular politics or askreddit thread.
Reddit is a platform for pushing manufactured consent/controversy and guerilla advertising. It is not a platform for open speech. The reddit content that most users see often does not represent the views of the userbase.
Here's a random post I picked from an old analysis notebook where most of top 10% of comments were deleted, and then the post itself was deleted when new comments started mentioning the censorship. Should give some idea about the magnitude and scope of what's going on https://imgur.com/a/2C5Kn2R
I completely agree that mods can push their own agenda about their subreddits; they have almost completely unfettered control of their subreddits, and the admins almost never intervene. But I don't agree that there's an argument to be made for the actual posters of content; it's simply a numbers game, as well as a good amount of "gaming" the system; e.g. posting during high-volume times, crossposting content, etc. I think the calls of shilling on Reddit are significantly more pronounced than shilling itself actually is, as I myself have posted content on multiple occasions and then been called a shill, when in reality I simply found whatever product interesting or useful or otherwise. On one occasion I was offered a free product _after_ making a post about it (I declined). I've never made a post that I've received any kind of compensation for, but I have made posts advertising non-profit events that I organized as a volunteer.
I have a group of friends that I've been on Reddit, and all of them have 100,000+ karma, and a couple with over a million, and they have somewhat shared the sentiment. I don't want to sound like I'm saying there's no astroturfing at all, because there definitely is, but there's this culture of calling anything with any kind of recognizable product in it an advertisement, when it can be explained much less conspiratorially.
What are your thoughts on accusations that admins are able to adorn comments with gold/silver for free and manipulate comment priority? What are your thoughts on the fact that any discussion about this on default reddit gets nuked?
There are broadly two kinds of manipulation on reddit. One is by outsider parties - the state sponsored propaganda, the guerilla ad campaigns, etc. The other is by the core moderation and admin team who appear to be actively shaping front page content through selective promotion of desirable and deletion of undesirable content even if it does not break rules. My above screenshot of a 50k upvote post being nuked due to anti-chinese sentiment is an example of #2, I think you're talking about #1 which is not so prevalent lately.
Seems like /r/news, /r/worldnews and many other hyper-popular subs are carefully crafted propaganda machines.
The best way around it to stay subscribed to smaller, more niche subs.
I think it's unlikely, but still it's annoying to see stuff like this here. I'm not against it, but it's always there. It got to the point that I started thinking about rtv like program for HN that has built-in recommendation system based on my favorites. Strong filters too. I know there is haxor-news, but it's not that. I want to be able to get a listing of stuff only related to my favorites and favorites of HN users I whitelisted.
The information we live and breathe every day is bought and paid for.
After a few days the agenda pushing and blatant shilling began anew and it's been a non-stop screaming mess since.
Dead Comment
Don't think this has to do with Reddit so much as the way we interact with each other online, in general.
Online communication should function the same way. Reddit/HN/Facebook's algorithms based on voting and popularity are absolute garbage for carrying on normal human discussions. That's because discussion is not their purpose, it's addiction to horde bickering and engaging in popularity contests for content.
The only natural/real-world scenario that you'd find "popularity" to sort discussions is a screaming fight, political campaign, or those dreaded high-school popularity years. And surprise, that's what Reddit feels like most of the time.
They are different mediums and have different requirements. I don't think real life conversation can be used as a good example for how online communication should work. I don't know that upvotes are the right answer either mind you, and I agree with your points about it. But it's just the best some platforms have come up with to combat the issues presented by large quantities of people talking all at once.
As someone else suggested, sort a popular thread by "new" and you're right, you get the full spectrum of opinions. However you also get lots of "internet noise". The baseless claims, useless yelling and general spamming that all open internet communications are subjected to.
I would say that actually showing users vote numbers is probably counter-productive. It's probably too appealing to our primate brains to be able to assign precise values to social interactions, and I think we'll probably find out in time that gamified social media is in the category of things like sugar, slot machines and opiates which are just a net negative for many many people.
SA is organized into sub forums which are like subreddits I guess, and a lot of the discussion takes place inside what are essentially Reddit like megathreads. In the threads I follow and post in, sometimes sure it gets off topic but when it becomes a problem the mods usually step in and probate the offenders (6 hour posting ban), but normally after a warning. People don’t post low content low effort things like I see in every single Reddit post. I’m talking about things like inside jokes that people quote and run to the ground.
In the past you had to have half a brain to even be online. I don't mean internet connection wise, I mean to set it up and find stuff.
What scares me the most is "justice by social media". People felt wrong doing against them burning torches and calling for pitchforks online, instead of getting a lawyer and getting justice. It's a lot easier, but it then snowballs into a raging fury of everyone strongly or mildly related to the issue chiming in, demanding justice. Then is justice served? no.
> And if the Anglophone internet is ::gestures:: like this now maybe it’s cause it’s less of a professional-class preserve? The dividing line maybe being smartphones where “people on the internet” went from “people who specifically spend $X/mo on it as luxury” to “people with telephone service”? That’s a real possibility, that for all the “Global Village” stuff the wondrous effect of the ‘90s internet was to create a cultural space that was MORE gatekept by wealth and education.
> That’s… kind of depressing, though. “Haha you thought the world was getting better because you were eliminating elitist barriers but actually it’s cause you were making them higher, which is good because the poor and non-elite are disproportionately idiots with worthless ideas and to the extent they’re on top of things the thing they’re on top of is undermining the basis of a good society, and anyway those times were a phenomenon of a narrow early adopter base and you’ll never ever get them back unless you make the non-elite economically and politically irrelevant.” Depressing but very well precedented, that’s exactly the arc newsprint, radio, and TV followed before.
https://kontextmaschine.tumblr.com/post/185164859368/your-gr...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
I think a big part of the problem is that somewhere along the line "real world" entities started to capitulate to the demands of social media mobs.
Like there was that case of the young woman who made a joke in poor taste to her dozen twitter followers on a trip to Africa, and somehow it blew up into a front-page story on traditional media and I believe she was fired from her job.
Her employer, and indeed all of us, could choose not to react to this kind of outrage storm, and then it would have no consequences besides perhaps some passing embarrassment until the internet chooses to move on to something else. Social media only has power because we give it power.
I think mobs often mistake vengeance for justice.
Regarding the other points, we may well look back at things like Myspace as Halcyon days of somewhat pure Social Media usage. It's a pity we can't still have a social media platform that isn't mined to hell for analytics, ads and GPS stalking but it seems that the tide is turning and people in the Western world are getting over the hype cycle and caring less about being a part of it. Tellingly I had cause to listen to a focus group this week that had privacy concerns about Facebook; before then I assumed it was only the HN crowd who thought that! I look forward to the next 5 years in tech but if I were to lay odds, I wouldn't bet on Facebook weathering well.
Deleted Comment
Having spent some (great) time in more traditional forums recently I think the algorithmic driven nature of reddit (and HN for that matter) along with it's centralization are the biggest contributors. The scoring systems have gamified online discussions to the point that you can't really have worthwhile discussions, most people with anything interesting to say (anything not mostly accepted by the group as a whole) will be punished by the algorithms, people with the most agreeable opinions will "win".
Being centralized and gamified is also the ideal environment for astroturfing, you can have a big effect for minimal investment. If someone clicks on a topic you can easily control what the first comment they see is, with more traditional forums it's first in best dressed and a lot of people will skip straight to the latest entries.
They work great for things like "how do I fix this problem" or "recommend X", but it is a terrible format for political discussion / anything remotely controversial.
It has a very noticeable polarizing effect in those cases.
Twitter isn’t much better, it too has been gamed. By simply having hordes of accounts saying whatever the message is, and replying to all.
Reddit has become so mainstream that everyone has a place. I think the big problems arise in the more general subs where all the miscreants from the web intersect. Same with YouTube, or any large community really. No amount of censorship or moderation can solve this, it's a problem for any sufficiently large userbase. If a solution can exist is doubtful, even.
hn also seems to be more accepting of opinions which people disagree with. Here it seems to lead more to a civil debate about why you are wrong, whereas on reddit you would more often than not get downvoted and called names.
I like to think of this as the "Tower of Babel" problem, where basically all the world's people cooperated on one monumental task, and God "confused their language" so they couldn't complete it. We see this pattern any time people form a critical mass: fragments form, there's a falling out, and the whole thing comes apart. Take any sufficiently old group of people and the pattern asserts itself.
The great thing about the internet is even if all the primary communities are small, it's trivial for members to inter-mix on their choice of small communities, self-selecting for culture fit rather than requiring armies of moderators to keep the conversation on track (though some moderation is still necessary).
You used to have to go actively seek out the toxic parts of the internet (except for the occasional raid of your forum by a rival, but you could usually ride that out). Now because they refuse to ban the like of The_Donald, it is like a Knitting website and Stormfront trying to share a single forum.
I do still enjoy going on 4chan (hardly a heaven of civilized discussion) and this very website. So in my mind, it can't be just because of a general trend in online discussions.
Recently, I've gone totally cold-turkey on the platform. Where as previously I had been posting daily for 9 years!
The platform used for discussion certainly has a large impact on the way people interact, and the culture that grows around it.
I'm open to arguments that Reddit is better or worse than most, but for my own view, I think the majority of subreddits are not a good place to be interacting with and in general have poor discussion quality and a fair bit of bullying - which I think is largely because of the nature of the downvote/upvote system and comment chains/weighting reddit has in place.
I personally think that reducing his particular gripe down to saying it's "a broader issue" isn't useful for narrowing down specific problems with particular methods of discourse.
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They are literally making the same exact mistakes, and its leading to the same exact results...karma whoring, piling on, ingroup/outgroup ete etc.
It seems beyond comprehension to me that they wouldn't have thoroughly looked at the rise and fall of Digg and not made every effort not to follow the same path.
Reddit has a strong incentive to make their website a platform where you shout into an abyss that echos back what you currently feel, where you can feel vindicated for downvoting and insulting the "other", and get that sweet dopamine kick for stealing (not sharing) content with no concept of attribution. All of that means higher engagement of the userbase.
If they wanted to encourage thoughtful discussion? That would mean requiring long-form posts, or throttling how fast users could comment. Wanting high quality discussion would mean encouraging posting sources and taking time to read them, which drives users off the site. It would mean dis-incentivizing the emotion-based vector for buying gold as a means to super-bump arguments you agree with, or to spite the opposition.
I haven't seen them make a formal system whereby publishers can pay to have their content autosubmitted and promoted to the front page. That was what killed Digg.
I thought Digg's vote system was simply being gamed by bad actors. The idea that someone at Digg thought it would be even a reasonably good thing to have the system you describe is totally bonkers.
This whole nested comment format becomes completely unreadable once you have more than two people involved in a comment thread, and the fact that submissions can't survive more than 36 hours guarantees that no deeper conversations would ever happen even if the comment format could support them.
On forums, there are discussion threads that last for years and the format makes them much easier to read from start to finish.
All of this is essentially the Competitive Exclusion Principle[1] applied to websites. It's why reddit clones will never gain significant market share so long as reddit exists in something resembling its current form.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_exclusion_principl...
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