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Reddit: A Nine-Year Case Study in Absentee Management

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Re: Reddit: A Nine-Year Case Study in Absentee Management

#21

Post by seiji »

rndn wrote: post #3

Reddit is pretty much a case study of upbringing without effective punishment. In real life kids behave because they have skin in the game—if they misbehave, they are not allowed ice cream. On the contrary, if you are banned from reddit, you can simply reset your browser and create a new account. I doubt you can fix reddit with a smarter design, because that won’t change the troublemakers. To fix reddit, you would po…

Reddit has this strange power inversion dynamic where the users think they are entitled to run the site. It's a complete illusion they have for themselves to feel more special. Reddit is a billion dollar company and unless you are in corporate management, you have no say. You can have opinions and attempt to have influence, but you have no flat out rights unless you are a decision maker at the corporation.

Reddit is actually 5 things: the software platform, a global hosted instance of the software platform, engineering to improve the software platform, operations to maintain the global hosted software platform, and managament/moderation/"admin"/peopleing of the global hosted instance of the software platform.

"prommie" users of Reddit think, because they use the global hosted instance of the software platform, they have skin in the game for all other issues as well. If that is actually true, you aren't a "company," you're a weird democratic-socialist commune. Companies must make difficult and annoying and sometimes flat out wrong decisions in order to survive, and you can't be answerable to a million mostly anonymous keyboard jockeys who feel no repercussions.

Re: Reddit: A Nine-Year Case Study in Absentee Management

#22

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

flanbiscuit wrote: post #14
Grue3 wrote: post #12

A well-managed site wouldn't grow on the Internet. Look at Tumblr, Reddit, 4chan, they became some of the biggest communities on the internet precisely because they were "everything goes", whereas Something Awful or Metafilter fell into obscurity (and SA became big in the first place when it was less restrictive). The less you "manage", the more likely your site will end up in Alexa top 100.

What happened to Something Awful? My friend was really into that site and tried to get me to join but I ended up gravitating towards Reddit in the end(around 2010/11)

That was absentee managment as well (lowtax basically disappeared for several years).

Re: Reddit: A Nine-Year Case Study in Absentee Management

#23

Post by lingben »

bcostlow wrote: post #11
mahouse wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it me or this is stupid? I mean, this is the digital world, you can make as many copies as you want, so if you give them a licence to whatever they want with it, what are your options after submitting something?

Not sure if you are saying it's stupid on Reddit's part, or the users'. For Reddit it's smart. Licensing doesn't just mean making an exact copy. Let's say Reddit was the one that packaged up a story posted on /r/nosleep/ and sold film rights—the user who posted that stuff would have an uphill battle to get anything from Reddit's profits on the arrangement. But, as a user, you can still make your own deals (you still…

exactly, /r/romesweetrome comes to mind among many others

Re: Reddit: A Nine-Year Case Study in Absentee Management

#24

Post by lagadu »

seiji wrote: post #21
rndn wrote: post #3

Reddit is pretty much a case study of upbringing without effective punishment. In real life kids behave because they have skin in the game—if they misbehave, they are not allowed ice cream. On the contrary, if you are banned from reddit, you can simply reset your browser and create a new account. I doubt you can fix reddit with a smarter design, because that won’t change the troublemakers. To fix reddit, you would po…

Reddit has this strange power inversion dynamic where the users think they are entitled to run the site. It's a complete illusion they have for themselves to feel more special. Reddit is a billion dollar company and unless you are in corporate management, you have no say. You can have opinions and attempt to have influence, but you have no flat out rights unless you are a decision maker at the corporation. Reddit is…

> You can have opinions and attempt to have influence, but you have no flat out rights unless you are a decision maker at the corporation.

That simply isn't true, as evidenced by Digg. The users, as a whole, are the one thing of value Reddit has and Reddit inc. has very little control over them.

Re: Reddit: A Nine-Year Case Study in Absentee Management

#25

Post by rndn »

fulafel wrote: post #10
rndn wrote: post #3

Reddit is pretty much a case study of upbringing without effective punishment. In real life kids behave because they have skin in the game—if they misbehave, they are not allowed ice cream. On the contrary, if you are banned from reddit, you can simply reset your browser and create a new account. I doubt you can fix reddit with a smarter design, because that won’t change the troublemakers. To fix reddit, you would po…

Upbrining without punishment definitely is definitely possible and practiced semi widely (google around). Punishment is a pretty bad way to address misbehaviour.

I was trying to keep things in the most general terms. A problem is certainly that you can hardly talk to the mob (I’ve tried that in some cases of cyberbullying, racism etc. on Reddit). You simply get downvoted and your comment gets buried.

It seems that there too few feedback loops in the Reddit community, possibly because it’s so easy to be ignorant online, and the popular ones are also of pretty low quality (SRS, subredditdrama, …). Those who can provide high quality feedback are too few and probably also don’t care enough.

Re: Reddit: A Nine-Year Case Study in Absentee Management

#26

Post by thearn4 »

norea-armozel wrote: post #5
Fede_V wrote: post #2

Very interesting article. There was a data viz (gender vs visits) that was needlessly flashy, when a simple x-y scatter would have been more clear. One part struck me though: Erwin sees evidence of it already, pointing to the recent debut of Upvoted, a Reddit podcast delving into the site’s most compelling stories. “Reddit is very much trying to establish itself as a curator of its own content and take back some of t…

This oddly reminds me of how YTMND was back in the day. Now it's mostly a niche site, but when it was semi-popular among certain segments Internet users it had some conflicts erupt between users such as atheists vs Christians being a classic spat on the site. Reddit seems to exhibit some of that coarse nature in its user base at least from my own experiences. I'm not sure Reddit's owners can herd the users into compl…

Ah YTMND... what a sharp rise and steady fall

https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=YTMND&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%...

Re: Reddit: A Nine-Year Case Study in Absentee Management

#27

Post by seiji »

todayiamme wrote: post #7

"""James Erwin, a Reddit moderator of several subreddits including r/history, argues that Reddit’s unwillingness over the years to provide strong, hands-on leadership to the site’s community is at the heart of the company’s lackluster business performance. Without a firm editorial grip, the flourishing of disreputable subreddits opened the door for BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, and others, which sift through Reddit…

All the weirdness from Reddit seems to come from historically mixing the CEO role with the Community Manager role. There should be an entire department only dealing with on-site issues and that department should have absolute authority. Reddit grew from a 2 person company where everybody did everything, but did it actually grow up once it got bigger? Reddit has had a valley golden child touch since the beginning, so normal company growth patterns haven't always happened where would you expect in the lifecycle of a company because "lol reddit—we're differunt!"

Having the CEO be at the mercy of users in a multi-million-user fractured community is like having Tim Cook be the top level escalation for Apple tech support. Sure, the users may love it, but it's not sustainable for a company. Give the users an outlet for their rage and moderation problems, but don't touch the toxic waste personally.

Re: Reddit: A Nine-Year Case Study in Absentee Management

#28

Post by ianlevesque »

nadams wrote: post #13
mahouse wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it me or this is stupid? I mean, this is the digital world, you can make as many copies as you want, so if you give them a licence to whatever they want with it, what are your options after submitting something?

You could stamp everyone of your posts with a CC-NC license. Since the content is yours - I don't think they can magically wave the CC-NC license on the basis that you uploaded it to their site.

IANAL but if you agreed to their terms and uploaded something then you've relicensed it to them. This is the same as those misguided souls posting copyright notices under their Facebook messages.

Re: Reddit: A Nine-Year Case Study in Absentee Management

#29

Post by gipp »

flanbiscuit wrote: post #14
Grue3 wrote: post #12

A well-managed site wouldn't grow on the Internet. Look at Tumblr, Reddit, 4chan, they became some of the biggest communities on the internet precisely because they were "everything goes", whereas Something Awful or Metafilter fell into obscurity (and SA became big in the first place when it was less restrictive). The less you "manage", the more likely your site will end up in Alexa top 100.

What happened to Something Awful? My friend was really into that site and tried to get me to join but I ended up gravitating towards Reddit in the end(around 2010/11)

Among other stuff, Let's Plays (basically an early version of what guys like TotalBiscuit or PewDiePie do on YouTube now) started on SA and got really popular across the Internet, leading to a huge influx of very different users that completely changed the character of the site.

Re: Reddit: A Nine-Year Case Study in Absentee Management

#30

Post by [deleted] »

mahouse wrote: post #6
impostervt wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Reddit's user agreement, you own content you submit, but you give Reddit a "do whatever you want with it, even to make money off of it" license. https://www.reddit.com/help/useragreement#p_17

Is it me or this is stupid? I mean, this is the digital world, you can make as many copies as you want, so if you give them a licence to whatever they want with it, what are your options after submitting something?

[deleted]
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