61–70 of 618 posts
Reddit wouldn't be so toxic if the vote counts were hidden, but echo chamber validation is the ultimate badge of honor there. There is so much in this document that applies to all things Reddit (please note that I wrote it inspired by my time on Reddit) : https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Avoiding_Tr...
I've significantly reduced my time on Reddit. Used to pull up the website out of curiosity every day but the atmosphere is incredibly toxic. My front page was riddled with Russiagate stuff too for some reason and every time you'd bring up an argument that isn't the norm you get a mob after you.
It's hard to bring up without being attacked, even off of Reddit, but for long-time heavy users it's been obvious for a while that Reddit has purposefully undergone several changes to control the narrative at the behest of advertisers and the powers that be.
I'm sure that's what most people could say about their time at, or on, Reddit.
Reddit is just a reflection of the world. There is both good and bad there. It is very easy to avoid the bad. Only visit the subreddits that you know are good. For instance, I'm a boardgamer and r/boardgames is a very friendly place. Other subreddits I frequent like r/woodworking, r/bodyweightfitness, r/campingandhiking are likewise places that positively contribute to the world.
And reddit admins must know about it.
I think there is a very important distinction that needs to be made. The popular reddit experience is vastly worse than the customized reddit. It took me a while to realize that my reddit experience was vastly improved once I was very picky about which subreddits I follow.
As many on Hacker News know, I've been an avid fan of Reddit and believe that their data and community, and there's still a lot more that can be done that can be derived from that data that can't be found anywhere else. That said, from an administrative perspective, the intense hands-free policies are baffling. You'd expect a company based off the nature of community would engage with their community and their needs.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is an important distinction. I could never quite understand what all the hub-bub was until I realized that. I've used my account to comment since before they added subreddits. And I never stumble across one of the "toxic" ones except for the rare occasions when one of the other subreddits links to those ones.
Wait, how did it work before adding the subs? A single board like HN, but without any specific topics? It seems crazy. I can't imagine Reddit without subs.
Some folks complain about the Digg debacle and how that negatively affected the Reddit userbase, but IMO what truly fucked Reddit as a tech news source was the introduction of images.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are some subreddits where they are hidden for a period of time (not sure how long, but it's quite a while). I wonder if anyone has analyzed those?
A formal statistical experiment was done in /r/politics about the impact of hiding vote counts temporarily but it did not find statistical evidence that it made an impact on discourse: https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/mitmediala...
Reddit wouldn't be so toxic if the vote counts were hidden, but echo chamber validation is the ultimate badge of honor there. There is so much in this document that applies to all things Reddit (please note that I wrote it inspired by my time on Reddit) : https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Avoiding_Tr...
Reddit would also be better if karma wasn't known.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is an important distinction. I could never quite understand what all the hub-bub was until I realized that. I've used my account to comment since before they added subreddits. And I never stumble across one of the "toxic" ones except for the rare occasions when one of the other subreddits links to those ones.
Wait, how did it work before adding the subs? A single board like HN, but without any specific topics? It seems crazy. I can't imagine Reddit without subs.
As an ordinary user, I thought that the creation of subreddits was a clever solution to the Eternal September Problem.
The initial pool of users were folks that were sniped away from Slashdot and Digg. There was quite a bit of frustration about the editorship of Slashdot, and having a system that was effectively user-edited was quite attractive.
But as the readership grew, a wider array of material started showing up, frequently accompanied by the typical grumbling about relevance.
The solution was to split off new user groups into more specialized subgroups. The initial set of subreddits were effectively curated by Reddit itself, based on the categories of stuff that was showing up in practice. User-generated subreddits didn't come until later.
I think there is a very important distinction that needs to be made. The popular reddit experience is vastly worse than the customized reddit. It took me a while to realize that my reddit experience was vastly improved once I was very picky about which subreddits I follow.
The problem is that a majority of people are just absolutely manipulated by their emotions and dive head first into the feedback loop designed by social media to provide an addictive stream of never-ending engagement.