I wonder what the "next reddit" is going to look like...
Reddit Terminal Viewer development is shutting down
41–50 of 110 posts
Re: Reddit Terminal Viewer development is shutting down
#42> 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.
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.
Re: Reddit Terminal Viewer development is shutting down
#43> 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…
You just described the biggest problem with Wikipedia lol. :D
Re: Reddit Terminal Viewer development is shutting down
#44It'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
What would transfer ownership even mean? Its open source, anyone can continue maintaining it without asking permission.
Re: Reddit Terminal Viewer development is shutting down
#45> 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 t…
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.
Re: Reddit Terminal Viewer development is shutting down
#46It'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
What would transfer ownership even mean? Its open source, anyone can continue maintaining it without asking permission.
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Re: Reddit Terminal Viewer development is shutting down
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
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…
> 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.
If you've got 1000 people in your house you'll have a couple of conversations going on in the kitchen, a couple in the lounge room, a couple outside and people will be wandering between the different sections and conversations. This seems pretty familiar to traditional forums where you'll have specific sub forums, and topics in those sub-forums, if you wander from one forum to another you'll see the most recent topic/conversation taking place. Sort by new in reddit seems to be the opposite, you'll see the newest topic but you want see the active conversations, at the topic level you'll only see the latest top level post not any ongoing conversations.
There is a limit where this breaks down of course, but perhaps the solution is to accept the limit and have many smaller communities instead of one big one.
Re: Reddit Terminal Viewer development is shutting down
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I basically do not trust any claim or article that I read on Reddit, Hacker News, Facebook, or any other social media by default now, if it triggers the "this may be a controversial topic" flag in my brain. That means anything to do with recent events that would make the news, politics, even practically anything "science-y".
HN, Reddit, Twitter and any other semi-anonymous social media site are just too easily gamed and astroturfed by anyone with a VPN and some time. Facebook and Twitter's "organic" content tends towards clickbait preying on people's anger responses.
Re: Reddit Terminal Viewer development is shutting down
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
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…
>If you had 1000 people in your house, bump order wouldn't work either
It definitely does, and it works better than "popular" sorting, here's how. You walk by rooms and overhear people talking. You hear a lot of small conversations, sorted by most recently heard. You find one you're interested in, and you're welcomed into the room of 2-20 people. You continue having a discussion, and it's less likely for it to turn "heated" because everyone in the group knows each other a bit.
You argue that it's "too hard to follow if everyone is talking". But the point is that you don't try to follow every thread/room. The alternative is worse: On Reddit, there are only a few ballrooms (posts on the front page of a subreddit), but they each have a couple keynote speakers (comments upvoted 2,000 times). But if you try to talk to anyone in the ballroom, they'll won't pay attention because the speaker they came to listen to is at the podium.
On Hacker News, it's not as bad because it's small. Instead of walking into ballrooms, you're walking into seminars at a university. There's a designated speaker, but anyone can interrupt the speaker at any time to offer helpful comments.
Re: Reddit Terminal Viewer development is shutting down
#50I 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.