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Reddit Terminal Viewer development is shutting down

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Re: Reddit Terminal Viewer development is shutting down

#81

Post by thunderbird120 »

Trufa wrote: post #41

I wonder what the "next reddit" is going to look like...

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.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_exclusion_principl...

Re: Reddit Terminal Viewer development is shutting down

#82

Post by archey1 »

Angostura wrote: post #52
cubano wrote: post #31

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.

> 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.

Reddit doesn't need this system there are plenty of vote farms that you can pay a miniscule amount of money to and they will do it for you.

Re: Reddit Terminal Viewer development is shutting down

#83

Post by nsilvestri »

kuzehanka wrote: post #38

> 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…

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.

Re: Reddit Terminal Viewer development is shutting down

#84

Post by OskarS »

kkarakk wrote: post #35

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.

Re: Reddit Terminal Viewer development is shutting down

#85

Post by AmericanChopper »

kebman wrote: post #73
AmericanChopper wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s probably true (though I’m not sure we’re any more intelligent than any other internet community). My point was just that we shouldn’t mistake homogeny for tolerance of opposing views.

Well, homogeny certainly makes a group far easier to lead, since disagreements will usually be on grounds that are way easier to reach a liveable compromise on.

It means there are less opposing view points to disagree with. Not that we're any better at managing disagreement.

> homogeny certainly makes a group far easier to lead

What about the value of diversity?

Re: Reddit Terminal Viewer development is shutting down

#86

Post by kuzehanka »

nsilvestri wrote: post #83
kuzehanka wrote: post #38

> 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…

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 sim…

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.

Re: Reddit Terminal Viewer development is shutting down

#87

Post by whywhywhywhy »

Trufa wrote: post #41

I wonder what the "next reddit" is going to look like...

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".

Re: Reddit Terminal Viewer development is shutting down

#88

Post by cbm-vic-20 »

chronogram wrote: post #22
0xADEADBEE wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 analyti…

> 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. Opposite experience here. Examples: the #archlinux channel on Freenode I had on autojoin for ages but never saw that higher quality discussion there. The #Fedora channel is pretty good but not so much chatting there. Last I used IRC was over a year ago, so may…

Unfortunately, a lot of people have been switching over to using Discord, and that's splitting up a lot of the IRC community who doesn't want to move to a closed, corporate controlled system.

Re: Reddit Terminal Viewer development is shutting down

#89

Post by Angostura »

cubano wrote: post #61
Angostura wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Nice little summary here https://searchengineland.com/digg-v4-how-to-successfully-kil... It was really was an astonishingly cack-handed set of decisions.

Re: Reddit Terminal Viewer development is shutting down

#90

Post by paulriddle »

OrwellianThrow wrote: post #69
kuzehanka wrote: post #38

> 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…

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.

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