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Storming Reddit's Moat

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Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#101

Post by fjabre »

detaro wrote: post #81
abcdjdjd wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have left reddit mostly at this point as well, with some exceptions with some subreddits. The entire site is garbage at this point and filled with groupthink and mod abuse at this point. I'm curious, what alternative sites have you found at this point, besides this one, that seem to have what Reddit used to be? Or maybe even if it isn't exactly what reddit used to be, at least some good alternative for sites to go…

> besides this one You do realize how far from "moderators only remove illegal posts" HN is, and how much that shapes what HN is?

Yes there maybe some common sense approaches to curating things but Reddit has gone too far IMHO.

I think HN is a separate use case than is reddit. Which is why HN will never become Reddit nor does it want to. It's always been a niche site. Even though it's gained quite a bit of notoriety in the last decade. Most people outside of tech circles have no idea what HN is.

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#102

Post by ranger207 »

antihero wrote: post #44
abcdjdjd wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Moderators have a lot of power to influence conversations on Reddit in non-obvious ways. You had the above quote when I was commenting on your post, but may have edited it out. But I think this line right here is also why reddit is becoming unusable and going downhill fast. Basically, moderators are given way too much power and users have no recourse against mod abuse really. Users can't vote a moderator out for exa…

I disagree, for small subreddits, mods should have all the power they want to curate and garden and develop their community in the way they see fit. The great thing about Reddit is that if a mod is abusive and most users agree, there's absolutely nothing preventing you starting a new subreddit. Perhaps larger less niche subreddits should have a greater amount of accountability, though, because something like /r/canad…

>...there's absolutely nothing preventing you starting a new subreddit. Except for discovery. If you want to talk about, say, Python, you'll probably go to /r/python. But what if /r/python's mods start sending the sub down the drain? Go to /r/python2? /r/python3? /r/python_lang? New users are still going to go to /r/python and be sucked into a bad community. If they're really invested in discussing Python, maybe they'll find /r/python_lang, but if they're not they'll just bounce off and the entire community won't grow.

IMO reddit needs namespaces. Back in the beginning, there weren't subreddits, just reddit.com (like HN is now), and as reddit grew they created subreddits to divide discussion. I think it's time for another subdivision. This might work well with their attempts to become more of a people-focused social media company: a person can start a subreddit and appoint their own moderators: /r/ranger207/python would be an entirely different subreddit from /r/antihero/python. This reduces the "default name" problem: if you want to discuss Python and search "python subreddit" you'll get both results. You won't automatically assume /r/ranger207/python is better than /r/antihero/python like you would assume /r/python is better than /r/python_lang. Anyway, that's a big digression...

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#103

Post by ranger207 »

fjabre wrote: post #45
antihero wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, for small subreddits, mods should have all the power they want to curate and garden and develop their community in the way they see fit. The great thing about Reddit is that if a mod is abusive and most users agree, there's absolutely nothing preventing you starting a new subreddit. Perhaps larger less niche subreddits should have a greater amount of accountability, though, because something like /r/canad…

I disagree. Giving them too much power puts them into power trip mode. And defeats the purpose of reddit: curated content from the userbase. If I wanted to be told what articles to read by a bunch of mods I'd go to CNN or Fox news. Reddit mods should let their communities decide and have most of the power. This is the spirit of reddit. Not auto-bans and IP sniffers. They should only be responsible for removing illega…

>...curated content from the userbase. The key word there is "curated". Just upvotes/downvotes is not sustainable for quality discussion. It just leads to low quality easy effort content like memes. Moderators are important to keep discussion on track and prevent the sub from becoming a cesspool. Of course, they can and do still power trip, so still a problem.

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#104

Post by sellyme »

fjabre wrote: post #41
abcdjdjd wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Moderators have a lot of power to influence conversations on Reddit in non-obvious ways. You had the above quote when I was commenting on your post, but may have edited it out. But I think this line right here is also why reddit is becoming unusable and going downhill fast. Basically, moderators are given way too much power and users have no recourse against mod abuse really. Users can't vote a moderator out for exa…

I couldn't agree with this more. As someone who has gotten to the top of Reddit front page twice with my free (no ads) web app I now cannot. It's all but impossible. Mods are so over protective they will ban you for practically nothing. If you attempt to evade the ban even innocently they will sniff you out. I think Reddit's mod tools are disgusting and foster censorship and make Reddit a more negative and critical p…

> If you attempt to evade the ban even innocently they will sniff you out.

How exactly do you "innocently" attempt to evade a ban?

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#105

Post by colejohnson66 »

ranger207 wrote: post #102
antihero wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, for small subreddits, mods should have all the power they want to curate and garden and develop their community in the way they see fit. The great thing about Reddit is that if a mod is abusive and most users agree, there's absolutely nothing preventing you starting a new subreddit. Perhaps larger less niche subreddits should have a greater amount of accountability, though, because something like /r/canad…

>...there's absolutely nothing preventing you starting a new subreddit. Except for discovery. If you want to talk about, say, Python, you'll probably go to /r/python. But what if /r/python's mods start sending the sub down the drain? Go to /r/python2? /r/python3? /r/python_lang? New users are still going to go to /r/python and be sucked into a bad community. If they're really invested in discussing Python, maybe they…

What would happen when that moderator inevitably dies or steps down from a vibrant community?

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#106

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

chongli wrote: post #49
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #15

Many popular subreddits are quietly operated by moderators with industry connections. Some of this occurs naturally. People who were deep enough into a niche to become moderators of a subreddit in the late 2000s and early 2010s are also likely to end up working in that industry or starting business in that industry. However, many companies have realized that being in the good graces of subreddit moderators can be ver…

It’s interesting how Reddit‘s failure to effectively monetize and cut their most important users in on the action, the way YouTube and Twitch have done, seems to have led to a grey market. This hurts Reddit (obviously, since they’re cut out of the market) but it also hurts users due to a lack of transparency. This exposes users to all kinds of astroturfing, shilling, and other misinformation. In a way, it’s quite sim…

>Amazon tried to push off a core cost centre from their business

This is absolutely not true.

Customer reviews were conceived of as a barrier to entry that could not be trivially recreated by competitors. They were also conceived (naively, as it turned out) as inherently more trustworthy than anything created by company editorial/review staff.

There was never any question of "well, we could do reviews ourselves, but ... nah, let the customer do it". The goal was to harness a subtle kind of network effort to do both of (1) improve the usefulness of the site for users (2) create barriers to entry.

[ EDIT; s/others/users/ ] (#2 amzn employee)

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#107

Post by colejohnson66 »

ranger207 wrote: post #103
fjabre wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Giving them too much power puts them into power trip mode. And defeats the purpose of reddit: curated content from the userbase. If I wanted to be told what articles to read by a bunch of mods I'd go to CNN or Fox news. Reddit mods should let their communities decide and have most of the power. This is the spirit of reddit. Not auto-bans and IP sniffers. They should only be responsible for removing illega…

>...curated content from the userbase. The key word there is "curated". Just upvotes/downvotes is not sustainable for quality discussion. It just leads to low quality easy effort content like memes. Moderators are important to keep discussion on track and prevent the sub from becoming a cesspool. Of course, they can and do still power trip, so still a problem.

I don’t think there’s really a good solution here... Anyone can go rogue anytime.

Stack Exchange attempts to solve this using three methods: their “reputation” method (gamification), elections, and paid moderators. If you can prove to the community you’d be good, you and a few others are “elected” community moderators (happens once a year?). If you get 10k reputation on a single site, you get access to those moderator tools as well.

And for those with less, you get a smaller set of the tools. For example, IIRC, the “close votes queue” is unlocked at 3k(?). It seems to work well enough.

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#108

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

cblconfederate wrote: post #51

I don't think reddit is that unique. The main problem is that forums are no longer monetizable, so people don't have an interest in maintaining and moderating separate websites, so not unbundling. My use of reddit, and what i observe in general (by looking at other people's post history) is to visit a few specific subreddits often, not the homepage, not r/all. It seems there used to be a time when everyone was there…

If you were old enough (:) everything you've written above could be rewritten by just substituting "[rR]eddit" with "[uU]senet".

plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#109

Post by betwixthewires »

One thing I think ignored in the article is the rise of FOSS federated servers. There are a few prominent examples to those who follow these sorts of developments, but there are two in particular that I find interesting: Lemmy and Littr.me.

Lemmy is basically a clone of reddit's functionality that federates over ActivityPub. It is a very high quality piece of software. A single server can host multiple communities and users, just like reddit. You can follow and comment on posts and communities on external servers using your account on whichever server you call home.

Littr.me is more like hackernews, a single community server, but one that will federate with other servers using the ActivityPub protocol, like Lemmy. The development is slower, but it is still interesting and the maintainer seems to be committed to building it out. Something like this allows what the author of this article talks about, single community sites for different niche communities, but also allows for intercommunity interaction.

With either of these, a user can tailor their feed to subscribe to any number of communities on any number of servers, and lurk, or interact if they like. With tools like this, the compromise of eliminating friction by centralizing communities is no longer necessary. I personally believe federating protocols rather than central servers are the future of online social interaction, and I am very excited about it.

One thing I think needs to exist is a message board/forum server that federates. The link aggregator UX paradigm is not optimal for all online communities. Forums are very useful and as of right now I know of no effort to implement federation in an existing FOSS forum server or build one with federation in mind.

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