121–130 of 162 posts
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Gave up on reddit a long time ago because of the moderation problems.
Curious, what alternatives have you found that are similar to what reddit used to be (besides this site)? Also, what alternative sites have you found replaced Reddit for you, even if they are not similar to what Reddit once was?
> As the name implies, Reddit is designed to be read. People who only read along, but never participate are so integral to the platform that users coined a new term for them: “lurkers.” I ... "coined a new term" ... having grown up on usenet, mailing lists and IRC channels, the idea that reddit coined the term "lurkers" doesn't make me mad at the author, it just makes me feel really old.
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…
How many front page posts have we had in the last two weeks whining about political censorship?
HN has politics alright, just the other side's politics.
"Social network envy" will eventually be Reddit's undoing. The fact that they have been trying to position themselves as a social network, unsuccessfully, for several years and they still haven't given up on it is alarming. If Google can't even pull it off with all of their resources and properties (including giants like YouTube and Gmail), I don't see how Reddit will either. The "me too" features, like the TikTok cl…
But no, they killed it. The thing is, their AMA system captured lightning in a bottle very regularly. Engagement was high, the community was happy and it brought positive press to reddit, at least for the US market.
But like you said, social network envy.
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 an…
From my POV this seems to be the same issue that has prevented federated social networks or chat services from taking off: there's no meaningful, concrete advantage to it.
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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…
I love these conversations. As I've said in about 3 other places now - these are the side effects of automation. It didn't use to be like this because it was not possible - and reddit was in many ways MUCH worse. You couldn't ban known bigots or racists because they would be back with an alt. The presence of harassment and hate speech has a chilling effect on normal users - they aren't here to engage or fight nazism.…
What good is karma is it's not adhered to? If you can just remove things because you disagree with them?
Perhaps you should read Aesop's fable: The Wind and the Sun. I believe you would have something to learn from this fable about motivating people in the right direction.
The funny thing about using Craigslist as the example for unbundling is that Craigslist, to this day, works better than anything that's attempted to replace or unbundle it. Craigslist remains a stable, profitable company that provides an enormous amount of value.
I dispute this. Craigslist may appear to work better however: - Many unbundled categories have far better products available now. AirBnB and Trulia are great examples. - In areas Craigslist still has a hold, such as in rental housing, what we don't see is the cost of Craigslist's failure to provide advanced features. This includes people getting scammed, and bad landlords continuing on without record just like bad ta…
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>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…
> The mods really have no reason removing posts, outside of clear violating posts that may break laws, since the users can choose what they want to see with the upvote and downvote button. I have to disagree. My counterpoint would be the AskHistorians subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/ Admittedly, I'm a history nerd, but it's probably the most interesting subreddit I've found yet. And it's full of del…
/r/AskHistorians is one of the more unique subreddits, in that it has evolved to become what reddit envisioned a subreddit to be. But running counter to that are a thousand other country subreddits, where if you don't hold a hard line (lefty) view to politics, you will get banned. I have seen Labour shills with premium reddit accounts allowed to post content on r/uk that's downright against the rules, but hey, apparently agreeable to the majority of redditors, so it stays. Likewise I just assume that all of the country subreddits are internally influenced directly by political parties themselves. I have seen fake news being spread by all who have a vested interest (such as Armenians during Nagorno Kharabakh on r/Europe) and mods not even lifting a finger. We all know how r/Conservative and r/The_Donald mods just kicked out people who put forward views that were marginal to the rest of the sub. And why do subs like r/Sino, which openly peddle fake news, even exist? IMO reddit site moderators are largely sleeping and only wake up if something hits the newsstands.
Moderators should be empowered with the ability to censor and delete/flag comments, and to ban people with repeated infractions. But to ban somebody from a country sub and/or letting mods ban people with one or no infractions, while selectively applying the rules? No way. They should not even get filters imo. If it makes their job harder, then so be it.
That being said, one sub that I've found really nicely monitored is the r/casualuk sub. Politics is a strict no no, and they have some sort of bot to filter out such content based on keywords. The mods aren't some silent grandstanding keyboard warriors but people actively involved in the community who actually go so far as to organize real world events.
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Gave up on reddit a long time ago because of the moderation problems.
I mean just look at geographic subreddits like r/canada and r/vancouver they all have people, moderators with extreme alt-right views often banning people for sharing opposing views. Astroturfing is common as aged reddit accounts are easily obtainable and Reddit algorithm isn't sophisticated enough to detect this. /u/maxwellhill is also the biggest mystery of all. Even pinging the username results in a ban. This sing…
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> because something like /r/canada can't easily be replaced. Yeah. As it became more and more clear that /r/canada was modded by reactionary bigots, a lot of people started moving to /r/canadapolitics and /r/onguardforthee.
You still have the issue that r/canada is the default place to go if you're new and want to talk about Canada. To make matters worse, r/canadapolitics isn't advertised on r/canada, so how are new users supposed to find out about it?