621–630 of 1001 posts
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Reddit is basically successful despite itself. It's wild.
Reddit is proof of Internet Rule No.51 "the better the content, the worse the User Interface"
Strike you say? That's like, as Louis Rossmann on his yt channel wisely said, "I am so angry, so infuriated that you're abusing me, that ..... I WILL... leave for 3 days and then come back for the rest of my life". Like it's literally like saying "hey I need you in my life". Do you know what message that sends? What would you think if your customers would say "hey Im not gonna come for 3 days but I'm coming for the r…
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Most of the content is also modded by a small subset of mods—literally dozens. You've got maybe a hundred mods who are "power mods" that control the vast majority of large subreddits, and these are the ones "protesting". They don't own the subreddits. They have no rights to them, but they like to pretend that they do. Their moderation has, in many ways, become oppressive to the userbase. You don't hear about it becau…
I'm surprised more people aren't talking about this. I'm active in some video game subreddits and I even mod a video game related sub with about 25k subscribers. And on multiple occasions I've had terrible interactions with those big multi-sub moderators. A particularly infamous multi-sub mod (whom you can probably figure out) has threatened me for my subreddit on multiple occasions, making statements like "I'll have…
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Traffic is down modestly, revenue is down dramatically, outages are up, bugs are up, abuse is up, many users have departed, and the value of the company has fallen by something between half and two thirds. One of its core assets, the blue checkmark for verified notable accounts, has been permanently destroyed. I no longer use it, but word from my friends who still do is that is has become grimmer, less fun. Musk has…
> I'd suggest Casey Newton's articles on it That explains why the rest of your comment doesn’t make sense to me. IMHO Casey Newton is a vulture journalist. He specializes in exaggerate and twist every minor problem he can find in tech companies.
But I am one of Twitter's first 500 users and am a former Twitter employee who keeps an eye on Twitter. And I think Newton's doing a much better job of reporting on Twitter than most places.
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Traffic is down modestly, revenue is down dramatically, outages are up, bugs are up, abuse is up, many users have departed, and the value of the company has fallen by something between half and two thirds. One of its core assets, the blue checkmark for verified notable accounts, has been permanently destroyed. I no longer use it, but word from my friends who still do is that is has become grimmer, less fun. Musk has…
I don't notice any of the things you mentioned. As a user, I haven't felt much difference before and after Musk's takeover. If anything, I think Twitter is a little bit better and more vibrant now, because the censorship is not like before. Yes, lot's of people tried Mastodon as an alternative, but I still see almost all my followees on Twitter.
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Most of the content is also modded by a small subset of mods—literally dozens. You've got maybe a hundred mods who are "power mods" that control the vast majority of large subreddits, and these are the ones "protesting". They don't own the subreddits. They have no rights to them, but they like to pretend that they do. Their moderation has, in many ways, become oppressive to the userbase. You don't hear about it becau…
> The very nature of the site is self moderating. Let people post what they want and vote on it. This only works (mostly) for legal content. Unfortunately a lot of illegal content would be highly popular and upvoted if not moderated. It also doesn't really work when a subset of users engage with the system in bad faith or leverage bots. Paid moderation is expensive - even if offshored - and I'm surprised that Reddit…
It doesn't work even then.
I've never (_never_) seen a community get large and be able to moderate itself with just technology like upvotes/downvotes. Someone needs to say "You're violating our community standards; get out."
Large, in this case, means big enough that cliques form. That happens well before a thousand people.
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Twitter too! When I worked there they jokingly referred to the head of product as the defense against the dark arts teacher, in that every year or so they'd disappear mysteriously and there'd be a new one. Most of Twitter's successes came from watching what users were actually doing and supporting that (e.g., at mentions, retweets, quote tweets). Many of their failures have been trying to graft on something irrelevan…
> Most of Twitter's successes came from watching what users were actually doing and supporting that (e.g., at mentions, retweets, quote tweets ). Yeah, maybe if what users are actually doing is bully each other you shouldn't support that.
Could quote tweets be used by ringleaders of mob abuse? Sure. But the solution to that isn't to remove the feature. There are many other ways to deal with that, including banning the people who enjoy fomenting mob abuse campaigns.
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I will continue to use reddit.
Same. One thing that I've noticed is that this seems to be a rebellion of power users and not the average Joe, which is why this has gotten so much traction on HN. To the Average Joe, if Apollo shuts down, they'll just download the Reddit app. However, HN users look at the Apollo dev and see themselves, so they're jumping on this out of solidarity. I personally think this will last a few days and then all the default…
Your strawman is just that.
You can't comprehend that not everyone is as casual like you and will happily take whatever they get like a good boy because, "you don't really care".
Some people do contribute and care and are a significant part, on aggregate, of what makes reddit special.
Your expectations about "reddit will win because it holds all the cards" are pretty obvious to make. You're not some Nostradamus, when there's no clear reddit alternative like last time around but it's still too early to tell if the users who are intended to be driven to the main app will actually go there instead of empowering other places and causing a slow but eventual migration.
Internet is, many times, about power users and "what's cool" driving others there. Reddit is not Google or fb in that they can simply buy the competition when it appears.
But hey, there's always someone with an "the authorities are always right and will win" mindset.
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>Thanks so much for telling me what goes on in my head, bub. I mean, if you're going to Reddit to marvel at the sidebar rules or CSS stylings, then I guess you're going there for the mods qua mods. But I would assume that this represents a relatively rare user psychographic. Beyond this, my point is that it's unfair to give the mods credit for indirectly cultivating communities but refuse to extend this same consider…
Mods don't just edit the css, they moderate. You can clearly see the difference a good mod team does. After the reddit blackout is over, check out the difference between /gaming and /AskHistorians. AskHistorian threads are often 90% deleted comments because people try commenting without posting any sources. For smaller communities mods keep away trolls and spambots. They enforce custom rules that sub will have. > Yes…
It's a weird comparison to make, too. You're comparing a default subreddit that is mostly for memes with one of the subreddits held in highest regard. Lots of highly-moderated subreddits are just awful. Why not compare /r/AskHistorians with the large number of highly- but poorly-moderated subreddits? There are many (I won't name names) that you would expect to be reasonably neutral places but because of who picked the name originally have become politically extreme over time. Or just as a result of the effect of the upvote/downvote mechanism. The high influence that early votes have on submissions means that if a small group of people make it their life's work to watch /new (and they do exist!) they can control the narrative very successfully.
The idea that reddit mods are some great asset to the site is just strange, IMO. To me, they're one of the worst things about the website. Most of the big subreddits are dominated by the same group of power moderators who have some questionable conflicts of interests with outside forces. Smaller subreddits tend to be dominated by high-school-style cliques.