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Reddit vs Hacker News vs Twitter

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Re: Reddit vs Hacker News vs Twitter

#61

Post by eogas »

willvarfar wrote: post #55
eogas wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That first one was submitted to /r/programming by a user who has a really bad history of incessantly spamming his/her own blog and nothing else. The user has 2 comments in 4 years, and only 2 submissions which are not self promotion (one of which is yours). I couldn't find a trace of the other two, though looking at your account (or what I think is your account) I am seeing a slew of filtered posts, some of which are…

Thanks I've tried to put moreSQL through again - is it on topic for proggit? http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/qklxn/google_mo... I don't like the idea of having to scrape HN to find other people's content so I can hide my own content submissions in the noise.

I just approved that post. It should be fine.

And on your second note, the idea is not that you go seeking out content to mix in with your own. If you happen to come across a cool article, and it hasn't been submitted to proggit yet, just contribute it. This is probably part of the community vs content aspect you mentioned in a different comment, but sheer size of the site means that you cannot really ignore the community aspect.

I could probably get in trouble for saying this, but the reddit userbase, as a whole, is not smart enough to filter out what is good and bad. If a bunch of bloggers just auto submit every blog article they write, we will have tons of crappy, ad-ridden, off-topic posts being voted to the top. It still happens from time to time. HN might be smart enough to distinguish the good from the bad, but reddit surely is not. So we have to be at least a little restrictive.

I'm not saying your content falls into those categories, but we can't really give special treatment to people we like or are familiar with. There is one guy in the /r/programming approved submitters list, and he is a very noteworthy programmer who, for whatever reason, could not get any of his posts through the spam filter. He is the one exception. For the most part, everyone is lumped into the same bucket.

So when your posts get caught in the spam filter, just send us modmail. Sometimes we'll get them, sometimes we won't. That's just how it is. I saw earlier that you said you sometimes delete them if they've been filtered. This may be a bad idea. I cannot say for sure, because the admins don't really disclose this stuff, but deleting and resubmitting the same link has been known to hurt a user's standing with the spam filter, so just deleting it may do the same thing, I'm not sure. And there's really no reason to delete it. The only think it will clutter up is the spam filter, which is going to be cluttered no matter what.

Anyway, I hope this has been somewhat useful to you. Sorry about the massive walls of text. Let me know if you have any other questions or concerns.

Re: Reddit vs Hacker News vs Twitter

#62

Post by eogas »

diminoten wrote: post #54

There is something systemically flawed with Reddit's moderator system which precludes it from ever being an unqualified success as a social news aggregator. The primary issue revolves around the selection process for moderation. To become a moderator for a subreddit, you need to have thought of the name of the subreddit. That's it. This nomenclature designation act grants any user absolute power within that domain sp…

I think you hit the nail on the head with your last point, though I wouldn't necessarily call it moderator abuse. The actions that moderators can take on reddit were built on a laissez faire model of moderation, where anything goes except blatant spam. This obviously doesn't work very well for moderators who choose to run their subreddits in a different manner, and this happens to be most of the big subreddits, because laissez faire moderation just doesn't work on a large scale.

For example, the sole /r/truereddit moderator believes in a laissez faire moderation style, and the subreddit is slowly getting worse and worse as the userbase increases. Every time a /r/truereddit post makes it to the front page, a virtual swarm of idiocy surrounds the entire subreddit for a few days.

But that's the only way the moderation system is designed to work. There's no way to remove/approve content without training the filter. If someone submits a codinghorror post to /r/programming that is completely off-topic, the moderators either have to remove it, effectively warning the filter that codinghorror might be spam, or hope that the userbase does the right thing and votes it down. Usually, they won't, especially the people who are voting from their customized front page, not paying attention to what subreddit something is in.

It's broken, and the admins have never really expressed any concerns about this fact.

Re: Reddit vs Hacker News vs Twitter

#63

Post by kijin »

joejohnson wrote: post #56
kijin wrote: post #8

> The per-page time is actually quite high; often over 5 minutes on average for a lot of my stories even when its a big crowd. I suspect some subtle misreading of Google Analytics on my part, or else people might actually be reading the whole thing carefully!? That might be because a lot of people do what I do: keep the article open while browsing comments on HN or Reddit, and switch back and forth between the two ta…

Is there a simple way in javascript to tell if a tab is currently visible in a browser?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1760250/how-to-tell-if-br...

But that can still lead to inaccurate measurements of "time on opage" if the user switches back and forth between tabs. Do you only measure the periods during which the tab is active (and if so, how granular?) or do you simply subtract the first active timestamp from the last active timestamp?

Re: Reddit vs Hacker News vs Twitter

#64

Post by diminoten »

eogas wrote: post #62
diminoten wrote: post #54

There is something systemically flawed with Reddit's moderator system which precludes it from ever being an unqualified success as a social news aggregator. The primary issue revolves around the selection process for moderation. To become a moderator for a subreddit, you need to have thought of the name of the subreddit. That's it. This nomenclature designation act grants any user absolute power within that domain sp…

I think you hit the nail on the head with your last point, though I wouldn't necessarily call it moderator abuse. The actions that moderators can take on reddit were built on a laissez faire model of moderation, where anything goes except blatant spam. This obviously doesn't work very well for moderators who choose to run their subreddits in a different manner, and this happens to be most of the big subreddits, becau…

One of the core problems with even talking about the issue is the general disdain Reddit users have for one another, or to be more accurate, the disdain individuals have for the collective. The idea that content can be "better" or "worse", and this can be judged by an individual to the exclusion of the group, completely circumvents the entire concept of Reddit - crowdsourcing news.

Re: Reddit vs Hacker News vs Twitter

#65

Post by eogas »

eogas wrote: post #62
diminoten wrote: post #54

There is something systemically flawed with Reddit's moderator system which precludes it from ever being an unqualified success as a social news aggregator. The primary issue revolves around the selection process for moderation. To become a moderator for a subreddit, you need to have thought of the name of the subreddit. That's it. This nomenclature designation act grants any user absolute power within that domain sp…

I think you hit the nail on the head with your last point, though I wouldn't necessarily call it moderator abuse. The actions that moderators can take on reddit were built on a laissez faire model of moderation, where anything goes except blatant spam. This obviously doesn't work very well for moderators who choose to run their subreddits in a different manner, and this happens to be most of the big subreddits, becau…

Weird. As it turns out, the feature that I was complaining about reddit not having (not being able to add/remove without training the filter) was added an hour after I made this comment.

Re: Reddit vs Hacker News vs Twitter

#66

Post by guga31bb »

diminoten wrote: post #64
eogas wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you hit the nail on the head with your last point, though I wouldn't necessarily call it moderator abuse. The actions that moderators can take on reddit were built on a laissez faire model of moderation, where anything goes except blatant spam. This obviously doesn't work very well for moderators who choose to run their subreddits in a different manner, and this happens to be most of the big subreddits, becau…

One of the core problems with even talking about the issue is the general disdain Reddit users have for one another, or to be more accurate, the disdain individuals have for the collective. The idea that content can be "better" or "worse", and this can be judged by an individual to the exclusion of the group, completely circumvents the entire concept of Reddit - crowdsourcing news.

>The idea that content can be "better" or "worse", and this can be judged by an individual to the exclusion of the group [...]

This happens in every growing online community. As the community grows, the new members don't necessarily have the same interests as the original ones. This happened at digg, reddit, and now even HN has posts about declining quality, which is another way of saying content can be "better".

Re: Reddit vs Hacker News vs Twitter

#67

Post by willvarfar »

eogas wrote: post #65
eogas wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you hit the nail on the head with your last point, though I wouldn't necessarily call it moderator abuse. The actions that moderators can take on reddit were built on a laissez faire model of moderation, where anything goes except blatant spam. This obviously doesn't work very well for moderators who choose to run their subreddits in a different manner, and this happens to be most of the big subreddits, becau…

Weird. As it turns out, the feature that I was complaining about reddit not having (not being able to add/remove without training the filter) was added an hour after I made this comment.

Maybe even the reddit devs hang out on HN these days? ;)

Generally, what's the beef with not liking "self promotion" i.e. me posting my own blog articles?

Re: Reddit vs Hacker News vs Twitter

#68

Post by willvarfar »

eogas wrote: post #61
willvarfar wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks I've tried to put moreSQL through again - is it on topic for proggit? http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/qklxn/google_mo... I don't like the idea of having to scrape HN to find other people's content so I can hide my own content submissions in the noise.

I just approved that post. It should be fine. And on your second note, the idea is not that you go seeking out content to mix in with your own. If you happen to come across a cool article, and it hasn't been submitted to proggit yet, just contribute it. This is probably part of the community vs content aspect you mentioned in a different comment, but sheer size of the site means that you cannot really ignore the comm…

So I can infer the rules better, which of my posts are appropriate for proggit and which are not?

lets try and train the bayesian filter in my brain ;)

Re: Reddit vs Hacker News vs Twitter

#69

Post by cdf »

davidw wrote: post #31
leoedin wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think to a certain extent 3 or 4 years ago Reddit was very much like HN is now. When I first joined Reddit (2007) there was generally a lot of reasoned discussion, and the submissions were very much programmer orientated in a way that's long since passed. I'd imagine (although I suppose I have no real evidence for this) that the people who talk about Reddit and HN in the same context were active on Reddit a few yea…

A lot of us discovered reddit when Paul Graham mentioned it in an essay. It was pretty cool in the beginning, but then it started tending towards Ron Paul, and various political stories rather than stuff that was actually interesting . And thus, HN...

Ron Paul is still ok. I can tolerate lolcats even. It's the deterioration of comments to youtube level that puts me off.Or just downvotes without explanation. I neither want to read nor write on reddit these days... and I signed up on reddit when Paul Graham mentioned it, 6 years ago.

Re: Reddit vs Hacker News vs Twitter

#70

Post by pozorvlak »

eogas wrote: post #52
willvarfar wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of my posts never get through the spam filter, yet I think they are programming related. http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/16399069781/googl... for example http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/13264962223/sum-o... and http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/13265364121/popen... are two others that I would like to share wider I don't think they ever got through :( (I've lost track of what I've t…

That first one was submitted to /r/programming by a user who has a really bad history of incessantly spamming his/her own blog and nothing else. The user has 2 comments in 4 years, and only 2 submissions which are not self promotion (one of which is yours). I couldn't find a trace of the other two, though looking at your account (or what I think is your account) I am seeing a slew of filtered posts, some of which are…

> It filters really heavily against people who submit the same domain a large part of the time, and we (moderators) tend to stick to that as well.

Is that done on a per-subreddit basis, or a whole-site basis? If I submit mostly my own content to proggit but mostly other people's content to other subreddits, will the proggit filter hate me?

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