31–40 of 69 posts
I'm not sure that FB and Twitter shares are the same as "diggs".
* dysfunctional, but community nonetheless.
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If you think that subreddits don't matter, then you are clearly expecting from Reddit something that it was not designed to have. The most popular subreddits are swarmed with teenagers and the quality has gone downhill, that's true. But the value of Reddit is in its (less popular) subreddits.
huggyface's point is that Reddit should hide uninteresting-for-me material and surface interesting-for-me material automatically. Subscribing to subreddits is a manual process that shouldn't be necessary.
Trying to make everything automatic seems like a job for a different site entirely.
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Manual binning is more than the "hack", it's the reason Reddit is successful and the reason why Digg will not be (unless they emulate). Manual binning does something magical: each bin is a separate community run by moderators. Each one has different rules, different posters, different content and different discussion. If you automatically sort into bins, then you will automatically lose the distinction between bins.…
Why do you think they can't coexist? In fact my actual suggestion is that they should coexist. But the "just subscribe appropriately" response is fundamentally broken, and only provides a partial solution. This approach absolutely benefits any subreddit as well.
So, what's the point of automatic recommendations on Reddit? If there is any fitness-related material on Reddit, I'll see it in /r/fitness anyway.
Besides, how are you going to train the recommendation engine? By analyzing what submissions people upvoted?
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huggyface's point is that Reddit should hide uninteresting-for-me material and surface interesting-for-me material automatically. Subscribing to subreddits is a manual process that shouldn't be necessary.
How is subscribing to a subreddit fundamentally different from upvoting? To get recommendations, you need to somehow feed the recommendation engine with your interests. Look at it this way: when you upvote a fitness-related submission, you say "hey, I'm somewhat interested in fitness", when you subscribe to /r/fitness, you say "hey, I'm really interested in fitness." So, both upvoting and subscribing are actually man…
With which you also say -- or so Reddit believes in its current level of imperfection -- "and I have complete affinity with everyone else who happens to vote in /r/fitness".
Is that true? Is there any subreddit where that is true?
It perplexes me that this is being treated like an either/or. It is not. In reality subreddits see a constantly exploding entropy as users try to fix a broken mechanism of correlation -- the fact that I like gaming doesn't mean that I like the same thing as every other reader of /r/gaming, for instance. Just fix that by splitting off into /r/truegaming, or maybe /r/games, or maybe...
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Two things: trivially, you can change the subreddits you are subscribed to and remove the "fictitous FB pic" etc. posts. Second, and more interestingly: people have different facets that they show in different subreddits. As an example here on HN people prefer tech-oriented stuff. But not everyone here is that into tech. They just sort or organize the content, so they come to HN for in-depth stuff, and (say) Engadget…
I see this argument a lot, and I have two counterpoints: 1. I don't want to have to spend time researching subreddits just to figure out what I'd like. Content aggregators are meant to remove steps from the process, not add them. 2. While the content of smaller subreddits are usually improved, the level of discourse in comments are not. Even if you say 'okay, no meme posts, no meme comments', the fact is that you're…
Between being generically named, being linked in similar subreddit sidebars and showing up in the search, I think it's pretty easy to find what you're looking for or create it yourself and know that it will get more bites than a random website people would have to Google to get to. I would even say that in Reddit's case, there are just so many users from so many different walks of life that it is an easy bet to find a subreddit that suits your fancy in both content and personality.
There's an exploratory phase that anyone who wants to delve into a community has to go through, and if that takes too much time, perhaps that's the user's problem, not the site's.
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huggyface's point is that Reddit should hide uninteresting-for-me material and surface interesting-for-me material automatically. Subscribing to subreddits is a manual process that shouldn't be necessary.
And I think most users of reddit would disagree. Sometimes I visit /r/gaming or even gasp /r/all knowing what I'm going to get. Likewise, I visit /r/games knowing I'm not going to get the same content as /r/gaming. Trying to make everything automatic seems like a job for a different site entirely.
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If you think that subreddits don't matter Categorization does still matter (in the Netflix example they can competently recommend and rank for me, but they still allow me to filter into specific categories). Subreddits are useful. However subreddits are a very coarse, manual solution to what I described. To the comment about what reddit is designed for, it started sans subreddits. Indeed, an original focus was recomm…
Manual binning is more than the "hack", it's the reason Reddit is successful and the reason why Digg will not be (unless they emulate). Manual binning does something magical: each bin is a separate community run by moderators. Each one has different rules, different posters, different content and different discussion. If you automatically sort into bins, then you will automatically lose the distinction between bins.…
Sure, there are users who adjust their subreddits, but (if I'm remembering this correctly) jedberg has stated the vast majority— some 90%— of users never make an account. I'm betting subreddits aren't the main reason reddit attracts so many people.
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Why do you think they can't coexist? In fact my actual suggestion is that they should coexist. But the "just subscribe appropriately" response is fundamentally broken, and only provides a partial solution. This approach absolutely benefits any subreddit as well.
What exactly is fundamentally broken in subscribing to subreddits? If you are interested in fitness, you subscribe to /r/fitness. Fitness materials won't all of a sudden be posted to /r/gaming where you (if you are not subscribed) will miss them. So, what's the point of automatic recommendations on Reddit? If there is any fitness-related material on Reddit, I'll see it in /r/fitness anyway. Besides, how are you going…
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How is subscribing to a subreddit fundamentally different from upvoting? To get recommendations, you need to somehow feed the recommendation engine with your interests. Look at it this way: when you upvote a fitness-related submission, you say "hey, I'm somewhat interested in fitness", when you subscribe to /r/fitness, you say "hey, I'm really interested in fitness." So, both upvoting and subscribing are actually man…
you say "hey, I'm really interested in fitness." With which you also say -- or so Reddit believes in its current level of imperfection -- "and I have complete affinity with everyone else who happens to vote in /r/fitness". Is that true? Is there any subreddit where that is true? It perplexes me that this is being treated like an either/or. It is not. In reality subreddits see a constantly exploding entropy as users t…
So, the site should be unique for each user, right? But if you take the tactic you mentioned in a previous post: "Give users the ability to dislike something strongly enough that anyone who voted it up is excluded from all vote counts/rankings/recommendations as provided to that user for some period of time." You'll pretty quickly run out of any other users to interact with.