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blog.samaltman.com

21–30 of 433 posts

Re: Reddit

#21

Mod/admin censorship, government manipulation (out of Eglin AFB most likely), and corporate advertising/shilling are pretty blatantly huge in reddit right now, with many users openly looking for alternative websites. The admin team has shown again and again that they're willing to tolerate anything until there's bad PR. One of the founders (Alexis) has a PR firm, Antique Jetpack, which is on record [1] as cooperating…

Perfect example is r/nfl censoring the Bill Simmons story last week.

Re: Reddit

#22

Mod/admin censorship, government manipulation (out of Eglin AFB most likely), and corporate advertising/shilling are pretty blatantly huge in reddit right now, with many users openly looking for alternative websites. The admin team has shown again and again that they're willing to tolerate anything until there's bad PR. One of the founders (Alexis) has a PR firm, Antique Jetpack, which is on record [1] as cooperating…

> The admin team has shown again and again that they're willing to tolerate anything until there's bad PR.

They frame it quite differently--they broadly want to support legal free speech, even ugly free speech. They do so up until the point it would be impossible to do so without damaging the company.

What do you prefer them to do?

Re: Reddit

#23

I like Reddit. I recently obtained a data dump of every single submission and comment so I could perform interesting data analysis and may just determine what make a post on Reddit viral. The problem I have with Reddit is that I'm still unsure if it's a positive externality. There's a lot of good aspects of Reddit (discovery, community), but there's so much bad about Reddit that it's impossible to overlook it (abusiv…

I agree with you, but...

> no administrator transparency,

admin transparency can lead to vociferous site-wide meta nonsense and it can also get toxic very quickly.

Re: Reddit

#24

Mod/admin censorship, government manipulation (out of Eglin AFB most likely), and corporate advertising/shilling are pretty blatantly huge in reddit right now, with many users openly looking for alternative websites. The admin team has shown again and again that they're willing to tolerate anything until there's bad PR. One of the founders (Alexis) has a PR firm, Antique Jetpack, which is on record [1] as cooperating…

There's so much work being done on reddit right now that users don't like, don't won't or don't care about while things that users and mods need to effectively run their subs and enjoy the site (like better anti-spam measures, finer grained control on user behavior, disabled downvote buttons, logging of user activity so you can see who trolls are) aren't appearing.

When prioritizing what gets developed, does anybody think that not showing up/down votes will bring more users or would an option to disable downvote buttons on a breast cancer survivor support group sub so that it feels like a safer place to share make more sense?

Then there was that weird relationship with imgur (quickly becoming another major social network), where they were violating all kinds of content and promotion policies but were given free reign to do whatever and for the longest time nobody could figure out how imgur was funding itself. Oh, it turns out reddit is an investor in imgur.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/03/after-five-years-of-bootstr...

Then there's all kinds of weird censorship policies, where entire groups of users and subs discussing bad things are killed but lists of subs involving rape, death, beastiality and various other horrible things sit around just fine.

And you get half-assed explanations like https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2foivo/every_man_is_r...

Reddit's problem is that it doesn't really have a universal set of consistent policies, except for one, don't do anything to make us look bad in the press, everything else is random and capricious.

I think lots of users would like to go somewhere else, but the network effect on reddit is effectively acting as a network lock-in. There's plenty of other aggregator sites, but they can't get traction with the 9000 lb gorilla in the room. It would be very hard for another digg->reddit shift to happen unless reddit does something on the order of the digg debacle to piss off the entire userbase.

Re: Reddit

#25

"...are giving 10% of our shares in this round to the people in the reddit community..." How's that supposed to work? Reddit (the company) will own the shares? Some foundation? A bit more detail would be nice.

Lets hope for a subreddit controlling it. No really, have the users control it. Really.

Yes, yes, trolls, hacked accounts, wall street manipulators, sock puppets, 4chan, 14 year olds, etc.

But, I mean, wow, just imagine the flame wars! It would be a beautiful fire of crazy. Have the insane fedora neckbeards actually try to get things together in a really real setting? The raw data files alone would be worth it. You'd glean so much, and in a Public setting. Yeah, Google does it already, but to let all of us join in on the analysis of the decision making process? I dare say it: You'd be able to determine how an internet-type true democracy would work. Hash out representatives, the whole deal.

Give it to the users, reveal just how dumb we all are in a herd.

Re: Reddit

#26
Yishan Wong has a big vision for what reddit can be. I’m excited to watch it play out.

Wow, seriously? He's talking about the guy who spewed this nonsense[0]:

We understand the harm that misusing our site does to the victims of this theft, and we deeply sympathize.

Having said that, we are unlikely to make changes to our existing site content policies in response to this specific event.

The reason is because we consider ourselves not just a company running a website where one can post links and discuss them, but the government of a new type of community.

If Sam wants to hitch his wagon to this wash-your-hands-of-responsibility-while-reaping-the-profits attitude, that's his business, but's it's fucking reprehensible.

0: http://www.redditblog.com/2014/09/every-man-is-responsible-f...

Re: Reddit

#28
I wish that Reddit would actually copy HN's about box and remove the 10:1 rule for submissions. This include killing Anonymity Rules from /r/talesfrom*.

Re: Reddit

#29

Yishan Wong has a big vision for what reddit can be. I’m excited to watch it play out. Wow, seriously? He's talking about the guy who spewed this nonsense[0]: We understand the harm that misusing our site does to the victims of this theft, and we deeply sympathize. Having said that, we are unlikely to make changes to our existing site content policies in response to this specific event. The reason is because we consi…

I'm confused, sorry. Are you for or against the banning?

Re: Reddit

#30
I keep asking this, but it never gets much attention - but why can't reddit put more effort in to a hierarchical structure.

As others have said some of the best contents is in the smaller sub-reddits, but they often struggle to get much content because people feel that to get any "attention" they have to post in a sub-reddit. I feel people would be encouraged to submit to smaller sub-reddits if there was a hierarchical structure whereby if a story did well in a sub-reddit, it would get to the front page of the next sub-reddit above it - so I might submit to /r/Dundee which leads to /r/Scotland which leans to /r/UnitedKingdom etc

I'm sure there would be some clever way to structure and control this. It would breathe life in to the smaller sub-reddits.

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