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Re: Reddit

#161

Post by Kequc »

Reddit has got to be one of the ugliest popular websites on the internet. And idealistic, gosh. How can you look at a toilet magazine largely being contributed to by people on their toilets and think "I bet all those people want to own a part of it."

This article suggests that in a "couple of years" reddit "could have close to a billion users". Are all these numbers just being pulled out of thin air? This person is talking about investing in reddit, a site with so many pageviews for such a long time which last I heard still somehow was not turning a profit.

This person is investing in reddit and giving 10% of their investment to purportedly a billion people. Which is a valuation of 1e-8 percent of his investment per person.

I don't want that? Can I not have it somehow.

Re: Reddit

#163

Post by B-Con »

[deleted] wrote: post #112
B-Con wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One thing I sincerely hope reddit will do with the new injection is to increase the level of quality of content and discussion across the board. Often the advice given is "you've got to find the smaller subreddits" and while that's true, I think having the first few layers filled with terrible content and hive-minded, often racist/sexist discussion is incredibly detrimental to both the site's image and new user exp…

[deleted]

> I guess the only website I can think of that allows comments and is super-popular with the general public is Facebook, but since it's sorta-non-anonymous, people don't spill hatred all over the place.

That's actually a very interesting point.

I think a lot of the stereotypical poor Internet comments only exist because the author is anonymous and is talking to a faceless account. (Not all of it, of course, some of it is probably due to the communications medium.) I can't find the original post that I liked, but this one[0] has some interesting information on allowing an attacker to identify with a victim. I would think that would apply in this case too some extent.

If you actually had to vouch for what you said and what you said online were associated with you as a person, and you had a ballpark idea of who you were talking to, I think people would add more filters to themselves. That kind of social pressure is largely self-policing. Jerks will be jerks, but hopefully fewer non-jerks would turn into jerks.

I like the option of anonymity, but in all honesty I think it mostly just helps the edge cases, not large-scale discussion. Is it any wonder that Facebook and Google have tried to enforce "real names" policies and the Play store now links all reviews to a G+ account? There are other reasons for those moves, but it can't hurt to encourage the civility that accountability brings. Anonymity can bring out both the best and worst in people.

[0]: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/05/the_psycholog...

Re: Reddit

#164

Post by ufo »

[deleted] wrote: post #147
ufo wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't work in practice and I don't know of any big reddit community that has managed to keep things clean without strict moderation. For example, one problem that happens very often is that image macros and other "lighetweight" content get more votes than longer articles. It only tkes seconds to look at a picture but ot everyone can take a couple of minutes to read an article and vote on it (not to mention that…

[deleted]

This kind of argument pops up all the time whenever a subreddit has a discussion about moderation but in my experience it doesn't work in practice. For starters, only are there technical disparities between what the rating algorithm considers hot and what the community actually likes (for example, images can get lots of quick votes soon after submission, which propells them to the front page). But perhaps even more importantly, there is the "eternal september problem": moderation lets a subreddit enforce their culture to the new users, which is very important. Something like /r/askscience would be impossible to maintain in its current state with just user voting.

As for tagging, it helps in some situations but its not an universal solution. The UI is kind of lacking (you need a 3rd party extantion to hide unwanted tags and it doesnt filter posts in the reddit.com frontpage) but it also doesnt do anything for passing users who havent configured their tags.

In a hypothetical world maybe its possible to create a smarter "hotness" algorithm that is less prone to these problems but in the current system I really don't think "just downvote the bad stuff" is a practical solution.

Re: Reddit

#165

Post by kyro »

frogpelt wrote: post #158
kyro wrote: post #9

Exciting news. One thing I sincerely hope reddit will do with the new injection is to increase the level of quality of content and discussion across the board. Often the advice given is "you've got to find the smaller subreddits" and while that's true, I think having the first few layers filled with terrible content and hive-minded, often racist/sexist discussion is incredibly detrimental to both the site's image and…

I find your post ironic. You are excited (presumably) about Reddit and about the possibility that the community may be given the opportunity to own a piece of Reddit. Yet, you find the actions of the majority of the Reddit community "detrimental" to the site's image. Reddit is what it is. A bunch of people on the Internet. You are either excited about the community or you don't like most of them, which is it?

Thanks for asking the hard questions.

I'm excited to see what this new equity-share model will lead to, and hope that the value and quality I already get from reddit can be multiplied with this capital. You can be displeased with certain aspects of something while at the same time acknowledging the good and its potential, like with children, friends, your country, really any relationship or community.

Re: Reddit

#166

Post by na85 »

kyro wrote: post #9

Exciting news. One thing I sincerely hope reddit will do with the new injection is to increase the level of quality of content and discussion across the board. Often the advice given is "you've got to find the smaller subreddits" and while that's true, I think having the first few layers filled with terrible content and hive-minded, often racist/sexist discussion is incredibly detrimental to both the site's image and…

The reddit admins are taking completely the wrong approach if their goal is to increase the quality of discussion on the site.

Every time a subreddit gets added to the defaults, it goes one of two ways: The subreddit goes to total shit (r/funny, r/wtf), or the moderators are forced to combat an ever-rising tide of shit in order to maintain quality (r/science).

Neither of those scenarios seem tenable in the long term.

There needs to be a single default subreddit so that users can branch out from there on their own.

Re: Reddit

#167

Post by buckbova »

gatsby wrote: post #4

"It’s always bothered me that users create so much of the value of sites like reddit but don’t own any of it. So, the Series B Investors are giving 10% of our shares in this round to the people in the reddit community, and I hope we increase community ownership over time. We have some creative thoughts about the mechanics of this, but it’ll take us awhile to sort through all the issues. If it works as we hope, it’s g…

Probably all shares go to r/gonewild.

Re: Reddit

#168

Post by lifeisstillgood »

Ok, Sam Altman, YC and reedit all just entered my personal mini-hero status for "we want to give 10% of shares to "the community"

It does more than bother me that community created value is captured by a few servers in SV - and it's going to take a lot of experimentation to get this right. I rather like the idea of licensing my location data to Google Traffic, and rather doubt giving equity to some but not all redditors will ever work out fairly, but hats off for actually acknowledging the problem publicly and trying something. I expect whatever the normal for community value will be in twenty years, none of the ideas on this thread even come close - in beginning to enjoy the ride though :-)

Re: Reddit

#169

Post by squidmccactus »

kyro wrote: post #9

Exciting news. One thing I sincerely hope reddit will do with the new injection is to increase the level of quality of content and discussion across the board. Often the advice given is "you've got to find the smaller subreddits" and while that's true, I think having the first few layers filled with terrible content and hive-minded, often racist/sexist discussion is incredibly detrimental to both the site's image and…

Whoa whoa whoa whoa. Reddit is full of racism and sexism? Are you sure? That sounds like reverse sexism to me.

Re: Reddit

#170

Post by buckbova »

kyrra wrote: post #61
giarc wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With HN, once a user reaches a certain level of "upvotes" they unlock the ability to downvote.

Ya, I thought about after I wrote it. Though I believe you can only downvote comments not stories on HN.

You flag posts and they'll drop in the rankings, sometimes right off the front page.
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