Earlier quoted context omitted.
[deleted]
HN has never been purely tech-focused. You're right, of course, that it's a lot smaller than Reddit.
Mostly because HN doesn't have a /showerthoughts
261–270 of 433 posts
Re: Reddit
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are hundreds of thousands of voters participating on /r/all content. Your vote isn't going to matter whatsoever except in the critical time between when something is first submitted and when it falls off of the new submissions page (and rising page, and controversial page). A ten minute conversation with the average voter will repel you from the idea that eveyone should want to listen to what 51% of most people…
Your vote isn't supposed to matter, not any more than anyone else's vote. That's the entire premise of democracy, in fact, a fact that's completely and utterly ruined by the arbitrary nature of moderation. The idea that you'd ever go to reddit.com or reddit.com/r/foo and see nothing but gems is a pipe dream. You're asking other people to do your work for you. You are the one who's supposed to contribute your up/downv…
Most people go to reddit to hear about news or see what's popular, not to sift through new submissions for gems. If reddit cared only about democracy, it would solve the problem of an incredible submission being buried by a measly five to ten downvotes in its first twenty minutes regardless of how many people would have liked it overall. Personally, I have neither the time nor the incentive to try to influence groupthink. (I was very careful in my choice of "groupthink." A democratized frontpage that hundreds of thousands of people influence is almost equivalent to literal groupthink. And that's not terrible in and of itself, but if you're going to argue that mods should be stripped of their tools, then it becomes quite the dilemma.)
HN, on the other hand, seems much truer to the overall thrust of your argument, because there are no downvotes for submissions, and only two upvotes are needed for a story to reach the first or second page of HN. But HN only works because there are exceptionally smart and prudent moderators who are constantly curating the singular frontpage.
Re: Reddit
#263As a long time Reddit user, I've been really disappointed lately with Reddits "battle" against content creators and the little recourse you have if you are marked as a spammer or shadow banned. See the recent /r/indiegaming debacle for example, where a subreddit where mainly indie devs would post about their games now allows very little self promotion ( http://redd.it/2fdwyv ). Some of these rules are Reddit wide so…
Self-promotion is one of the really hard problems to solve. Some of my least favorite subs that I really want to like (/r/Entrepreneur is an especially egregious example) have this problem severely. If I see another self-aggrandizing blogger post a link promoting their system for making money on the internet with information products, I'm gonna catch their hair on fire.
So, you say "content creator", I say "people trying to sell me shit that I don't want".
I've got stuff to sell, websites I want to promote, etc. too. But, I accept that the cost of me having a nice community I want to be a part of, that isn't focused on consumption as the only purpose in our lives, means I shut up about it except when it's really relevant and someone else brought it up.
Re: Reddit
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
>"I'm a male and why is this on my reddit page" and people that just barge in without reading rules to post things against our rules I think its asking way too much of someone who wants to join a casual site known for cat pics and meme jokes to read through the couple dozen default sub rules. There's no practical educational solution here. The volume of new users and the labor of understanding all these rules is huge…
> I think its asking way too much of someone who wants to join a casual site known for cat pics and meme jokes to read through the couple dozen default sub rules. But it's not asking too much of that same cat-and-meme based system to be a focusing point for decently written short-stories and a good place to discuss books? I mean, you're saying that it's asking too much of people that they just click 'unsubscribe' on…
My point is that the system at writingprompts worked fine before they were made a default sub. I imagine 2X was a better place before as well, but I'm not a reader of that sub, so I can't really comment.
Reddit's management simply has an economic incentive to promote these gems to defaults to draw in users and make the site more attractive to those unwilling to dig down, but in the end this hurts those subreddits. I suspect this will be reddit's downfall. It curates some grass-roots communities that are self-managed, watches them grow, and then throws them to the wolves of Joe and Jane CasualAsshole. Now these gems have been thoroughly bro-ified, meme-ified, and politically-correctified with endless arguments web commentators like to get into (religion, politics, accusation of various 'isms', etc).
So yeah, I eat my own dogfood. I know writingprompts will never be good again the same way I know 2X suffers from the same thing with casual visitors. The difference is I know its a symptom of reddit default changes and don't think there's anything here regarding "education" that can fix this. Reddit's need for growth and popularity means decent subs become shitty subs over time. Heck, even when they remove defaults, the damage is done. /r/atheism will never be this philosophical-type sub, it'll always be meme-ish anti-Christian crap. Whatever mindshare they hoped to attract long left, the same way the writers I used to recognize on writingprompts are long gone now.
In other words I blame reddit management, but she blames reddit users. I think those are pretty different takes on the source of those problems. She seems to believe some heavy-handed "reddit 101" is going to fix everything. I believe that is hopeless once you reach the level of a default sub. Shitty users are always there, its how you manage them, compartmentalize them, incentivize them, etc that matters.
Re: Reddit
#265Exciting 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 think having the first few layers filled with terrible content and hive-minded, often racist/sexist discussion. Relative to what? Are YouTube and Yahoo bastions of intellectualism and racial tolerance? If you really think that Reddit's issue is that the quality of discussion is too low, you need to take another look at any other site on the internet.
It won't be tolerable until we weed out anyone who might say anything that anyone finds slightly offensive. No jokes allowed.
You think laws made to help people get up from the bottom tier should apply to everyone on the bottom tier and not just people of a certain color? Well you're racist.
Your favorite movie is blazing saddles? Well guess what: you're a racist.
/s
I think everyone should be able to use the same water fountain and no one should be able to cut in line solely based on the color of their skin, but on their level of thirstyness.
According to a lot of people on reddit (and HN) I'm a racist. I thought racism was discriminating against someone based on skin color.
Re: Reddit
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am against a site policy that says "we are aware that something horrible happened, but we aren't willing to make any changes to prevent it from potentially happening again". I'd love to get some feedback from the downvoters, because it's hard for me to reconcile Yishan Wong's statement with Sam's assertion that he's "excited to watch it play out".
I think he is being very clear. For now, at least, he doesn't want to be the moral police - he expects each user to exercise their own moral judgement. I personally prefer reddit to leave moral choices to their users
he expects each user to exercise their own moral judgement
It's clear that this is not happening in any meaningful way, so his lack of action is simply an admission that he can't or won't do anything to prevent abhorrent behavior on the site he's responsible for. If it's a government, it's a powerless one, enforcing no laws but collecting taxes regardless. There's nothing to admire there.
Re: Reddit
#267As a long time Reddit user, I've been really disappointed lately with Reddits "battle" against content creators and the little recourse you have if you are marked as a spammer or shadow banned. See the recent /r/indiegaming debacle for example, where a subreddit where mainly indie devs would post about their games now allows very little self promotion ( http://redd.it/2fdwyv ). Some of these rules are Reddit wide so…
You are confusing mods and admins. > For example, if you make a few self posts, make tons of comments, post links to 5 different websites, then post 1 link to your website, you are breaking the rule and if a mod sees it you can be banned (comments/self posts don't count towards the 90/10 rule so your 5 posts to 1 self promotion post is breaking the rules). Some admin recently said that something like that has never h…
A mod can ban you from their subreddit and that happens a lot based on a fairly subjective basis. There are even times where you just get caught by moderating bots then if the moderators don't bother to reply to you, there is little recourse. I have heard of cases from friends who have been banned for fairly bizarre reasons. I'm not saying you will be banned the first time you break the rule but people who post about content they create have to be extremely careful or they can be banned either from a subreddit or globally. When you are a moderator of a subreddit that has millions of viewers, I think it shouldn't be so subjective.
Re: Reddit
#268Exciting 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'm a default (twoxchromosomes) mod. I would love to see better moderation tools. Most of the shitty content I've had to deal with are from newer/multiple accounts, as well as the older accounts that are sick of the trolls. Our AutoModerator shadowban list and our ban list is so ridiculously long I can barely scroll it. It'd be amazing if we didn't have to rely on a bunch of other tools (toolbox, RES, AutoModerator)…
Yeah, Reddit's weakest link is its moderation tools or really, lack thereof. The mod tools were really written for a much smaller site, and hopefully this infusion of cash will let them hire devs who can make it their mission to make the mod tools useful.
Granular abilities - like the ability to give someone only the power to delete comments, or only the power to tag titles or something.
Restrict posting from new accounts - force accounts to be X days old before they're allowed to comment in a given subreddit.
Exposing the IP's of users to the mods - Most trolls/spammers aren't going to with proxies/whatever to get that many IPs, so exposing this is the first step to bans, which leads to...
Better bannning tools - even 4chan has good banning tools, why can't Reddit?
I spent all of 5 minutes on this so I'm sure a good developer can come up with a super useful list of tools, and them write them.
Re: Reddit
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mods don't decide to make a subreddit a default, admins do.
I was under the impression that the admins consulted with the mods before doing so, but I could be wrong; how the front page has worked has changed many times over the years, and I haven't been keeping very close track.
I'm sure that the admins would remove any sub that asked from the default list.
Re: Reddit
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Mod/admin censorship I'll admit that mods aren't always perfect, but they're (for the most part) regular users who are making communities the way they want to. I've very rarely seen people remove posts or ban users just to promote a particular agenda, and the ones that did were hated by their fellow mods. And I'd really like to see some good examples of admin censorship. The more common complaint I hear about the ad…
Whenever Reddit fails it will because of the modding system. They should have a mod rotation policy.
The problem with modding, or really leadership roles in general, is that everyone says they want to do it, but very few of the people who say that will actually put in the necessary time, and even if they do, a large percentage of them will suck at it. You want to know why there's so much mod overlap in the large subreddits? That's why. The people in charge of adding more mods would much rather have someone they know is dependable than risk trusting their community with an unknown. I agree that diversity in moderators, especially between subreddits, is a good thing, but it's much easier said than done. Finding, vetting, and training new mods is hard work.