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Re: Reddit

#291

Post by jn1234 »

Goronmon wrote: post #188
LeoPanthera wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heavily moderated subreddits are Reddit's biggest problem. Time and again, the volunteer moderators prove that they cannot be impartial, and bias creeps in, inevitably culminating in a bizarre power struggle with the normal users. I've seen it so many times. This isn't helped by the fact that the majority of popular subreddits are moderated by the same people, resulting in a kind of weird cabal situation. I'm not sur…

>This isn't helped by the fact that the majority of popular subreddits are moderated by the same people, resulting in a kind of weird cabal situation. This is because moderating is a shitty job and hardly anyone wants to actually spend time doing it. >Heavily moderated subreddits are Reddit's biggest problem. The problem isn't heavy moderation, it's poor moderation. Moderation is basically a requirement for any commu…

The other problem is that community gets to decide what content is on top of the page by upvoting. As the community gets larger some more quality in depth and technical submissions won't get the same upvotes as a simple meme post.

Re: Reddit

#292

Post by benmathes »

ufmace wrote: post #279
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…

I don't understand this. How does "the reddit community" own shares in a company? What does that even mean? Are board votes going to be held on reddit posts or something?

likely some kind of cryptocurrency. Given YC's involvement in Stripe, nonzero chance it will be done with Stellar.

Re: Reddit

#293

Post by Balgair »

alexis wrote: post #88
lziz wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you thought about making the "trending" feature more prominent/content-rich? I've found a bunch of new subs I've come to love through it.

I got excited when I saw that feature. It's a shame it's riding the meme of another platform, but people instantly "get it," at least. The core problem is people don't even understand how the site works (subscribe to communities you like). That's something the team is still working on improving in a non-annoying way. Mobile is going to be a big part of it, I think.

Since I cannot Pm you here:

1) Thanks a ton for the site, I have enjoyed many hours on it and find that it has made my world better.

2)As with any growth, things will fall to the human norm. It's fine, but thank you for fighting the good fight, I know it's not said much, but thank you.

3)Best on the new round of funding, yall worked hard and you deserve it.

4)I came to HN to escape reddit, actually. Yes, I'm in a ton of subs and it helps, but I also like seeing what other people are talking about. I find the content here better, though it is falling behind too. It helps me escape my 'filter bubble'. I've no idea how to keep the rice and throw the husk, but keep working on it, I believe in you guys.

5)Quick note, everytime I try to post in a sub I like, I get autobanned for not reading some obscure rule I can't see in my browser. It is very discouraging and leads me to firmly stay in the lurker category. Please give the mods better stuff to manage with. Also, having to read for 10 minutes to post a EE or CompSci question is tough, i just go to StackOverflow then, it turns me off.

6) Advice: Your lurkers and your posters are very different populations. Make sure to reach out to the lurkers too, as I can guess the posters are the ones that you interact with most of the time.

7) Idea: Maybe limit the group size you are in. Read the IP and tag it into 1 group or another. Put visitors in different groups automatically. I'm not saying people in cleaveland are in one group. I mean limit the size of a group of frontpages. I remember hearing that people can't remember the names of more than 150 people close to them. My idea is based on that. Force people into smaller groups where they interact. And yes, lurkers would be a problem here. It makes a big site small.

Re: Reddit

#294

Post by SL61 »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #66
jn1234 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heavily moderated subreddits are another way to get great quality content. The only problem with this is that it relies on volunteer moderators who devote large amounts of their free time to making the site a better place.

Heavily moderated subreddits are Reddit's biggest problem. Time and again, the volunteer moderators prove that they cannot be impartial, and bias creeps in, inevitably culminating in a bizarre power struggle with the normal users. I've seen it so many times. This isn't helped by the fact that the majority of popular subreddits are moderated by the same people, resulting in a kind of weird cabal situation. I'm not sur…

The Reddit admins seem to be aware of moderation issues, but doing something to fix it would cause a shitstorm or require a major redesign of the site. A while back, they introduced a limit on the number of defaults subreddits you can mod (I think it's two or three). It's a start but it didn't do a whole lot.

Re: Reddit

#295

Post by convoces »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #144
silencio wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

>"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…

>Worse, once a sub is made a default, its quantity goes up but its quality goes down.

This seems to be almost universally true for any online community. As a userbase widens, content quality and even social dynamics become diluted to some extent towards a general population baseline.

As a mod of /r/changemyview (153k subscribers), we have discussed opting out of becoming a default sub if we were approached by the reddit admins. We already continuously struggle to maintain sub quality, given 50k subscriber growth in the last 9 months, though we have seen some success with our small set of very well-defined, strict, and heavily enforced rules.

Re: Reddit

#297

Post by AJ007 »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #144
silencio wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

>"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…

For those of us who have run online communities, there certainly is a strong inverse relationship between age & size. A big community continually fractures off disgruntled users. There certainly are some exceptions to this, and examples to follow.

If, "In several years, I think reddit could have close to a billion users" then the quality of reddit will be just that. Hell, with a billion users, the average person will not even be fluent in your language. Alternatively it becomes a system where you very explicitly follow people and topics as one would do with Twitter. If so then can reddit be changed radically to accomplish this yet through small enough iterations as to not result in an exodus? There would be the challenge.

For now reddit remains a fairly good newswire for niche topics such as oculus.

Re: Reddit

#298

Post by moultano »

alexis wrote: post #96
minimaxir wrote: post #7

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…

That's one big reason why Steve & I wanted it to be open-source! http://code.reddit.com It's not like all forum-software-innovation stopped in June 2005 when the 2 of us launched reddit to the world. The hard part is going to be quantifying "quality of submissions" in a scalable way. We thought a lot about this and while it's not perfect, the vast majority of content on reddit across those half million communities is…

To do this effectively, you need to track clicks.

Right now, the primary thing that causes something to succeed on reddit is the rate of upvotes. Anything that takes time to upvote will be less likely to succeed, because it will receive its initial upvotes at a lower rate. (It takes at least an hour to upvote a great new yorker article vs. something that will be voted based on the title alone or a 1 second click.)

To fix this, you need to track click -> upvote interval and correct for this.

This is the main reason why subreddit quality goes down with size. Only the extreme head of the "upvote rate" distribution has an opportunity to succeed when the subreddit is large, so the "upvote rate" drowns out the "upvote ratio" as a factor.

Re: Reddit

#299

Post by noir_lord »

walden42 wrote: post #239
noir_lord wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would agree with you that the vast majority of the content is indeed good unfortunately the bad is often concentrated into a few sub-reddits and at reddit scale that still is a lot of bad unfortunately.

I think it's an interesting issue because the primary issue is what interests people, not the website itself. If a majority of people want to concentrate on the bad, then the bad shows up more. If the mods or admins make the site such that it's impossible to concentrate on the bad, then that would involve some kind of censorship that could be very biased towards someone's definition of good. The issue is the people,…

> The issue is the people, not with Reddit.

That is always true, in fact I'd go as far as to formulate Waldens Law, "if the issue is either people or X, it's people" ;).

Re: Reddit

#300

Post by noir_lord »

silencio wrote: post #93
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'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)…

What about the ability for Mods to set karma or time based limits before someone can post? (say 7 days and 100 upvotes).

Hacker News does something like that you can't downvote till 1000 upvotes iirc.

That would stop the casual trolls at least (of course there are ways around it but then there always are).

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