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Re: Reddit

#321

Post by pbiggar »

DanBC wrote: post #23
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…

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.

Stackoverflow did this very well: the meta discussion is in meta.stackoverflow, which you won't see if you're not into.

Re: Reddit

#322

Post by mst »

SwellJoe wrote: post #221
sliverstorm wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not being a feminist doesn't make you sexist, last I checked.

Last you checked, eh? Where did you do your checking? Let's review some definitions for feminism: "the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities" "the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes" Which part of that do you disagree with that makes you not a feminist? And, if being a feminist means one supports gender equality (which is what it means), how do you belie…

If the people who self-identify as feminists in practice actually believed that, life would be easy.

As it is, the perception to the vast majority of people is such that I find it more effective to avoid the word and simply advance the equal rights part.

Wanting to avoid associating yourself with the general zeitgeist of thought generated by soi-disant feminists is, annoyingly, quite reasonable currently.

"With friends like these, who needs enemies" applies a lot more often than I might like :(

Re: Reddit

#323

Post by thearn4 »

justaman wrote: post #177

One simple way to improve the quality of posts is to remove default subreddits. Instead, have people pick from a list of common interests: programming, games, rap, etc. I think that by limiting interaction with trolls will, over time, reduce the total number of trolls. It is my assumption that the majority of trolls tend to stay on the default subreddits. This would also allow for smaller subreddits to grow by in a s…

As a mod of two defaults, I agree that this might be a good way forward. Right now, adding a popular but non-default sub to the default set is a very quick way to decrease the quality of the posted content, and can nearly kill the community unless the mods are extremely proactive. I can't help but think that there must be a better way.

Re: Reddit

#324

Post by mst »

misterS wrote: post #313
fragmede wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 acc…

"hopefully this infusion of cash will let them hire devs …" They shouldn't need additional developers for these features (unless all the existing ones left?), seems to me that these things should be doable fairly quickly.

"It seems to me that all this programming would be easy" is a common thought, and almost always wrong. I am included in this category.

Re: Reddit

#325

Post by 001sky »

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,…

This is a great point. There is a demand for violence. It's counter-intuituve and non-PC but people pay good money to see it. It has nothing to do with redit, IMHO its more of a media phenomena. Look at the middle east.

Re: Reddit

#326

Post by andrewflnr »

jberryman wrote: post #311
hellodevnull wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>often racist/sexist discussion I'm confused. Reddit is one of the most anti-racist/sexist communities on the internet. That's the hivemind, so you'd expect anything that's racist or exist to quickly be deleted or pushed to the bottom of the thread where nobody can see it (on the large subreddits anyway).

/r/funny is super sexist, and some days there'll be two or three racist jokes on the front page.

Maybe morally, but in practical terms that's not really contradiction. People on The Internet are thoroughly desensitized to the moral impact of things like that. Almost no one complains when we laugh at violent comedies, despite the fact that we all know murder is bad. There are a few more noises about Game of Thrones, but it's still extremely popular. Why are a few racist/sexist/etc jokes on r/funny any different? If you want to throw those out, you pretty much also have to throw out the other 95% of popular culture that derives entertainment from bad behavior. Of course that's what we fundamentalist Christians have been saying for about a millennium, but of course no one listened.

Re: Reddit

#327

Post by alexis »

cookiecaper wrote: post #183
alexis wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've been hamstrung by a UI/UX that made a lot more sense when we only had a dozen active subreddits https://web.archive.org/web/20080410190800/http://reddit.com... reddit is a platform for communities like twitter is a platform for individuals. There are a half million communities now on reddit and our onboarding experience should do a better job exposing people to the communities they love (kinda like twitter does…

reddit has a long way to go before it can function as a universal community platform like twitter functions as a universal individual broadcast platform. The biggest problem is that reddit has a personality. It doesn't just have a tendency or a leniency imposed by the fundamental platform constraints. You go to Twitter when you want short updates or broadcasts from any type of people . Everyone can use it and feel co…

There are 130,000,000 people (40%+ outside the USA) using it every month.

One can't honestly or realistically generalize 130,000,000 people other than to say they have an internet connection and are literate.

As I said, there are half a million communities and the way it works (which sadly is lost on a lot of people -- our fault) is that one subscribes to communities (or unsubscribes) based on taste and interest. If someone doesn't want to hear from r/politics on an issue, unsubscribing (unfollows to use twitter's nomenclature) is exactly what one does.

Again, I'll point out that one can't generalize a platform with 130M people. One needn't look further than r/religion, r/christianity, r/conservative, r/islam, r/Judaism (I could go on) to find those communities.

I challenge anyone to actually use reddit for a week, subscribing to communities with content that most resonates with them (unsubscribing from the ones that don't) and not have a positive front page experience.

Have you done this?

Re: Reddit

#328

Post by rspeer »

hellodevnull wrote: post #287
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…

>often racist/sexist discussion I'm confused. Reddit is one of the most anti-racist/sexist communities on the internet. That's the hivemind, so you'd expect anything that's racist or exist to quickly be deleted or pushed to the bottom of the thread where nobody can see it (on the large subreddits anyway).

At the point when /r/AdviceAnimals was removed from the defaults, it was basically "racist statement on top of Unpopular Opinion Puffin" all the time. People started referring to it as the "White Man's Birden".

I was surprised to find that out, too. Reasonable people unsubscribe from the worst defaults, and don't find out what the unreasonable people who are left there are up to.

Re: Reddit

#329

Post by aardshark »

ufo wrote: post #142
[deleted] wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

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…

What if moderators had control of how posts are ranked in their subreddits? I think that would result in some very interesting subreddit specific ranking algorithms.

Re: Reddit

#330

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #92
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 popular parts of reddit are popular because they appeal to many people, it's the same as music. The most popular bands will have the broadest appeal. So most of the reddit front page is cat pictures and slapstick humour because that's what everyone can appreciate. If the front page was full of obscure stuff about haskell , less people would enjoy it. In terms of racism, I've never seen racist or sexist content on…

I just looked and there's a "Chinese Army Drill" photoshop on the front page. The picture itself is one thing but things have contexts and given that this exists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_fire_drill you gotta wonder where the artist is coming from.
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