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Storming Reddit's Moat

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151–160 of 162 posts

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>...curated content from the userbase. The key word there is "curated". Just upvotes/downvotes is not sustainable for quality discussion. It just leads to low quality easy effort content like memes. Moderators are important to keep discussion on track and prevent the sub from becoming a cesspool. Of course, they can and do still power trip, so still a problem.

I don’t think there’s really a good solution here... Anyone can go rogue anytime. Stack Exchange attempts to solve this using three methods: their “reputation” method (gamification), elections, and paid moderators. If you can prove to the community you’d be good, you and a few others are “elected” community moderators (happens once a year?). If you get 10k reputation on a single site, you get access to those moderato…

Paying your mods. There's a novel idea!

Absolutely agree these systems can work when designed the right way. Reddit has designed its system as punitive.

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#152
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think there’s really a good solution here... Anyone can go rogue anytime. Stack Exchange attempts to solve this using three methods: their “reputation” method (gamification), elections, and paid moderators. If you can prove to the community you’d be good, you and a few others are “elected” community moderators (happens once a year?). If you get 10k reputation on a single site, you get access to those moderato…

Paying your mods. There's a novel idea! Absolutely agree these systems can work when designed the right way. Reddit has designed its system as punitive.

Yep. AFAIK, some of SE’s employees are assigned to work as mods

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#153

Many popular subreddits are quietly operated by moderators with industry connections. Some of this occurs naturally. People who were deep enough into a niche to become moderators of a subreddit in the late 2000s and early 2010s are also likely to end up working in that industry or starting business in that industry. However, many companies have realized that being in the good graces of subreddit moderators can be ver…

I think there should be stricter rules for subreddits whose names sound "official" or "primary".

There is this subreddit: r/india. Which is full of toxicity towards Indian culture. But people are more likely to stumble upon that subreddit. There's also a hard-right subreddit that's equally biased, but at least that's not named r/india.

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#154
post #23

> As the name implies, Reddit is designed to be read. People who only read along, but never participate are so integral to the platform that users coined a new term for them: “lurkers.” I ... "coined a new term" ... having grown up on usenet, mailing lists and IRC channels, the idea that reddit coined the term "lurkers" doesn't make me mad at the author, it just makes me feel really old.

Haha whoops... I will add a correction for this.

Good correction, and no worries, once I recovered from feeling old it was honestly hilarious :D

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#155
post #142
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Craigslist's unchecked spam, moderation and safety problems have slowly made it unusable. And yes the data does show exactly this. FB Marketplace had 800 million users in 2018 ( https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-marketplace-is-used-in-70... ) while Craigslist's revenue has been falling year over year ( https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/craigslist-revenue-fe... ).

I don't see how fb marketplace avoids these issues

Simply having a real Facebook account tied to listings and purchases eliminates 99% of them. Both parties can also see when the account was created.

Also everything you list goes through manual approval, so the most obvious spam never makes it through.

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was using data in the abstract. AskHistorians is still a niche sub for history nerds, and is well run, like most of the niche subs. I don't disagree, reddit is my goto for niche topics. But if you look at all major country subs, or major subs such as politics, news, world news, etc., all are badly run, with a hard bent to the left. > It sounds a lot like your actual complaint here is that you don't like perceived p…

> But if you look at all major country subs, or major subs such as politics, news, world news, etc., all are badly run, with a hard bent to the left. Not exactly the left's fault if the right on the internet tends to be, you know, literal nazis and people calling for hatred. If /r/Conservative is representative of the average right wing user, yeah, it's normal they're getting banned, as they are absolutely incapable…

In fact, I don't disagree with you. I stated that too, that subs are literally being taken over by either far-right but mostly far-left trolls. I specifically included far-right hijacking to take into account what happened to r/France and r/Canada.

I've seen libertarian folks being hounded out of r/conservative just as much as I've seen centrists being hounded out of r/politics. Not to mention, most comments seem like they were written by people with zero world view, and who haven't gone anywhere beyond a 100 miles from home, regardless of political leanings. Reddit general (I.e. Reddit minus the niche subs), the subs that come on Popular, is basically a diorama of the lowest possible denominator of man.

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not certain, but doesn't a 'read only' reddit page still get changed when a user who was in it deletes their account and posts? Often when a search engine sends me to reddit, the comments that probably contained the relevant information are long gone.

You might be right, in which case Google should offer a link to the corresponding Internet Archive wayback page (where the deleted content should still exist). Failing that, there are browser extensions for both Chrome and Firefox that enable this functionality.

They have it in their cache themselves so they even wouldn't have to link to IA.

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#158
> Really good SEO is one of the truest moats that exist today.

Or not. Every time Google changes its algorithm small businesses get slaughtered. I don’t know if it’s a low or high number, but you see posts about it on SCO or marketing forums every time there’s a change.

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Thousands of data points" sounds awfully scientific. Can you show me the dataset? Or are you using the word "data" in a more abstract sense here? I'm not well versed enough to know if what you say about /r/uk or /r/europe is true, but I'm quite sure /r/askhistorians is not the only well run subreddit on the site. You're just picking examples of subreddits you say are badly run and using them as evidence that all oth…

I was using data in the abstract. AskHistorians is still a niche sub for history nerds, and is well run, like most of the niche subs. I don't disagree, reddit is my goto for niche topics. But if you look at all major country subs, or major subs such as politics, news, world news, etc., all are badly run, with a hard bent to the left. > It sounds a lot like your actual complaint here is that you don't like perceived p…

A gentle correction. You and I view them as hard left, but they seem to regard themselves as centrists. If I am correct, they feel they are doing a public service. I prefer vigorous debate but they feel that certain views are so destructive that they should not be aired publicly.

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>HN is nothing other than r/technology or r/programming without the politics How many front page posts have we had in the last two weeks whining about political censorship? HN has politics alright, just the other side's politics.

I disagree. HN has actual discussions and is, for the most part, politically neutral. That is, while some discussions will have a political component to them, such as discussing tech censorship, no opinions are being buried for simply existing "on the other side." While being a free speech advocate is political, it does not fit into the US left/right political structure. So I don't see opposing the censorship of poli…

> is, for the most part, politically neutral.

I thought so too, but in the last few months, I wasn't sure. Comments seemed pretty polarizing, but each "side" was about equal in number.

Prior to the last few months, it seemed like political discussions were actually nuetral/objective. Hopefully it returns that way.

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