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What Reddit Got Wrong

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Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#191

Post by somethingreen »

nullindividual wrote: post #6
dale_glass wrote: post #3

I think the idea put out by some people here that Reddit might be in the process of radically changing tracks is plausible. Reddit was always very hands-off. They had lots of very unpleasant and controversial content until their hand was forced. Overall they seem to want a site that runs itself as much as possible and over time content that required interaction and management (eg, AMAs, Secret Santa) got de-prioritiz…

> Put those together and it's plausible that Reddit wants to go from a discussion site with cats to a cats feed site with meaningless discussion, and a bunch of ads mixed in. Based off of my personal experience with many subreddits that have a four digit plus subscriber count, I think reddit has largely already achieved the above goal. The amount of mindless "me too!" and "here's how that works /confidentlyincorrect"…

Which is why I don't think that moderator strike will have much effect. All these popular trash filled subreddits are moderated. Moderators just don't do that good of a job. Managing a community is hard and I sympathize with people doing it for free and failing. But as result, the number of subreddits that will actually be destroyed by their mods leaving is too small to affect company balance sheet. Vast majority of Reddit is already pretty low quality and its users are fine with it.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#192

Post by nomel »

Euphorbium wrote: post #57
dale_glass wrote: post #3

I think the idea put out by some people here that Reddit might be in the process of radically changing tracks is plausible. Reddit was always very hands-off. They had lots of very unpleasant and controversial content until their hand was forced. Overall they seem to want a site that runs itself as much as possible and over time content that required interaction and management (eg, AMAs, Secret Santa) got de-prioritiz…

Next up, getting rid of comment trees.

What's a good alternative when more than a few people are involved in the conversation?

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#193

Post by guerrilla »

shmatt wrote: post #179
guerrilla wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, third parties made tools for them (and some automated things themselves.) Now those tools are being taken away from them. They would basically have to pay to be mods to continue doing things the way they were being done. That's my understanding of the situation anyway.

then resigning would have been the way to go. shutting off access to the knowledge base others contributed to is a power play if you volunteer at a dog shelter, and find you don't agree with some of their practices anymore. do you stop volunteering? or do you just set all the dogs free

No, strikes have always been the way to effectively deal with these things. Setting the dogs free is not a strike. You can read up on how effective strikes have been executed ethically when critical care is involved; this isn't one of them though. It's naive to call it a "power play" though since literally every alternative by every actor involved is a "power play", just some are more effective than others.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#194

Post by cwkoss »

sdwr wrote: post #65
cwkoss wrote: post #41

Posted this a while back, but maybe someone will want to pick this up and run with it now: I specced out a decentralized spam-resistant reddit alternative a while ago, and posted it here a few months ago. Please build this, happy to sign away non-exclusive IP rights if you have an idea of how to monetize. --- I've specced out a decentralized reddit alternative a little bit, but have too many side projects. Someone pl…

That's beautiful! Inverts the whole process, flips the script. I can see it splitting bi-modal in a bad way though. Friends are one thing, but most following will probably be of aggregators / known figures, and they're going to be either lowest-common-denominator, or highly specialized. Basically gonna look like old reddit, where your options are AskScience or rage comics.

Yeah, my goal for this would be to develop an open protocol (similarish to email) that can solve reddit-like use cases. I think something along these lines could accomplish both lowest common denominator and specialized use cases (perhaps needing users ability to have separate 'personas' with different follow weights).

I think there could be different clients for different kinds of users - do you want to curate your follow list and transitively republish? Or do you mostly want to only consume and only publish your direct upvotes?

But I haven't gamed out the network effects very deeply, could be some pernicious scaling problems I have handwaved away.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#195

Post by hgs3 »

chaosjevil wrote: post #33

The main problem with this article is that it's only handling the current events, without taking into account that Reddit has a long-standing history of user-hostile decisions. For example... let's talk about The_Donald, shall we? (inb4: I'm not from USA, "Trump" and "Biden" for me are just "some leaders from some tacoland", so I'm not emotionally attached into this matter.) Some users were protesting that The_Donald…

The simple solution to the "censorship" problem is to not have a landing page that aggregates the highest voted content: the only content users should see should be from the subreddits they are subscribed to. In this scenario, there is no need for censorship or vote manipulation to reach the front page (because there should be no front page).

Some might say this approach would result in echo chambers, but guess what...echo chambers are going to happen anyway, whether it's restricting your intake of news to certain news networks, restricting internet browsing to only specific websites, or your local/offline real world community gatherings. There is no way to stop echo chambers.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#196

Post by cwkoss »

tootie wrote: post #184
cwkoss wrote: post #41

Posted this a while back, but maybe someone will want to pick this up and run with it now: I specced out a decentralized spam-resistant reddit alternative a while ago, and posted it here a few months ago. Please build this, happy to sign away non-exclusive IP rights if you have an idea of how to monetize. --- I've specced out a decentralized reddit alternative a little bit, but have too many side projects. Someone pl…

I said the same about Mastodon v Twitter, but decentralized solves nothing. It just makes it impossible to complain to anyone. We absolutely need centralized and uniform moderation rules and guidelines. And it needs sustainable funding to operate. There are not really any major tech challenges to achieve this. You could build a 140-character microblog in a weekend. The problem is attracting enough users to generate t…

This model makes every user moderate their own follow list: if you're transitively pushing spam/hatespeech/garbage to the people who follow you, they will unfollow you or be at risk of pushing the same to their followers. Upvotes are effectively 'vouching' for content, and so you should only upvote judiciously.

Attention is the reward for moderation.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#197

Post by ben_w »

ugjka wrote: post #185
raverbashing wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right about people eating this shit up of course But the question is if people will willingly remain on a Reddit which is just like Tiktok or YT shorts or Instagram, etc and has no differentiator Especially with their lousy mobile experience

If there was a clear successor existing with a team that could scale fast, there wouldn't be a Reddit strike but a Reddit exodus. Lemmy and other garbage is not it...

So, dumb question incoming:

How hard would it be to make a thing with the same API as Reddit so the apps that are currently about to shut down can instead change base domain and keep going?

Including existing OSS servers, assuming there already is some (complete!) open source one somewhere — I can google for the attempts ("plebbit" was submitted here for discussion only last week) but I can't trivially tell if they're any good.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#198

Post by KnobbleMcKnees »

JohnFen wrote: post #173
MostlyStable wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Compared to what? It's really important to compare those reddit results to elsewhere and not the hypothetical "best" answer. Yeah, reddit answers are often not great, but in my experience, the rest of google search has, over the past 10 years, gone to complete and utter shit. If I don't already know where to look (and just want google to get me there faster), 99% of my results are going to be useless blogspam. 2)…

> reddit answers are often not great, but in my experience, the rest of google search has, over the past 10 years, gone to complete and utter shit. Fascinating. I've read so many comments here about how people search reddit specifically in order to get better results, but I've never understood this. I don't find reddit to be better enough for that sort of thing to be worth going to reddit as a first choice. Perhaps t…

It really depends what you're looking for answers to.

If you're looking for more trustworthy product reviews than the ones on an Amazon product page, or you're looking for how to fix an obscure problem with your 3d printer, it's damn reliable. Having the opportunity for open and anonymous conversation on these things increases the chance of meaningful discussion.

For the former, Google search results are a hodge podge of bought-and-paid for "best of" sites, and for the latter dominated by ancient niche forum posts and shitty Quora answers.

Half of the Internet is now soulless self promotion and devious attempts to advertise without you knowing you're being advertised to.

So two cheers to Reddit, frankly. We could do a hell of a lot worse.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#199

Post by colinsane »

tmaly wrote: post #102
nullindividual wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Put those together and it's plausible that Reddit wants to go from a discussion site with cats to a cats feed site with meaningless discussion, and a bunch of ads mixed in. Based off of my personal experience with many subreddits that have a four digit plus subscriber count, I think reddit has largely already achieved the above goal. The amount of mindless "me too!" and "here's how that works /confidentlyincorrect"…

People are going to go somewhere. I just can't see Lemmy, Kbin, or Mastadon gaining much traction. For those old enough to remember Napster, it worked because it was centralized.

i’m feeling like i don’t understand the language around this recently. Lemmy/Kbin takes 1000’s of previously disparate forums and brings them into one UI and identity system: isn’t that more “centralized” than the old phpbb/forum way?

i mean architecturally it’s nearly as decentralized, but from a user point of view that’s not the part that matters. construct the Napster UI atop a decentralized architecture, and it’s all the same right? heck most large websites today are internally decentralized (sharding, load balancing, …) if you peek inside them: the real difference here is not that a service is distributed across machines, but across machines with different owners. it’s really more of a political distinction, the UX could be identical, it just isn’t (quite) due to preference or limited labor.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#200

Post by WWLink »

satvikpendem wrote: post #30
clarle wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apollo doesn't show ads, right? In fact getting users away from Apollo and onto the main Reddit app would be net revenue positive.

Indeed, the fact that Apollo can use the API for free then turn around and charge users for a premium version all while giving nothing back to Reddit is simply insane, you would never see Facebook, Instagram or other services allowing the same thing. And before one says that third party app users drive user driven content, what kind of content do you think Facebook and Instagram have?

I don't think anyone disagrees. The rate they were charging, and every. single. message. that has come from Reddit's CEO since that announcement have been so full of shit that they'd make the porto potties at woodstock (or the shit pits at Fyre festival) look like flower pots.

They could have changed NOTHING about the move except their messaging and attitude and things would've gone a lot better.

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