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What Reddit Got Wrong

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Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#221

Post by spiralx »

tootie wrote: post #177
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…

You know who handled this really well and got pilloried for it? Ellen Pao. She took a solid stand on the right side of the issue and got shredded by the user base for it. I think she was very forward thinking in how the problem could spiral and that the business was predicated on being an enjoyable environment with absolutely no obligation to dangerous or hurtful users. If it was possible to uphold every fundamental…

Her job was to come in, make a bunch of unpopular changes and then move on, leaving the existing management who wanted those changes free of any associated blame. Quite literally her job was to be a scape-goat, it's quite a common strategy for companies who want to do unpopular restructuring or other large changes, and I'm pretty sure one she was well-compensated for.

Which is not to say that the amount of hatred and bile she received wasn't - unsurprisingly - wildly excessive and disgustingly misogynistic.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#222

Post by GravityisaHoax »

ilyt wrote: post #116
Macha wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

r/games was once the upstart and had to gain enough users who wanted something more moderated/curated than r/gaming to get to its current position.

And now sticky with mods declaring "well, we will not do anything about the situation" sits at 0 upvotes (in reddit speak: it got more downvotes and upvotes), with a bunch of well-upvoted comments about how sub should participate in the protest. They are completely detached from their userbase.

I just read the sticky and those are some real stupid reasons to not blackout the sub, and instead just made a half-assed attempt to participate.

I've never visited r/games and now I'm glad I never have.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#223

Post by ravenstine »

raverbashing wrote: post #176
ravenstine wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All you have to do is look at what every other social media platform has done, which is devolve into an infinite scroll of the following: - Kitty/puppy videos - Exotic street food - girls with shorts/leggings showing buttcrack or cameltoe acting oblivious or holding a product (i.e. using ambiguous sexuality to sell something) - Someone doing some kind of weird elaborate craft as a form of spectacle - Twerking or faux…

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

Though I'm not certain, my guess is Reddit is calling everyone's bluff; they've run the numbers and know that the long game is in their favor if they Tiktokify. Every social media platform eventually declines, and they must know that they have to adapt-or-die to maintain a similar rate of growth.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#224

Post by Macha »

dredmorbius wrote: post #216
patmorgan23 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget the epic story of the fall of r/worldpolitics and the rise of r/anime_titties as its replacement.

So, um, storytime? (I'm unfamiliar with this.)

r/worldpolitics gradually became overtaken by US politics since Reddit is so dominated by US users. This displeased international users, as r/politics was already US-centric politics, and so r/worldpolitics had been seen as a place to discuss rest of world politics.

The head mod did not agree, and after a couple of years of the sub being basically unmoderated and 90% US politics, and generating user complaints as a result, threw a tantrum and said anything goes, and posted a load of anime porn.

Since the subreddit named world politics was now full of anime porn, and a little inspired by the subreddit r/marijuanaenthusiasts (the subreddit about Botany, since r/trees was taken by the weed people), a bunch of users decided to create a subreddit called r/anime_titties for discussing non-US politics.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#225

Post by itairal »

mvdtnz wrote: post #167
xapata wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People who post on Reddit are very often just completely wrong, and often that wrongness becomes a meme (in the original sense of the word) that propagates through the site for literally years. Isn't that just a microcosm of the internet and society in general?

The internet I came from (in the days of discussion forums) didn't suffer this problem because there were no internet points attached to posts, and posts were ordered oldest to newest. Incorrect information was called out. On Reddit, the "right kind" of incorrect information is upvoted and boosted to the top, and anyone calling out this misinformation is downvoted.

The worst part to me is the binary nature of internet points. Up or down. No difference between something one simply doesn't agree with vs utter and complete bullshit.

On the other hand I am not sure what the old internet forums I loved would look like if you scaled up the users 100X and then linked all these random forums together so one username interacted across message boards. That would have basically been a disaster and internet points would not have been the major problem.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#226

Post by soperj »

JohnFen wrote: post #181
SoftTalker wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm. FTP servers are pretty easy. "ls" to see files. "get" to get them. What wasn't easy was finding them, and then preventing them falling over when too many people tried to access them at the same time. Napster solved that with distributed file serving and consolidated listings of what was available.

Even easier if you used a nice client to access ftp. The notion that Napster was easier than FTP doesn't ring true to me, either.

napster was fire up the program and search. You needed to know which FTP server you were going to pull from, often you needed to upload a certain amount of content just to download anything. Did you actually ever use Scour or Audiogalaxy pre napster? Because I did, and it was vastly more difficult.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#227

Post by itairal »

SoftTalker wrote: post #137
soperj wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Napster worked because it was free and easy and that didn't exist before (FTP servers were not easy). If it were because it was centralized then bit-torrent would have never taken off.

Hm. FTP servers are pretty easy. "ls" to see files. "get" to get them. What wasn't easy was finding them, and then preventing them falling over when too many people tried to access them at the same time. Napster solved that with distributed file serving and consolidated listings of what was available.

FTP servers at that time for MP3s were ratio servers. You had to upload something in order to download and at a specific ratio of kb. Most wouldn't give you credit for uploading something they already had as well.

Finding the songs was no problem. I can remember some kind of web search engine. It was just too hard to get a collection going to even be able to download something though. I guess the idea was to rip your cd collection but that idea simply didn't occur to me at the time.

Napster took off because it was a free record store at a time when everyone was use to paying $13 an album in 2000 USD($23 adjusted for inflation).

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#228

Post by anadem »

codetrotter wrote: post #143
tmaly wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 just can't see Lemmy, Kbin, or Mastadon gaining much traction. Me neither, but it’s worth a shot. I have set up a public Lemmy instance. Registration is open currently. Would be nice to see a handful of people join my instance.

I'm happy to join your Lemmy instance, having jumped ship from Reddit as there's no way I'll use their app. Would you share its address?

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#229

Post by panopticchaos »

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 on the fence about Lemmy/Kbin, but I think it has a better shot than Mastodon.

Twitter's thing was "giant conversation with everyone" - federation interferes with that.

Reddit was inherently fragmented (subreddits, and heavy redditors tended to describe groupings of related subreddits). Federation seems pretty natural here (community names can just have an @ symbol somewhere in there).

There are UI and discoverability issues, but those seem rather tractable.

I think performance at scale will be a real issue though.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#230

Post by anadem »

kyriakos wrote: post #130
e4e5 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't Reddit own the data now? That's the unfortunate truth of these platforms. They offer your a platform and pay for hosting and you give them your attention and content.

I haven't tested it but if as a user you were to ask for your days to be deleted they'd have to comply, at least in EU. So if there was a mass walkout a lot of comments and post would disappear.

No need to ask, just use Power Delete Suite: https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
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