241–250 of 324 posts
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And, to be fair, it did die down. Even though there's still some aftershocks to the initial revolution, reddit seems to be mostly back to normal now.
Except, you know, Reddit moderators having editorials run in the New York Times.
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> As the article explains, the issues aren't to do with Victoria herself. In that respect, why she was fired doesn't matter It absolutely matters. If it was something egregious and for cause, the company probably wouldn't have a choice but to terminate her on the spot. There are a lot of scenarios where they also wouldn't be able to disclose why she was terminated. If that's what happened, yes the company made poor c…
If a single person is necessary for maintaining one of the most important parts of your website, you need a plan to handle their absence. It doesn't matter if she was fired, or if she quit, or got hit by a bus. A single person leaving your company should not be able to cause a breakdown of this scale.
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This article is falling on me as tone deaf. Most people who frequent the site dont care at all about the plight of the moderators. Moderators are not elected, they arent forcefully drafted, they dont step down when the community dislikes them. They are landowners who got there first, followed by a lot of cronyism/nepotism. It's an old boys club. They do a lot of hard work for the site, but they would be easily replac…
> Most people who frequent the site dont care at all about the plight of the moderators. They care about the quality of the comment they see on the subreddits they follow. That transitively means they really care about the plight of the moderators. They just don't know it. > Moderators are largely faceless human spam filters. On the well-moderated subreddits—which are increasingly the largest ones—they do a hell of a…
I'm tired of that false comparison being repeated over and over again.
* reddit traffic surpassed Digg traffic well before the Digg v4 launch [0]. Digg was already in decline [1] while reddit was growing [2], and the Digg v4 exodus just made it happen faster. If anything, Digg v4 can be looked at as a failed last-ditch effort to stop the bleeding. Honestly, reddit can't die yet because there's nothing there to kill it. It's the same reason Facebook is still the king of social media even though everyone hates it.
* Digg had a number of other problems, as well. People had lambasted Digg for years due to power users and a culture of vote manipulation. I remember from that period, almost every post on Digg's front page was from the same 4 people or so. Digg also allowed and encouraged vote brigades: they had a site feature allowing you to send vote requests to anyone on your friend's list, and the power users mostly operated by using pyramid-like organizations where they'd send a link to a group of people, each member of that group would pass the link on to another group, and so on (this was mostly done through offsite tools like AIM and IRC, not the site's vote request feature). Digg was A-OK with that: their only rule was against automated voting using bots (Mark Cuban's brother got banned twice for violating that). At Digg, there was a widespread (and true) belief that if you weren't one of the fabled power users, you'd never get anything on the front page. This is one of the reasons reddit has a site-wide rule against vote manipulation. If you notice, reddit still has a wide variety of posters making the front page.
* Digg was all about the front page, and there was no real community aspect. Digg had a small handful of admin-created categories (which launched with v3), and you could browse the new queue, and that was it. The whole site was about mindless link propagation. On the other hand, reddit's signature feature is its user-created subreddits. Rather than just being a place for people to share links, redditors organized into communities based on things like shared hobbies (think places like /r/makeupaddiction and /r/blacksmith), fandoms (everything from /r/comicbooks to /r/mylittlepony to /r/kamenrider), and support groups for marginalized communities (e.g., /r/asktransgender, /r/actuallesbians). Digg had nothing of the sort. That's a fundamental incentive for people to stay on reddit: even if the front page goes to shit, you're not going to see something like the trans community or any of the numerous fandoms that have a presence on reddit pack up and leave. With Digg, wrecking the front page wrecked the whole site.
* Digg v4 drastically changed the site functionality. They stripped out a huge amount of site features, including downvotes on posts, friend pages, and categories (none of which HN has, by the way), and articles by mainstream publishers were weighted over other links. Nothing reddit has done has changed site functionality like that.
[0] http://trak.in/tags/business/2010/10/04/digg-vs-reddit-traff...
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/jun/03/digg-... (published over two months before Digg v4 launched)
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They are certainly replaceable, but they just as certainly not fungible. Reddit management clearly made a mistake here, not because it annoyed some moderators, but because they showed poor understanding of a fundamental part of their business (i.e. this is a lot of avoidable bad press, if nothing else) They seem to have realized this, and are working on amending process. Nothing wrong with that, this is how things ca…
They seem to have realized this, and are working on amending process. I'm not holding my breath. Reddit has promised moderators better tools and users better transparency and more features for months and years. So far, all those promises have been completely empty, and I see nothing to suggest things will be different this time. Put more crudely, at least two people on the reddit staff, Ohanian and Pao, are completel…
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> It's also worth noting that Taylor's transcriptions, while generally accurate, were not verbatim. This is an incredibly dishonest thing to say. There's only one reason to publish someone's verbal responses verbatim, which is that you're trying to make them look like an idiot. Someone who gave verbal interviews and published the responses verbatim would be totally unfit for their job.
So television interviews...?
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If you were the CEO of Reddit it would go the way of Digg. The community is what makes the site successful, and the moderators shape the community, in addition to being the chief content creators. Developing an adversarial relationship with the community or the moderators is the absolute fastest way to torpedo the site. In addition, as a few other comments on this article have pointed out, the shutdown was not a reac…
> moderators shape the community, in addition to being the chief content creators. Moderators create very little content. Most of the content is taken from other places, and most content is posted by people who are not mods.
- Some of the "flagship" subreddits, and AMA in particular, only work because of constant effort from admins/mods, with the bulk of community contributions ranging from useless to toxic.
- What differentiates Reddit from, say, 4chan is having some semblance of community, coherence and civility. This is partly due to the karma system, but mods play a big part in this too. "Content" was the wrong word to use, but good moderation is (IMO) as important as good submissions in many cases.
"We did not anticipate or intend for other communities to follow our lead as part of a protest."
"The secondary purpose of shutting down was to communicate to the relatively tone-deaf company leaders that ..."
Own up to one or the other.
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I don't think poster knows for sure but you can assume based on traffic levels to comments and just general web stats. A majority of users don't comment on anything. Most people don't even create an account to vote. They probably don't even know what was going on.
That seems like a pretty silly argument. You can literally use it as an argument against any sort of change because "most people don't vote." In fact they do vote, not with upvotes and comments but with their views. Those views indicate the place is somewhere they like spending their time, which is primarily a function of the moderators and the people posting content to the subreddit in the first place (the "vocal mi…
Most social sites seem pretty similar as far as user interaction other than click through. I got 60k page views from one top HN post, a couple hundred upvotes, and probably less than 100 comments on the thread and my blog.
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Actually it was a reaction by the Reddit community to management idiocy. As such, it was entirely justified. You don't seem to understand how this works. Reddit does not own the community. Reddit hosts the community, and in return the community provides content for Reddit. The community has already moved from another provider, and if Reddit carries on with more management idiocy, it will move again. Social is littere…
You are defining the community as people who interact with the site (or maybe content creators). I am defining it as people who visit the site. The old 90-10-1 rule suggests the community how you define it is only a small subset of the community how I defined it. If someone doesn't care enough to even create an account on Reddit, what makes you think they have strong feeling about the personnel decisions of the compa…
The people who are complaining the loudest about the site's failures aren't members of the 90% of lurkers - they're members of the 9% of occasional contributors or the 1% of prolific contributors. And they're the ones that will make or break the site, so blowing them off as "not the majority" seems like a really awful idea.
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OK, $FamousPerson shows up at reception asking for an employee who has recently been escorted off the premises with their possessions in a black plastic bag (been there, got the video and t-shirt). You sort of know that random $FamousPeople showing up is part of $BusinessAsUsual. You have just realised that you have apparently no procedures whatsoever for booking appointments for personal visits to the building (e.g.…
Do you see any famous person bitterly complaining and starting petitions because their AMA fell through? It was probably quite inconvenient for the few people who got affected by this at the time but it hardly merits a subreddit let alone sitewide meltdown.