31–40 of 110 posts
They are literally making the same exact mistakes, and its leading to the same exact results...karma whoring, piling on, ingroup/outgroup ete etc.
It seems beyond comprehension to me that they wouldn't have thoroughly looked at the rise and fall of Digg and not made every effort not to follow the same path.
> More concerning, I no longer wish to support reddit as a platform. Widespread astroturfing, manufactured controversy, politics, bullying, incessant nitpicking and arguing. I don't like how people treat each other on the platform, and I don't like how it makes me feel when I use it. Don't think this has to do with Reddit so much as the way we interact with each other online, in general.
> Don't think this has to do with Reddit so much as the way we interact with each other online, in general. Having spent some (great) time in more traditional forums recently I think the algorithmic driven nature of reddit (and HN for that matter) along with it's centralization are the biggest contributors. The scoring systems have gamified online discussions to the point that you can't really have worthwhile discuss…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It certainly has to do with Reddit. It's unnatural for humans to communicate with priority of "most popular". If you walk in a room with strangers, meet two friends at their house, or talk in private with your mother, all of those discussions are "bump order", meaning that your most likely discussion to respond to is the most recent "thread" (or subject) that someone brought up. Online communication should function t…
You can sort by new if you really believe that-and change default sort order in the settings. i've kept mine to controversial
GitHub Issues is another odd example. They sort by "newest thread", which I've never seen any other service use by default. It makes long difficult issues/proposals end sooner than they should, because a comment someone makes 2 seconds ago is still buried on page 12. It doesn't matter than I set the sorting mode to "most recent comment" because other people don't do it as well.
Discourse is a fantastic example of a good community platform. You can "star" a post to give your appreciation, but that doesn't give your post any visibility boost by default. It treats all comments equal, as they should, and gives threads attention that is linearly proportional to the number of comments, which is how discussions/subjects work in real life.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I started using Reddit around the same time (actually 9 years ago!) and I feel the same way about it now. Recently, I've gone totally cold-turkey on the platform. Where as previously I had been posting daily for 9 years!
I've used Reddit since almost the beginning and it started off how HN is, being more tech-focussed than general. The discussions were, like here, the main selling point. It can still be great, you just need to take a bit of time and subscribe to subs that interest you without being too popular. With popularity comes the inevitable drop in quality.
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The moderation here goes far beyond "nudges".
Not to mention that flags on HN are much more powerful for suppression discussion than downvotes are on Reddit. I find discussion on this website pretty unrewarding because a story can go from hundreds of upvotes and top of the front page to discoverable only through search in a matter of minutes--just from a handful of flags and an extremely opaque weighting system. I also dislike that moderators here can arbitraril…
The comments that get detached are marked as such in a direct reply, with a link to the context.
But speaking of that, I wonder what happened here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20040963...
> More concerning, I no longer wish to support reddit as a platform. Widespread astroturfing, manufactured controversy, politics, bullying, incessant nitpicking and arguing. I don't like how people treat each other on the platform, and I don't like how it makes me feel when I use it. Don't think this has to do with Reddit so much as the way we interact with each other online, in general.
The barrier of entry for someone to go and write counter-productive / aggressive / abrasive comments online is very low now. In the past you had to have half a brain to even be online. I don't mean internet connection wise, I mean to set it up and find stuff. What scares me the most is "justice by social media". People felt wrong doing against them burning torches and calling for pitchforks online, instead of getting…
> And if the Anglophone internet is ::gestures:: like this now maybe it’s cause it’s less of a professional-class preserve? The dividing line maybe being smartphones where “people on the internet” went from “people who specifically spend $X/mo on it as luxury” to “people with telephone service”? That’s a real possibility, that for all the “Global Village” stuff the wondrous effect of the ‘90s internet was to create a cultural space that was MORE gatekept by wealth and education.
> That’s… kind of depressing, though. “Haha you thought the world was getting better because you were eliminating elitist barriers but actually it’s cause you were making them higher, which is good because the poor and non-elite are disproportionately idiots with worthless ideas and to the extent they’re on top of things the thing they’re on top of is undermining the basis of a good society, and anyway those times were a phenomenon of a narrow early adopter base and you’ll never ever get them back unless you make the non-elite economically and politically irrelevant.” Depressing but very well precedented, that’s exactly the arc newsprint, radio, and TV followed before.
https://kontextmaschine.tumblr.com/post/185164859368/your-gr...
Ever since starting a project to collect and analyse the reddit firehose, I've had a series of eye opening experiences about just how manufactured the popular reddit content is. Every day, comments and posts with hundreds to thousands of upvotes get deleted by moderators because they don't fit the desired narrative. A small ring of moderators are in control of most default subs. A small ring of accounts make up for more than 50% of regular front-page content.
If you ever want to take a glimpse at the amount of manipulation going on, point something like snew.notabug.io at a popular politics or askreddit thread.
Reddit is a platform for pushing manufactured consent/controversy and guerilla advertising. It is not a platform for open speech. The reddit content that most users see often does not represent the views of the userbase.
Here's a random post I picked from an old analysis notebook where most of top 10% of comments were deleted, and then the post itself was deleted when new comments started mentioning the censorship. Should give some idea about the magnitude and scope of what's going on https://imgur.com/a/2C5Kn2R
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to mention that flags on HN are much more powerful for suppression discussion than downvotes are on Reddit. I find discussion on this website pretty unrewarding because a story can go from hundreds of upvotes and top of the front page to discoverable only through search in a matter of minutes--just from a handful of flags and an extremely opaque weighting system. I also dislike that moderators here can arbitraril…
> I've several good responses and rebuttals get buried or get taken out of context unfairly as a result of this heavy handed moderation, which also often comes without warning or acknowledgement. The comments that get detached are marked as such in a direct reply, with a link to the context. But speaking of that, I wonder what happened here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20040963.. .
Not true, or not (always) true. My comment here was a response to the top comment in the thread, but it was detached without context, warning, or comment and for seemingly no reason.
> More concerning, I no longer wish to support reddit as a platform. Widespread astroturfing, manufactured controversy, politics, bullying, incessant nitpicking and arguing. Ever since starting a project to collect and analyse the reddit firehose, I've had a series of eye opening experiences about just how manufactured the popular reddit content is. Every day, comments and posts with hundreds to thousands of upvotes…
After a few days the agenda pushing and blatant shilling began anew and it's been a non-stop screaming mess since.