51–60 of 110 posts
It's always sad when the original maintainer gets burnt out and refuses to put in the effort to transfer ownership but que sera sera - i'm glad forking exists as a concept in Code management
What would transfer ownership even mean? Its open source, anyone can continue maintaining it without asking permission.
I always marvel that Reddit has seemed not have learned even one lesson from Digg. 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.
I haven't seen them make a formal system whereby publishers can pay to have their content autosubmitted and promoted to the front page. That was what killed Digg.
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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…
"...but it then snowballs into a raging fury of everyone strongly or mildly related to the issue chiming in, demanding justice." I think mobs often mistake vengeance for justice.
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Reddit brings together far more diverse communities than any other site, who then slam head on in to each other in the generic subreddits. You used to have to go actively seek out the toxic parts of the internet (except for the occasional raid of your forum by a rival, but you could usually ride that out). Now because they refuse to ban the like of The_Donald, it is like a Knitting website and Stormfront trying to sh…
I don't think that's really such a problem, it alleviates the echo chamber effect of personalized searches, ads, content, forums, etc. on most of today's internet. Some community intermingling is good, and afterwards everyone can go back to their own subreddits.
I have almost never seen a civil conversation between a Trump and non-Trump supporter on Reddit, but all the time I see nasty slapfights which simply divide the community further.
> 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…
You just described the biggest problem with Wikipedia lol. :D
> 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.
In a broader sense, sure. But I've witnessed very little of that here, which is mostly self moderated with a nudge from the admins. I've noticed this also in other smallish niche communities. Reddit has become so mainstream that everyone has a place. I think the big problems arise in the more general subs where all the miscreants from the web intersect. Same with YouTube, or any large community really. No amount of c…
I like to think of this as the "Tower of Babel" problem, where basically all the world's people cooperated on one monumental task, and God "confused their language" so they couldn't complete it. We see this pattern any time people form a critical mass: fragments form, there's a falling out, and the whole thing comes apart. Take any sufficiently old group of people and the pattern asserts itself.
The great thing about the internet is even if all the primary communities are small, it's trivial for members to inter-mix on their choice of small communities, self-selecting for culture fit rather than requiring armies of moderators to keep the conversation on track (though some moderation is still necessary).
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I hear you that it doesn't work the same way offline. But there is a good reason for the difference. If you had 1000 people in your house, bump order wouldn't work either. Even 30 active people in a chat room gets too hard to follow if everyone is talking. They are different mediums and have different requirements. I don't think real life conversation can be used as a good example for how online communication should…
>If you had 1000 people in your house, bump order wouldn't work either It definitely does, and it works better than "popular" sorting, here's how. You walk by rooms and overhear people talking. You hear a lot of small conversations, sorted by most recently heard. You find one you're interested in, and you're welcomed into the room of 2-20 people. You continue having a discussion, and it's less likely for it to turn "…
Community driven content feed sites are not great at fostering close communities, but they are great at offering a more shallow community experience to more people at once. I want to blame feed style sites for the downfall of community online, but they are likely just a symptom of an influx of people online and needing a different way to accommodate that. Imagine a global chat network where #science had 20,000 chatters, how would you chat about anything meaningfully? So you can see feed sites as inverting the dynamic of community to cater for larger numbers, which matches your analogy with the ballroom and keynote speakers and also what happens in real life.
Community driven content feed sites definitely offer something that chatrooms or threaded discourse can't, which is discoverability of information over a broad range of topics in a short time period. But it does this at the expense of depth and community, and also at the expense of breadth of opinion.
Threaded chatrooms are actually a pretty cool alternative, and I would love for them to have more wide spread usage. You can enter some.network/#science for general chatter amongst friends, and then when a topic you care about comes up you and all the people who care can dive into a thread to talk about it.
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I hear you that it doesn't work the same way offline. But there is a good reason for the difference. If you had 1000 people in your house, bump order wouldn't work either. Even 30 active people in a chat room gets too hard to follow if everyone is talking. They are different mediums and have different requirements. I don't think real life conversation can be used as a good example for how online communication should…
> I hear you that it doesn't work the same way offline. But there is a good reason for the difference. If you had 1000 people in your house, bump order wouldn't work either. Even 30 active people in a chat room gets too hard to follow if everyone is talking. If you've got 1000 people in your house you'll have a couple of conversations going on in the kitchen, a couple in the lounge room, a couple outside and people w…
I totally agree. My suspicion is that reddit and other community driven content feed sites are a symptom of the influx of people showing up online. They became popular as they're a shallow enough community to work with a large population of participants. More in depth community can only be sustained meaningfully up to a certain amount of participants. Even in teams, there is a limit to how many people can be part of a team effectively and humans naturally break up into smaller groups within larger ones.
> 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…
I think a big part of the problem is that somewhere along the line "real world" entities started to capitulate to the demands of social media mobs.
Like there was that case of the young woman who made a joke in poor taste to her dozen twitter followers on a trip to Africa, and somehow it blew up into a front-page story on traditional media and I believe she was fired from her job.
Her employer, and indeed all of us, could choose not to react to this kind of outrage storm, and then it would have no consequences besides perhaps some passing embarrassment until the internet chooses to move on to something else. Social media only has power because we give it power.
> 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.
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…