Exciting news. One thing I sincerely hope reddit will do with the new injection is to increase the level of quality of content and discussion across the board. Often the advice given is "you've got to find the smaller subreddits" and while that's true, I think having the first few layers filled with terrible content and hive-minded, often racist/sexist discussion is incredibly detrimental to both the site's image and new user experiences.
I know there's great content there, and great people having great discussions, but it's not terribly easy to find. I'm thoroughly convinced that reddit could be an incredibly valuable source of reliable news, discussion, and entertainment, but the way it's structured highlights its more juvenile aspects.
And if it can find a way to establish legitimacy, it'll be worth far more than it is today.
I would love to see better moderation tools. Most of the shitty content I've had to deal with are from newer/multiple accounts, as well as the older accounts that are sick of the trolls. Our AutoModerator shadowban list and our ban list is so ridiculously long I can barely scroll it. It'd be amazing if we didn't have to rely on a bunch of other tools (toolbox, RES, AutoModerator) or consider building our own tools (subreddit history scraper). It'd also be amazing if there was some site-wide automatic action against certain throwaway accounts so we don't have to clean up _after_ the 4th attempt at some idiot trolling us.
I would also love to see a better take on Reddit 101 too. We still get comments like "I'm a male and why is this on my reddit page" and people that just barge in without reading rules to post things against our rules (like a ton of misogyny _and_ misandry). Some of this is inevitable but it's pretty annoying that there isn't much we can do here either other than deleting things after the fact.
I don't think that those two alone will improve the site significantly, but it would be a burden lifted for default mods, and that might help clean up parts of the front page. Maybe. I don't even want to think about how much time we spend on everything from figuring out trolls to writing warning notes for each other, to discussing some idiot user trying to dox one of the mods. It'd be time we can spend doing other things for the subreddit. That would be nice.
reddit is a platform for communities like twitter is a platform for individuals. There are a half million communities now on reddit and our onboarding experience should do a better job exposing people to the communities they love (kinda like twitter does but less ham-fisted).
e.g.,
There are Cleveland Browns fans who've visited reddit every day for years and don't realize there's a r/clevelandbrowns community that they'd love, not to mention r/cleveland and r/foodporn or whatever other communities they'd dig.
That's the vast majority of reddit content but we're not doing a good job exposing it.
> One thing I sincerely hope reddit will do with the new injection is to increase the level of quality of content and discussion across the board. Often the advice given is "you've got to find the smaller subreddits" and while that's true, I think having the first few layers filled with terrible content and hive-minded, often racist/sexist discussion is incredibly detrimental to both the site's image and new user experiences.
Do we have any examples of large Internet communities with unilateral good discussion?
They way I've thought about it, the subreddits with better user content/discussion are primarily because:
* They attract fewer people, so only users more dedicated to the topic and more dedicated to finding a good community will find them. These users tend to be better contributors.
* Heavy-handed authoritarian moderation.
The first one only works so long as the subreddit is less popular. The more it will regress toward the mean of Internet contributions, which I believe to be inherently low.
The second one only works well when you have a specific topic with carefully defined rules and very active moderators with no regard for popular consensus and said moderators don't develop a power complex.
I don't think reddit has shown any interesting solutions to the problem of high quality contribution. At the risk of sounding elitist, we've seen how popularity kills quality discussion on countless communities over the years. Again, I think massive discussion tends toward being inherently low on average.
Edit: Beaten by noir_lord by a couple minutes listing the exact same two points.
I like Reddit. I recently obtained a data dump of every single submission and comment so I could perform interesting data analysis and may just determine what make a post on Reddit viral.
The problem I have with Reddit is that I'm still unsure if it's a positive externality. There's a lot of good aspects of Reddit (discovery, community), but there's so much bad about Reddit that it's impossible to overlook it (abusive subreddits, abusive users, no administrator transparency, etc.)
There's free speech, and then there's the ethics of promoting and profiting off of abusive/illegal content.
My dream startup would be a Reddit-esque link aggregator, which favors the actual quality of submissions, instead of submissions which are lowest-common-denominator which are optimized for the hive mind.
As a long time Reddit user, I've been really disappointed lately with Reddits "battle" against content creators and the little recourse you have if you are marked as a spammer or shadow banned. See the recent /r/indiegaming debacle for example, where a subreddit where mainly indie devs would post about their games now allows very little self promotion ( http://redd.it/2fdwyv ). Some of these rules are Reddit wide so theres nothing they can do but it essentially discourages content creators from being close to their audience on Reddit.
On top of that, if you are banned from a subreddit (even a default one) the moderators can basically choose to ignore you and you are SOL. There's the whole 90/10 rule where if you are posting something from the same source too often, you can be seen as a spammer and banned. It's very easy to break this rule. For example, if you make a few self posts, make tons of comments, post links to 5 different websites, then post 1 link to your website, you are breaking the rule and if a mod sees it you can be banned (comments/self posts don't count towards the 90/10 rule so your 5 posts to 1 self promotion post is breaking the rules). I wish they would just let the upvote/downvote system do its job and weed out content people don't want instead of forcing people to post a bunch of crap they wouldn't normally post just to make their profile look good so they can post about their own projects once in a while.
if you are banned from a subreddit (even a default one) the moderators can basically choose to ignore you and you are SOL
This touches an issue I'd like to elaborate on: the psychology of someone who is willing to moderate a Reddit subsection—or any similar site, like many mailing lists—is probably not good. It takes someone willing to spend a fair amount of time at a thankless task that is hard to do well and rarely if ever remunerative.
A lot of the people who start at that task do so optimistically but quit as their lives change or the task becomes more onerous. Who gets left? People with axes to grind; people with no sense of perspective; petty tyrants; and so on. I don't use Reddit much for many reasons, but one is the low quality of moderators. I don't bother messaging them anymore, ever, because doing so is largely a waste of time.
The problem with moderators is not dissimilar from the problem of users: people who regularly have something interesting to say and the means to say it well get blogs, as I wrote here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2013/06/05/social-news-sites-a... . Those who don't stay on Reddit.
Self-promotion is one of the really hard problems to solve. Some of my least favorite subs that I really want to like (/r/Entrepreneur is an especially egregious example) have this problem severely. If I see another self-aggrandizing blogger post a link promoting their system for making money on the internet with information products, I'm gonna catch their hair on fire.
So, you say "content creator", I say "people trying to sell me shit that I don't want".
I've got stuff to sell, websites I want to promote, etc. too. But, I accept that the cost of me having a nice community I want to be a part of, that isn't focused on consumption as the only purpose in our lives, means I shut up about it except when it's really relevant and someone else brought it up.
Not sure if you've been on the other side of the "battle", but there is a heck of a lot of genuine spammers on the site, and shadowbans are one of the few effective tools.
Very rarely is it the kind-hearted entrepreneur showing off a new thing he built who gets hit with a shadowban. It happens, but it's rare. More common is people creating accounts to do nothing but advertise, usually neglecting to disclose their affiliation in any way. Even more common is spammers creating hundreds of throwaway accounts used to promote Youtube channels/affiliate links/click scams/article farms and other nonsense. If you use a regular ban they simply make a new account. So yes, there's a very good reason for shadowbans.
>There's the whole 90/10 rule
90/10 is a guideline, not a hard set rule. Moderators of a subreddit have wiggle room when it comes to defining spammers. Many subs allow self-promotion. If you're advertising in one that doesn't allow it, then you're in the wrong.
>I wish they would just let the upvote/downvote system do its job
Votes work decently to bubble up quality content (if you consider lowest-common-denominator "decent"), but ultimately it does nothing for preventing spam, trolls, doxers, spoilers and whatever else.
> For example, if you make a few self posts, make tons of comments, post links to 5 different websites, then post 1 link to your website, you are breaking the rule and if a mod sees it you can be banned (comments/self posts don't count towards the 90/10 rule so your 5 posts to 1 self promotion post is breaking the rules).
Some admin recently said that something like that has never happened. Only flagrant violators of that rule get shadowbanned by the admins.
I understand the need to fight obvious spam and shadowbanning being a good tool for that, but shadowbanning regular users that are trying to contribute actual content is very disrespectful to the users.
"It’s always bothered me that users create so much of the value of sites like reddit but don’t own any of it. So, the Series B Investors are giving 10% of our shares in this round to the people in the reddit community, and I hope we increase community ownership over time. We have some creative thoughts about the mechanics of this, but it’ll take us awhile to sort through all the issues. If it works as we hope, it’s going to be really cool and hopefully a new way to think about community ownership."
This is awesome. Curious to see how this plays out. What's the approximate timing for announcing if reddit is able to do this or not?
Mod/admin censorship, government manipulation (out of Eglin AFB most likely), and corporate advertising/shilling are pretty blatantly huge in reddit right now, with many users openly looking for alternative websites. The admin team has shown again and again that they're willing to tolerate anything until there's bad PR.
One of the founders (Alexis) has a PR firm, Antique Jetpack, which is on record [1] as cooperating with Stratfor of wikileaks fame. I can't quite see how the two are unconnected.
A couple of years ago, one of the admins there tacitly admitted that he was under a National Security letter complete with gag order to give up user information.
A few months ago, reddit changed its voting system in order to completely obfuscate user detection of large scale vote manipulation. The community was unanimously against this change, and has been overruled.
I don't see a great future for reddit, honestly. I'll continue to use it until whoaverse or another alternative is populated enough.
There's so much work being done on reddit right now that users don't like, don't won't or don't care about while things that users and mods need to effectively run their subs and enjoy the site (like better anti-spam measures, finer grained control on user behavior, disabled downvote buttons, logging of user activity so you can see who trolls are) aren't appearing.
When prioritizing what gets developed, does anybody think that not showing up/down votes will bring more users or would an option to disable downvote buttons on a breast cancer survivor support group sub so that it feels like a safer place to share make more sense?
Then there was that weird relationship with imgur (quickly becoming another major social network), where they were violating all kinds of content and promotion policies but were given free reign to do whatever and for the longest time nobody could figure out how imgur was funding itself. Oh, it turns out reddit is an investor in imgur.
Then there's all kinds of weird censorship policies, where entire groups of users and subs discussing bad things are killed but lists of subs involving rape, death, beastiality and various other horrible things sit around just fine.
Reddit's problem is that it doesn't really have a universal set of consistent policies, except for one, don't do anything to make us look bad in the press, everything else is random and capricious.
I think lots of users would like to go somewhere else, but the network effect on reddit is effectively acting as a network lock-in. There's plenty of other aggregator sites, but they can't get traction with the 9000 lb gorilla in the room. It would be very hard for another digg->reddit shift to happen unless reddit does something on the order of the digg debacle to piss off the entire userbase.
> The admin team has shown again and again that they're willing to tolerate anything until there's bad PR.
They frame it quite differently--they broadly want to support legal free speech, even ugly free speech. They do so up until the point it would be impossible to do so without damaging the company.
Unfortunately I don't think most people will care. The vast majority of users don't comment, and few ever figure out if they or their submissions are shadow banned.
If someone tries to make a replacement that fixes all the issues they will have to forgo whatever small amount of profitability there is in making a digg-like website. And it would probably have to be hosted in Iceland or some other obscure location.
I'll admit that mods aren't always perfect, but they're (for the most part) regular users who are making communities the way they want to. I've very rarely seen people remove posts or ban users just to promote a particular agenda, and the ones that did were hated by their fellow mods. And I'd really like to see some good examples of admin censorship. The more common complaint I hear about the admins is that they're not active enough.
>government manipulation
I'd really like to see any sort of evidence whatsoever supporting this.
>corporate advertising/shilling
Again, I'd like to see some evidence. There have been a few high-profile cases like the Quickmeme guy, but I've never heard of large corporations wasting money on reddit. That's what Twitter and Facebook are for.
>The admin team has shown again and again that they're willing to tolerate anything until there's bad PR.
If you're talking about content, agreed. If you're talking about spammers and shilling, absolutely not. I think reddit is just about the best site of its kind around, in terms of software, users, and mods/admins when it comes to fighting spam.
>One of the founders (Alexis) has a PR firm, Antique Jetpack, which is on record [1] as cooperating with Stratfor of wikileaks fame. I can't quite see how the two are unconnected.
He released all of the emails he exchanged with them and it was never anything sinister.[1]
>A couple of years ago, one of the admins there tacitly admitted that he was under a National Security letter complete with gag order to give up user information.
Source? I don't remember this at all.
>A few months ago, reddit changed its voting system in order to completely obfuscate user detection of large scale vote manipulation. The community was unanimously against this change, and has been overruled.
No, the vote counts before, especially on popular posts, were almost completely wrong (intentionally). In exchange for taking away the individual vote counts, which were mostly bogus anyway, they made the "percent liked" statistic much more accurate. I dislike that they took away that ability completely from comments except for the "controversial" dagger, but I saw absolutely no sinister intent in what they were trying to do there.
Your whole comment reads like you've been taking what /r/conspiracy and /r/undelete tell you at face value and have never actually dealt with the mods or admins on reddit, or even taken the time to understand how it really works.
It's a good time to invest in reddit. Not because it will become cooler over the coming years, but because it will become more valuable as it monetizes itself and sells off it's goodwill/equity.
Reddit as a platform peaked in 2013- quantitatively[1] and qualitatively. It's mainstream now, and will soon be passe (something like SomethingAwful).
If reddit has any value as an investment, it's for advertising and personal (pseudonymous or not) data. Facebook peaked a few years ago in the way I've described, and since their IPO has grown in market value[2] but declined in cultural value[3] (even as its MAU continue to grow!). They are slowly selling off piece by piece, literally to the highest bidder, the equity, trust and attention that it has built up over the years. It's not a sustainable model, it's in a mature phase by now, and it generates a whole lot of cash while it lasts.
Wouldn't be surprised to watch reddit do the same.
I keep asking this, but it never gets much attention - but why can't reddit put more effort in to a hierarchical structure.
As others have said some of the best contents is in the smaller sub-reddits, but they often struggle to get much content because people feel that to get any "attention" they have to post in a sub-reddit. I feel people would be encouraged to submit to smaller sub-reddits if there was a hierarchical structure whereby if a story did well in a sub-reddit, it would get to the front page of the next sub-reddit above it - so I might submit to /r/Dundee which leads to /r/Scotland which leans to /r/UnitedKingdom etc
I'm sure there would be some clever way to structure and control this. It would breathe life in to the smaller sub-reddits.
I worked there from 2008-2011 and always wanted to implement exactly this, but at that time we only had 5 +/- 1 employees so nobody ever had the time.
Now that they have dozens of employees I wish they'd put this high up on their roadmap. As a nearby comment points out, it would be the next step on reddit's journey toward reincarnating the golden age of Usenet.
I'm wondering about the load of shareholder service work that has to be done when corporate stuff gets put up to a vote. They have to notify people, and that might be hard if someone uses a throwaway account and somehow ends up acquiring a share because of it.
While I have a real name account there, TBH 95% of the time I'm using an alias.
Lets hope for a subreddit controlling it. No really, have the users control it. Really.
Yes, yes, trolls, hacked accounts, wall street manipulators, sock puppets, 4chan, 14 year olds, etc.
But, I mean, wow, just imagine the flame wars! It would be a beautiful fire of crazy. Have the insane fedora neckbeards actually try to get things together in a really real setting? The raw data files alone would be worth it. You'd glean so much, and in a Public setting. Yeah, Google does it already, but to let all of us join in on the analysis of the decision making process? I dare say it: You'd be able to determine how an internet-type true democracy would work. Hash out representatives, the whole deal.
Give it to the users, reveal just how dumb we all are in a herd.
One simple way to improve the quality of posts is to remove default subreddits. Instead, have people pick from a list of common interests: programming, games, rap, etc. I think that by limiting interaction with trolls will, over time, reduce the total number of trolls. It is my assumption that the majority of trolls tend to stay on the default subreddits. This would also allow for smaller subreddits to grow by in a sense linking interests into categories rather than the current method of community discovery.
I think it's time we re-invented Usenet by making the subreddits tree-structured. Or at the least, by making a tree-structured list of subreddits.
At the moment there are thousands of subreddits but the only way to find them is by playing with the 'random' button and hoping for a bit of serendipity.
Ok, Sam Altman, YC and reedit all just entered my personal mini-hero status for "we want to give 10% of shares to "the community"
It does more than bother me that community created value is captured by a few servers in SV - and it's going to take a lot of experimentation to get this right. I rather like the idea of licensing my location data to Google Traffic, and rather doubt giving equity to some but not all redditors will ever work out fairly, but hats off for actually acknowledging the problem publicly and trying something. I expect whatever the normal for community value will be in twenty years, none of the ideas on this thread even come close - in beginning to enjoy the ride though :-)
They allow shit like /r/greatapes and a entire super racist network of subreddits like /r/ferguson and shit, but hoo boy if you're Jennifer Lawrence they'll bend over backwords to shut down /r/TheFappening to get rid of your nudes... While simultaneously ignoring /r/Photoplunder, which does the same thing but to people who aren't famous.
And lets not even start on banning /r/creepshots but not /r/CandidFashionPolice, which is THE SAME FUCKING THING.
I mean shit, if you're going to have standards, at least be consistent.
And don't get me started on /r/netsec and it's shitty anti-disclosure philosophy.
I like to believe that due to the anonymity on reddit it provides a much better reflection of our society - and hence also exposes some of the deeply ingrained hypocrisy.
The one downside (as I see it) of Reddit that Facebook, G+, and HN all don't have is the ability to downvote. Downvoting makes it so larger subreddits will only have material on their front page that the majority of that group agrees with. This leads to certain subreddits (like /r/politics/) being heavily dominated by one side of the subject area.
But I still use reddit daily myself. Getting off some of the default subreddits and subscribing to ones focused on a specific topic (a video game, programming language, city, etc...) has replaced specialized/focused forums for me. It's definitely a great communication platform.
How is that any different from upvoting patterns? A lot of upvotes has a bigger impact than any downvotes, and given the mod mail for the default subreddit I mod... people are well aware of that but continue to complain like that's something we can change.
For what it is worth, I see plenty of stories drop off the HN front page by being overcommented on. HN seems to go for a 'controversial' rank rather than straight up scores. I'm not sure how that's any better. At least on reddit, you can pick the way you want to sort your stories and comments.
As others have said, you can downvote here to, but I know what you are saying. The majority always rules on reddit, and on the default subs, there are so many comments that you will never see anything but posts that agree with the majority. It's a tough problem to solve with community that big.
Not a YC investment, but I'm interested in how this relates to YC's mitigation of signaling risk.
> So the new rule is that partners can only invest some amount of time after Demo Day (we’ll experiment a little to figure out exactly how long) or as part of a Series A.
Reddit seems to qualify under the "some amount of time after Demo Day" caveat. Does anyone know at what time period YC ended up setting?
[+] [-] kyro|11 years ago|reply
I know there's great content there, and great people having great discussions, but it's not terribly easy to find. I'm thoroughly convinced that reddit could be an incredibly valuable source of reliable news, discussion, and entertainment, but the way it's structured highlights its more juvenile aspects.
And if it can find a way to establish legitimacy, it'll be worth far more than it is today.
[+] [-] silencio|11 years ago|reply
I would love to see better moderation tools. Most of the shitty content I've had to deal with are from newer/multiple accounts, as well as the older accounts that are sick of the trolls. Our AutoModerator shadowban list and our ban list is so ridiculously long I can barely scroll it. It'd be amazing if we didn't have to rely on a bunch of other tools (toolbox, RES, AutoModerator) or consider building our own tools (subreddit history scraper). It'd also be amazing if there was some site-wide automatic action against certain throwaway accounts so we don't have to clean up _after_ the 4th attempt at some idiot trolling us.
I would also love to see a better take on Reddit 101 too. We still get comments like "I'm a male and why is this on my reddit page" and people that just barge in without reading rules to post things against our rules (like a ton of misogyny _and_ misandry). Some of this is inevitable but it's pretty annoying that there isn't much we can do here either other than deleting things after the fact.
I don't think that those two alone will improve the site significantly, but it would be a burden lifted for default mods, and that might help clean up parts of the front page. Maybe. I don't even want to think about how much time we spend on everything from figuring out trolls to writing warning notes for each other, to discussing some idiot user trying to dox one of the mods. It'd be time we can spend doing other things for the subreddit. That would be nice.
[+] [-] alexis|11 years ago|reply
https://web.archive.org/web/20080410190800/http://reddit.com...
reddit is a platform for communities like twitter is a platform for individuals. There are a half million communities now on reddit and our onboarding experience should do a better job exposing people to the communities they love (kinda like twitter does but less ham-fisted).
e.g., There are Cleveland Browns fans who've visited reddit every day for years and don't realize there's a r/clevelandbrowns community that they'd love, not to mention r/cleveland and r/foodporn or whatever other communities they'd dig.
That's the vast majority of reddit content but we're not doing a good job exposing it.
[+] [-] B-Con|11 years ago|reply
Do we have any examples of large Internet communities with unilateral good discussion?
They way I've thought about it, the subreddits with better user content/discussion are primarily because:
* They attract fewer people, so only users more dedicated to the topic and more dedicated to finding a good community will find them. These users tend to be better contributors.
* Heavy-handed authoritarian moderation.
The first one only works so long as the subreddit is less popular. The more it will regress toward the mean of Internet contributions, which I believe to be inherently low.
The second one only works well when you have a specific topic with carefully defined rules and very active moderators with no regard for popular consensus and said moderators don't develop a power complex.
I don't think reddit has shown any interesting solutions to the problem of high quality contribution. At the risk of sounding elitist, we've seen how popularity kills quality discussion on countless communities over the years. Again, I think massive discussion tends toward being inherently low on average.
Edit: Beaten by noir_lord by a couple minutes listing the exact same two points.
[+] [-] minimaxir|11 years ago|reply
The problem I have with Reddit is that I'm still unsure if it's a positive externality. There's a lot of good aspects of Reddit (discovery, community), but there's so much bad about Reddit that it's impossible to overlook it (abusive subreddits, abusive users, no administrator transparency, etc.)
There's free speech, and then there's the ethics of promoting and profiting off of abusive/illegal content.
My dream startup would be a Reddit-esque link aggregator, which favors the actual quality of submissions, instead of submissions which are lowest-common-denominator which are optimized for the hive mind.
[+] [-] giulianob|11 years ago|reply
On top of that, if you are banned from a subreddit (even a default one) the moderators can basically choose to ignore you and you are SOL. There's the whole 90/10 rule where if you are posting something from the same source too often, you can be seen as a spammer and banned. It's very easy to break this rule. For example, if you make a few self posts, make tons of comments, post links to 5 different websites, then post 1 link to your website, you are breaking the rule and if a mod sees it you can be banned (comments/self posts don't count towards the 90/10 rule so your 5 posts to 1 self promotion post is breaking the rules). I wish they would just let the upvote/downvote system do its job and weed out content people don't want instead of forcing people to post a bunch of crap they wouldn't normally post just to make their profile look good so they can post about their own projects once in a while.
[+] [-] jseliger|11 years ago|reply
This touches an issue I'd like to elaborate on: the psychology of someone who is willing to moderate a Reddit subsection—or any similar site, like many mailing lists—is probably not good. It takes someone willing to spend a fair amount of time at a thankless task that is hard to do well and rarely if ever remunerative.
A lot of the people who start at that task do so optimistically but quit as their lives change or the task becomes more onerous. Who gets left? People with axes to grind; people with no sense of perspective; petty tyrants; and so on. I don't use Reddit much for many reasons, but one is the low quality of moderators. I don't bother messaging them anymore, ever, because doing so is largely a waste of time.
The problem with moderators is not dissimilar from the problem of users: people who regularly have something interesting to say and the means to say it well get blogs, as I wrote here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2013/06/05/social-news-sites-a... . Those who don't stay on Reddit.
[+] [-] SwellJoe|11 years ago|reply
So, you say "content creator", I say "people trying to sell me shit that I don't want".
I've got stuff to sell, websites I want to promote, etc. too. But, I accept that the cost of me having a nice community I want to be a part of, that isn't focused on consumption as the only purpose in our lives, means I shut up about it except when it's really relevant and someone else brought it up.
[+] [-] SquareWheel|11 years ago|reply
Very rarely is it the kind-hearted entrepreneur showing off a new thing he built who gets hit with a shadowban. It happens, but it's rare. More common is people creating accounts to do nothing but advertise, usually neglecting to disclose their affiliation in any way. Even more common is spammers creating hundreds of throwaway accounts used to promote Youtube channels/affiliate links/click scams/article farms and other nonsense. If you use a regular ban they simply make a new account. So yes, there's a very good reason for shadowbans.
>There's the whole 90/10 rule
90/10 is a guideline, not a hard set rule. Moderators of a subreddit have wiggle room when it comes to defining spammers. Many subs allow self-promotion. If you're advertising in one that doesn't allow it, then you're in the wrong.
>I wish they would just let the upvote/downvote system do its job
Votes work decently to bubble up quality content (if you consider lowest-common-denominator "decent"), but ultimately it does nothing for preventing spam, trolls, doxers, spoilers and whatever else.
[+] [-] Semaphor|11 years ago|reply
> For example, if you make a few self posts, make tons of comments, post links to 5 different websites, then post 1 link to your website, you are breaking the rule and if a mod sees it you can be banned (comments/self posts don't count towards the 90/10 rule so your 5 posts to 1 self promotion post is breaking the rules).
Some admin recently said that something like that has never happened. Only flagrant violators of that rule get shadowbanned by the admins.
[+] [-] mikelat|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] arfliw|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gatsby|11 years ago|reply
This is awesome. Curious to see how this plays out. What's the approximate timing for announcing if reddit is able to do this or not?
[+] [-] cryoshon|11 years ago|reply
One of the founders (Alexis) has a PR firm, Antique Jetpack, which is on record [1] as cooperating with Stratfor of wikileaks fame. I can't quite see how the two are unconnected.
A couple of years ago, one of the admins there tacitly admitted that he was under a National Security letter complete with gag order to give up user information.
A few months ago, reddit changed its voting system in order to completely obfuscate user detection of large scale vote manipulation. The community was unanimously against this change, and has been overruled.
I don't see a great future for reddit, honestly. I'll continue to use it until whoaverse or another alternative is populated enough.
[1]: https://search.wikileaks.org/gifiles/?viewemailid=277352
[+] [-] alexis|11 years ago|reply
http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1l4aiq/reddit_is...
[+] [-] bane|11 years ago|reply
When prioritizing what gets developed, does anybody think that not showing up/down votes will bring more users or would an option to disable downvote buttons on a breast cancer survivor support group sub so that it feels like a safer place to share make more sense?
Then there was that weird relationship with imgur (quickly becoming another major social network), where they were violating all kinds of content and promotion policies but were given free reign to do whatever and for the longest time nobody could figure out how imgur was funding itself. Oh, it turns out reddit is an investor in imgur.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/03/after-five-years-of-bootstr...
Then there's all kinds of weird censorship policies, where entire groups of users and subs discussing bad things are killed but lists of subs involving rape, death, beastiality and various other horrible things sit around just fine.
And you get half-assed explanations like https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2foivo/every_man_is_r...
Reddit's problem is that it doesn't really have a universal set of consistent policies, except for one, don't do anything to make us look bad in the press, everything else is random and capricious.
I think lots of users would like to go somewhere else, but the network effect on reddit is effectively acting as a network lock-in. There's plenty of other aggregator sites, but they can't get traction with the 9000 lb gorilla in the room. It would be very hard for another digg->reddit shift to happen unless reddit does something on the order of the digg debacle to piss off the entire userbase.
[+] [-] IvyMike|11 years ago|reply
They frame it quite differently--they broadly want to support legal free speech, even ugly free speech. They do so up until the point it would be impossible to do so without damaging the company.
What do you prefer them to do?
[+] [-] codexon|11 years ago|reply
If someone tries to make a replacement that fixes all the issues they will have to forgo whatever small amount of profitability there is in making a digg-like website. And it would probably have to be hosted in Iceland or some other obscure location.
[+] [-] AlwaysBCoding|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icpmacdo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smikims|11 years ago|reply
I'll admit that mods aren't always perfect, but they're (for the most part) regular users who are making communities the way they want to. I've very rarely seen people remove posts or ban users just to promote a particular agenda, and the ones that did were hated by their fellow mods. And I'd really like to see some good examples of admin censorship. The more common complaint I hear about the admins is that they're not active enough.
>government manipulation
I'd really like to see any sort of evidence whatsoever supporting this.
>corporate advertising/shilling
Again, I'd like to see some evidence. There have been a few high-profile cases like the Quickmeme guy, but I've never heard of large corporations wasting money on reddit. That's what Twitter and Facebook are for.
>The admin team has shown again and again that they're willing to tolerate anything until there's bad PR.
If you're talking about content, agreed. If you're talking about spammers and shilling, absolutely not. I think reddit is just about the best site of its kind around, in terms of software, users, and mods/admins when it comes to fighting spam.
>One of the founders (Alexis) has a PR firm, Antique Jetpack, which is on record [1] as cooperating with Stratfor of wikileaks fame. I can't quite see how the two are unconnected.
He released all of the emails he exchanged with them and it was never anything sinister.[1]
>A couple of years ago, one of the admins there tacitly admitted that he was under a National Security letter complete with gag order to give up user information.
Source? I don't remember this at all.
>A few months ago, reddit changed its voting system in order to completely obfuscate user detection of large scale vote manipulation. The community was unanimously against this change, and has been overruled.
No, the vote counts before, especially on popular posts, were almost completely wrong (intentionally). In exchange for taking away the individual vote counts, which were mostly bogus anyway, they made the "percent liked" statistic much more accurate. I dislike that they took away that ability completely from comments except for the "controversial" dagger, but I saw absolutely no sinister intent in what they were trying to do there.
Your whole comment reads like you've been taking what /r/conspiracy and /r/undelete tell you at face value and have never actually dealt with the mods or admins on reddit, or even taken the time to understand how it really works.
[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1l4aiq/reddit_is...
[+] [-] throwawayornot|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] hammock|11 years ago|reply
Reddit as a platform peaked in 2013- quantitatively[1] and qualitatively. It's mainstream now, and will soon be passe (something like SomethingAwful).
If reddit has any value as an investment, it's for advertising and personal (pseudonymous or not) data. Facebook peaked a few years ago in the way I've described, and since their IPO has grown in market value[2] but declined in cultural value[3] (even as its MAU continue to grow!). They are slowly selling off piece by piece, literally to the highest bidder, the equity, trust and attention that it has built up over the years. It's not a sustainable model, it's in a mature phase by now, and it generates a whole lot of cash while it lasts.
Wouldn't be surprised to watch reddit do the same.
[1] http://www.randalolson.com/2014/09/28/the-most-upvoted-post-... [2] http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=FB&t=2y&l=on&z=l&q=l&c= [3] https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=facebook
[+] [-] wasd|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orky56|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Major_Grooves|11 years ago|reply
As others have said some of the best contents is in the smaller sub-reddits, but they often struggle to get much content because people feel that to get any "attention" they have to post in a sub-reddit. I feel people would be encouraged to submit to smaller sub-reddits if there was a hierarchical structure whereby if a story did well in a sub-reddit, it would get to the front page of the next sub-reddit above it - so I might submit to /r/Dundee which leads to /r/Scotland which leans to /r/UnitedKingdom etc
I'm sure there would be some clever way to structure and control this. It would breathe life in to the smaller sub-reddits.
[+] [-] raldi|11 years ago|reply
Now that they have dozens of employees I wish they'd put this high up on their roadmap. As a nearby comment points out, it would be the next step on reddit's journey toward reincarnating the golden age of Usenet.
[+] [-] waterlesscloud|11 years ago|reply
They don't want more attention, they feel it will decrease their quality, and they're probably right.
[+] [-] markburns|11 years ago|reply
https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2hwpmm/fundraising_fo...
[+] [-] SuperKlaus|11 years ago|reply
How's that supposed to work? Reddit (the company) will own the shares? Some foundation? A bit more detail would be nice.
[+] [-] mksm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chiph|11 years ago|reply
While I have a real name account there, TBH 95% of the time I'm using an alias.
[+] [-] Balgair|11 years ago|reply
Yes, yes, trolls, hacked accounts, wall street manipulators, sock puppets, 4chan, 14 year olds, etc.
But, I mean, wow, just imagine the flame wars! It would be a beautiful fire of crazy. Have the insane fedora neckbeards actually try to get things together in a really real setting? The raw data files alone would be worth it. You'd glean so much, and in a Public setting. Yeah, Google does it already, but to let all of us join in on the analysis of the decision making process? I dare say it: You'd be able to determine how an internet-type true democracy would work. Hash out representatives, the whole deal.
Give it to the users, reveal just how dumb we all are in a herd.
[+] [-] justaman|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simonblack|11 years ago|reply
At the moment there are thousands of subreddits but the only way to find them is by playing with the 'random' button and hoping for a bit of serendipity.
[+] [-] dkokelley|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|11 years ago|reply
It does more than bother me that community created value is captured by a few servers in SV - and it's going to take a lot of experimentation to get this right. I rather like the idea of licensing my location data to Google Traffic, and rather doubt giving equity to some but not all redditors will ever work out fairly, but hats off for actually acknowledging the problem publicly and trying something. I expect whatever the normal for community value will be in twenty years, none of the ideas on this thread even come close - in beginning to enjoy the ride though :-)
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] opinionedated|11 years ago|reply
And lets not even start on banning /r/creepshots but not /r/CandidFashionPolice, which is THE SAME FUCKING THING. I mean shit, if you're going to have standards, at least be consistent.
And don't get me started on /r/netsec and it's shitty anti-disclosure philosophy.
[+] [-] jcfrei|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kyrra|11 years ago|reply
But I still use reddit daily myself. Getting off some of the default subreddits and subscribing to ones focused on a specific topic (a video game, programming language, city, etc...) has replaced specialized/focused forums for me. It's definitely a great communication platform.
[+] [-] silencio|11 years ago|reply
For what it is worth, I see plenty of stories drop off the HN front page by being overcommented on. HN seems to go for a 'controversial' rank rather than straight up scores. I'm not sure how that's any better. At least on reddit, you can pick the way you want to sort your stories and comments.
[+] [-] giarc|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vlunkr|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] windsurfer|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taylorbuley|11 years ago|reply
> So the new rule is that partners can only invest some amount of time after Demo Day (we’ll experiment a little to figure out exactly how long) or as part of a Series A.
Reddit seems to qualify under the "some amount of time after Demo Day" caveat. Does anyone know at what time period YC ended up setting?
http://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-investment-policy-and-email-l...
[+] [-] foobarqux|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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