
Reddit holds the secret to fixing Facebook - edward
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-43383766
======
NietTim
> In fact, I'd go as far as to say Reddit provides a model for how to create a
> more interesting, fairer web. A model that doesn't drag down other
> publishers in the process.

No, instead it drags down users who don't follow the hivemind and bolsters
power hungry mods who set the narrative. Reddit, and it's system, is in my
opinion the very opposite of fixing anything, unless you think echo chambers
are good thing.

> With Reddit, though, it's right there on the homepage. As I write this, the
> top item on the site - about a person conquering drug addiction - is there
> because 49,600 people felt it worth my attention.

And a number of posts you don't see because they're either removed or because
the algorithm holds them back. Also, the upvotes you see are _not_ how many
people have upvoted that post... That number is much different.

> Under Reddit's upvote/downvote system, clickbait headlines often sink
> quickly, while long, descriptive titles, leading to genuinely insightful
> information, thrive.

How much time has this author spend on reddit? Clickbait is upvoted just as
easily, as long as it goes along with what the hivemind thinks on that moment.
And long descriptive titles do indeed thrive - because almost no one reads the
article and most discussions that follow are bases solely on the title of the
article.

Sigh so much wrong with the article, so much wishful thinking towards reddit..

~~~
Chardok
If this article was 5-10 years ago, I would have agreed with most of it, but
as it stands you are absolutely correct.

The Reddit algorithm now is incredibly opaque with constant tinkerings that
make me think the "voting" is more of a placebo button on the front page. In
recent memory, there were a few incidents of /r/The_Donald fully populating
the front page, all with 0 upvote scores, which came off suspiciously as if
they were deeply messing with the voting system.

Where it used to be a platform where you could be assured there would be
minimal censorship, it is now commonplace to "shadowban" users who go against
the narrative and the rules are arbitrarily enforced to ban subreddits. (Check
out /r/shitredditsays for a subreddit that constantly breaks site rules but
still stands unopposed)

Reddit is obviously striving for constantly more advertising friendly platform
and it has been demonstrated multiple times upvotes are easily bought and
advertisers are constantly sneaking in posts disguised as users to do their
"viral marketing"

No, author, Reddit is moving right towards the direction of Facebook rapidly.
It is only a matter of time before they begin to lock out content behind a
login page, you can already see the transition today.

~~~
ryanlol
>there were a few incidents of /r/The_Donald fully populating the front page,
all with 0 upvote scores, which came off suspiciously as if they were deeply
messing with the voting system.

You know that reddit doesn't actually show you vote counts, right?

~~~
Chardok
What I meant was that the numbered score they had next to every post was 0,
which is incredibly atypical for that to show up on the front page.

And yes, Reddit removed the ability to see the number of upvotes/downvotes on
any item a few years back. Just another way for them to obfuscate the actual
results of a post.

~~~
sushid
Wasn't this when they were trying to ban /r/the_donald outright from /r/all? I
feel like they were trying to penalize the "real" score but somehow kept that
the same and accidentally set the "fake" score to zero instead.

------
intended
I think the author missed the actual special trick that Reddit allows over
other subs/forum systems - subreddits.

Look Reddit is transparently similar to many forums that came before it, and
most of the old farts from slash dot will know this.

What major change Reddit enables is subreddit budding/splitting for forums.

Forums had a terrible problem with the noise to signal ratio- sometimes the
topic (say pictures) was too broad to deal with. How the heck do moderators of
a forum on pictures deal with memes? Or just cute baby pics? Or nature pics-
and so on.

Well subreddits solves that - while giving you a single identity you can use
to traverse all this stuff, with a relatively consistent set of functions over
each subject domain.

This is a pretty major function and any large scale forum will have to enable
this functionality.

Also subreddit creation is a snap.

—-

As for everyone who is bemoaning the state of Reddit - that’s the state of any
forum after it starts attract the full attention of the internet populace.

The truth is long since known. The net is generally an ugly place and assuming
that the admins or mods are some how unusually responsible for this state of
affairs is dismissive of reality.

I Once modded at Reddit - I’ve gone from pro free speech to defining a whole
new set of rules and conditionals for working with speech online.

Free speech in the old net sense is long since gone, and it’s not
implementable at scale. Trust me, we’ve tried.

At best there’s networks of ideas and forums working with or against each
other.

~~~
commandlinefan
> Free speech in the old net sense is long since gone, and it’s not
> implementable at scale.

This is the constant refrain from the pro-censorship crowd: "if we let people
say distasteful things, they'll start thinking distasteful things!". Well, no
- you have it backwards. They already think it, that's why they wrote it down.
What you're trying to do instead is to make the people who believe X think
that they're all alone in the world, being the only ones who believe X, which
actually fails spectacularly - the people who believe X learn to speak and
write in "dog whistles", and the fact that you're suppressing them in the
first place helps convince them that they were actually right in the first
place. Otherwise, why would you be so threatened by them?

~~~
xr4ti
What is this "free speech" on the net people that speak of? Has it ever
existed?

With few exceptions the right to post in a forum has always been at the
pleasure of the mods/sysop. In fact, the quality of discussion is usually
proportional to how effectively the mods cull the off topic content and wield
the ban hammer against the trolls. It has been this way since the days of the
dial in BBS.

If the people who believe in X are unwelcome in a particular forum, then no
one is stopping them from building their own. Maybe they don't benefit from
the network effects of a Reddit, but a Reddit derives zero or even negative
benefits from hosting them, so fair deal.

------
John_KZ
Reddit is much worse that Facebook. Yes, Facebook. Reddit is extremely fast to
censor and hide opinions, even without the knowledge of the person silenced.
Different opinions are not tolerated. Completely wrong and ignorant comments
get thousands of upvotes and maintain very high visibility despite stating
things that can be proven false by elementary textbooks or a single google
query. There's a toxic pretend-academic mindset, based around "science" and
"sources" as infallable, religious-type absolute proofs of opinions. Hundreds
of the top thousand posts are covert advertisement, many with fake upvotes and
comments, created by either PR companies, botnets, or Reddit's own ad
services. And all that without going into the toxic environment of users
mindset, corrupt moderators (yes, actually taking money from companies and
scammers) and other problems.

Reddit is very close to everything wrong with the internet. And on top of
that, they're trying to turn into a facebook-like abomination, because the
anonymous, free-for-all nature of the past Reddit has not been proven to be
profitable or controllable enough.

------
anonytrary
Reddit is trivial to get started with as it's a streamlined, modern online
forum with pretty basic rules. I've tried signing up to Facebook recently, and
it's very difficult to get started. There are too many things to do, too many
buttons and too many questions. I feel like I'm visiting a different country
and have been thrown into the middle of a foreign marketplace.

~~~
code_duck
What I noticed about signing up on Facebook in 2018 is that I was immediately
inundated with friend requests from Africa. I can’t imagine how that plays out
for your average random older, non tech savvy American signing up for the
first time.

------
petraeus
There are many major problems with reddit,

the foremost being the abusive mods on each sub reddit who let their power
delude themselves into forming a god complex, the second being the voting
system where it costs nothing to down or up vote leading to extremely bigoted
subreddits where those in opposition to the hivemind are quickly banned and
their opinion suppressed. lets not even get started on the karama junkies who
will repost anything of significance repeatedly if it means getting another
100 or 200 karma, reddit is a cesspool of spam and ignorance fueled by a
failed system.

------
vit05
All Reddit users will disagree. I prefer to use Reddit, but he is not an
example of anything right now. It is suffering as much as any other platform
that offers a space for discussion. Besides being completely populated by Bots
and groups that act in an orchestrated way.

------
_aeneas
Reddit and Facebook are completely different concepts. The former is a forum,
the latter tries to digitize real-life friendships. The difference in MAUs
might also be a hint, everything is easier at smaller scale.

~~~
dangerlibrary
As businesses, both companies are trying to hold their audience’s attention
and sell that attention to advertisers.

Also, Reddit is a high traffic site, so the MAU argument doesn’t really hold
water. Generously, maybe facebook’s popularity in more diverse international
markets adds additional challenges?

------
intendedeffect
Surprised and then not-surprised to see this discussion turn into a shitshow.
I never spent much time on Reddit until relatively recently, but I think
they're doing a pretty good job, and that's speaking as someone who ran an
online community of a few thousand people for a while.

A lot of my favorite corners of the internet are places where people
obsessively talk about some fairly narrow niche, and for me assembling a
stream out of such forums ends up being pretty delightful! Plumbers post
plumbing in-jokes in /r/plumbing, but explain them to anyone who asks and help
out the non-plumbers who wander in with questions. I never bump into the
darkest corners, and I'm glad that they've been sweeping them out.
Periodically I'll see a pile of [deleted]s, but generally in some thread
clearly vulnerable to inappropriate comments or dumb yucks jokes.

I'll assume all the "power hungry mods" people here aren't idiots having their
"that's what she said" comments and race theories deleted. Is the mod dynamic
significantly different in much larger subs than I frequent? Are people
frustrated at having comments deleted, or are they running afoul of some subs'
(sometimes very persnickety) posting requirements?

------
nkkollaw
What a weird article. Why comparing Facebook with Reddit?

"Bikes hold the secret to fixing traffic jams". Ok, sure...

------
ghostbrainalpha
The problem with Reddit is this... not sure how to fix it.

I like to play a game where I make up sort of believable 'true stories' about
minor celebrities. I always make sure they are VERIFIABLE FALSE to someone who
did the tiniest bit of fact checking.

Sometimes they only receive a few up votes... but a lot of times they get
thousands. Eventually someone will call bullshit, but that person is just
crushed by the avalanche of up votes. Lying about minor things isn't something
most MODS will ban you for, or even delete your comment, so most of them still
stand.

There has to be some mechanism where one person who can prove they know the
truth, has more voting power than the general visitor who does not. It's just
like something Sheryl Sandberg said to me at a women's leadership conference.
"It takes a lot of people working together to build something great, but it
only takes one asshole to fuck it up."

~~~
intended
There's no way to do that because it relies on a naive understanding of truth.

Sometimes the celebrity themselves may have selective recall of an event - so
even a statement from the subject of the rumor could be false.

Two video cameras catching the same event from different angles can imply
vastly different stories.

Basically the plot of rashomon unfolds everyday and at scale.

------
nikki-9696
Does the author even know how reddit works? The vote numbers you see aren't
real (sidebars and faq on the site itself explain this see
[https://www.reddit.com/wiki/faq](https://www.reddit.com/wiki/faq) ) and many
subs don't let you downvote unless you join them. Reddit is no panacea or
utopia and has plenty of issues of its own, as pointed out by many already.

~~~
SippinLean
The numbers are fuzzed by generally a good indicator.

There's no way to disable downvoting on reddit. Some subs try to hide the
button using custom CSS, but this doesn't affect those with custom CSS
disabled sitewide, per-subreddit (with RES) or mobile users (presumably the
majority of traffic).

Tangent rant: giving your sub some character with a custom banner is ok, but
the ability to hide or change _basic_ UI like the logout button or voting
buttons is a huge flaw in the design of reddit.

------
zombieprocesses
The only reason he's saying that is because reddit has given BBC "special
status" and BBC's social media team controls a bunch of subreddits.

Reddit has turned into a crazy echo chamber - a crazy echo chamber that is in
line with BBC's goals.

------
threeseed
This is hilariously ignorant.

Reddit just in the last few days banned /r/uncensorednews and /r/european for
some of the most racist, xenophobic content you can find on the internet. And
the admins allowed this behaviour to persist for months and years.

Or maybe they should spend some time in /r/incel or /r/kotakuinaction to find
disturbing sexist and mysognistic communities that again is unparalleled
amongst the rest of the internet (4chan included).

The depths of Reddit is truly an horrific and appalling place to be. And no
self respecting website should ever follow what Reddit does to stop it (i.e.
not very much).

~~~
ppod
This is like complaining about the internet because it contains websites that
you have no obligation to ever visit.

~~~
fredoliveira
It is not. In fact, OP states exactly how it is not, by saying that Reddit
does very little to stop the toxicity of reddit.

Are you shielded from the "bad parts" of reddit if you don't subscribe to that
type of sub-reddit? Well, maybe, unless you hit /r/all in your top navigation.
It's all right there lurking under the surface. Reddit gets very dark very
fast and it is factual that they don't control it nearly as well as they
should.

So no, it is not like "complaining about the internet because it contains
websites that you have no obligation to ever visit" because the internet has
no mechanism to surface bad content on the whim of its users. All it takes on
reddit to surface something terrible is coordination and hitting the upvote
button.

~~~
anuddashoah
This is clearly coming from someone whose views generally align with the
progressive/leftist/globalist reddit hivemind.

As someone very much on the other end of the spectrum, it might be interesting
that everyone in my circles _loathes_ reddit for the censorship and
manipulative propaganda. I hate how well they "control" it, and I despise your
euphemistic use of the term.

~~~
fredoliveira
I am willing to have a pondered discussion about this, because it is most
certainly true that we both have biased (to one side or the other) views of
what they do. It can even be that neither of us is right.

I am obviously not for censorship of ideas, but reddit goes deep into the
worst mankind has to offer. There's a line that each individual will draw on
what is acceptable to them or not. I think that reddit often crosses that line
for many people (would say most, but I don't know and am trying to avoid
bias). I _do_ think they need to stop the proliferation of racism, pedophilia
and other societal maladies. You may draw different lines.

But I would love examples (and you have what appears to be a throwaway account
here, so I think you can be comfortable sharing) of what you think is reddit's
censorship or their manipulative propaganda. I mean this in earnest. I don't
see it, but we all have different views of the world.

~~~
anuddashoah
>I am obviously not for censorship of ideas

You are though. What's the point of including this little disclaimer if you're
going to render it meaningless in your next breath?:

>I do think they need to stop the proliferation of racism, pedophilia and
other societal maladies

I think they have every right to do this, but I condemn them for it.

If the ideas are so terrible, beat them with rational arguments. If you have
to ban an idea, it seems inherently evident to me that the idea contains some
irrefutable truth that can only be silenced, not defeated. It disgusts me the
same way that critical discussion of the holocaust is punishable by
imprisonment in some places, in contrast to virtually every other historical
incident which we encourage fact-checking and debate and almost invariably
acknowledge that there are two sides to every story.

I wonder if I could appeal to you by taking this approach... When you drive
people away from relatively mainstream places like reddit, where they are
exposed to alternate viewpoints even if sticking predominantly to their
politically incorrect echo-chamber subs, you don't magically change their
opinion. You don't make the idea go away. All you achieve is creating a
persecution complex within these people, reinforcing their belief that they
know some inconvenient truth, you create solidarity within that community of
exiles, and you drive them into a pure echo chamber of ever-increasing
radicalisation without objection.

I personally grew disillusioned with reddit after being banned from all my
favourite subs for reasonably tame (and relevant) comments condemning the mass
3rd world invasion of Europe and the West, and the increasing push by
socialists and Marxists to manipulate and destroy our culture. My most
frequented sub I now haven't visited in, I estimate, over 18 months, because
it's infuriating seeing the leftist circlejerk and knowing I'll be rate-
limited or banned even if I create a throwaway to offer a reasonable and
polite comment in opposition.

Instead, I spend most of my time on voat and a little on 8chan, and in the
space of a couple years I've gone from libertarian race realist to full 'gas
the kikes' and 'niggers ruin everything'. It's a redpill I can't unswallow
now. It's a redpill I maybe never would have known if I hadn't seen subs
banned, subs manipulated, inconvenient news censored, algorithms altered, etc
and said fuck it, I'm out.

If they were at least honest about it, I could accept it. Perhaps it's the
perverse nature of it that frustrates me the most. /r/politics is an egregious
example: the name implies neutrality, when in fact it's a cesspool of anti-
White, pro-globalist, leftist hysteria and propaganda.

~~~
reptantchaos92
>If you have to ban an idea, it seems inherently evident to me that the idea
contains some irrefutable truth that can only be silenced, not defeated.
Expecting a "rational" debate while spouting such irrational views is quite
absurd. Most people, and that probably includes myself, will hold some views
in high regard; convinced that are rational, whilist being just like your
example pretty much a fallacy.

I find quite laughable that some jerks cry about censorship when a private
company denies them access to a site, while they propose to use physical force
and violence to deny access to other people to a physical place.

------
WA
tl;dr: Reddit's "secret" to fix Facebook is the ability to downvote stuff.
Because Facebook only measures engagement and doesn't care if users like it or
not. Reddit (or downvoting in general) provides a better filter.

The article ends awkwardly with something that makes no sense at all:

> _On the same day that Mr Huffman appeared at SXSW, the web 's inventor - Sir
> Tim Berners-Lee - published a letter._

> _" What was once a rich selection of blogs and websites has been compressed
> under the powerful weight of a few dominant platforms," he wrote._

> Reddit has the power to help reverse this trend.

By centralizing discussions on a single website? Odd.

~~~
makecheck
Even with the downvoting option of Reddit, I found implementations like
StackOverflow’s to be more interesting (at S.O., “down” doesn’t remove as many
points as “up” adds, _and_ it costs the downvoter personal points to do it).

~~~
acdha
The SO model seems tricky to generalize. I like that downvoting has a cost but
for political topics that’s vulnerable to sock puppets & trolls unless there’s
a very healthy karma threshold.

~~~
hycaria
Do we really need to put an idiotic comment at -150 points to make a point
though ?

~~~
acdha
I was thinking more about the situation where a bunch of accounts are
registered and upvote each other into prominence or coordinate downvotes. That
can have a pronounced effect on community norms and many communities don’t
have enough genuine participants with spare time to stay on top of even minor
troll infestations much less a GamerGate, Russian political operation, etc.

------
rapnie
this recently appeared on HN and New Yorker article makes an interesting
(though bit long) read on how Reddit manages its network behind the scenes:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16569778](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16569778)

------
notacoward
HAHAHAHA no. Reddit is not a good model for much of anything.

To start with, they're solving a much simpler problem. A large percentage of
their claimed 1.6B users per month are pure drive-bys - outsiders who followed
one link one time and then left quickly. That's not the same as two billion
users actively posting and interacting with content. Also, their data model is
simpler. Even a hundred thousand subreddits are easy to model and manage
compared to the "social graph" which is unique for each user.

Even with that smaller scale and simpler model, they're not even trying to
address some of the interesting problems such as privacy. You post something
to a subreddit and it's visible or not - even to those casual visitors -
according to the subreddit's settings. You don't get individual control of
each post's visibility, which is essential for many people to control which
sides of themselves they show to which groups of friends.

Reddit is shouting in one of many town squares, and _can be nothing else_.
Facebook can also be used that way, but for many it's more importantly a way
to have more private interactions. Reddit doesn't even try to solve the
interesting problems, so it could hardly be considered a model for solving
them.

