
The demise of r/science AMAs on Reddit - edwinksl
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/reddit-r-science-ama/
======
LeoPanthera
I'm completely on the side of Reddit, here. Subreddit moderators have too much
power. It's all very well saying "anyone can create a subreddit, if you don't
like one, make another" but it's impossible to compete with subreddits sitting
on common names, like "science".

The practice of _removing_ higher-voted posts in order to keep their AMAs at
the top should never have been allowed, and I'm glad that it now isn't.

Abuse of moderator power is one of Reddit's biggest problems.

~~~
fhood
And yet, here you are on hacker news, and extremely heavily moderated forum.

The only way for popular forums to maintain interesting content is moderation.
Otherwise the top posts tend towards generic mush that is vaguely interesting
to most, and extremely interesting to very few.

~~~
edwinksl
It appears a lot of people are not aware of this important function of
moderation unless they see it for themselves, perhaps by doing some
moderation. It is not surprising at all to people who have done some
moderation that relying on just upvotes and downvotes does not surface good
content.

~~~
foepys
Up- and downvotes work to a certain extend. But when the community grows big
enough, the upvotes tend to heavily favor "funny" and other easily digestible
content. Many subreddits and other online communities died the, what I call,
10,000 member death. If you don't apply moderation at that point, serious
content will disappear.

------
tunesmith
Good journalism suffers if subjected to popularity algorithms. What a weird
wave this has been, where Facebook's News Feed used to be okay and then
sucked, where my curated Twitter feed used to be okay and then sucked, etc.

There's a difference between what people say they want (as interpreted by
views, clicks, eyeballs), and what they want to want (as interpreted by
values, what feels rewarding in hindsight, what they're glad they did later).
I wonder if these algorithms will ever evolve to start serving up metaphorical
vitamins instead of potato chips.

~~~
maxk42
The "popularity" algorithm is potato chips.

Good moderation is vitamins.

~~~
thaumasiotes
Excessive consumption of vitamins will cause much bigger problems than
excessive consumption of potato chips.

~~~
pavel_lishin
But in moderation (heh), eating vitamins is much, much better for you than
eating potato chips.

Nobody's arguing for an excess of anything. Obviously a completely locked down
subreddit that rejects and deletes all posts and comments would be useless,
but so would one that's completely unmoderated.

~~~
794CD01
>Obviously a completely locked down subreddit that rejects and deletes all
posts and comments would be useless,

Not necessarily. Reddit used to have some of those as running jokes.
/r/blackfathers and such. Disagreeable uses are still uses.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Sure, but that's more of an art installation. Duchamp's Fountains is a neat
work of art, but I can't really use it for its intended purpose.

~~~
794CD01
Firstly, you probably could do what you mean for that specific piece, at least
once or twice. But more importantly, that statement presupposes the wrong
intended purpose.

------
djhworld
At the start of the article I was revelling in the enjoyment of confimation
bias washing over me around how reddit is changing, but then I read this

> Allen admitted to the Daily Dot that he deleted popular r/science posts so
> AMAs would be more prominently featured. But he argues the controversial
> action was required for his posts to gain widespread visibility.

Don't think Reddit is in the wrong here...

~~~
commandlinefan
Honestly, Reddit needs to be doing _more_ to stop mods from running rampant
all over the user base. A _lot_ more.

------
zelon88
"My posts weren't the most popular, so I had to delete the popular ones to get
mine to the top of r/science!"

Did he really just say that post manipulation is allowed when he personally
values the content and expected it to be accepted?

Reddit is so covered in arbitrary rules as it is. It's harder to get a post to
stick on Reddit than it is here on HN sometimes, and HN isn't even for general
discussion like Reddit is.

Now we're finding out that the social media website with the most red-tape and
outright hostile attitude towards it's userbase deletes user content to
substitute self-promotional content produced by organizers?

I think it's time to find an alternative. Reddit wreaks of hostility towards
users. It's the online equivalent of a park bench with coin operated spikes to
deter homeless people.

~~~
roblabla
Temporarily deleted for the AMAs to gain traction. They were restored once the
AMAs made it to the front page.

This sounds bad, but you have to realize that:

\- The AMAs had very high-profile guests, and it's easier to attract those
guests if you can promise high visibility

\- Moderators have very little tools to curate and promote contents that they
view as valuable.

~~~
zelon88
"\- Moderators have very little tools to curate and promote contents that they
view as valuable."

Why do moderators need tools to promote content they view as valuable? Isn't
that what the upvote button is for?

These are moderators. Volunteer enthusiasts of the communities they moderate.
They have no stake in Reddit and they get nothing regardless of what content
gets seen by who. They're job is to make sure nobody breaks subreddit rules.
They aren't supposed to be purveyors of content on a social media platform.

If I want to see structured, planned, and promoted content I'll go to CNN or
Politico or NYT. I joined Reddit to be a part of a community that aggregates
and promotes crowd-sourced content based on popular opinion.

Giving moderators tools to control the content beyond what they need to
enforce the rules is manipulation of the underlying purpose of Reddit, and
should be disallowed.

This isn't a Facebook page for a business that serves a purpose. It's an
online forum whose purpose is to aggregate and rank crowd sourced content with
crowd sourced input. Adding a "To The Top" button for moderators defeats the
purpose of Reddit.

~~~
masklinn
> Why do moderators need tools to promote content they view as valuable? Isn't
> that what the upvote button is for?

The upvote button leads to Logan Paul and walmart. If that's what you want,
there are plenty of unmoderated subreddits which provide that.

> These are moderators. Volunteer enthusiasts of the communities they
> moderate. They have no stake in Reddit and they get nothing regardless of
> what content gets seen by who.

They absolutely have a stake in the community they are nurturing actually
working and leading towards the outcome they're looking for. Folks moderating
/r/science want /r/science to be good according to their criteria of goodness,
which are unlikely to be the same criteria used by moderators of /r/aww,
/r/antm, /r/SWARJE/ or /r/SubredditSimulator/, all of which are different from
one another.

Moderators are not unemotional robots doing busywork for a faceless
corporation.

> They're job is to make sure nobody breaks subreddit rules.

Their "job" is to create and foster communities, moderators _define subreddit
rules in the first place_.

------
TekMol
There seem to be two stages in the life cycle of social media sites that every
one of them follows:

1) The site starts with transparent rules. The users are in power. Data access
is open and easy. The user interface is friendly.

...the site becomes popular...

2) Rules become a secret. Power is taken away from the users. Data access
becomes limited and more complicated. The user interface becomes bloated and
hostile.

I really hope we will manage to get decentralized social media off the ground.
It sucks that even after years of work, the content creators and community
builders have nothing to show for it. They are just slaves to the platform
owners.

~~~
kps
> _The user interface is friendly._

One advantage of the systems that web fora largely replaced — mailing lists
and usenet — is that content and presentation are not coupled, so each user
can use their own preferred interface.

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koolba
> First, the site replaced default communities—the 100 subreddits that once
> made up the front page of Reddit—with r/popular, _which takes posts from all
> subreddits_. The changes were made to help smaller subreddits compete with
> the larger, more established communities.

That's wrong as /r/popular explicitly excludes a bunch of sub-reddits. While
one could see it as the Reddit staff catering it to what's "popular", a more
cynical view is that the entire concept was created to shape the definition of
"popular". It's pretty easy to tip the scales when you're the one managing
them.

Separately, does The Daily Dot have any sort of editing or review process?
"Huffman" is misspelled "Hoffman", extra confusingly in a direct quote from
him.

~~~
ihuman
If you want to see a version of /r/popular with all subreddits, there's
/r/all. /r/popular removes NSFW subbreddits, and subreddits that users often
filter from /r/all (like sports subreddits).

------
oconnor663
> Reddit has not confirmed what specifically it changed to prevent post
> manipulation but said it’s something it doesn’t support or allow.

Presumably some of these changes had to do with removing e.g. r/The_Donald's
ability to spam the front page. This article is really incomplete without
talking about the problems that the new rules were designed to solve.

------
xtreak29
The article is missing some context here where spez said that r/science mods
removed the popular posts in the sub during AMA for increased attention which
is allegedly vote manipulation from their end.

Full reply :
[https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/8khscc/rscience_wi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/8khscc/rscience_will_no_longer_be_hosting_amas/dz8nky8)

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p49k
I noticed HN fixes inaccurate titles, can that be done here? I don’t think
it’s fair for the title to imply Reddit is to blame, based on the CEO’s
comment in the article, which goes into detail on the (completely reasonable)
anti-abuse measures that resulted in this. The moderators were clearly
manipulating the site to promote these AMAs (albeit with good intentions) so
it seems things are more complicated than “Reddit censors science”

Edit: looks like it’s been changed, thanks!

~~~
edwinksl
OP here. I took the title verbatim from the article to avoid editorializing. I
am not sure where HN stands regarding changing the post title to something
that is significantly different from the article title.

~~~
dang
That's in the site guidelines:

 _Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait._

The article title in this case is arguably both, so we changed it to use a
more neutral phrase from the article. That's always the best way to change a
title, btw, when you have to. Articles nearly always include some neutral
representative phrase that describes what they're about, and it's much better
to find a 'native' one that way than to make up a new title oneself. Trick of
the trade.

------
danso
I do agree that the r/science moderator was wrong in attempting to game the
frontpage algorithm (by removing popular r/science posts, temporarily, so that
AMAs could float to the top). But I don't get why these AMAs, which ostensibly
drew large audiences, wouldn't already be at the top of r/science at their
peak?

~~~
dghughes
There are many things I don't agree with on reddit such as locking of posts
but r/science has to be one of the best moderated sites on reddit.

I'm not sure about removing posts I've never noticed that on r/science. But
just because I have not witnessed it doesn't mean it isn't true. I do have to
say in post comments all the jokes, anecdotal stories (I'm guilty!) or
bickering are quickly removed and that seems appropriate for the science. Let
actual verified scientists answer genuine questions or make comments in a
post's comments section.

This seems like both sides have good points but one side is the overall owner.
The majority of subreddits have abysmal moderation quickly locking what the
mods can't be bothered to moderate. Locking posts stifles debate it's just
pure moderator laziness.

~~~
programbreeding
>I'm not sure about removing posts I've never noticed that on r/science. But
just because I have not witnessed it doesn't mean it isn't true.

Just FYI, there's no question if it's true. The mod admitted it in the
article:

"Allen admitted to the Daily Dot that he deleted popular r/science posts so
AMAs would be more prominently featured. But he argues the controversial
action was required for his posts to gain widespread visibility.

“[deleting posts] is a consequence of the nature of the user base’s interest
in science,” Allen told the Daily Dot. “Meaning, if science is put in front of
them, they [Reddit users] like it. But they don’t go seek it out. That’s for
stupid cat pictures and other relaxing things. Science isn’t.”"

------
Havoc
They sure seem determined to re-enact the DIGG collapse.

------
digi_owl
On an possibly unrelated note it seems my account has developed an issue where
the front page tabs only shows articles from the last 12 hours, at best.

~~~
mrec
Is this the old "hot" front page, or the new default "best" front page? The
latter is complete and utter garbage, and favours newness above all other
criteria.

~~~
digi_owl
both actually, the hot tab showing a few more than the best tab.

