

Why Reddit is mediocre: some scientific evidence - scarmig
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/09/09/why-reddit-sucks-some-scientific-evidence/

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Rainymood
First of all. I feel like this author only recently found out about Reddit
through TheFappening.

>Leskovec and his colleagues don’t look at Reddit, but instead at four other
prominent information-sharing Web sites with roughly similar mechanics (these
sites, like Reddit, allow users to “upvote,” or “downvote” posts and
comments).

The paper compares CNN.com (general news), Breitbart.com (political news),
IGN.com(computer gaming), and Allkpop.com which are all completely different
from Reddit.

>(1) People who write low quality posts are more likely to write again when
they get negative attention. Furthermore, the quality of their posts
deteriorates.

Simply not true. Posts that are downvoted dissappear (getting downvoted 'into
oblivion'). This discourages shitposting.

>(2) People who write high quality posts are encouraged by positive attention
to write more.

Not entirely true either. Posts that are 'popular' get upvoted. Posts that get
upvoted get upvoted. Often these are made up anecdotes, or quick witty jokes,
wordplays, quick digestible fluff. The whole gilding thing makes it worse
(sometimes).

>This may help explain why so many of Reddit’s subreddits are dominated by
bigots, misogynists and other people who appear to thrive on public
abhorrence.

Ooh so that's what this article was all about ...

~~~
dubfan
Yeah, it does seem like it misses the point. The biggest problem I have with
Reddit is that most sub-Reddits don't promote high-quality comments, and
instead reward jokes and pop-culture references. Fun drinking game: Go on the
Men's Fashion Advice sub-Reddit, search for "Bonobos" and take a shot every
time the top-rated comment in a post is a joke along the lines of "y u buy
clothes from an ape lol"

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razster
Poorly written it seems.

Also, Sub-reddits vary from sub to sub, poor moderation. You cannot drag all
of them into it just because one screws up.

This is a fluff piece.

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hackuser
The study cited researched communities at CNN, IGN, Breitbart, and allkpop.
How similar are these communities to Reddit? (A serious question; I've never
participated in any of them.)

To be clear: The article bases its analysis of Reddit on the study,[1] which
examines the communities named above but does not mention Reddit.

[1] [http://cs.stanford.edu/people/jure/pubs/disqus-
icwsm14.pdf](http://cs.stanford.edu/people/jure/pubs/disqus-icwsm14.pdf)

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friednslip
The paper is fairly interesting from a methodological POV, and I do agree with
the hypothesis that negative feedback actually does encourage trolls too, but
none of those communities are anything close to reddit in their scope. The
biggest problem I see in making the analogy is the fact that two of the four
communities(allkpop, IGN) studied are fairly myopic in their subject focus,
and subject to filter bubbles.

~~~
freshhawk
But so are subreddits, by definition. Why would a collection of independently
myopic communities act differently? It might I suppose but it seems less
likely.

