

Sports Bars and Biker Gangs – The Death of Reddit - ed
http://www.chuqui.com/2015/07/the-death-of-reddit/?1=1

======
dasil003
There are certainly a lot of accurate observations in here, but the entire
lens is mis-focused. Consider:

> _Don’t try to fix it. It’s broken. It can’t be fixed. Instead, it’s time to
> decide what the service you want is, and build that service out of the ashes
> of the failure of this Reddit._

First of all, this is garbage advice, an absolute fool's errand. The fact that
you are ostensibly in control of Reddit as its management team does not mean
that you have any chance in hell of parlaying that into a new community of any
sort. A random 18-year-old in his dorm room has just as much chance of
creating the next legitimate online community as Reddit management does.

Reddit is what it is. For all its warts, it's a tremendously successful
community that evolved in a very particular way. Just because you're paying to
keep the lights on doesn't mean you can control the nature of the community.
Any attempts to overtly reshape Reddit into something that warms the heart of
an investor is doomed to failure because it runs against the fundamental
nature of Reddit, and thus can have no effect but to shed users—which of
course is Reddit's only asset.

This is no doubt upsetting to shareholders, some elements of management,
journalists, social activists and all manner of Reddit observers, but it's
just the way online communities work. You can build tools and policies to
nudge things this way or that a bit, but fundamentally you do not control it.
For all self-stated credentials of the author, I would expect him to recognize
this fact a bit more, and pile on his value judgements declaring "failure" a
bit less.

~~~
MBCook
> and thus can have no effect but to shed users—which of course is Reddit's
> only asset

Yor're assuming that all users are equal and the important thing is raw
eyeballs.

There are users and behavior that are driving people away. The whole 'we
support FPH' and sexist comments about Pao in every story about her is turning
people off.

Further more, if Reddit is an advertising supported company they're going to
have a big problem selling ads against /r/coontown. It _doesn 't matter_
that's one little corner and you can turn your ads off against it. The story
in the news will be 'P&G paid 30m to advertise on a site full of hate speech'
and the story will be _correct_ because it DID go to THE SITE not the sub.

And that's going to play _really poorly_ for P&G (chosen as a big brand, don't
know if they advertise).

Same thing applies to celebrities doing AMAs. The next time a democratic
candidate does an AMA and Fox starts trumpeting the... ahem 'anti-PC'...
elements of Reddit to make everyone look bad do you think that candidate will
be happy? "They used to host child porn too! It was called /r/jailbait!"

They're getting a reputation that's going to make buying their ad platform
untenable for many large advertisers.

~~~
cxseven
It would be cool if Reddit's karma and upvoting worked more like Netflix's DVD
recommendations: tailored to each person.

Rather than the surfaced comments being a function of raw upvote count, the
upvotes could count for or against you seeing the comment based on whether
they came from someone who tends to deliver you read-worthy content. Racists
would see all the racist comments they want; others not so much.

This could also decrease the influence of voting brigades and others trying to
game the system.

~~~
mc32
The downside of this is that it becomes self reinforcing. So people don't get
to see what the wider society thinks. They only get to experience what like-
minded people have to say. Despite the ugliness one is likely to come across,
I think it's better for society if individuals get to experience the full
spectrum of society. Else we're walling ourselves off.

~~~
johnnyo
If we are talking about current events or politics, that is a problem.

But I use reddit mostly to follow news about my favorite sports teams and a
few of my hobbies. For that, I don't care what the rest of reddit is saying.

------
dlandis
> But seriously, Reddit may be functional, but it’s dead.

But seriously, it really isn't dead. And the whole post seems overly dramatic
actually. Not to mention that the author starts by describing how he never
uses Reddit and doesn't even have an account, but yet evidently thinks he has
a very precise understanding of all its problems and clearly has very strong
feelings about how they should be addressed. Sounds like a redditor to me!

------
brownbat
Imagine the article rewritten as "The Death of the Internet."

All the premises are the same, and largely true: there's no strong central
control, it's basically run by volunteers who have conflicting interests, and
there's some abhorrent stuff out there.

The conclusion, that it's a failed experiment, doesn't seem to follow.

Reddit may die someday. Could happen, aggregators die, but I don't think a
scandal means it's at death's door.

Even though I disagree with the conclusion, especially its forcefulness, the
article has a fantastic collection of links. The links would be a great first
place to catch the journalistic zeitgeist.

~~~
smacktoward
Except that nobody's trying to operate "The Internet, Inc.", a centralized,
for-profit business encompassing the whole of the network. That's what Reddit-
the-company has been trying to do with Reddit-the-community, and it doesn't
work very well.

~~~
brownbat
Fair. And to that point, Digg's making money and Youtube is struggling.

Maybe all our success stories need another look...

[1] [http://blog.digg.com/post/109580738071/digg-by-the-
numbers-2...](http://blog.digg.com/post/109580738071/digg-by-the-
numbers-2015-edition) (well, "consistent revenue"... couldn't find precise
financials since 2008 or so)

[2] [http://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-
fo...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-for-
youtube-1424897967)

------
Mithaldu
It's interesting how all these people arguing against Reddit are unaware of
the prime principle by which Reddit decides to shut down communities. To reuse
his analogy:

Communities are shut down when they don't stay inside their rooms.

There's a term for that, brigading. On 4chan the principle was called
"anonymous isn't your army". Generally the people who build such "high amounts
of free speech" places don't mind if literally _everything_ is discussed, but
they, and over time also the userbase, reacts strongly if sub-groups try to
use the power of the crowd amassed to actively and negatively influence other
people, be this other sub-groups on the site, places elsewhere on the
internet, or even physical places or people.

Edit: He also says "tens of floors", which further demonstrates the ignorance,
since Reddit would be better described as thousands of floors. ( 676,951 sub-
reddits according to redditmetrics. )

~~~
tzs
> Edit: He also says "tens of floors", which further demonstrates the
> ignorance, since Reddit would be better described as thousands of floors. (
> 676,951 sub-reddits according to redditmetrics. )

It's an analogy between Reddit and a big community center building with
different groups having rooms in the building. The point is the relationship
between the groups in the above ground rooms, and the groups that are hidden
away in basement rooms. The number of floors is _completely_ _irrelevant_ to
the validity of the analogy as long as it is enough to qualify as a big
community center by community center standards. Tens of floors is sufficient.

If he had said tens of thousands of floors so that the number of rooms would
have more matched the number of sub-reddits, there would be people complaining
that no building has tens of thousands of floors.

~~~
Mithaldu
It's relevant because the cost and responsibility of closely managing
something of "community center" size is wildly different from something of
"arcology" size. Also see problems faced by: Youtube, almost every ISP ever.

------
TD-Linux
If you aren't a Reddit user, how can you judge what is causing the death of
Reddit? It's your personal anecdote of why you don't use Reddit, but clearly
there is an enormous userbase that was using Reddit despite the low amount of
global moderation.

~~~
MBCook
As a longtime Reddit user, this post struck a real chord with me. Horrible
crap on Reddit does exist, and sexist/racist/hateful/uncalled-for-jackassery
comments seem to be more and more common in the defaults and other places
where the mods don't keep REALLY tight control.

It is getting, slowly, worse. Not because of the number of people but the
standards of behavior they keep pushing the line on without pushback.

I think the biker bar analogy is fantastic. Even when the bikers stay in their
corner their large number is getting scarier and more creepy.

~~~
_delirium
I've seen this in the European-focused subreddits lately. Places like
/r/europe are usually pretty "normal" discussion boards considering that their
demographics are English-speaking, internet-using young people of those
regions. But periodically the comments (and comment scores) end up very
uncharacteristic in a thread or sub-thread, especially if it has to do with
immigration, Islam, or nationalism. Not just in the sense that some people
have conservative or nativist views on those subjects, but that suddenly the
discussion seems to be totally dominated by extreme versions of those views,
anything vaguely liberal said about the subject is downvoted to infinity, etc.
And the reason in that case if you dig around _usually_ turns out to be that
someone in a far-right/xenophobic subreddit linked there and caused an influx
of people with those views.

------
whoisthemachine
Perhaps the problem is that a company is trying to monetize a fully democratic
social network? A network like this deserves to be open-source and non-profit,
that's the only way the organization that runs the forum can reasonably hope
to remain appearing as a neutral actor in the forum. Also, they do need _some_
self-governance rules, as only to remove liability (which they do [1]).

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/rules/](https://www.reddit.com/rules/)

~~~
theodorewiles
I think the real threat is the investors demanding outsize returns. I have
read elsewhere that Pao might have been a sacrificial lamb - make some
changes, get fired, changes stay in place. I'm sure that the board has
significant changes around monetization in mind.

The mods should move everything to a non-profit org. The site is open-source
already, and you could even use their Oauth to port user accounts over
directly. My understanding is that they are just breaking even, which sounds
bad for a for-profit but sounds great for a not-for-profit, especially if your
executive director is getting CEO level pay.

Now, someone else will spend the time implementing my fantastic idea for me,
right? /s

------
hiou
Reddit isn't a single community site. Its what ning thought it could be.

------
michaelwww
_" there comes a time with communities that go toxic where the only real
answer is to take them out behind the barn and Old Yeller them. That time has
come for Reddit."_

I've been on Reddit since near the beginning and still enjoy the site
everyday. We regulars keep pointing out the great subreddits that exist, so I
don't need to do that here. Unlike Chuq, I don't feel guilt by association
because there are also terrible subreddits. I'm not one to condemn all of
4chan because of 4chan/b/, but I can understand those who think that way.

What I wanted to say is that Reddit has not changed, society has. If anything
Reddit has improved by banning subreddits like jailbait and fatpeoplehate. The
trend on Reddit is less toxicity, not more as Chuq implies.

America has been having a conversation the last few years about rape culture,
sexual harrasement of women, micro-aggressions, exclusionary speech, gender
fluidity, sexual objectification of women in video games, sexting, celebrity
nudes, and so on. This new awareness has been applied to Reddit recently
starting with 'the fappening' and continuing with gamergate. I think these
conversations are worth having and I like some of the change as a result, but
it's not fair to Reddit to say it is going downhill. We're just applying a new
set of standards to it.

Could a site like Reddit or 4chan even become succesful today with all the new
rules in place, or would they kill it in the crib? I'm not sure.

------
smaili
Starting to get tired of all these people complaining about Reddit, and yet
when I put it out there to build something better I barely get any responses.

------
fab13n
The fixing strategy somehow reminds me how Digg has been "fixed", not long
before the user base massively migrated to Reddit.

------
RALaBarge
I think the reports of Reddit's death is greatly exaggerated. The death
certificate isn't usually granted until you produce a dead body, and it seems
that Reddit, good and bad, is still very much alive.

------
callil
Tons of problems yes, but in 6 months this will be all but forgotten. It will
become a part of internet lore. Reddit is not dead, reddit will live on and
evolve slowly as its community changes and adapts.

------
nraynaud
I am a bit skeptical, if maximizing shareholder value at any cost is stupid,
then aligning the mods with money seems a bit stupid too.

------
byerley
It's hard to not view this as whining about the failed gentrification of
Reddit (especially with the biker bar analogy).

I'm struggling to think of any successful social network sites that are heavy-
handed with moderation. Certainly twitter, facebook, ect. get the same
accusations of harboring "unethical" groups.

------
EarlPoncho
> reddit is dead

31st most visited website. i hope to be this dead one day

------
hoopd
Having somebody throwing chairs will ruin your dinner party, so is the person
who's only going to look for an excuse to police how others speak.

------
wanderer2323
The author is scared by the reddit 'basement' and he wants us to think that
his position is in such a majority that reddit is doomed. Sorry, Chuq Von
Rospach, that's just false-consensus effect talking.

