
How Reddit went from a second-tier aggregator to the Web’s unstoppable force - robg
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/01/reddit_how_the_site_went_from_a_second_tier_aggregator_to_the_web_s_unstoppable_force_.single.html
======
ChuckMcM
_"In many ways, Reddit is a more accessible, less vulgar version of 4Chan, the
meme-spewing online redoubt of the Web’s most vicious trolls."_

This sort of sums up Reddit for me. 4chan is an example of what some Usenet
groups were years ago, a community of like minded individuals debating their
world views which are fundamentally similar and who share a common
background/mindset. I suspect there is a relationship between the commonality
of the participants and the vibrancy of the community.

It has been my experience that when you take a set of self selected folks and
give them a wide ranging area to discuss, their discussions about most topics
are energetic and self-reenforcing. This makes for a very strong community
experience.

I first noticed it hanging out with 'air force' kids (which is to say early in
my life everyone I hung out with, their parents, like mine, were serving in
the air force). That shared experience, moving from base to base, base housing
which was always nearly the same, stores with the same goods, etc, we (the
kids) seemed to have remarkably similar views about things. I noticed it again
when I went to college, the bulk of the folks who entered engineering were all
there for similar reasons and that created a community with a common set of
interests and values. For many folks college was the first place they had
experienced the 'community effect' that arises when there is a 'kind of
people' selection criteria affecting the overall group.

I am glad for the successes of Reddit. Staying vibrant and alive will be a
challenge, it is for any community, but they have a good start.

~~~
ChrisNorstrom
I actually left Reddit for this exact reason. It's obviously a success but to
me the size of the community became too much to be a functioning community.
Every submission had thousands of comments. The "smartass" comments are always
at the top, the mindlful ones get lost in the middle, mine ends up at the end.
What's the point in chiming in with meaningful discussion when there's 2,000
"chit chat" comments like "That's what your mom told me last night" followed
by "That's I told your mom last night", followed by "That's what she told me
to tell your mom last night", followed by another regurgitation of the
previous comment in a different order.

=== Why I left Reddit ===

I remember Reddit back when it had tech news and startup advice. Back when it
was like Hacker news basically. At that time Reddit's comments were of the
highest quality. It was the most intelligent & sometimes hilarious discussion
I had ever seen in an online community. So I fell in love with Reddit. But as
it grew (especially from Digg refugees and popularity) Redditors started to
"participate" on an astronomical scale. Because of the shear amount of
participation, the first members to comment on a story (despite having
mediocre comments) had a better chance of getting upvoted, those who waited a
few hours to submit their comment got their voice lost among thousands of
comments and no one would ever see it.

The problem with upvotes is this: They don't scale up very well. Whoever
comments first competes with LESS comments and so has a HIGHER chance of
getting their comment upvoted. Remember, just because your comment was one of
the first to be seen and voted on doesn't mean it contributes the most to the
conversation, the best comments come from people hours, sometimes days, after
a submission gets popular. So by the time high quality comments came in, the
community of Redditors had already received and upvoted the most mediocre,
smart ass comments with tired memes, old jokes, & complete non seriousness.
Even if they spotted your high quality comment that revealed something
incredibly profound and rare, you never stood a chance at catching up to the
comments at the top.

Also, as Reddit's popularity grew, the worst of humanity came out. Off-
topicness, mob-rule, endless memes all became the norm. You had to flee to a
subreddit and even then, the massive amount of comments (most of them one
liners and chit chat) was just too much to wade through. I became frustrated
at trying to have a serious conversation in a room full of jokers, I was just
fed up with trying to speak in a room full of thousands of people yelling. So
I just left.

My last few days I was a Redditor, I remember every submission had comments
like these at the top:

Comment#1 "Smartass answer that doesn't contribute to the conversation",

Comment#2 "Smartass conversation that doesn't contribute to the answer",

Comment#3 "Contribution that doesn't converse the smartass answer"

Comment#4 "Smartass answer that doesn't converse the contribution"

Comment#5 "I see what you did there"

Comment #2,476 _The most intelligently posted comment that will never get
upvoted because no one can see it_

I just left, and not on a good note. I miss Reddit because it helped me
overcome my Christian Extremism and move towards Athiesm but it is nothing
like it used to be, and for that I am angry. The Reddit I remember is dead.

~~~
b0rsuk
Reddit is an interesting lesson for everyone with vague interest in society
and human (tribal?) behavior. One of less pleasant experiences I had was on
Atheism subreddit. Atheists like me like to think they're a bit special,
they're more civilized, and don't exhibit the behaviors attributed to
religious folks (intolerance, agression, mob mentality). Except that Atheism
subreddit is eerily similar to how religious folks behave at times. My
conclusion is that it's not so much atheism that makes certain folks more
restrained, but isolation. Online, on a site like Reddit where atheists can
group together, they're just another tribe. Only a bit (if at all) better than
others.

Oh, and the top voted link at the moment was a sex tape of some woman who
declared she's having sex with a stranger just to spite her husband who joined
a sect which made him sell their furniture. And she was going to making him
watch the video.

~~~
Shorel
Atheism doesn't change human nature in any fundamental way. Reddit is not at
fault here.

In fact, I see human nature as ritualistic as ever. As I see the world, most
things in religion are more human-in-a-society based (a ritual for adulthood,
a ritual for marriage, and some more rituals) than belief based.

We atheists/agnostics/non-religious should separate the wheat from the chaff
and stop assuming something is bad just because religion does it.

------
kamaal
This is probably an Indication of one thing. Some people go in the search of
elusive perfection. Which never seems to be achievable. No pure perfection
exists.

So please don't deny the good for the perfect.

Reddit, has been ridiculed enough for being bad for X reasons. But hey, that's
the only thing existing out there. And it works well for vast majority of the
people. People who are out there just for chat or a serious discussion on a
sub reddit.

I have seen that this thing works in many cases. If you have some good idea
that can solve problems. Work on it and get an implementation out. Even if for
the moment the working quality of that thing or the implementation quality of
that thing isn't upto the mark.

This can be seen manifest in things like programming languages too! People
criticize Php/Perl for all sort of reasons. But hey, remember they are so much
useful and practical in the real world the elusive perfect that is supposed to
replace never comes into existence. Because the elusive perfect is always in
never ending path of ideation and implementation, in form of some abstract
concept.

People call bash scripts and solutions hacked together using sed/bash/Unix
text processing utilities crud, non readable, not elegant or whatever. But
remember they often serve as the fastest way to solve some very difficult
problems in seconds/minutes. While an equivalent verbose elegant language
would take hours of effort writing and testing the program.

Sometimes an existing ugly solution survives in the real world, it wins and
persists and nothing really replaces it. For many reasons, it was first to
arrive. It convinces people that it can be useful to them. It is practical, it
can survive and maintain the niche for a long time.

Meanwhile the elusive perfection, never arrives.

Reddit works and wins on the same principles.

------
johno215
The killer feature that reddit has is subreddits.

I disagree with the article; there is no one reddit culture. One can go to
r/politics, r/gardening, r/fitness, or r/askscience for example, and they all
feature their own cultures and own biases. For example r/fitness has a culture
focusing on weight lifting for fitness. But for people who are into fitness
through running, there is r/running. The same thing goes for politics:
r/politics tends to be left leaning, but you can find right leaning people in
order subreddits.

There are thousands of vibrant community subreddits were people with similar
interests (and sometimes opinions) participate. All with their own cultures
and moderation rules for what are acceptable posts.

Subreddits combined with voting and good moderation make reddit way better
than usenet, Digg in its heyday, or 4chan.

~~~
cdr
I don't really agree. There is definitely a general reddit culture (a bland
white male young american type of culture) and it seeps into all subreddits to
various degrees. It's pretty awful for the "default" subreddits but it affects
the entire site. If you want to have intelligent discussion outside of the
biases of the above demographic, god help you if your subreddit gets popular
or someone does a search that finds it.

You could compare it to 4chan having a culture despite there being dozens of
different boards.

~~~
johno215
Maybe we just visit different sub-reddits. I tend to stay away from the front
page ones because they remind me to much of the culture Digg used to have when
it was popular. But there are plenty of smaller yet highly active subreddits
that don't.

I will admit that for the ones I use, the proportion of Americans are at least
90%.

~~~
PerryCox
Your exactly right. Once you unsubscribe from the default subreddits and start
subscribing to subreddits that have more moderation (against memes, etc)
reddit becomes a much better place. You end of with subreddit's like
AskScience where you can have though provoking conversations without memes.

That's what makes reddit great, if your not into the memes, you can easily
"turn them off".

~~~
cdr
I agree that strong moderation is key, but reddit's moderation system doesn't
encourage strong moderation and is pretty borked in general. Strong moderation
is a rare exception, especially when you consider the more popular subreddits
have thousands to hundreds of thousands of users per moderator.

For one thing, the site admins won't get involved with what they term
"moderation fights" so one bad actor as a mod can cause a hostile
takeover/coup of a subreddit that nothing can be done about.

------
watmough
Reddit did two brilliant things:

    
    
      1. They didn't screw up their site. 
      2. They scaled. Not without struggles tho. 
    

Pretty good demo of letting competitors destroy themselves.

~~~
g3orge
I alway believed that reddit needs a redesign, but now that I'm thinking it,
Digg had 4 redesigns and maybe that is a part for why it failed. People don't
like change.

~~~
smspence
It was arguably only the dreaded "version 4" redesign that caused the failure
of Digg. And it wasn't necessarily the look that everyone hated, it was the
fact that every single aspect of functionality was completely changed in a way
that made it a different type of website. It took the voting-power out of the
users' hands and gave it to the "publishers" of the content.

------
brador
Aside: There is a lot of very cool stuff on Reddit at this point and it would
be a shame to lose it through some random act of nature/massive admin
error/other non predictable event...

Has Reddit considered providing a public backup functionality ala Wikipedia?
Anyone have thoughts on this?

~~~
newandimproved
Not only that, but with Reddit being a political force to be reckoned with, it
may become a target of the US government.

~~~
zhazam
> it may become a target of the US government.

The FBI might target them, but most likely for their laissez-faire moderation
where deleting a subsection literally dedicated to child pornography caused a
major uproar.

~~~
gzavitz
I think calling r/jailbait pornography could be debatable. Technically
speaking there wasn't anything illegal with the sub-reddit, which is why it
upset a lot of people - even those who wouldn't go close to r/jailbait (such
as myself).

~~~
zhazam
Possession of it was grounds for conviction in US vs Knox.

------
SnydenBitchy
Apropos reddit, here’s how Alexis Ohanian deflects the blame from redditors
onto the victims of their creepy facebook-stalking and harassment: “Your kids
need to know that any time they take an image and put it in a digital format…
they should assume that it is now public content… That’s the useful thing I
think CNN could have reported on, instead of making up a bunch of jibber-
jabber about reddit.”

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXZYvrue1BE&feature=youtu...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXZYvrue1BE&feature=youtu.be&t=2m31s)

~~~
babs474
That is really interesting to me considering reddits reaction to a service I
created a while ago that allowed you to retrieve deleted or edited comments.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/etd52/lets_have_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/etd52/lets_have_a_discussion_about_deleted_comments/)

Apparently digital reddit comments are exempt from this notion.

~~~
ceol
Ah, I remember you. Would you mind going over how unedditreddit saved
comments? Do you think you'd be able to make the same service now where
threads reach 5,000+ comments daily?

~~~
babs474
Sure, reddit has (or had at one point) a json api to get all new comments as
they stream in. Unedditreddit simply saved those comments. Later when the user
indicates they are interested in a certain comment id, I can simply serve it
up out of my database.

Whether the same approach would work today depends on how well the reddit new
comment api is holding up. Even a year ago, when unedditreddit was working,
new comments was a decent sized firehose and the approach seemed to work well.

~~~
ceol
Thanks for your answer! I forgot about the /comments page for each subreddit
(including r/all). How often did you poll the API for comments? It seems like
there are so many comments that you'd have to do it every couple of seconds.

------
nextparadigms
I like that Reddit's voting system is a lot more democratic than Digg's system
where there were "power users". I think this also helped create the strong
and, at the same time, large community.

~~~
sausagefeet
Offtopic but, I'd love to see a site where any downvote MUST have a comment
associated with it, that way one has to validate their downvotes. A downvote
can be agreed with (increasing the downvote) without comment though, like
saying "Yes I agree with what this person says is wrong with this".

~~~
TylerE
That would make things worse. The biggest problem with Reddit right now is
that not enough people downvote weak content. Making downvotes harder will
only increase the rate at which the 4chan refugees meme the place up.

~~~
Anechoic
_The biggest problem with Reddit right now is that not enough people downvote
weak content_

IMO the biggest problem with Reddit is that too many people downvote well-
supported arguments because it goes against their belief system which really
stymies the conversation. I'd like to see downvotes haves some 'cost'
associated with them so they are used sparingly and on content that really
deserves to be downvoted.

~~~
mkr-hn
The problem with this is that even the best communities have types of
arguments that get plenty of upvotes. That would make it easy for someone who
knows how to win upvotes to get all the downvote points they need, while
making it hard on people who play fairly.

~~~
saryant
This was essentially Slashdot's approach to voting. Make mod points a sparse
currency, forcing users to be far more cautious in their use of them.

I don't agree with their policy that those who vote in a thread may not
comment in that thread but I think a lot can still be learned from Slashdot's
model.

------
ddelony
Reddit is a spiritual successor to Usenet, with all the good and bad that
entails.

~~~
thought_alarm
If only they had heirarchical reddits...

    
    
        /r/comp/sys/hp48
    

... and an archive like DejaNews or Google Groups (back when it used to
actually work) to record everything for future reference.

------
philhippus
'How' - Digg bloated and went belly up, Reddit welcomed the fallout.

~~~
oldstrangers
More realistically, reddit continued to cultivate their community while digg
struggled through redesign after redesign, usually putting users second or
third (when they introduced RSS importing).

------
contextfree
I only ever visit the programming subreddit. I used to prefer Hacker News but
for my taste it has declined quite a bit of late, to the point where
r/programming threads have approximately the same content quality with
slightly less groupthink and much less self-seriousness.

(No, this isn't a quality post either, but it at least expresses my sincere if
underexamined feelings.)

~~~
georgieporgie
Much like the rest of Reddit, /r/programming comes across as a bunch of 23
year olds. The "wisdom" I see bandied about in there is stunning.

------
b0rsuk
One of things I like the least about link aggregator sites like reddit, hacker
news and digg is the tendency to post hordes of links about the same major
event. I understand these links differ in their point of view and show the
event in different light, but come on ! There should be a way to group them
and make them use only one line, like

"Breaking news: Elvis Presley remains dead (41 links)"

Have a look at this picture: <http://wstaw.org/h/5e262d116e9/>

------
vicapow
it's about the community and how the site is structured to support that
community (and cats.)

------
Jun8
Started reading the article and got stuck reading the
[http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/omdyt/what_is_the...](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/omdyt/what_is_the_coolest_way_you_have_ever_been_asked/)
thread for 30 minutes or so.

That's how.

~~~
vl
You. are. evil.

You just reddit-bombed me and who knows how many HN'ers. 30 minutes gone and
counting.

------
peterjmag
OT: I wish journalists would stop capitalizing "web". The internet is an
established medium, not a singular entity. I can't think of any good reasons
to capitalize it—any suggestions?

~~~
petercooper
I was thrown into the world of online journalism in the late 90s when it was
dictated by most style guides to capitalize Web. I still retain this as a
habit in professional writing, although appreciate and _occasionally_ use the
newer forms like "website" instead of "Web site." The AP style guide also
recommended "Web" although I don't know if it does _now_ as I don't pay as
much attention to style as I did.

Put it this way, journalists who've been around a long time learnt "Web" and
will often stick with it out of habit. "E-mail" seems to be a little further
along the line here though with old school journalists seemingly more likely
to use "email" than they did 10 years ago.

(This page - <http://www.apstylebook.com/?do=ask_faq> \- indicates that AP
recommends "Web" but also "website" and "email.")

 _Internet_ , on the other hand, is (and continues to be) capitalized in most
cases and certainly in formal usage. The Internet is _an_ internet, but an
internet is not necessarily the Internet.. ;-)

~~~
peterjmag
Ah, I was aware of the AP's recent switch to "website", but I wasn't aware
that it did _not_ include a change to "web". Thanks for pointing that out!

You make a good point about "Internet", but I always feel somehow unclean when
I write it that way. Perhaps it's just this generation's aversion to
capitalization in general. Here's one interesting argument against that form:
<http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2004/08/64596>. Food for thought.
:-)

------
AznHisoka
As an aside, anyone else sick of hearing success stories of sites/businesses
we all have the potential to make? Reddit and DropBox.

~~~
bpodgursky
But you didn't.

~~~
prawn
Like the classic response to criticism of contemporary art:

    
    
      I could've made that.
      Yeah, but you didn't.

~~~
AznHisoka
Yup, that's my favorite response too. FYI, I wasn't criticizing. Just stating
a natural response to articles like these. I'm busy working on my gig as well.

