
r/ChangeMyView Is Graduating Reddit: Introducing ChangeAView.com - ChangeAView
https://changeaview.org/2019/04/06/r-changemyview-is-graduating-reddit-introducing-changeaview-com/
======
defertoreptar
When I first saw the subreddit, I thought it was a neat idea. I like the idea
of digging into a tough subject and challenging our beliefs.

I couldn't put my finger on it for the longest time, but what I eventually
realized was that I didn't like how inauthentic the whole thing felt. Changing
a deeply held belief just isn't that easy, yet almost every thread has the OP
giving a delta.

How it appears to me is that people have beliefs that they realize are either
unpopular or controversial, and so they use the subreddit to learn what they
"should" believe or at least a rationalization for ignoring their true
beliefs.

~~~
Sendotsh
> How it appears to me is that people have beliefs that they realize are
> either unpopular or controversial, and so they use the subreddit to learn
> what they "should" believe or at least a rationalization for ignoring their
> true beliefs.

A large portion of Reddit in general (especially the front page and popular
subreddits) is people making up stories/opinions/content created specifically
to illicit as many replies and argument as possible, as that's what gets more
votes and attention. It's a popularity contest, not a place for genuine
discussion.

You see it here too, to a lesser extent. You see it everywhere there's
likes/upvotes tied to accounts. People compete for the high score.

I still personally think forums were/are a better format for discussion. Just
a flowing conversation where general activity in a thread bumps it up and not
votes.

~~~
darkpuma
Even the traditional PHP forum has all kinds of senseless 'flare' on each
post. Post counts, signup dates, eye catching signatures, etc. A large portion
of the screen space on your typical forum is still dedicated to attention
seeking behavior.

IRC is better. There is very little on screen besides the discussion itself.
IRC nicks can be used to grab attention, but there are only a few characters
to work with so usually it's just a bit quirky but not really distracting.

~~~
phist_mcgee
And 4chan theoretically is better still, because the anonymity means posters
are not rewarded at all for their contributions. Even the same poster, posting
twice in the thread is not identifiable on most boards, allowing the
discussion to be the primary focus. On the other hand, the culture of most
*chans is to be abusive and confrontational, so who knows if it is any better.

~~~
darkpuma
In my experience 4chan has more attention seeking behavior than IRC (inline
images facilitate it moreso than nicks), and on IRC users tend to be more
friendly and aware of each other's humanity.

~~~
chx
> and on IRC users tend to be more friendly and aware of each other's
> humanity.

I have been on IRC since 1993 but this is news to me.

~~~
michaelt
'Friendlier than 4chan' is a pretty low bar.

~~~
chx
For sure but "aware of each other's humanity" is ... not something I'd call
your typical IRC dweller.

------
propter_hoc
There are two problems that you will have to deal with:

\- auto-discovery and growth through r/all - no longer will you have people
popping in because you made it to Reddit's front page

\- loss of the great number of current subscribers who (before) can go to
their reddit homepage and see your top posts automatically, but (now) would
have to go to a totally new website to see your posts. I subscribe to about 40
subreddits but only visit deliberately about 3 of those.

Good luck (sincerely), but I would not be surprised if r/CMV stays larger than
your new independent website.

~~~
diminoten
It'd be not-that-difficult, technology wise, to integrate with Reddit, with
submissions instead going to changeaview.com instead of reddit.com's comment
section.

~~~
Tomte
But legally that's a huge can of worms. Reddit would shut them down instantly.

And not necessarily by suing, Reddit could save itself some trouble and simply
delete the subreddit.

~~~
diminoten
Reddit has never shut down any other company or group doing anything related
to that, and honestly why would they?

~~~
Tomte
Have others integrated Reddit submissions into third-party web sites?

I'd be surprised if Reddit liked that.

~~~
diminoten
[https://np.reddit.com/r/hackernews/](https://np.reddit.com/r/hackernews/)

Reddit offers an extensive API to do just that:
[https://www.reddit.com/dev/api/](https://www.reddit.com/dev/api/)

It makes tons of business sense to let things like that happen. It is in no
way a legal can of worms or in fact any trouble at all.

~~~
Tomte
Good to know. Thanks!

------
msvan
It'll be interesting to see if this works. If it does, it means that Reddit
mods can gain full ownership of their communities and do something more than
just run a volunteer subreddit. If you run a popular sub, I think it's
reasonable to ask why you are spending countless unpaid hours tending to a
community when someone else reaps all the profit. It's natural to say: "Okay,
I have hundreds of thousands of users here on Reddit. That's gotta be worth
something."

This does open the Pandora's box of monetizing a group of people that really
dislike getting monetized. (Reddit users, that is.) And if it does work, maybe
Reddit communities will start to be seen as a way to start community-based
businesses/organizations.

~~~
ssnistfajen
I mod a large-ish subreddit and I disagree with moderators "gaining full
ownership of their communities". Not every mod was around since the very
beginning or did most of these mods spend considerable effort marketing their
communities like one would do in an actual company. Even for communities with
a clear theme and set of behavioural rules (e.g. r/CMV), a lot of that is
enforceable via AutoMod. Most of what moderators do are barely more than
Internet janitors.

A volunteer position is voluntary. There is no contract or minimum time
commitment (though some subs have minimum mod action requirements). If a
moderator no longer likes to commit their time, they can either go on a hiatus
or leave.

Monetizing individual Reddit communities or paying moderators will create a
whole plethora of financial and ethical issues which Reddit HQ is obviously
unwilling to address at the moment. I'm pretty sure they've thought about this
and decided keeping the status quo is the best choice for the time being.

------
fourstar
This won’t work. Here is why: I tried the same thing with /r/lifeprotips.

I created that subreddit YEARS ago and initially wanted to build the website
for it.

I populated all the good life hacks that I found throughout the internet
initially to the subreddit and the community naturally grew — but I also
invested time and money into it (by giving gold to top members).

Then when I launched the website, I had an auto moderator rule that removed a
post from anyone who submitted a link-based post and PM’d them telling them to
submit to the new website (@lifeprotips.com).

Well, guess what happened? Someone got upset and reported me. Because I had
Adsense on it, that went to “justify” their case saying I was monetizing the
subreddit.

It resulted in a subsequent shadow ban which eventually led to the removal of
my reddit account (pretty old account with lots of history).

The mod who did this is /u/krispykrackers.

Good luck, though. I’m rooting for you, because Reddit doesn’t reward or
appreciate creators, and without them, they’d be nothing.

~~~
diminoten
The mistake you made was allowing posts at all on Reddit. You should have
changed the CSS to point people at lifeprotips.com, and just created
submissions for posts on lifeprotips.com.

~~~
TeMPOraL
The mistake was thinking they owned a community. They may have started it, but
once grown, the community is its own thing. A successful migration to an
external website would require a wide buy-in from the prominent community
members, and cannot be done by fiat by whoever technically controls the means
of discussion.

~~~
diminoten
Reddit communities aren't the same as in person social communities, they don't
have any real structure beyond the moderation class. The "buy in" you're
talking about _is_ the fact that this site was built.

I don't think this will "succeed", but not because of anything related to
migration; it's just not that good of an idea, from a business standpoint. If
they redefine success as something other than growth and user retention, maybe
they can create a fake kind of success, but this site will not grow users or
any of the things a normal startup looks for when launching a product, and the
monetization will never be worth anything of value, but simply because the
idea isn't that great.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Disagree thoroughly.

WRT. communities - no, there really is more to it than "moderation class",
just like there's more to HN than pg, dang and sctb. Regular submitters,
regular commenters and people voting are what creates a community, what makes
visitors go there, what makes one subreddit better than another on the same
topic. They're the soul of a subreddit. Despite what the subreddit creator or
moderators want, nothing can prevent those regulars from deciding to stay, or
to move elsewhere. 'fourstar built a site and wanted to migrate the community
by fiat, but people didn't move, and instead reported him.

> _it 's just not that good of an idea, from a business standpoint. If they
> redefine success as something other than growth and user retention, maybe
> they can create a fake kind of success, but this site will not grow users or
> any of the things a normal startup looks for when launching a product (...)_

Here is a thing: nobody in the community cares. The regular posters,
commenters and voters don't care about "growth and user retention" beyond
"people like it in here". Lurkers and irregular visitors don't care about it
either, they're interested in actual content the community curates.
Communities like subreddits exist so that people with like interest can
exchange thoughts and media about those interests together. That somebody
monetizes them indirectly through ads is an artifact of hosted platforms, but
nobody will be willing to abandon a perfectly good one just because someone
related to the community wants to take this money for themselves instead.

Imagine this: a guy got together some people and started organizing regular
open poetry evenings in a coffee shop in the center of a city. The event
became successful, grew quite an audience; the coffee shop wanted it there (as
it drove foot traffic), so it kind of kept organizing itself. Fast forward
couple years, the original organizer suddenly announces that from now on, the
meetings will take place in a coffee shop he just opened on the outskirts. How
do you think the regular guests and performers would react? I imagine they'd
laugh the guy out of a room - it's ridiculous to leave a perfectly good
meeting place and move to the middle of nowhere just because one person
_really really_ wants to make money off them. I imagine if the guy was telling
the guests to go elsewhere next time, the coffee shop itself would step in and
kick the guy out.

~~~
diminoten
Reddit and HN are entirely unrelated, and any sense of community that you
think exists in a subreddit is your own perception, not reality. Sorry, it
just isn't there, because the platform doesn't allow for it.

~~~
TeMPOraL
My personal experience strongly disagree with yours. Not every subreddit
develops a community where people recognize each other, but many do. Or, as
you say, I'm imagining it.

Regardless, my argument still holds. Whatever semblance of community there is,
it's obvious it won't appreciate someone disrupting it in order to make a
buck.

~~~
diminoten
Sorry, you're completely imagining it, and no your argument doesn't hold.

Also, I hate to break it to you, but _Reddit_ is making more than a buck on
your little "community". Nothing whatsoever is different or special about
Reddit vs. this website.

You're not part of anything, you're not building anything, the people you
think of as "friends" on Reddit aren't, and you need to realize that. That
site isn't for what you think it's for.

------
huebnerob
The idea that people’s important opinions can be changed by some sort of
silver bullet mega-argument is naive and immature, and frankly a great example
of what’s wrong with discourse on the internet.

In this light, the fact that CMV has the hubris to think their ‘experiment’ is
significant outside reddit is not surprising, but no less laughable.

~~~
cirgue
> The idea that people’s important opinions can be changed by some sort of
> silver bullet mega-argument is naive and immature, and frankly a great
> example of what’s wrong with discourse on the internet.

Even more naive and immature is the idea that conversations either lead to
epiphany or do nothing. Comments are read several orders of magnitude more
than they're responded to. You might not change that person's mind right now,
but that kind of discourse is a part of how other people form or reinforce
their opinions, and the OP might be more willing to change their mind in the
future upon having other interactions and experiences that challenge their
views, especially if someone has shown them a good-faith argument in the past.

~~~
huebnerob
> Even more naive and immature is the idea that conversations either lead to
> epiphany or do nothing.

Ah yes, where ever did I get that idea when forming my opinion about a site
titled change my view, where you literally get a whole separate level of fake
internet points for giving people deltas, cough, epiphanies?

~~~
mejari
Except CMV itself doesn't claim that that "whole separate level of fake
internet points" are epiphanies, or even full changes of position

>The definition of 'change' (verb) is "make or become different."

>Following on from the previous segment, we therefore believe that a change in
view simply means a new perspective. Perhaps, in the example of literally
looking at something, you've taken a step to the side; or a few steps; or
you've moved around and now stand behind it. Maybe you haven't 'moved', but it
looks slightly different to you now; in a new light.

>A change in view need not be a reversal. It can be tangential, or takes place
on a new axis altogether.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/index#wiki_what_i...](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/index#wiki_what_is_a_.27change.27.3F)

------
BucketSort
Is there a decentralized version of Reddit that allows you to own your
subreddit? I recently got burned where a sub I created was taken from me
without explanation or warning and when I reached out to the admins, it fell
on deaf ears. The idea that you have no ownership over your subreddit is
bearable until you get burned and realize how crazy it is. Same thing goes for
YouTube.

~~~
dman
Can you explain how and why a subreddit gets taken away?

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
reddit.com/r/redditrequest lets people request control of a subreddit that has
inactive moderators

~~~
BucketSort
I created the subreddit and brought on moderators I watched over for years,
then about 8 months ago I was removed suddenly without any warning or reason.
When I reached out to the admins they replied with an automated response. It
truly pisses me off because this was a good will project for me and I was an
archangel of the sub. It only started to bother me that they did this when the
usurper mods started supporting a third party platform in an effort to
potentially move people off the sub, which I found to be suspicious and now I
can do nothing about it. It really left a terrible taste in my mouth.

------
sgt101
To paraphrase : "We have been looking to find a way to monetise community
involvement and we think that moving it to somewhere that we control will let
us do that."

I myself am keen on big houses, fun parties and fast cars, so I can see the
attraction for the founders, I'm not sure what's in it for anyone else though.

~~~
canofbars
This seem fair, why should community moderators not get paid for their work?
Reddit gets everyone else to do the work and then scoops up the ad views at
the end.

------
oooshha
They will rapidly find that 90% of their traffic continues to exist within the
subreddit, therefore anyone wanting a good thread will post it there rather
than on the website, and the website will rapidly atrophy and be abandoned.

~~~
r00fus
While this may be true ( some currently successful sites are spin-offs from
other sites ), often there is an orbiting behavior.

If the option is to successfully monetize a portion of the flow vs nothing, it
may turn out to be a net positive for the subreddit admins.

~~~
blueboo
...but originating from Reddit? There's, ah, voat...

~~~
Vinnl
Imgur comes to mind.

~~~
slfnflctd
What's funniest to me about this is how reddit spent a bunch of money creating
their own image hosting service, but somehow imgur is still often the better
choice.

------
chpmrc
A friend built [https://arguman.org/](https://arguman.org/) a few years ago.
It's a platform for structured discussions ("argument analysis") which uses a
different (IMHO better) approach to discussions than unstructured text.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Woah, it looks great! Reminds me of Kialo
([https://www.kialo.com/](https://www.kialo.com/)), but there are only two
ways to recursively split an argument there ("agree" / "disagree") vs. three
here, and I also like Arguman's layout more. Pass my thanks to your friend, as
I've wanted for a long time to see discussions represented in this kind of
tree layout.

(Another thing I'd really love to see would be an extension of this: a DAG of
arguments, not a tree. This would most likely make sense only when arguments
solidified, and could be rearranged and deduplicated to form a graph.)

------
markdown
This feels wrong. I created a niche sub that currently has ~10k users, but I
consider the members of the community to be as much the "owners" of it as I
am.

Just as I work to keep spammers and self-promoters at bay, I'd find it pretty
scummy to form a startup around the sub and make money out of the
contributions of thousands of community members.

Separately, I like that at Reddit I know what I get now and very likely to get
in the future. But what if ChangeAView pulls a Quora and starts making it
harder to view content, like requiring login, etc.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Yup. Were I a member of that community, I'd feel wronged too.

> _Just as I work to keep spammers and self-promoters at bay, I 'd find it
> pretty scummy to form a startup around the sub and make money out of the
> contributions of thousands of community members._

Exactly. As you said, you may have created a community and technically own the
forum, but you're not _the_ community. The community is its own thing, and the
founder demanding it move somewhere else so they can monetize it would be no
different than an invasion of spammers - just another attempt at profiting off
the community.

------
jachee
Change my view: Verb forms of "graduate" which have a direct object _should_
be followed by "from" unless they're referring to the act of calibration.

"Jimmy graduated from college." Not "Jimmy graduated college."

Alternately acceptable exception that proves the rule: "State College
graduated 1500 students this year."

~~~
reaperducer
_" Jimmy graduated from college." Not "Jimmy graduated college."_

See also: "Oil needs to be changed." Not "Oil needs changed."

People are afraid of "to be" these days.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _See also: "Oil needs to be changed." Not "Oil needs changed."_

Correct (I think) alternatives: "Oil needs change", "Oil needs changing".

~~~
adamrezich
The oil needs a change

The oil needs to be changed

The oil needs changing

~~~
reaperducer
_The oil needs changing_

Not great. It’s very common, but it’s gerund abuse. In a lot of places it’s
considered hillbilly talk.

------
jf22
I love this subreddit but wouldn't visit a separate website.

~~~
benatkin
I don't like the subreddit but if I did, I would be interested in
participating in their community on a separate website. To each their own, I
guess.

Why I don't like it: a big part of it is people taking troll posts seriously.
The third post down on changeaview.com when I visited it is "To be transgender
or to condone it is nothing short of a lie". Then the author goes through a
bunch of talking points. They're not there to give people a fair chance to
change their view but to get people to read their garbage. Still, people argue
posts like these and get to feel good about it, when they're really just
helping to provide attention to trolls.

~~~
detcader
I'm interested in how this taxonomy of discussion works... can you define the
lines between what is "fair" discussion, "talking points" "trolling" and
"garbage"? Like, where does criticism of Israeli military aggression against
Palestinians fall? If that's an easy one, what about Ilhan Omar's views on the
government's influence in geopolitical affairs? Whatever your answers, would
many people not disagree?

~~~
r00fus
It’s mainly diagnosed on repetition of talking points.

If it sounds like astroturfed content then it’s likely to be so, whether
intentional or not.

------
snazz
I wonder how much more this will happen with the current controversy
surrounding Reddit’s funding and uncertain future. They are doing surprisingly
well after a horrid redesign and everything else that’s happened over there.

~~~
superkuh
Reddit is transitioning to a Facebook model to suck up all the users that are
hemorrhaging from over there. There's a new concentration on posting to
personal profiles, integrating commercial entities (ie, u/washingtonpost) as
"users" to blend in their ads seemlessly, and gentrifying to appease these new
adertisers that don't want to be next to potentially controversial content.

These are all things that don't bother the new users at all and the loss of
the founding population of redditors isn't causing any tears at corporate.

Of course they go after the scoundrels first in this quest but as the frog
slowly boils more and more mainstream 'controversial' subreddits like
changemyview will get pushed out.

~~~
chillacy
I think that was inevitable the moment they started taking big VC money.
There's most proven way to become massively profitable is trading your user's
attention for ad money.

------
konart
>CMV: Asking peopel to stop using the "OK Hand" gesture because racists use
it, just gives power to that hand sign and legitimizes the white power
movement.

Holy crap, some people actually discuss something like this?

~~~
slfnflctd
Honestly, I don't see what's wrong with that discussion topic. I personally
haven't come to a conclusion myself.

On one hand, knowing it's associated with racists makes me hesitate to ever
use it. On the other hand, why should I let them change my behavior when a
minuscule bit of research would show that I'm clearly not a racist? Like with
many such things, it mostly depends on the context, but would be interested in
the conversation and not so quick to dismiss it as pointless.

~~~
konart
Really? For me it sounds like this - "Should we castrate men because some men
are rapists?".

>On one hand, knowing it's associated with racists

I'm pretty sure this is just west's or even a certain number of countries
problem. This topic is the second time I've personally ever heard\read that
somebody uses this sign as something other than an "ok" sign. The first time
I've read about it in someone's tweet - I even decided to call out to my
friends\readers\etc and one guy from Canada new about this.

Anyhow - no, nobody should stop using some sign just because a small, even if
very vocal group of people started using in for whatever reason they have.
Next time they will start to wear some color and what? We should stop wearing
it? Last time I checked people are pretty damn good with wearing brown coats
from Hugo Boss despite the obvious history facts.

This is like building a cage around yourself just because there are a few
stray dogs with rabies in the town.

>dismiss

I'm not saying it should be dismissed, if someone have questions or doubts -
one should feel free to voice them, sure. I'm just amazed by the topic, or
rather by the fact that some people haven't found an answer to this after so
many years. If this helps them to find one - I'm glad.

------
sodosopa
Good for them. I honestly and truly hope they succeed.

I have a small sub (30-40k =/\- subscribers)and thought about doing this. I
have the infrastructure for my personal projects but don't know if I wanna
deal with the upkeep and some of the few mods we have.

We're not political, we just wanna help people learn something and tell
someone to bugger off when it's needed. Would open up a lot of possibilities
and we would just use the Reddit sub as a link farm back to our site. It's
horrible UI and other inabilities aren't the experiences we want for our
users.

~~~
eecks
What's the sub?

~~~
sodosopa
I'm being somewhat vague about it now but hope to have news in the next 90
days.

------
hliyan
Perhaps this should be combined with a debate platform such as
[https://www.kialo.com/](https://www.kialo.com/)

------
durability
CMV: every single post in this subreddit and others like it (unpopular
opinions, am I the asshole, etc) are all 99% fake and useless wastes of space.

------
dontbenebby
Is it better to be it's own site? People need to seek out a website,
subreddits can be stumbled upon much more easily.

------
leowoo91
This event changed my view on how difficult it's to make a separate website.

------
iron0013
FROM

------
jadbox
I've been following this community and it's what inspired me over the last
year to build Dinnertable.chat, live matchmaking conversation platform that we
released just a few weeks ago: [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/dinnertable-
chat-3](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/dinnertable-chat-3)

------
InTheArena
Let's be honest about a different factor here - even if ChangeAView doesn't
take off, I doubt CMR has much of a future. There are few places on Reddit
where any sort of divergent view is accepted by the board, by the mods, and
the community in general. Maybe CMV continues to stick around, but given how
polarized it reddit has become, it's doubtful that there is room for a
subreddit that encourages open, critical thought..

(I say this, after finally throwing in the towel and unsubscribing from
/politics today. Even as a nevertrumper, the daily drumbeat of vitriol against
anyone who doesn't exhibit perfect ideological conformance is staggering)..

