I think the problem with Reddit (and Digg, and almost every other popular social news site) is algorithmic. The pattern is the same every time one of these sites becomes popular - it starts out with a small group of insightful people that submit and vote on content that they find interesting. The reason it works is that they have similar taste. Kind of like hacker news at the moment. Once the site grows, however, the initial group gets diluted and the site is swarmed with content that is not necessarily core content for the original group. And the new arrivals vote up the material that is submitted by the other new arrivals, thus diluting the site to the lowest common denominator. This is why Reddit is now filled with Ron Paul, conspiracy theories, LOLcats, and all sorts of other crap.
It is possible, and in my opinion not all that hard, to solve this algorithmically.
One way would be to make mod points weighted, so that members that have signed up early, have high karma, have the same taste (based on their upmods and submissions) as the core group have mod points that count for more than new arrivals that have yet to build any credibility.
Another way would be to not let new arrivals submit stories until they reached a certain karma. This would mean that submitted stories would stay more true to the original idea.
Another way would be to only let users have a certain amount of mod points that would be renewed after x days, spurring users to use them more sparingly, and stopping users that up/downmod everything that is not in their particular interest.
Yet another way would be to let the system learn from the users submissions and votes, and show stories based on this calculated using datamining. Maybe as a "my {site}"
There are numerous other ways of doing it, these are just off the top of my head - and yes there are probably pitfalls in some or all of these ideas.
The point I want to make though is that the social news sites are pursuing the wrong goals once they start to gain traction. Instead of working on and constantly tweaking their algorithms they seem to focus more on new features, design, marketing or whatever.
There is an excellent business opportunity in creating back-end software to drive these sites and solve the algorithmic problems that, for some reason that is unclear to me, are so hard for these sites to do properly.
But, you're changing the way that the site _can_ be used. Not saying the that recommendation engine works well, but it won't work at all if I can't rate things because I have no karma left. It also won't help me, if I use reddit in place of sites like del.icio.us or other social bookmarking sites.
Personally, I think the private subreddit thing is going to be a huge win, because it now becomes a better del.icio.us. In del.icio.us you can share links, but you can't easily discuss things about them. Now, in order for this to be really good, reddit will have to provide a "copy this to my private subreddit" and make it more blatantly apparent that you can actually become "friends" with others. It wouldn't hurt reddit if they made it super super easy to add and update the people allowed in the subreddit (I'm thinking API even).
Anyway, the argument about a site not being useful at all if you can't rate things because you have no karma left is easily countered if you head over to Slashdot and see how their system works. http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml I absolutely agree though that it cannot be used as a del.icio.us or the like.
But it will be interesting to see how it plays out over at Reddit. I'm not holding my breath though...
I didn't see it as such, more as an interesting conversation :-)
But won't you have the problem that Reddit seems to suffer from, namely that some users will downmod all other rising stories than their own? Maybe even bother to create multiple accounts for doing so?
And I agree, the above alone won't solve Reddits problems. But if someone with a bit of algorithmic sense had the dataset to look at I think that it should be possible to come up with a pretty good solution. Probably one using a multitude of technologies, of which the above may be some.
> ... namely that some users will downmod all other rising stories than their own?
Reddit's new "create your own subreddit" can have moderators that can ban users, or make it private with invites. Maybe what you'll get is something similar to flickr groups. "You contribute great stories and provide insightful comments, please come join us in our private subreddit."
This probably leads to other problems...
> Probably one using a multitude of technologies, of which the above may be some.
While I agree that stopping spammers from hitting the front page would be a great addition to any social news sites, I'd hate to see the other, not so popular uses, of these sites suffer as a result of combative strategies.
I think that line of thought is on the right track. The reason money hold value is that they are a scarce resource. Some can have more than others, but only if they have earned it. Thus users with more "money in the bank" can have a stronger say. (note similarity with real world ;-))
The major problem with modding systems as they are today (in my humble opinion, that is) is that there are no scarcity. We all have all the money in the world, so to speak.
What this means is that we don't save our mod points, submissions or whatever because there is no cost in losing them. We can give away money and still have an unlimited amount. And we all have equal amounts.
We need to go from socialist to a capitalist modding systems :-)
I've always thought this would be a really good feature for conferences or big lecture classes to have so that people could ask and vote on questions in real time.
Is Reddit supposed to be democratic? I would say its more like a republic (with the representatives elected via Reddit karma points, the powerful getting more powerful) Not that there's anything wrong with that - Seth Godin says the #1 in most categories dominates - Vanilla ice outsells all other ice cream flavors combined. People like leadership, whether its ways to amuse away a little of the day (lolcats, conspiracy theories) or MSM
I'd love to have one for feature ranking for my startup. Auctomatic has something along these lines which they built themselves... I've always been envious.
