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.
> 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.
> Yor're assuming that all users are equal and the important thing is raw eyeballs.
I really don't get how you are taking that from what I said. Of course I don't think all users are equal or that users and advertisers won't be driven away by bad behavior. It would be ridiculous to suggest otherwise.
My point is that, if management comes in swinging a white sword they will inevitably suffer a net loss. As I said, the community can be nudged in one direction or another—quite significantly given sufficient understanding and guile on the part of management—but you can't declare Reddit "broken" and then "fix" it. Even if you assume Reddit has "failed" (which I don't, but even granting that), the changes you need to make will drive away many more users than it ever attracts, because the "good" potential users are already turned off by Reddit, and the existing users will be alienated. If management comes in with the mentality of needing to "fix" Reddit then they are damned if they do and damned if they don't. Fortunately such axiomatic pessimism in Reddit is unfounded—I get how it is not what a heavy-handed SV elite megalomaniacal MBA wants in his portfolio, but that doesn't mean it can't be a successful business on its own terms.
> the changes you need to make will drive away many more users than it ever attracts, because the "good" potential users are already turned off by Reddit, and the existing users will be alienated.
That's an assumption. Based on no data. I know plenty of people, myself included, that have no interest in Reddit as it is today. I know a few interesting sub-Reddits but I don't want to deal with that community right now.
If the community changes I would be more interested. I'm not going to spend my time contributing to a sub-Reddit if it's the kind of place that is shitty to people I'm friends with.
Yes it is, in fact it is more than just an assumption, it is my thesis.
Also you seem to be using "no data" as a pejorative, but I challenge you to produce any data on this topic period. Some things are intractable or at the very least incredibly expensive to conduct good science around, and if you refuse to consider a topic without data you will be paralyzed.
Like the OA I have been participating in online communities for a very long time (ran my first BBS starting in 1988), so I have a pretty strong sense of how they live and die. One of the things I've learned is that what people say they will do in the face of some future changes correlates terribly with what they actually end up doing when said change is put into effect. Therefore, the last thing I would do is throw a grenade into my community in the hopes of attracting you and your friends who are put off by the current state of affairs.
> I really don't get how you are taking that from what I said.
It seemed to me that you were suggesting that shedding users is bad for Reddit. I think shedding a very small select percentage of the users could be a huge benefit for the site.
Remove some of the worst who don't add anything positive to the site and make an example out of them. Draw the line in the sand clear and bold.
That will get rid of some of the worst elements, and encourage others to behave better. I'm sure you'll lose people at first but in the long run I think it would benefit the site and its growth.
Any 'nudging' that is like the recent banning FPH is the same as a white sword to a sizable, at least vocal, segment of the community. I agree with the article that management is in a pretty bad spot. I've been on Reddit for years but I now notice that a lot of it seems to have a 'bad neighborhood' feel. I'm not sure it has a long life as a desirable destination.
My proposed solution is: move any subreddit you (The owners of the site) deem to be full of assholes to a different set of servers, that aren't free to use. If you want to be in a group full of assholes, you have to pay. Now you've split reddit into the normal people and the assholes, and they'll either have to pay, or stop being assholes and beg you to take them back.
With regard to a brand not wanting to get associated with the unsavory elements of society, what is the difference between advertising on reddit which has unsavory subs and advertising on the WSJ. It's not as if all readers of the WSJ are all upstanding citizens. I'm sure most are, but there have to be a few who aren't. Why is association transitive in one medium but not in another. Is it because one is a platform and provides a medium to these elements? But even so, how does that imply these communities "represent" the larger community as well as the management?
Surely we are capable as a soviet of making these distinctions...?
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.
A long, long time ago, that's how it tried to work. Long before they introduced subreddits, and before the signal/noise ratio made PG want to create HN.
Getting better recommendations was even presented as the reason why you should upvote/downvote posts.
But recommendation engines are very hard. Just look how poorly Amazon's work, despite its central role in corralling gigantic amounts of cash, the manpower and the raw talent that Amazon possesses. Reddit's smart customized home page wasn't better than the generic one. Eventually, multiplying subreddits and letting people [un]subscribe to them solved the problem better than going all AI.
As for fighting voting brigades, I believe they continuously work very hard on this, but rely on secrecy to keep their measures effective.
That's too bad. I'd especially like to see how it'd work on comments, where I'd try to teach reddit to avoid in-jokes.
As for Amazon, maybe its recommendations are intentionally unrefined, like how Target discovered it needed to obscure its direct mail campaigns aimed at newly pregnant women ( http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h... ). Granted, it's plausible Amazon just hasn't cracked the code yet.
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.
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.
Groupthink takes hold on Reddit even without tailored sorting.
In fact, I suspect allowing more isolation between factions would allow for a diversity of opinions to brew in those pockets, with the good ideas inevitably metastasizing to the whole network.
Yeah, but that doesn't solve the problem inherent in karma anyway, that all you end up getting is a bunch of people posting and upvoting comments with the same or similar viewpoints and patting eachother on the back.
Instead of spending energy on preventing people from patting each other on their back, I think it'd be more efficient to spend it on not having to watch them do it. Those who are patting backs in order for others to watch would wind up losing out in this scheme, anyway.
Reddit's management has a ton of resources that an 18-year-old in his dorm does not. Depending on the choices they make and who is running the team, I'd say Reddit either has a much lower chance (right now), or a much higher chance (if we assume they get a good management team in place), than the hypothetical college student. But the same chance?
> Just because you're paying to keep the lights on doesn't mean you can control the nature of the community.
Actually, it does? It doesn't mean you can create whatever you want, but you can certainly destroy the bits you don't like, which is what the advice you're critiquing is suggesting. You say that means you'll shed users, but that's the point of the advice. The analogy the author is using is hiring some really strict bouncers to eject the "bikers". Which will absolutely cause the bar to "shed users" in the short term.
> 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.
I don't think you really understood his comments. Fundamentally you're responding to someone saying "Reddit can't be fixed" with "this guy is an idiot; doesn't he understand Reddit can't be fixed?".
> Fundamentally you're responding to someone saying "Reddit can't be fixed" with "this guy is an idiot; doesn't he understand Reddit can't be fixed?".
You're ignoring the part where parent said
> it's a tremendously successful community ...
Reddit's built a large community of people who don't mind partying next to the biker bar. An anti-authoritarian community that wants free speech, is not politically correct, and isn't advertiser friendly.
It may not be an easy community to profit from, but does it need to be "fixed"?
> Reddit's built a large community of people who don't mind partying next to the biker bar. An anti-authoritarian community that wants free speech, is not politically correct, and isn't advertiser friendly.
Mist of Reddit do not want free speech. When you ask anyone about the good bits of Reddit they mention /r/askscience, which has vigorous moderation, or the tiny subs that also have some amount of moderation. And when you ask what they don't like they mention the free speech stuff - they talk about the floods of shitty pun threads or image macros or juvenile dumb comments.
Have a look for some of the "what's the worst subreddit?" threads and you'll see all the usual vile subs mentioned as being the worst, and highly upvoted as being terrible.
Imagine that Reddit can get rid of all the FPH / etc subscribers overnight - let's say 250,000 people. The cast majority of them are worthless for Reddit. They produce nothing, they post no good content, they cause trouble. A reasonable portion of them are the scum of the Internet. Reddit loses nothing by getting rid of those people.
First, a reminder: Reddit is the commercial product of a for profit company which is currently losing a significant amount of money operating Reddit. Last I heard they were being valued at $500m based on the expectation that they would be able to figure out how to profit from Reddit. The people who run Reddit won't just shrug and walk away if it turns out getting "their" slice of that $500m is harder than they expected.
> Reddit's built a large community of people who don't mind partying next to the biker bar.
Reddit has built a large community of people, large portions of whom absolutely detest each other and very much mind "partying next to each other". And as Reddit grows, the tensions are becoming more severe, not less.
> An anti-authoritarian community that wants free speech, is not politically correct, and isn't advertiser friendly.
No. A very, VERY small portion of the community could be described that way. Most people just want celebrity AMAs, cat videos, dank memes, swapping funny stories, and maybe some chat about their local city or favourite sports team. (Or relationship advice, or sex advice, or trading candy with people from other countries, or whatever it is that attracts them to Reddit.) The number of people who are ideologically committed to free speech (and not just for the things they personally like) on Reddit is, as in real life, tiny.
(Edit: If you disagree, feel free to cite a study or whatever. But I'm active on reddit, moderate a moderately popular subreddit, etc., and I don't think you're describing the Reddit community as it actually exists. I'm not even sure that a Reddit community could even be said to exist.)
> It may not be an easy community to profit from, but does it need to be "fixed"?
See point one. Absolutely, because Reddit will stop existing the moment Reddit Inc turns the lights off because it's too hard to profit from. (Yeah, sure, maybe they'll hand the domain name off to a non-profit that can try and cover costs with donations first. Assuming there's anything left by that point, the resulting website won't look much like the Reddit of today.)
I don't use reddit that often; you probably know it better than I do. But when I look at the default home page from time to time I usually see anti-authoritarian content along with the cats, cute posts, and celebrities.
For example, right now there are posts about cops shooting a pot dealer, YouTube bullying an app author, and employers reading employee's social media, all the top posts in different default subs.
This is offtopic and, I freely admit, overly cynical. However...
People in general are selfish; the core Reddit demographic (males 18-29) is certainly no exception.
One of the paradoxes of Reddit is that the site can appear so monolithically left liberal, yet at the same time so militantly libertarian. Few politicians seem to engender such strong positive feelings as Ron Paul and Elizabeth Warren, often at the same time and from the same people.
The answer is that if Reddit has a vibe it's "freedom for me", closely followed by "fuck you, I've got mine". Redditor's don't like being censored, and they don't like content they like (mostly celebrity nudes) being censored. They don't like taxes that they might have to pay, and they don't like social programs for the poor, but they love taxes on the rich or spending on the middle class (and, especially, spending on student loans). They're anti-cop when the perceived victim looks like them, but pro-cop when it doesn't. They're very much pro-pot, and pro-civil-liberties if it involves their email being read, but otherwise they don't much care. The NSA reading their email is a true outrage and morally indefensible; the CIA torturing swarthy foreigners is a big yawn.
It's fair to call Reddit anti-authoritarian, but it's the anti-authoritarianism of someone in a dorm room bitching that the dorm monitor asked them to turn their stereo down. What there isn't, in my experience, is any deep reservoir of principle. The median Redditor will write outraged screeds about free speech if you suggest that the site shouldn't play host to links to celebrity nudes, or if you move to ban a subreddit they personally participate in. They might even follow along on a popular bandwagon (eg, making snide remarks about "Chairman Pao") even if they couldn't articulate why, exactly, Pao was meant to be bad.
So yes, cops shooting a pot dealer gets Reddit's attention (although I will note that as of right now, the top comment is critiquing the writing of the article, and the second-top-top comment is blaming the victim, and yes I do think that is in part because the victim is black, and thus harder for the average Redditor to empathise with). Youtube bullying an app author, or employers snooping on employees are also obvious examples of the stuff Reddit care about (ie, "bad stuff happening to people like me"). What I haven't seen is significant numbers of people who care about eg, free speech qua a universal human right.
(And thus ends my probably overly cynical digression.)
I think reddit overall is more comparable to a festival. There are groups and communities there interacting with each other and within themselves, but there is not all that much that they all have in common that they don't also have in common with their neighbor who isn't sure about computers being good for anything.
I don't intend that to be hair splitting about words, I think that attempts to address reddit users as a single community are a fools errand.
While I agree with everything you said after the quote you cited, I disagree with the suggestion that there are really any accurate observations in this article.
The entire "sports bar and biker gang" premise is entirely flawed. The picture painted is that of some perfect place which gets bastardized and taken over by some unsavory group of people who are unsavory even if only because of their memborship in said group.
How does it make any sense to allegorize such a gigantic online community as "a good place that got stormed by shitty users"? Yes, there are definitely Reddit users that get off on spending their free time harassing others. However, they are not many, and, for every handful there are, there are 100x more content creators, blog authors submitting content, people campaigning for charities, and so on.
If the presence of a few foul people are enough to make you vacate an entire massive community and feel as though you cannot participate, then I might suggest that you grow up a bit, learn that there is literally no public place in the world that is all rainbows and puppies, and check whether you are being overly sensitive.
Aside from that, the author's view on how any of this works is obviously and completely incorrect. The suggestion of "taking what's there" and "moving it somewhere else where the bad people won't go" belies the incredibly and simplistic worldview behind this article - you cannot pick and and move a community of people to another place, you cannot raise a big banner that says "I don't like it here!" and bring all of your well-established users to another place. Your users do not take such a (frankly, whiny) take on the world. They appreciate the platform, what's been there, and so on.
As for bemoaning why the biggest subreddits aren't controlled by the admin? In the end this is perhaps the single defining comment in this article. "Why, oh why don't the admins exert draconion control over their users so that I don't have to hear and come across things I disagree with?!" Because that's not how communities work, because that's not how open discussion works, because that's now how any of this works at all.
Frankly, I find the author's mindset absolutely infuriating. Why is this incredibly naive, oversensitive, and whiny post getting any attention at all? Anyone that has been around online communities (and, frankly, life after college) for longer than a year can easily recognize this sort of bullshit.
Edit: To pre-empt some responses, no, I am not standing up and saying that harassing users should be left alone because of freedom of speech. There is obviously a limit - active and purposeful harm should be prevented as much as reasonably possible if one wants to maintain a large community with a positive public image. However, the "biker gang moving into my space" analogy is exactly the sort of analogy I would expect from the sort of person that is ready to cry victim at the slightest provocation - and those sorts of people, in fact, are exactly the ones that have had the most damage on online communities in the past few years.
Furthermore, am I the only one so far to comment on the fact that the "biker gang" image the author evokes is inherently judgmental and simple-minded? The hypocrisy in just that one analogy is astounding. Shame on this author and his/her cognitive dissonance, victim complex, and naivety.
>If the presence of a few foul people are enough to make you vacate an entire massive community and feel as though you cannot participate, then I might suggest that you grow up a bit, learn that there is literally no public place in the world that is all rainbows and puppies, and check whether you are being overly sensitive.
Some of the best communities (/AskHistorians and /AskScience) are already struggling with this. A mod from /AskHistorians:
>To illustrate, without in any way intending to boast, it is clear that a number of current and past staff members at Reddit really enjoy AskHistorians. This has been made publicly clear a number of times. But the reality of Reddit is that AskHistorians was created by going against the grain, by struggling against Reddit's mechanisms rather than being organically created by them, and by quite frankly disregarding a number of statements about Reddit's underlying philosophy made by admins and CEOs alike. That mostly involves deleting an enormous quantity of comments, with the express purpose that they are not seen any more, that they are vanished into the aether.
>In addition, reddit's increasingly poor reputation on the internet might, for some people, be because of what they perceive as censorship. But in my experience, the majority of that poor reputation is garnered from the kind of communities that Reddit harbours, which have grown larger and increasingly restive. And so long as they're there and doing their thing we have to share a website with them. We have to share a website with communities that have racist slurs in their name, that spew raw bigotry like it's water for all the farms of China. A lot of our flaired users on AskHistorians are professionals in their fields, and at times it is pretty hard to keep convincing them to stay on a website like this. Most of that convincing consists of how much stuff we are able to keep out of our community. I don't see how that is remotely tenable if we're no longer able to actually leave seas of [deleted]
Half the comments you cite are more about moderation tools than about users. As for the rest (specifically, the second one), I don't think that any reasonable person would confuse /r/CoonTown with /r/AskHistorians.
>A lot of our flaired users on AskHistorians are professionals in their fields, and at times it is pretty hard to keep convincing them to stay on a website like this.
I meant "half of the statements", not "half of the comments". That was very obvious from what I said, so I suspect that you are being intellectually dishonest.
Regardless, to stay on topic, out of "a lot" of people, then "at times" some will want to leave. Expecting a 100% retention rate all the time is unrealistic.
Maybe a few of them saw comments about atheism in /r/atheism, a very major subreddit, and weren't comfortable posting in a place that isn't a "safe space" for Christians? Maybe, maybe not - who knows? But if you want to define what's "safe" to allow in open discussion, then you're pointing your community towards the metaphorical grave. Whether there's a possibility of afterlife for a doomed community is an open question.
I think the biker gang label is appropriate. I mean, any time you have a small group in a community who will show up and destroy or dominate the entire conversation about their negative behavior, how is that different from 15 guys in leather showing up and beating you senseless for suggesting that they go deal meth elsewhere? And if you see that happen repeatedly at a bar you frequent, would you continue drinking there?
You've missed the point that using the analogy of "biker gang" is inherently portraying groups of people that ride on motorcycles and have a favorite bar are inherently bad people. Biker gangs have often been portrayed in the media in a very stereotypical manner that has little bases in reality. How would it sound if I used the analogy of a "gang of black thugs with their baggy pants and shitty music" moved into my community and ruined it, and that "they should get high and make our white women uncomfortable elsewhere"? Same thing.
Look at your own comment of "go deal meth elsewhere." Is the irony lost on you?
Even past that, the analogy is flawed because it assumes an organized group of "bad people" that move into "my space". There is no such organized group, and it is no one person's space.
Even past that, there is no group of people on Reddit that "show up and destroy or dominate the entire conversation." I've been on Reddit actively for about seven years and while I definitely see the vitriolic individuals (and some specific toxic subreddits), I think it is incredibly childish to suggest that "my safe space is ruined by all these bad people!" The site has not been "dominated" by "the bad people". It feels ridiculous to have to say that about a place that gets, what, 7+ billion pageviews a month now?
Well, that's a good point. You're right about the use of Biker Gang as a pejorative being in the same vein as your statement. I still think that I agree with the point that he's making that in a community which is inclusive enough you'll find people there who are openly hostile, and that you have to choose whether you accept the hostile people or the people they're hostile to. Depending on your choice you might then end up on the wrong side of history, irrespective of your original goals.
I read a lot of specific reddits (sub-communities) like /r/programming, /r/cpp, /r/math, etc. Honestly? I'm completely unaffected by the "biker gangs" he's rambling about.
> 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.