Some of this occurs naturally. People who were deep enough into a niche to become moderators of a subreddit in the late 2000s and early 2010s are also likely to end up working in that industry or starting business in that industry.
However, many companies have realized that being in the good graces of subreddit moderators can be very good for their business. It's becoming common for brands to reach out to subreddit moderators with offers of free products or even paid job offers to bring them onto the company's side. I know of several companies that routinely send free gear to relevant subreddit moderators. The arrangement is "no strings attached" but it usually results in a favorable moderation outcomes for the company. Moderators have a lot of power to influence conversations on Reddit in non-obvious ways.
In some ways, having a subreddit that champions your products while maintaining an appearance of being impartial is better than explicitly spinning out of Reddit. People know not to trust positive Amazon reviews, but Reddit conversations are generally assumed to be authentic.
You had the above quote when I was commenting on your post, but may have edited it out. But I think this line right here is also why reddit is becoming unusable and going downhill fast.
Basically, moderators are given way too much power and users have no recourse against mod abuse really. Users can't vote a moderator out for example. Many times, mod abuse is also hidden, so you can't see a log of what they have been removing and hiding. Both of these things would show clear mod abuse in the open, but reddit seems to want to hide this.
Moderators should really only have the power to remove illegal stuff or have clear rules linked for each removal or ban.
Mods should not be able to turn on "filter" features that auto hide or auto delete posts, as they regularly just use it to target posters or topics they don't like, even if it is still on topic and popular in the subreddit.
Also, mods are more and more removing or locking posts mainly because they politically disagree with them. They use excuses or hide this corrupting behavior all the time. Many times a lock posts will be done with a claim "its too hard to keep moderating this post", when reality is they were just removing posts that didn't break rules and were posts the mod simply disagreed with.
Add all the above and more and combine it with clear corrupt interests, and you basically ruin what reddit once was. Which was a place to go to free discussion on many topics. It is not longer that. It is just a place where mods basically abuse their power on most subreddits and astroturfing is more and more the norm.
Its almost like people forgot their was a an upvote and downvote button. The mods really have no reason removing posts, outside of clear violating posts that may break laws, since the users can choose what they want to see with the upvote and downvote button.
I have to disagree. My counterpoint would be the AskHistorians subreddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/
Admittedly, I'm a history nerd, but it's probably the most interesting subreddit I've found yet. And it's full of deleted comments, because they have a very strict criteria about what can and cannot be posted. The system absolutely works for them. I'm not saying every subreddit should be organised the way theirs is, but I'm glad they are able to do what they do.
IMO, transparency is good. By all means make a public log showing what admins have done. But don't limit what they can do.
Perhaps larger less niche subreddits should have a greater amount of accountability, though, because something like /r/canada can't easily be replaced.
With greater power should come greater accountability. Think a sort of public/private model for subreddits.
They forgot this within a few weeks of seeing rule breaking behavior.
I recently went through some old logs and discussions from 7/8 years ago. People actually talked about how important it was to upvote content and follow rediquette.
That discussion died because you have to enforce rediquette and the "honor code" fails when people see that abusing the code goes unpunished. This means that upvote downvote become like/dislike.
This logically implies that if you want to make upvotes work, then you need to really prune your community for rule compliance. My favored example of this is badecon.
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The other issue really fascinating issue is how automation results in better filter bubbles.
Before automod, people couldn't ban alt accounts fast enough. Ban bigot_1, and 10 minutes later you would have bigot_2. Until automation, banning was a fools errand.
Later, bots could target words, so now your regexes would stop variations of N*er and other coded hate speech - which also meant that you could stop users from using the names of alternate subs.
Now this may be a great thing. You ban bigot_2 and he can't speak anymore so he goes to create his own sub, where they say they will be a free speech zone (and vehemently downvote opposing ideas).
Of course, these bastions also use the same tools, and they maintain their ideological purity.
Leading to the final conclusion - that moderation is innately a question of morals and ethical leadership. Not of technological design.
A statement made on HN, a site with significantly more extensive moderation than all but the most restrictive subreddits. I mean, obviously moderator abuse exists. In fact, reddit has whole subreddits devoted to pointing it out and discussing it!
Virtually everyone wants moderation. And, sure, we tolerate some level of abuse as part of that bargain; in the expectation that we always have a large choice of forums.
Note that there really isn't much discussion space in the intermedia area between "moderated like reddit" and "open like 4chan". And that's for a reason: any attempt to loosen the moderation valve leads rapidly to a descent into loud-and-viral-but-unsavory content. That's what just happened with Parler, for example.
Imagine HN without moderation other than the removal of illegal stuff. You have no idea how hard mods work to keep subreddits on topic and non-toxic.
> Its almost like people forgot their was a an upvote and downvote button. The mods really have no reason removing posts, outside of clear violating posts that may break laws, since the users can choose what they want to see with the upvote and downvote button.
70M US citizens voted for Donald Trump. You cannot trust anonymous users to keep a subreddit a decent place.
As someone who has gotten to the top of Reddit front page twice with my free (no ads) web app I now cannot. It's all but impossible.
Mods are so over protective they will ban you for practically nothing.
If you attempt to evade the ban even innocently they will sniff you out.
I think Reddit's mod tools are disgusting and foster censorship and make Reddit a more negative and critical place.
A new post type as the OP suggests like IMGUR? This point is laughable OP. Good luck getting passed mods. They don't let you do shit like that anymore.
Mods rule with an iron fist on Reddit even to the chagrin of their communities. Shame on reddit and its handlers for taking Reddit in this direction.
I have since left reddit and only very casually browse it from time to time. Lots of group think. You will get banned simply for disagreeing with mods in some extreme cases.
Reddit didn't used to be this way. I had been a user there for over a decade. They so casually banned me it left a bad taste in my mouth.
Reddit has gone to the dogs or in this case the mods. It's embarrassing how far Reddit has fallen.
I met Steve and Alexis at MIT startup bootcamp. They were awesome. The reddit they created is no more.
In a way, it’s quite similar to the issue of Amazon product reviews. Amazon tried to push off a core cost centre from their business onto the backs of volunteers. Now the system is totally corrupted by manufacturers and their paid shills.
This is absolutely not true.
Customer reviews were conceived of as a barrier to entry that could not be trivially recreated by competitors. They were also conceived (naively, as it turned out) as inherently more trustworthy than anything created by company editorial/review staff.
There was never any question of "well, we could do reviews ourselves, but ... nah, let the customer do it". The goal was to harness a subtle kind of network effort to do both of (1) improve the usefulness of the site for users (2) create barriers to entry.
[ EDIT; s/others/users/ ] (#2 amzn employee)
It's difficult to find a thread that isn't politicized in some way, or does not have at least some toxic elements to it. I've been told sometimes that it's 'just the mainstream communities', however the most toxic encounters I have had were always in the more niche threads. It devolves into downright vitriolic flame wars if you disagree with someone, and generally "agree to disagree" just inspires more wrath.
Astroturfing is common as aged reddit accounts are easily obtainable and Reddit algorithm isn't sophisticated enough to detect this.
/u/maxwellhill is also the biggest mystery of all. Even pinging the username results in a ban. This single account has been responsible for almost 70% of what you read on r/worldnews and its not far fetched to suggest that a small group of people actively dictate the world landscape.
Majority of people on reddit do not read beyond the headlines much like other social networks. People simply do not care to objectively ask for truth and are punished for doing so on Reddit.
Viral content is recycled over and over for hoarding karma points. Some users were caught fabricating heart wrenching stories for virtual internet points. I believe that these are farmers, creating thousands of accounts to be sold to people with commercial interest.
Very different than what HN does and it is the right way to maintain meaningful discussions. Too much of Reddit is just trolls and maladjusted individuals creating their own pseudo-realities like r/aznidentity or other Red-Pill subreddits.
Take for example some of the Apple related blogs & ecosystem. I don't doubt for one second that Apple monitors them and may even feed them leaks.
Why would a subreddit be somehow immune from this corruptive pressure? Better to know the system is corruptible rather than look at reddit as somehow above the fray.
It wasn't even thinly veiled, but of course you got downvoted to oblivion if you even mentioned dropping a named platform from the title.
There's a dangerous cabal of Reddit "power mods" who rule the great majority of most popular subreddits. Its existence and composition goes way beyond the simple "being in the field".
There are a bunch of other reddits where stuff just silently disappears.
There is this subreddit: r/india. Which is full of toxicity towards Indian culture. But people are more likely to stumble upon that subreddit. There's also a hard-right subreddit that's equally biased, but at least that's not named r/india.
r/hailcorporate would disagree, but, sadly, their corporate marketing detectors are too sensitive and they can come off as tin-foiled kooks.
Still, more content than you think is astro-turfed on reddit (and I've been claiming this for years).
The most public contribution I made to reddit's codebase when I was there was the SEO features. I did all the usual stuff like cleaning up title and meta tags, and adding a sitemap. But the change that had the largest effect, by far, was adding the title of the story into the URL. As soon as we launched that, our Google traffic shot up.
The way you know you have truly mastered SEO is when Google takes away your control of the crawl rate on your SEO control panel. Soon after that we had lunch a special set of servers that just serve requests for Google, because they were killing us by crawling years of old posts.
IIUC some of the biggest factors that Google uses for the page itself (network effects obviously play a huge part) are domain, url then title. If you notice these are fairly space limited and user visible which means that it is harder for the website author to spam these with possibly relevant keywords.
The reddit codebase is designed for recency. Interacting with old threads really trashed the databases, at least back then.
The "me too" features, like the TikTok clone and the chat rooms, are either derided or ignored entirely by the community.
I suppose it's difficult for them to attract dollars and media attention as "just" a message board -- despite seemingly being the world's largest. But that's what their actual users want it to be: the world's best message board. But their product changes keep making it a worse message board in the hope of being more like Facebook.
I can't imagine people use the chat function either. It seems like they are prioritizing features for the sake of ad revenue or product team egos over making much needed infra updates. General latency and error rates while browsing reddit.com are almost unbearable now. And search always was and still is a mess. And don't get me started on the mobile apps..
Spammers do.
The profiles bullshit really ruins it. But it's probably profitable in the short term. It's what advertisers want.
But no, they killed it. The thing is, their AMA system captured lightning in a bottle very regularly. Engagement was high, the community was happy and it brought positive press to reddit, at least for the US market.
But like you said, social network envy.
The chat rooms were/are ignored because the sub mods can't moderate them at all. They end up being filled with spam/self-promotion.
My use of reddit, and what i observe in general (by looking at other people's post history) is to visit a few specific subreddits often, not the homepage, not r/all. It seems there used to be a time when everyone was there for the giggles, r/pics, r/politics etc, when the content was very viral and entertaining. Nowadays all the major generic subs are filled with so much spam (i mean politics) that they're barely useful other than as a place to blow off some steam against the other team.
Topical subreddits could fork off reddit if they wanted to put the effort in it. HN is nothing other than r/technology or r/programming without the politics, and it exists because YC has an interest in maintaining it. Nomadlist exists despite r/digitalnomad/ etc.
Reddit is aging, and it shows. There are subs with the same moderators for more than 10 years, who often end up removing the interesting parts in order to maintain an imaginary "culture" in their heads. And there are a lot of shady moderators too.
If these communities were on traditional forums, I wouldn't be able to do any of this. I would never bother to make an account specifically for that forum. Some communities benefit from keeping out tourists like me, but not commercially.
How many front page posts have we had in the last two weeks whining about political censorship?
HN has politics alright, just the other side's politics.
While being a free speech advocate is political, it does not fit into the US left/right political structure. So I don't see opposing the censorship of political speech as being "the other side's politics."
It's funny because I clearly remember when it was the other side with a "moral majority" who was trying to silence all opposing views. I was against it then as well. I think we should all be against authoritarianism no matter which political party we support. As I see it authoritarianism has led to suffering of the common people almost every time.
plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
I ... "coined a new term" ... having grown up on usenet, mailing lists and IRC channels, the idea that reddit coined the term "lurkers" doesn't make me mad at the author, it just makes me feel really old.
Their core product isn't something people want to pay for (image hosting itself can be obtained anywhere, including from cloud storage subscriptions people already pay for), and their social side is at odds with the advertising business model - you need ads to survive, but ads revenue is forever decreasing and people will leave if you put too much ads.
Ummmm... 1. Does the data suggest that is true? 2. If it were true, would it support the "unbundling" narrative given that it would be a case of something being part of another bundle?
I simply do not understand why Craigslist refuses to improve in this regard. Look, I get why Craig doesn't want to change the design of his site, but how in the hell do they justify such crap not being removed?
(1) You HAVE to kill the original community. Otherwise momentum will keep your users using the old community. Our first launch saw a successful small website take off initially after it was launched only to have traffic slowly die down over the next several months. What finally got it off the ground and growing again was killing the original reddit community. There's no way around this.
(2) There WILL be resistance and/or a drop-off in users. The good news is now there are a lot more opportunities to grow your community: Advertising, cross-site collaborations, guest blog posts, etc.
(3) Do not strive for feature parity with reddit. Instead, strive to deliver MORE value. For instance changemyview could add categorization features. Maybe a search function that lets you search for posts that have been tagged as "view changed successfully!" or "view not changed".
(4) You have to have a business model. Selling advertising or taking donations are NOT business models. There was a time when it made sense but many online communities - reddit particularly - are averse to viewing ads. If you're not creating something, selling something, or taking a commission then you haven't got a business model. One model which can be successful for larger communities: Premium membership subscriptions. You just have to make sure the premium features provide sufficient value that people want to subscribe without making non-subscribers feel like you're just limiting features to be greedy.
(5) If you have multiple moderators - incorporate.
In both cases I was not the original creator but was a longstanding moderator who inherited an active community.
> did you bring the moderators on board with your business plan?
They brought me on board with theirs.
> how did the users react when you killed the community?
Positively. Reddit as a corporation isn't actually well-liked by the majority of the community. Poor administration policies, poor design changes, slow UI - there's a lot to complain about.
There were, of course, a few who loudly complained. But there will be a few who loudly complain about any change or no change at all.
Jokes aside, it's such a shame to see subreddits explode in popularity and then get filled with low quality content that moderators don't even care to curate.
- Many unbundled categories have far better products available now. AirBnB and Trulia are great examples.
- In areas Craigslist still has a hold, such as in rental housing, what we don't see is the cost of Craigslist's failure to provide advanced features. This includes people getting scammed, and bad landlords continuing on without record just like bad taxi drivers prior to Uber/Lyft.
Lemmy is basically a clone of reddit's functionality that federates over ActivityPub. It is a very high quality piece of software. A single server can host multiple communities and users, just like reddit. You can follow and comment on posts and communities on external servers using your account on whichever server you call home.
Littr.me is more like hackernews, a single community server, but one that will federate with other servers using the ActivityPub protocol, like Lemmy. The development is slower, but it is still interesting and the maintainer seems to be committed to building it out. Something like this allows what the author of this article talks about, single community sites for different niche communities, but also allows for intercommunity interaction.
With either of these, a user can tailor their feed to subscribe to any number of communities on any number of servers, and lurk, or interact if they like. With tools like this, the compromise of eliminating friction by centralizing communities is no longer necessary. I personally believe federating protocols rather than central servers are the future of online social interaction, and I am very excited about it.
One thing I think needs to exist is a message board/forum server that federates. The link aggregator UX paradigm is not optimal for all online communities. Forums are very useful and as of right now I know of no effort to implement federation in an existing FOSS forum server or build one with federation in mind.
From my POV this seems to be the same issue that has prevented federated social networks or chat services from taking off: there's no meaningful, concrete advantage to it.
The main downside of moving off reddit would be that you lose access to the larger pool of reddit users and communities. That however is mitigated by the fact that federated communities can still interact with each other despite being independent services.
Personally this would be my main goal for the project: managing to get one of the cool subreddits to leave reddit in favour of starting their own independent community using my code. However some of the things that are made easier by the centralized model of reddit are quite more difficult in the federated case (moderation as an example), and I don't feel confident (yet) to push for this.
I own and operate RadioReference.com, which is a reference database source and community mainly for those who own and listen to police scanners (and other radios). I acquired a small startup that was broadcasting police scanners online with the intent to supplement RadioReference.com's community and content with online scanners that you could listen to. At the time, the startup I acquired had about 400 radios online, and when the acquisition closed and we folded the content into RadioReference.com it quickly took off and doubled the amount of feeds within a few months.
At that point, I decided to spin the online feeds off to a separate Web site and business by registering "Broadcastify" (the verb-ify domains were just becoming popular) and the rest was history. Broadcastify has over 7000+ online scanner feeds and has been wildly successful with partnerships with mobile app developers etc.
I disagree with this, at least for non-account users. Slowly the mobile website has gotten more and more closed for newcomers. It is not always possible to just read a quick reddit thread that comes up on google because of the "Sign-in to read more" that bombards your screen.
There's a fast growing ecosystem of Reddit-adjacent sites and services out there, which I think is a much more interesting business model than direct replacement.
Nobody saw the content.
I vaguely knew about the website when it happened but ignored it. I'm on cmv for one reason, it shows up in my reddit feed. It's not interesting enough to spend time on a separate website/app.
What's good about reddit is the diversity of content you can get.
That said, I kinda scoff at the author's casual diss of Craigslist and assessment of their advantages. Craigslist has 50 total employees, nearly a billion in revenue, and a strong mission. It's not like people haven't tried to take them on before. Reddit will not be the next Craigslist any more than r/CMV will be the next Reddit. People go to Reddit because it's easy to see good content and not see bad content. I 100% attribute that to the ability to mod, downvote, and have community-based subscriptions. The author has a pretty good sense of what makes Reddit good, but has a horrible sense of what makes Craigslist bad.
The mentality on that site is "support everything as long as it follows our values as a whole" so you'll see a bunch of a random questions being answered relatively well, personally helping me with those random things I know nothing about.
As a normal place to be though? It's brainwashing. Most people don't spend enough time on these sites to realize but I've worked a job where I had a solid 3 hours out of every day to browse. It's quite literally the same opinions being held at the top of the comment section. If your opinion isn't in line with the standard, it's downvoted, regardless of your fact behind it.
For example, I've had an argument with someone about anxiety and they described their issue as mentally debilitating. They really couldn't handle chatting with someone online, let alone talking with people. I have no issue with that but I did point out that we've been arguing back and forth for maybe 5-6 posts now and they have been growing with aggressiveness. Over this argument, I received close to 100 downvotes, then got banned from the community.
The initial post? It was about a drug to treat anxiety and how groundbreaking it was going to be. I mentioned in my post that, coming from a family of pharmacists and seeing effects firsthand, I know of a lot of people who get significantly worse because of drugs like this. Specifically mentioning that you need to get tested in multiple ways before something like this should be considered (talking about the effects of a similar drug for depression).
Socially it's a terrible place to be. Factually, quite interesting if you ignore karma (but they make it really hard to ignore karma).
Or not. Every time Google changes its algorithm small businesses get slaughtered. I don’t know if it’s a low or high number, but you see posts about it on SCO or marketing forums every time there’s a change.
This is the recipe for taking on Reddit... interest first.
