- Everyone seems to agree that something went very wrong for r/news on what should have been a crucial day for the subreddit. But the reason for that is the subject of heated debate, with the sides of the argument falling along the now familiar fault lines of Reddit’s ongoing culture war between free speech absolutists who believe Reddit has become too “politically correct” and those who believe the site needs to do more to limit the frequency and spread of hateful, harassing and abusive speech on the platform.
One of the problems that Web 2.0 has is the issue of unpaid volunteers moderating the content that you need in order to keep your product around long enough to look at the ads. There are a few, very few, good places left on Reddit; the mods there make them worth visiting. /r/news has 8 million subs, how in the hell can you moderate that? and how can you as a company allow non-employee randoms dictate the face of your company? Slashdot still sort-of works, so does Fark, hell Digg kinda works now that the stigma of Digg 4.0 is ancient history. I wish I had the answer to this and access to VC cash, but I'm just some dude who's been on the 'net 30+ years.
I was on a hill, in the deep rurals of Indiana with no phone, no net, no outside world for two days this weekend. Looks like I picked the right weekend to get out of Dodge.
Reddit functions on gamification. The rules were written for Asteroids. The game has become Eve Online. The bridge from one to the other is open-source. The results are predictable. Moderating a large sub is akin to policing Mardi Gras with a wiffle ball bat, except nobody is even giving you beads. /r/movies had 6 million subscribers when we decided we needed to be more "public-facing" and I decided life was too short. /r/news has to be apocalyptically bad. Don't blame the moderators. Fundamentally, their platform has been overstretched past the point of uselessness and has crossed over into malignant obstruction. There is nothing in mod toolbox that would have prevented this; the moderators exist in this instance simply to be the scapegoats of an architecture that is fundamentally incapable of the performance its users require of it.
Do you think this is true of /r/the_donald & co? This week had them completely covering the front page (Or at least, I had ~10/25 posts left on my front page after RES blocked the rest). I find it somewhat hard to believe that they are really that popular a sub and not just gaming / mass-upvoting every post. But then again, if they were doing something obvious, I'd imagine the admins would be quick to shut them down, given the amount of shit / drama the cause on the rest of the site.Reddit functions on gamification.
By "gamification" I mean "you get points for behavior." This is true of every subreddit and every account. Reddit makes a lot more sense when you realize that a moderator's ability to influence a subreddit is the same as an individual user's ability to influence a subreddit... plus CSS and scripting. Combine that with the fact that their hires make piss-poor money and deal with a wretched internal communications culture and you soon realize that even the "admins" have little control over the process.
I haven't heard about this specifically, but it would certainly explain a lot. But I have noticed how awful the admins are at communicating with users. They have one of the most skeptical userbases around (or maybe better said is big enough to still have lots of skeptical people), yet they still act like bland corporate press releases are going to satisfy those users. Invariable people call them on their nonsense (and these get pushed to the top), so it becomes a shitshow. Honestly I don't think they know what to do with what they have better than anyone else. their hires make piss-poor money and deal with a wretched internal communications culture and you soon realize that even the "admins" have little control over the process.
If people want updates on news they go on news websites. If people want to get into mindless discussions with a bunch of the dumbest people they can expect to meet they go to Reddit threads on said news articles. Large subreddits can't function with the current system but let's just hope they stay over there complaining instead of finding us here.
Ya I could have been more clear, that's an example where they could actually go to Reddit and find more information than what was on the mainstream news sites. For mass shootings though ? That's gonna be all over the news and Reddit will mainly be posts linking to said articles.
It all depends on the scale, and location in real life. If it is a big enough event, in which more can be shared via the people, or in a location where the people are driven to communicate what they're experiencing - that it provides news greater in perspective than what a selection of biased companies can give, it will happen. Unless you live in North Korea.
Yes. In this case, one of the benefits of news being shared on a large platform was that there were people sharing about the needs of the blood donation centers in real time. Since there were people right there, they could share with a wider audience about how people could help in the crisis. One of the huge criticisms in that debacle was that some of those helpful posts were deleted in the midst of everything else going on. However, when it's working the way it should, there can be benefits to getting information from a large platform where people can share their experiences of an event with people who are actually there in real time.
The websites that employ reporters. The ones already commenting on the news and the ones everybody already knows. These articles get posted in Reddit so what does anybody actually gain from looking for them there instead of just checking the news ? The brutal discussion, the internet experts, the leaps and bounds to conclusions, the complaining about censorship as if being censored on Reddit is akin to living somewhere they jail reporters.
A lot of decent users come here during Reddit's outrage flair-ups, though. Often times it's the users who get sick of Reddit's whining and look for somewhere else to discuss good articles.
I remember when Voat took off after the banning of /r/fatpeoplehate and the like. I checked it out then myself,* although I never found it to be a particularly interesting community even then. Someone listed hubski in a post setting out a bunch of alternatives, and this was the only one that looked like it was worth being a part of. *Disclaimer: I didn't care that they banned that sub in particular, I just disliked how arbitrary they were about it. Plus I was sick of the admins' attempts at taking curtain calls when it was obvious they were just bowing to outside pressure (see also: the /r/jailbait incident and surrounding craziness).
I was watching while this happened, and I almost created a thread about it. But the situation righted itself pretty quickly. There was a thread in AskReddit that took over and another thread about what happened to r/news. It's more surprising to me that a major news outlet has the page space and resource to write about a mod mess up on a website the day after the largest mass murder in US history. Today, Steve Huffman created a thread to address the issues with the emphasis on the right issues, I think. It was about the tragedy first and foremost. The poor handling of the information was secondary but is being handled pretty well. I really like his responsiveness and the strategies they're trying for the future.