So I will start off by saying that I am extraordinarily biased in this discussion, since I was just on the receiving end of the broken Reddit format.
I really noticed it first in /r/Games, which was the more serious of the gaming subreddit without being a pretentious shithole like /r/truegaming, and a nice cut above /r/gaming. I was actually pretty proud of the subreddit; along with the GW2 sub, it felt like the mods sort of knew what they were doing and the community was generally behind the sub's idea. Even now, 24 out of 25 of the links on the front page are within the intent of the sub.
Except for the one at the top, a link to Zero Punctuation's review of Black Ops 2.
The intent, as defined in the sidebar, is "to provide a place for informative and interesting gaming content and discussions." Zero Punctuation is neither informative nor terribly interesting. Even if you enjoy it, its not because its the best review in the world. Its actually usually a terrible review, but its entertaining.
So I checked the comment section, and to my unfortunate lack of surprise, most of the comments were jokes. No discussion was taking place.
Now to understand a bit of my bias here, I believe pretty heavily in separate behavior for separate occasions, and not mixing how you behave in different groups. I don't swear in front of my family, but I do so prolifically in front of my friends. I don't type the same between Hubski and Reddit, since they're both two different groups and require two different behavior sets.
So I expected a level of seriousness to be there, and while I know that not everything has to be serious, there's a difference between light-hearted comedy and a pointless link. There is nothing to be gained by posting a link to a popular review of a video game if no discussions are going to take place; the people who watch Zero Punctuation would already have seen it, and the people who haven't are probably not going to understand or care. Or have been purposefully avoiding Yahtzee for a year and a half because the reviews get grating.
The flaw showed itself when I asked people to look at the review and how well it lined up with what the sub was about. My comment became a pretty quick upvote-downvote war, with three children. One person who hated Yahtzee, one who thought they were in /r/gaming at first (ouch) and another saying that Yahtzee was a good reviewer. Which he isn't, but that's a separate debate.
That was the extent of discussion occurring in the thread that actually related within a reasonable degree to the topic at hand. I expected my criticisms not to be taken well, because I've long ago accepted that people dislike being told how much the person they like isn't a great contribution to discussions, and that people have a hard time accepting that they can be wrong. What I didn't expect was that it would be buried with few responses.
I don't actually care if people agree with me, or if I'm downvoted. I stand by a lot of what I say, even if its controversial, and recognize that unpopular opinions are neither wrong nor right, just unpopular. But I expected more people to come to the defense of the sub, to contribute to the discussion. I'm sure, given more time, people would have, but by the time they'd be on the computer, my comment was already at the bottom.
I've noticed this with other comments before; unpopular opinions that are still contributing to the discussion get buried because of communal disagreements, and those comments which are upvoted the most hit the top by default. I think this is ultimately contributing to the general dissatisfaction with reddit, at least with some of the smarter members.
I originally joined hubski because the community was just so much better, but I've noticed that the wheel and badge system is a bit more accepting of controversy. Its hard to view the wheel and badge as an "I agree button" and I've always seen it as an "this is important" button. But because it has no negatives, no way to move the comment or post down, there's no way to really bury something.
Maybe its late, or maybe I'm on to something. I don't know, but I think there's a discussion to be had.
I don't think you're treading new ground here. browsing old posts in /r/ideasfortheadmins or /r/theoryofreddit reveals the rising warning cry. Saying "it's broken" isn't nearly as useful as saying "it's broken BECAUSE" or "It's broken, HERE'S HOW TO FIX IT." You'll get there eventually. I'm pretty sure Hubski is MK's response to "here's how to fix it." To no one's surprise, I don't fully agree with his solutions but they're a hell of a lot more proactive than my attempts (skype screaming matches with admins). Over my many years of thought on the subject I've come to an inescapable conclusion: The format isn't broken, it's simply revealing its ultimate utility: fluid, anonymous discourse amongst the disinterested. You may not care if you get downvoted, but everyone else does. You should care, by the way - downvotes are censorship. And while you can point out that /r/Games is not the same as /r/gaming, but everyone reaches it from their front page and even if they could, they aren't likely to compartmentalize their mind between /gaming and /games. And that's the real issue - there's nothing preventing anyone on Reddit from going anywhere else on Reddit and doing whatever they please and since the Reddit community is large and homogenous with only pockets of diversity, that diversity is routinely trampled. The solution is tighter control of who is permitted what in which subreddit, which is something I and countless others have been raising with the admins since 2008. Since the Admins have zero interest in implementing anything of the sort, however, expect things to continue the way they are.
When I read this the first time, I mistakenly read futility instead of utility, I guess as some kind of internal projection. Therein lies the problem with life in general. Alfred Nobel creates dynamite to help engineer and shape the world, and we quickly turn it into bombs to kill people.The format isn't broken, it's simply revealing its ultimate utility: fluid, anonymous discourse amongst the disinterested.
...Joseph Pulitzer invents the Spanish-American war, and quickly creates a prize to celebrate important journalism. Explosives to kill people predated Nobel by a fair shot. Dynamite just made it less likely to be hoist on your own petard. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petard#.22Hoist_with_his_own_pe...
No, I get that. And my point is that when people accomplish great evil by accident they tend to put a band-aid on it and hope nobody notices. Nobel gets a bye from me because the morality of making it easier for your guys to kill the other guys is pragmatic in nature, whereas so many humanitarian awards are directly related to the scumminess of the people they're named after.
Typically I share what I find interesting and I click on the comment hubwheel if I think the comment is thoughtful, no matter if I agree or not. The hubwheel, like Karma or any other point-based system, becomes like a game with rewards. I think people like being rewarded, even for something as trivial as being able to award another user a badge. Hopefully, the system here encourages engagement and thoughtful commentary. Its difficult to tell, because its a small community, which I think by nature is going to be more respectful and thoughtful, since everyone kind of develops a "personality" of sorts, which the rest of us come to know in some way. If this site were orders of magnitude bigger, then we would see if its the format or the people make it great. I suspect the format is an improvement over what's out there, but its still the people that count the most by far.
I am firmly of the opinion that voting of any kind is only helpful in ranking the discussion as beheld by its participants and spectators. One aspect I'm keenly fond of on Hubski is the fact that the wheel loops around for ever and ever without counting because you know what? Outside of an individual comment, the overall score of any participant is totally irrelevant. I'm currently in a fight with some mouthbreathers in /r/centuryclub about how their endless pursuit of karma is, in fact, the cancer that is killing /b/.
I think the wheel is the closest to perfection I've seen. It gives you the slightest bit of ego stroking feedback you crave (even if you're against it on principle), -then stops. You get 8 votes of approval, and once there, you just have to be content that at least a few people out there found what you have to say valuable (or more likely agreeable, given how we humans tend to operate) and it's now time to let it go. No being the first to race into a serious discussion with a clever pun or meme to reap as many upvofes as humanly possible. I don't mind humor as an honest spontaneous response, but when it gets in the way of discussion as often and severely as it does on Reddit it gets really tiresome.
The wheel was thenewgreen's idea. I loved it immediately, but I can't take credit for it. At the time, posts and comments had between 1 and 5 +'s, if I remember correctly. The idea was similar, that the score was only a rough indicator of approval, and there was an upper limit. But tng was the one that said: "Why not just use the wheel instead?" Then we had the wheel, but still a plus sign to click on. Finally, I think it was alpha0 that suggested that we just click on the wheel itself. EDIT: Here's a image of Hubski before the wheel:
On my tombstone: "Came up with the idea to use the hubwheel as a voting mechanism and died at sea saving his family from Somali pirates"
btw, I didn't see the image the first time I read your comment. FANTASTIC!! It's like seeing a baby photo. Hubski sure has come a long way, good times pal!!
I like the wheel too, but as someone viewing posts that already have a full wheel there's little reason to click on the wheel. Does it do anything?
If you click the wheel on a link, it will push that link out to all your followers, along with links you post yourself. If you click it on a comment, it just adds a 'spoke' to the wheel until it fills up...after that it doesn't really do anything (again, just on comments, not links), which is a very good thing IMO :)
sweet sweet karma. the problem with reddit is that it's the new digg, and whatever... it's not the small cozy site it used to be in 2006. hubski to me is like the way the old reddit was.... small and cozy. Don't much care for the trivial technical differences, though i do like the trivial technical differences between hubski and reddit... tags are great here..... the idea of sub-reddits is a major fail.
I don't think subreddits were the mayor failure. In fact, I think small private subreddits are the only thing saving reddit from being 100% of full shit. This place doesn't have actual downvotes as far as I know, and I think downvotes are the biggest issue on reddit too. Also, sorry for necroposting a 42 day old thread.
Hubski is far more provider-based and far less content-based and I endorse that. I do think tags/subreddits/whatever are useful to discover and enjoy content that isn't provided within your usual haunts, but I think the best solution there is going to be different for everyone. I think a real issue is that Reddit didn't start out being inclusive to everyone but as soon as f7u12 cartoons hit, the universality of its architecture began to be exploited by everyone. And since you can't disinterest the f7u12 crowd from occasional forays into /r/askscience, the universality dragged everything down.
Does Reddit automatically weight your comment higher if you have a lot of Karma? I don't use it, so I don't know these basic things. If so, I think that's a huge mistake. We should all be in each discussion as equals, at least in terms of opportunity for participation.
As far as Reddit's rankings: - you need over 10 karma (not comment karma) in any given subreddit in order to bypass the spam filter in that subreddit. Having, say 55,000 karma in all other subreddits does not matter. Comment karma within that subreddit does not matter. - Having -10 or less comment karma in any given subreddit will trip the comment timer in that subreddit. It is a point of pride of mine that I have managed to trip the troll filter in both /r/2xchromosomes and /r/mensrights because they're both full of extremist morons. - If there are two comments posted at roughly the same time (think it's within a minute), the commenter with the higher comment karma will have their post appear on top and the lower comment karma will appear below. Note that as soon as their vote totals are no longer equal, the individual comment karma of the poster becomes irrelevant. That's it. That's all karma is used for on Reddit. That is the sum total of the utility of scorekeeping. FUN FACT: backintheday it was routine to see trolls with negative comment karma. As Reddit has grown larger, it hs become virtually impossible to amass negative comment karma, in no small part because while Reddit counts the impact of "downvote brigades" on any given page (where it really shouldn't be counted), the voting impact of "downvote brigades" has no impact on an individual's overall score (where it really should be). In other words, they have it exactly backwards: campaigns to silence dissent are chillingly effective but any overall impact on the prestige of any given user is nill.
The effect is less than you might imagine, particularly now. Over the past year I've gone from being "oh, of course you're being upvoted, you're kleinbl00" to "why are all these people downvoting you?" I know where the bodies are buried and WarPhalange isn't even on my radar. I'd say less than 1% of Reddit's users these days could name five users.
You hit the nail on the head with reddit's upvote/downvote system: folks should be upvoting legitimate contributions to discussion, but instead they upvote funny, clever comments and downvote anything that contradicts or offends their existing views. I was active on reddit for about four years and watched its decline. The jokes and cleverness increased exponentially. Meanwhile I got mercilessly downvoted and criticized for pointing out unpopular things that are nonetheless true, e.g. that the middle ages were a period in which large technological and social strides occurred, that 5/3/1 is not the ultimate weight training program, that the Meyers-Briggs personality index is not much more reliable than astrology. I finally gave up and quit when a board moderator personally attacked me for noting that there are age related declines in your physical capabilities. One of the current reddit front page items is nothing more than a photo that's linked as "WTF." The guy couldn't think of one single descriptive word to write for it? Yet it made the front page. My limited experience suggests that reddit's credibility fell in two big waves. First, the Digg migration. Second, an influx of children from 4chan. If it helps, you can vastly improve your reddit experience by immediately removing from your subscription list /r/pics, /r/wtf and /r/funny. If you want to eliminate the circlejerks as well, unsubscribe from /r/atheism, /r/politics, and so forth. Subscribe to topical subreddits like worldnews, science, and some for your area.
I've already unsubscribed from the majority of front page subs. I keep /r/WTF around for cheap entertainment, since its less banal than /r/funny and sometimes makes me giggle. Maybe once a month. Well it used to. The thing is that /r/Games was supposed to be the better version of /r/gaming. It was smaller, had a better team of moderators, and made honest attempts to avoid being another gaming, which was really goddamn awful. So the place where I had taken refuge, and generally was okay with, had its first little cracks in the wall. The same is happening with /r/movies, though in a much worse way. I didn't actually mind the Christopher Nolan circlejerk since at this point I'm so used to watching communities have a competent director's dick in their collective mouths that it really doesn't shock me, and occasionally they have had some decent posts. It wasn't until I started noticing the Wreck-It Ralph posts that I realized just how bad the sub had gotten. Wreck-It Ralph was a competent movie, if that. Its primarily a movie in which a gimmick is used for the first half and then the plot of the movie progresses with the gimmick totally forgotten except for a small House of the Dead scene. It is a movie which I was surprised hadn't been made earlier, since the basic draw of the movie is exploiting pre-established icons of popular gaming culture in order to draw a crowd by making them feel like they are part of the inner circle of a group that doesn't exist except for in this artificial setting. I was critical of it, and was downvoted, but they, fine. There was some discussions going on. I don't mind getting people who disagree with me to talk, I just want people to talk. Then today there was a post of a can of Barbasol with a title stating at the OP associated it with Jurassic Park, and then proceeded to ask what other things people associated with movies. If that was some sort of way to tell how effective product placement has been, bravo W&K you have once again proven that people will voluntarily surrender marketing data by the thousands without giving it a second thought. Would you like to know my credit card so you can directly charge me for the products you are advertising? How about my address so you can ship them to me? Because if its not a marketing scheme, then its one of the stupidest posts of all time. Its not even a scene from the movie. It is a picture of a can of shaving cream taken from google images and given minimal context in the form of a movie. But because people see that association, go "oh my god, Jurassic park! I love that movie that has been marketed to me for 15 years or so!" and proceed to upvote it to a score of +12XX. I can only reach maybe three conclusions here. 1. Maybe I'm being way too overly confident in the ability of the people who post on the site. 2. There is some sort of secret web page that the link takes everyone else to but me, or 3. The system is broken and promotes dumb but popular ideas. Now yes, I might have a high standard for what is a good submission, but I do try and recognize that not everything I agree with or like is good. I don't post Two best Friends Play in /r/Games because its not a video for that section. Regarding the history of reddit, I sure hope the children off of 4chan stay there. /b/ is at least offensive. I can actually enjoy a very biting forum rather than a very bland one.
My line of thinking has been that if votes are used to sort comments, then there is an advantage to them be sorted by only a positive signal rather than both positive and negative signals. It's just a hunch, but my hypothesis is that enabling an instant negative response biases the atmosphere towards a less-civil type of interaction. b_b is right that Hubski hasn't been put to the test of scale that a site like Reddit has. However, its my hope that the follow/share type of propogation enhances the famliarity that users have with those that share similar interests. Hopefully this breeds more civility too.
I think the more important aspect of hubski is the block function. If I find out someone is posting really banal shit I'm just going to remove them from my feed. Since, if I read your update correctly, totally removes them from existence for me, its a very effective way of me never having to worry about this sort of banal shit. If they share an interesting link, its not like someone else I follow won't send me it anyway.
I "ignored" a user this morning that seemed to be "spamming". Now none of their posts will make my feed. If you click under "tools" you will see a script that forwardslash created so that the comments of people you ignore will also not show up for you. here is the link
Reddit's great if you know how to use it and properly play to its strengths to enhance your experience on the site. Its best feature is subreddits, ie. your ability to exactly customize what variety of content you do and do not want to be exposed to. Also, you can use filtereddit on RES to filter keywords or websites you have no interest in. There's a lot of great content and great contributors on reddit in addition to the terrible content, and reddit optimizes itself so that you can get exactly the experience you want. Take advantage of it.