Slashdot Mirror
Reddit To Transform Into a Social Network With New Profile Pages (digitaljournal.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Digital Journal: Reddit has announced it has begun trialling a radical new profile page design that's reminiscent of Facebook and Twitter. It will evolve the discussion board site towards being a social network by enabling users to post directly to their new profile page. At present, posts on Reddit have to be directed into a specific sub-Reddit community. You can't simply write a post and have it appear across the network which can make it difficult to get your voice heard. Unless you've got some reputation in a relevant sub-Reddit, your posts may end up going unnoticed. That could soon change. Last night, Reddit announced it's working on a drastic revision of its user profile page experience. The site has commenced testing of an early version of the design. According to a report from Reuters, just three "high-profile" users currently have access to the feature. When the new pages are eventually opened up to all, they'll showcase the user's profile picture and description. Below the header, posts from the user will be publicly displayed. The user will be able to add new posts to their page, without submitting to a sub-Reddit. Users will be able to follow each other to stay informed of new posts, effectively creating a social network atmosphere above the discussion boards.
This kills the reddit.
Why needlessly abuse intransitive verbs?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Reddit plans on being as successful as Digg.
Can't see any upside to this.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
We use reddit specifically because it isn't a "social network". Don't try to turn it into one!
What about more radical changes towards transparency?
Shadow banning (only you can see your own posts), censoring, strange moderation, etc. etc. etc. have become a bane of many subreddits.
Digg previously wounded itself because it threw out all of its user's work, and then compounded the insult by preventing them from commenting. It's a ghost town.
Reddit appears to be adding something, not taking something away.
If that's the case, I doubt it'll hurt them in any way. What remains to be seen is if it will benefit them. That will depend on how they manage (and limit) the new capabilities, and how their user base views what they do.
Facebook is certainly ripe for competition.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Soon we will need to host our subs elsewhere. Quite coincidentally, I was just about to start doing that in order to host a private sub, so this doesn't even add an action item to my to-do list. :/
It is kind of weird how out of touch the reddit management is with the users, if they think this will increase, rather than decrease, the number of participants. The reason reddit _works_ is that it's not a social network and they don't sniff your butt all the time the way facebook does. Sigh.
Decline in popularity aside, Slashdot still reigns supreme as the best 'format' for online discussion. I have to hand it to the creators for sitting down and thinking through how to do moderation and anonymity. Reddit seems to have just re-invented PHPBB and all the other forum software with this.
-1 to +5 limits bandwagoning. I've seen stuff recover from initial -1 to 5, on Reddit once the bandwagons and bots take over it's near impossible for a post to change the direction.
Limited voting rights. Random moderation points. Meta-moderation. Even something as simple as not being able to moderate and comment on the same thread. 90% of Reddit is "I disagree, I'll downvote then tell them why they're wrong".
AC accounts are all equal. No account needed in the first place or a simple checkbox if I am logged in. (Plus some hilarity of "I'm posting AC because I work for..." and then they forget to check the box.)
In the golden days browsing at +4 was nothing but decent discussion of tech topics. (Or people complaining about how that isn't news for nerds). Sure the trolls show up and people have been screaming about GNAA since I can remember but they're quickly down to -1.
If there's someone that I find insightful or hate I can friend/foe them *server side* and moderate a bit further.
It's not perfect but given everything that's come along since then it's still better.
I wish someone would give the codebase a good rinse and expand it to more news discussion. It's not Reddit, Facebook, Digg or anything else that I've found.
Reddit is already generally a toxic echo-chamber of superficial snowflakes CERTAIN that their opinion is the most important one. This will make it even worse.
The value of Reddit is in the focused subreddits - /r/askhistorians, etc., where the discussion is heavily moderated to be on-topic and to a standard. This change sounds like a horrible idea and will either go completely unnoticed by users because that's not how they use Reddit or will kill it off because the promoted profiles suck all the traffic from the specific subreddits.
12:50 - press return.
Am I the only one who read that as superfluous snowflakes?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Reddit has been essentially "dead" for a long time now. It's no secret that mod abuse runs rampant there, and censorship has been very problematic.
Hell, it was only a few months ago that, as reported by Slashdot, the CEO was caught editing user comments and then begged for forgiveness. That's the sort of incident that cannot be forgiven, ever.
I used to have fun gaming reddit. It's fairly easy as you say. I've been #1 front page submission and #1 comment, been both the highest and lowest comment in a thread for the exact same comment, but submitted at different times using slightly different wording and have done this by copying other people's posts, but having mine ranked the highest while theirs is the lowest and visa versa). Timing is critical as is exact wording.
Like you say, the modding system here isn't anywhere near as atrociously broken as the ones at Reddit, Hacker News, Stack Overflow, and similar sites.
But as good as it looks compared to those awfully flawed approaches, we still need to admit that the Slashdot approach is also fundamentally broken and detrimental to this site.
The fact that a comment can easily go from -1 to +5, or even the other way from +5 to -1, shows a severe lack of consistency. The +5 to -1 case is particularly concerning. In that case we have multiple people moderating in the "wrong" direction. That's not acceptable.
Even ignoring problems like those, the modding itself is so often useless. I now have to constantly browse at -1 because poor modding often results in the most insightful and worthwhile comments ending up at -1, while the ones at +5 are bland, pointless comments that often just point out the obvious, or worse, merely express a popular opinion. I'm here to read comments that really make me think. I don't want to participate in a populist "circle-jerk".
The lack of transparency when it comes to modding is also damaging. If somebody is considered responsible enough to moderate the comments of other users, then they should be perfectly willing to have their modding history out in the public. There should be an easily accessible list of each comment and how the user moderated it.
Additionally, all of the modding data should be made public via frequent data dumps. We should be able to independently analyze the moderating histories of all mods, including the site administrators/editors. This would make moderating abuse detection much easier to perform by the community.
When moderating abuse is detected, the punishment should be extremely severe. The tolerance for what is and isn't abuse should be very low, too. For example, if a mod has over 5% of his moddings overturned/negated by a subsequent modding over any period of time, then that user should never moderate again at the very least. Ideally, their account would be banned.
Modding here should be something that people do reluctantly. It should entail huge risk to whoever is doing it, including the banning of their account(s). Modding should only be done in the most certain cases, where people are willing to stake their reputations and even their account's existence on it. Any doubt or uncertainty at all, no matter how small, indicates the modding should not be done.
All in all, it may even be best just to eliminate the modding here altogether. It typically fails at what it's intended to do. It typically doesn't promote the best comments. It typically highlights useless comments. It's typically used to hide the most insightful and informative comments. It's used to push agendas instead of promoting open discussion.
When browsing at -1 all of the time (in essence, disabling the mod system) provides a better experience than browsing with the moderation enabled, it's time for the mod system to go. Just show all of the comments, and let us ignore the ones we want to at an individual level.
Many have gone to Voat already.
Don't we have enough Facebook already? Reddit was something special.
It's not April 1 yet, is it? I'd add more, but I need to update my MySpace profile.
I use Reddit because Facebook is useless to me and I hate profile sites. All they're doing is attracting more idiots. You're going to see more Tumblr-like high school/middle school girly posts. A bunch of Big Bang Theory fans wanting to be nerds too, but not intelligent enough to reply to posts without trolling (some Slashdotters) or trying to start a discussion when I ask simple question. It's already bad enough. Also, this will completely break a lot of third party open source apps for Reddit, a lot of which haven't been updated in a few years. More code, more bugs, slower site, and the lighter web browsers probably won't load it anymore. I'm also really curious as to what kind of privacy agreement they've cooked up for it, given what a lot of people use Reddit for (it's not all cat pics and gifs) and who's the U.S. fearless leader right now. But, it will be all cat pics and gifs because people need to be "liked" and they'll have a profile to showcase it.
You know that insult doesn't work anymore considering how many times the dude's been proven right and especially now since they're trying to say he's "WITH TEH RUSSIANS!!!1"
Slashdot is next.
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /
will it transform into not suck?
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
I now have to constantly browse at -1 because poor modding often results in the most insightful and worthwhile comments ending up at -1
I don't know that I've seen too many insightful (or even useful) comments at -1, but I browse at -1 because otherwise the threads don't make any sense: somebody posts a top-level comment, it gets downvoted to -1, and 50 people respond to tell him why he's wrong. With browsing set at 1, all I see are the responses.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
I've heard that up to 27% of who you are arguing with in those places are Bots. So good luck on de-tangling the mess they put out.