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Former Reddit Executive Sees 'No Hope' For Reddit (nymag.com)
An anonymous reader quotes former Reddit product head Dan McComas:
I think, ultimately, the problem that Reddit has is the same as Twitter and Discord. By focusing on growth and growth only and ignoring the problems, they amassed a large set of cultural norms on their platforms. Their cultural norms are different for every community, but they tend to stem from harassment or abuse or bad behavior, and they have worked themselves into a position where they're completely defensive... I really don't believe it's possible for either of them to catch up on the problem. I think the best that they can do is figure out how to hide this behavior from an average user.
I don't see any way that it's going to improve. I have no hope for either of those platforms. I just think that the problems are too ingrained, in not only the site and the site's communities and users but in the general understanding and expectations of the public... I don't think that they're going to be able to turn these things around...
I fundamentally believe that my time at Reddit made the world a worse place. And that sucks, and it sucks to have to say that about myself... I've got a lot of advice for start-ups, and it's not very fucking complicated. It's just: Think about the impact that you want to have on your users and on the people consuming your content and do the right thing... Don't be idiots about it. You're people, you see what's going on, you see trends that are forming, just fucking do something. It's not that hard.
I don't see any way that it's going to improve. I have no hope for either of those platforms. I just think that the problems are too ingrained, in not only the site and the site's communities and users but in the general understanding and expectations of the public... I don't think that they're going to be able to turn these things around...
I fundamentally believe that my time at Reddit made the world a worse place. And that sucks, and it sucks to have to say that about myself... I've got a lot of advice for start-ups, and it's not very fucking complicated. It's just: Think about the impact that you want to have on your users and on the people consuming your content and do the right thing... Don't be idiots about it. You're people, you see what's going on, you see trends that are forming, just fucking do something. It's not that hard.
Guess what. That's how real people express and discuss their opinions. They speak out their beliefs (be it controversial or not), discuss, argue and shout. On rare occasions they jump to each other's throats. That's how we, human beings, behave when what we're hearing doesn't fit our vision of the world and that's normal. What's not normal is believing that political correctness should somehow be enforceable on the whole population. People use reddit because they value it for what it truly is - one of the few last places on the Internet where they can speak openly. If reddit execs try to take this freedom away, reddit will be as good as dead.
Yeah, I think Reddit is a lot better if you take a little time to choose your subreddit subscriptions. Like you said, if things are bad for you at /r/weiner_pretzels, move on. But also, if all you're interested in is /r/weiner_pretzels, subscribe to that and nothing else. You have that option.
However, that doesn't quite answer all the of questions and fix all of the problems. For one thing, there's the incessant "free speech" debate that pops up every time reddit bans a subreddit. Where do you draw the line between "allowing speech that you don't like" and promoting depravity? You don't want to go around censoring everyone, but at some point you have to draw a line. The way a site is built determines what it can be used for, and when you provide people with the use of the site, you have some moral responsibility for how it's used.
And these kinds of things only get worse when you consider that various groups are working to manipulate and weaponize these platforms for propaganda and information gathering. I'm not just talking about Russia. I'm sure other governments are doing it, and so are private companies. The internet is full of paid shills, astroturfing, trolls, and misinformation campaigns.
But there's also the problem of abuse. At one point, I got into an argument on reddit, and the person I had argued with started posting aggressive replies to anything I said on reddit. Suddenly, everything I posted immediately got hundreds of downvotes-- I'm not sure, but I assumed he somehow had a bunch of bot accounts. They had less protection from harassment back then, so I eventually deleted my account and made a new one.
I don't agree that there's no hope for reddit or that it has made the world a worse place. There's a lot of room for improvement, but a lot of reddit's problems are problems with the Internet in general.
> Reddit's "problem" has _nothing_ to do with their communities
Nonsense.
When a person gets downvoted just for asking a question then they have a community problem.
When subs encourage group-think then they have a moderator problem.
When posts are censored, deleted, or shadow banned then it has a management problem.
Reddit's advantages over /.:
* Unicode fucking works /. advantages over Reddit:
* Markdown formatting works for code
* Sub-reddit for every possible fetish, er, I mean interest.
* Can edit posts
* AMA popularity
* Editors actually fucking do their job
* Can post to a thread up to 6 months
* F.A.Q. per sub-reddit
* Readers are given a clue _why_ a post was moderated
* Moderation is limited to +5
* Less circlejerk
* Less groupthink
* Can't edit posts
Now one could argue "How many fucking times does Usenet need to be re-invented??" and you'd probably have a point.
However it could also be argued that /. and reddit serve different needs.
* The average /. reader tends to be more civil with the average age in their mid 40's.
* The average reddit user tends to be far more immature with the average age in their mid 20's.
Both
* have their share of fantastic posts.
* have their share of slashtards and redditards.
There needs to be a balance between management, moderators, AND community.
i.e. There is nothing you can do to make trolls go away. It really is up to the community to police themselves. But you also don't want to censor those with a different opinion.
This is nothing new. We just see the problem more with reddit due to its younger age and greater popularity.
If anyone out there is interested in making money from the users and not their data, I'm constantly looking for new sites. I would *pay money* for a site that had the benefits of each that you outlined.
HTML was cute when I was 18 and on Slashdot but Markdown won. It's just so much easier to type and easier for non tech people. The Moderation of Slashdot is hands down the best I've seen of any website. Randomly distributed points to actual users limits bandwagoning and the taxonomy of voting separates the +5 Funnies from the +5 Informatives or the elusive +5 Trolls.
I want a place that isn't newspaper comments section or Facebook to discuss not just "News for Nerds" but other stuff in the news. The technology exists to do an automatic first round moderation. Something that auto moderated posts with below 10th grade reading level down would go a far in making a forum readable.
And sometimes I just think about going back to Usenet and adding some moderation protocol and server. Let me subscribe to a filtered Usenet moderation service for $5/month and let existing infrastructure handle the post storage.