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.

Comments

That's how people talk.

[devslash0]

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.

Re:That's how people talk.

[Anonymous Coward]

>last places on the Internet where they can speak openly

Says the guy who's clearly never tried to express an opinion on reddit that strongly contradicted the prevailing groupthink.

The entire point (or at least the practical end result) of the karma system is to algorithmically suppress non-conformist thinking so that unpopular opinions are efficiently removed from the sight of anyone who doesn't go out of their way to find them. Overt censorship is redundant and unnecessary, allowing reddit to claim to be pro-free speech. And that's not even touching on the phenomenon of users (or major media outlets) exploiting the lack of anonymity to dig through a wrongthinker's history to find identifying information to threaten them with.

Compare this to 4chan and its offshoots, where everything posted is listed strictly chronologically and anonymously, and (for the most part) nothing is ever removed unless it's illegal or violates one of the random, non-ideological rules (i.e. No Ponies). If the mob wants to attack you, they have no options other than to argue your points or simply call you names.

Re:Question

[UnknownSoldier]

> 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
* 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 /. advantages over 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.

Re:Question

[0100010001010011]

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.