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

Question

[quonset]

Now that Mr. McComas has said he is/was part of the problem, how much money was he raking in for being part of that problem, and is he returning any of it?

I like these mea culpas, such as from Reddit or Facebook. "I was raking in the dough and living the high life, but yeah, we screwed you and probably society. Live and learn. Excuse me, my yacht awaits."

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.

Re:Question

[thomst]

DNS-and-BIND blurted:

Half of all people are less intelligent than average. You're saying you don't want to read their opinions? Not only is that racist, but it's ugly classism as well. They have just as much a right to representation as anyone.

<facepalm>

I'm accustomed to you spewing stupid, thoughtless, didactic nonsense, but this takes the entire catering truck.

Half of all people are less intelligent than average. Not only is that racist, but ...

It's not UnknownSoldier who's being racist here, you nimwit. You are the one who's claiming that non-white people are "less intelligent than average." UnknownSoldier's disinterest in the opinions of stupid people makes no distinction that I can see regarding race. In my own experience, idiots come in all colors, all sexual persuasions, all ethnicities, all religions. You are the one who is saying, in effect, that prejudice against dimwits is somehow equivalent to being prejudiced against a particular race or group of races.

It's not.

But saying - even by implication - that white people aren't stupid, so not wanting to hear from dumbasses must automagically mean you're prejudiced against black people (or asians, or Hispanics, or American Indians, or anyone other than white folks) IS as blatantly racist as it's possible to be without physically waving a Confederate flag and chanting "You will not replace us!"

Please, just STFU and go the fuck away ...

Re:Question

[thomst]

DNS-and-BIND stated:

Half of all people are less intelligent than average. Not only is that racist

Which prompted me to observe:

It's not UnknownSoldier who's being racist here, you nimwit. You are the one who's claiming that non-white people are "less intelligent than average."

UnknownSoldier's disinterest in the opinions of stupid people makes no distinction that I can see regarding race. In my own experience, idiots come in all colors, all sexual persuasions, all ethnicities, all religions. You are the one who is saying, in effect, that prejudice against dimwits is somehow equivalent to being prejudiced against a particular race or group of races.

It's not.

But saying - even by implication - that white people aren't stupid, so not wanting to hear from dumbasses must automagically mean you're prejudiced against black people (or asians, or Hispanics, or American Indians, or anyone other than white folks) IS as blatantly racist as it's possible to be without physically waving a Confederate flag and chanting "You will not replace us!"

That, in turn, motivated DNS-and-BIND to reply:

Any policy which has a disparate impact on marginalized communities is racist. Calling blacks stupid and saying that they hate all stupid people equally is a common tactic used by racists. It needs to be called out wherever it appears.

How would it be bad to replace white people with brown immigrants? The whites are racist as hell. "Look, to be totally honest, if things are so bad as you say with the white working class, don't you want to get new Americans in?" This is a pretty mainstream view among Establishment types and their allies. You don't agree?

I don't give a fuck about the "mainstream view" of the Establishment. Likewise, I could not possibly care less about the mainstream view of the anti-Establishment. My interest is in individuals, not affinity groups, clubs, associations, fraternal organizations, religions, "movements" or other granfalloons.

It's a universal ploy on the part of people, like yourself, who clutch at any excuse to exercise their propensity for judgementalism, to label every person with a distaste for conversing with idiots as "racist", so that you can delegitimize their preference not to waste their time and effort throwing intellectual pearls before imbecilic swine - and wrap yourself in the undeserved flag of righteousness in the process.

In my experience, intelligent, thoughtful people understand that time is the most precious commodity any human possesses - more valuable, by far, than wealth, power, fame, or a complete set of new-in-box Star Wars figurines. That's because we each get only so much of it. When that's exhausted, that's it. We cannot buy, borrow, manufacture, or inherit more. So, permitting people who are either inherently incapable of participating in intellectual discourse, or who are actually proud and jealously defensive of their ignorance and ineducablitly, to waste our constantly-dwindling supply of time constitutes for us (because I count myself in that number) an inexcusable squandering of that irreplaceable resource. It's not a badge of tolerance, it's a display of irresponsibility and ingratitude - and it is and should be a mark of shame.

To maintain, as you obviously do, that, because some racists twist that prejudice against wasting time arguing with our intellectual inferiors into a defense of actual bigotry, the rest of us are also somehow bigots, as well, is complete and utter bullshit. More precisely, it's a claim of guilt by INVOLUNTARY association - and I, for one, reject it as absolutely false and defamatory.

I have had sometimes-extensive colloquies with intelligent and insightful persons for whom English is not their first language, and whose grammar, usage, and vocabulary reflect that fact, without being willing

Re:Question

[another_twilight]

Any policy which has a disparate impact on marginalized communities is racist

Only is a very superficial and lazy sense. 'Racist' implies discrimination based on race. If the discrimination (and I'm using that in the literal and neutral sense of the word) is based on one criterion you would expect that the distribution of other criteria through the groups would be different.

You need to demonstrate or prove that the nominated criterion is being used as a proxy for something like race.

Advertising a position and asking that candidates have a university level of education may mean that members of a particular subset of the community have fewer qualifying candidates than the general population. That doesn't make the specification racist, sexist, ageist or anything else. If you consider that there's a problem with the educational distribution, such as an inequity in opportunity due to historic and systemic discrimination, then by all means advocate for changes in policy and/or programs to increase access and/or support. But calling the ad 'racist' and insisting that the criterion be relaxed or eliminated does nothing to help anyone - not the employer who needs someone with a minimum competence, nor those who don't have the qualifications due to lack of opportunity through to outright oppression.

You're saying you don't want to read their opinions? Not only is that racist, but it's ugly classism as well. They have just as much a right to representation as anyone.

Their ignorance is not equivalent to someone else's knowledge. The 'right to representation' that you reference only exists in terms of elected representatives and is limited to their vote. Their right to free speech guarantees only their right to say something and imposes no obligation on anyone else to listen.

I strongly agree with programs and policies to increase access and provide support for groups that have poorer outcomes for things like education, employment and social mobility, but how can you test that this is succeeding unless you maintain the standards that first alerted you to the fact that some subsets of the community weren't meeting them? Surely we want to provide support to allow all members of society to meet the standards that, at the moment, only some do - not lower the bar so that we can pretend that everyone is equal.

Removing or lowering the standard just masks the problem.

Why is it really a problem?

[SuperKendall]

Whatever social norms that exist on Reddit, are the things that led Reddit to becoming the success that it is. Any attempt to "cure" it will kill the company, as it is killing Facebook and Twitter.

I don't personally use Reddit much myself, but I read it from time to time and the "culture" seems board dependent and overall fine. I think instead some people with more and more fascist (read: liberal) bents are alarmed that the platforms they helped create sometimes host WrongThink, and thus they would rather see the platforms burn than allow heretics to continue to speak...

Re:Why is it really a problem?

[war4peace]

Same here, I rarely visit Reddit but when I do, I am looking for specific subjects and my overall experience was positive.
I would add that Reddit has become so big that it has similar population layout (statistically, socially, etc) as the entire Internet. In other words, it's a representative subset of the Internet.
So this guy's saying there's no hope for "The Internet".

Re:Why is it really a problem?

[rtb61]

Tried reddit for a bit, weirdness in forums and control weirdness by reddit itself, just off putting. Each subreddit is it's own clown show of control freaks and or mostly dead, most of it seems mostly dead. In the end just deleted everything and cancelling reddit pretty convoluted, so just killed its scripts and cookies. Only time I ever go there now, is when it pops up in Duckduckgo searches. Some of the subreddits have good content but not really worth the bother of participating in ie if the answer to a specific question is there fine but putting up with the rest of the power plays simply not worth it at all, kings and queens of their own little molehills, ugh.

Re:Why is it really a problem?

[Austerity Empowers]

That's the thing, I don't see anything wrong with Reddit (twitter is another story). These people exist, and while society has managed to mostly marginalize if not entirely abjure this element in every day social context, the power of the internet does serve to remind us that they still exist. The solution should mostly be the same: moderated spaces should have the power to remove this element and maintain the sanitized social sphere that they desire. Unmoderated forums are ... buyer beware. Censorship will end up reigning supreme, but as long as its not in the hands of one person or group, it will be possible to attain some semblance of free speech.

The only thing "wrong" is that perhaps one might be led to believe there are more neo-nazi's (for example) than actually exist. The internet does not give us a good way of counting bodies, only posts and avatars, both of which are very misleading. In this way it's dangerous to "democracy" in that very small fringe elements might lead themselves to believe they are more popular than they actually are, and when they do not win the vote, are likely to believe foul play or conspiracy. That is kind of dangerous, but not reddit's fault.

commentsubject

[Anonymous Coward]

I think, ultimately, the problem that Reddit has is the same as Twitter and Discord: It's full of internet users.

Every day, another surface dweller strays too far from the spawn zone on Tutorial Island and gasps.

Every day, another 24 hours of Eternal September.

Members Volunteer

[cahuenga]

Members of Reddit communities self select, they choose to be there. If things are bad for you at r/weiner_pretzels, move on.

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.

[ArylAkamov]

Agreed. If you want true, open discussion about the last place left is the chans. You need to wade though an ocean of piss, but the interesting discussions you eventually find make it worth it.

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:That's how people talk.

[Tablizer]

The devil's in the details. The Fox News link claims Reddit censored "Trump supporters". What if those supporters were also spewing racist comments. Would Fox tell you that detail?

Many useful subreddits

[JoshuaZ]

Yeah, there are some pretty toxic subreddits, but for many niches or specific interests they are really good. /r/spacex is pretty much the best place to discuss SpaceX and a lot of other New Space things, /r/math is pretty good for mathematical discussion that's more relaxing and not has high level as Math Overflow, etc. One of the real problems that Reddit has which is really a problem not just with Reddit but in many other parts of the internet is the bubble problem: people self-organize into subreddits not just based on interests but on beliefs. So one has left-wing or right-wing subreddits for example who just reinforce their preexisting political viewpoints. This mixes in really badly with confirmation bias and other standard cognitive biases.

Any factual statements hidden in linked article?

[ffkom]

I tried reading the linked article but gave up after reading 3 paragraphs that contained many words without making any concise statement. Reads like the blabber of a literary critic.

Reddit is just...

[b0s0z0ku]

Reddit is just Usenet in 2018. It's a communication tool; I don't see a need for every community to be a comfortable space for everyone. Don't like a community? Start your own.

I guess ...

[PPH]

... if Reddit fails, this will leave only 4chan to carry on the high moral standards and intellectual discourse of the Internet.

Slashdot not all that different in some regards

[paradigmsareconstruc]

The situation with Reddit is in some regards similar to what happens on Slashdot.

Comments

Bad comments seem to be a harder problem than bad submissions. While the quality of links on the frontpage of [HackerNews] hasn't changed much, the quality of the median comment may have decreased somewhat.

There are two main kinds of badness in comments: meanness and stupidity. There is a lot of overlap between the two—mean comments are disproportionately likely also to be dumb—but the strategies for dealing with them are different. Meanness is easier to control. You can have rules saying one shouldn't be mean, and if you enforce them it seems possible to keep a lid on meanness.

Keeping a lid on stupidity is harder, perhaps because stupidity is not so easily distinguishable. Mean people are more likely to know they're being mean than stupid people are to know they're being stupid.

The most dangerous form of stupid comment is not the long but mistaken argument, but the dumb joke. Long but mistaken arguments are actually quite rare. There is a strong correlation between comment quality and length; if you wanted to compare the quality of comments on community sites, average length would be a good predictor. Probably the cause is human nature rather than anything specific to comment threads. Probably it's simply that stupidity more often takes the form of having few ideas than wrong ones.

Whatever the cause, stupid comments tend to be short. And since it's hard to write a short comment that's distinguished for the amount of information it conveys, people try to distinguish them instead by being funny. The most tempting format for stupid comments is the supposedly witty put-down, probably because put-downs are the easiest form of humor. [5] So one advantage of forbidding meanness is that it also cuts down on these.

Bad comments are like kudzu: they take over rapidly. Comments have much more effect on new comments than submissions have on new submissions. If someone submits a lame article, the other submissions don't all become lame. But if someone posts a stupid comment on a thread, that sets the tone for the region around it. People reply to dumb jokes with dumb jokes.

Maybe the solution is to add a delay before people can respond to a comment, and make the length of the delay inversely proportional to some prediction of its quality. Then dumb threads would grow slower. [6]

And this ...

It's pretty clear now that the broken windows theory applies to community sites as well. The theory is that minor forms of bad behavior encourage worse ones: that a neighborhood with lots of graffiti and broken windows becomes one where robberies occur. I was living in New York when Giuliani introduced the reforms that made the broken windows theory famous, and the transformation was miraculous. And I was a Reddit user when the opposite happened there, and the transformation was equally dramatic.

It all sounds remarkably similar for me to what's happening here, honestly. Hopefully the Slashdot moderators are listening and thinking about ways to value contributors who introduce comments which inspire critical, independent thinking. My own personal experience has been that Slashdot's karma system is not at all rewarding people who introduce novel arguments. Arguments are generally rated according to whether or not they diverge from that which we've all been taught, and there is no emphasis upon the inherent value of critique which inspires thought -- and over time, change.

Re:Slashdot not all that different in some regards

[paradigmsareconstruc]

Re: "Exhibit A: your "argument" that the large size of dinosaurs is evidence that gravity is fake"

The argument that has been put forward is that dinosaurs violate Galileo's square-cube law, by analogy with human powerlifters. The divergence is not small: Galileo's square-cube law, parameterized by very generous values adopted from observations of human powerlifters, suggests a maximum weight for land-walking animals of around 21,000 lbs. Galileo's square-cube law works for all current land-walking animals in existence today, yet the largest dinosaur that we know of weighed in at a stunning 150,000+ lbs.

Why does Galileo's square-cube law work for today's animals, but then fails by a 7x margin for dinosaurs?

That's not even a complete description of the problem, for there is also the issue of how the sauropods were able to transport blood to their necks, and also the issue of how the largest flying creatures managed to fly. I'm fully aware that there have been many attempts to explain the paradox. In fact, The Dinosaur Heresies and How Dinosaur Ran - and Other Scientific Insights are apparently two excellent resources which summarize these attempts.

If you prefer to keep the question open -- without the suggestion of any hypotheses -- then that's fair. But, when people suggest that those who communicate the paradox are somehow practicing fake science for the sin of quoting this famous Galileo claim which works for all land-walking animals today, what you are really doing here is to suggest that independent, critical thinking should not be a part of our online social activities.

There are many pain points happening here, but one thing that I have noticed is that if an overhaul were to occur, the new system needs to penalize people who misstate other peoples' claims. Nobody was claiming that "gravity is fake" (follow the link; this was never stated); what was claimed is that -- somehow -- the gravitational constant may change.

A social network's rewards system must be able to accommodate the most challenging situations. Questioning Relativity is a test for the social network. Can a rational conversation occur? The dinosaur weight paradox is exactly the kind of conversation which the Slashdot rewards system should be redesigned to accommodate: These conversations bring out all sorts of misconceptions, name-calling and other bad behaviors, and the social network's infrastructure is failing to address these anti-patterns.

I submit that your own comment is Exhibit B.

Re:Slashdot not all that different in some regards

[paradigmsareconstruc]

Message to moderators:

Your system should not be designed to favor particular truths. Your rewards system should be designed to favor rational, coherent, concise discussion that is devoid of bad behaviors (e.g., calling somebody a "nutter").

In science education circles, this debate is known as the positivist/constructivist debate. People who design social networks where science is discussed should never design their system in such a way that it favors establishment science over competing claims, for the simple reason that science is provisional -- and in fact, it is this provisional nature of science which is the source of its power. If you design your social network to penalize people for disagreeing with textbook theory, you have removed the very thing which makes science special, and much like the problems which plague Reddit, you will favor a community which is hyper-focused upon specialist knowledge of existing theory, without much awareness of the long-term trends that define where science is going.

Re:Slashdot not all that different in some regards

[david_thornley]

Boldfacing an argument doesn't actually make it stronger.

There are claims that have evidence, and claims that don't. There are claims with lots of evidence, and claims with very little. There are claims that stand up to tests, and claims that are made sometimes and always refuted in the same way. Establishment science is usually pretty much right. It's possible to challenge it, but to do so usefully takes evidence. There have been corrections in establishment science, but they almost all came from people who were thoroughly familiar with the currently accepted science.

Repeating the same lame claim over and over again doesn't help anything. When one person is saying something that's backed by lots of evidence, and there's five other people pulling ideas out of their asses, mandating equal treatment is a Bad Idea.

What you will get in such a case is a discussion where nobody knows anything significant and nobody has evidence, because all the people with a clue will be discouraged and leave.

TLDR version of Article

[Jarwulf]

Reddit has a problem. I'm going to handwave a lot about it, but if you cut through all the bullshit its people saying mean things I don't like (free speech) and helping Donald Trump. Reddit banned it but I'm so butthurt over it we need find someway to stop it before it even happens. There, I just saved you guys 5 minutes out of your life.

Re:TLDR version of Article

[stdarg]

Yes, the old; they want to censor me because they are Social Justice Warriors gambit. The "mean things is free speech". The things that get censored are; off topic, race baiting, personal insults, threats to violence, and things of that nature.

There are a lot of SJW's on reddit. Mean things are free speech. Race baiting and personal insults and threats to violence are free speech. (note: it's "credible" threats of violence that aren't protected)

The thing that annoys me about people like you is that you say "oh race baiting and personal insults are obviously bad, why should we allow that." And that's reasonable on the face of it. But it turns into an environment, mainly due to the SJW's alluded to, where stuff like "I'm against affirmative action in college admissions" becomes race baiting, and becomes a personal insult to many users, and maybe is even a credible threat of violence because "hey man you're talking about taking away **education** for **real people** man and violating their rights, just stop that."

Re:I read the entire thing. . . .

[Jarwulf]

It was vague but essentially he doesn't like free speech or donald trump, like the rest of the reddit admin but the article is him pissing and moaning that even they didn't do enough to stop them.

Ask George Boole

[retroworks]

The search engine is the saving grace of Reddit, Twitter, etc. It doesn't matter how much traffic or crap is generated, to me, because I'm there for the search box. If I use booleans correctly, I usually find someone intelligent sending some information I needed.