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.

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".

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.

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.

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: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.