Fixing Reddit
thecaucus.net
thecaucus.net
The other improvements they mention sound good, but Reddit's issues are more down to leadership problems than community/cultural/technical ones.
And when that happens, all the "objectionable" stuff gets cleared out. Can't have them associated with those "wholesome" corporate brands after all.
Well, the thing is, reddit is a private company and so the classic "freedom of speech" definition does not apply to it. And while their goal was unrestricted discussion a few years back, in attempt to pave road for profitability they have abandoned that goal. The goal of reddit right now it to become as attractive to advertisers as possible. What that entails is up to them to decide. One of the effects is heavy moderation of anything controversial. They seem to be attempting to "play it safe". We'll see if it will pay off.
I think you completely missed the point of the comment and instead answered in the lines of "why you can't tell your boss to fuck off without getting fired, despite the first amendment".
A key community manager rule is 'don't promise freedom of speech on your site, because you likely don't have it and you will get absolutely eviscorated the minute you try and censor anything':
http://www.managingcommunities.com/2010/01/24/when-talking-a...
http://www.managingcommunities.com/2015/07/16/your-online-co...
If you say your community is pro freedom of speech or allows freeom of speech, you pretty much make yourself obliged to allow anything that's not literally illegal. That will include an awful lot of stuff that you personally don't like, that your corporate backers don't like, that other members on the site don't like...
And hence you have to make the awful decision; do you allow anything (like Voat or certain chan boards) and accept the consequences? Or do you start censoring and immediately lose the right to say you allow freedom of speech?
Making comments like this is a great way to cause a site or business to self destruct spectacularly. Reddit may be a private company, but their community was founded on a freedom of speech stance. They've turned against those ideals, so now they're going to struggle a lot more since people feel they've been betrayed.
That's a situation Reddit is going to have a lot of trouble escaping. And they could have at least delayed it by not hiring people who dislike the principles the company and site was founded on.
So from business analytic's perspective, he sees the numbers and he sees the target audience PLUS advertiser contract clauses (like no racism/sexism/certain porn things, non-liberal leaning things in general), and you get essentially private censorship. It's not a pretty sight, especially looking at deleted and locked threads daily, but it has a certain logic behind it. That logic is not in out favor, but we are not all people.
I think the reality is one of the founders believed as you did and it was allowed as long as it was expedient. It isn't expedient now and they've shifted gears.
1. http://snapzu.com (worked with this one about a year ago)
That being said, I just want to wish you good luck on your endeavor... the social network game is a really tough nut to crack because community is 99% of the value.
I just don't understand why people are going after a market that seems to be unprofitable. Am I missing something?
2) Everyone who tried to move into Imgur's position found image hosting was very expensive and impractical as a hobby. The problem is they've largely been ideological and cut off from Reddit's ecosystem due to Imgur's incumbency.
3) Ultimately, until Reddit or Imgur stumbles in a substantial way that pisses off users none of them will be viable even with VC money.
For instance:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MediaCrush https://www.reddit.com/r/MediaCrush/comments/2tzuv0/mediacru... https://www.reddit.com/r/MediaCrush/comments/2v8ume/why_didn...
which was followed by:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MediaCrush/comments/2vpfwe/imgrushc...
Currently the only really one I know of is:
https://voat.co/v/veuwer aka http://www.veuwer.com/
Slimgur
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/11/03/imgur-alternative-s...
which became:
https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_t...
Most of the original links/evidence of that are gone from the internet at this point tho and I'm tired of digging for them. :/
EDIT:
http://web.archive.org/web/20090328080325/http://digg.com/od...
> imgur - the simple image sharer. The best in image hosting. imgur.com — imgur is a free image sharing/hosting service that allows you to quickly upload and edit your photos and share them with friends the Internet. Now you're asking, "How is this different from imageshack, tinypic, or photobucket?" Well that's simple. imgur is free (as in beer), no ads, anonymous, and easier to use. It's my gift to the Internet. Enjoy!
Ah archive.org still has it.
But yeh, it was effective guerilla marketing only. It was posted to Digg slightly before Reddit btw.
Because for a lot of them, it's fun. And for a similarly high amount of them, it's a chance to run their own community that fixes the perceived problems with others they've been part of online.
Not everything is about the money here.
There are a few. Slimgur is one of the most common direect competitors I can think of, but there are also the various meme maker sites that host the resulting memes for users.
Another incredibly common competitor for a small slice of the market is gifycat, which used to be the crappy newcomer that never worked and is now almost a de-facto standard on Reddit.
Sometimes, people make a website because they want that website to exist, not because they want to get rich.
Recently Imgur appears to have started redirecting some people from direct image links to their full site (some claim this happens even on submissions linking directly to an image/gif). I've noticed this quite a bit on mobile or in the Alien Blue app. Others have also reported this behavior. My guess is Imgur is doing this not to display ads right away, but to drive people to their own app for later monetization and growing their own brand/community.
Imgur has taken $40M in funding, and so is presumably needing to find an exit at some point. Reddit sending tons of traffic directly to images was great for establishing themselves deep in the Reddit ecosystem early on, but if people are going directly to images vs. to the HTML page, that's a lot of lost impressions beyond just those who visit it directly or go to upload photos.
The load times for their site vs. just direct image/gif files are pretty painful on mobile, and this ultimately impacts the Reddit experience. I'm really curious if Reddit would ever roll out their own image host as a result, and it will be very interesting to watch this.
This has always been true for traffic from FB and Twitter, but are you saying this is now also true when the referrer is reddit.com?
I double-checked today and count not find any indication that Imgur redirects images on Reddit referrers. (Although some Reddit submissions incorrectly submit the ad-page itself which is why people get confused)
If anyone has reproducable evidence of a redirect, let me know.
The article should also highlight overzealous mods that paint every outgoing link as spam.
It queries reddit.com/r/funny every ten minutes and collects the top 1000 images submitted. You as a user can then browse an endless stream of images much like Instagram.
At the end of the night it takes all the collected images from that day and parse them into 20 picture albums that user can be accessed by pressing the shuffle button on the top bar.
It's a never ending stream of funny images
However they are now stuck with the same issue any other company is that relies heavily on a 3rd party for a core component of their business. Namely, degradation in the experience of the 3rd party results in a perceived degradation of their own service as users view the experiences as one in the same. Most people probably realize that Reddit and Imgur are separate companies, but if a core part of their Reddit browsing experience gets messed up by Imgur, that is also Reddit's problem.
Now, I'm sure the community could come up with something eventually, as inevitably happens when an image host gets too spammy. The issue is that it is not easy to trust every host, and frankly should be something Reddit owns to have better control over.
In that case, why are the vote scores on Caucus submissions blatantly inflated? There is zero probability scores are in the hundreds for completely random content. (glancing at the number of unique accounts who have made submissions, I question if 100+ active accounts even exist.)
You are incorrect about the timing of the 2000 point threshold on Reddit though. Those have been regularly hit since the Digg migration in 2010.
For example, on Reddit, the score that you see is extremely simple/primitive: upvotes - downvotes. The entire premise behind Caucus is that content can and should be scored using much more sophisticated algorithms. Some of the many factors that we use to generate scores: poster's reputation, voters' reputations, posters/voters' activity levels, community size, number of times the post has been seen by voters, etc.
If this all sounds very abstract and you're wondering what a sophisticated scoring algorithm looks like, here's a famous one that we drew inspiration from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank.
Anyway, long story short: the scores that you see on Caucus aren't an indication of the number of people who voted on it. They are the output of our reputation-system-based scoring algorithm. Hope that clears things up!
You can have a magic algorithm, that's fine. You can have it rank submissions behind-the-scenes, that's fine. But you can't copy Reddit's UI/UX and claim it doesn't behave the same.
(Also, PageRank is based on relationship networks, which makes no sense for a link aggregation where each link functions independently from each other. Saying an algorithm is sophisticated requires substantial proof which you do not provide.)
I'm genuinely interested to see if this works out. Not kidding. However, with a straight face, I can also say I'm not optimistic, because 'echo chamber' tendencies are kind of why those "communities" tend to flourish, at least in my perspective.
I think it's prohibitively difficult, and only a decentralized system will succeed.
- Nobody wants to read a bunch of different ways to say the same things.
- Nobody cares about the person that happens to be the first to say something.
- Nobody wants to read through a tree of indented comments.
- Nobody has the time to read a wall of text when all they care about is the TL;DR.
Ain't nobody got time for this. I want a clear visual representation of the community's reaction to a post:
- Why I should care about this post.
- Why I should ignore this post, which doesn't deserve any of my attention.
- Why I should have a positive reaction to what the post is about.
- Why I should have a negative reaction to what the post is about.
- How accurate and representative of reality is this post?
- What actionable items I can take from this post.
- What related content/posts should I seek if I want more of this.
The pyramid of why-should-i-care-ness should be presented to me in the right orientation, or time is wasted.
What alternative is there?
How do you avoid the "Power User" effect that Digg (and arguably Reddit) ran into? If your most reputable users keep getting more and more reputable, eventually you have only a handful of very active users who have a majority of the voting power.
Ironically Slashdot actually did this. Of course it had lots of other problems.
This ensures that if anyone is ever dis-satisfied with the way the highly-reputed-users in a particular community are using/abusing their voting-power, they can simply create/migrate to a different community where those individuals will have no voting power at all. In the equilibrium, people will self-select into communities that match the tone/character that they are looking for.
But if nobody wants to pay for a service, then maybe it isn't as useful as we thought.
Having said that, as someone that uses some subreddits for forums there is exactly one thing that I'd like to see done for Reddit (and any other site with a downvote/dislike button).
If you click the downvote button it should instead prompt you to create a reply denoted as a dissenting viewpoint. You will then explain your rebuttal.
Separately, a 'Report Abuse' button would flag a post for moderation attention (but also include who's reporting the abuse). A moderator should be able to see the full edit-history of a post (within the last day, maybe week).
I'm sure the gambling aspect (big gains if you invest a lot and wisely) would hook a ton of people. Quality, hopefully, would follow.
Sounds like commie bullshit to me.[1]
It also sounds counter-productive to "building engagement". If I only have so many "points" to give out, I won't upvote much, will I?
[1] I'm being funny, but I do have a point.