Here are the top ten reddit comments from Feb of 2018, based on their character length multiplied by their votes.

E.g. the first comment has 5,144 characters with a vote of 42,457 so it had the highest rank of 218,398,808.

https://www.reddit.com/r/justneckbeardthings/comments/7wwyw5/neckbeard_crew/du4cbk5
https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/7xkstl/shooting_at_south_florida_high_school/du94nag
https://www.reddit.com/r/uwaterloo/comments/7w0dgv/dave_tompkins_is_overrated/dtwzhbz
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7vwkqg/hey_reddit_what_products_are_identical_to_a_brand/dtvtkzd
https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/80xs1v/china_bans_george_orwells_animal_farm_as_xi/duzfoko
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/80h9bj/why_is_it_okay_to_cook_some_animals_alive_while/duvwgg8
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7xztxf/who_is_the_worst_person_youve_ever_met/ducsa86
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7zwebj/barbershairdressers_of_reddit_how_exactly_do_you/durco2m
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7wi1g8/what_concept_fucks_you_up_the_most/du13k9x
https://www.reddit.com/r/wifesharing/comments/7wa854/my_bf_is_looking_for_inspiration_what_would_you/duz0q9l

On the whole, there does seem to be a correlation between comment length and comment quality, especially when votes are factored in. More details here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRC08EWmy1GgzdrIvR2p9EGUpQpIbYjp8MmvlgfNT4REbXbjxOUUdXBHMqXnF_4OGsR9PrV_-xuehlW/pubhtml

I originally posted this as a comment here but thought it might deserve it's own discussion.

I think that the rise of megathreads/ultrathreads/collections of threads on reddit has been a large detriment to the site.

I'm a mod for a few large subreddits that utilizes them (and I know a good portion of people reading Tildes right now are as well), and as time goes on I've started to dislike them more and more.

At first they were great - they seemed to silo off all the posts and noise that happened around an event, and made the lives of mods easier. Posts that should've been comments could now be removed, and the user could be pointed towards the megathread. Users could go back to the post and sort by new to see new posts, and know that they'd all have to do with that one topic.

I believe that this silo actually hurts the community, and especially the discussion around that original megathread, more than it helps. As modteams I think we underestimate the resilience of our communities, and their ability to put up with "noise" around an event.

The fact that we are in a subreddit dedicated to that cause should be silo enough - each post in that subreddit should be treated as an "atomic" piece of information, with the comments being branches. By relegating all conversation to a megathread we turn top level comments into that atomic piece of information, and subcomments into the branches.

But that's just a poor implementation of the original! There are some edge cases where this might make sense (take /r/politics, it wouldn't make sense to have 9 of the top 10 posts just be slightly reworded posts on the same issues), but I think this can be remedied by better duplication rules (consider all posts on a certain topic to be a repost, unless the new post has new or different information).

There is something to be said about the ability to generate a new, blank sheet of conversation with a post, that is not marred with previous information or anecdotes. New comments on a megathread post don't have that luxury, but new posts do.

Additionally, I feel like the way reddit originally conditioned us to view posts is to view them then not check them again (unless we interacted with someone in it or got a notification). This prevents potentially great (but late) content from gaining visibility, as a non-negligible portion of the population will still be browsing the subreddit, but will never click the post again.

I haven't logged in for a week or so (~tildes admin can tell me when I last lurked ;p) and it's looking better and better!

Reddits, especially worldnews, are looking more and more stagnant and Hacker News is getting stale too. Whereas tildes is looking nicer and nicer. Keep up the awesome work :D

I've seen a few remarks here and there that have implied sort of matter-of-factly that places like /r/The_Donald have no redeeming value, the community members are awful (and undesirable to have here), their ideas are all reprehensible, etc. I assume that this is mostly just due to the demographic coming primarily from popular reddit mod teams where being anti-Trump is sort of an unspoken requirement - but I don't really know for certain.

It reminds me a little of this woman in a class i had once, who spoke to me about atheists, assumed I was christian just as a matter of course. It's kind of an awkward situation to find yourself in. I don't identify as an atheist, but if someone is mildly insulting atheists, it's uncomfortable. You have to be a covert conservative (or covert center-right, or even left-leaning Trump voter) or else you risk being blasted/flamed/mocked/etc. in places like reddit.

Part of what attracted me to Tildes was the sales pitch that it is to be a community for civil conversation, no hate-speech/bigotry. I think that's a perfect environment for political discussion - far more than shit-flinging and nuclear downvoting on /r/politics. So even if I'm the only MAGA person here, maybe there's a chance we can actually have civil conversations on topics we might initially disagree on...?

Edit: wow! Really happy to have these conversations with folks. Sad that i haven't encountered any fellow (public) Trump voters/supporters yet but very pleased that things have been civil as advertised. ;) Apologies for slow responses, trying to give proper thought and consideration to all the comments!

Edit2: gotta head to bed. sorry to anyone i haven't responded to questions from. feeling a bit like a novelty "And here's our token Trump voter. ha ha, he sure is a quirky one, isn't he, that crazy dictator-enabler!" xP. I'll try to answer any questions I've missed tomorrow. Sleep well, all (well, all who are going to sleep before I get back).

Edit3: Thanks for the open engagement, all you people who live in a different reality!

Still a bit bummed there aren't any MAGA friends here yet, but I've been blown away by how cordial most of you have been (i hope we can retain this culture into the future of the site). For those who are just coming in and don't want to read everything, I'd say a tl;dr of the conversations I've had below is:

• most people here want to engage with others on important topics without the shit flinging,
• some people express disbelief that someone can not be a bigot or racist and vote for Donald Trump,
• I've been repeating in various conversations the Laurel and Yanny thing is a great metaphor for the polarized camps experiencing different realities, seeing different movies on the same screen.

I'm continuing to try to reply to questions, and in the spirit of not provoking heated emotions I have been trying not to argue any of my political beliefs except that both sides are seeing different realities.

I imagine that I'm not the only one here now that was part of the Digg exodus to Reddit many years ago and I wonder what you all think we can learn from the rise and fall of these platforms to better design our new community.

Is it inevitable that our social networks degrade with population until a new one rises from Its ashes, so to speak?

What can we do to protect ourselves from this pattern and maintain a healthy populace?

I invite you to read the whole thing here, even if you've read it in the past: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/reddiquette

A couple of prompts for discussion:

• Are the ideas in reddiquette good?

• If everone here followed it, or something similar, would that be a good thing?

• If only a portion of people here followed it, or something similar, would that still be a good thing?

• I was thinking about that Evolution of Trust game/article/demo linked here previously and this one came to me: Imagine a personality that would make internet interactions the best possible- what habits and tendencies would that personality have?

• What are some good values/ideals or goals for a site like Tildes (or its community) to shoot for, in the biggest picture possible?

I'm curious how many other furries (if any) have came here so far, and have a couple questions:

1. Which furry communities did you participate in the most on Reddit?
2. Which of those communities, if any, do you think would work well on Tildes?

Personally, I'm very partial to furry_irl, since there's a lot of friendly discussion in the comments, but I'm not sure the post content would fit very well here, unless fluff content was allowed.

To anyone confused, this and this are very brief introductions to what a furry is.

One of the very frustrating things for me on reddit is the way crossposting works, essentially making it a karma whoring feature more than anything else.

Can crossposting be simplified? For example: I just posted a topic in ~tv, however I realize it applies more to ~comp (sorry, I was premature on posting it somewhere - maybe it can be moved?) but could fit in ~tv as it's related, even if being a 3rd cousin from the groups intent. It would be nice to be able to pick the groups I'd like to publish it to, so the discussion is centralized and consistent - if that makes sense?

*Removed a word

I decided to take a second look at the reddit redesign out of curiosity, and the lack of responsiveness was jarring. I found myself waiting several seconds just for a click to properly register. So I decided to take a look at the actual numbers for a bit of fun. Here are the results as reported by the Firefox network tab:

Redesign

13.88 MB / 7.23 MB transferred
Finish: 57.46 s
DOMContentLoaded: 1.92 s
load: 25.67 s

Old

1.91 MB / 631.45 KB transferred
Finish: 1.06 min
DOMContentLoaded: 3.23 s
load: 3.97 s

And just for the sake of comparison:

~

358.34 KB / 110.39 KB transferred
Finish: 1.48 s
DOMContentLoaded: 1.34 s
load: 1.51 s

It took me a few seconds to realize that tapping on the # of votes would count as an upvote.

The usual arrows would be nice, even Facebook is experimenting with those now.

update: Just realized this suggestion was already raised 4 days ago.