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The not-so-subtle ways reddit shows it doesn't care
Increasingly over time, I've been seeing reddit less and less like the cool startup I used to think it was and more like a business. Not a day goes by where I don't see a post breaking the site wide rules, but Reddit does nothing. And that's on top of other hate subreddits like r/The_Donald that break the rules every day. Occasionally you'll hear about subreddit mods getting PMed by admins asking them to control their users in the same way Winrar tells you your free trial is about to run out. The worst are when the admins are clearly only banning to appease their user base, like banning r/incels just for it to come back as r/braincels and the admins once again ignore it.
Wait... reddit isn't open source anymore? I guess because they didn't like so many sites copying them but if you're going to make your project open source, embrace what the community does. Nobody forced you to make it open source.
Oh my god it's so 2008 and he seems so down to earth. Stop you're gonna make me feel bad about dissing reddit :(
For anyone who (like me) didn’t follow the reddit kerfuffle, “chimpire” is the collective term for the racist (particularly anti black) subreddits that existed. It was kind of ambiguous from context so I had to google it.
Yishan very publicly suggested that Ellen Pao was the "fall girl" for Alexis
Yeah, he's pretty active in the community. I've spoken to him a few times and he seems like a down to earth nice guy. Maybe he's more of a gold bar in a toilet.
You can probably place most of the blame for this on the large amount of venture capital that they've taken recently. Reddit was a surprisingly small company for most of its life. When I started there in January 2013 (when the site was already over 7 years old), there were still only about 10-15 people working on reddit itself, and the company didn't seem to have much pressure from its investors.
Then in 2014, they took $50M in venture capital, and Yishan left as CEO a couple of months later. Ellen was CEO for about 7 months, and then Steve came back and replaced her. When I left in October 2016, the company had grown to over 150 employees, about 10x as large as when I started less than 4 years before (and most of them hired in the previous year).
Last year, they took $200 million more, and the company now has over 450 employees and is still hiring a lot.
They're under a lot of pressure now to monetize the site, because those investors expect a large return and their valuation is very low compared to their traffic. Reddit probably needs to raise their valuation to at least the $10B-$15B range now, and then aim to be acquired or IPO. That's their goal now, and almost everything they do will be in pursuit of that.
I started here on Tildes 2½ months ago, and I already spend more time here than Reddit. I'd been an active user there for 7 years, and a moderator for about 6 of those years, but this redesign is a step too far for me.
I'd been a moderator of /r/Help for a couple of years, and I was starting to consider whether to resign from that subreddit, as the redesign became more and more prominent. On the one hand, I wasn't using the redesign, so I would have to invest extra time training myself how it works in order to be able to answer questions about it. On the other hand, remaining as moderator of the officially sanctioned help community was a form of implicit support for what Reddit was doing. I was already considering stepping down from /r/Help. Then Tildes came along. I stepped down from /r/Help a couple of weeks later.
I've always had a bit of unease about the larger context of Reddit and the behaviour they allow there, but as long as I focussed on just my little patches, I could ignore everything else. Then the redesign came along and was an omnipresent reminder that Reddit was going in a different direction to me, and I realised I didn't want to be dragged along that path.
Even their approach to implementing the redesign was wrong (regardless of the software itself). It was incomplete and buggy software in alpha-testing, and they started just pushing it out to all users. That's just wrong. That proved to me that they really don't care about their users.
I've reduced my activity on Reddit to a bare minimum. I go there only to moderate two subreddits that I really don't want to let go of: I made them (created one, founding co-moderator of the other). I've been there since Day One for both of them, and they're my babies. But they're the only things keeping me on Reddit these days.
I didn't know you used to work for reddit? But yeah, it's obvious reddit's been adding more and more ways to make revenue lately.
What was it like working for Pao? As someone who spent a good 48 hours stuck to their computer screen during The Fattening and seeing her get fired just a little while after that, I'd absolutely love to hear what her reaction was like during that period - and really, what was the overall mood in reddit's office back then!
I understand you may not want to discuss this subject, being an ex-employee and all but if you feel like sharing, it would mean a lot to me personally. Feel free to shoot me a PM too if you want some good ol' plausible deniability :)
I probably can't/shouldn't say much, but I doubt I'd have much interesting to say anyway. I worked almost entirely remotely (I'd only go to the office for a week every few months), so almost all of my visibility into things was through email or the company chat rooms. I'm sure being in the office was very different.
Ah, what a shame! But you actually answering me is more than honor enough for a single day :D
I betcha! I can't even imagine... those were some of the most tense couple of days in my life, and I've been through some IRL shit you wouldn't believe even if I told you (I know because some people don't believe me when I do tell them) - but still... can't imagine what that must've been like at the very center of the storm...
I'm sure outwardly they must've been patting each other in the back and praising how right they were to ban r/fatpeoplehate and others but the backslash was wilder and lasted longer than any other reddit crisis so far. It must have gotten under everyone's skins real good... I mean, Pao did end up getting fired not long at all after all that.
I wasn't on reddit when all that happened, but isn't it called the fappening?
Can we agree to not use that name for the event? It's all part of the horrible harassment of Ellen Pao and overweight people and I don't think it's appropriate to use here. Not to mention that link you included is absolutely disgusting and is justifying harassment of overweight people.
Yeah it's a common practice in the corporate world so I wouldn't be surprised she was used. They use someone as a scapegoat to implement unpopular changes, give the people "justice" when they complain, and then keep the changes.
I heard of a great new site that's way better than Reddit called Tildes. You should check it out! ;)
Honestly I think Reddit is allowing controversial posts to stay up because it brings people to Reddit to debate or defend it and it just means more activity and more ad revenue all around. Any publicity is good publicity to them. When /r/The_Donald came about conservative people were flocking to Reddit in droves to brigade subreddits and troll. They absolutely don't care about their users, they just want Reddit to stay on people's minds.
Never heard of Tildes, thanks for the suggestion. It's invite only though :/
Absolutely correct, they're one of the top websites in the world now and certainly making bank, who cares what their users think as long as they can keep pumping those numbers up?
For altright unethical shit-post garbage visit Voat
Psst, there have been proposals to merge the two together!
Not that the notabug community is a shining example of high quality civilty either. (No offense to @go1dfish, but the first ones to leave reddit are the worst.)
Oh hey, the site loads rather quickly now :D
The one that really sticks me is what happened to kotakuinaction. Reddit staff make a big deal about letting hate subs just burn themselves out or implode naturally as the best way to do away with them. Enter the founder of KiA who finally accepts that his sub is just a cesspool of transphobia, racism, and misogyny and closes KiA.
In the spirit of letting hate subs implode on their own, Reddit staff put the hate machine back together so it can keep churning out discourse.
Yeah, Kotaku in action sucks. It's pretty much just r/CringeAnarchy GAMER edition, who think their time is best spent whining about what some random female game developer said. However, they did give us this glorious copy pasta:
Yeah, that and all the battlefield controversy shit makes it hard.
Gamers: I just wish they would respect historical accuracy.
Also gamers: Watch me hop out of a plane and no-scope counter-snipe.
Then land in someone else's plane, shoot down another plane, then dive out and parachute to the ground into an abandoned tank.
Porque no Las dos
I'm sorry but it's them that are not "gamer".
Also, if gamer is a person definer adjective, my god things are far worse than I thought.
I'm a gamer and proud of my interest because of this far over just playing games.
That being said, is not the thing that defines me.
Those clowns are on par with the Twitter feminists that are simply sad frustrated little people that hide behind a label they don't even understand.
lol, true, I guess.
That said, memes are a dime a dozen. I could do with KiA never having existed.
Definitely. Though as a lover of r/gamingcirclejerk, it does come in handy quite a bit.
That copypasta was indirectly responsible for my first ever gold. I finally was able to visit the lounge and do goldish stuff.
The redesign should have been incontrovertible proof that the reddit administrators don't care about users (in the sense of the users that actually make up the reddit community, not the "new" users they're trying to attract now).
What you don't like an overly modernized bland and confusing layout with less functionality and less customization options?
It's absurdly bad, it's still buggy as hell and they're pushing for mass adoption. I have a userscript to redirect the original design for the few subreddits I still use.
At least you can just opt out. There's no need for an extension or the old link. Otherwise agreed, redesign sucks.
I'm not 100% against the redesign, and think if it was more polished and less focused on keeping you on the site it'd be great. But even now it's beta software at best.
Once they limit or prevent third-party apps from accessing their API and/or fully depreciate the old design (assuming they do either of those), I've promised myself (I swear!) that I'll stop using Reddit all together. I've already started using it less and less after the ugliness of 2016 (which has only gotten worse), but since joining Tildes I'm spending much less time on it. Hopefully by the time they kill 3-p apps/the old design I won't be using it much anyway. That's my plan, at least.
But that's the problem isn't it: they're trying to grab some of that Facebook marketshare but no one is going to leave Facebook and use an anonymous website that tries to be Facebook instead. It just doesn't work!
They're a top-10 most-accessed website on the USA throwing away the entire user-experience that got them there to begin with for the sake of a strategy that cannot possibly work... what is happening at reddit?!
I missed the reference to
What's about that?
The title of this post reminds me of an essay by Rebecca Solnit: Not Caring Is a Political Art Form. It was about immigration, race, and policies, but I'm reading a more substantial connection in there, more than the similarity of titles.
In the Solnit piece, she wrote that the US government, represented by Trump and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, uses the MS-13 gang as a bogeyman to drive up fear and xenophobic sentiments and an excuse for American policies. The reality is that the MS-13 gang was a result of American policies -- specifically, running the civil war for the Salvadoran government while rejecting the refugees.
Not to invoke moral equivalence, the similarity of behaviours can be noticed. Reddit appears to care about solving a problem, but this problem is the very feature of Reddit. It's the way Reddit ought to be run as conceived largely implicitly but purposefully built into it by Reddit itself.
As I quoted in another post, for the corporate social media, online identities are commodities. And you don't care for commodities. You exploit them and make capital in their circulation.
In order for there to be care, a social media platform must embrace online identities as more than commodities (and in duality to this, we ought to be more than consumers of the commodified online identities of ourselves and others -- we need to practice self-care in resistance to self-consumption).
Winrar gives you a 30 day free trial but you can just click the X on the "pay for winrar" popup and keep using it. Yes, when I was new to reddit I saw it as this awesome place that cared only about the users. Now, years later, it's just a corporate money maker that tried to appeal to the kids.
Thank you for the explanation.
I get what you mean by "try[ing] to appeal to the kids", but I'd say all of the Big Social Media try to appeal to "virulence" (adj. "viral"). In this process, they indeed can end up with generating a bunch of byproducts, such as real but rare opportunities for connection. But the corporate nature of Big Social Media is to appropriate them and turn them into another cog in the virulence machine.
True, but there was a time when reddit was the cool kid.
It's a fairly common stance though. Care about what affects you directly.
And in this what they care about is the biggest possible user base for ad rev.
Oh yeah. Definitely.
Their official app showing 2/3 ads next to each other and saying that is a bug that will™ be fixed
Oh yes, I remember when the app I used to work on suddenly got a super duper nasty bug that made a whole lot of ad deals to be closed and start printing for revenue on my webpage!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I was soooo upset at all the profit that bug was making me, to this day I coudln't tell you what caused it! In all likelihood I just must have forgotten to update the antivirus for my webserver!!!
Seriously reddit..?