Honestly, the main thing this should tell people is how awful at measuring traffic Alexa is. Reddit's traffic is nowhere close to Facebook's. I wouldn't be surprised if we get a weird tech-press...
Honestly, the main thing this should tell people is how awful at measuring traffic Alexa is. Reddit's traffic is nowhere close to Facebook's.
I wouldn't be surprised if we get a weird tech-press war over this as Facebook and Reddit try to convince the world why it's wrong or correct respectively.
They might be soon enough. The 2nd official invite thread had to be locked this afternoon after receiving 600+ requests in a little over 30 minutes. There's a real hunger for an alternative.
They might be soon enough. The 2nd official invite thread had to be locked this afternoon after receiving 600+ requests in a little over 30 minutes. There's a real hunger for an alternative.
C'mon, though. 600+ users is a drop in the ocean that is Reddit's user base. The demand for an alternative is there, but frankly, at this point it's a minuscule proportion of Reddit's user base...
C'mon, though. 600+ users is a drop in the ocean that is Reddit's user base. The demand for an alternative is there, but frankly, at this point it's a minuscule proportion of Reddit's user base that is demanding it.
People here on ~ are the early adopters. The mass is unlikely to move from Reddit any time soon. You just have to watch how at odds the upvotes and the comments are... A crappy meme of some kind makes front page, and all the comments slam it. That shows you that even those who COMMENT on Reddit are in the minority. Hell, the people who UPVOTE on Reddit are in a minority of their own compared to the people who just browse.
Not saying ~ can't make it, not at all... It's a big, beautiful world out there. What we need is choice, not hopping from one gargantuan monopoly to the other.
That's fine. Make a high quality website that is purely early adopters. Make it good enough to retain those hardcore people while being of a higher quality than the competitor. Eventually a...
That's fine.
Make a high quality website that is purely early adopters. Make it good enough to retain those hardcore people while being of a higher quality than the competitor.
Eventually a catalyst will occur that drives the userbase into mass exodus to the better alternative. The better alternative just actually does NEED to be better, active and clearly good.
This is precisely what occurred with Digg+Reddit. Reddit coexisted as a much MUCH smaller site for a huge amount of time, but it was higher quality and better due to a smaller hardcore userbase - many of which were using both sites. Then Digg messed up and people started to jump ship. Then Digg REALLY messed up and the exodus occurred in full force.
Be better and just exist for long enough. Focus on user retention and the hordes will come slowly. User retention is the big issue for smaller communities, and it comes with value/quality.
One of the big things I recall about the Digg/Reddit exodus was that Reddit had for a year or two had all the top voted content Digg had but it was posted to reddit earlier/faster. If that occurs here, it will largely persuade people to move because they will be getting the same content but earlier, this is a strong motivator for making the decision to move elsewhere.
(I suspect a chunk of that content was probably being posted by reddit's team internally to drive up their own quality, but can't prove it)
It was. They haven't been cagey about the fact that they used bots to automatically crosspost the best content from other places on the web to 'help reddit get started.' What you're describing...
It was. They haven't been cagey about the fact that they used bots to automatically crosspost the best content from other places on the web to 'help reddit get started.'
What you're describing isn't just the digg-reddit exodus, that's the general pattern of what happens for every social site that's ever existed. Eventually changes are made that focus on goals aimed at attracting 'more' users, and this inevitably tanks the quality of the content. It's hardly limited to online - the same thing happens to real world events and gatherings - Gencon, Burning Man, etc.
The trick is finding a way to keep the quality up when the horde comes to crash the party. Nobody's ever managed to do that before. I'm hoping we can do it here. By the time the mass exodus begins, all of the early adopters and best contributors here should be firmly entrenched as curators and moderators and the heaviest weight voters, armed to the teeth with whatever tools we can think of to give them the power to defend their communities from this onslaught so they don't have to pack up and run like what has always happened in the past.
I expect we'll end up with some pretty strict moderation in the top-level ~groups, not unlike reddit, though hopefully using far more advanced systems so that moderation is more like curation rather than janitorial and police work. As one dives deeper into the hierarchy, the groups get smaller, the moderation gets lighter, and it has a more free-for-all attitude. All the time the best quality stuff from the lower groups bubbles up to their parents and eventually to the top of the hierarchy.
That should help facilitate higher quality (though more generalized topics) as one browses the roots of the hierarchies, and more specialized and much less strictly regulated content at the bottom of the branches. When a community does well and grows, it can spin off its own sub-groups to help keep the number of users small.
I don't think the exodus is a threat. The change in quality on reddit wasn't significant during the digg exodus (despite what some people say), I was there, I was a power user on Digg, and I was a...
I don't think the exodus is a threat. The change in quality on reddit wasn't significant during the digg exodus (despite what some people say), I was there, I was a power user on Digg, and I was a user of reddit pre-exodus. Very little changed when the hordes moved over.
Reddit changed a bit later on when it started to get stronger on things like "witchhunting". One of the core earliest principles of reddit was "just go and create a new community if you don't like it in this one", and that worked really well. If the mods of a subreddit were problematic then people would start an exodus to a new subreddit. This happened countless times. However, as reddit implemented witchhunting rules this stopped. They were originally intended to stop redditors attacking people outside of reddit but mods started to remove posts complaining about other mods on reddit and that stopped redditors from moving from one low quality subreddit to a new higher quality subreddit with better moderation.
This is in my opinion one of the main reasons culture changes started to occur on reddit.
This shouldn't happen here because Tildes wants to take a more top down hierarchical approach, where no moderators own their groups. This will allow Tildes to hold moderators more accountable for quality and in my opinion should never result in a quality dip.
What will matter for Tildes is for the upper-staff (@Deimos and whoever else he brings on board) to maintain a VERY good relationship with the casual community of the site. If the brand image of the upper staff becomes distrusted or disliked then they will no longer be believed in to maintain quality. This will become harder and harder to do as the site grows in size.
If I were in the team I'd be saying things like there should be monitoring for tone and opinion. The team should be doing approval rating tests so that a slip in quality or opinion of the community for them can be seen over time and accounted for. They're very important factors for the future of the site.
As for moderation. That's not too hard. I don't think I need to go into it too much here as the core group here already is mostly mods. We all know what good and bad modding looks like. And we all know what mistakes happen that aren't always controllable. The modding isn't too hard, Tildes will also have to keep a good relationship with its mods of course, so managing cliques and power-factions of people may become difficult at a later point in time, but it's nothing that Deimos won't already have seen and experienced through his prior work.
Yeah, I remember the exodus too (though I was never a digg user myself) and I'm in agreement - it was pretty remarkable how unaffected reddit was by nearly doubling their userbase in the period of...
Yeah, I remember the exodus too (though I was never a digg user myself) and I'm in agreement - it was pretty remarkable how unaffected reddit was by nearly doubling their userbase in the period of a couple weeks. The site was crashing a lot back then, been a while since we've seen the dreaded 502/504 and the 'static' reddit front page.
Honestly I think it was the long-term cycle of negativity from the downvotes that soured reddit. Mods were also trying to select for quality in a system that was only ever built for short-term popularity, which was a core design mistake imo. Since mods had no tools for that, it was all about removals, which created even more negativity. Another blow was when the entire site (and all of the moderators) finally woke up to the fact that reddit corporate didn't give a damn about them at all. That really came to a head with the Blackout in 2015, when Victoria was let go and the mods showed some real solidarity. It's just like you said - once the confidence in the leadership is lost, it's game over.
Reddit's problem is they outright lie, and people are onto it now. Open, honest transparency goes a long, long way smoothing over any challenges and problems that arise. If you've got no credibility because you've failed to deliver and given bullshit responses too many times, people will turn (rightly imo) against you, and you lose the goodwill needed to successfully marshal a community towards their goals.
Big fan. Been invested in Monero and Bitcoin for years so I like the PoW aspect of voting. That being said it's not really working well on mobile for me right now, Android Oreo, Firefox. But I'll...
Big fan. Been invested in Monero and Bitcoin for years so I like the PoW aspect of voting.
That being said it's not really working well on mobile for me right now, Android Oreo, Firefox. But I'll try later on desktop
OK, just used your site on desktop and I gotta say, this site is great. I love that you don't have to sign up for anything. It's like an organized decentralized combination of 4chan and reddit. I...
OK, just used your site on desktop and I gotta say, this site is great. I love that you don't have to sign up for anything. It's like an organized decentralized combination of 4chan and reddit. I hope it catches on.
That being said, I know this is still early but is there any chance of subnotas(?) in the future or being able to pick subs?
Doesn't it collect data based on people who install their toolbar browser add-on? That seems like a demographic that is either not internet-savvy at all, or intentionally trying to manipulate...
Doesn't it collect data based on people who install their toolbar browser add-on? That seems like a demographic that is either not internet-savvy at all, or intentionally trying to manipulate perceptions. Maybe they use other data sources now instead of just the browser toolbar thing.
Edit: also, isn't alexa the same alexa from amazon? The fact that both companies have a particularly strong ideological and political connection (both neoliberal/left-wing organizations, both big-tech silicon valley types) suggests the data may not be assumed unbiased with as much certainty.
I believe it's mostly based on their toolbar, yes. Which also means that it doesn't measure mobile app traffic at all, and my understanding is that a huge portion of Facebook's traffic is through...
I believe it's mostly based on their toolbar, yes. Which also means that it doesn't measure mobile app traffic at all, and my understanding is that a huge portion of Facebook's traffic is through their app.
In my opinion, that's one of the main reasons it's gotten so bad lately. It's gotten too big for it's own good, and a lot of the people on there don't actually know any better than anyone else,...
In my opinion, that's one of the main reasons it's gotten so bad lately. It's gotten too big for it's own good, and a lot of the people on there don't actually know any better than anyone else, even if they don't realize it or admit it. Plus, with the size comes the splintering, there's a lot of divisiveness now, and reddit completely feeds into that. What with echo chamber subreddits where saying something that isn't the "right thought" gets you kicked out, and general rudeness to each other, not to mention saying something approved so you can get those nice points that mean literally nothing.
Actual conversation has been lost, save for a very few splinter subreddits, and there doesn't seem to be any fixing it given the size.
This has been happening for years now. People have been complaining about the quality of content going down because communities have been allowing more fluff recently, but imo the biggest reason...
This has been happening for years now. People have been complaining about the quality of content going down because communities have been allowing more fluff recently, but imo the biggest reason is everywhere is getting big enough that the community values change to easier to digest content.
Reddit's ranking algorithms are heavily biased towards fluff, so the only way to prevent a subreddit from getting completely taken over by it is with very strict, constant moderation. Reddit's...
Reddit's ranking algorithms are heavily biased towards fluff, so the only way to prevent a subreddit from getting completely taken over by it is with very strict, constant moderation. Reddit's ranking algorithm is basically "whatever gets the most upvotes (and least downvotes) the fastest is the best", which is biased towards posts that are:
quick to view (voted on quickly)
easy to understand (voted on by a lot of people)
non-controversial (far more upvotes than downvotes)
That heavily leans towards simple/funny/cute/etc. images and gifs, and with the redesign and mobile apps starting to use "card views" that display the full images and autoplay gifs, it only biases it even more.
I moderate a couple of smaller subs on reddit that require mod approval for all posts. The sidebar and submit window tell posters that their post has to be approved before it will be visible to...
I moderate a couple of smaller subs on reddit that require mod approval for all posts. The sidebar and submit window tell posters that their post has to be approved before it will be visible to subscribers. At least for smaller subs, it's an approach that works well for maintaining quality.
That really ties into my point. It's easier to digest, but there's no substance to it. The few times the masses (normies, masses, outgroup, w/e you want to call it) find something with substance...
That really ties into my point.
It's easier to digest, but there's no substance to it. The few times the masses (normies, masses, outgroup, w/e you want to call it) find something with substance and nuance, they don't know how to deal with it. They're too used to simple content that doesn't make them think, or look at things from a different perspective. They like to be told and shown only things they like, never anything that goes against their view or ideals.
That makes for a weak community (and society, in my opinion.)
The way Reddit has escaped this in the past was through the use of subreddits. They've been super helpful to create isolated communities but it leaves it up to your peers to find that community to...
The way Reddit has escaped this in the past was through the use of subreddits. They've been super helpful to create isolated communities but it leaves it up to your peers to find that community to begin with. With an influx of trolls you also end up with them finding and trying to ruin your community as well (/r/seattlewa and it's MAGA members for instance many of whom don't live in Seattle).
One of the biggest things I also noted is that people don't read the articles. Has anyone seen reallyread.it? Seems like a great concept. I can't help but feel that Reddit does feel like Facebook at times, with all the titlebait articles. This far however, the "best" comments are great at disseminating the nonsense. Although I doubt it'll stay that way as more users come.
Does Reddit also have a high participation rate? Or are most users just lurkers?
I agree that initially subreddits were a fantastic community tool on Reddit but now I feel that they cater even more to bite-sized information and mindless content that Reddit has become...
I agree that initially subreddits were a fantastic community tool on Reddit but now I feel that they cater even more to bite-sized information and mindless content that Reddit has become synonymous with. It feels like every time there's a gif that's even moderately funny, a new subreddit gets created in order to absolutely squeeze all life out of the joke and finding every example of images and gifs similar to that joke all over the internet until eventually the only original content that can be posted is people making facebook-style posts in the spirit of the subreddit. For example /r/ChildrenFallingOver, /r/KidsAreStupid, /r/*PeopleTwitter. It gets tiresome and it makes browsing /r/all so worthless.
Very well put. And yeah that can be the issue with being a habitual /r/all browser, hashtag crap subreddits like that come up all the time because they're quick intake, geared towards upvoting and...
Very well put. And yeah that can be the issue with being a habitual /r/all browser, hashtag crap subreddits like that come up all the time because they're quick intake, geared towards upvoting and going.
I got introduced to this through the same article being posted on Reddit. Thanks to everyone for letting me try this out. I hope it grows. I am hopeful their model proves to create a positive and...
I got introduced to this through the same article being posted on Reddit. Thanks to everyone for letting me try this out. I hope it grows. I am hopeful their model proves to create a positive and large community.
I'm actually surprised that it beat out facebook! didn't think reddit had that kind of mass appeal, though i guess that's something the admins are out to fix with their redesign. i truly wonder...
I'm actually surprised that it beat out facebook! didn't think reddit had that kind of mass appeal, though i guess that's something the admins are out to fix with their redesign.
i truly wonder how long it will take until my mother decides to make a reddit account
The redesign seems to be exactly that. Make it as appealing as Facebook or other sites. However, there's a caveat to that. A lot of the time the original group is pushed out because of the masses,...
The redesign seems to be exactly that. Make it as appealing as Facebook or other sites. However, there's a caveat to that. A lot of the time the original group is pushed out because of the masses, and the original purpose of the group is lost.
The people that were first on Reddit don't want that, most of current Reddit doesn't seem to want it. While the masses are great at monetizing a product, it tends to become the focus, losing the original audience with it. When your mother makes a Reddit account, it's the beginning of the end times for that site, imo.
It's a good problem to have, but how does a popular community site avoid some of reddit's issues? Unless growth is continually capped and pruned, eventually the community will become too watered...
It's a good problem to have, but how does a popular community site avoid some of reddit's issues?
Unless growth is continually capped and pruned, eventually the community will become too watered down like reddit's culture is.
If VC money is taken, there will be an incentive to monetize the audience. When you bring on a UX team, they will want to track user usage of the site. Just curious how you break past that barrier of success at scale.
The tilde blog posts go through this with some proposed solutions, the main factors to keep a site from devolving is An open-source codebase, to ensure that predatory code doesn't sneak in. A...
The tilde blog posts go through this with some proposed solutions, the main factors to keep a site from devolving is
An open-source codebase, to ensure that predatory code doesn't sneak in.
A non-exploitative source of income, which means not relying on advertisements. This unfortunately needs some other source, like donations. And, to be fair, it's not impossible. Wikipedia is one of the biggest sites on the internet while relying entirely on donations (as far as I know!).
Everything else is down to community maintenance and moderation. Subreddits like /r/AskScience and /r/AskHistorians do a decent job of it, but it requires not just strong moderation but smart moderation and a robust set of rules.
I just dont want to deal with the 1) redesign and 2) facebook bullshit going on Reddit. (This site so far seems like the best possible alternative!) I think the size of the community doesn't...
I just dont want to deal with the 1) redesign and 2) facebook bullshit going on Reddit. (This site so far seems like the best possible alternative!)
I think the size of the community doesn't really matter. It's the nature/purpose of that community.
(EDIT FUCK can we please move this cancel button? i keep pressing TAB TAB SPACE and losing my edits)
Honestly, the main thing this should tell people is how awful at measuring traffic Alexa is. Reddit's traffic is nowhere close to Facebook's.
I wouldn't be surprised if we get a weird tech-press war over this as Facebook and Reddit try to convince the world why it's wrong or correct respectively.
They might be soon enough. The 2nd official invite thread had to be locked this afternoon after receiving 600+ requests in a little over 30 minutes. There's a real hunger for an alternative.
C'mon, though. 600+ users is a drop in the ocean that is Reddit's user base. The demand for an alternative is there, but frankly, at this point it's a minuscule proportion of Reddit's user base that is demanding it.
People here on ~ are the early adopters. The mass is unlikely to move from Reddit any time soon. You just have to watch how at odds the upvotes and the comments are... A crappy meme of some kind makes front page, and all the comments slam it. That shows you that even those who COMMENT on Reddit are in the minority. Hell, the people who UPVOTE on Reddit are in a minority of their own compared to the people who just browse.
Not saying ~ can't make it, not at all... It's a big, beautiful world out there. What we need is choice, not hopping from one gargantuan monopoly to the other.
That's fine.
Make a high quality website that is purely early adopters. Make it good enough to retain those hardcore people while being of a higher quality than the competitor.
Eventually a catalyst will occur that drives the userbase into mass exodus to the better alternative. The better alternative just actually does NEED to be better, active and clearly good.
This is precisely what occurred with Digg+Reddit. Reddit coexisted as a much MUCH smaller site for a huge amount of time, but it was higher quality and better due to a smaller hardcore userbase - many of which were using both sites. Then Digg messed up and people started to jump ship. Then Digg REALLY messed up and the exodus occurred in full force.
Be better and just exist for long enough. Focus on user retention and the hordes will come slowly. User retention is the big issue for smaller communities, and it comes with value/quality.
One of the big things I recall about the Digg/Reddit exodus was that Reddit had for a year or two had all the top voted content Digg had but it was posted to reddit earlier/faster. If that occurs here, it will largely persuade people to move because they will be getting the same content but earlier, this is a strong motivator for making the decision to move elsewhere.
(I suspect a chunk of that content was probably being posted by reddit's team internally to drive up their own quality, but can't prove it)
It was. They haven't been cagey about the fact that they used bots to automatically crosspost the best content from other places on the web to 'help reddit get started.'
What you're describing isn't just the digg-reddit exodus, that's the general pattern of what happens for every social site that's ever existed. Eventually changes are made that focus on goals aimed at attracting 'more' users, and this inevitably tanks the quality of the content. It's hardly limited to online - the same thing happens to real world events and gatherings - Gencon, Burning Man, etc.
The trick is finding a way to keep the quality up when the horde comes to crash the party. Nobody's ever managed to do that before. I'm hoping we can do it here. By the time the mass exodus begins, all of the early adopters and best contributors here should be firmly entrenched as curators and moderators and the heaviest weight voters, armed to the teeth with whatever tools we can think of to give them the power to defend their communities from this onslaught so they don't have to pack up and run like what has always happened in the past.
I expect we'll end up with some pretty strict moderation in the top-level ~groups, not unlike reddit, though hopefully using far more advanced systems so that moderation is more like curation rather than janitorial and police work. As one dives deeper into the hierarchy, the groups get smaller, the moderation gets lighter, and it has a more free-for-all attitude. All the time the best quality stuff from the lower groups bubbles up to their parents and eventually to the top of the hierarchy.
That should help facilitate higher quality (though more generalized topics) as one browses the roots of the hierarchies, and more specialized and much less strictly regulated content at the bottom of the branches. When a community does well and grows, it can spin off its own sub-groups to help keep the number of users small.
I don't think the exodus is a threat. The change in quality on reddit wasn't significant during the digg exodus (despite what some people say), I was there, I was a power user on Digg, and I was a user of reddit pre-exodus. Very little changed when the hordes moved over.
Reddit changed a bit later on when it started to get stronger on things like "witchhunting". One of the core earliest principles of reddit was "just go and create a new community if you don't like it in this one", and that worked really well. If the mods of a subreddit were problematic then people would start an exodus to a new subreddit. This happened countless times. However, as reddit implemented witchhunting rules this stopped. They were originally intended to stop redditors attacking people outside of reddit but mods started to remove posts complaining about other mods on reddit and that stopped redditors from moving from one low quality subreddit to a new higher quality subreddit with better moderation.
This is in my opinion one of the main reasons culture changes started to occur on reddit.
This shouldn't happen here because Tildes wants to take a more top down hierarchical approach, where no moderators own their groups. This will allow Tildes to hold moderators more accountable for quality and in my opinion should never result in a quality dip.
What will matter for Tildes is for the upper-staff (@Deimos and whoever else he brings on board) to maintain a VERY good relationship with the casual community of the site. If the brand image of the upper staff becomes distrusted or disliked then they will no longer be believed in to maintain quality. This will become harder and harder to do as the site grows in size.
If I were in the team I'd be saying things like there should be monitoring for tone and opinion. The team should be doing approval rating tests so that a slip in quality or opinion of the community for them can be seen over time and accounted for. They're very important factors for the future of the site.
As for moderation. That's not too hard. I don't think I need to go into it too much here as the core group here already is mostly mods. We all know what good and bad modding looks like. And we all know what mistakes happen that aren't always controllable. The modding isn't too hard, Tildes will also have to keep a good relationship with its mods of course, so managing cliques and power-factions of people may become difficult at a later point in time, but it's nothing that Deimos won't already have seen and experienced through his prior work.
Yeah, I remember the exodus too (though I was never a digg user myself) and I'm in agreement - it was pretty remarkable how unaffected reddit was by nearly doubling their userbase in the period of a couple weeks. The site was crashing a lot back then, been a while since we've seen the dreaded 502/504 and the 'static' reddit front page.
Honestly I think it was the long-term cycle of negativity from the downvotes that soured reddit. Mods were also trying to select for quality in a system that was only ever built for short-term popularity, which was a core design mistake imo. Since mods had no tools for that, it was all about removals, which created even more negativity. Another blow was when the entire site (and all of the moderators) finally woke up to the fact that reddit corporate didn't give a damn about them at all. That really came to a head with the Blackout in 2015, when Victoria was let go and the mods showed some real solidarity. It's just like you said - once the confidence in the leadership is lost, it's game over.
Reddit's problem is they outright lie, and people are onto it now. Open, honest transparency goes a long, long way smoothing over any challenges and problems that arise. If you've got no credibility because you've failed to deliver and given bullshit responses too many times, people will turn (rightly imo) against you, and you lose the goodwill needed to successfully marshal a community towards their goals.
I've been dropping that whenever someone expresses interest in free speech or decentralization.
Ditto.
~ & NAB
yin & yang
Does notabug work on mobile?
Big fan. Been invested in Monero and Bitcoin for years so I like the PoW aspect of voting.
That being said it's not really working well on mobile for me right now, Android Oreo, Firefox. But I'll try later on desktop
OK, just used your site on desktop and I gotta say, this site is great. I love that you don't have to sign up for anything. It's like an organized decentralized combination of 4chan and reddit. I hope it catches on.
That being said, I know this is still early but is there any chance of subnotas(?) in the future or being able to pick subs?
Also, you should accept Monero
Wow that's impressive.
For whatever reason, Alexa has for a long time consistently overrated Reddit's traffic. I don't know why they still have any credibility at all.
Doesn't it collect data based on people who install their toolbar browser add-on? That seems like a demographic that is either not internet-savvy at all, or intentionally trying to manipulate perceptions. Maybe they use other data sources now instead of just the browser toolbar thing.
Edit: also, isn't alexa the same alexa from amazon? The fact that both companies have a particularly strong ideological and political connection (both neoliberal/left-wing organizations, both big-tech silicon valley types) suggests the data may not be assumed unbiased with as much certainty.
I believe it's mostly based on their toolbar, yes. Which also means that it doesn't measure mobile app traffic at all, and my understanding is that a huge portion of Facebook's traffic is through their app.
Well, TIL. I'll take Alexa stats with oceans of salt.
In my opinion, that's one of the main reasons it's gotten so bad lately. It's gotten too big for it's own good, and a lot of the people on there don't actually know any better than anyone else, even if they don't realize it or admit it. Plus, with the size comes the splintering, there's a lot of divisiveness now, and reddit completely feeds into that. What with echo chamber subreddits where saying something that isn't the "right thought" gets you kicked out, and general rudeness to each other, not to mention saying something approved so you can get those nice points that mean literally nothing.
Actual conversation has been lost, save for a very few splinter subreddits, and there doesn't seem to be any fixing it given the size.
This has been happening for years now. People have been complaining about the quality of content going down because communities have been allowing more fluff recently, but imo the biggest reason is everywhere is getting big enough that the community values change to easier to digest content.
Reddit's ranking algorithms are heavily biased towards fluff, so the only way to prevent a subreddit from getting completely taken over by it is with very strict, constant moderation. Reddit's ranking algorithm is basically "whatever gets the most upvotes (and least downvotes) the fastest is the best", which is biased towards posts that are:
That heavily leans towards simple/funny/cute/etc. images and gifs, and with the redesign and mobile apps starting to use "card views" that display the full images and autoplay gifs, it only biases it even more.
I moderate a couple of smaller subs on reddit that require mod approval for all posts. The sidebar and submit window tell posters that their post has to be approved before it will be visible to subscribers. At least for smaller subs, it's an approach that works well for maintaining quality.
That really ties into my point.
It's easier to digest, but there's no substance to it. The few times the masses (normies, masses, outgroup, w/e you want to call it) find something with substance and nuance, they don't know how to deal with it. They're too used to simple content that doesn't make them think, or look at things from a different perspective. They like to be told and shown only things they like, never anything that goes against their view or ideals.
That makes for a weak community (and society, in my opinion.)
The way Reddit has escaped this in the past was through the use of subreddits. They've been super helpful to create isolated communities but it leaves it up to your peers to find that community to begin with. With an influx of trolls you also end up with them finding and trying to ruin your community as well (/r/seattlewa and it's MAGA members for instance many of whom don't live in Seattle).
One of the biggest things I also noted is that people don't read the articles. Has anyone seen reallyread.it? Seems like a great concept. I can't help but feel that Reddit does feel like Facebook at times, with all the titlebait articles. This far however, the "best" comments are great at disseminating the nonsense. Although I doubt it'll stay that way as more users come.
Does Reddit also have a high participation rate? Or are most users just lurkers?
I agree that initially subreddits were a fantastic community tool on Reddit but now I feel that they cater even more to bite-sized information and mindless content that Reddit has become synonymous with. It feels like every time there's a gif that's even moderately funny, a new subreddit gets created in order to absolutely squeeze all life out of the joke and finding every example of images and gifs similar to that joke all over the internet until eventually the only original content that can be posted is people making facebook-style posts in the spirit of the subreddit. For example /r/ChildrenFallingOver, /r/KidsAreStupid, /r/*PeopleTwitter. It gets tiresome and it makes browsing /r/all so worthless.
I call those "subreddits as hashtags". It's really not what subreddits are for, but like you said, it's become an incredibly common thing lately.
Very well put. And yeah that can be the issue with being a habitual /r/all browser, hashtag crap subreddits like that come up all the time because they're quick intake, geared towards upvoting and going.
I don't have concrete numbers on Reddit or any particular sub-reddit but the 1% Rule is worth reading up on.
Nah... it was always like that. It's always been an echo chamber of pseudo intellectuals.
I got introduced to this through the same article being posted on Reddit. Thanks to everyone for letting me try this out. I hope it grows. I am hopeful their model proves to create a positive and large community.
I'm actually surprised that it beat out facebook! didn't think reddit had that kind of mass appeal, though i guess that's something the admins are out to fix with their redesign.
i truly wonder how long it will take until my mother decides to make a reddit account
The redesign seems to be exactly that. Make it as appealing as Facebook or other sites. However, there's a caveat to that. A lot of the time the original group is pushed out because of the masses, and the original purpose of the group is lost.
The people that were first on Reddit don't want that, most of current Reddit doesn't seem to want it. While the masses are great at monetizing a product, it tends to become the focus, losing the original audience with it. When your mother makes a Reddit account, it's the beginning of the end times for that site, imo.
I would say it is more a signal of how far facebook usage has fallen this year in the US than how high reddit has risen.
As much as I would like to believe that, it seems that survey data disagrees.
It's a good problem to have, but how does a popular community site avoid some of reddit's issues?
Unless growth is continually capped and pruned, eventually the community will become too watered down like reddit's culture is.
If VC money is taken, there will be an incentive to monetize the audience. When you bring on a UX team, they will want to track user usage of the site. Just curious how you break past that barrier of success at scale.
The tilde blog posts go through this with some proposed solutions, the main factors to keep a site from devolving is
An open-source codebase, to ensure that predatory code doesn't sneak in.
A non-exploitative source of income, which means not relying on advertisements. This unfortunately needs some other source, like donations. And, to be fair, it's not impossible. Wikipedia is one of the biggest sites on the internet while relying entirely on donations (as far as I know!).
Everything else is down to community maintenance and moderation. Subreddits like /r/AskScience and /r/AskHistorians do a decent job of it, but it requires not just strong moderation but smart moderation and a robust set of rules.
I just dont want to deal with the 1) redesign and 2) facebook bullshit going on Reddit. (This site so far seems like the best possible alternative!)
I think the size of the community doesn't really matter. It's the nature/purpose of that community.
(EDIT FUCK can we please move this cancel button? i keep pressing TAB TAB SPACE and losing my edits)
:( nevermind, the edit wasnt that important
Yet somehow whenever I reference it 9/10 people haven't used it and are maybe familiar with the name but have no concept of what the site is.