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What can we learn from the life-cycles of Digg and Reddit?
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?
The two biggest ones are don't sell out and listen to your community.
I do think that so far main stream massive social networks are doomed to fail. However the goal of Tildes is not to be main stream and as long as the core values of the communtity are up held I see no reason we shouldn't live a long healthy life. However as technology advances there might come a time where this site and others like might be irrelevant but I personally feel that there will always be a place for message boards.
I would actually disagree to an extent with the "listen to your community" advice. With reddit, part of the problem is toxicity of a vocal subset of the community, which spilled over into large numbers of trolls willing to wade into technical debates, invoking elaborate hypotheticals and abstract principles, arguing for rules that shelter toxic behavior. When /r/fatpeoplehate was banned, there was an avalanche of people suddenly interested in "consistency" more than curtailing abusive behavior itself.
Also modern internet toxicity is, in its own weird way, sophisticated enough to understand that debates are shaped by norms, and conscious of the need to defend preferred forms of toxicity by challenging norms themselves (e.g. redefining routine community moderation of abusive behavior as "censorship," even though this form of moderation had been uncontroversial from the 90s up until about 2015).
So part of the problem is that abusiveness itself has become organized and ideological, with a certain appreciation for the need to bake itself into culture and into online communities.
Yeah, same. "stick to your founding principles" > "listen to your users"... even though listening is important.
"Listen to your users when they recommend things that don't compromise your founding principles" is a better, more nuanced and accurate way to state the best method to avoid community regression and collapse IMO.
I remember an admin saying that reddit wasn't meant to be a bastion of free speech, and then someone linked an interview where a different admin had used those exact words to describe reddit. Consistency is probably the most important, since people who disagree with the founding principles won't stick around anyway.
It helps if you don't sell out to venture capitalists and stockholders. That's guaranteed to undermine any set of principles that run contrary to making piles of money.
$10 says that "someone" was probably @go1dfish. He's well know for calling out the hypocrisy at reddit HQ. :P
I totally agree. The founding principles are however very broad and it's easy to lose sight going forward. We must be vigilant as well and make sure every voice is heard. Not just the loud ones.
I would argue that listening to vocal subsets of users with radical ideas contradicts listening to your users. A good leader listens to all ideas not just the loudest. The more I read and interact with this communtity the more I'm inclined to believe that we will have intelligent leadership over populists. I agree with your points. It is up to us as well. We must not be apathetic when we face organized, sophisticated toxicity. The rational, easy going part of the communtity must not be easy going about matters that concern the direction of the communtity. It's easy to look at what has happened to Reddit and think "we can't do anything about it, time to jump ship" that must not happen here. We must foster participation and open discourse so the average user feels like he has a voice and I feel like we're on the right track.
I put toxicity & abusiveness in a very different corner from "radical ideas." I don't know if that means I agree or disagree with you, but I feel the latter shouldn't shelter the former, and I definitely agree that we should entertain all manner of radical ideas. For instance there might be some fantastic new ideas on how to curtail toxic behavior that seem too radical to entertain, and making sure we have a space where those ideas are given their due is something I would regard as very important.
And I completely agree that we shouldn't let the attitude of "we can't do anything about it" become the default feeling here.
I think we are on the same page. I'm not a native speaker so some times I mess up my wording and fail to get my point across. To clarify, groups of people with radical ideas tend to be louder than the majority but they should not be given more weight because of how loud they are. They should however not be ignored.
I'm going to have to disagree with your deference to "intelligent leadership" over populists. The real world equivalent is what is going on right now with the Democratic party in the US - a small group of elites hold the throne and are not good representatives of the majority.
You pretty much have to assume that people with certain interests will try to game the system, get into those positions of power and bend the system towards their own ends.
The obvious response is to move towards a decentralized power structure - more like a direct democracy - and in an online forum it would seem like an easy thing to implement - except you will have a lot of users who will try be over-represented and other users who can't be bothered to participate. So limit the number of accounts one person can have and make voting mandatory.
You make good points and we are kind of on the same page. It's still a young site and we don't have a large enough user base right now to prevent any kind of take over of brigades of people with their own interests. I don't know what is the magic number for opening up the site but I would asume large enough for that to happen easily.
At the moment our leadership is basically Deimos and until all the features are implemented to enable something resembling a direct democracy we need to make sure that the core values of the site are upheld. We also don't want to end up with an echo chamber which is a very real possibility while the community is still small. It is often hard to discern what is the real majority thinking without having systems in place to get that data.
How do "we" make sure the core values of the site are upheld when, as you yourself say, Deimos is the sole leader? How do you plan to usurp Deimos' authority and ablity to run this site any way he bloody-well wants to?
We are currently under a benevolent dictatorship. There is no "we", only "he".
Deimos can't run the place by himself when it as it grows. We the users have to be vigilant as well. There will have to be some kind of moderation and we don't know exactly how that will work. The trust system is not implemented yet but everything points to that we the users will have an important role in moderation. Especially the active and "trusted" users. Hence we need to uphold the core values.
Actually, based on the explanations from Deimos and his helpers, and my own experiences on www.StackExchange.com which uses a similar system, I believe I have a fairly good idea how it will work.
Ok, then you know more than me. I don't know the stack exchange system. Hasn't Deimos said that it will be tied into the trust system and the trust system is still a WIP as to how it will be implemented?
Yes and yes. However, even though the implementation details might not be known yet, the broad principles are known. I've read an explanation by Deimos himself, but I can't track it down to link it for you.
As you participate in a group, you'll earn trust in that group. If your posts get upvoted, your trust rating will increase (because you're obviously providing relevant content to the group). Eventually, when there's a report function, your reports will earn you trust: if you report a comment and it ends up being removed by a "moderator"-type, then your trust rating will increase (because you obviously know bad when you see it, and you're willing to act on it); if you report a comment and it does not end up being removed, your trust will not increase, and may even decrease (because you don't know bad when you see it, or you're using reports wrongly). If you apply a useful relevant tag to someone else's post, your trust rating will increase (because you know how to categorise posts). As you move up the food chain, your actions will either earn you more trust (if they contribute to the group) or reduce your trust rating (if they detract from the group). And more trust will give you more powers.
Moderation will be very decentralised. There will be editors and curators and other various "moderator" roles. A group with 10,000 subscribers might have 1,000 editors and 500 curators and so on.
You're right that we need to uphold the core values, but people who don't uphold the core values will find that their trust ratings do not increase and they won't get the extra abilities that come with higher trust, so they'll have less influence over the site than people who do uphold those values. It'll be kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy: only people who uphold the core values will get the power to uphold the core values, and the only people who get the power to uphold the core values will be people who already uphold them.
But none of that is relevant right now. Right now, only Deimos can do any moderation activities like moving posts or applying tags or removing comments or banning users. He is the sole upholder of values here. Nothing you or I do can matter.
That sounds close to what I imagined. The big question then is how will it be implemented. I would imagine that at first it will be a small pool of users that will be moderating essentially giving them special powers and then gradually more people will enter the pool as they gain "trust".
Are you familiar with Arrow's impossibility theorem from economics? It boils down to this - essentially, democratic voting systems will fail at optimising outcomes for the most people. Which therefore implies a dictatorship is optimal.
The math was elegant enough to win Kenneth Arrow the Nobel prize. However, I personally did not see the real-world applications of his theory until I saw reddit degrade with it's attempt to be 'democratic' as you described above.
I wouldn't consider reddit to have fallen. It's still going strong and I personally still have a lot of use for it (memes, obscure political subreddits, learning the stupid stuff Trump did today, cat pictures, porn, etc.)
For me, ~ seems like a good replacement for /r/truereddit or /r/askreddit. It encourages interaction, since it doesn't seem pointless to comment on a post that's over 8 hours old.
I think the three biggest things for maintaining the quality of the site are
Has Reddit become too big to fail now?
I don't think any website is really too big to fail, but I don't think their userbase is going away anytime soon as long as reddit's owners can keep the lights on. And even if 90% of redditors left the site, reddit would still be a pretty active place.
My favorite things on Reddit will probably be around for a while, but they are relatively niche. r/law is educational and topical, r/spacex and r/spacexlounge are great too. All of those don’t have mob rule going on, which is one of the things that turns me off about some subs.
In those 3 subs, rational conversation still rules the day.
What happens is the slow, sweet, subtle decay from driving away all of your best contributors.
That picky 10% creates about 98% of reddit's content, and 100% of all of the worthwhile content. Tildes is sitting here siphoning that group off of reddit right now. They are always the first to show up on new forums and the first to leave when it goes bad. The submitters and content creators are the lifeblood, not the passive consumers. It's a variation on the Pareto principle.
These are the people who build up a new place, then make it popular enough to outshine the old place. Then the horde sees the new shiny toy in the distance and comes running, crashing the new party and turning it into the same mess the old party had become... so the cool kids leave again and build another, and this cycle continues eternally. It's become so predictable and depressing. :/
I want to know what happens when the horde crashes into the brick wall of an ironclad trust system that is primed to beat their bullshit. Tools that give the people who built a place the ability to fight back against the culture they created being erased. Nobody every even tries to do this. I guess it's counter-productive to the profit-motive in the eyes of modern marketing, and that seems wholly irrational to me.
I think the new userbase who don't know how it used to be will stay around, the older userbase leaving.
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." Reddit is not dead, nor even dying. Quite the opposite: it keeps growing and growing.
What you mean to say is that there's something that has changed Reddit for the worse in your personal opinion.
Reddit is not failing or dying. It's changing. That's an entirely different matter.
I disagree. I think all topics should be on the table. I don't think that shutting down whole topics is a valid approach.
What we need to focus on is behaviour, rather than topics. If you're concerned about "nasty conversation and hivemind", then that's what we should focus on, rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I haven't had problems with posts being deleted on reddit. I mean, I've been banned from various ban happy subreddits, but half the time that happened I was pretty much asking to be banned. And when my posts are deleted, it's usually because the mods think I'm posting my anime meme to the wrong anime meme subreddit. And while those mods are obviously fascists with no sense of humor, they've always been transparent with their reasoning.
Do we just frequent different parts of reddit? Or maybe I'm just boring and never post anything controversial (it's pretty trivial to figure out my real name from my reddit handle, so I kind of have to avoid posting inflammatory stuff with it anyhow.)
I've seen various online communities kept civil by banning discussion of politics and religion (shoutout to Shamus Young's blog & forum) but it would be nice if ~ was a place were those conversations could happen in a polite and moderated fashion.
I think the biggest lesson to learn from Reddit is that having a 'points' system where users gain points from comments and posts leads to redundant, low-effort content. People complain about reposts, but they happen because they're easy. Reddit has new users every day, and it seems like most of them enjoy the same jokes over and over again.
Should the number of votes a comment be hidden on ~? Seems almost pointless to have it since you can't see the total number of votes you have (which is a good thing)
I think the current system needs some work. We've discussed this recently since the Tag system was disabled. I don't like the vote button on its own. I really like that the total number of votes can't be seen, and it should never be displayed to anyone, not even the user themself.
Personally, I don't even really like the vote button. I know we need some kind of system in place to rate user comments and submissions, because eventually @Deimos is going to create a trust system that will work based on community reaction. The vote button is simple minded and too easy to press. It presents the same issues we have on Reddit where the group think has the loudest representation.
There are many improvements that can be made to the system, and I think over time that will happen. So far, Tildes is going in the right direction.
I only just joined, so I'm not familiar with the story behind disabling the tags, but learning that ~ intended to use /. style tags instead of downvotes was the biggest "finally someone made this" moment that caught my interest.
I think any direct visibility into the site-internal karma/votes/value-of-content system will inevitably lead to gaming/manipulation and low effort point-seeking, and /.'s solution still feels like the right direction.
In the case of votes/points, /. caps the visible score of any given post into the range [-1,+5] (with one displayed tag). The actual sorting can still use the real vote counts, but only display a more granular view to users.
Alternatively, getting rid of "raw" votes entirely in favor of only using tags (adding a few more positive tags like "interesting" or "informative") would force users to think a little bit about why they liked a certain post and enable more useful sorting/filtering for readers.
This is my thinking as well. I hate that the vote button is mindless. @Deimos said that he thinks a default 'good' tag would eventually just take place of the vote button, and I think that argument isn't far from the truth so we need to develop a good system. It seems like slashdot's system has gone through similar motions.
In the early days of reddit, there was a mantra repeated over and over by people on reddit who understood the meaning of "Eternal September":
"Do not talk about reddit on other web sites"
"Do not post links to reddit on other web sites"
I think it had a positive effect in slowing the influx of assholes and preventing them from taking over. (The big influx of assholes came later after reddit became really well known).
I agree that Eternal September kills sites. IMO we should keep Tildes growth to a minimum. It could even be set up so that only X amount of new accounts can be created each month.
I would envision this as a percentage: the value of X would be a percentage of the number of existing accounts. For example, X might be 1% (or 2% or 5%) of existing accounts. That allows X to scale up as the site increases (it would be silly to allow only 10 people to sign up per month when the site has 100,000 subscribers!), but keeps the number low in proportion to the total number of subscribers.
I think another thing to learn from is Hacker News. Not from its failings, but from its relative success. I know it’s really simple in scope compared to ~, but what makes HN so useful, good, and non-toxic?
Is it moderation?
Is it a focus on specific content that brings only certain types of people? (I mean professionals)
Is it its relative obscurity?
Is it that you can downvote, but only after x amount of karma?
Is there something else that I’m not thinking of?
edit: For those not too familiar with HN, here is Deimos' post and discussion about tildes
ᵉᵈᶦᵗ ⁻ ᶠᶦˣᵉᵈ ˡᶦⁿᵏ
One thing I value most about HN is the implied expectation that your contributions will be of a certain quality, and not typically a form of meta joke. It's rare to see someone comment with an imgur link to a meme, for instance.
This tone was set from the get go and the community upheld it through voting and, at times, responses even after Arrington spilled the beans and brought in big traffic with his TechCrunch article.
This is probably one of the better arguments I've heard for excluding content in the rules of ~. When there is an expectation of what the community will function like (quality responses, dislike of low effort posts), new folks will learn those lessons as well. These lessons might be through reading the rules or through posts being moderated or ignored, but it will nevertheless make sure the site maintains an air of seriousness.
We've got lots of options for content that just entertains our brains lowest common denominator but it is important to have a place we know requires us to be more conscientious about how we post and interact.
Yes and no.
I moderate a subreddit on Reddit that is devoted to in-depth discussions about a topic. We've got rules a-plenty, and we set up a high-quality culture from the get-go.
This worked for a while: new subscribers joined up because of the in-depth discussion culture they saw, and they supported that culture by maintaining the high level of quality. "Monkey see, monkey do" worked for a while.
However, as the subreddit continued to grow, it started attracting people who saw good discussion, but didn't understand why it was good. They subscribed without understanding what they were subscribing to, or not caring. More and more of the shallow culture from general Reddit began to seep in. Even with very active and interventionist moderators, the quality of discussion has decreased noticeably over the 5 years since we started the subreddit.
I'm optimistic about this website because the number of moderators will scale up with the number of subscribers. Rather than having a handful of moderators try to manage posts by 40,000 users (as in our subreddit), I expect that a certain percentage of subscribers will have roles in moderating the content here by being "trusted users". Even if that percentage is as low as 1% (which I highly doubt!), that means that 1 in 100 people will have some ability to enforce the culture to some degree. That'll work a lot better than mere "monkey see, monkey do" for new subscribers.
Your clarification makes sense and I guess I need to expand on my idea as well.
It sounds like the main difficulty will be not having rules people agree with but rather making sure that they are enforced. You're right about the workload increasing though, and that might be something to work on.
The idea that actually comes to mind is something like an "Overwatch" feature from CS:GO. Users with sufficient "trust" would be asked to look at content and vote on whether to take moderator-like actions on a comment or post, might help alleviate some of the workload from official mods.
Yes. Exactly. As I understand Deimos' and his helpers' explanations about this website, there will be no official moderators. Or, more to the point, everyone can be a moderator.
A moderator on Reddit (for example) has a certain set of powers that a normal user does not have: remove comments, change flairs/tag, ban users, and so on. Simplistically, it's all or nothing: you either are a moderator with all these powers, or you're a user with none of them.
Here on Tildes, those various moderation powers will be distributed among trusted users. As you earn more trust, you'll acquire more moderation powers. At a low trust level, you might gain the power to report a comment. At a higher trust level, you might gain the power to remove a comment. At a low trust level, you might gain the power to apply a tag to someone else's post. At a higher trust level, you might gain the power to move a post into another group. In this model, lots of people will be moderators - whether they're just reporting comments or whether they're removing comments. There will be no hard and fast line between "non-moderator" and "moderator"; it'll be a sliding scale between zero mod-powers through partial mod-powers to full mod-powers, and each user can move up and down that scale depending on how much trust they earn (or lose).
HN is an echo chamber, though. It can also be toxic at times. Not /r/fatpeoplehate kind of toxic, but still...
I really think the best thing we can do is continue with good content, civil discourse and just being decent to each other.
Unfortunately as more people join I think we'll find people trying to make tildes something it isn't.
The majority of people I've interacted with here are capable of making a reply to a user that what they said is inappropriate in a non aggressive way.
Call me optimistic, but I think it might work for a while.
Then when more new users join and they see the tone of discussion they'll either participate or see that it's not the place they want to be.
I think that is imperative that we have the trust system in place and have these users build some trust before opening to everyone else.
The current users seems quite reasonable and to understand and share the core principles of tildes and would act as moderators once the gates open.
It definitely cannot be just @Deimos, @Amarok and @cfabbro forever as they cannot live on the website, scrolling through every comment.
Did you hear me, @cfabbro? Take a break, get a coffee!
For me, number 3 in four things to accept.
http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
Unfortunately, there does need to be some sort of gatekeeping. It can happen after the fact, but someone needs to protect the group - even from itself.
The above is a great read, even if it's a bit on the long side.
I think one of the biggest things is to not be reliant on advertising for revenue, so I'm already really positive about the direction here. Advertising always means that more users is better, but content quality is improved by removing bad actors. Advertising also inexorably incentivizes massive data collection and privacy invasions.
Still, Tildes can't just rely on donations forever. I really like the no ads as well, and it works for a small community like this, but if the site were to grow, we would be met with problems very quickly. Unfortunately, I just don't see it being sustainable over time.
I think, with many communities, a "benevolent dictatorship" is necessary. When people try to be too inclusive and give everyone equal say, it devolves into a shitshow. It happened with Digg, Reddit, Burning Man, you name it.
One needs to establish some rules and values and then say, if you agree with these things and are willing to abide by them, you're welcome here. If not, feel free to find or create something more to your liking.
I think a big part is sorting by activity rather than popularity, I think it's the only way to include everyone in the discussion.
Just joined and am really enjoying this "activity" view that reminds me of the other forums I used to join combined with the nested conversation style. Best of both worlds.
I must say I feel much more comfortable committing here than I do on other platforms.
Let's hope it stays that way.
I don't think there's anything realistic that could have been done to keep reddit 'good' for longer than it has been. It's experiencing a natural rise and fall, as OP said. That it's lasted for this long (10 years!) is a testament to the site's design and flexibility. Subreddits kept reddit fresh for a really long time. It's been around for eons in web terms, and it's still good if you stick to the right subreddits.
Some of that flexibiltiy, over time, has created problems. Fringe hate communities thrived on reddit because of the ability to stay out of the limelight, so to speak. All of us are guilty of creating our own echo chambers on communities like reddit. That's a major way in which the internet has changed in the last 10 years; we all get information targeted to our worldview.
Reddit's problems grew as the site grew. It's expensive to run. Its userbase is not what it once was (nothing wrong with that, but the userbase's separation from youtube commenters gets smaller every year). There's not much to learn from that; it just got big. All of this didn't make the site die quickly because of the aforementioned flexibility of subreddits.
The redesign reddit is going through has obvious motivations to anyone who's been through the Digg redesign or around the internet long enough in general. The admins are trying to monetize it; they're mostly doing things you or I would do if reddit was our job. I'm not here because the reddit admins ruined their site; I'm here because I want to try a smaller community again.
Don't let power users take control.
I know that power users are a concern of the Tildes devs, which is good because a reputation system, which I still think is a good idea, could potentially encourage that kind of misuse.
Stay small, basically. As soon as a site gets big, quality suffers greatly.
Do you think this applies to every site? Is it impossible to maintain quality at scale in all cases, or has it just never worked so far?
I think it applies to all websites built around a community. Still haven't seen any of them not get ruined by hordes of new users.
Honestly? The only people you should ask for/accept things from are your community. Without a community, a site is a useless husk, and if you actively go against (the majority of) your community's wishes, then there won't be much of a community left. There's also the age-old "don't sell out" point. Don't seek money over wanting to foster a healthy, consistent discussion medium. Follow your heart, my man
Has Reddit really fallen? It's changing, sure, but falling? I don't think so. Even if it is falling, it's definitely too early to make that call. It might alienate a certain type of user, but it will probably attract a different type of user. That's not falling, that's evolving.
Did some fish "fall" when they evolved legs and became land animals? They stopped being able to function in the water. They failed at being fish. But can we consider that a "fall"?
I think monetization, and advertising has ruined Reddit. Lots of Astro-turfing that hijacks influence from actual users and hands it to companies that can buy front page spots.
to add to that. what can we learn from the failures of voat. That site seemed to have so much potential.
Can you explain how voat has failed? The only thing I ever hear about it is that it's overrun with all of reddit's rejects (white supremacists and whatnot). Is there something more fundamental that went wrong with it or is it just the user base?
It's pretty much the user base
Kinda offtopic, but I like how little groups there are so when a new one comes out theres a ton of activitie on it.
Right? The size of this community makes it kinda magical right now. I'm having a good time, I hope that an influx of users can be managed effectively in the future.
I've been thinking about a way to improve online social media for quite a while (even considered starting a "new reddit" myself) and I would have to say that Deimos has made a great start by making the platform user supported. I also like the idea of a Trust mechanic within the system and I think it should be taken even farther.
I would propose a heirarchical trust structure to place the most amount of trust with the people who deserve it and less on down. The trust system would be executed in voting by biasing the trust with greater voting power.
I imagine the first tier with the highest voting power to be people who are vetted and verified to be the person they say they are - who even use their real name as their avatar. +10 voting power
The next tier down would be people who are vetted and verified but use a moniker for their avatar to avoid doxing. +5 voting power
The lowest tier would be anonymous avatar. +1 voting power
Each member would have one avatar in each of these tiers and each avatar would be able to raise their voting power by contributing to the community in positive ways - thereby building trust along the way.
Each community would be able to vote to dilute their trust by "splitting their stock" if they feel the trust level in their community has been "gamed"
Sounds like a neat mechanism for combatting bots or malicious accounts.
Thanks. I guess that bots and trolls are part of my worry, but astroturfing is as big of a concern.
Social networks are largely fads. Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Snapchat, Instagram, Reddit, Digg, LinkedIn, etc. Sure, they all serve different purposes and some are still around and doing quite well. But, getting dethroned is inevitable.
I think that once any site is unleashed to the masses it either continues to grow and expand to stay relevant or it dies. This leads to the "facebook/youtube" problem in which quality decreases as the userbase grows and then the masses move onto the next best thing.
Flexibility and a very clear & consistent vision of what Tildes wants to be in the grand scheme of things is the best way to succeed.
People are always looking for the next best thing. Instagram stories is a great example. Why use Snapchat stories when you could use Instagram stories? Or, why not use both? Barriers to entry for social networks are very low, and the market is very saturated. For the users, the main attraction to any social network is the "social" part of it, and thus the userbase. People get bored and they also get attracted to newer features of other communities and eventually they will flock elsewhere. I'm not saying how long the lifecycle is or that it will be complete and total destruction - Myspace is still around. Just that it tends to happen, according to history anyway.