"due to site-wide bug"? Due to site-wide protests by moderators, more like. This headline by The Verge is false. They linked to the comment where Alex Le explained why Reddit rolled back the...
"due to site-wide bug"? Due to site-wide protests by moderators, more like.
This headline by The Verge is false.
They linked to the comment where Alex Le explained why Reddit rolled back the feature:
They rolled it out too fast.
They didn't make it clear who was moderating and responsible for the chat rooms.
They didn't let moderators know if the feature was live for their communities.
The only time Alex Le even mentions a bug is when he says "this was all confused by a bug that occurred in rare circumstances". He doesn't say they're withdrawing the feature due to the bug, he's saying that, on top of everything else, the bug made things worse. But that's the point The Verge leads with. That's bad reporting.
Basically, the mods kicked up a stink and the admins backed down.
I agree that's probably the real reason, but it's not the reason stated by the admins, and is not the title of this article. They don't officially acknowledge the mod protests, and say they're...
I agree that's probably the real reason, but it's not the reason stated by the admins, and is not the title of this article.
“If you dismiss the banner in 3 communities where the feature is active on desktop web or android, then the small button you’re seeing appears on all communities. But importantly, for all support communities, the button does nothing. Your users could never enter chats for this feature even in the rare case they saw the button,” Le wrote. “We are actively fixing this now. The feature is being rolled back in a matter of a few hours and the button will be removed.”
They don't officially acknowledge the mod protests, and say they're reverting it because of bugs.
edit: I was about to revert it, but don't want to start an edit war. I just think it's editorializing to change the headline to the "woke" version even if everyone knows it's the case.
I think they probably will do that. They had press articles around this feature, made an official blog post about it and an /r/blog submission (which they very rarely do any more), and so on. I...
I think they probably will do that. They had press articles around this feature, made an official blog post about it and an /r/blog submission (which they very rarely do any more), and so on. I think it's extremely unlikely that it gets totally dropped.
My prediction is that the promised explanation post will be made today at about 4 PM pacific time (prime Friday news dump time), and then this feature will be back sometime in the next week or two with some small tweaks to try to mollify mods a bit.
I'm thinking the same. They've committed to the project; they're going mitigate the biggest pain points and go ahead with it. And while I might not care for chat, I'll still be fine with it if...
I'm thinking the same. They've committed to the project; they're going mitigate the biggest pain points and go ahead with it.
And while I might not care for chat, I'll still be fine with it if they simply let us opt our communities out. Having an official chat group using our name with zero intent to enforce our rules is a nightmare situation.
I can't even say how many times I've had to address a situation before it got out of hand, or prevent misinformation from spreading, sometimes targeted and getting to witch hunting levels. If that's allowed to ferment in a chat with no control, that would have nasty spillover effects for the subreddit.
At least if we can opt out, it can be somebody else's problem.
As long as one of those "tweaks" is the promised opt-out feature, I think the mods will be mollified. That seems to be their (our) non-negotiable request.
then this feature will be back sometime in the next week or two with some small tweaks to try to mollify mods a bit.
As long as one of those "tweaks" is the promised opt-out feature, I think the mods will be mollified. That seems to be their (our) non-negotiable request.
I could have updated the title. I considered doing so. But the misreporting goes further than the title. The article leads with discussion about the bug, which is the minor point, and only gets to...
I could have updated the title. I considered doing so. But the misreporting goes further than the title. The article leads with discussion about the bug, which is the minor point, and only gets to the moderator protests later on, even though that's the major point. Basically, whoever wrote this article is re-writing history, and trying to convince people that Reddit did not back down after multiple moderator protests (or, at least, allowing Reddit to put out this narrative without being challenged).
If you take a look at my comment frequency here, you can see gaps where In don’t comment. Those are generally times I went back to reddit and was more active there. I always end up coming back...
If you take a look at my comment frequency here, you can see gaps where In don’t comment. Those are generally times I went back to reddit and was more active there.
I always end up coming back here though. Things like this are reasons why. I feel like Reddit is just adding more and more features without giving proper control over them or notice that they’re rolling out major changes like this.
Here's the post in /r/modnews about changes they're planning to make to this before they deploy it again (likely in 2 weeks or so): An Update on “Start Chatting”
Here's the post in /r/modnews about changes they're planning to make to this before they deploy it again (likely in 2 weeks or so): An Update on “Start Chatting”
One day, Reddit is going to have a Digg 4.0 moment, where they implement a new feature, redesign or rule and chase their user base away. They narrowly avoided this fate back in 2015 when they...
One day, Reddit is going to have a Digg 4.0 moment, where they implement a new feature, redesign or rule and chase their user base away. They narrowly avoided this fate back in 2015 when they effectively threw Ellen Pao under the bus over a censorship and unfair dismissal scandal, then elected their old CEO to ironically censor the site even harder.
Forcing unmoderated chat rooms upon their community moderators could easily have been one of those moments, had they not backed down.
The question is where the Reddit exodus will go... There are loads of Reddit clones yet none of them seem like a particularly viable alternative for their own reasons.
They avoided it by a mile, a little surface anger isn't going to cause people to leave en masse. Everyone says 'look out for another Digg' - the Digg exodus was a seriously uncommon event, I don't...
They avoided it by a mile, a little surface anger isn't going to cause people to leave en masse. Everyone says 'look out for another Digg' - the Digg exodus was a seriously uncommon event, I don't know of any user base migration that comes anywhere remotely close to the speed of that one and very much doubt it will happen to Reddit. Reddit might go the way of MySpace or Yahoo (slowly and with many whimpers), but it isn't likely to go the way Digg did.
Digg happened because Reddit was simply the better platform at the time - the migration itself was already happening, 4.0 was just the push that caused critical mass.
Digg died because the owners haphazardly took a lot of social bookmarking features away from the site, whilst simultaneously turning it into little more than an overglorified RSS feed with...
Digg died because the owners haphazardly took a lot of social bookmarking features away from the site, whilst simultaneously turning it into little more than an overglorified RSS feed with comments.
I mean... the removal of some features was well warranted. Friends lists were merely a tool that astroturfers used to push their shitty blog spam, and removing the bury button was a good solution to stop brigades.
But I think the main thing that killed Digg was that there was an alternative on the market that was in many ways better. Digg had limited categories and Reddit allowed users to create their own community moderated sections.
Think about it this way. Other social networks like MySpace and Bebo died because they were mismanaged into oblivion and implemented the same shitty app features that became such a point of contention and annoyance for Facebook users. Also, MySpace never really ditched the fugly early 90s website look until Justin Timberlake bought the site at a bargain bin price from News Corp.
The reason why awful redesigns kill some websites and not others is down to viable alternatives. YouTube has been through many algorithm changes, redesigns and other changes that have shafted the community, yet there's been no major exodus because every YouTube competitor has shut shop due to the high costs and plethora of legal issues associated with video hosting.
Reddit is definitely suffering from similar issues to what Digg was rife with in its heyday. Content is definitely controlled heavily by a cabal of power users similarly to Digg prior to its v4 update, but unlike Reddit these power users actually have the ability to remove content through community moderation. The worst part is that rather than try to break the monopoly that power users have like Kevin Rose tried to, Reddit's owners are instead pandering to them.
But the thing about Reddit is... social news aggregators are a dime a dozen. Hell, Reddit until around 2014 was at one point open source, allowing anybody and their own mother to create a Reddit clone if they so wanted.
The Reddit redesign is also a huge point of contention in the community, and I genuinely believe that if Reddit were to force the new design upon its users, there would be some form of exodus from the site, perhaps to SaidIt or Voat.
I haven't really been on Reddit in a while but didn't they already implement something like this before? Or some kind of link with Snoonet or whatever? It seemed like a pretty useless feature back...
I haven't really been on Reddit in a while but didn't they already implement something like this before? Or some kind of link with Snoonet or whatever?
It seemed like a pretty useless feature back then, moreso now that most Subreddits have effectively figured out Discord integration.
They added a chat feature a couple of years ago, but it was for one-on-one chats, person to person. Then they added optional subreddit chat rooms last year(?), which moderators could enable for...
They added a chat feature a couple of years ago, but it was for one-on-one chats, person to person.
Then they added optional subreddit chat rooms last year(?), which moderators could enable for their subreddits (or not).
Yeah, they rolled this out to "provide their users with an interactive outlet during the pandemic" or something to that effect. One difference between this and the normal subreddit chat option is...
Yeah, they rolled this out to "provide their users with an interactive outlet during the pandemic" or something to that effect.
One difference between this and the normal subreddit chat option is mods have no control over it. They can't opt out, and they can't moderate it. It's a site-wide chat run by the admins, with a room for each subreddit. Contrast to a sub-wide chat, run by the moderators, who have kick/ban privileges. Suddenly you've got what looks like an official /r/askscience chatroom, but it's up to the admins to interpret and enforce /r/askscience's rules, which no one realistically expects to happen.
That's not quite it either. This feature creates many small group chats. I don't know the actual numbers, but for example if you went into /r/askscience and clicked on the "start chatting" button,...
That's not quite it either. This feature creates many small group chats. I don't know the actual numbers, but for example if you went into /r/askscience and clicked on the "start chatting" button, it would put you in a small group chat with something like 5 other users that had clicked it recently too. More people continuing to click it would get their own small group chats, it's not combined into one large one.
So large/active subreddits could potentially have hundreds of these "associated" chats going on, with no insight at all into how many there are, who's in them, and what's happening in them. The way it works gives it the potential to be extremely easy to abuse for spammers, harassers, etc.
"due to site-wide bug"? Due to site-wide protests by moderators, more like.
This headline by The Verge is false.
They linked to the comment where Alex Le explained why Reddit rolled back the feature:
They rolled it out too fast.
They didn't make it clear who was moderating and responsible for the chat rooms.
They didn't let moderators know if the feature was live for their communities.
The only time Alex Le even mentions a bug is when he says "this was all confused by a bug that occurred in rare circumstances". He doesn't say they're withdrawing the feature due to the bug, he's saying that, on top of everything else, the bug made things worse. But that's the point The Verge leads with. That's bad reporting.
Basically, the mods kicked up a stink and the admins backed down.
I agree that's probably the real reason, but it's not the reason stated by the admins, and is not the title of this article.
They don't officially acknowledge the mod protests, and say they're reverting it because of bugs.
edit: I was about to revert it, but don't want to start an edit war. I just think it's editorializing to change the headline to the "woke" version even if everyone knows it's the case.
If they don't acknowledge the protests, what's to say they won't re-release it in a week after they "fixed the bug"?
I think they probably will do that. They had press articles around this feature, made an official blog post about it and an /r/blog submission (which they very rarely do any more), and so on. I think it's extremely unlikely that it gets totally dropped.
My prediction is that the promised explanation post will be made today at about 4 PM pacific time (prime Friday news dump time), and then this feature will be back sometime in the next week or two with some small tweaks to try to mollify mods a bit.
I'm thinking the same. They've committed to the project; they're going mitigate the biggest pain points and go ahead with it.
And while I might not care for chat, I'll still be fine with it if they simply let us opt our communities out. Having an official chat group using our name with zero intent to enforce our rules is a nightmare situation.
I can't even say how many times I've had to address a situation before it got out of hand, or prevent misinformation from spreading, sometimes targeted and getting to witch hunting levels. If that's allowed to ferment in a chat with no control, that would have nasty spillover effects for the subreddit.
At least if we can opt out, it can be somebody else's problem.
As long as one of those "tweaks" is the promised opt-out feature, I think the mods will be mollified. That seems to be their (our) non-negotiable request.
I'll go with one that's a little more neutral and covers both.
I could have updated the title. I considered doing so. But the misreporting goes further than the title. The article leads with discussion about the bug, which is the minor point, and only gets to the moderator protests later on, even though that's the major point. Basically, whoever wrote this article is re-writing history, and trying to convince people that Reddit did not back down after multiple moderator protests (or, at least, allowing Reddit to put out this narrative without being challenged).
It might not be fake news, but it's bloody close.
If you take a look at my comment frequency here, you can see gaps where In don’t comment. Those are generally times I went back to reddit and was more active there.
I always end up coming back here though. Things like this are reasons why. I feel like Reddit is just adding more and more features without giving proper control over them or notice that they’re rolling out major changes like this.
Here's the post in /r/modnews about changes they're planning to make to this before they deploy it again (likely in 2 weeks or so): An Update on “Start Chatting”
Good changes. That satisfies all my previous grievances.
One day, Reddit is going to have a Digg 4.0 moment, where they implement a new feature, redesign or rule and chase their user base away. They narrowly avoided this fate back in 2015 when they effectively threw Ellen Pao under the bus over a censorship and unfair dismissal scandal, then elected their old CEO to ironically censor the site even harder.
Forcing unmoderated chat rooms upon their community moderators could easily have been one of those moments, had they not backed down.
The question is where the Reddit exodus will go... There are loads of Reddit clones yet none of them seem like a particularly viable alternative for their own reasons.
They avoided it by a mile, a little surface anger isn't going to cause people to leave en masse. Everyone says 'look out for another Digg' - the Digg exodus was a seriously uncommon event, I don't know of any user base migration that comes anywhere remotely close to the speed of that one and very much doubt it will happen to Reddit. Reddit might go the way of MySpace or Yahoo (slowly and with many whimpers), but it isn't likely to go the way Digg did.
Digg happened because Reddit was simply the better platform at the time - the migration itself was already happening, 4.0 was just the push that caused critical mass.
Digg died because the owners haphazardly took a lot of social bookmarking features away from the site, whilst simultaneously turning it into little more than an overglorified RSS feed with comments.
I mean... the removal of some features was well warranted. Friends lists were merely a tool that astroturfers used to push their shitty blog spam, and removing the bury button was a good solution to stop brigades.
But I think the main thing that killed Digg was that there was an alternative on the market that was in many ways better. Digg had limited categories and Reddit allowed users to create their own community moderated sections.
Think about it this way. Other social networks like MySpace and Bebo died because they were mismanaged into oblivion and implemented the same shitty app features that became such a point of contention and annoyance for Facebook users. Also, MySpace never really ditched the fugly early 90s website look until Justin Timberlake bought the site at a bargain bin price from News Corp.
The reason why awful redesigns kill some websites and not others is down to viable alternatives. YouTube has been through many algorithm changes, redesigns and other changes that have shafted the community, yet there's been no major exodus because every YouTube competitor has shut shop due to the high costs and plethora of legal issues associated with video hosting.
Reddit is definitely suffering from similar issues to what Digg was rife with in its heyday. Content is definitely controlled heavily by a cabal of power users similarly to Digg prior to its v4 update, but unlike Reddit these power users actually have the ability to remove content through community moderation. The worst part is that rather than try to break the monopoly that power users have like Kevin Rose tried to, Reddit's owners are instead pandering to them.
But the thing about Reddit is... social news aggregators are a dime a dozen. Hell, Reddit until around 2014 was at one point open source, allowing anybody and their own mother to create a Reddit clone if they so wanted.
The Reddit redesign is also a huge point of contention in the community, and I genuinely believe that if Reddit were to force the new design upon its users, there would be some form of exodus from the site, perhaps to SaidIt or Voat.
I haven't really been on Reddit in a while but didn't they already implement something like this before? Or some kind of link with Snoonet or whatever?
It seemed like a pretty useless feature back then, moreso now that most Subreddits have effectively figured out Discord integration.
They added a chat feature a couple of years ago, but it was for one-on-one chats, person to person.
Then they added optional subreddit chat rooms last year(?), which moderators could enable for their subreddits (or not).
Gonna go out on a limb here and guess not many subreddits used the optional chat room feature so now Reddit more or less wants to force it through?
Yeah, they rolled this out to "provide their users with an interactive outlet during the pandemic" or something to that effect.
One difference between this and the normal subreddit chat option is mods have no control over it. They can't opt out, and they can't moderate it. It's a site-wide chat run by the admins, with a room for each subreddit. Contrast to a sub-wide chat, run by the moderators, who have kick/ban privileges. Suddenly you've got what looks like an official /r/askscience chatroom, but it's up to the admins to interpret and enforce /r/askscience's rules, which no one realistically expects to happen.
That's not quite it either. This feature creates many small group chats. I don't know the actual numbers, but for example if you went into /r/askscience and clicked on the "start chatting" button, it would put you in a small group chat with something like 5 other users that had clicked it recently too. More people continuing to click it would get their own small group chats, it's not combined into one large one.
So large/active subreddits could potentially have hundreds of these "associated" chats going on, with no insight at all into how many there are, who's in them, and what's happening in them. The way it works gives it the potential to be extremely easy to abuse for spammers, harassers, etc.