The problem is that a majority of people are just absolutely manipulated by their emotions and dive head first into the feedback loop designed by social media to provide an addictive stream of never-ending engagement.
My dad was extremely happy using Stumbleupon for years. It was about as high-pace low-quality you could get on the internet. I showed him sites like Reddit and elsewhere but he was very content with just Stumbling.
People like to blame FB/Twitter for low quality content without considering the huge market for that stuff. People aren't the ignorant sponges who can be pushed/pulled in whatever direction other people think is better for them, which is how everyone seems to treat the average internet user or voter. Much like trying to blame the whole "obesity crisis" on some evil capitalist food producers, without considering the natural evolution of the workplace, evolving urban environments, technology, chemistry, or just standard irrational human behaviour to be lazy and knowingly make bad choices.
I'm sure quite a few ivory tower intellectuals had their way they'd ban tabloids like National Enquirer and trashy reality TV like Big Brother. But I doubt that would suddenly make these demographics any better informed or better citizens.
We can try to push back against straight up lying, at least when it goes beyond entertainment, but demand will always find supply in the marketplace...
So yes, platforms making dumb content more available do make people dumber long term. I don't know what to do about it, but at least we have to recognize that this is a legit problem.
Sure, but even if that turns out to be the case what concerns me is how often people automatically take the next step and assume that it should or CAN be controlled top-down, and that doing so will surely result in the average/lowest common denominator consumer suddenly becoming smarter and less ignorant.
Basically the assumption that it is such a significant problem, that people would be far better informed/smarter if we just banned/regulated what some central organization or individual mega-corporations deem as not good content.
That's a significant leap - and one that I feel is very often disconnected in these discussions. Just because problem X exists, doesn't mean solution Y will solve it. Or that problem X is a significant enough problem that the rewards will warrant the costs/risks of attempting to fix it.
Of course no one will seriously suggest a gif prohibition (I hope), but regarding fake news specifically, regulation such as the FCC Fairness doctrine could possibly work.
The point is not to eliminate undesired behavior entirely, but to make it less available and less desirable compared to alternatives. For example, smoking cigarettes is being largely successfully solved by education, promotion of general health, gross packaging, putting cigarette cases out-of-sight in supermarkets, and taxes, not outright prohibition.
I don't think that just because the content is digital you can't do anything about it without introducing worse problems for freedom of speech and such. Tons of industries are successfully regulated, this one is not special enough to be unsolvable.
People like to blame FB/Twitter
Just because there is a demand for something, doesn't mean we shouldn't fight the urge.
Netflix chooses which shows to show in its spotlight section / email blast. TV stations decide which shows to put in prime time slots.
Newspaper editors decide which articles get placed where. Your friends decide which articles to share in their feed (and thus expose you to them).
Companies advertise their products on TV, create retail spaces in our neighborhoods, to entice us to consume their products.
If you’re worried about a world in which people decide these things for others, the sad reality is: we’re already in that world.
The key difference is that editorializing affects individual outlets, or groups of outlets under one owner. In that case other parties can simply create the own competing outlets to provide a balance, aka a marketplace of ideas. But when it's a top down control from government or mega-corps then the controls applies across the entire marketplace and across all organizations/mediums, and is therefore far more harmful, open to abuse, and ultimately chills speech.
Not to mention in the top-down scenario the source of what's "appropriate content" is usually the most vocal special interest groups, lobbyists, or worse the latest public outrage of the day - not some editor/company trying to deliver what they think consumers want most. But instead other parties trying to control what content other people should and should not be allowed to produce/consume.
The only way to push back is by rallying your own outrage, lobbyists, and special interest groups - a highly unoptimal process, valuing the powerful and entrenched parties, not what is "right" and moral. And if history is any indication, bad laws/regulations rarely get removed anywhere near as quickly as they are added.
That's a name I haven't heard in a long time.
Wow, harsh. My sense is that the problem is that these other sites are simply not very findable, and Google search results have been getting steadily and measurably worse over the last several years.
I have an inclination to agree, but how is that measurable?
Google's fundamental assumption and it's biggest weakness is that: Excellent content will always have an excellent source to upvote it with links. This isn't always true. If ever another search engine were to supplant google, it would probably take advantage of this weakness. This weakness is even bigger in niche areas that google AI is not able to recognize.
This leaves institutional and commercial websites as the corpus of "open content" available for Google to index/test, and while they are sometimes useful, the incentives are much less straightforward when you bring in money and organizational politics.
Depending on the organic voice of the users who were publishing personal web pages and just wanted to discuss their interests and share the best information available got Google where it was, but now that lifeblood is locked down and thoroughly controlled by Google's competitors. Nowadays, many hobbyists and small businesses even forgo the web site entirely and just operate out of a Facebook page or group.
Worse still, open forums typically either completely disallow links with accurate anchor text or explicitly tell search engines to ignore them with rel=nofollow. This makes PageRank even less valuable, because the shared URL is not associated with link text. Some forums will transparently place anything containing a URL in a moderation queue, leaving no information at all for a search crawler to extract (ostensibly to prevent spam, but I've found in practice it's more often used by niche forum operators to block out competitors and get higher prices for ads; you can even see this on reddit, as many subreddit mods configure AutoModerator to filter any URLs pointing to unapproved domains).
Google was designed for the web as it stood in 1999. It's not 1999 anymore. Sadly, hyper-aggressive legal restrictions like the CFAA and the RAM Copy Doctrine mean that a useful search for the 2018 web is unlikely to materialize (at least in the U.S. or countries that impose similar restrictions).
If not for Facebook or Twitter I likely would've never found The Athletic, a newer news media website for sports. I doubt they'd have just advertised on ESPN or some other sports broadcast channel website. Some of the content there has been incredibly insightful and meaningful. I even find articles from there on Twitter that I wouldn't normally have seen since I have the content from there filtered to what I like in my day to day consumption.
That said, all this is for nought - what is it that we actually do with said day to day consumption? Ever since I started asking myself two questions for any issue - 1) "What's the issue/problem?" 2) "What am I going to do about it?" - I've realised that most of what I pick up is largely for pointless entertainment and time wasting (not to mention that very few friends truly care about me knowing more "stuff"). With that in mind, I've started to curb my news junkie habit with the goal of focusing on more important stuff.
So here was the conundrum: Continue trusting the sorting algorithm by posting and sharing links to a very small obliging audience (as well as continuing to read and comment on links shared by another, but not necessarily the same small group), or change something? I went for the deactivation experiment. So far so good (I think?).
At least Twitter has a larger pool of "talent" to start with, but it still doesn't make "curation" any easier and most users* would probably concede it's a massive waste of time. Admittedly, Facebook Memories has made me realise that past-me is a poorer version of current-me and if the trend (hopefully) continues, future-me will also cringe at current-me.
Seriously, there's so little time to waste: https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html
* Of course, there's probably a minority who have gotten employment or work connections through Twitter but I'd say that's a small minority compared to main userbase.
I know it's not optimal because Twitter neglects it, but I find the lists feature to be useful enough for curation.
I follow quite a few accounts on separate lists that I wouldn't want to follow all the time in my main feed.
I did spend less time refreshing some timeline. But
1) I did miss some of my "audience" (feels like an audience more than friends, but I'm twisted)
2) I'm now way less aware of lots of news. Two days ago was the first time in years that I thought to myself "what ? I didn't know that" about an event. Not sure if this is bad or good, but it's an important difference.
I would suggest it's good. Most news in my view is "junknews", even from reputable outlets (including independent media). Why? Very rarely is any news actionable in any way. It's likely that very little of what you and I see each day fundamentally changes how we live our daily lives.
Most of it is entertainment and us humans just like to "know" things - there are more effective ways to be informed about the world if that is the honest objective. Spending an equivalent amount of time reading books or going outside into the streets/community is likely far more useful for nearly everyone. Outsource getting the most important updates to people you know; they'll enjoy knowing "stuff" and keeping you up-to-date.
Catching up on news can always come later anyway (e.g., if you need to cram for an "exam"; i.e., voting).
Normally when people find a forum that interests them (like, say, HN) they need to bother creating an account, often validating an email etc... It only takes two minutes but that's enough friction to weed out the vast majority of the people who just stumble randomly on one of your posts. On Reddit once you have an account you just have to click a button to subscribe to any community you like. It's "eternal september" on steroids. 4chan had "lurk more", Reddit is "repost more".
So your post sounds a bit to me like "Twitter is great if you know the hashtags to follow" and it's probably true but at this point is it really representative of the website? If you need to filter 99% of the content to make it usable, maybe there's a bit of a problem still? I just went to /r/all and had a look at the subreddits available there, I find 16 million accounts subscribed /r/gifs, 3 millions to /r/politics, 17 millions to /r/gaming, 18 millions to /r/pics etc...
So yeah, I'd believe you if you told me that /r/common_lisp, /r/mongolia/ and /r/treepics/ are amazing communities but I don't think it's enough to redeem Reddit as a whole.
Strict moderation can still be effective once obscurity is lost. /r/SpaceX is an example of an excellent subreddit that has survived an explosion in popularity.
> So your post sounds a bit to me like "Twitter is great if you know the hashtags to follow" and it's probably true but at this point is it really representative of the website? If you need to filter 99% of the content to make it usable, maybe there's a bit of a problem still?
You're just making the observation that the majority of internet users aren't sophisticated intellectuals. Demanding that the website you visit are sophisticated everywhere is just a demand that they are hidden or ignored by most people. I don't see how this is different than having hidden/ignored hashtags, subreddits, or filters.
Oh well.
Comments which — without being racist or sexist — go against the popular & politically correct leftist stance are downvoted to oblivion. Meanwhile, extremely statist stances are tolerated and celebrated by users.
Originally, the word referred to classical liberalism, which has freedom as its primary value.
Modern 'liberals' — the one's you're referring to — have values very different to the original liberals. They are, in fact, opposite in the current political landscape.
It's worth making the distinction to avoid confusion.
The thing they have in common is social liberalism (allow gay marriage, individual drug use, etc).
Once the site grows beyond those 1st, 2nd and 3rd degree connections, you get exposed to those 4th, 5th and 6th degree connections that might have some values and opinions that are shocking to you because they don't run in your orbit.
I feel bad that the author contributes his time to making a world a worse place. I see Reddit as giving more visibility to the world. It's true there's some crazy stuff from some loud people, but my guess is if it was quantified it would still be a small percentage of actual content on Reddit. But just like in life, a rare shocking event dominates our consciousness much more than persistent normal events.
I think Hacker News referenced it somewhere too but I can't find it now (maybe it's in the signup process).
This phenomenon might be easier to understand with a specific example like the recent Ghostbusters remake. It was by most accounts a bad movie. If you browse any movie related subreddit you will see plenty of valid criticism of that movie. Mixed in with that are comments about how that movie never should have been made with an all female cast and that is what caused the movie to be unsuccessful because women aren't funny. It is easy for some naive kid to see that and think "yeah, I saw that movie and it wasn't funny, maybe that comment has a point". Meanwhile it might never occur to them the user who originally left that comment came to Reddit to be a member of an incel community that is notoriously sexist and anti-women. This allows these communities to grow their size by spreading hate and feeding off the rest of the site.
Sure, it can go the other way too, and that's scary.
I was pretty much in the sunlight-best-disinfectant camp until I heard https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/08/25/546127444/epis...
Now, I dunno. Clearly we can't expect independent well-meaning anti-racists to be as effective as extremely carefully crafted propaganda appealing to baser tribalist instincts. It's already uphill battle to get people to be open-minded. Those who argue for reinforcing people's existing biases have it easier.
But if there's any chance of getting the bigots to change their views, it seems it will be in respectful conversation with others, which Reddit at least is capable of, though I guess it doesn't seem the trend, unfortunately…
Another part of the issue is that not all hateful content has a big blinking sign on it saying "I am being hateful". It is often a lot subtler than that. One big example is how the Reddit community has handled the Me Too movement. If the big subreddits are your only source of news you might think that Terry Crews is the primary victim of Hollywood's sexual misconduct. There is nothing wrong with telling Crew's story. He is clearly a victim and he deserves for his voice to be heard. A single post or comment about Crews is not sexist, however he has been the primary focus of this discussion on Reddit. It is important to think about it deeper and why his story dominates this topic. Maybe it is because a sizable portion of Reddit simply doesn't care about female victims the way they care about male victims. This type of bias is only visible holistically and therefore is much harder to combat with open debate as you describe.
I am myself aware of all sorts of ideal communication habits that address the common failings. Perhaps there's some slim hope that this wisdom will eventually reach far more people and become dominant to where we actually learn how to communicate better than we do today.
I think of the cases where people met their trolls in real-life and had reconciliation of sorts, or that woman who grew up in the Westboro Baptist Church and got convinced to leave after someone on Twitter responded empathically and intelligently instead of antagonistically, leading to long-term exchange of perspectives… these stories are the exception today, but we have that at least…
It is particularly annoying when a hobby subreddit gets swarmed by the fanatical social justice crowd and kills all conversatamd community that existed previously.
The leaked content from r/the_donald are downvoted to oblivion. The leaked contentent from r/shitredditsays has much more power.
However, if you are simply seeing conservatives from r/news posting, and assuming they are crazies from r/the_donald, then you are assuming bad intent and may need to re evaluate how many conservatives live on the internet. Regardless of your political affiliation, you will see opinions you disagree with and that’s a good thing for the most part.
People in TD can write in others subs too, as can people from late stage capitalism. Wanting to forcibly segregate and silence people with different opinions is I think at the heart of the problem with silicon valley right now.
'remove those who disagree with me' has killed hundreds of millions over the years, and is a common and dangerous kind of groupthink.
Almost everyone on the sub is tired of the constant brigading and would like more active moderation of the trolls. The main moderator refuses to do anything and has similar views to your own, thinking that we should welcome them with open arms. This has the effect where Berkeley students and residents can't even talk about things affecting their community as they get drowned out by the mass of right-wing trolls. And this usually comes at times when its most crucial for there to be an avenue for Berkeley students/residents to have a platform to speak with each other (e.g. protests, riots, local political issues).
It's fairly hard to ban people on a site where account creation is as easy as it is on reddit. Moderator tools have improved a little since, but remain inadequate for dealing with sustained brigading.
The problem with even mild forms of censorship, is that bad actors can combine it with emotional manipulation and media manipulation to push their own agenda.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LofV6cJzILA
Right now, bad actors on the far left are using outrage as a tool to push their own authoritarian agendas. In this, they are aided and abetted by the far right. Both extremes thrive on outrage, especially the outrage that comes from intellectually dishonest censorship.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Reddit is fully within its right to support free speech. It is the reason why it is successful.
Are you telling me I shouldn't be exercising my free speech right to argue that reddit should remove alt-right subreddits? Are you placing barriers around acceptable free speech?
I am merely informing you of the fact reddit isn't going to go along with your idea to engage in mass censorship because they are strongly pro free speech, and only ban subreddits in very rare situations.
They aren't perfect on free speech, but Id give them a solid A-.
You have lots of other options if you like censorship, and you can feel free to use those instead.
That's the great thing that reddit offers. You can join moderated communities as well as unmoderated. It's your choice which to engage in, and reddit isn't going to take away OTHER people's choice because you say so.
>Reddit isn't going to take away OTHER people's choice because you say so
Why use language like this? I bring it up because this is exactly the sort of haughty writing style I'm used to hearing when I engage t_d users... I don't know if it's a dialect or simply an artifact of shared mindset.
Reddit does censor, don't forget! They've even banned self proclaimed safe spaces such as mgtow hangouts.
I'm also curious where you get your sense of authority, saying things like "I'm informing you of the fact that reddit...". That's powerful language! Do you work at Reddit? If so, can you offer further insight?
Using words like "facts" seems silly. Given enough advertiser pressure, I bet reddit would content tweak. If t_d lost it's fragile control over it's users and went full blown hate speech, I bet it would vanish. So, where does this confidence come from?
EDIT: Shit, we've hit the reply depth limit or whatever. I'm happy to continue this conversation privately if you wish, my email's in my profile.
To reply in an edit, I agree that typically spez has taken a pro-free speech line, but given that we're discussing this in an article that contradicts this from an insider perspective with lines like
>and then, ultimately, these things will bubble up, make it into the press, and then we would make a decision to change things. We would deal with the immediate impact, which was painful, would last a week or two, and then it would go away.
Which leads to my belief that if t_d lost just a little bit of control, and the press caught wind, that reddit would cave and ban it.
They self identify as being strong supporters of free speech and strong opponents of censorship.
They literally founded their platform based on these ideas.
This stuff isn't a secret or some mystery. Just listen to the actual words that come out of their mouth and read the things that they actually write.
And they aren't shy about this kind of stuff. They speak frequently on these topics, both online, in person, and in their public official media posts.
"In this paper, we studied the 2015 ban of two hate communities on Reddit, r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown. Looking at the causal effects of the ban on both participating users and affected communities, we found that the ban served a number of useful purposes for Reddit. Users participating in the banned subreddits either left the site or (for those who remained) dramatically reduced their hate speech usage. Communities that inherited the displaced activity of these users did not suffer from an increase in hate speech. While the philosophical issues surrounding moderation (and banning specifically) are complex, the present work seeks to inform the discussion with results on the efficacy of banning deviant hate groups from internet platforms."
I have at least three accounts that I know of (I've probably forgotten about others).
I'm sure people who participate in terrible behavior like that probably also have multiple accounts.
How does the study account for those users simply abandoning the accounts they used for those hateful subreddits? I find it far more likely that they didn't "leave the site entirely", and instead just migrated to their other accounts not associated to the banned subreddit.
This was done with small "hate" subreddits too. Imagine they did that with some of the largest controversial subreddits, that would probably make half the users pack up and go.
Yes. The kind of mentality which is drawn to social condemnation has been a mental substrate to all kinds of bad stuff throughout history. No matter how positive the cause for which it's done, it often becomes toxic and authoritarian. Witness various religions throughout history, as well as the high ideals of the early international communists.
why even post this comment if you're not going to name the sub?
It's a dangerous trend for both society and reddit itself.
Here's a lot of users talking about how it happened to /r/canada
https://www.reddit.com/r/onguardforthee/comments/7z1wap/forg...
https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/7z706y/whats_...
My suspicion is that whatever entity is behind massive twitter troll farms of far-right content (as well as inflammatory far-left content) is also doing everything it can to stir the shitpot over at reddit. /r/conspiracy is another one "lost" to the far-right. I even catch whiffs of it in the bay area subreddits sometimes.
I'd say the same for /r/shitredditsays but for the far-left, except it's been that way for as long as I can remember (LONG before any of the bot farm stuff).
Wouldn't squashing the voices of the "right-wing contingent" just lead to an (already implied) echo chamber of leftist thought?
Your one single comment sums up the problem I have with user-moderation systems like reddit (and HN).
The biggest change I've noticed is just how political the city/country subreddits have become. A few years ago, they used to be more fun places but now nearly all the content is very hateful and polarizing.
I don't think this is a reddit thing - it's a societal thing.
Other platforms are also getting far more acerbic in general. City council meetings, local news, etc. It seems the country is in a period of time where politics is both forefront and rather contentious.
I feel the stuff on-line is simply reflecting the greater societal trends - jut with the typical amplification everything on-line breeds.
A baseline rule prohibiting threatening violence, most people agree with, but apparently it is a controversial attack on free speech if a private website wants to moderate the use of its platform to promote hatred against people based on the color of their skin.
And banning racism is being held as an example of liberal bias! Amazing.
That's entirely different from people that are explicitly not trying to be neutral and are trying to promote a specific political ideology. I expect that majority of moderators on Reddit are not trying to promote anything. However there is definitely a growing contingent that don't want neutrality and they are taking over.
Or at the very least only ban something when the authorities literally force you to do so.
In theory, everyone has equal ability to share their opinions and all have equal weight. In reality, you have a lot less influence than someone willing to post 24/7 everywhere they can. The quickest way to drive away reasonable people is to do nothing.
Furthermore, it is the internet - I've never been convinced by any argument that HN or reddit or even facebook has any obligation to give "fair time" to far-right nationalism. For as long as Fox News exists and promotes itself as an actual news agency (HAH!), I don't think community-generated content websites need to bother.
Why doesn't the far-right just "pull itself up by its boostraps" and make a reddit for the far-right? (sidenote, sometimes this does happen, and it almost always is full of the most comically hateful people: see voat)
I'd feel much better if reddit and twitter were even handed with their condemnation of comically hateful people. As someone on the Left, what I've seen is that Left-leaning media bias tends to give indirect license to the most extreme authoritarian and even toxic fringes of the Left. It also fuels a reaction from the far Right.
For as long as Fox News exists and promotes itself as an actual news agency (HAH!)
The mechanism I cite above has been in operation at Fox, just in the other direction.
Umm, why would they do that when they can instead use reddit?
Reddit sells itself as being a strong supporter of free speech. THEY SELF-identify as being a neutral platform.
If the censorship supporters want to interact in a censored forum, then they can make their own subreddit and moderate it how ever they feel like, or make their own website.
The right doesn't need to do anything, because reddit wants to be neutral.
I honestly don't see what the big deal is. For example, lots of lefty subs have banished "Tankies", communists who think Stalin did nothing wrong, from their communities.
Ultimately, neither a fascist nor communist can oppose such a purge/restriction without being a hypocrite. Such actions are well within either group's ideological wheelhouse and therefore they should stop complaining.
If you don't think that is a problem then... well, I can't help you.
That implies it's only possible to be "right-wing" or "leftist".
I've used my account to comment since before they added subreddits. And I never stumble across one of the "toxic" ones except for the rare occasions when one of the other subreddits links to those ones.
It seems crazy. I can't imagine Reddit without subs.
As an ordinary user, I thought that the creation of subreddits was a clever solution to the Eternal September Problem.
The initial pool of users were folks that were sniped away from Slashdot and Digg. There was quite a bit of frustration about the editorship of Slashdot, and having a system that was effectively user-edited was quite attractive.
But as the readership grew, a wider array of material started showing up, frequently accompanied by the typical grumbling about relevance.
The solution was to split off new user groups into more specialized subgroups. The initial set of subreddits were effectively curated by Reddit itself, based on the categories of stuff that was showing up in practice. User-generated subreddits didn't come until later.
Everyone wanted tags for posts (myself included), and when they announced subreddits, there was a lot of belly aching. I thought the choice of using subreddits was a technical one to make the site more easily partitionable but they gussied up the reasoning behind the concept of communities. I think they made the right choice.
Some folks complain about the Digg debacle and how that negatively affected the Reddit userbase, but IMO what truly fucked Reddit as a tech news source was the introduction of images.
A knowledgeable, enthusiastic community provides lots of background, alternative views, tit bits of related info and random facts. Without comments and discussion most of the value is gone.
I mentioned this merely as a historical footnote to show how far reddit's come.
Reddit didn't even have comments at first!
https://web.archive.org/web/20050804002153/http://www.reddit...
If you're into anything gaming related, good luck. I've been on some subreddits of popular games and it's basically just like the rest of Reddit. In particular, Reddit's system just doesn't work well when there's a lot of users. And the drawback is that these subreddits tend to dominate the space so people do not make private, limited gaming BBS boards as much anymore.
I think it's the same thing with most social apps though. Small discord servers allow you to build up groups of online friends, but if you just go into the specific game ones you're going to end up with a mix of good and bad.
Overall it's just an issue of popularity bringing out the worst in people.
I don't really agree, it's the issue of aggregating everything relevant to a subject, which makes the popularity relevant.
BBS were not aggregated by subject. They're aggregated by the BBS itself. For a given game, there may be 10 BBS. That's how it was before. You'd go to the BBS with the community style you prefer. You have a choice.
Now, you're just stuck with one subreddit/Discord server/etc., which just reduces the quality of it all. And given the poor organizational ability of those services, it becomes entirely driven by a mix of popularity and posting speed.
[also no skin in the game for the BBS owner, as there is no BBS owner. No BBS competition]
It's the same with most "social apps", yes, because discussion shouldn't occur on "social apps", it should occur on private moderated spaces.
At some point shortly after, they added the ability to create subreddits, the site blew up in overall scale, and I was completely oblivious to it all for years, being that I only read /r/programming.
Point is, the site gives you a lot of useful ability to curate what you read.
Because of the excess of disinterested capital that only values growth, a thing that could be a positive and productive thing is instead a cancer — it grows and grows without purpose. That’s why Reddit (and Tumblr) have massive porn sections that aren’t spoken about and Reddit is a watering hole for white supremacy and political propaganda.
The porn thing is really interesting in other ways. Hosting images and video is mostly hands off, so it begs the question of what shady things are the third party media hosting people doing to make money and what is Reddit’s business relationship with them.
The biggest porn section in reddit is currently ranked 61 of all subreddits. Cat picture section is ranked 6 and is 18 million subscriptions vs 1.4 for the porn. Do reddit have some 18 times more sinister business relationship with cat shops, veterinarians, and cat food, or should we just conclude that reddit reader are human with human interests and as that goes most people prefer looking at a cat picture while a smaller minority goes to reddit for a dose of nudity.
Go to http://redditlist.com/all and look at what the people want to consume. Celebrate that science is where it is.
I sometimes think that news and media overblow the nasty sides of the Internet (the sexist / racist side, the trolls, etc.) way out of proportion. For a taste of what average Redditers are interested in, I perfectly think subscription count is reasonable (more so than activity -- people can be very passionate / post a lot about something that is overall a minority opinion).
I cannot comment on the actual communities themselves other than what I see from a quick skim (I don't use Reddit much), but the top community subjects don't feel very toxic. Jokes, knowledge, games, pictures, cuteness, music. Maybe the big news subs (eg worldnews) get political, for all I know, didn't seem too bad on a quick skim.
None of the top list screams "white supremacy" or "political propaganda" to me (some say "politics", sure, but propaganda?). Due to size, of course, I would expect some moderation is needed for those super-huge communities, but that's expected these days. r/conspiracy (probably the biggest community that steps a little bit into a more paranoid worldview) has a lot of people, but r/science has 30x more.
I would even argue that gonewild (the top "porn" subreddit) is atypical compared to most commercial Internet porn sites, which is probably why it actually cracks the top 100.
Porn and white supremacy constituencies are similar in the context of a VC backed company whose trajectory is tied to an equity event. That is that they drive lots of engagement and probably more time on site.
Reading the article, the author’s point was that pursuit of growth at all costs creates bad situations like echo chambers for racists.
Other sites like Stackoverflow avoiding this sort of situation by being intelligent and strategic about pursuing growth.
Porn offends some people as well (and is not meant to be viewed in certain social scenarios, of course). Reddit has a "safe for work" and "not safe for work" category, and as far as I'm concerned this dividing line is probably better than the no-nudity-period type policies of Facebook (which leads to dramas over non-pornographic nudity, eg breastfeeding photos, a famous Vietnam photo, etc.). It seems like cute pictures and jokes drive more growth to me at first glance then porn, anyways.
Managing "toxic behavior" is a lot trickier, from what I see -- over-heavy moderation also can lead to issues. But "growth at all costs" social media, without checks, leads to factors such as bullying, abuse, and harassment listed as negatives in articles on your growth prospects.
New accounts get subscribed to the defaults automatically -- hence the top ~50 subreddits by sub count are or were defaults.
"User Activity" is probably more accurate. Even then, how are they determining activity? Views? Comments? Up/downvotes?
Regardless of defaults, I doubt there is a single metric that show that porn on reddit is more popular than cat pictures. There is doubt in any method that collect metrics, but if we define them as insignificant then the same metric can not later then be used to say that porn is significant on reddit. Uncertainty cut both ways. Subscriptions can be bots, could be mistakes, might be from users not reading the site, or simply made up. Same goes for view counts or "activity".
Check out this marketing pitch for Reddit ads. https://www.slideshare.net/webjoe/reddit-26009093
Think of the dimensions of use here. I'm sure cat pictures get lots of hits, but I doubt cat pictures drive 20m average visit time.
That's the core of reddit, which was founded as a normie 4chan at the beginning of a time when many sites were trying to monetize the energy coming from that corner of the internet. The parts that you like are an outgrowth of that, and originally essentially subsidized by it. The fact that when you remove that element completely, you don't have a business (there have been many attempts at a "civil" reddit), shows that it still is.
There was already a metafilter. If part of you, at least part of the time, wasn't attracted to the id of reddit, you probably would have been on metafilter.
Tumblr is a different case - just a blogging site with social extensions - and there have always been porn blogs (and nazi blogs, but the social element of tumblr happened to pull it into a different direction.)
https://i.imgur.com/Ybmk6fZ.gifv
All the subreddits I want to see I subscribe to directly. For everything else I browse All with these filters.
You can subscribe to X subforums. and only ever see those same X subforums.
But you can NOT see "All" excluding only things racist subforums for example. So it is either your little bubble, or the full blown promoted/paid xenophobic posts.
For /r/all, there is the ability (on the right sidebar) to filter subreddits. You can add whatever subreddits you wish to exclude when browsing "All".
I am becoming more and more picky about which subreddits I follow.
I have even unsubscribed from some that are partially interesting to me like androiddev (I work as an Android engineer) because they were 10% interesting information, 90% circlejerk/toxic.
I think that fine-grained subreddits naturally tend towards echo chambers, because it has become easier and easier to find and interact with people that think just like we do.
/r/science and /r/programming aren't bad
After that you should just check out niche communities and see if they've been taken over by trolls. So far /r/motorcycles, /r/ultralight, /r/camping etc have been fine, as opposed to the many iterations of /r/onebag which generally suffer from power-grabbing moderation.
I'd also like to hear about people's favorite subreddits in terms of comment quality, as I'd happily read a passionate and informative stance on something I'm usually not interested in compared to what I read on /r/politics.
Edit: I meant to use it as an example -- I'm actually interested in any type of subreddit, I meant to explain! So thank you for the suggestions and I'll definitely check them out :)
/r/christianity usually has fairly high quality comments and conversations among Christians and non-Christians.
/r/netsec has high quality posts and comments.
/r/hockeyplayers has a very helpful community but probably not of interest if you're not a hockey player.
/r/goodyearwelt has awesome reviews and information about high quality footwear
/r/malefashionadvice is one of the better run larger subreddits that has writers from major publications that post and comment
/r/askhistorians is very heavily moderated which means a lot of the most interesting questions remain unanswered for a long time, but the answers that are provided are very well thought out and sourced
/r/asksocialscience is similar to /r/askhistorians just different content
Granted it's center-left most of the time (from a US perspective anyhow - as a European it is at best centrist) but that's more a function of a reaction to the current climate than anything else.
So I guess I'd ask: "what kind of comments are you looking for?" because outside of the science communities you're not going to find better discussion threads.
For instance, you get one article about Trump's nickname for Sessions being Mr. McGhee. The comments decide this is bad. Then you read the comments on other stories and people are gleefully calling him a racist elf.
That's just pointless and is a disincentive to visiting. But I keep returning to the subreddit because of how helpful it is in keeping up with the Russia stuff and because of the rarer insightful comments that give reasonable perspectives you will never hear a major publication speculate on.
r/holdmyredbull - extreme sports cousin of "hold my beer". Other fun ones in this circle include "hold my juice box" and "hold my fries". I tend to think of watching someone go skydiving without their own parachute as universally interesting, ymmv.
r/AskReddit - Good survey of the current human experience, usually leave here with a feeling that your questions about the world and lives of other people aren't as unique as you though. Sometimes it's banal/off topic, though.
r/ELI5 - "Explain like I'm 5" usually contains layman's questions about science, maths, history, and other sometimes unapproachable with great responses from people who know their stuff. Almost always leave here with something new to think/talk about.
r/ProgrammerHumor - I'm a programmer, but even some of my non-programmer friends can enjoy the jokes over here.
If you're into woodworking, take a look at r/woodworking
r/hiking if you like hiking
r/campinggear for gear
r/baking if you like baking
etc. Just do a search for your hobbies and see what subreddits show up.
/r/askhistorians
/r/apple
I am forgetting a few more.
Good link content however.
It's a good distinction, but it doesn't solve the issue that problematic subreddits will continue to exist, even if I've customised Reddit to avoid them. I understood that was more Dan McComas's issue with Reddit, and with Twitter.