http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1l4aiq/reddit_is...

To be perfectly fair, any comment posted by a founder of Reddit would become a top-voted comment.

When prioritizing what gets developed, does anybody think that not showing up/down votes will bring more users or would an option to disable downvote buttons on a breast cancer survivor support group sub so that it feels like a safer place to share make more sense?

Then there was that weird relationship with imgur (quickly becoming another major social network), where they were violating all kinds of content and promotion policies but were given free reign to do whatever and for the longest time nobody could figure out how imgur was funding itself. Oh, it turns out reddit is an investor in imgur.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/03/after-five-years-of-bootstr...

Then there's all kinds of weird censorship policies, where entire groups of users and subs discussing bad things are killed but lists of subs involving rape, death, beastiality and various other horrible things sit around just fine.

And you get half-assed explanations like https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2foivo/every_man_is_r...

Reddit's problem is that it doesn't really have a universal set of consistent policies, except for one, don't do anything to make us look bad in the press, everything else is random and capricious.

I think lots of users would like to go somewhere else, but the network effect on reddit is effectively acting as a network lock-in. There's plenty of other aggregator sites, but they can't get traction with the 9000 lb gorilla in the room. It would be very hard for another digg->reddit shift to happen unless reddit does something on the order of the digg debacle to piss off the entire userbase.

They frame it quite differently--they broadly want to support legal free speech, even ugly free speech. They do so up until the point it would be impossible to do so without damaging the company.

What do you prefer them to do?

If someone tries to make a replacement that fixes all the issues they will have to forgo whatever small amount of profitability there is in making a digg-like website. And it would probably have to be hosted in Iceland or some other obscure location.

    comp.* – computer-related discussions (comp.software, comp.sys.amiga)
    humanities.* – fine arts, literature, and philosophy (humanities.classics, humanities.design.misc)
    misc.* – miscellaneous topics (misc.education, misc.forsale, misc.kids)
    news.* – discussions and announcements about news (meaning Usenet, not current events) (news.groups, news.admin)
    rec.* – recreation and entertainment (rec.music, rec.arts.movies)
    sci.* – science related discussions (sci.psychology, sci.research)
    soc.* – social discussions (soc.college.org, soc.culture.african)
    talk.* – talk about various controversial topics (talk.religion, talk.politics, talk.origins)

I'll admit that mods aren't always perfect, but they're (for the most part) regular users who are making communities the way they want to. I've very rarely seen people remove posts or ban users just to promote a particular agenda, and the ones that did were hated by their fellow mods. And I'd really like to see some good examples of admin censorship. The more common complaint I hear about the admins is that they're not active enough.

>government manipulation

I'd really like to see any sort of evidence whatsoever supporting this.

>corporate advertising/shilling

Again, I'd like to see some evidence. There have been a few high-profile cases like the Quickmeme guy, but I've never heard of large corporations wasting money on reddit. That's what Twitter and Facebook are for.

>The admin team has shown again and again that they're willing to tolerate anything until there's bad PR.

If you're talking about content, agreed. If you're talking about spammers and shilling, absolutely not. I think reddit is just about the best site of its kind around, in terms of software, users, and mods/admins when it comes to fighting spam.

>One of the founders (Alexis) has a PR firm, Antique Jetpack, which is on record [1] as cooperating with Stratfor of wikileaks fame. I can't quite see how the two are unconnected.

He released all of the emails he exchanged with them and it was never anything sinister.[1]

>A couple of years ago, one of the admins there tacitly admitted that he was under a National Security letter complete with gag order to give up user information.

Source? I don't remember this at all.

>A few months ago, reddit changed its voting system in order to completely obfuscate user detection of large scale vote manipulation. The community was unanimously against this change, and has been overruled.

No, the vote counts before, especially on popular posts, were almost completely wrong (intentionally). In exchange for taking away the individual vote counts, which were mostly bogus anyway, they made the "percent liked" statistic much more accurate. I dislike that they took away that ability completely from comments except for the "controversial" dagger, but I saw absolutely no sinister intent in what they were trying to do there.

Your whole comment reads like you've been taking what /r/conspiracy and /r/undelete tell you at face value and have never actually dealt with the mods or admins on reddit, or even taken the time to understand how it really works.

[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1l4aiq/reddit_is...

I agree with the rest of your comment but would like to qualify this, for reasons I wrote here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8391963 .