Looks like reddit is changing its policy and is abandoning free speech to protect people's feelings.
Well... Reddit is a deeply misunderstood community because its actual function is not governed by policy, it's governed by folklore. In order to know that folklore you have to do a lot. The more you do the less interested you are in interacting with those who don't understand the folklore. So it's easy to look at this and go "ohhhhh shit major change" when in fact what you're seeing is posturing ahead of a major business play. Reddit Inc. has always reserved the right to stomp the shit out of any community they feel like. They banned f7u12 for 2 days for fucking with the CSS. They took down an even dozen circlejerkers hangouts for violating site rules (I oughtta know, I goaded 'em into seven of them). They took down /r/jailbait essentially because SomethingAwful threatened them. Previously they'd taken down /r/jailbait when violentacrez modded those said same circlejerkers (in part, to goad me). They don't give a fuck. They really don't. They want you to think they give a fuck because the more they stomp on communities, the more time they have to spend stomping and they have barely better community management tools than the paltry array moderators have to work with. If you check that thread, you'll see a couple hundred communities mentioned that are worse than fph that aren't banned - this is how it starts. Now that they've opted to pull one offensive subreddit, the "you pulled X why not Y" discussions commence and all of a sudden, their thinly-spread team has to get into community management. Assuming you mean it, that is. About that "thinly spread team", by the way. Reddit raised $50m on a half-billion-dollar valuation in September. Supposedly they pulled in eight million dollars in ad revenue. Yet the front page still shakes you down for donations (Reddit Gold). Does that seem like a disconnect to anyone else? Reddit Inc was, in the private corners of the site, raked over the coals for years over subs like /r/beatingwomen, /r/creepshots, /r/coontown and the like. They never once answered why /r/beatingwomen was allowed but /r/stormfront wasn't; the answer is pretty obvious though. They knew they'd face a lot more bad press for neonazi subreddits than they would for shock subreddits. But that was before the VCs started seeing the writing on the wall for Internet 2.0. Everyone is eager to get the payout ahead of '99 Mk. II. You don't have to read Pando every day to see that Secret cratered, to see that Snapchat is overvalued, to see that Groupon was a harbinger not a fluke. The money in Reddit wants their money out of Reddit. The only way they're going to get that is if they can sell Reddit before it craters. They're not going to be able to do that if Reddit is associated with the Fappening, Creepshots, FindBostonBombers and every other scandal under the sun. When even Twitter says "you know, we prolly oughtta do something about stalking and harassment" it becomes pretty obvious that Reddit needs to say "We are doing something about stalking and harassment." Take a look at your post. Now take a look at this post. do you see the part that's missing from your post? Yup. Code changes. When even twitter is willing to tweak the code to look like they're doing something, a blog post without any demonstrable engineering change is the clearest signal there is of "business as usual."
I'm suggesting that at the very least, the money in Twitter wants not to lose their money. Twitter has been under the microscope of late as their numbers start to wear thin, as their revenue streams start to pan out and as they start to get more press for harassment than breaking news. As a consequence, Twitter issued a "there there, everything's okay, we're more than just a rage engine" and changed policy and code. Not saying it'll mean much in the end, but it got the subject changed from Twitter to "something other than Twitter." Reddit has pretty much been one long downhill slide of bad publicity since Obama showed up to do an AMA. This is the sort of move one makes if one wishes to staunch the bleeding without actually doing anything.
Twitter somehow "doesn't work". It worked in the very early days, but the filtering tools just aren't there - or rather, they're not there for the average user's capability. It started out as "microblogging". Well, a blog is a destination. Sure, you can subscribe to it (if you have the know how, most don't). But back in the day, would you have subscribed to several hundred active blogs? Hell no. So it's really just like being on your own bridge over a section of a very fast flowing river, and missing nearly everything. And barely even having the time to do that.
Destinations have been heavily deprecated in favor of surge traffic. That's why even the New York Times writes clickbait titles and why RSS feeds are no longer supported by Google. Ryan Holiday pointed out that Twitter's sole claim to glory is breaking the news of Osama Bin Laden 8 minutes ahead of a White House announcement. 8 minutes.
Oh undoubtedly, but Twitter has become the conduit for other destinations. The dumb pipe. The surge happens, and everyone is off to the NYT or BBC or whatever. Is there any way to track, for example, how many of your Followers actually saw a particular tweet of yours? (Assuming they didn't click on it). So often I hear companies saying "we'll put it out on Twitter" but what is "out" in that context? Who is there? Whereas Facebook (which personally I loathe) has a far quieter, more in depth feed, and individual pages within it are far more like destinations if you're interested enough to actually go to a company page on there. I've actually tried going to corporate Twitter accounts before to get their news/information: it's impossible. It doesn't aggregate in a useful way. It doesn't look useful.
Twitter's penetration remains pathetic. Their die-off rate is also heinous. Followers are likely to be bots and traffic is easily purchased. Facebook traffic is genuine. I hate them both, but Twitter is a paper tiger.
I registered here only to say thank you for clearing this up for me. I guess this website's better cuz it doesn't have as much money as Reddit yet. But it'll go the same way cuz everyone wants to succeed in this world.
I'm not 100% certain I agree with you on the Bubble 2.0 idea. I think that some sections of the net are ripe for that kind of explosion(or implosion), sections which things like Reddit are firmly seated in. But I think its not just a business issue. I think its a user society issue as well. We're desperately looking for a new form of social communication over the net, one that's fairly standardized but which any one can get involved in. What that means in the long run, I'm not exactly sure.
There's "what you want" and "what you will pay for." In order for change to come, someone has to be remunerated (either financially or spiritually) for what they do. Reddit needs to make money. It has not done so for lo these many years. In the runup to the next dotcom crash, that's been okay... many many companies have not been required to make back any of their cash because they're "disruptive" and "some sections of the net are ripe for that kind of explosion." But 4chan has never made money, and never will. Amazon barely makes money, and never will. Facebook? Facebook makes phat stax. They will continue to do so for as long as their ad platform works, which they're kind of fucking up right now. But at least they have somewhere to start. Reddit has the ability to target individual customers yet self-serve remains the biggest clusterfuck in the history of advertising. Anyone with half a clue starts to look at "the most hateful site on the Internet", contemplates the fact that it will never make money, and decides that their money is better invested elsewhere.
They've been fucking up their platform. The feed is kind of a gerrymandered nightmare and it's caused ROI on ads to plummet. They're still the best bang-for-buck for local advertising, but not nearly by the percentage they used to be. They're also really polluting everyone's feed with clickbait bullshit and they make it really tough to see the posts you care about, which drives down visibility. I know I didn't install FB in my new phone, and I got it in November. People have a lot of Facebook fatigue.
This might interest you: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000We're desperately looking for a new form of social communication over the net, one that's fairly standardized but which any one can get involved in.
There was a discussion this morning in a reddit sub where I'm subscribed called /r/watchpeopledie. Sounds pretty crass just from the name, and a decent percentage of regular users wouldn't be bothered to look much further. Some of the people subscribed there are concerned that the this is exactly the logic that will follow - they've banned a sub for disliking the obese but not a sub where people watch murders and executions and talk about them (and let's be honest - sometimes make jokes)? The sad thing is, it would really be a shame to lose that sub. It's one of the few I've found where community policing works actually works, there's rarely disrespect (and what exists is almost always downvoted to oblivion), the moderators are just as involved as the regular users - most people there seem to be on the same page. The consensus seems to be that these "fringe" subs are safe as long as they refrain from brigading. I guess we'll find out. And who knows? As a moderator of /r/serialkillers, maybe my opinion on what's appropriate is skewed.
Who didn't see this coming? You can't have a website that popular, that garners media attention from actual journalists and has subsections devoted to beating women and posting pictures of dead children. They're going to ban a lot more subreddits in the near future. I don't really give a shit, it just seems more surprising that this didn't happen sooner. Interesting note from the comments, a bunch of people who apparently really hate fat people brought down voat, a reddit clone, by jumping over to /v/fatpeoplehate
Jesus WEPT. I am so glad that the kinds of people who do this are deserting Reddit in droves. Most of them weren't there at the start, in those long ago days (when /r/atheism was actually a constructive and fascinating place) and I sure as hell won't miss them once they're gone. The amount of truly interesting, intelligent contributors who will jump ship due to some angry trolls not being able to vilify fat/whatever people is negligible. And there are more than enough great people who will remain. I found it more amazing that they left /r/jailbait up for so long, and have left all these other subs up for so long.
They have no ability to police. /r/all for the past 18 hours demonstrates this pretty cleanly. So announcing an intent to police, without buying new squad cars, hiring more beat cops, building out a courthouse and otherwise assembling the infrastructure necessary to do actual policing accomplishes exactly fuckall. /r/jailbait was left up as long as it was because it was the devil they knew. Violentacrez was on a leash and worked with them; cut off that head and a thousand others will spring up. It worked in the Admins' advantage to have their pr0n in a well-controlled, sanctioned corner. The only reason they took it down is SomethingAwful demonstrated to them just how sensitive they truly were to bad PR.
The issue I had with /r/jailbait is that it clearly involved photos where the age could not be verified, nor the user permission, regardless of violentacrez's supposed moderation. (Did he personally track the subject of every image, the date it was taken, and their birth certificate?) It should never have been allowed from the get-go. I thought it highly unwise they allowed it as long as they did (same with upskirt subreddits). While I think there are also serious risks with /r/gonewild and similar (in terms of pictures being posted without permission, the best mods in the world can't totally police that) at least its intention is self-posting. That was never the intention of /r/jailbait. Its aim was to post images of teenagers who looked borderline age of consent. Ultimately the issue is whether Reddit ever needed to be a porn site to gain sufficient traction? Maybe it did. Maybe it was simply a business decision to tolerate (and still tolerate) all that shit.
The issue Reddit faces is simple: If they want to control content, they need the tools to control content. If they lack the tools to control content, they must rely on social engineering. I would go as far as saying anything with nudity should be well-firewalled deep into Reddit. Require a credit card at least. But the twin problems with this are (1) see previous comment about tools (2) 80% of Reddit's traffic, as of 2011 at least, was porn search. And yes. "Jailbait" was one of the principal search terms. There's a world of difference between the traffic stats Reddit advertises and what a paid report from any of the CPM sites will give you. Reddit is a porn haven.
Knew a guy in charge of "the internet" for all of one of the big 5 studios (Sony, Warner, Universal, Disney, Paramount). Bigtime redditor. Tried to sell said same studio on Reddit. Said same studio paid for the actual traffic reports, as opposed to the stuff Reddit usually hypes. Reddit is radioactive with porn.
You must have gotten there way before me. I used to get railed on for being agnostic because "goD don't realz" was the only acceptable answer to some people. And few people would say anything or downvote their obvious disinterest in the actual conversation.(when /r/atheism was actually a constructive and fascinating place)
I have a funny feeling most the people complaining about this didn't even start going to Reddit until 2011. I mean enough say so in the comments of their announcement thread. It's funny because those same people drove me to seek alternatives and find Hubski. Maybe more will come here because of this. But I'd be happier if those that do aren't the ones that subscribe to /r/fatpeoplehate, /r/coontown, and the like.
I am definitely one of those users, or close enough that it doesn't matter. I found Reddit towards the end of college so my subs migrated quite quickly from the defaults, at the time, to smaller and smaller subs. I hadn't seen it much before, but from my few years I have seen small subs I've enjoyed turned to cesspools more often then not. As time goes one more people will jump ship to alternatives, like Hubski. However, the biggest issue with switching to any alternative is the breath they have. Reddit having such a huge userbase allows me to find the niche subreddits that are interesting to me, but places like Hubski I find somewhat barren in that regard. It feels like the only discussion you can find are in the global feeds. Maybe that has changed though, since the last time I looked here. All I know is I have to take a look around and see how Hubski has changed since last I looked around.
Hubski feels very small compared to Reddit, but that can be a good thing. For me, with some of the smaller forums I've been on before, not only do you get to know users better, but you'll also find yourself taking part in conversations you never would have otherwise, just because at the moment, they're the only things to talk about. So you're exposed to new things, but in a different way.
Hubski is very small compared to reddit. If there was new content here more frequently I'd totally jump ship. That's what I did from digg to reddit when reddit was nothing more than a joke among digg users. Reddit has shitloads of new stories every minute. Not that that's a good thing most times but if you throw enough shit at a wall. If there were 4 new, interesting documentaries posted here every day I'd write off reddit like a bad check. Reddit's only saving grace is volume and they seem to have pissed off their based pretty severely. Over things their base didn't know existed when they woke up but are now a rallying cry. It's exactly the type of response I expect and it might even slightly affect active user base.
I agree with you. I wish there was more content too. I try to post all I can but I have a problem with posting things I don't find like..super awesome interesting. I think there just needs to be generally more people (and I'd love more diversity—I feel like we have a lot of writers and musicians but not a lot of designers...or brain surgeons...or veterinarians....) It's sort of a catch-22. If we had more people there would be more content (even though it might be shittier?) But, if we don't have awesome content, we don't get people. We don't market or advertise (besides STICKERS!) because every time we've even thought about it, we've realized it may be detrimental to the community. I mean, if all of fatpeoplehate came here, I think it might be a bad thing. All I can say is keep posting, keep commenting, invite people who you think would be awesome, mention Hubski around town, and we'll get there. That's what I do (and try to do better everyday) anyways.
You don't have the infrastructure for more people. Hubski, steady-state, is many many interconnected groups of people that interact or not based on their interests. It becomes a fluid mixer. You need the ability to keep your interactions under Dunbar's Number while also opening up your field of play to the horizon. User follow keeps your true interactions under 150 or so, and it works quite well. In order to go bigger you need subject affinity (tags, search, etc) such that your "crowd" can move freely about the "map." until then, you will have one crowd in one corner of the map and anyone who wanders out will not be followed. Build out search, build out tags, build out the other axis and Hubski can expand to the horizon.
Yes to all of that. forwardslash if you have search done by tomorrow night, drinks are on me and mk.
Serious question: are you guys thinking this is a 10-100 man-hour problem or a 100-1000 man-hour problem? Because there's your need for monetization: I suspect that if every active user donated $50, we still wouldn't have offered up enough coin to breach the "insult" barrier. I'm no programmer but I have a reasonable understanding as to why search is hard. It's one of many unwieldy problems that are going to rear their heads as the site evolves. In my opinion, there's a lot of real tricky coding that needs to happen and you're either asking someone to take several hundred hours on the chin or you're rolling a Miata's worth of coin into the problem. Which is great when there's enough love or money to go around but we all know that never lasts.
Comment threads are one of the worst cases for text search, because you're comparing short texts (query strings) to short texts (comments). There are ways to make it work, but most of them involve crunching some very big matrices periodically, and you don't want to do that if you don't have some big iron to do it on.
I'm no coder either so you're asking the wrong fella. Buuuut... It's been a LONG MOTHERFUCKING TIME COMING and I know that / is no slouch and has a strong work ethic, so I'm fairly confident it's a big endeavor. That said, this was one of those years where each of us on the Hubski team has had some major life changing, big stuff go down and we aren't where I'd like us to be developmentally. I don't think any of us are happy with that. We had some big goals. But... we are picking up steam. Edit: Also, it's worth noting that what we do have is pretty substantial. It's over 4 years worth of tweaks, updates, new functionality etc. That's something that shouldn't be overlooked but is easy to. I want search and I want an API. YESTERDAY. I'd like to give those things to you all (and myself as a user) and then add a donation button. The donation button will help with stickers, server costs, other swag and maybe, maybe, just maybe we can get forwardslash some help. But by all accounts, he's making some good progress building us a functional database to search... and beyond that it's above my pay grade. Basically though, we're asking forwardslash to take it on the chin. But, all of us on team-hubski do this. We don't run this place for the money, that's for damned sure.
There's probably not even enough quality content generated in a day. Most reddit posts are pictures or some stupid meta bullshit. I want a better reddit but when you strip out most of reddit you probably aren't left with much. I'm subscribed to like 10 subreddits right now and I could have easily missed this news. Subscribing to ten reddits is very OK. Not great, very whatever but fun occasionally. But there always seems to be new bullshit I don't click on, so hey, there's that.
And that's why I come back all the time - Quality over quantity, every single time. It would be nice if there was more content on hubski, but I refuse to share anything I don't think is 100% worthy of merit and discussion. It's almost like we're... thoughtful about it (to hearken back to one of hubski's slogans). Thoughtful about what we share, what we say when we share and discuss it, and who we share hubski with to continue to have quality content.but I have a problem with posting things I don't find like..super awesome interesting.
I agree wholeheartedly. I enjoy having conversations and being able to discuss topics rather than have them devolve into memes or one liners. This is something I see that Hubski excels at. However, from an outsider, and in particular a potential new user, they are going to see the front page (for lack of a better term) as scarce. This is one of the top ones up there and it only has mid-twenties for comments. In fact, it is the only one that has more than 5 comments. I am not saying it is a bad thing that topics have smaller and more personal conversations, but I am not saying it's a good thing either. Right now I think it only attracts users that want to have a conversation, but that's about it. I guess it is a bit of the chicken and the egg scenario.
Yeah, I've been lurking for a week and I've only been a member for a day, so I'm pacing my posts so I don't annoy other people on here with my presence. I kind of want to comment on a few stories here and there though, to get some conversations going. However, I'm not too keen on accidentally stepping on any toes either, so I'd rather just err on the side of caution for now.
This is massive circle jerk that's on the front page of Reddit right now is the catalyst to finally make me jump ship. As a user who switched during the Digg 4.0 fiasco, i've been so tired of the same junk constantly posted to Reddit this last 2 years. I'm hoping as once active user slowly dwindled into a non-poster I can make a smooth transition here at hubski and finally start contributing some content to other individuals again.
I've experienced the same issue as you. When I started on Reddit, I was fine with the defaults, and honestly, the defaults weren't half bad. But slowly but surely the quality of discussion fell, and I migrated to smaller, more niche sub Reddits. Now even those are becoming toxic, and I just want out. But yeah Hubski is great but, like you, when I came to Reddit, it was at the right time. It was small enough that there was quality discussion, but big enough to have an active community with a variety of topics. We can only hope we find another site in that sweet spot. Hopefully, Hubski can be that. Unfortunately, it's a problem we'll always have to deal with as long as good sites become popular. It's called the eternal September
I'm kind of weird in that I bounced around from forum to forum, social site to social site, for the past decade and a half. I've hit some of the big ones, and ones so small I doubt if I named them anyone would recognize them. I'd usually stick around a certain site for a year or so, then when things started getting stale or repetitive, go somewhere new. Something about Reddit was different. I've been on there for about four years, going through about a dozen accounts (for the sake of anonymity). For the longest time, I loved it. It was so big, there was always something new to discover. I'd stumble on subreddits that exposed me to new music, rekindled my love for old music that I forgot I enjoyed so much, discovered so many passing interests that I could experience vicariously through other posters without investing time, effort, or money on my own part. I could become a voice in smaller subreddits while staying completely anonymous in bigger ones. It had so much to offer. Now though? It feels too big. Too weird. I've lost that sense of intimacy I've had in other communities. I think my current account there will be my last. Maybe Hubski will be my greener pastures, maybe I'll move on quickly, I don't know. I do know I don't regret the time I spent on Reddit, but I also know that once I finally do leave, I won't miss it.
A casual user notices that everything on Reddit is reliant on voting up, voting down, and choosing communities to be a member of. It feels very democratic. A moderator on Reddit notices that the votes don't matter, communities are fluid and that Reddit has a lot more in common with Somalia than Hellenistic Greece. A moderator has more in common with an afghan warlord than he does with a senator. So if you're a casual user, you go "terk mah free speeches!" and rouse your rabble. If you're not a casual user, you go "dude. Votes don't matter and never did. Enjoy your ban." and thus do both corners come out swinging.
Man, that really sucks. I mean, it's not like I didn't see it coming, but I really didn't expect these changes to be so harshly induced. I used to love Reddit for being a platform for free speech, no matter if I agree with what is said or not. Sure, I hated a lot of communities there, but I wouldn't want to see them banned. Good thing I stumbled across Hubski a while ago :)
Exactly. It has to happen as Reddit becomes mainstream. The fringe groups will slowly get pushed out to different online communities. Reddit USED to be the underdog and so it could accept any form of subreddit, but with all the media attention, it has to straighten up and FPH is only the tip of the iceberg.
No joke guys and gals, if you are on reddit and specifically in a subreddit with interesting people that may be a good fit here, invite them. We benefit from new ideas and perspectives. Bonus points if you invite Beatles fans. -sorry mk.
I would like to caution those recruiting new members under these circumstances, however. A lot of the people looking to get out of reddit at the moment seem to be the types who really love to hate. I'm not really trying to tell anyone what to do here, but I think it's important to think about the kind of people you all, as users of Hubski, want to populate this site. If you all are fine with those types of people inhabiting this space, more power to you, invite away. I just think that it matters under which context people are led to Hubski, myself.
Couldn't agree more, hence the use of the words interesting and good fit. ...and Beatles :)
I'm looking to get out of reddit. Have been for a while. I don't care for the hate subs at all, but I can't stand biased moderation. It's what made me leave gamefaqs, it's what made me leave myspace, and it's what's making me leave reddit. Can't say I'll stick around hubski. Not really my type of people. But it's a nice enough space here that makes me want to keep coming back.
Invite "your kind of people". Ideally, Hubski would end up having many pockets of varied communities. Use the infrastructure and make it yours. Nothing would make us on the Hubski team happier than to have many varied communities with different interests that occasionally overlap. That would be AWESOME.
I'm curious what features would be needed? I took a quick glance at the subreddit and it seems like a cool concept. We have the ability to sticky posts and add two tags. What else is needed? If it's something that would well serve Hubski as a whole, we would be all ears. Also, we have had past features that are now defunct that may be worth revisiting if we were to have a large influx of new users that are creative writers. lil knows what I'm talking about. Also, check out the Primer Page for many of our functions.
One thing that I really miss is having a way to aggregate posts from writers and condence them into longer texts. Right now the community volunteers are working on an archive that is a separate website where you can see all of the posts of a story in one place, but they are facing issues with that. They still want people to visit the subreddit to upvote and comment on the stories to show appreciation for the stories, but the reddit API is a little awkward at that. There is no good way of documenting the universes from the stories expect for Wiki pages. Also the only way to find stories from a universe is to search through a user or the wiki. There are no tags or anything even remotely functional in reddit itself. I would love to see support for something like following a tag that is the universe and a story sequence. Something like #jenkinsverse for the universe and #billybob for the story. I could then look at my feed and see the stories from those tags whenver they get posted. Maybe I could even have a way to trigger a daily digest of the stories from a tag that would be emailed/pushbulleted/IFTTT/sent to my kindle. Also there is no way to financially help out the writers. One or two of them set up a Patreon account and help, but there is no way to make that built into the subreddit without some crazy CSS magic. Honestly, if Hubski would like to bring back some of the features for writers, I definitely recommend the subreddit /r/shutupandwrite and it's creator, awk(or awkisopen). He has built an incredible feedback system that ties in the subreddit and IRC to create a way for writers to improve. EDIT: Sorry for the word vomit, I accidentally took 2 caffeine pills instead of my vitamins. send help
I'm on mobile. Pardon my brevity. Are all the universes by the same person or different people?
So we used to have these things called personal tags. Basically it was a tag that was tied to your username. ie: #insomniasexx.goodlongread You could see, ignore, follow, etc by both the user and the tag. It seems like it might work for what you are talking about (too bad we ditched it). The reason for implementing them was to give people the ability to see (and not see) exactly what they wanted—super granular control. The problem was (as seen in the comments of the hubski update post above), they weren't actually being used. Everyone generally agreed that it was a good concept but, for whatever reason, the implementation wasn't good. We do still have lists. Example: https://hubski.com/list?id=1,111921,105134,151313,81519,104022,122420,160552,100957,57650,55796,198468,140041,103903,102546,105375,94303,140041,136556,129011,103594,92964,131429,128846,200623,201834,215061,59396,49317,149662,205902,200151,215061,194662,203357,174121,109072,185214,185594,208309,118145,114724,108495,102546,101449,59754,146684,96333,95326,86371,145445,86155,81949,76798,72253,64416,140604,168325,208187,103537,152267,151535,64774,59754,125341,53181,51930,205044
Basically, you put these together manually by stringing together pub id numbers separated by commas. Obviously though, it's not optimal because it is manual. We never saw much love for them so we never coded up a way to do them easier but if you had any ideas of a sweeter implementation, we're literally all ears. We also allow some "URL hacking" (aka query strings) as announced here: So you could generate a "personal tag" still by doing something like this: https://hubski.com/tag?id=poetry&author=lil Or, for your universe/story example by doing: mk or forwardslash could certainly code those up in a jiffy though, right guys? (don't kill me).
We don't have an "or" command do something like "show posts tagged this by this author or that author. It also doesn't seem that stacking tags works (ie: https://hubski.com/tag?id=goodlongread&tag=crimestories) https://hubski.com/tag?id=UNIVERSE&author=AUTHOR1
The functionality you discuss is kind of hacker-level stuff, though. One problem is that lots of deep stuff is possible within the UI... if you know the magic word. And unless you know the magic word, you don't even really know you can do that, and if you don't really know you can do that, it doesn't occur to you to fish around to see if it's possible.
By all means, invite away! We are not keen on doing it ourselves, but it's awesome when you guys do so on our behalf. Means more coming from you than it would me, you know?
I can't say I'll miss any of it, especially /r/transfags, which recently had "lol you don't pass" discussions around pics of a 16 year old trans kid. Yeah sure, you have a right to be allowed to make fun of people, I even encourage it in many aspects - but perhaps you should question your motives when a significant amount of your entertainment involves beating other people down to make yourself feel better. That said, this is a pandora's box, and there's no way of undoing this. As someone mentioned elsewhere, now any "hate" subreddit, or "disagreeable" subreddit that continues to exist long term can be construed as being tacitly accepted by Reddit administration. It's basically a giant game of whack-a-mole that they're guaranteed to lose. This is a wide sweeping policy that is completely indefensible and unenforceable in reality. It will either completely destroy the website as it stands currently, or (in a far more likely situation) do absolutely nothing.
The problem is that absent any cues for affinity, anonymous communities will rally around their aversion to "the other." Negative emotions are much more natural to express in an anonymous forum so you develop communities around things people are against just as easily as things people are for. This leads to a bigger problem: when your community favors anonymity and antagonism over identity and empathy, the general character of your community will become anonymous and antagonistic. I've been discussing this problem with admins since 2008. Anyone with the slightest insight into the sociology of the Internet can demonstrate that an anonymous community based on an approval system (which is what upvotes and downvotes are) will grow meaner over time, even disregarding growth. Yet Reddit has done very little to backstop against the descent into hate. They had a chance when they bought RedditGifts. That was a community based around giving and exchange. However, they never integrated the first thing about it, never built exchanges around subreddits, communities or anything else, never attempted to use it to turn Redditors from anonymous things to hate into people likely to give you pencil sharpeners and manga novels. And now that ship has sailed. The truly ironic thing is that by choosing this hill to die on, this windmill to tilt at, they're enrolling their community in demonstrating just how vociferously they hate the obese. Any casual user that checks /r/all will discover (1) Reddit has little to no ability to police its community (2) that community is vile and repulsive. But hey. They got their blog post.
Absolutely 100% correct. This has been discussed at length by Hegel, Sartre, and many others less famous. If it wasn't fat people, or trans people, or black people, or arab people, it would be someone else. It seems that humanity is in constant need of an "Other", a bogeyman. Much of this has to do with how we define ourselves. It is actually a difficult mental task to define ones self by what they are, and significantly more simple to define ourselves by what we are not. "I don't know what I am, but that is NOT it," as it were. As a Canadian, it is interesting to see how much of Canadian culture is built on the premise of "Not America", or "Not the UK". Our "Others" represent what we see the need to define ourselves as not being. It is even easier to do so when that "Other" is a faceless thing, a caricature. I don't know if this is because of, or if the two concepts are related in how they are treated by the brain, but language has a similar problem. without visual context, how do you explain what the word "Large" means? when it comes down to it, "large" generally means "Not small". "Small", on the other hand, means "not large". Large could also mean "heavy", but what is heavy but "Not light"? A lot of our descriptive adjectives are defined by what they are not, rather than what they are. Just like us. Edit: mk, I'm still getting a lot of 502s these days. Is it my connection?The problem is that absent any cues for affinity, anonymous communities will rally around their aversion to "the other."
I really hope this influx doesn't change the tone or sophistication of Hubski for the worse. I just found this place, and I really like it. Everything about the way it is designed and run seems to be geared towards encouraging thoughtful discussion and communal interaction, unlike Reddit where everything about the way the site is designed encourages antagonism and extremism. It almost feels like the more academic subreddits, except throughout the entire site!
Don't worry about it! I was just curious. I've kind of got a save-comment strategy in case of 502, so It's no big deal.
Well its going to be an interesting few days on Reddit. But it'll be old news in a week or two and everyone on there will continue doing the same old thing. Maybe we'll get a few new permanent users here and Voat will definitely be picking up some steam. However of the subs they banned they left quite a few out that should have been included. They're being rather picky.
Agreed. It's always fun to see a few doomsayers' comments at the top of threads followed by things going back to 'business as usual.' With this one people may try to drag it on - but even (?|?), which was highly unpopular at the time, blew over for the most part (leaving only the occasional 'I miss seeing votes' comment in its wake).Well its going to be an interesting few days on Reddit. But it'll be old news in a week or two and everyone on there will continue doing the same old thing.
Seeing the admins of Reddit get thousands of downvotes for stating their views on the subject pleases me greatly. I almost want to fap to all the drama that's going on. I hope Reddit dies a very painful death, and I feel like the admins are one step away from triggering a Digg v4 level exodus.