The website drives itself further and further into the ground.
That's part of the reason why I am on Hubski now. I am looking for a decent alternative. Unfortunately a lot of places don't seem to have the user base or activity levels. Voat gets mentioned a lot, but the content is really hit or miss, plus it seems to get a lot of the worse from Reddit. So far Hubski looks great.
Definitely not a reddit replacement. For starters, everyone here seems to be welcoming and well spoken so far.
I'm also a reddit refugee, and basically never comment there anymore. I use it as a content aggregatior, but to actually carry on a conversation? Hubski all the way.
I wouldn't call myself a Reddit refugee, as I never felt myself driven from the place by any scandal and I've actually been on all sorts of websites, some still alive and some dead, for years. That said, when I discovered Hubski and lurked for a while before registering, I knew I found something special here. There's s degree of courtesy on this website that you don't often find elsewhere on the internet. In fact, my first month or so on here was a bit of an adjustment period for me, as I had to let myself acclimate to the fact that people on here aren't being deliberately contentious like so many other places on the internet. Suffice to say, this place is great.
I totally agree with your descriptions of Hubski (see?). I do consider myself driven from Reddit to an extent, due to a combination of the contention that you talk about and also the fact that it seems to be about who can be edgier the fastest.
Yes one of things that I like about Hubski is that it's probably one of the few places on the Internet where most of the conversations don't devolve into a flame fest. Sure nothing is perfect but you can really learn something from the articles and conversations posted here and that is important. When people get into discussions on other sites, they just fight and never learn anything from one another. People are so passionate about their beliefs on a place like Facebook or Twitter but they never take the time to learn. A lack of an open mind is very common these days on both sides. I feel like most people go around in the same circles never learning. I have a tendency to lurk on here but I do enjoy the fact that people can have civil conversations on here because that's such a rarity these days.
So, this is real and not /pol/ conspiracy garbage. I wonder how many other times they have changed posts, altered content etc. We all know by now that the reddit admins have multiple accounts, it is how they got the site rolling. I'm now 1000000x more happy to not be on reddit any more.
falsification is in their FUCKING DNA. Ever wondered why fucking Ron Paul was fucking everywhere in 2007-2008? cuz Alexis and Steve are die-hard fucking libertarians.
Steve Huffman is libertarian like China is democratic.
To be honest I doubt they have other times. While I'm not for sure, it reads like spez went into the database and directly altered stuff. That is annoying to do. Then again, this isn't the first time I've seen this sort of thing happen online, so who knows. I'm more surprised that people are surprised that it's happened. It's happened for as long as internet forums have existed. It's bad, but not new.
And for such a site of significance this seems like amateur hour. How did he think there wouldn't be tremendous backlash from something so childish? Puts the entire site to shame. His staff must be furious.
He said his staff was furious, but people are posting screenshots of the admins chatting. Granted, the screenshots may be spurious.
I assume you are saying that as it is an actual reddit admin quote.
I'm finding myself disagreeing with this. I couldn't find words as to why until I saw your comment below about changing your words in a comment and how that affects integrity. It's the same integrity for a small place as a big place, but people do it in both places. In a small place, there's really no recourse. No one cares that it happened. The user base in a small place is too invested in that place to care that one person is affected. In a bigger and more diverse place like Reddit, the accountability is greater. Huffman got away with it for an hour before people were getting enough attention to force his hand. On smaller platforms, I've seen those things go on for years with no one admitting fault or anyone caring. It appears there's more accountability because it's a big site. For me personally, that gives me a bit more confidence that my words being tampered with will more likely be addressed than in a smaller site. I asked this in another comment section, but does the small size of a place say that it lacks cultural significance? What does that say about smaller sites?
I don't think it's any worse than BoingBoing and Gawker disemvoweling obnoxious comments. It's not like it wasn't obvious to the users involved their comments were being edited. There are a lot of things reddit and spez in particular deserve to be criticized for, but playing with assholes who were asking for it isn't one of them.
The fundamental problem with the admins' behavior on Reddit is it is inconsistent, opaque, and quixotically-driven. And considering the impact their behavior has on discourse, it makes the whole structure completely unpredictable and untrustworthy. But it's not like this shit is new. There has never been a time when the admins weren't completely arbitrary. Nowadays, though, they're being arbitrary to a crowd whose median age is 16 so the response is understandably juvenile.
Indeed. I think the only reason spez in those "admin chats" (which I thought were actually default moderators) says solidly that they won't ban/don't want to ban T_D is because at least they are vaguely contained where they are. Imagine if they did ban that sub what a disaster it would be. The mistake they make is assuming it's a problem with that subreddit's users, when it's just part of reddit's nature that they've been able to use so massively. It's always had toxic lairs.
Speaking as a former default mod: Reddit doesn't have the tools to ban anything. They can play whack-a-mole and hopefully wear out their adversaries or drive them to another site. They can hunker down on the knowledge that what they do takes less work than what their adversaries do, which hopefully balances out the fact that they're outnumbered a thousand to one. They can ban one community and another and another and another and hopefully the goons get tired of the game. But every time they try this ploy they show their limits. Meanwhile their adversary learns their game and learns what it takes to make them capitulate. And as the scandals mount, they get more press. The game becomes more fun. And all the reasonable people have been driven away, and what's left are the jihadis. At its fundamental core, Reddit does not have the architecture to control the conversation. Upvotes and downvotes are a crude and brutal tool that favors easy-to-digest content and despite the fact that criticism has five times the impact of praise Reddit counts both equally. It's an architecture that weaponizes enthusiasm and inattention at the cost of thoughtfulness and insight, while also heavily favoring dissemination over digestion. If virulence ("virality" - fuck you marketers) is the aspect of social dissemination we're watching these days, Reddit was engineered to be ebola back ten years ago. There have been adaptions and modifications that have allowed it to keep its carriers alive for a while but it's a fuckin' brutal organism. It wasn't designed to be controlled. It was designed to spread. It was designed to shape its own destiny through competition and extinction and there were never many controls built in to steer it. And what controls do exist lack any sort of utility in dealing with a persistent threat. Most of us have long since given up. If there had been any thought whatsoever to social media, Jack Dorsey and Alexis Ohanian and Mark Zuckerberg would have considered for a minute or so just how easily their little petri dish projects could be weaponized. But they didn't. And here we are.
Hmm. I disagree on a philosophical level. If one of the controlling members of Hubski for instance took a random, inconsequential comment of mine and changed it to "I like the smell of my own farts," it'd be a little funny and in the grand scheme of things, there wouldn't be any direct harm. However, their doing it crosses a line, because they would violate my trust and abuse their power. It would bring into question their integrity and the integrity of Hubski.
I wasn't very surprised to see it happen. A lot of people are very offended about it, but I don't find myself caring much. What surprised me more is that subreddit sharing a conversation where Spez repeatedly says they won't ban it, as evidence they may ban it. I feel bad for both sides involved. Or rather, am slightly sympathetic.