It's not mutiny, it's survival of the fittest. Alexis and Steve are diehard libertarians. The site is built around the premise that social darwinism will provide the most efficient solution to any problem. Thus, subreddits and the near-total lack of Admin involvement in them… except when the money bitches (Sears), crime is imminent (violentacrez modding the CIRCLEJERKERS in /r/jailbait) or bad press is threatened (/r/creepshots). Hell - as soon as Adrien Chen putted Violentacrez, Yishan Wong announced the admins were pulling out of /r/modtalk - essentially saying "you're on your own, suckaz." So what you're left with isn't The HMS Bounty, it's Bartertown. It would take fifteen to twenty minutes for any average social psychologist to look at the makeup of Reddit and recoil in horror. The sad thing is I've been arguing with them for five years now about ways to scale back the brutality and every suggestion I've ever made has gotten a nod, a grin and a cold shoulder. Yet they keep asking.
It took me longer than it probably should have to realize this. It should have been as bright as day when the answer to any grievance or criticism of subreddits was, "You can always start your own."Alexis and Steve are diehard libertarians. The site is built around the premise that social darwinism will provide the most efficient solution to any problem.
The voting system itself is the biggest problem. You drown out discussion because people are much more willing to upvote stupid pictures than they are long articles.
I don't disagree, but the difference (a big one) is that there is no "main page" that gets corrupted by this easy to digest content. If you want to have a feed of longer form reads you can follow #goodlongreads or better yet, follow a user that doesn't post or share easily digested content. -you're good like that. mk too and any numbering others. So it's the voting mechanism in conjunction with the way content is presented that is the issue.
The feed you see when you're logged out or not following anyone serves as the "main page" equivalent, and it's just as susceptible to corruption as reddit's /r/all. For years people said the same thing about reddit: the easy-content corruption didn't matter because you could just follow different subreddits. But even among my followers, it seems people vote more for agreeable short content rather than long content.
I think that in a lot of ways Hubski's architecture is more akin to Twitter than it is reddit. Nobody goes to twitter to see a main page. Right now we have a very small site but if it were to grow those global pages would become pretty meaningless IMO. You would have to construct your own feed. You could seek out those posts you deem high integrity and follow others that feel similarly. Is this going to eliminate the occasional puff piece being shared in to your feed? No. We're humans, we like candy even if we say we only eat healthily. You been on Hubski IRC lately? I've been stopping by randomly but nobody is around.
The voting system is not at fault here. It's the community. The bigger the website gets (and the more attention it draws) more people go towards it. Reddit has a lot of 13/14 year old kids who only "upvote stupid pictures" . The secret to Reddit is finding the correct subreddits and contribute to them.
The voting system is in a sense at fault. Examine the algorithm: 
. In the time you can read a reasonably long article worthy of an upvote, you could rate at least 25 images. Because of the nature of the time fall off inherent to the algorithm, human's natural inclination to keep hitting the dopamine button and that you can only give one upvote rather than rate content out of 10 or 100, pictures will always dominate over words as content.
It seems like if it did happen, we would hear about it from a former moderator, right? My guess is that it doesn't happen. I would think that organizations have too much to lose to play with that fire. kleinbl00 you have mentioned that you moderate a default sub, have you ever been approached by someone offering you money for favors in regards to that role?
I"ve never been approached. No one I know has been approached. Frankly, "have some money" is far more crass and far less successful than what works and what happens daily. qgyh2 became an admin to post Amazon referral links to pay for server time. He did this after a prominent power user (who shall remain unnamed) started a sock puppet named "AmazonAssociate" who would answer questions with Amazon affiliate links. Note that he had nothing to do with Amazon - and it doesn't take long to set up an affiliate page. Nonetheless, back when Reddit had like 80,000 users he was still making $200-$500 daily. So now affiliate links are banned unless an admin posts them. SolInvictus was totally for hire. Reddit accounts are readily available for sale; gold farming takes many forms. Without saying too much, I was moderating /r/politics when the blacklist came out. I left two days later. I'll let Napoleon Bonaparte speak for me: Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
It'd be much easier to just use vote bots to get a similar effect anyway. I'm something like 90% sure that reddit's frequently manipulated by vote bots.
I enjoy this article. Seems like you wrote it with a passion & maybe a quickness - you've got a couple redundant words here and there - On the other hand, elegant avoidance of ending a sentence in a preposition: - Might want to put in an "ly" here: All in all though I really enjoyed your perspective. You seem both knowledgeable and analytical in this article. One of my favorite subreddits when I reddited regularly was r/metareddit, this would be a great article to share there as well, probably. I hadn't thought of the dichotomies of Reddit in this way before and I found it edifying.the burden of managing all those topical niches had grown burdensome
By default, logged-in users view the site from a home page that threads together links from the subreddits to which they’ve subscribed.
Reinforcing that impression are the new moderation features the administrators occasional unveil
Ah, thanks for checking up on me. I've corrected the errors. And, yeah, I'm kind of a stickler for not ending with a preposition, unless my goal is to strike an informal tone. Glad you enjoyed it. Looks like someone's already linked to it over at r/metareddit.
I see that you are writing on medium now, I didn't realize that. Glad to read your work again, I was sorry to see cultureramp.com go away. mk once asked one of the founders of reddit what the key to the success of the site was and the answer was subreddits. It gives the users ownership of a segment of the site. This ownership makes them "champions" of the site, effectively marketing their own subreddits outside of reddit itself, bringing in new people etc. Created /r/bowling? Then you're going to get your bowling league to join reddit to participate etc. I've often wondered how Hubski could provide a way to give more "ownership" to the people in our community without having that "ownership" infringe on others experience as it seems the mod's have infringed (at times) on the experience of their fellow redditors. -As I've mentioned before, I'm not a redditor so I have no skin in the game but I do like to read these types of things to learn more about what does and what does not work. Good seeing your work again, I look forward to more.
It's always heartening to hear that people miss Culture Ramp. I think I probably have editing in my blood, but it's been nice just working as a writer for a while. I've also had a few op-eds at Polygon, so you can catch me there every so often as well. I think the Reddit founder was probably right about subreddits contributing to the site's popularity. Some of the most popular platforms on the Web are built on internal contradictions. It's part of what gives them traction, since it gives the platform a kind of problematic texture, something to work out. People love a puzzle.
Honestly, I started realizing I needed to quit Reddit when I started wondering how much was faked. I can go really deep into that rabbithole. (Like, what if a group of moderators/insiders created Game of Trolls in order to give older reddit users something interesting to pay attention to so that when you initially get bored with the site, you have something else to get involved in? But nah. That's crazy talk. GoT isn't an inside job...right? But the factions that appear on Reddit and are based pretty much solely around Reddit interest me. It would be clever if you could create that sort of thing on purpose in order to keep user interest. Reddit became, to me, like a soap opera or daytime drama at times due to this.)People love a puzzle.