As another ancient old thing - I was on Fidonet and Citanet, and I used to bangpath my way to anon.penet.fi - I agree in general, but I'm not sure I agree with you about the unusually caustic nature of Reddit. It reminds me very much of parts of the old Alt hierarchy; a fetid swamp of scum and villainy. EDIT: Update begins here, I somehow posted too early, and now the servers are cranky. Up to a certain point, that sort of chaos can be invigorating. And for a time it was. I've seen Reddit become exponentially more toxic over the last year, and it's far less likely to find something interesting floating on top of the scum. The most toxic thing about reddit is that it's hardly chaotic at all. Everyone has gotten sorted into their own epistemic bubbles, which are defended to the last ditch. But I do love a bit of chaos. I like a place where people mingle and a discussion may turn in very unpredictable directions. That has it's upsides and downsides; for one thing, it's metastable at best. Usenet really was never the same after it was discovered by the spammers. But before then, there had been trolls. Even then, it was a game to certain sorts to find an innocent community and disrupt it "for the lulz." That phrase might even date back to Alt.flame. But that's only one source of friction. There's the spammer/monetize/exploiter mindset, the ones who see no good thing without thinking "wow, wouldn't it be great if we could strip-mine that?" And then there's the control-freaks. There are several subcategories of control-freak and some are not particularly toxic. Keeping the packets running on time is pretty important. But it can become hilariously unproductive very quickly. I think the Scientology flap was one of the best examples of that - when Scientology tried to sue the Internet. I see the most problematic ones as Social Conservatives with religious motivations. Some focus on disruption - some on exploitation. But they have learned, and Reddit is definitely a big fat juicy target. There was a huge influx of that sort from Digg - /r/conservative seems much like the old Digg Patriots. Reddit is simply too large and too fast moving for them to wreck the place - or perhaps they have learned from an obvious mistake; you can't control the message if the means of control are simply eliminated. Pao was possibly the single worst possible choice to bring Reddit into line - but that assumes the people who chose her understood what was even possible. I'm going to assume she was hired on her merits as a control freak and power-junkie. Without judgement - that's just not going to work. Having said that, I'm not sure it would be possible to salvage both community AND have a revenue stream to monetize. That's because - well, I think there is very little understanding of people in general and toxic behaviors in particular. Certainly if management is itself toxic, they won't welcome inquiry, much less change strategy. AOL, Facebook, Yahoo Groups... All of these have or had thriving communities that they managed to kill off. And I think this may be that people qualified to manage a company are the last people who should be consulted on the quality of conversation and human interactions. The simple sadists who bring us the dregs of reddit and the howling lunatics that fuel the activist right object to reasonable discussion, for very different reasons, I would imagine. So if the /b/tards don't get you, the concern trolls will. And if you become the focus of media attention - if you become fashionable - the signal-to-noise ratio becomes untenable. After a few decades of seeing places come and go, due to various combinations of toxic communities, ham-fisted community management and inept attempts to monetize, it's likely reddit's turn. Or perhaps it will be lucky and become the next livejournal - a quiet, unfashionable backwater, covered in moss and memories, but still worth a visit from time to time. So here's to hubski. May it never become popular. If asked what a good place to move on to would be by someone you don't know - suggest voat to the howling twits and snapzu to those who are simply too nice to ever permit an actual discussion to occur.
An important distinction for Usenet and 4Chan is the lack of a front page. Sure - there were bitter trolls all over usenet, and there were corners full of fire. However, it was necessary to seek them out. There was no algorithm that would hold them up to the light if they got enough traffic. That's enough to set Reddit apart - the fact that an eyesore can be brought out into the shining light through activity alone. It incentivizes trolling and disruption far more than either 4chan or usenet ever could. This leads to the stratification you describe: the thugs can hang out in their own private Idahos until they feel like setting off on an adventure. The lack of friction between subreddits is something else unseen on usenet or 4chan - there remains a 'homepage' to exploit and if you exploit it enough, you exploit everyone's homepage. Control of Reddit is fully in the hands of the VCs now. You've got Ellen Pao (ex-Kleiner Perkins), Sam Altman (Y-Combinator) and Alexis Ohanian (Y-Combinator) in direct control of five dozen untenured, unempowered serfs. When Marissa Mayer bought Tumblr and said she wouldn't fuck with it, people believed her; when she burned Tumblr's community into a gif engine it was immediately obvious that Tumblr's monetization strategy was immune from its community. I suspect Reddit is in a similar place.
About 15 years ago, just before the last tech bubble burst, I was working for an ISP in London, doing sysadmin stuff on their forums (vbulletin), running their IRC server that was hooked up to DALnet, amongst all the other stuff as well expected of a sysadmin of that era. (Radius, LDAP, MySQL, blah blah blah). Before the company was bought by a large italian carrier, and before the bubble burst, we had somewhere around 600,000 customers (which was a big number back then!), with a vibrant community that was flourishing on the vbulletin forums, and with a fairly large number who liked to engage in IRC. The company spent no money on hardware at all for the entire time I was there. They were also running around and spending most of their time trying to figure out how much we were worth. At some point someone valued the company at over $800 per customer - $0.5Bn valuation, roughly. For a company that wasn't public, just a privately own company, a subsidiary of several other well known companies (hence being evasive who they are not that it probably matters anymore). Anyway, the management was throwing millions of dollars every month at marketing, sending out CDs to every man woman child and rabbit in the United Kingdom. They spent no money at all on hardware to support the influx of customers we were getting, even though we were hemorrhaging customers hand over fist because apparently it was an acceptable level of churn. All that mattered was, each user was worth $800 a year to someone, if only we can figure out how to extract that money from them. Of course it was bullshit. Just as we were being shopped around to be sold, the arse fell out of the market, and we ended up being sold to aforementioned italian carrier for ~$50Mn. (Can't remember the exact figures but the orders of magnitude should be about right) Sorry, I've rambled. My point, MBA types don't see a community. They see dollar signs. They see a user base to be converted into a revenue stream. They will not care if they lose 20%, or even maybe 50% of the community base as long as they can extract some magic amount of dollars from the remainder. According to https://www.reddit.com/about/, they handled 3,176,546 logged in users last month. Somewhere, someone has put a dollar figure on how much on average a reddit user is "worth", lets say $1000 a year, and they looking at the resultant $3Bn potential (bullshit) dollars, and wondering how, exactly, they can extract even just 10% of that. They will not give a flying fuck about whether or not the community will survive the experience.Control of Reddit is fully in the hands of the VCs now. You've got Ellen Pao (ex-Kleiner Perkins), Sam Altman (Y-Combinator) and Alexis Ohanian (Y-Combinator) in direct control of five dozen untenured, unempowered serfs. When Marissa Mayer bought Tumblr and said she wouldn't fuck with it, people believed her; when she burned Tumblr's community into a gif engine it was immediately obvious that Tumblr's monetization strategy was immune from its community.
I'm not yet convinced. The whole self moderation thing is so far incomplete and trivially circumvented with sockpuppets. The moderating tools seem to be merely encouraging a situation where there are (for example) people literally using hubski as a platform on which to incite racial hatred which those who've moderated out those folks won't realize the extent of, but they're nonetheless associated with in the eyes of potential community members who are then going to self select whether they want to be here.
What we have today isn't what we will have tomorrow. mk might want to jump in here, but I would expect that as problems arise there will be discussion and thought about how to deal with specific issues. For example, take a look at anti-spam solutions (I work at an anti-spam company). You can look at the entire user base and see how well they moderate, and whether they are accurate at moderating against obvious spam and other evils, or whether they just follow the herd. You can then weight those users higher, lets call them a canary. They are an early indicator that someone is a fuckwit. You could then use that data to generate a list of "low quality" submitters, that a user can opt into hiding posts from on their profile. "Hide low quality submitters" checkbox. The default "public" not-logged-in feed would show only "high quality submitters". Hubski could also generate a internal list of "high quality" members. These are members who consistently get badged for their content, and are rarely hidden or muted. A user could opt to sort "high quality members" to the top of threads. Again, the not-logged-in experience could have this enabled by default. This is just one idea that I came up with after reading your comment and thinking for a few minutes. mk etc are likely to be able to do better. I'm sure it has obvious flaws that haven't occurred to me yet. If you're not restrained by trying to make money and just care about the quality of the community, you can do things that you ordinarily wouldn't do.
This has to be the most succinct lambasting of Reddit culture I've seen so far. Nice job. I find it hard to go there, now that I know Hubski exists. I know that here at least you can have a reasoned debate, and the unreasonable can just be ignored.What does exist on Reddit is the abuse of speech as a "heckler's veto." Censorship by the mob. And the worst aspect of it is, management's laissez faire attitude toward it enables ripples across the internet.
>They will not give a flying fuck about whether or not the community will survive the experience. Well, of course not. Thing is, though, that's part of the huge reaction. I mean, it's also racist and misogynist, juvenile and intensely personal - but aside from all of that there is the sense of being disrespected. And if the past is any guide, all this butthurt will lead to the creation of wonderful things. Maybe one of those angry children will devise a way to automate management and venture capitalism.
>An important distinction for Usenet and 4Chan is the lack of a front page. ... That's enough to set Reddit apart - the fact that an eyesore can be brought out into the shining light through activity alone. It incentivizes trolling and disruption far more than either 4chan or usenet ever could. It's almost a search engine for it. Well, no it is. And in the last few years, I've been confronted with things I've managed to entirely avoid for 50-odd years. Now that I think of it, that's not an entirely bad thing - but it is exhausting. >Control of Reddit is fully in the hands of the VCs now. Well, it was doomed to happen. But in more precise terms - the logo and the servers are in the hands of VC's. All the rest is both ephemeral and rather pissed off. I do wonder if Pao's placement at Reddit was a step up - or the equivalent of being sent as the Czar's representative to Siberia.
Graphictruth, I really enjoyed your insight and your style of writing in this reply. Should you ever get bored, I'd happily read your thoughts about how the internet of yesterday compares to today's net - and where and how the better aspects of those times can be found/replicated today.
:) Well, I'm not sure it was better - but it was smaller, more intimate and the rather technical requirements kept some of the idiots out from underfoot. And I think we did well. It was a new thing and it took everyone by surprise. Mostly with she sheer volume of crap it could spew, as Spafford observed, but it turned out that all that stuff was pent up. The internet of today is built on stacks of formfeed filled with ASCII porn. :) And looking back, everything is so much better for that getting out in the open. Our collective unconsciousness was spewed onto our screens and - well, it wasn't nearly as dark as we had all feared. And it brings the possibility of tyranny of course - but it also brought us notice that we had been living under various more or less gentle tyrannies for many years. It was not entirely pleasant to learn these things - but it's better that we know.
I ran a Fidonet node for a few years. Whee. Pretty much. Couldn't have said it better myself.As another ancient old thing - I was on Fidonet and Citanet, and I used to bangpath my way to anon.penet.fi - I agree in general, but I'm not sure I agree with you about the unusually caustic nature of Reddit. It reminds me very much of parts of the old Alt hierarchy; a fetid swamp of scum and villainy.
So if the /b/tards don't get you, the concern trolls will. And if you become the focus of media attention - if you become fashionable - the signal-to-noise ratio becomes untenable. After a few decades of seeing places come and go, due to various combinations of toxic communities, ham-fisted community management and inept attempts to monetize, it's likely reddit's turn.
>I ran a Fidonet node for a few years. Whee. Good old Fight-o-Net! I was a Citanet sysop for a while. Strangely, both still exist. I can't say I quite understand why, but they do.