Kate Conger has been writing snide pieces on Reddit for a while now, so take this as a biased article. But this may also explain why the /r/space and /r/astronomy forums are dead.
That article is horrible. It's like back office gossip with all the names replaced with "sources". That it was written on anything more than toilet paper or someone's personal journal is amazing to me. As lurid gossip, it kept my attention. But it wasn't very illuminating. There's no substantiation for pretty much anything. The whole article is incredibly vague. It's difficult to tell which employees were laid off and which left voluntarily. The employees leaving voluntarily could have left for any number of reasons. But she lumped them all together when she claimed that there's an atmosphere of being with an abusive boyfriend, which was claimed by one anonymous source. If the atmosphere was really that bad, it should have been possible to find ex-employees who were claiming the same thing but were now in better jobs. If she had been able to show that, it would have been a more credible article. The number of visitors by month at the end of the article didn't really say much. It was all just written in a way that implied negativity, even when the numbers were trending positive.
I don't disagree with most of what you're saying but I would really caution against trashing a former employer in an article that will be easily searchable so I could understand why even ex-employees would avoid attaching a name to that. No potential new employer will like finding that and having a new job at the time of the article doesn't mean they won't be searching again some day soon.
Because employees and ex-employees are unlikely to speak out against their employers, when they do, an article is noteworthy. That's the reason this article is not noteworthy. When an article has enough substantiation with names, dates and quotes, management of any company is forced to respond. Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon was forced to respond with this response in August 2015 when an article with facts, names, dates and pictures of ex-employees appeared that claimed that workers at Amazon are overworked. Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace Nothing in this article requires a response by Reddit because the claims are not backed by anything substantial.
Isn't the core problem with Reddit that the company "Reddit" is completely divorced from the thing that is Reddit? They all put on their suits and go to work under the Reddit logo, with a pretty receptionist answering a constantly ringing phone, and people talking in hushed whispers in the echoing marble foyer... ... while the actually community of Reddit, it is more like the back lot at Glastonbury, with deeply rutted and muddy tracks instead of paved roads, most of the people are covered in their own shit and mud and frying ballz on a cocktail of adderall and molly and rockstars, while sleeping in wet tents for 30 minutes a night, and trying desperately to get a look at titties or grope any girl who may be passing by, all while sneering at the Juggalos on the other side of the fence, who are identical except for the facepaint. This is the central problem of "Reddit" and trying to take a community-powered web site into the business world. It only makes sense in some sort of Phil Spector Studio 54 coke-addled 1970's version of the world where Lemmy is still a roadie and Joan Jett and her friends are handed around like party favors. Reddit is not, and will never be a legitimate business. It's too much of a shithole for that. RIP r/astronomy.
I posted this because I did not have words to my thoughts and hoped that it would spark a conversation to help me put the thoughts and words together. It did; goobster fucking nailed it. There are two reddits: the community that posts, and the admins. Notice what is really telling about all the reddit articles of late? No tech stuff. No articles on how they are improving the server responses, or better mod tools or anything that relates to the bare technology of the platform. it's all crap like this. If I was a conspiracy guy I'd say they are intentionally trying to kill the site because they hate the user base. The explanation I was looking for is that reddit is now tainted from the goon invasions, the 4chan invasions, the fatpeoplehate and jailbait debacles etc... people who want to have neat conversations are not advertising their reddit presence like they did 5-6 years ago, if they ever did. And instead of focusing on modding tools that have been promised for years and other ways of helping the volunteers who help curate the content that generates eyeballs they rolled out an image hosting site, native ads, IAMA monetization and increased user tracking. This exact same thing happened to Digg. The news stopped being about the site and instead became about the people running it, then the place tanked. Reddit is too big to tank like Digg did, and there is a much younger user base that is willing to put up with a lot more than guys like me. It's like watching a dumpster fire where the dumpster is filled with all your mementos and photo albums.
Invite the /r/space and /r/astronomy folks to Hubski. They'd find a safe haven here. Hell, invite all the smart and thoughtful redditors over.
The thing is that a lot of the people who made those communities got sick of the racism and invasions and said "fuck it." There are a few astronomy forums out there, and I've not seen them under their reddit names. I'm wondering if more of the people in my age range took a step back and said to themselves "I'm too old for this nonsense, life is too short, and I have real life hobbies that I can focus my time on." AstroMike is gone, Bubbleweed no longer posts to reddit, the guys who got me into webcam astrophotography all gone. I'd love it to tears if I could be a part of the building of a good, decent, space community here.
I'd love it to tears if I could be a part of the building of a good, decent, space community here.
"If you will it, it is no dream."
Isn't the core problem with Reddit that the company "Reddit" is completely divorced from the thing that is Reddit? They all put on their suits and go to work under the Reddit logo, with a pretty receptionist answering a constantly ringing phone, and people talking in hushed whispers in the echoing marble foyer... ... while the actual community of Reddit, it is more like the back lot at Glastonbury, with deeply rutted and muddy tracks instead of paved roads, most of the people are covered in their own shit and mud and frying ballz on a cocktail of adderall and molly and rockstars, while sleeping in wet tents for 30 minutes a night, and trying desperately to get a look at titties or grope any girl who may be passing by, all while sneering at the Juggalos on the other side of the fence, who are identical except for the facepaint. This is the central problem of "Reddit" and trying to take a community-powered web site into the business world. It only makes sense in some sort of Phil Spector Studio 54 coke-addled 1970's version of the world where Lemmy is still a roadie and Joan Jett and her friends are handed around like party favors. Reddit is not, and will never be a legitimate business. It's too much of a shithole for that. RIP r/astronomy.
I am now under the operating mindset that no Web 2.0 company that depends on unpaid moderators can ever be a business. facebook works by flat out collecting every scrap of data about you it can and selling it to every advertiser and swindler with a checkbook. Then it locks in the user eyeballs and feeds them the content that will keep them fat happy and too lazy to go elsewhere. fucking nailed it, man. Thanks. That is what I was trying to put into type when I shared this last night. Ohanian does not want to run reddit anymore but, IMO he is stuck there. When he left a while back nobody cared that he existed; nobody will really pay to hear 'that guy who is no longer in charge of reddit' on the speaking tour. I made my account right about when comments on articles were enabled, but I had been lurking for a while as a lot of the Fark headlines came from Reddit. The SOPA fight was the best thing to come out of the whole experience, but the community there is no longer worth weeding through to get to the interesting bits.Reddit is not, and will never be a legitimate business. It's too much of a shithole for that.
Isn't the core problem with Reddit that the company "Reddit" is completely divorced from the thing that is Reddit?
And it's super-effective. We pay Facebook $1 a day and fully 80% of our links are from Facebook, 40% paid, 50% organic. We pay Yelp $5 per click and they've gained us three. Facebook effectively said "fuck your internet, we're doing this thing instead" and it totally worked.facebook works by flat out collecting every scrap of data about you it can and selling it to every advertiser and swindler with a checkbook. Then it locks in the user eyeballs and feeds them the content that will keep them fat happy and too lazy to go elsewhere.
I actually said this in my deleted comment to this article: But I felt like it was too ranty so I deleted it. Personally, I think reddit's death is because of shit like /r/news, or the constant abuses of moderators and the constant lack of attempts by admins to rein in their controls by some manner to reduce undue censorship. Users are leaving to sites that they don't have some all-powerful person over their heads that can remove them from the space in which all or speaking, or where a small group of squatters can kill a community of a hundred thousand. As well, many people seek a "smaller" or more personal experience with their content. This is one of such sites, voat is another.
That executive director failed because he thought he was smarter than the website, thought he knew better, thought reddit's userbase belonged to him.
The internet is full of amazing ideas that were ruined by the people running the company, trying to cash out in poor ways or user communities that are simply rotten. For about three years I only used Reddit for my internet needs. It took over from Fark, 4chan, everything. Then one day I realized that I no longer wanted to be in with the new crowd and fucked-off the internet as a whole for about a year and a half. Now, I only got on Hubski, spend about 30-40 minutes on news sites, and either read or play games and don't care about social media any more. The mods are not employees, they are users. If you start to treat them like employees, well, bad things. If you get the toxic SA Goons in charge of your subreddit, you drive away the people who made that community work. If you treat your area like a 4chan message board you attract the edgelords and push out the people who just want to talk and shoot the bull. Snapzu has the potential to be interesting but it is a circlejerk of circlejerks wrapped up in groupthink. It needs a big invasion of new blood to add content and character to the place. Voat, back when it was Whoaverse, had the potential to be a right-wing leaning Reddit clone until the FPH and coontown people/bigots/racists took over and make the place something that a guy like me does not want to be associated with. As has been said many times before I think Hubski, for now, can resist the pitfalls of the other places. This is a place that is not going to just aggregate the Imgur front page and offer comments; one of the reasons Reddit's traffic is falling is people just brows Imgur now. I wish I had the mental ability to work this all out, but I don't. I think that as long as Hubski allows the filtering it currently does and also does not implement a "downvote" system we can make this place work. And ranty is good. It helps me get the crap out of my head and helps me organize what I am saying versus what I wish to communicate.Personally, I think reddit's death is because of shit like /r/news, or the constant abuses of moderators and the constant lack of attempts by admins to rein in their controls by some manner to reduce undue censorship.
No, the core problem is the Glastonbury Fryers are all there has ever been, and every now and then they pull someone aside and say "here's minimum wage, how'd you like to be responsible for this travesty?" Anyone who has ever volunteered at a festival can guess how that works. Alexis and Steve are die-hard libertarians. They firmly believe that if you structure it properly it will run itself... and if what's there isn't working, then it hasn't adapted to the structure properly. Reddit reflects the culture it can afford, which is a poorly-run volunteer-heavy staff-light cacophony of unbridled IdSpeak. Back when it had 100th as many people you could still hear occasional brilliance but it's long since been drowned out by the chavs.
"What is honoured in a country will be cultivated there". I would argue that any large website, or website with a culture, is functionally analogous to a country in Plato's sense of the word. What does reddit honour? It honours "Gotcha" journalism (even of itself), it honours celebrity, it honours bite-sized knowledge. It honours theft of intellectual and artistic property. And it honours most of all the idea that they deserve that content for free. I can see why they have the culture they have - they've hoed the rows themselves, and their crop has come to fruition.
I imagine it's how reddit hates self-promotion, but loves people finding new content. You end up with, in general, people only liking something if the original creator didn't post it. That can then create an incentive to find and maybe even steal things across the internet. The other way I could see it is the much more generalized internet idea that piracy is ok.
keopi has the core of it. Think of it this way - how much do you think the photographers of the photos on /r/gentlemanboners are getting paid for those imgur links? The answer is, of course, a big fat goose egg. Every picture on the internet was taken by someone. When it comes to high quality photos, odds are that the person who took that photo makes a living at it (or uses it as supplementary income). If you're reposting that picture without permission, you are - under the law - using their intellectual property without permission, which is illegal in most western societies. This is one of the reasons that digital content is so undervalued in comparison to physical content - It's so easily replicable at an identical quality that it makes it almost valueless. And of course, we can't rely on people to not replicate, because people want pretty stuff, but don't want to play for it. We're like the people of Mozart's Vienna - "Generous with their praise, but not with their wallets"
Thanks for elaborating on that. I never thought of it this way, I must admit. It's so easy and simple to share digital stuff! I imagine this is among the main reasons people do so quite as eagerly, Reddit or not Reddit. Which isn't to say that Reddit has it as well as the rest of the 'Net: no, it's much worse on Reddit. What I don't think, still, is that Reddit despises original content in any way. Sure, sharing what you've found is fun, but there's plenty of OC to go around, as my experience tells me. /r/dota2, for example, has plenty OC on its main page every day, as silly or plain stupid as said content may be.
Hotlinking has been considered rude since forever, mirroring to imgur is, or at least was initially, about being polite and not giving some random site the hug of death when it can easily be avoided. Mozart was talking about patronage, not rent seeking via artificial scarcity. All the overfunded indiegogo/paetron projects say patronage can work again without beating the audience into submission with the law. That said, I would love to see every record executive and movie producer selling pencils on street corners. I have no sympathy for the industries that gave us DRM and the DMCA. May they die, and may they take the advertisers with them.
so far as I can tell, Mozart never said it. I was quoting my music history teacher (who, admittedly, may have been paraphrasing from some of Mozart's private correspondance, or a Mozart scholar). Also, Mozart was unique in that he was one of the first composers to strike out on his own and NOT have a single specific patron. Unlike Haydn or J.C. Bach - both of whom taught him - he was not a servant of a court. He had private patrons, yes, but they're more comparable to Patreon than they are to other actual Patrons of the time. For example, Mozart owned his music - the Esterhazy estate owned (and still does own) Haydn's music. I understand you're talking about broader reach of media companies, but I'm mostly talking about professionals in the industry, not companies. There is no "Big Nature Photography" like there is "Big Record Companies" - Unless you count National Geographic, maybe? Getty Images, I guess, but they're usually more about photos of people. we hotlink here all the time. Granted, we are MUCH smaller than reddit. However, this is not even really the point, the point is that often the people posting won't even cite the artist - they're not even giving due credit.Mozart was talking about patronage, not rent seeking via artificial scarcity.
I have no sympathy for the industries that gave us DRM and the DMCA.
Hotlinking has been considered rude since forever,
Yeah, you caught me, I just assumed you were referring to something Mozart said. But "give Mozart some cash so he can do his thing" is a very different thing than "let Mozart sue anyone who doesn't give him cash before listening to his music into oblivion." The former is great and good; I buy a lot of music because I have the money and want to throw a tip in the jar, and pretending I'm buying a product is the only means available to do it. That latter is not so good; fuck that imaginary Mozart, he's not worth it.
What is honoured in a culture will be cultivated there - even, as you say, a lack of cultivation.The bottom line is that if you want an herb garden with diversity, you need to keep the mint from taking over. If you want an herb garden that takes care of itself, don't bother planting anything but mint because after a couple years it'll be the only thing left.
Imgur has never been more than Imageshack or Tinypic with the profits sucked out. Now that they're pretending to be a big boy place they're trying to pump the profits back in. One of Reddit's worst mistakes was not buying that thing from MrGrim the day he created it.
Wow, I remember this conversation. This may have been the last thread I followed before I broke down and make my Hubski login in November 2013. I just, on a lark, googled my comments on reddit and looked for my name. I did a grand job of deleting my presence there; the only time my name shows up is in replies, and all of those are astronomy and work related, so all good on that front. My last mention was August 2014. The middle reddit, for me at least, was over. Ran that greasemonkey script to purge my profile and bailed. I care still because I have a sentimental attachment, but I don't contribute or give them page views any more.
I actually used to run an actual circus. All volunteers. One paid person, and the performers got a nightly stipend for each performance. We had 11 performers and about 30 volunteers, total, 9 of which actually did any work. Looking at Reddit through this lens, I am somewhat baffled by how well it actually works! :-)
I think it may be a case where the last CEO or manager attempted to "diversify" the company by adding a branch and "restructuring" and now, with a new CEO without that "diversity" goal, and that branch failing there are a lot of "diverse" people leaving. As well, the article may have been saying that the company is stressful because they are dealing with reddit, and the article claims that reddit as a site is racist/sexist and that the admins trying to prevent it are getting backlash that is making them leave. And/or that this is a problem generally in tech. I don't think anyone was claiming, or trying to claim that women or minorities leave at a higher rate due to not being able to deal with stress. And if they are making that claim they are either incorrect, or those people incapable of dealing with stress should just not be working those jobs rather than trying to change them to make their lives easier at the harm of everyone else.
Tired talking points from subreddits that breed and repeat those points until those commonly going to them can do nothing but repeat those talking points rather than learning and thinking on their own. Anita saying "everything is sexist" was a reference to her past self where she constantly acted like that and lost friends, learning to be a more decent person in the meantime. She was not literally saying "everything is sexist" she was saying that is how she felt after taking her first "womens studies" classes. And they are not claiming everything is oppressive to women and minorities, they are claiming that male dominated areas like tech are, and/or that sites like reddit which DO have a lot of sexism in them have resulted in people leaving reddit. If you want to talk down these people, if you want to appear inteligent and change minds, stop going to places that recycle these points over and over, or at least suppliment them with some sources from places like /r/gamerghazi. Even if you don't agree with them, you should at least take the time to read and understand their views.
And/or that this is a problem generally in tech. This is all just implied in the article which is why you're not stating it outright. The author doesn't really say if this is happening. The author can't really know if this is happening. The leaving of employess and the way she sees the site are written in close proximity as though they're related, but she can't really show that they're related unless they told her why they left. She doesn't have enough quotes from enough people who left to show a trend. Since many of them may not have worked directly on the Reddit website, I can't really see a direct correlation between the atmosphere of the website and the atmosphere of the workplace. The one Linkedin resume I saw didn't show any oversight on the Reddit site on it. It was mostly administrative duties related. (I was a little surprised that the author of the article linked to someone's resume. It seemed a bit invasive to me. But since I clicked on it, I read it.)As well, the article may have been saying that the company is stressful because they are dealing with reddit, and the article claims that reddit as a site is racist/sexist and that the admins trying to prevent it are getting backlash that is making them leave.