Sports Bars and Biker Gangs – The Death of Reddit

http://www.chuqui.com/2015/07/the-death-of-reddit/?1=1

by ed • 11 years ago

60 59 11 years ago

dlandis• 11 years ago

But seriously, Reddit may be functional, but it’s dead.

But seriously, it really isn't dead. And the whole post seems overly dramatic actually. Not to mention that the author starts by describing how he never uses Reddit and doesn't even have an account, but yet evidently thinks he has a very precise understanding of all its problems and clearly has very strong feelings about how they should be addressed. Sounds like a redditor to me!

Mithaldu2• 11 years ago

It's interesting how all these people arguing against Reddit are unaware of the prime principle by which Reddit decides to shut down communities. To reuse his analogy:

Communities are shut down when they don't stay inside their rooms.

There's a term for that, brigading. On 4chan the principle was called "anonymous isn't your army". Generally the people who build such "high amounts of free speech" places don't mind if literally everything is discussed, but they, and over time also the userbase, reacts strongly if sub-groups try to use the power of the crowd amassed to actively and negatively influence other people, be this other sub-groups on the site, places elsewhere on the internet, or even physical places or people.

Edit: He also says "tens of floors", which further demonstrates the ignorance, since Reddit would be better described as thousands of floors. ( 676,951 sub-reddits according to redditmetrics. )

tzs• 11 years ago

Edit: He also says "tens of floors", which further demonstrates the ignorance, since Reddit would be better described as thousands of floors. ( 676,951 sub-reddits according to redditmetrics. )

It's an analogy between Reddit and a big community center building with different groups having rooms in the building. The point is the relationship between the groups in the above ground rooms, and the groups that are hidden away in basement rooms. The number of floors is completely irrelevant to the validity of the analogy as long as it is enough to qualify as a big community center by community center standards. Tens of floors is sufficient.

If he had said tens of thousands of floors so that the number of rooms would have more matched the number of sub-reddits, there would be people complaining that no building has tens of thousands of floors.

Mithaldu2• 11 years ago

It's relevant because the cost and responsibility of closely managing something of "community center" size is wildly different from something of "arcology" size. Also see problems faced by: Youtube, almost every ISP ever.

brownbat2• 11 years ago

Imagine the article rewritten as "The Death of the Internet."

All the premises are the same, and largely true: there's no strong central control, it's basically run by volunteers who have conflicting interests, and there's some abhorrent stuff out there.

The conclusion, that it's a failed experiment, doesn't seem to follow.

Reddit may die someday. Could happen, aggregators die, but I don't think a scandal means it's at death's door.

Even though I disagree with the conclusion, especially its forcefulness, the article has a fantastic collection of links. The links would be a great first place to catch the journalistic zeitgeist.

smacktoward• 11 years ago

Except that nobody's trying to operate "The Internet, Inc.", a centralized, for-profit business encompassing the whole of the network. That's what Reddit-the-company has been trying to do with Reddit-the-community, and it doesn't work very well.

brownbat2• 11 years ago

Fair. And to that point, Digg's making money and Youtube is struggling.

Maybe all our success stories need another look...

[1] http://blog.digg.com/post/109580738071/digg-by-the-numbers-2... (well, "consistent revenue"... couldn't find precise financials since 2008 or so)

[2] http://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-fo...

TD-Linux• 11 years ago

If you aren't a Reddit user, how can you judge what is causing the death of Reddit? It's your personal anecdote of why you don't use Reddit, but clearly there is an enormous userbase that was using Reddit despite the low amount of global moderation.

MBCook4• 11 years ago

As a longtime Reddit user, this post struck a real chord with me. Horrible crap on Reddit does exist, and sexist/racist/hateful/uncalled-for-jackassery comments seem to be more and more common in the defaults and other places where the mods don't keep REALLY tight control.

It is getting, slowly, worse. Not because of the number of people but the standards of behavior they keep pushing the line on without pushback.

I think the biker bar analogy is fantastic. Even when the bikers stay in their corner their large number is getting scarier and more creepy.

_delirium• 11 years ago

I've seen this in the European-focused subreddits lately. Places like /r/europe are usually pretty "normal" discussion boards considering that their demographics are English-speaking, internet-using young people of those regions. But periodically the comments (and comment scores) end up very uncharacteristic in a thread or sub-thread, especially if it has to do with immigration, Islam, or nationalism. Not just in the sense that some people have conservative or nativist views on those subjects, but that suddenly the discussion seems to be totally dominated by extreme versions of those views, anything vaguely liberal said about the subject is downvoted to infinity, etc. And the reason in that case if you dig around usually turns out to be that someone in a far-right/xenophobic subreddit linked there and caused an influx of people with those views.

ameister142• 11 years ago

I haven't noticed it getting worse; I have noticed people complaining about it more, though. The up-vote down-vote system turns everything into an echo chamber anyway, so whatever racist or objectionable comment you see will probably go away unless the majority agrees with it.

dasil0033• 11 years ago

There are certainly a lot of accurate observations in here, but the entire lens is mis-focused. Consider:

Don’t try to fix it. It’s broken. It can’t be fixed. Instead, it’s time to decide what the service you want is, and build that service out of the ashes of the failure of this Reddit.

First of all, this is garbage advice, an absolute fool's errand. The fact that you are ostensibly in control of Reddit as its management team does not mean that you have any chance in hell of parlaying that into a new community of any sort. A random 18-year-old in his dorm room has just as much chance of creating the next legitimate online community as Reddit management does.

Reddit is what it is. For all its warts, it's a tremendously successful community that evolved in a very particular way. Just because you're paying to keep the lights on doesn't mean you can control the nature of the community. Any attempts to overtly reshape Reddit into something that warms the heart of an investor is doomed to failure because it runs against the fundamental nature of Reddit, and thus can have no effect but to shed users—which of course is Reddit's only asset.

This is no doubt upsetting to shareholders, some elements of management, journalists, social activists and all manner of Reddit observers, but it's just the way online communities work. You can build tools and policies to nudge things this way or that a bit, but fundamentally you do not control it. For all self-stated credentials of the author, I would expect him to recognize this fact a bit more, and pile on his value judgements declaring "failure" a bit less.

78666cdc4• 11 years ago

While I agree with everything you said after the quote you cited, I disagree with the suggestion that there are really any accurate observations in this article.

The entire "sports bar and biker gang" premise is entirely flawed. The picture painted is that of some perfect place which gets bastardized and taken over by some unsavory group of people who are unsavory even if only because of their memborship in said group.

How does it make any sense to allegorize such a gigantic online community as "a good place that got stormed by shitty users"? Yes, there are definitely Reddit users that get off on spending their free time harassing others. However, they are not many, and, for every handful there are, there are 100x more content creators, blog authors submitting content, people campaigning for charities, and so on.

If the presence of a few foul people are enough to make you vacate an entire massive community and feel as though you cannot participate, then I might suggest that you grow up a bit, learn that there is literally no public place in the world that is all rainbows and puppies, and check whether you are being overly sensitive.

Aside from that, the author's view on how any of this works is obviously and completely incorrect. The suggestion of "taking what's there" and "moving it somewhere else where the bad people won't go" belies the incredibly and simplistic worldview behind this article - you cannot pick and and move a community of people to another place, you cannot raise a big banner that says "I don't like it here!" and bring all of your well-established users to another place. Your users do not take such a (frankly, whiny) take on the world. They appreciate the platform, what's been there, and so on.

As for bemoaning why the biggest subreddits aren't controlled by the admin? In the end this is perhaps the single defining comment in this article. "Why, oh why don't the admins exert draconion control over their users so that I don't have to hear and come across things I disagree with?!" Because that's not how communities work, because that's not how open discussion works, because that's now how any of this works at all.

Frankly, I find the author's mindset absolutely infuriating. Why is this incredibly naive, oversensitive, and whiny post getting any attention at all? Anyone that has been around online communities (and, frankly, life after college) for longer than a year can easily recognize this sort of bullshit.

Edit: To pre-empt some responses, no, I am not standing up and saying that harassing users should be left alone because of freedom of speech. There is obviously a limit - active and purposeful harm should be prevented as much as reasonably possible if one wants to maintain a large community with a positive public image. However, the "biker gang moving into my space" analogy is exactly the sort of analogy I would expect from the sort of person that is ready to cry victim at the slightest provocation - and those sorts of people, in fact, are exactly the ones that have had the most damage on online communities in the past few years.

Furthermore, am I the only one so far to comment on the fact that the "biker gang" image the author evokes is inherently judgmental and simple-minded? The hypocrisy in just that one analogy is astounding. Shame on this author and his/her cognitive dissonance, victim complex, and naivety.

banachtarski• 11 years ago

Exactly. The op doesn't understand reddit.

I read a lot of specific reddits (sub-communities) like /r/programming, /r/cpp, /r/math, etc. Honestly? I'm completely unaffected by the "biker gangs" he's rambling about.

KVFinn2• 11 years ago

If the presence of a few foul people are enough to make you vacate an entire massive community and feel as though you cannot participate, then I might suggest that you grow up a bit, learn that there is literally no public place in the world that is all rainbows and puppies, and check whether you are being overly sensitive.

Some of the best communities (/AskHistorians and /AskScience) are already struggling with this. A mod from /AskHistorians:

https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3cxedn/i_am_steve_huff...

To illustrate, without in any way intending to boast, it is clear that a number of current and past staff members at Reddit really enjoy AskHistorians. This has been made publicly clear a number of times. But the reality of Reddit is that AskHistorians was created by going against the grain, by struggling against Reddit's mechanisms rather than being organically created by them, and by quite frankly disregarding a number of statements about Reddit's underlying philosophy made by admins and CEOs alike. That mostly involves deleting an enormous quantity of comments, with the express purpose that they are not seen any more, that they are vanished into the aether.
In addition, reddit's increasingly poor reputation on the internet might, for some people, be because of what they perceive as censorship. But in my experience, the majority of that poor reputation is garnered from the kind of communities that Reddit harbours, which have grown larger and increasingly restive. And so long as they're there and doing their thing we have to share a website with them. We have to share a website with communities that have racist slurs in their name, that spew raw bigotry like it's water for all the farms of China. A lot of our flaired users on AskHistorians are professionals in their fields, and at times it is pretty hard to keep convincing them to stay on a website like this. Most of that convincing consists of how much stuff we are able to keep out of our community. I don't see how that is remotely tenable if we're no longer able to actually leave seas of [deleted]

jschwartzi2• 11 years ago

I think the biker gang label is appropriate. I mean, any time you have a small group in a community who will show up and destroy or dominate the entire conversation about their negative behavior, how is that different from 15 guys in leather showing up and beating you senseless for suggesting that they go deal meth elsewhere? And if you see that happen repeatedly at a bar you frequent, would you continue drinking there?

MBCook4• 11 years ago

and thus can have no effect but to shed users—which of course is Reddit's only asset

Yor're assuming that all users are equal and the important thing is raw eyeballs.

There are users and behavior that are driving people away. The whole 'we support FPH' and sexist comments about Pao in every story about her is turning people off.

Further more, if Reddit is an advertising supported company they're going to have a big problem selling ads against /r/coontown. It doesn't matter that's one little corner and you can turn your ads off against it. The story in the news will be 'P&G paid 30m to advertise on a site full of hate speech' and the story will be correct because it DID go to THE SITE not the sub.

And that's going to play really poorly for P&G (chosen as a big brand, don't know if they advertise).

Same thing applies to celebrities doing AMAs. The next time a democratic candidate does an AMA and Fox starts trumpeting the... ahem 'anti-PC'... elements of Reddit to make everyone look bad do you think that candidate will be happy? "They used to host child porn too! It was called /r/jailbait!"

They're getting a reputation that's going to make buying their ad platform untenable for many large advertisers.

dasil0033• 11 years ago

Yor're assuming that all users are equal and the important thing is raw eyeballs.

I really don't get how you are taking that from what I said. Of course I don't think all users are equal or that users and advertisers won't be driven away by bad behavior. It would be ridiculous to suggest otherwise.

My point is that, if management comes in swinging a white sword they will inevitably suffer a net loss. As I said, the community can be nudged in one direction or another—quite significantly given sufficient understanding and guile on the part of management—but you can't declare Reddit "broken" and then "fix" it. Even if you assume Reddit has "failed" (which I don't, but even granting that), the changes you need to make will drive away many more users than it ever attracts, because the "good" potential users are already turned off by Reddit, and the existing users will be alienated. If management comes in with the mentality of needing to "fix" Reddit then they are damned if they do and damned if they don't. Fortunately such axiomatic pessimism in Reddit is unfounded—I get how it is not what a heavy-handed SV elite megalomaniacal MBA wants in his portfolio, but that doesn't mean it can't be a successful business on its own terms.

cxseven4• 11 years ago

It would be cool if Reddit's karma and upvoting worked more like Netflix's DVD recommendations: tailored to each person.

Rather than the surfaced comments being a function of raw upvote count, the upvotes could count for or against you seeing the comment based on whether they came from someone who tends to deliver you read-worthy content. Racists would see all the racist comments they want; others not so much.

This could also decrease the influence of voting brigades and others trying to game the system.

mc322• 11 years ago

With regard to a brand not wanting to get associated with the unsavory elements of society, what is the difference between advertising on reddit which has unsavory subs and advertising on the WSJ. It's not as if all readers of the WSJ are all upstanding citizens. I'm sure most are, but there have to be a few who aren't. Why is association transitive in one medium but not in another. Is it because one is a platform and provides a medium to these elements? But even so, how does that imply these communities "represent" the larger community as well as the management?

Surely we are capable as a soviet of making these distinctions...?

Lazare3• 11 years ago

I don't think that's entirely true.

Reddit's management has a ton of resources that an 18-year-old in his dorm does not. Depending on the choices they make and who is running the team, I'd say Reddit either has a much lower chance (right now), or a much higher chance (if we assume they get a good management team in place), than the hypothetical college student. But the same chance?

Just because you're paying to keep the lights on doesn't mean you can control the nature of the community.

Actually, it does? It doesn't mean you can create whatever you want, but you can certainly destroy the bits you don't like, which is what the advice you're critiquing is suggesting. You say that means you'll shed users, but that's the point of the advice. The analogy the author is using is hiring some really strict bouncers to eject the "bikers". Which will absolutely cause the bar to "shed users" in the short term.

For all self-stated credentials of the author, I would expect him to recognize this fact a bit more, and pile on his value judgements declaring "failure" a bit less.

I don't think you really understood his comments. Fundamentally you're responding to someone saying "Reddit can't be fixed" with "this guy is an idiot; doesn't he understand Reddit can't be fixed?".

leereeves2• 11 years ago

Fundamentally you're responding to someone saying "Reddit can't be fixed" with "this guy is an idiot; doesn't he understand Reddit can't be fixed?".

You're ignoring the part where parent said

it's a tremendously successful community ...

Reddit's built a large community of people who don't mind partying next to the biker bar. An anti-authoritarian community that wants free speech, is not politically correct, and isn't advertiser friendly.

It may not be an easy community to profit from, but does it need to be "fixed"?

maxerickson• 11 years ago

I think reddit overall is more comparable to a festival. There are groups and communities there interacting with each other and within themselves, but there is not all that much that they all have in common that they don't also have in common with their neighbor who isn't sure about computers being good for anything.

I don't intend that to be hair splitting about words, I think that attempts to address reddit users as a single community are a fools errand.

hiou• 11 years ago

Reddit isn't a single community site. Its what ning thought it could be.

smaili• 11 years ago

Starting to get tired of all these people complaining about Reddit, and yet when I put it out there to build something better I barely get any responses.

byerley• 11 years ago

It's hard to not view this as whining about the failed gentrification of Reddit (especially with the biker bar analogy).

I'm struggling to think of any successful social network sites that are heavy-handed with moderation. Certainly twitter, facebook, ect. get the same accusations of harboring "unethical" groups.

hoopd• 11 years ago

Having somebody throwing chairs will ruin your dinner party, so is the person who's only going to look for an excuse to police how others speak.

wanderer2323• 11 years ago

The author is scared by the reddit 'basement' and he wants us to think that his position is in such a majority that reddit is doomed. Sorry, Chuq Von Rospach, that's just false-consensus effect talking.

nraynaud• 11 years ago

I am a bit skeptical, if maximizing shareholder value at any cost is stupid, then aligning the mods with money seems a bit stupid too.

EarlPoncho• 11 years ago

reddit is dead

31st most visited website. i hope to be this dead one day

RALaBarge• 11 years ago

I think the reports of Reddit's death is greatly exaggerated. The death certificate isn't usually granted until you produce a dead body, and it seems that Reddit, good and bad, is still very much alive.

callil• 11 years ago

Tons of problems yes, but in 6 months this will be all but forgotten. It will become a part of internet lore. Reddit is not dead, reddit will live on and evolve slowly as its community changes and adapts.

fab13n2• 11 years ago

The fixing strategy somehow reminds me how Digg has been "fixed", not long before the user base massively migrated to Reddit.

whoisthemachine• 11 years ago

Perhaps the problem is that a company is trying to monetize a fully democratic social network? A network like this deserves to be open-source and non-profit, that's the only way the organization that runs the forum can reasonably hope to remain appearing as a neutral actor in the forum. Also, they do need some self-governance rules, as only to remove liability (which they do [1]).

[1] https://www.reddit.com/rules/

theodorewiles• 11 years ago

I think the real threat is the investors demanding outsize returns. I have read elsewhere that Pao might have been a sacrificial lamb - make some changes, get fired, changes stay in place. I'm sure that the board has significant changes around monetization in mind.

The mods should move everything to a non-profit org. The site is open-source already, and you could even use their Oauth to port user accounts over directly. My understanding is that they are just breaking even, which sounds bad for a for-profit but sounds great for a not-for-profit, especially if your executive director is getting CEO level pay.

Now, someone else will spend the time implementing my fantastic idea for me, right? /s

michaelwww• 11 years ago

"there comes a time with communities that go toxic where the only real answer is to take them out behind the barn and Old Yeller them. That time has come for Reddit."

I've been on Reddit since near the beginning and still enjoy the site everyday. We regulars keep pointing out the great subreddits that exist, so I don't need to do that here. Unlike Chuq, I don't feel guilt by association because there are also terrible subreddits. I'm not one to condemn all of 4chan because of 4chan/b/, but I can understand those who think that way.

What I wanted to say is that Reddit has not changed, society has. If anything Reddit has improved by banning subreddits like jailbait and fatpeoplehate. The trend on Reddit is less toxicity, not more as Chuq implies.

America has been having a conversation the last few years about rape culture, sexual harrasement of women, micro-aggressions, exclusionary speech, gender fluidity, sexual objectification of women in video games, sexting, celebrity nudes, and so on. This new awareness has been applied to Reddit recently starting with 'the fappening' and continuing with gamergate. I think these conversations are worth having and I like some of the change as a result, but it's not fair to Reddit to say it is going downhill. We're just applying a new set of standards to it.

Could a site like Reddit or 4chan even become succesful today with all the new rules in place, or would they kill it in the crib? I'm not sure.

Sports Bars and Biker Gangs – The Death of Reddit

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