The article is terribly condescending towards Reddit's founders and moderators. They have created and grown it to be in the top 10 of US websites. The site is still growing very strongly. Yet they're presented as an immature bunch who have no idea what they're doing and need "adult" supervision, e.g.
> Those cats can't run anything
> in retrospect, one flaw with [Condé Nast]’s hands-off approach was an assumption that Reddit’s founders would know when and how to ask for help. [...] Looking back [...] more hand-holding would have been a good idea.
Articles like this are a barely veiled attempt to put pressure on Condé Nast and the other owners - Reddit needs to be instilled with a corporate, PR-oriented mentality ASAP. Its spirit of "open discourse and peer-to-peer learning" is incomprehensible to corporate America. On the other hand, the impressive user base seems ripe for more aggressive monetization. So the old deal has become inconvenient:
> During the courtship of Reddit [...] the company promised that if the deal went through, it would leave the founders alone to run the site with minimal interference
> The article is terribly condescending towards Reddit's founders and moderators.
Quibbling point, but I found the article fairly flattering toward moderators. And as in the article, it's moderators who're often the quickest to call the admins out for the burden their inaction places on us. A lot of what reddit is now has been accomplished by moderators in spite of that burden.
A well-managed site wouldn't grow on the Internet. Look at Tumblr, Reddit, 4chan, they became some of the biggest communities on the internet precisely because they were "everything goes", whereas Something Awful or Metafilter fell into obscurity (and SA became big in the first place when it was less restrictive). The less you "manage", the more likely your site will end up in Alexa top 100.
What happened to Something Awful? My friend was really into that site and tried to get me to join but I ended up gravitating towards Reddit in the end(around 2010/11)
The core SA audience at its height are in their 30s now, and the internet has changed.
The people who used to deliver content solely on SA for the audience there now have global reach through other platforms. FYAD and FYAD-lite alumni are behind most of weird twitter, they run large communities on Facebook and Tumblr, and some of them even write for the Guardian and Jacobin among others. Youtube replaced SA-based LPs just as surely as it replaced YTMND.
Meanwhile, the administration policies have been as consistently outdated as the forum software, driving dedicated communities to offsite forums and casual information-seekers to the greater resources of Reddit.
Among other stuff, Let's Plays (basically an early version of what guys like TotalBiscuit or PewDiePie do on YouTube now) started on SA and got really popular across the Internet, leading to a huge influx of very different users that completely changed the character of the site.
You named three sites. The top 10 is Google, Facebook, Amazon, Youtube, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Ebay, Craigslist, Twitter, and Reddit. I would call three of those (Craigslist, Wikipedia, and Reddit) "unmanaged," although that's a stretch. That's hardly "more likely" than the 7 "managed" sites.
Leaving aside the sites that are not communities, you have Youtube (got big because of lenient enforcement of media copyrights), Craigslist (got big because it allowed all kind of stuff, up to and including prostitution), Twitter (people complain about Twitter lack of management on HN weekly, and it never turned profits). The only exception from the rule is Facebook. Zuck's running a tight ship over there and it did beat "unmanaged" Myspace.
Reddit is pretty much a case study of upbringing without effective punishment. In real life kids behave because they have skin in the game—if they misbehave, they are not allowed ice cream. On the contrary, if you are banned from reddit, you can simply reset your browser and create a new account.
I doubt you can fix reddit with a smarter design, because that won’t change the troublemakers. To fix reddit, you would possibly have to profoundly change the way our civilization socializes the young, remove inequality and provide more psychological support. Or you would have to build a better reputation system and use that for sorting, but that’s likely going to be incompatible with anonymity and it won’t be as fun.
Reddit has this strange power inversion dynamic where the users think they are entitled to run the site. It's a complete illusion they have for themselves to feel more special. Reddit is a billion dollar company and unless you are in corporate management, you have no say. You can have opinions and attempt to have influence, but you have no flat out rights unless you are a decision maker at the corporation.
Reddit is actually 5 things: the software platform, a global hosted instance of the software platform, engineering to improve the software platform, operations to maintain the global hosted software platform, and managament/moderation/"admin"/peopleing of the global hosted instance of the software platform.
"prommie" users of Reddit think, because they use the global hosted instance of the software platform, they have skin in the game for all other issues as well. If that is actually true, you aren't a "company," you're a weird democratic-socialist commune. Companies must make difficult and annoying and sometimes flat out wrong decisions in order to survive, and you can't be answerable to a million mostly anonymous keyboard jockeys who feel no repercussions.
There are three distinct groups who all have power: owners, moderators, users. (We saw the power of moderators when the blacked out the site in protest.) Any of the three, if they unite, can end the site.
I've seen all sorts of communities go through the death spams where the owners get annoyed at all the users and wish they would disappear because it would make their job easier. I saw 'pg going in that direction here at HN, complaining what a bother the users were, but he sensibly saw HN as a loss-leader for YC and hired 'dang to be a professional moderator. So the owners and moderators are on the same page.
But most places can't afford professional moderation, and so the moderators have power, and that dynamic can lead to the users feeling (rightly or wrongly) as if they are being abused.
But most places can't afford professional moderation
When you see Reddit employees driving around in their own Teslas, the "can't afford" point seems quite moot. (not that I'm bitter—I'm happy for you—but I'm less happy for me as a result. Brains are awful.)
The weird Reddit dynamic is volunteers have full control and the volunteers aren't courted by the site very much. All moderators of subreddits with more than X thousand subscribers should have monthly conference calls with the core Reddit moderation team to keep everybody on the same page, to address issues before they arise, and to give the moderators more of a feeling of being part of the whole. Also, pay them various amounts from token thanks payments to some multiplier of minimum wage (based on size of community? size of active community? size of active community over the past 30 days? can't make it too gamifyable).
It's a management problem. We have books and courses that teach management. We don't have to re-create the history of humanity every time we have a new problem just because "computers."
As far as thousands of moderators, you just make rings: ring 0 = Reddit Corporate employees; ring 1 = moderators of high-value subreddits (paid, maybe not full time, but compensated); ring 2 = moderators can elect sub-moderators for helping (maybe paid, maybe an on-boarding process for ring 1); ring 3 = community moderators (no pay, but trusted with simple decisions); ring 4 = on boarding for ring 3; ring 5 = unprivileged users.
> You can have opinions and attempt to have influence, but you have no flat out rights unless you are a decision maker at the corporation.
That simply isn't true, as evidenced by Digg. The users, as a whole, are the one thing of value Reddit has and Reddit inc. has very little control over them.
The users can get a new site easier than reddit can get new users. As long as the majority of users are happy, admins have the most power. But scare off enough and it snow balls into another Digg.
Reddit is a zero dollar company without users. The software platform is value-less and easy to recreate. Reddit pays for hosting, and if your business model is "we pay for hosting," your business is fragile.
Upbrining without punishment definitely is definitely possible and practiced semi widely (google around). Punishment is a pretty bad way to address misbehaviour.
You are confusing explicit and implicit punishment: the world "punishes" me for doing risky physical things in a way a video game doesn't; I can jump off a building and "die" in a video game, and potentially lose nothing. There are effectively no ramifications of any form on reddit for being an asshole or a bully or a troll: except in some isolated corner cases, for actual users (as opposed to people using reddit as a brand outlet, such as a developer of a popular video game) the value of a reddit account is effectively zero... people are unlikely to recognize it, if thy do people are unlikely to have read many of your comments, and you can always make a new one that is nearly impossible to ban. This effectively destroys the normal mechanisms we have as humans to keep people from being horrible, and reddit fails to replace with mechanisms that matter in the same way.
Yeah, says everyone except every reputable psychologist ever, and any parent who hasn't raised an out of control little monster of a child.
Negative reinforcement works better than any other form of reinforcement, except when paired with positive reinforcement for desired behaviors, just like innumerable studies and common goddamned sense tell you.
The terminology is a bit weird: Positive vs. negative means presenting a stimulus vs. removing it. Reinforcement means increasing the frequency of a reaction and punishment means decreasing it. You have to logically conclude, whether the presented or removed stimulus is nice or unpleasant. Here is an overview:
positive reinforcement: presenting nice stimulus to increase frequency of behavior
negative reinforcement: removing unpleasant stimulus to increase frequency of behavior
positive punishment: presenting unpleasant stimulus to decrease frequency of behavior
negative punishment: removing nice stimulus to decrease frequency of behavior
The great confusion stems from the fact that in common English language, with punishment we mean both increasing good behavior and reducing bad behavior, whilst in classical conditioning terms, punishment always refers to reducing the frequency of a certain behavior.
My first thought was that your comment was a little out there, but then I realized that I'm not that big on punishment with my own kids. I just let life punish them and stand by to assist them if they're in over their heads as well as to advise them on how to avoid future pitfalls.
Punishment that I would inflict would be fairly orthogonal to the real hazards that they'll face in life, so I haven't seen much point in it. I guess I'm more of a hippie than I thought. ;)
My parents called them consequences - the result I would experience was always tied to my actions in a manner that reflected what I would face in the real world as much as possible. I think this is a pretty good approach generally as it helped teach me the cause and effect of my actions at an early age.
I was trying to keep things in the most general terms. A problem is certainly that you can hardly talk to the mob (I’ve tried that in some cases of cyberbullying, racism etc. on Reddit). You simply get downvoted and your comment gets buried.
It seems that there too few feedback loops in the Reddit community, possibly because it’s so easy to be ignorant online, and the popular ones are also of pretty low quality (SRS, subredditdrama, …). Those who can provide high quality feedback are too few and probably also don’t care enough.
According to vet and animal behaviorist Ian Dunbar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Dunbar), the best way to train dogs is not by punishing them when they do something "wrong", but to reward them when they do something right.
He also tried this method on his own children and it worked quite well for his family :D
As a Reddit user and advertiser, I was disappointed when they doubled their ad CPM's in June without notice to advertisers (as mentioned in the article).
I can understand incrementally increasing the price with demand, but doubling the cost of CPM's without notice is a big fuck you to advertisers.
Now they're more expensive than Facebook and with less targeting capability and you can't change or edit your ads once their live.
I'm not not parent, but - I've purchased a few time-blocks for a different campaigns over last few years and it brought in significant traffic, a bit more conversions, but despite being able to target a subreddit, it is still hard to get your money's worth if you are promoting a brick and mortar store. Unless that store offers tangible goods sold online as well. Location constrained and in-person transaction type of services saw less of a bump in revenue. That is probably true for online advertising overall. My 2 cents
Very interesting article. There was a data viz (gender vs visits) that was needlessly flashy, when a simple x-y scatter would have been more clear.
One part struck me though:
Erwin sees evidence of it already, pointing to the recent debut of Upvoted, a Reddit podcast delving into the site’s most compelling stories. “Reddit is very much trying to establish itself as a curator of its own content and take back some of that space from BuzzFeed,” Erwin says.
The 'content' on Reddit is made by its users. Sure, it's annoying when Buzzfeed packages it up into an article and sells it for clicks (though if you visit Buzzfeed it's your own fault) but it does not belong to anyone.
Reddit, by itself, is an empty vessel - its only value is in retaining its creative users and staying user friendly enough that those users keep drawing more and more people in. The vessel itself is completely worthless. As much as it sucks to have to cater to the whims of the users, they represent the only real value Reddit has.
I will be watching very closely to see how the new admins get rid of the truly toxic subreddits, while still retaining the culture of openness and anonymity. It is a very difficult tightrope walk.
This oddly reminds me of how YTMND was back in the day. Now it's mostly a niche site, but when it was semi-popular among certain segments Internet users it had some conflicts erupt between users such as atheists vs Christians being a classic spat on the site. Reddit seems to exhibit some of that coarse nature in its user base at least from my own experiences.
I'm not sure Reddit's owners can herd the users into compliance. For me the most likely outcome will be the slow decline of Reddit because users that aren't even affected by the policy changes and enforcement (even helped and protected with the banning of subreddits like /r/beatingtrannies and /r/fatpeoplehate) will see it as a possible threat to how they can submit content to the site. It's that unintended effect that Reddit's owners need to be aware of because it's what's killed smaller forums and sites.
I know. It's sad, really. They still have contributors that make some interesting pages, but it's nothing like the old days. There was one user who took paintings by Bosch and turned them into animations. It was rather unsettling (Bosch's work always looked creepy to me) to look at them initially, but they were damn good imo.
I find it really hard to believe that Reddit's users aren't like the rest of the internet. Only 1% of users on a site create content, followed by 9% "participating" on top of that newly created content, followed by 90% just lurking.
Even if it's not that exact breakdown, I'd be extremely surprised if the lurking users didn't dwarf the active users, and the just-commenting users didn't dwarf the actual creators. The "content" on Reddit isn't made by its users, either. Redditors are just collectors, no less than any Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, or G+ users. No less than BuzzFeed or BusinessInsider.
I'd guess the lurk percentage (I assume you mean lurkers are people looking at the site who don't have accounts) may be lower than usual, because you can't subscribe to subreddits without an account
Lurker is usually defined by the fact that they don't participate. Whether or not they have an account isn't usually a factor, though obviously being non-participants they usually have little incentive to create an account. Up-vote buttons usually drag in a few percentage points more of lurkers into creating accounts. Generally speaking, the more of a continuum of ability to participate in a site that you have, and the easier it is to sign up for an account, the more you will capture non-registered users as registered users.
This is why sites like Twitter, Pintrest, and Tumblr have found relative ease in gaining growth, compared to their general value proposition as compared to older, more traditional blogging platforms like Blogger or WordPress. Because they have completely streamlined the re-sharing type of participation, they target their sites explicitly at that 9% of users who participate but don't create, rather than the much smaller 1% of users who create content.
Regardless, the emphasis of the 90-9-1 rule is on content creation and participation, not on the number of registered accounts. It even applies to largely account-less sites like 4chan.
According to Reddit's user agreement, you own content you submit, but you give Reddit a "do whatever you want with it, even to make money off of it" license.
At the beginning of online video, YouTube started with the same "we can resell your videos and do whatever we want without asking you" clause. Vimeo didn't have that. A lot of content producers would only upload to Vimeo (vimeo also had full HD support years before YouTube). Over time, people realized they can't beat the reach/speed/search/recommendations of YouTube, so now everybody gives in and lets GooTube just do whatever they want with the content in exchange for better and more-consistent-across-platforms exposure.
Is it me or this is stupid? I mean, this is the digital world, you can make as many copies as you want, so if you give them a licence to whatever they want with it, what are your options after submitting something?
Not sure if you are saying it's stupid on Reddit's part, or the users'. For Reddit it's smart.
Licensing doesn't just mean making an exact copy.
Let's say Reddit was the one that packaged up a story posted on /r/nosleep/ and sold film rights—the user who posted that stuff would have an uphill battle to get anything from Reddit's profits on the arrangement.
But, as a user, you can still make your own deals (you still own and can license the content yourself to others), and you probably can only make that deal because of Reddit exposure.
You could stamp everyone of your posts with a CC-NC license. Since the content is yours - I don't think they can magically wave the CC-NC license on the basis that you uploaded it to their site.
IANAL but if you agreed to their terms and uploaded something then you've relicensed it to them. This is the same as those misguided souls posting copyright notices under their Facebook messages.
I mean TOS, EULAs etc only go so far. If you think they are the word of god - then I'll create a TOS on my site that says for every page view you agree to pay me $X. Then when I sue you to get the money - any judge who isn't taking mind altering drugs should throw it out.
Interestingly enough Apple also had their Safari EULA state that you couldn't install it on a PC [1]. Obviously it was never brought to court - but still I'm sure thousands of people violated the EULA.
My take is yes - someone who operates a website/service can blanket content you upload unless you explicitly state otherwise. So here is a hypothetical question - you own the copyright of the material in question. Reddit makes a copy of your reddit post for their daily feed or something - could you send a DMCA removal request? I'm sure you would say no because of the TOS - but don't you own the original copyright?
> This is the same as those misguided souls posting copyright notices under their Facebook messages.
And from what I read basically Facebook has the ability to use public posts/pictures - which makes total sense (posting the copyright notice only makes you look like a fool). If you don't want them to use it - adjust your privacy settings.
Here is an example of a ridiculous TOS [2].
> Permission is granted to freely print, unmodified, up to 200 copies
How do you know how many I printed? Perhaps I scanned copies - would those be considered prints?
If you use their service, you first have to agree to their terms. You can put any magical gobledy-gook in your text, but your 'active' (if only by clicking on a button) acceptance of their terms will hold up better in court. Same as for this text right here and the good folks at ycombinator.
Now for your own content hosted on your own site that you control, it's a whole other story.
>By submitting user content to reddit, you grant us a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, unrestricted, worldwide license to reproduce, prepare derivative works, distribute copies, perform, or publicly display your user content in any medium and for any purpose, including commercial purposes, and to authorize others to do so.
How does slapping another license on it dissolve this one? They're using it under this other license that you agreed to, not the CC-NC one.
The criticism of the aesthetic of the reddit homepage is misguided. By not following current trends in web design, reddit has stronger credibility as a free-for-all where you might find interesting material.
If you want content curated by editors who are directed by big money, there are a million other sites for that.
I've never understood the implication that a simple layout necessarily correlates to better content. Is it because sites that don't look modern evoke a sense of nostalgia for the less corporate "old" web? Is it just hipsterism? Clever marketing on Reddit's part?
It comes up on HN too, whenever someone complains about the awkward layout, there are worries that somehow making the site look better or perform better will degrade the culture.
The current style (as I interpret it) is to have a very minimal amount of text, edge-to-edge images, and for the designer to control the user's experience very closely. Sometimes this is great! I think DigitalOcean's design works perfectly, and is a positive example of following current trends.
One of the main appeals of reddit is that it's a free-for-all, and the current design reflects that. If you're looking for chaos, reddit looks pretty good, and many of us do like some chaos from time to time.
"""James Erwin, a Reddit moderator of several subreddits including r/history, argues that Reddit’s unwillingness over the years to provide strong, hands-on leadership to the site’s community is at the heart of the company’s lackluster business performance. Without a firm editorial grip, the flourishing of disreputable subreddits opened the door for BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, and others, which sift through Reddit content and repackage it to advertisers in more sanitized conditions. “Reddit is watching other people eat its lunch,” Erwin says."""
I think this loses the magical thing Reddit has - extremely strong intent signals from millions of people who are constantly voting on these items.
An interesting route to monetisation for Reddit would be divorcing the hive mind from the more passive viewers. There are probably a sizeable number of people who really don't care about the discussions / community interactivity element within Reddit and don't even possess accounts. What if Reddit created an independent app which used the live data from all of these sub-reddit upvotes, comments, (sentiment analysis?) and the rate at which something got picked up to do their "buzzfeed"-esque curation? Reddit's repackaging would create that neutral advertising-safe space, which could be successfully monetised in different ways.
An example of this would be say a deep-connect with content providers like Netflix and Hulu as well as whatever sub-reddits exist for movies, where they have a curated, passive viewing experience of say short-movies culled from a combination of Youtube, Vimeo, and Netflix to create a unique mix that wouldn't exist anywhere else. This would create a constantly changing, dynamic "TV-like" experience. Some viewers would like to engage around what they've watched and then Reddit could close the loop and get more data. I'm sure there are other interesting things to do with all of the photos they have in their dataset. As well all the articles and user-submitted content. (a better Flipboard type app?)
Reddit the company doesn't have to fight with reddit the chaotic force. They can just harness and use it to achieve a scale of manual curation no one has ever attempted before. It could become something quite special.
All the weirdness from Reddit seems to come from historically mixing the CEO role with the Community Manager role. There should be an entire department only dealing with on-site issues and that department should have absolute authority. Reddit grew from a 2 person company where everybody did everything, but did it actually grow up once it got bigger? Reddit has had a valley golden child touch since the beginning, so normal company growth patterns haven't always happened where would you expect in the lifecycle of a company because "lol reddit—we're differunt!"
Having the CEO be at the mercy of users in a multi-million-user fractured community is like having Tim Cook be the top level escalation for Apple tech support. Sure, the users may love it, but it's not sustainable for a company. Give the users an outlet for their rage and moderation problems, but don't touch the toxic waste personally.
What I'm trying to say is that they don't even have to touch that entire "community" thing. It's a massive headache and it's better to leave it alone than try to whip it into something monetisable. They can treat it as a loss-leader, extract the data it generates, and spin-off revenue generating assets from it.
Yes, that is one of the dozen new (almost too obvious) things it seems would be a slam dunk for them.
If people are stealing your content, reformatting it, and just placing ads around it, you sure as heck can do that yourself. Sprinkle some magic app dust around it and -bam- drive buzzfeed out of business, which I think is what we all truly want (except for some clueless VCs who value buzzfeed at billions of dollars [vomit]).
If this article is a case study, it's only conducting research on the business challenge and ignores the societal impact. Reddit community members are treated as incidental targets for advertisers and the study observes the difficulty in marketing a brand to an environment hostile to brand messaging.
The article serves the intended readership well, and I found many of its points interesting, but it feels hollow to not mention that there is more to learn here. I'm left feeling like the take away is that creating a safer environment for advertisers is the same as creating a safer and healthier community but that necessarily excludes a kind of community; one that exists regardless of what Reddit does and one that is largely unserved by the corporate web. Communities that avoid mainstream, are suspicious of money's affect on authenticity. It's unruly, bad behavior too, but there are several ways you can slice that. Shaping it to fit a neutral channel that is friendly to advertisers is only one way.
Community dynamics is incredibly hard, managing it under growth and after a certain threshold even more so, and radical change is almost impossible.
It's easy to say that someone has been too lax or too firm but it's such a complex issue. It's really hard to force a community in certain direction. It's more about sowing the seeds with tools and ux and less about policies and rules... and then apply a light touch help it develop in the direction you want.
There's also a question of what the ultimate goal is. What's best for the most users? For making the most money? The biggest median satisfaction? To fulfill some aspirational teneth?
I think one of Reddit's fundamental problems at this size is that it is grown on the seeds of anonymity, user moderators and upvotes/downvotes.
It has served them well for a long time but chaos always ensues when a community reaches a certain threshold, and more pressure needs to be applied to keep it in check (if that's what you want)
Upvotes/Downvotes is a blunt tool and threads easily changes into who agrees with whom rather than promoting thoughtful comments.
User anonymity is great, but requires features around it at a certain size. A country has borders to keep criminals away and community needs a way to keep trolls at bay. If you just can create another account what's the problem with being a troll? One remedy might be a smarter karma system where more visibility is given to users that's posted interesting content, kinda lika slashdot.
User moderators are great when it works, like in some channels. But it's also a source of petty power struggles and dictators defending their fiefdoms. Reddit of course benefits tremendously from the work the "power" incentivizes these moderators do for free, but I keep wondering if at a certain size there needs to be more automation and checks and balances to avoid user moderators becoming destructive or slanted and put too much focus on the meta. Then again maybe some subreddits should be biased and let the mods rule as their will. It's a little weird though for big general subreddits for things like news and countries.
Anyway, Reddit is probably too much set in it's way to enact radical change without the users revolting, and there isn't proof that the model doesn't work, just that it has its problem, as all models probably would.
As I said, community dynamics are complicated. Will be interesting to follow Reddit going forward.
According to Wikipedia's Reddit timeline[1], they didn't have a CEO until Yishan became the CEO. I'm assuming they had some sort of leader before Yishan, however.
> Those cats can't run anything
> in retrospect, one flaw with [Condé Nast]’s hands-off approach was an assumption that Reddit’s founders would know when and how to ask for help. [...] Looking back [...] more hand-holding would have been a good idea.
Articles like this are a barely veiled attempt to put pressure on Condé Nast and the other owners - Reddit needs to be instilled with a corporate, PR-oriented mentality ASAP. Its spirit of "open discourse and peer-to-peer learning" is incomprehensible to corporate America. On the other hand, the impressive user base seems ripe for more aggressive monetization. So the old deal has become inconvenient:
> During the courtship of Reddit [...] the company promised that if the deal went through, it would leave the founders alone to run the site with minimal interference