But just standard moderation of content? That's absolutely necessary. Without moderations subreddits degrade into memes and low effort comments. You only need to look at web archive to see the quality of many subreddits vastly decline as they got big.

As a mod of a default subreddit, we remove joke comments and image posts. And it's not like it's a new thing, we have always done that. And the quality is still far from perfect, but it's much better than other subs.

Sometimes I click on the comments of a reddit post looking to see more discussion about it. And instead it's just a bunch of jokes. Often by a handful of people that lurk in the rising posts, and make sure they get their comments there first, and so beat all the other comments (reddit's comment sorting algorithm is god awful and easily exploited like that.) Even if they don't have anything to say, or any insight into the subject.

Another problem is there are two different types of users. "Serious" users, for lack of a better name, and "entertainment" users. The users there for entertainment upvote images, jokes, etc. Serious users are looking for discussion and debate and whatever. These two categories aren't easily separated and often mix. The users looking for entertainment often take over subs about serious subjects, e.g. worldnews.

The top posts become whatever pleases the lowest common denominator, or requires the least effort to read. Short articles are easier read the long articles, and images are even easier, and provocative headlines even easier. So image posts and headlines like "mildly important official says something politically unpopular" take over entirely.

In short, we should stop saying that "low quality content subs" are a problem. They really are not. The problem is instead a lack of well moderated subs, and/or a lack of promoting these or inability to discover them.

As long as this is true, what's wrong with taking over a sub, if that's what the people want? Making a new sub requires getting everyone to change.

You might as well ask those who wanted the old sub behavior to make their own sub.

There's no inherently right decision as to what the default should be, and in particular that decision isn't "just do what the original mods/creators want".

After all we are talking about subreddits that somehow got popular with what they were doing... So why does a popular subreddit have to change and why do the people who made the subreddit into the popular thing it was have to find a new place instead of whoever has a problem with how things are done making their own and new place?

I'm not sure which cases of hostile takeovers they're referring to, so I don't know what happened there, but presumably they either had a mod on their side, or got an admin to step in. The mod's behavior must have been pretty bad if an admin intervened.

I don't understand why you'd say that if an admin did something then the mod's behavior must have been pretty bad. Define bad? Bad for reddit's public image? Bad for monetization?

If what you're about to do after taking over was actually "what the people want" then you wouldn't have to take over.

If you remember when r/trees broke out of r/weed, people found out about the new sub because there was no auto mod bot which went and removed key words.

Those that want their heavily moderated spaces have them within easy reach, those that want their low effort internet junk food, likewise.

So what's the problem, again? It sounds like the system is working mostly as designed.

the defaults are important because they let people use the site before they decide they want to sign up

Don't road block me with some set of tiles and vague "business, technology, fashion, music" screen.

Reddit has it right that a new account should have some baseline. Their discovery tools however are not intuitive, if you can even call them tools.

have defaults with strict moderation, and alienate newcomers

have defaults with loose moderation, and the voting algorithm will favor the most superficial, bitsized posts.

All the best!

Obnoxious moderation is just as big a problem on reddit as the aforementioned.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/3pme4i/a_list...

https://reddit.com/r/subredditcancer/comments/374s5i/this_we...

Some subreddits will ban anyone that posts or comments in certain other subreddits.

For one, the worst behaved subreddits moderation wise are often the "default" ones, meaning the ones that everyone sees when logged out. They have a favored position on the site, in other words. Every user is subscribed to them by default, which also means their content is going to wind up on /r/all more often.

Also, once a subreddit gets that size, crap mods can get away with a lot more because the volume of submissions make it hard to tell that something untoward is going on. And the people who pay attention (perhaps a few thousand on a good day) will easily be drowned out by those who do not.

Community forks happen, but never at that level. The deck is hilariously stacked towards the entrenched communities.

See also http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centrali...

Usually it's easier to just make a new subreddit and convince people that yours is better.

You would need some moderating, but it "could work".

Lots of unknowns, such as how much moderating, how do control moderators etc. Its not really a solution to the actual people "problem" but more a UI/ presentation solution to compensate both sides. Now, trolls will always exist, and will always try to crash the party, does not matter what you do.

And that's bad because?

(My question is a rephrase of the parent's comment).

It's perfectly OK for people to have memes and low effort comments. Not everything should be a "high-bro" discussion, with nuanced arguments and evolved though policing.

Oh by the way they don't say they're removing the submission because it's pro-trump, they just enforce rules that are so broad that there can be a wide discretion in how they're enforced. These rules are heavily enforced for pro-trump and pro-clinton sbumissions, but not pro-sanders submissions.

You might not think it's a problem, but it's still a problem for Reddit: the conversation is generally inferior to the standards required for it to see mass adoption.

A lot of people want to create and consume low quality content. I don't dispute that. But a lot of people don't want to and the way Reddit is organized unfortunately pushes the low quality to the top.

Over the years, I have frequently tried to get into Reddit. I've found smaller subreddits and interesting communities, but even in them I'm confronted with low-effort comments too often. Structurally, the site just doesn't do enough to incentivize high quality contributions.

It's fine for there to be places for low quality content. There's plenty of them on every social network. The problem for Reddit is that they're front and center, not at the fringes.

As the parent intimated people don't all want your idea of quality. Reddit seems perfectly capable of quality within its structure - AskScience and AskHistorians seen like good examples. In other subs [SERIOUS] tags seem to work quite well.

>The problem for Reddit is that they're front and center, not at the fringes. //

It's primarily for entertainment the low SNR subreddits being most prominent seems to be a consequence of that.

I've seen people point to specific subreddits as quality before, but I've never found it to be true.

To verify, I just did a quick peruse through /r/AskScience. While the questions themselves are generally good and the SNR is definitely higher than Reddit overall, I hardly think it's an emblem of quality. There are plenty of drive-by comments with low substantive value and the combination of Reddits norms and algorithms don't seem to do a good job of burying those—even on the "best" subreddits.

Judging from the kind of statistics Reddit has, I seriously doubt that this is a problem for them.

The notion that there are untold millions (more than currently) waiting to get into Reddit but don't because they don't like the memes and jokes doesn't really strike me as accurate.

Where are the competing "serious" sites filling that niche?

It's rather the contrary -- the "serious" and high traffic comment threads, from the Guardian and NYT to CNN, -- get increasingly more (rather than less) Reddit like comments.

In fact killing those memes and jokes will more probably alienate Reddit's largest user base than do any good.

What is stupid memes and jokes for one, is the ability to discuss trully and freely for another.

Absolutely hilarious comment. It's the 31st most popular site in the world. You may struggle to use it but they're clearly not suffering.

Uhm, what? Low quality comments have never been a barrier for a website reaching mass adoption. In fact, mass adoption has been what has crippled the discussion in the biggest subredits. In any case, when discussing the quality of the comments, mass adoption is beside the point as far as we (average users that have no financial stake in reddit) are concerned.

Reddit is the place that instead of having /r/redvsblue you get /r/red and /r/blue 2 gated communities that simply live in their own little world happy with the perfect echo chamber they've created and that anyone who strays to post in the other camp's subreddit is automatically classified as a troll.

(Not all of that impression; certainly upvote-downvote systems tend to exacerbate groupthink. Even so.)

* Twitter in particular has the problem that if you want to interact with the other side, you have to pick a particular person to interact with; yet having someone you don't know initiating conversation just to disagree with you is rather unpleasant, especially if you're "famous" and end up with a lot of such conversations. On Reddit at least you can address an entire subreddit and avoid targeting anyone personally. You will probably be downvoted, which isn't great, but...

Eh why is that exactly? This is pretty much like calling people who object to the ideas that others present on Twitter as harassment. When you go on a public forum and present your ideas you open yourself to a public debate, hearing things that might be "unpleasant" should fall well within the realm of expectation in this case.

But the main one is the blurred line between public and private. Posting here definitely comes with the expectation of a public debate and so people who aren't in the mood for it will not post. But on Twitter everyone is encouraged to publicly post everything from random status updates to highly personal matters to idle chatter that is meant to only circulate among friends (and may not be fully thought through). You can avoid this by setting your account to private, and many do, but this blocks the spontaneous spread of posts through the social graph by means of retweets and replies, which is IMO the best thing about Twitter. There is no granularity, either: only one account toggle between all your tweets being visible to the entire world or to just your direct followers. (Including replies, which makes private accounts an imperfect shield: if you have a private account but chat with a public account, people can still see their replies to you and infer the content of the conversation, plus your username.) Also, whereas you can easily leave HN or Reddit or some forum altogether if you get fed up with it, leaving Twitter may be tantamount to losing contact with friends; you can make your account private but it's not the same sort of mental break.

The worst arguers on the Internet don't just disagree; they bring a moral judgment along with it. "You're wrong for believing in X, and the fact that you believe in X makes you a bad person." If you have enough people who agree with this, (and this often has absolutely nothing to do with broader support for X or whether X is actually bad or not) you actively feel hated, demeaned, etc for believing in X and voicing your opinion. Even being polite will provoke an enormous amount of vitriol simply because it's very easy to lump in a polite X-believer in with preexisting ideas that all people who believe X are assholes.

A lot of people react to this with, "Well, good. There are a lot of shitty Xs that people believe, and people really should be afraid to say those things out loud."

That's all well and good for some opinions; I'm not advocating being polite to, say, neo-Nazis who are denying the Holocaust or advocating genocide. But people rapidly expand X to "whatever I disagree with," and the result is that we treat disagreement on legitimate, reasonable issues that people will naturally disagree on as equivalent to endorsing genocide and believing that the Holocaust didn't happen.

It doesn't help that the Internet naturally magnifies hatred because it's very, very easy for 5,000 people to get ahold of something and leave one really nasty comment apiece. They spend 10 seconds writing a comment, but the person who originally posted X gets 50,000 seconds of written vitriol. It's overwhelming.

As a result, there are certain issues on the Internet (and in real life, for that matter) - vital issues, important issues, that I will not touch because they are far too likely to dump a massive amount of vitriol on me. I have better shit to do. As a result, the best possible outcome for me is not to engage entirely.

And then those exact same people who dump anger and hatred on all believers in X complain that said believers in X are "avoiding them." Well no shit they are, who would volunteer for that?

This is the core problem: what is "legitimate and reasonable" and what is closer to neo-Nazis (to pull your example)?

Painting a target on myself here for the sake of illustration: I am a Christian, and I believe in the literal truth of the Bible. This means, for example, that I believe homosexuality is a sin. (which, for the sake of clarification, does not mean that I hate other humans who are gay).

Where does that put me on the spectrum from "legitimate, reasonable issues" to "neo-Nazi"? The answers to that vary far and wide, and the way I get treated online varies accordingly.

I've been treated as another person at the conversational table ("so why do you think that?", "what does that mean for how you treat others?"), and I've been told I'm "objectively a terrible person" (and much worse) for believing what I do.

The problem is often less "how do I treat people who have reasonable disagreements with me" and more "what constitutes a reasonable disagreement?"

"Hey Bob, here's why you are wrong."

This is bad:

"Hey everyone else, here's why Bob is wrong and evil."

Twitter and the like are mostly 2 masquerading as 1. Call it open debate or whatever, I still don't like it.

Without that hard, often-gated work, how is anyone supposed to form an independent opinion on something like global warming, models of crime, economic policy, intimate relationships, pedagogy, and so on? So what you're seeing is not the discussion of ideas, but rather the negotiation of clan policy and identity.

There's no policy that you can implement to stop this "echo chamber" or "groupthink", which are merely symptoms of a deeper issue: that the antecedents of independent opinion on a wide range of phenomena are simply not there, and that obtaining quality is resource-intensive with non-trivial opportunity cost.

I truly miss the open forums (and even IRC, although that tended to be more focused) of the late 90's early 2000's yeah they could get vile some times but that's a bargain price for getting a public forum in which anyone can express their mind no matter how "wrong" or "offensive" some one can perceive that opinion to be. Today we get people claiming getting PTSD over twitter and every online community adopting a COC which often leaves no room for discourse that would make some one uncomfortable all and all forgetting that ideas that make some one uncomfortable are the ideas most worth discussing. 60 years ago it was "uncomfortable" for way to many people people to hear that blacks should be allowed to use the same bathroom as they are and thank cthulhu we didn't had Twitter and Reddit back then.

An obvious first step is removing downvotes so you can't completely obliterate someone who crosses sides to try to have a conversation, but after that, what else would help?

In my mind, some kind of code of conduct would help further those conversations, because it doesn't prevent people from expressing their opinions, it just makes them express them civilly. And if they express an opposing view without being overly antagonistic, then hopefully the other side wouldn't start insult slinging, and if they do, then that's what the COC would be there for.

I think there's a difference between having a "wrong" or "offensive" opinion, and expressing it in an offensive way. Do you think there's a way to achieve that balance, so that people can feel comfortable to express their opinions on either side, regardless of right or wrong, without it devolving into mudslinging and pure animosity on both sides? How do we accomplish that?

People mistake being challenged for being offended, having a discussion especially on a polarizing subject isn't supposed to be comfortable, but sadly we have too many people that have been cuddled to believe that it's their right to only hear the choir of angels reinforcing their opinions.

Heck even if some one decides to make a comment about ones maternal employment preferences I would not see a reason to moderate that, because unless you are discussing prostitution it most likely has very little to do with the actual argument and so would not score one much points in a debate.

Skilled debate in a venue like Reddit requires an understanding of esotericism, of not simply laying out facts and implications based on your own assumptions, but presenting a fascinating puzzle to the reader that leads them to challenge their own assumptions without being challenged by anyone in particular. When successful, such a puzzle glides beneath the surface tropes of the discussion, presenting the perspective without provoking hostilities. The karma system does not reward this very well, as those carefully crafted puzzles tend to get middling scores, while simple agreement, rationalization arguments(why your assumptions are right and the critics are wrong, from Someone Smart), and congratulatory joking trigger the instant upvote response. But putting in the effort into that dialogue is essential to engaging the community.

Also, for the first few years of its growth, the most popular search term that lead people to the site was 'jailbait'. That's the kind of community they nurtured and catered to.

Reddit would benefit from some way to put it in "intellectual mode" or "picture mode" that weighed certain post types and subs heavier.

If you just separate upvote buttons into funny and intelligent/insightful, then let users sort by the type of comment/post they prefer, wouldn't it solve this?

Slashdot does that, why hasn't that caught on? Complexity?

They could also harvest data on how often people click through a headline, how long they scroll through a comments page, how long until they move to the next item...

So in addition to having more voting options on an aggregator, I also want a separate aggregator that's purely driven by behavioral data, like average clickthroughs and time on page.

The only real problems I see with Reddit are political censorship in default subs and corrupt mods.

When you add all that together, Reddit (or at least the most visible part of it) really has become a bad place for open discussions.

And that's the same type of thing as brigading.

All the above is intolerance. We've forgotten as a society what that word really means.