That sounds like a good idea. I think reddit already does some similar stuff like that if I’m not mistaken. I also think it’d be a great idea if proxies and suspected proxies that continue to vote for or against certain users and topics in certain patterns was also tweaked in a better manner as well.
You’re being very combative, especially considering that I’m not involved with /r/technology and am by no means a “power mod.”
Here’s my take on it, part of a moderator’s job is to manage the quality of the conversation. Upvotes and downvotes help with that, but they have problems. For example, on AskScience the goal of the subreddit is to allow laypeople to get answers from scientists about questions, But, of course, not everyone who responds on the subreddit is a real topic expert, and sometimes people get things wrong. Of course, not everyone who votes on the answers is a topic expert either, and sometimes those wrong answers get a lot of upvotes because they sound right. The moderator team on AskScience has a lot of scientists from different fields, and when you spot what you know to be a wrong answer that has a lot of upvotes it’s a good idea to shoot it down.
Moreover, the subreddit has a bunch of rules (which are easily visible in the sidebar) about what is considered “on-topic” conversation. For example, AskScience doesn’t allow personal anecdotes because they aren’t suitable for answering a scientific question. However, anecdotes pull a lot of upvotes because they’re easy to relate to.
This doesn’t mean the conversation is any less participatory, it just means that it stays on topic and interesting. Much like pruning a tree to make sure it grows healthy, sometimes you have to prune a conversation to ensure that it advances in a good and meaningful way.
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You should really visit http://stackexchange.com/sites – the whole system is literally designed from year one to do what you describe, rather than being hastily duct taped on in an ad-hoc way to a system originally designed to be little more than a cluster of voted comments on a submitted link.
What I find frustrating is that reddit’s awful, awful UI has evolved virtually zero since 2005.
Stack exchange is awesome, but I feel like it attracts a different crowd than I’m looking for. Reddit has a huge and diverse audience, and AskScience gets millions of hits a month. StackExchange physics? I don’t have numbers in front of me, but I feel like it gets fewer eyeballs, especially from highschool and college aged kids. Part of my goal when answering questions is to expose students to the possibility of a career in acoustics, and to do that I need students to be looking at the site in the first place.
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You’re being very combative
I’m disagreeing with your point of view. That happens on less-censored forums.
Upvotes and downvotes help with that, but they have problems. For example, on AskScience …
You’re dodging my points.
The problem is you are comparing very different subreddits with very different scenarios without addressing nearly any of the points or questions I brought up.
Moderating posts with wrong answers concerning scientific questions on r/askscience is similar to editing a wikipedia page for accuracy.
That is incredibly different than banning words like “NSA” in order to censor an entire subreddit like r/technology which is vastly more like a technology magazine than anything like a wikipedia page.
If the rest of the world worked your way, all or most of the technology magazines wouldn’t cover the NSA at all. That would mean Popular Science, Ars technica, WIRED, Gizmag, etc.
All of which have covered the NSA and they’ve done so quite a bit in most circumstances:
For example:
http://www.popsci.com/category/tags/nsa
Actually, I challenge you to find any mainstream technology magazine that avoids the NSA topic.
I don’t necessarily disagree with some of your points when it comes to r/askscience, but in your original post you directly addressed r/technology and I think your approach is very wrong in regards to that subreddit.
But, fortunately, that kind of radical control that led to draconian censorship was rejected and r/technology has been demoted from the prestigious front page as a consequence.
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You’re making a strawman out of me, and attributing a more extreme opinion than I think is appropriate.I actually think that the NSA spying should be covered on /r/technology. I think it’s a very important topic, that it’s a highly relevant topic to technology, and that major new developments should have highly visible posts to spread that news.
My complaint is that very similar NSA posts that weren’t adding anything new to the conversation were floating up to the top day after day after day, and the comments surrounding those posts were exactly the same day after day after day. The conversation wasn’t advancing in a healthy way.
My point about moderating in this context is that conversations are at their best when there is variety, both in topics and points being made. Voting systems aren’t necessarily good at promoting this sort of variety, because people upvote the things they like, even if that means they upvote the same articles or opinions over and over again. As a moderator, it makes sense to prune extremely similar opinions and articles so you can focus the conversations on those topics…one big conversation with multiple different threads is going to have more valuable content.
If you look at those archives, they all trickle out the NSA stories as new information surfaces. Like all news stories, when big things were breaking, they might have a few articles covering the same topic from different angles. For example, on June 11th ArsTechnica posted a feature story about the NSA, and they had 4 companion articles that covered the NSA from personal, legal, and political activism angles. Great stuff!
Now, I don’t think the automatic rules necessarily break this. The posts that get deleted by automoderator rules don’t disappear forever, they go into a bin that moderators can comb through. On AskScience, automod bins a lot of comments, and one of our tasks is to go through almost all of them and make sure they were pulled appropriately. Presumably the mods on /technology did this as well, to some extent, because there have been some NSA posts on the front page in the last few months that would have been caught by their filter:
http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/search?q=NSA&sort=new&restrict_sr=on
Though, looking over that list, there was probably too large of a gap between posts on the NSA, so the mods should have been more liberal with letting those stories out.
On the flip side, users notice when the front page gets oversaturated. Here’s a post on /r/technology right now:
http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/23trgk/and_like_clockwork_7_of_the_top_10_rtechnology/
Within days of removing the filter, /r/technology has turned into a technology policy circle jerk. Seriously, look at the front page of /r/technology right now and count how many of them are the story that the FCC is backing fast lanes, which is the end of net neutrality. By my count, 6 are the exact same topic covered by different sources, and another 6 cover different angles. I don’t think it would be a bad idea to prune away the 5 least popular versions of the FCC fast lane story (it’s a good story), and maybe to kick one or two of the similar angle-pieces.
Do you honestly think that having 6 of the top 20 posts being duplicates is a good thing?
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Lesson: without strong moderation,
People do so love their junk food.
You’re making a strawman out of me, and attributing a more extreme opinion than I think is appropriate.I actually think that the NSA spying should be covered on /r/technology.
In your first post you heavily implied that you agreed with the mods at /r/technology (that would mean banning those keywords). You even doubled-down and said that blocking internet freedom stories in technology made a lot of sense to you.
Nowhere did you mention that the mods at r/technology were too overzealous nor mention any disagreement whatsoever with their banning of keywords, etc. - It’s only now that you’ve explained that your position is perhaps slightly more evolved than that.
The conversation wasn’t advancing in a healthy way.
In your opinion. Fortunately, many more disagreed with you, the poisonous mod situation has been corrected and healthy conversation and debate is now back at r/technology:
That’s a good thing.
Voting systems aren’t necessarily good at promoting this sort of variety, because people upvote the things they like, …
Please forgive me for taking that part of your sentence out of context, but I found it extremely telling. I think it shows that, once again, you’d be happier at a blog where you control the message and have lone, editorial powers.
People up-voting things they like will of course result in some redundancy, but that’s going to be a mild side-effect of a healthy, participatory system that isn’t neutered by control freaks.
That mild side-effect of perceived redundancy may get overblown for moderators who are at reddit nearly every day. Most average reddit users do not visit reddit every day, much less the same subreddit every single day. The job of a subreddit isn’t to appeal to the moderators, nor the avid minority of users that perhaps suffer from Internet addiction.
The posts will sort themselves out over time and the highest ranked ones will persevere for a while. The worst that happens is some users who aren’t interested in net neutrality (a minority, by the way) will need to scroll down an inch or two on their devices (if that) to pass those topics.
You’re blowing the perceived negative effects wildly out of proportion.
Within days of removing the filter, /r/technology has turned into a technology policy circle jerk.
A circle jerk? Wow…
I think redditors that actively use that hackneyed term to describe group dialog they don’t agree with nor enjoy may need some time and space away from reddit.
Seriously, look at the front page of /r/technology right now and count how many of them are the story that the FCC is backing fast lanes
Yes, it’s wonderful. It’s reflecting the will of the people who are very interested in that topic right now. Why does it bother you so much?
For the minority that’s not interested in the FCC’s draconian attack on the entire Internet right now, they can simply flick their fingers on their touchscreen or nudge the controls on their mouse to scroll past and ignore the FCC topics and look at others stories/posts.
Though, looking over that list, there was probably too large of a gap between posts on the NSA, so the mods should have been more liberal with letting those stories out.
Ya think? It’s a little too late and the censorship damage was done and can’t be reversed. Fortunately, those mods have now been neutered.
Do you honestly think that having 6 of the top 20 posts being duplicates is a good thing?
Except it’s very disingenuous to call them duplicates. For the most part, they are different perspectives from different media sources as well.
On the front page of technology right now in regards to Net Neutrality:
• Polls that show info on a youth demographic in support of it. A healthy debate ensues within.
• A post focuses on Obama’s perceived hypocritical nature. Another healthy debate ensues within revolving around Obama, role of government, etc.
• A focus on how net neutrality can affect our long term prosperity. More healthy debate surrounding that angle ensues within.
• Another post on what to do about the attack and how to save Net Neutrality. Healthy debate and ideas ensue.
Why is this bad again?
You’re giving far too little weight towards the damage mods create with overzealous censorship and far too much emphasis on your own personal tastes. If you were the moderator there right now the result would be the destruction of healthy, lively and varied debate because of your overzealous derision and incorrect perception of “duplicates”.
As someone who has been both a moderator and a user at popular Internet forums, I think it’s a good idea for moderators to sometimes take a break and look at the bigger picture beyond their own minor, personal annoyances that develop when they have their nose into something all day, every day.
Once again, if the mods and devs at reddit want to really provoke healthier conversations and debate, the focus should be on sockpuppets and brigading. That’s the real problem at reddit. Not an overabundance of free speech.
Unlikely in my experience. There may be some of that, but the real problem is that users love junk food and left to their own devices, that is pretty much all they will eat. Translation: statistically speaking, they will upvote the path of least resistance, each time, every time.
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/01/the-trouble-with-popularity/
If that were all that happened then I’d agree, however apparently there were members of the moderation team who were posting such links to click-bait articles and then allowing their own posts through the filter to reap the meaningless internet points sweet sweet karma.
This activity was made public, and then everything kicked off, lots of mod in-fighting, open childish arguments, and THAT is what prompted the admins to un-default /r/technology
I’m going to read your post you linked to in more detail and respond later. It looks very interesting so far! Thanks for directing me to it.
EDIT: I read your blog post and you may be surprised that I agree with a lot of what you said… for Stack Overflow. An overabundance of ASCII art clogging up a thread could become very annoying on Stack Overflow, etc.
I guess what troubles me it appears you’re comparing image macros, memes, rage comics, etc. to content on Net Neutrality, NSA overreach, etc. on Reddit.
Those are wildly different things, in my opinion. And, as I showed above, what a burned-out moderator with control freak issues may errantly see as “duplicates” are in reality very different topics that spur healthy discussions and a very healthy exchange of ideas.
I think some moderators are born to be in more controlled climates while there are others more adept at dealing with more participatory arenas.
Participatory venues like Reddit are always going to be messy, but so is any other evolutionary process. But, what tends to rise to the top on the main Reddit front page with combined subreddits is cream-of-the-crop, sometimes fun, topical, interesting and often important issues and news.
I think it’s fair to say that despite some of your reservations back in 2008, Reddit has been pretty successful. It’s not perfect and could certainly use some positive changes, however.
Unlikely in my experience. There may be some of that
In regards to sockpuppets and brigading. I’ve seen a huge problem at Reddit as have many others. I believe it’s one of the reasons so many lurk at Reddit instead of getting involved in discussions.
There was a group of us warning Digg of this issue and they kept ignoring it until it was too late. Digg’s dumb platform shakeups were only the final nails in the coffin because the Digg Patriots, etc. got so far out of control that it poisoned healthy debate at Digg. People got tired of it and left for Reddit in a mass exodus. Digg got desperate and errantly focused on moronically reshuffling the deck chairs on their Titanic instead of trying to find the real source of the leak and repairing it.
I see the same thing happening at Reddit and mark my words, just as brigading degraded Digg, if Reddit doesn’t get it under control, it will help to destroy it down the road if they keep discounting it. Once there’s an alternative to Reddit that has brigading under control, there’ll be a mass exodus away from Reddit just as Digg saw many leave their shithole for Reddit.
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