zlg's notepad

This page is read only. You can view the source, but not change it. Ask your administrator if you think this is wrong.
====== Reddit ======

Here is where I put my criticisms of Reddit, to help guide development for a replacement. It's gotten tiresome trying to navigate the social landscape of scoring-heavy link aggregators. It's a very competitive atmosphere, and I find it corrosive to the feel of a community. Some groups may thrive in spite of that design flaw, but survival bias is not evidence of the contrary. They are outliers for a reason.

There are considerable design flaws that result in undesired social behavior among users. Maybe that's required in order to get the engagement you need to get ads or gifts going, but it's not something I think can be sustained. Reddit's been through a lot of drama due to its userbase, and part of it is what they tolerate, what they take action against, and the disrespect and mistreatment that makes it past the radar of moderators and goes unnoticed.

I've decided that I don't like sites that sort based on voting. Democratizing a discussion is kind of like "whoever's loudest is correct", and it's not a good social vibe. One can choose sorting options and I believe even defaults, but scoring still remains across the site and there are no options to remove it from the UI or prevent others from seeing it to judge you by.

You can't set your profile to private, so it incentivizes people to creep your profile and personally attack you if a discussion becomes heated. Mod or admin action is often heavy-handed in conflict resolution style. Stonewalling is fashionable. Mod behavior is erratic across the site, subreddits are allowed onto /r/all that each have vastly different rulesets in addition to the foundational Reddiquette. This could be solved by enforcing a standard ruleset needed to hit /r/all, or hard requirements for moderators, or a system where moderators must review each others' work. Many ways to peel that potato.

It's a way different site now than it was back in 2012, in the vibe of the people who hang out on here. The same smarmy self-deprecating humor and pun contest, reddit jokes, but now there's a lot of casual or newbie users, bots that repeat top comments and create comment loops... Anytime you try to have a discussion it just goes downhill due to no real interest in communicating. It's more like we're all just talking *at* each other. At least, if you can manage to find another real person on there. When you do, it's too competitive. Too close to social media now. Maybe that's the goal though.

===== How To Improve It =====

  * **Voting needs to be invisible to everyone except the person voted on.** Number bias is real, and it only takes one or two votes when a comment or post is young to create a logarithmic influence on score. This is amplified on highly-populated subreddits. Remove the actual score, and users can't infer opinions of others, allowing their vote to be influenced. Unfortunately, the voting buttons are "agree/disagree", despite the original intent of "contributes/doesn't contribute" to discussion. Votes don't really improve the discussion.
  * **Profiles should have better visibility options for others.** You should be able to set your profile as private and prevent people from judging you based on comment history or karma count. Neither of those metrics are suitable judges of character or the quality of their participation. People act different in different places, you can't know for sure who someone is based solely on comment history. Make the settings granular if you wanna go nuts; I think private/public is fine to start with.
  * **Add an option to hide locked threads.** It's a bummer to read comments in a thread only to learn that it was locked *while you were reading it*, or see something on /r/all and go to read comments and participate, only to find you can't participate. A big part of social media is participation. There's no point in showing me threads that are locked and can't comment on. Make it an option, some people don't mind.
  * **Add an option to hide subreddits that have banned you.** If you keep the distributed modship model, then allow people to make cuts clean and simply disassociate from the sub entirely. Reddit already has "block subreddit" which I still don't fully understand how it works, but it's not what this does. If a subreddit bans you, then there's little point in hanging out there anymore. Some people may stick around, so make it an option.
  * **Add an option to disallow inbox replies by default.** Reddit is a major platform for harassment, and a large part of how it happens is the design of the website itself. This is part of that. Again, some people will want the old behavior of inboxing every reply, so it should be an option.
  * **Get rid of any automated content management.** Unless you have draconian, ironclad, no-exceptions types of rules, automation is not the solution to curation. Triggering bots with keywords that aren't made clear is kind of annoying. Bots pop into conversations where they aren't needed. You can fix this with requiring explicit disclaimers indicating it's a bot, special flairs, and CSS classes to target.
  * **Better regulate API access.** A lot of sites are archiving Reddit as-it-happens and part of how they do it so well is API access. Scraping is a long and time consuming process, and I don't think the TOS allows it. It's also easier to detect. In any case, there could be defaming things in the copies that Reddit may partially be on the hook for if it came up in a criminal case. IANAL but you never know.
  * **Allow invite-only communities to use invite trees.** This is a feature from [[https://lobste.rs|Lobsters]], but it's a wonderful idea and keeps people accountable. The idea is you are responsible for the behavior of those you invite. If you invite enough people who cause trouble, then //you// are removed or disciplined as well. It's a good way to keep people accountable in small, close-knit communities. This is a section of the population that Reddit currently does not serve.
  * **Allow user-based community namespaces.** First come, first served is a poor model for a namespace. It's that way everywhere else, sure, but why does it have to be that way? Why can't subreddits themselves be voted on, and then ranked on search results? If I search for "Nintendo", I shouldn't get just *one* /r/nintendo. I should be able to get anyone's /u/somedude/nintendo. Make subreddits act as tags you can post on your profile. That would certainly give it a more social media feel, and break up the namespace. I think this is similar to userreddits, but more in-depth. It's something I would implement, though.

---

I am not a particularly social guy, but the above things would go a long way to improving the Reddit experience and curb some bad behavior. Visiting the site has become a bad habit that I've been meaning to do something about for quite some time. I don't feel good after visiting. Now that I have some concrete ideas about why, maybe I'll just build my own replacement. I can actually do that.

I know PHP, Python, databases, and some light knowledge on caching. This website is self-hosted, at home, so there's some sysadmin experience.