> One thing I sincerely hope reddit will do with the new injection is to increase the level of quality of content and discussion across the board. Often the advice given is "you've got to find the smaller subreddits" and while that's true, I think having the first few layers filled with terrible content and hive-minded, often racist/sexist discussion is incredibly detrimental to both the site's image and new user experiences.
Do we have any examples of large Internet communities with unilateral good discussion?
They way I've thought about it, the subreddits with better user content/discussion are primarily because:
* They attract fewer people, so only users more dedicated to the topic and more dedicated to finding a good community will find them. These users tend to be better contributors.
* Heavy-handed authoritarian moderation.
The first one only works so long as the subreddit is less popular. The more it will regress toward the mean of Internet contributions, which I believe to be inherently low.
The second one only works well when you have a specific topic with carefully defined rules and very active moderators with no regard for popular consensus and said moderators don't develop a power complex.
I don't think reddit has shown any interesting solutions to the problem of high quality contribution. At the risk of sounding elitist, we've seen how popularity kills quality discussion on countless communities over the years. Again, I think massive discussion tends toward being inherently low on average.
Edit: Beaten by noir_lord by a couple minutes listing the exact same two points.
How much of that is due to the (relatively token but non-zero) membership cost? I subscribed there years ago because I enjoyed the conversations and found it to have a good signal-to-noise ratio.
Granted, this is subjective to some degree as what I consider "noise" might be considered "signal" by others. I think that it worked because their intention was to make the sort of community that they wanted whereas Reddit seems more interested in making a platform for everyone.
I can see the use for each approach and I still find it one of the best things about internet communities in general. If you want something different, it's relatively easy to take a shot at making something more to your liking.
I just think that same $10 or whatever that it costs to join the SA forums and motivates most members to avoid shitposting would also present a barrier to the sort of broad, mass appeal Reddit is shooting for.
I keep fantasizing about some sort of inception-like system where you could go "deeper" below each subreddit when you chose to, finding a smaller subset of people who'd also gone deeper out of dissatisfaction with convo quality. Maybe it would be one-way gate where you couldn't go back to participate on upper levela. Maybe you comments would still show up above, but the votes in the deeper level would be tallied relative to its users... I keep posting this when quality comes up in discussion, but no one ever bites :)
Fork? More like a dive? If /r/worldnews level 1 gets bad, you just click "go deeper" button. After confirmation, you're now in /r/worldnews level 2 whenever logged in. You don't see comments from level 1 folks, and their votes don't affect the conversation and order int level 2. Same for every subsequent level.
Also allows friends to say "I gawd, this place is terrible. Let's leave it all behind. I'll meet you in level 22?" They then hold hands and take the irreversible plunge into the unknown ;)
How would friends coordinate their simultaneous exit without being observed by the people they want to leave behind? Would you allow more than one group of friends to leave the same level, or do they first have to migrate to level 2, then immediately to level 3?
I don't consider it to be large. The (intentionally) mostly poor design and SEO helps with that. I think that's a good thing - really helps keep discussions mostly on-target and interesting, and promote the high-value content over the jokes.
Though I do think the place can be a bit humorless and pedantic at times...
> I guess the only website I can think of that allows comments and is super-popular with the general public is Facebook, but since it's sorta-non-anonymous, people don't spill hatred all over the place.
That's actually a very interesting point.
I think a lot of the stereotypical poor Internet comments only exist because the author is anonymous and is talking to a faceless account. (Not all of it, of course, some of it is probably due to the communications medium.) I can't find the original post that I liked, but this one[0] has some interesting information on allowing an attacker to identify with a victim. I would think that would apply in this case too some extent.
If you actually had to vouch for what you said and what you said online were associated with you as a person, and you had a ballpark idea of who you were talking to, I think people would add more filters to themselves. That kind of social pressure is largely self-policing. Jerks will be jerks, but hopefully fewer non-jerks would turn into jerks.
I like the option of anonymity, but in all honesty I think it mostly just helps the edge cases, not large-scale discussion. Is it any wonder that Facebook and Google have tried to enforce "real names" policies and the Play store now links all reviews to a G+ account? There are other reasons for those moves, but it can't hurt to encourage the civility that accountability brings. Anonymity can bring out both the best and worst in people.
Do we have any examples of large Internet communities with unilateral good discussion?
They way I've thought about it, the subreddits with better user content/discussion are primarily because:
* They attract fewer people, so only users more dedicated to the topic and more dedicated to finding a good community will find them. These users tend to be better contributors.
* Heavy-handed authoritarian moderation.
The first one only works so long as the subreddit is less popular. The more it will regress toward the mean of Internet contributions, which I believe to be inherently low.
The second one only works well when you have a specific topic with carefully defined rules and very active moderators with no regard for popular consensus and said moderators don't develop a power complex.
I don't think reddit has shown any interesting solutions to the problem of high quality contribution. At the risk of sounding elitist, we've seen how popularity kills quality discussion on countless communities over the years. Again, I think massive discussion tends toward being inherently low on average.
Edit: Beaten by noir_lord by a couple minutes listing the exact same two points.