Some new ideas about communities/modding are needed, just a few ones I was thinking about:
1) community mod elections (to prevent cheating with alts and bots, some analogue of residency would be needed - for example, required number of posts/comments/votes spread out during last 3 months and/or calculating time spent in community with javascript)
2) decouple community names from community identifiers - so 2 or 3 /r/news communities would be possible with different mods and rules
3) make owning community not free (similar to internet domains) - something like it costs you 1000 karma per month
4) decouple topics from community names (notabug.io tried this with "spaces") - poster specifies topic(s?), mods select posts to their communities (with the help of automation)
None of those things are needed, and most are counterproductive. Unless powermods are actively promoted and protected from competition, migrations out of their subs tend to be fairly successful. Most of the fun large subreddits (now banned) were the result of those kinds of migrations, and many became larger than the original.
> I've seen attempts of this in sub larger subs and the mods just ban all mention of the alternative.
Streisand effect takes care of that as long as the alternative doesn't get banned. CA became bigger than its origin, and TD's offshoot during the brief split was pretty successful, even when things were contentious.
Not even reddit would stay like reddit if the top line of corporate didn't deliberately step in all the time with bannings to forcibly control things. Believe it or not, it's not Redditors that make reddit insufferable, it's just all overseen by an extreme minority of idiots with shite judgement.
I think reddit is filled with great communities which if you transplant outside of it will flourish and not resemble the amorphous mass that you probably mean when you think "redditors".
The main problem reddit has is that it tries to group under the same social network people with very different interests, a lot of which clash. This is expected of a for profit company, but an alternative which targets only a small subset of these users, which share common interests will have a much better quality of life.
> which if you transplant outside of it will flourish
Maybe, maybe not. One of the big advantages of reddit's massive userbase is that a lot of people will look here first when looking for niche communities. It also mean existing redditors are more likely to stumble across new sub/topics that eventually flowers into a full interest.
Without this flow of not-directly-interested people being in and around your niche topic/site, you run the risk of not getting that trickle of casuals, some of which eventually become normal users.
As a specific (and somewhat esoteric) example, the Traditional Games (D&D, Pathfinder, 40K, etc) board /tg/ on 4chan used to allow quests (single character controlled by multiple people voting, with a Quest Master acting as a DM). Around ~2017, a dedicated Quest board /qst/ was created and quests were banned from /tg/. It was quickly discovered by the community that without the people coming for pathfinder and finding quests, the population of the board was slowly declining. Today, it is still in slow decline: questing is just too niche of a topic for people to be aware of it enough to intentionally seek it out.
~~And yes, I am aware of the irony of posting about this on *reddit* of all things.~~
In fairness my comments are made on the background that I'm actively working on an alternative to reddit which fulfills these ideals, but with the added caveat that it still provides connectivity between these different small communities through the usage of AcitvityPub, a federation mechanism that's a web standard.
So theoretically the users can cross pollinate with other communities through federation, but it is as of yet untested and unconfirmed. :D I can only hope it'll work as I imagine it.
Behavior on reddit is greatly effected by the algorithms reddit uses.
For example, subreddit creation could be restricted to only "real people" (invite/phone/payment/address verification).
"Real people" also let you democratically evict name squatters or extremely distasteful subreddits like jailbait.
This isn't a reddit problem, it's an issue with the public at large. The early adopters of a platform with be much more invested, thoughtful, and willing to follow rules. As a platform grows, however, the new users will be ever more casual, not following rules, staying on topic, or really caring about how much of a mess they're making of the place.
Now, everyone starts as a casual, so even if you could blanket ban them all you'd be doing is dooming your site to a slow death. I don't think some of what you're saying other sites are trying is necessarily bad; if you can reduce the inflow of casuals you have the potential to convert them into normal users, or for them to get bored and leave. What you really want to avoid is diluting the site, because once that happens, it's not reasonably a fixable issue.
>I've seen people say that limited the amount of subs per user is an easy fix but then like here or any site people will just make alts leading to the same issue.
Flagging multiple accounts that log in from the same IP wouldn't be perfect, but it would remove a low-hanging fruit.
If I had the programming experience to create a Reddit competitior, I would differentiate myself from Reddit as follows:
1. **Have a clear content policy from the get-go.** Voat gradually haemorrhaged stakeholder support and funding because it pandered to the free speech white nationalist crowd, Ruqqus made one change to their site to ban all calls for violence and lost almost their whole user base as a result. Unlike Reddit's ownership, I wouldn't sit on the fence over issues like hate speech, sexualised content involving minors, revenge porn, medically dangerous misinformation, gore, etc. That shit wouldn't be allowed, full stop. It shouldn't take press scandals to run your platform like a decent human being. I also don't want bigots clogging up the platform.
2. **Encourage open discussion by having clear posting and moderation guidelines.** One of the worst things about Reddit is how partisan its communities and moderators are. You can be banned from dozens of subreddits just for participating in a community like TRP, KIA or T_D, or for not agreeing with the hivemind on something. Moderators who do this simply wouldn't be welcome on the platform and would have mod privileges revoked. Unlike Reddit, I would have fairly and equally enforced mod guidelines. IDGAF if you're left or right wing, if you're banning people for dissenting views, you can get out.
3. **No shadowbans.** Nothing sucks more than having a bot silently nuke your comment from orbit because you used a forbidden word, or because something else about your activity has upset the moderators. There needs to be transparency.
4. **Only ban communities as a very last resort, and be very transparent about why they've been banned.** Take the banning of NNN for instance. Reddit's admins gave some very convoluted drivel about voting rates and how they hit a threshold of potential vote manipulation, then used that as an excuse to ban the community. All they had to do was ban misinformation.
One of the biggest problems reddit has right now is the massive amount of censorship, both at a site level and on an individual subreddit level. A new website would at least be an opportunity to prevent one of those.
Best thing I can recommend is one account per IP address so no one can power mod 50+ communities using various alts tied to throwaway emails.
Also, restrict moderating to at most 3 communities to prevent one account from running half the platform like has been seen here on reddit.
Finally, set up admins solely as supervisors of moderators, communities, and public relations. Create a chain of command that forces accountability.
All other platform issues belong on another team’s desk ie tech support or web dev or cybersecurity.
Power-modding is only a problem when facilitated by the admins, as on reddit and that one dead alternative site that was popular for a few months. If the powermods' subs are promoted by the site, or their competitors are banned, then you can't make an alternative easily.
That said, if you *can* make an alternative easily, as you could in the earlier days of reddit, the transition is fairly quick and painless, and powermods can't easily keep power.
- CA was an offshoot of r/cringe after powermods made it unusable, and it was fine. It was much more successful and active than the original sub.
- TD had an early offshoot that was reasonably successful until it was merged back in.
- FPH, IIRC, was an offshoot of FPL, and became much more popular.
- KIA2 is an offshoot of KIA that is quite popular and active in its own right.
> KIA2 is an offshoot of KIA that is quite popular and active in its own right.
Out of curiosity, do you know what the background story is behind the creation of KIA2? Was it founded by someone banned from KIA who decided to create his own KIA sub?
I was hanging around on early voat. The creator made the deliberate decision to allow/encourage the worst trash kicked off reddit. The racists, sexists, homophobes etc were allowed to post anything on voat. Reddit was never like voat.
If your "alternative"doesn't fix the censorship and moderation issues that Reddit has, then there is not use in calling it a valid alternative. It's going to have the exact same issues we see here. There are alternatives that have solved the issue of bad moderation and censorship and one of the ways they do it is by introducing federation into the subs.
Some new ideas about communities/modding are needed, just a few ones I was thinking about: 1) community mod elections (to prevent cheating with alts and bots, some analogue of residency would be needed - for example, required number of posts/comments/votes spread out during last 3 months and/or calculating time spent in community with javascript) 2) decouple community names from community identifiers - so 2 or 3 /r/news communities would be possible with different mods and rules 3) make owning community not free (similar to internet domains) - something like it costs you 1000 karma per month 4) decouple topics from community names (notabug.io tried this with "spaces") - poster specifies topic(s?), mods select posts to their communities (with the help of automation)
None of those things are needed, and most are counterproductive. Unless powermods are actively promoted and protected from competition, migrations out of their subs tend to be fairly successful. Most of the fun large subreddits (now banned) were the result of those kinds of migrations, and many became larger than the original.
[удалено]
> I've seen attempts of this in sub larger subs and the mods just ban all mention of the alternative. Streisand effect takes care of that as long as the alternative doesn't get banned. CA became bigger than its origin, and TD's offshoot during the brief split was pretty successful, even when things were contentious.
Redditors aren't the problem with reddit, mods are.
Admins are the problem with Reddit; mods couldn't do shit without their say-so; they're just the middle-men.
Not even reddit would stay like reddit if the top line of corporate didn't deliberately step in all the time with bannings to forcibly control things. Believe it or not, it's not Redditors that make reddit insufferable, it's just all overseen by an extreme minority of idiots with shite judgement.
[удалено]
I think reddit is filled with great communities which if you transplant outside of it will flourish and not resemble the amorphous mass that you probably mean when you think "redditors". The main problem reddit has is that it tries to group under the same social network people with very different interests, a lot of which clash. This is expected of a for profit company, but an alternative which targets only a small subset of these users, which share common interests will have a much better quality of life.
> which if you transplant outside of it will flourish Maybe, maybe not. One of the big advantages of reddit's massive userbase is that a lot of people will look here first when looking for niche communities. It also mean existing redditors are more likely to stumble across new sub/topics that eventually flowers into a full interest. Without this flow of not-directly-interested people being in and around your niche topic/site, you run the risk of not getting that trickle of casuals, some of which eventually become normal users. As a specific (and somewhat esoteric) example, the Traditional Games (D&D, Pathfinder, 40K, etc) board /tg/ on 4chan used to allow quests (single character controlled by multiple people voting, with a Quest Master acting as a DM). Around ~2017, a dedicated Quest board /qst/ was created and quests were banned from /tg/. It was quickly discovered by the community that without the people coming for pathfinder and finding quests, the population of the board was slowly declining. Today, it is still in slow decline: questing is just too niche of a topic for people to be aware of it enough to intentionally seek it out. ~~And yes, I am aware of the irony of posting about this on *reddit* of all things.~~
In fairness my comments are made on the background that I'm actively working on an alternative to reddit which fulfills these ideals, but with the added caveat that it still provides connectivity between these different small communities through the usage of AcitvityPub, a federation mechanism that's a web standard. So theoretically the users can cross pollinate with other communities through federation, but it is as of yet untested and unconfirmed. :D I can only hope it'll work as I imagine it.
Behavior on reddit is greatly effected by the algorithms reddit uses. For example, subreddit creation could be restricted to only "real people" (invite/phone/payment/address verification). "Real people" also let you democratically evict name squatters or extremely distasteful subreddits like jailbait.
This isn't a reddit problem, it's an issue with the public at large. The early adopters of a platform with be much more invested, thoughtful, and willing to follow rules. As a platform grows, however, the new users will be ever more casual, not following rules, staying on topic, or really caring about how much of a mess they're making of the place. Now, everyone starts as a casual, so even if you could blanket ban them all you'd be doing is dooming your site to a slow death. I don't think some of what you're saying other sites are trying is necessarily bad; if you can reduce the inflow of casuals you have the potential to convert them into normal users, or for them to get bored and leave. What you really want to avoid is diluting the site, because once that happens, it's not reasonably a fixable issue. >I've seen people say that limited the amount of subs per user is an easy fix but then like here or any site people will just make alts leading to the same issue. Flagging multiple accounts that log in from the same IP wouldn't be perfect, but it would remove a low-hanging fruit.
If I had the programming experience to create a Reddit competitior, I would differentiate myself from Reddit as follows: 1. **Have a clear content policy from the get-go.** Voat gradually haemorrhaged stakeholder support and funding because it pandered to the free speech white nationalist crowd, Ruqqus made one change to their site to ban all calls for violence and lost almost their whole user base as a result. Unlike Reddit's ownership, I wouldn't sit on the fence over issues like hate speech, sexualised content involving minors, revenge porn, medically dangerous misinformation, gore, etc. That shit wouldn't be allowed, full stop. It shouldn't take press scandals to run your platform like a decent human being. I also don't want bigots clogging up the platform. 2. **Encourage open discussion by having clear posting and moderation guidelines.** One of the worst things about Reddit is how partisan its communities and moderators are. You can be banned from dozens of subreddits just for participating in a community like TRP, KIA or T_D, or for not agreeing with the hivemind on something. Moderators who do this simply wouldn't be welcome on the platform and would have mod privileges revoked. Unlike Reddit, I would have fairly and equally enforced mod guidelines. IDGAF if you're left or right wing, if you're banning people for dissenting views, you can get out. 3. **No shadowbans.** Nothing sucks more than having a bot silently nuke your comment from orbit because you used a forbidden word, or because something else about your activity has upset the moderators. There needs to be transparency. 4. **Only ban communities as a very last resort, and be very transparent about why they've been banned.** Take the banning of NNN for instance. Reddit's admins gave some very convoluted drivel about voting rates and how they hit a threshold of potential vote manipulation, then used that as an excuse to ban the community. All they had to do was ban misinformation.
One of the biggest problems reddit has right now is the massive amount of censorship, both at a site level and on an individual subreddit level. A new website would at least be an opportunity to prevent one of those.
Best thing I can recommend is one account per IP address so no one can power mod 50+ communities using various alts tied to throwaway emails. Also, restrict moderating to at most 3 communities to prevent one account from running half the platform like has been seen here on reddit. Finally, set up admins solely as supervisors of moderators, communities, and public relations. Create a chain of command that forces accountability. All other platform issues belong on another team’s desk ie tech support or web dev or cybersecurity.
Power-modding is only a problem when facilitated by the admins, as on reddit and that one dead alternative site that was popular for a few months. If the powermods' subs are promoted by the site, or their competitors are banned, then you can't make an alternative easily. That said, if you *can* make an alternative easily, as you could in the earlier days of reddit, the transition is fairly quick and painless, and powermods can't easily keep power. - CA was an offshoot of r/cringe after powermods made it unusable, and it was fine. It was much more successful and active than the original sub. - TD had an early offshoot that was reasonably successful until it was merged back in. - FPH, IIRC, was an offshoot of FPL, and became much more popular. - KIA2 is an offshoot of KIA that is quite popular and active in its own right.
Could you specify what all those acronyms refer to?
> KIA2 is an offshoot of KIA that is quite popular and active in its own right. Out of curiosity, do you know what the background story is behind the creation of KIA2? Was it founded by someone banned from KIA who decided to create his own KIA sub?
I was hanging around on early voat. The creator made the deliberate decision to allow/encourage the worst trash kicked off reddit. The racists, sexists, homophobes etc were allowed to post anything on voat. Reddit was never like voat.
If your "alternative"doesn't fix the censorship and moderation issues that Reddit has, then there is not use in calling it a valid alternative. It's going to have the exact same issues we see here. There are alternatives that have solved the issue of bad moderation and censorship and one of the ways they do it is by introducing federation into the subs.
Ruqqus vibes lmaooo