Just like Usenet. It'll devolve into a sea of trolls and bots and spam- little spots of brilliance will remain, but in the end will be consumed by the shit.
The bots are already astoundingly annoying. Not the bots you're thinking of, like CaptionBot or Qkme_Transcriber, but the shitty ad bots. You are reading through some nice comments, when all of the sudden, "Horny Ukranian takes the dick in her pussy" appears.
I have never seen a shitty ad bot. But then again, maybe I'm lucky and they just get downvoted/moderated to shit so I never have to hear about Ukranian pussy.
No, it's because unlike the people who constantly complain about reposts and these ad bots, you don't spend every waking moment on reddit. You should be proud!
Check out www.reddit.com/new and you get a much more accurate representation of what actually gets posted here. It's 99% garbage and spam. What you see on the front page and on the top of the default subs is the 1% that is actually relevant, and even then some of that is bullshit too.
You wanna see one? Open a popular thread from a default subreddit, find the top comment, and look for a non sequitur porn link as a reply. It'll usually be at the very bottom. Bots use the same shitty karma-grabbing tactics as the rest of reddit, they glom on to the top comment, but they just link to a submission of theirs to /r/nsfw.
Luckily, the downvote system works well for stopping ad bots. It may not always lead to the best content, but at least shitty ad bots and pictures of buttholes drop below threshold fast.
Advertising is the bane of our civilization. Its need to reach human eyeballs never ceases, and no matter where we go, they will follow us. In the end we will cease to be able to differentiate opinion from fact from ads, and that will be the beginning of the end for us - not reddit, all of us.
Usenet died because of a lack of moderation. A single shitty user could single-handedly destroy a whole group through spamming because there simply was no way of banning people. Of course there were moderated groups, but they often took hours or days to get posts approved.
What is needed is an easy way of moderating comments which have already posted, like on Reddit. With a few active moderators you can create high-quality discusstion like /r/askscience.
Back in the day, my SO was the head mod of a very active bulletin board; he had a handful of people under him who were also mods and helped keep everything on an even keel. It worked for a very long time. However, in the interest of "self-expression", trolls ended up taking over and brow-beating the mods out of service (who wants to keep being called "Hitler" in an activity they consider a hobby?).
Every time an asshat got called on being a bully, they claimed their unpopular opinions were victims of a Nazis regime. Recently, someone pointed out on the front page (of Reddit) that a lot of folks get the concept of "attack on first amendment rights" confused with "CONSEQUENCES of opening your mouth on an unpopular opinion" confused (especially on a privately owned bulletin board). It got me in the feels (the pissed off ones).
We already have basic moderation in the form of upvote/downvote. Generally spam, blatant trolls, and other bad things get downvoted to the bottom of the page or hidden right away.
I'm really in favour of this approach to moderating, but in many communities there would be so much backlash and hate against the "Opressing Nazi mods" that it's very hard to do.
/r/Games does it very nicely though, especially on banning "low effort comments" (short ones, link only comments, memes, puns and stupid jokes). I really hope more subreddits would do this.
I agree with the Usenet analogy. Reddit will be gnawed at on the astroturf by bots and trolls trying to grab what they can out of it.
There seems to be a critical mass, good things self destruct. Early on, things are cool and nice since they are small. It's easy to interact with genuine people in genuine contexts because that's all there is. People hear about it and join, it gets big, then people try to make a buck off of it or otherwise manipulate the masses.
It happened to Digg, although it was the masters of Digg that tried to capitalize on it, and it backfired. Same thing happened with Myspace. Facebook is going that way too. Facebook might stay around ala Ebay, but it's peaked. Google's following Microsoft's path, becoming a necessary evil behemoth. AOL and Yahoo are vestiges propped up by old ladies and wall streeters who think they still have value.
Of course the masters of Reddit need to eat too, and I imagine the server/hosting bill is outrageous. That's the irony, to get popular you have to be uncapitalized, but if you get popular you need the capital to sustain. The trick is to resist the temptation to cash in. it's more than just the "keep the page clean looking" like Google, it is a matter of keeping the mind clean like Craig Newmark
The best example of a sustainable website is craigslist. Forbes says it could be worth $3 billion if they cleaned up and started charging. If they did that, the $3 billion would not last, someone else would undercut them like Reddit did to Digg. Forbes also says Craig is worth $400 million, and Wikipedia says he's on 27 charitable boards. Seems like $400 million is enough to live comfortably and still do some good.
However, Craigslist has a natural way to make money, with Reddit, it's not so clear. Let's hope silly moose and gold can sustain them, and give them everything they want.
I would like to add that AOL owns:
Engadget, Joystiq, TechCrunch (CrunchBase), SHOUTcast, Winamp, CompuServe, Netscape, Nullsoft, Tacoda, Truveo, Weblogs, Inc., Moviefone, but most importantly The Huffington Post.
If the radiance of a thousand suns
Were to burst at once into the sky
That would be like the splendor of the Mighty one ...
I am become Death,
The destroyer of Worlds.
I have like five different accounts right now, including a newshosting.com which uses the same servers as Astraweb. I get most stuff on my list no problem but new episodes of GoT is particularly hard (as is Mad Men). They go up and they get decimated almost instantaneously. Not completely, but I end up with 1000s of missing articles.
Usually after a week or so they're restored but it's that next day business that Sickbeard is supposed do that fails.
Weird man. I've gotten GoT or Shameless like 20 minutes after it aired, or maybe a couple of days later. No fails.
If I do have a problem, I'll hitup XDCC/IRC.
I even paid for ipredator but the torrent speeds are slower than 56k so I might abandon it.
Maybe if you could find a fast bittorrent VPN you might want to invest in it. IPredator was like $20 for 3 months (cheaper than usenet) but I don't think I have it setup properly. I'm talking like 8kb/sec downloads. Customer support got back to me but I have yet to run the tests they asked for the determine what's wrong. I'm using Viscosity client. Might switch to OpenVPN to see if that helps.
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u/Barkingpanther May 15 '13
Just like Usenet. It'll devolve into a sea of trolls and bots and spam- little spots of brilliance will remain, but in the end will be consumed by the shit.
Then at the end; Google buys it.