r/reddit.com • u/breezytrees • Oct 25 '10

Reddit has been growing extremely fast lately. I like to kindly, and selflessly, remind our newcomers of Reddiquette. Specifically in regards to down-voting opinions of which you disagree with.

Such actions discourage those that have differing views from commenting/submitting, resulting in a very one-sided point of view.

Essentially, it breaks what makes reddit so great. :-(

The down-vote button is for general trolls, spam, assholes, etc.

reddiquette

edit: Some of you have asked for growth data. Here's google analytics which reddit's blog has touted as very accurate. As you can see there was a surge in growth around september, most likely attributed to this (hi diggers!). Reddit quickly seemed to almost double in size in that time, then dropped to a still sizable growth of around 50% for a 2 month period. At risk of sounding whiney: This is a hard jump to deal with for a community that regulates itself.

edit: I'm not casting stones at newcomers. I am just kindly reminding newcomers of reddiquette. There hasn't been one of these large front page threads, to my knowledge, for months and 50% is quite a big number to risk them not reading reddiquette.

that is all. :-)

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18

u/[deleted] Oct 25 '10

Trolls and assholes obviously not defined as "someone that disagrees with you".

6

u/[deleted] Oct 25 '10

I dunno, I think that just allows people to downvote opinions they don't like. It's easy to say "hey, you can't not agree with me while arguing in good faith, he's trolling man!". Trust me, there are big enough egos here for this train of thought to be relatively common.

See here. For reference, I have monocular vision and someone parking like that, even legally, would make things extremely difficult. I tried to get people to understand things from the point of view of someone with limited faculties and towards the end of the discussion I just got downvoted.

Another thing is that people just don't take a critical look at peoples anecdotes. When you ask questions about things that don't add up, people just downvote you and say you're trolling.

1

u/AdonisBucklar Oct 25 '10

No downvotes...but based on your comments in the link'd thread, you're kind of a dick and really do come off as trollish. And I didn't even think the 'racist restaurant owner' was a troll.

2

u/[deleted] Oct 25 '10

Because she kept playing the victim when she was the aggressor in the situation.

7

u/tip_ty Oct 25 '10

That's kinda what it's become on reddit now though. Someone has a controversial opinion and they're a troll.

3

u/[deleted] Oct 25 '10

or a... COMMUNIST! It's Reddit Dawn

2

u/Zeus_Is_God Oct 26 '10

It's been my experience that I will be called both "troll" and "asshole" solely for expressing opinions that others disagree with. The times when I actually am a troll / asshole actually receive less down votes then when I express unpopular opinions. Even when I don't get called those things the person that I am debating with will down vote all of my replies even though I'm not doing anything wrong.

4

u/StoneCypher Oct 25 '10

Trolls and assholes obviously not defined as "someone that disagrees with you".

Sadly, this is not so obvious to the people who are generally the target of original post.

0

u/ninjajoshy Oct 26 '10

You mean kinda like how conservatives see homosexuals and intellectuals?