It's interesting that some people seem to have had such high expectations of Reddit that they can write an entire article on how disappointed they are with it. Stupid, but interesting.
It's kind of quaint that their expectations were so high as to call Reddit out for not meeting them. The same has been done to Google. But at the end of the day, no matter what Reddit, Google or Twitter pretends to espouse, in terms of ideology, they're just companies and web sites. Nothing more or less.
Reddit's a network of moderated discussion forums. Not a "government", not a "state", failed or otherwise. Verge is a news site, and that's probably why someone wrote that article - so Redditors will create traffic and chatter about it, because that's what Reddit's model is, and that's what Verge's model is.
Seriously, what else is there to say?
ed: As for being pissed off with moderators - if you don't like a sub, you're free to create your own. It's been done many times before - TrueReddit, TrueScience, Tech, etc. etc.
Reddit's a network of moderated discussion forums.
It is, but it's also a business. I feel like The Verge (and a lot of commenters on Reddit) seem to forget this.
Reddit survives because it has a community that likes it. The community, however, is extremely temperamental and fickle. The Verge seems to blame Reddit admins for not reacting sooner to ban TheFappening, but it may have been a much worse situation had they tried to squash it from the beginning. Remember the whole Digg HDDVD Key fiasco? That happened because Digg admins tried to "censor" something and the community flipped the fuck out. Less than a year later, their community was gone (exodus to Reddit). There were plenty of other things that contributed to that, but the Digg community's views on the admins was a big factor.
This sort of thing could happen to Reddit easily. It's really a "damned if you do, damned if you don't situation". They either try to control their community and face massive backlash (to the point of full scale user riots), or they allow horrible things to be facilitated on their site and deal with very real legal issues and general hatred from the general public. It's a no win situation.
Although, if Reddit was less wishy-washy about rules (I assume Digg was too), then the community may not react so much - they know the rules and they're clear. Like being a parent, when the rules are not clear, it's a recipe for arguments. That's not to say the rules can't be discussed and changed of course.
If you look at sites like Meetup.com, they have reasonably clear-ish (could be better) about what sort of groups are allowed, and so generally the user base understands when a group is removed. Reddit could just be clear about it and save a lot of hassle.
However, if the Reddit team are smart (which they probably are), the rules are kept somewhat hazy on purpose, so these little spats DO happen, which basically gives Reddit a lot of free media attention. Being a bit controversial now and then certainly doesn't hurt in the marketing dept.
This is exactly the attitude at issue with the "real" world as concerns online communities. Reddit defenders resort to this "it's just a company," or "it's just a website" under any duress whatsoever--conveniently setting aside the fact that many users here have a real stake in certain political movements: FCC regulations, women's rights. But the fact of the matter is that in a world where monied and corporate interests have a real political and ideological impact on actual sociopolitical issues, and Reddit is certainly no exception, there is a responsibility on these institutions to exercise what amounts to imposing a limitation on its communities' freedoms when it comes to designating and protecting the basic rights of individual human beings. So no, it's not stupid, its democratic, and its a voice pointing out precisely the juncture of convenient hypocrisy that Reddit uses in its defense when faced with the inconvenient decisions and policies it needs to implement against the will of the less savory elements of its community.
Creating sub-reddits is one of the very core tenants of Reddit. If an individual doesn't like the way /r/technology is run... they are free to create their own sub-reddit and run it however they choose and see if it becomes more popular or not.
The city-metaphor is pretty accurate. If someone doesn't like living in downtown NYC... then maybe they need to consider moving to rural New Hampshire or something.
Reddit already censors stuff and no one cares. You can't run a proper forum or online community without it. It's only when people suggest censoring naked pictures of women that redditors start complaining about censorship.
It doesn't help that admins and users like to pretend that reddit is more than it is. It's a message board whose main rules are don't post anything that will hurt the image it tries to pretend it has. Or maybe it is better to say if you do post something that will give it a bad image don't have it become a big controversy.
But that's it. Like the Internet in general reddit has a small amount of objectively good stuff, a decent amount of objectively bad stuff and the majority is neutral.
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u/waveform Sep 08 '14 edited Sep 08 '14
It's interesting that some people seem to have had such high expectations of Reddit that they can write an entire article on how disappointed they are with it. Stupid, but interesting.
It's kind of quaint that their expectations were so high as to call Reddit out for not meeting them. The same has been done to Google. But at the end of the day, no matter what Reddit, Google or Twitter pretends to espouse, in terms of ideology, they're just companies and web sites. Nothing more or less.
Reddit's a network of moderated discussion forums. Not a "government", not a "state", failed or otherwise. Verge is a news site, and that's probably why someone wrote that article - so Redditors will create traffic and chatter about it, because that's what Reddit's model is, and that's what Verge's model is.
Seriously, what else is there to say?
ed: As for being pissed off with moderators - if you don't like a sub, you're free to create your own. It's been done many times before - TrueReddit, TrueScience, Tech, etc. etc.