Good article, but you give reddit too much credit. For the most part, it's a cesspit of echochambers, shadowbanning, powertripping mods and so on. The same dynamics the unfold on facebook and twitter also happen on reddit.
I think that human nature just kind of naturally creates that dynamic. Most human beings are the type of petty narcissists who cannot be trusted with even the slightest scrap of power, even something as trivial as modding an internet forum. It just goes right to their heads and they start having an ego trip thinking that they're the kings of Turd Hill. Look at our politics, government, corporations, etc, and you'll see that pattern repeat itself again and again.
However, I think Reddit's algorithm is pretty good at discouraging this behavior, or at least not encouraging it. Twitter or Facebook, by contrast, actively promote this kind of personality defect.
Reddit’s problem, in terms of your example distributions, is that it attracts a very narrow and small portion of society. And because subreddits naturally create even smaller, specific echo chambers, the idea of a useful distribution is completely gone. The idea of reddit is good but it’s slowly morphed into having its own big problems. Using the idea of reddit for the large social media platforms would be a better success than reddit itself.
I agree, but that all starts with implementing a downvote system so that the popularity of a comment or post is correctly linked to societies favorable and unfavorable opinions. It ties very closely to the main point of this article: namely, that when you have a system that is only designed around people's positive feedback but which artificially eliminates negative feedback, then you wind up with the social media algorithm promoting things that are wildly out of step with what society wants. People are evolutionarily designed to hate: it's both a useful and beneficial emotion which we evolved for a very good reason. When the social media algorithm doesn't factor hate in, then the things that are promoted on social media become very different from what society in general believes.
I think that the various subreddits are very good at reflecting preferences within those specific subreddits (which do tend to be echo chambers). The bigger a subreddit is, the more in step it comes to the opinions of society as a whole. The overall accuracy of Reddit in measuring user preferences can largely be attributed to the fact that Reddit has a system where users can express not just support of an opinion but also hatred of that opinion, and the algorithm reflects that. On a subconscious level, hate constitutes a very large factor in most people's political values, so an algorithm that doesn't reflect that is going to have totally delusional values. Most people don't like to talk about this because it reflects badly on humanity in general, but that's what makes many aspies superior to normies - because we're willing to have the honest discussions that they're not.
Good article, but you give reddit too much credit. For the most part, it's a cesspit of echochambers, shadowbanning, powertripping mods and so on. The same dynamics the unfold on facebook and twitter also happen on reddit.
I think that human nature just kind of naturally creates that dynamic. Most human beings are the type of petty narcissists who cannot be trusted with even the slightest scrap of power, even something as trivial as modding an internet forum. It just goes right to their heads and they start having an ego trip thinking that they're the kings of Turd Hill. Look at our politics, government, corporations, etc, and you'll see that pattern repeat itself again and again.
However, I think Reddit's algorithm is pretty good at discouraging this behavior, or at least not encouraging it. Twitter or Facebook, by contrast, actively promote this kind of personality defect.
Reddit’s problem, in terms of your example distributions, is that it attracts a very narrow and small portion of society. And because subreddits naturally create even smaller, specific echo chambers, the idea of a useful distribution is completely gone. The idea of reddit is good but it’s slowly morphed into having its own big problems. Using the idea of reddit for the large social media platforms would be a better success than reddit itself.
I agree, but that all starts with implementing a downvote system so that the popularity of a comment or post is correctly linked to societies favorable and unfavorable opinions. It ties very closely to the main point of this article: namely, that when you have a system that is only designed around people's positive feedback but which artificially eliminates negative feedback, then you wind up with the social media algorithm promoting things that are wildly out of step with what society wants. People are evolutionarily designed to hate: it's both a useful and beneficial emotion which we evolved for a very good reason. When the social media algorithm doesn't factor hate in, then the things that are promoted on social media become very different from what society in general believes.
I think that the various subreddits are very good at reflecting preferences within those specific subreddits (which do tend to be echo chambers). The bigger a subreddit is, the more in step it comes to the opinions of society as a whole. The overall accuracy of Reddit in measuring user preferences can largely be attributed to the fact that Reddit has a system where users can express not just support of an opinion but also hatred of that opinion, and the algorithm reflects that. On a subconscious level, hate constitutes a very large factor in most people's political values, so an algorithm that doesn't reflect that is going to have totally delusional values. Most people don't like to talk about this because it reflects badly on humanity in general, but that's what makes many aspies superior to normies - because we're willing to have the honest discussions that they're not.