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DonRocks

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Redditt is an "edgy" social media site.  It can be harsh but it can also be great. Media sites read Redditt all the time to pick out trends and interesting perspectives. Edgy can be a synonym for brutal at its most vicious   I went back and looked at comments, sorted them from the most recent comments.  Stoppleman was mostly brutalized by commentators that hate him.  It was harsh.

Don:  I believe the law around internet content mostly favors the carriers of content.  That might be why Yelp has escaped losing in court.

I know barely nothing about Reddit, but there's a disturbing letter written by their retired CEO in today's Washington Post:

"Former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao: The Trolls Are Winning The Battle for the Internet"

Pao says, among other things:

 "This isn't an easy problem to solve. To understand the challenges facing today's Internet content platforms, layer onto that original balancing act a desire to grow audience and generate revenue. A large portion of the Internet audience enjoys edgy content and the behavior of the more extreme users; it wants to see the bad with the good, so it becomes harder to get rid of the ugly. But to attract more mainstream audiences and bring in the big-budget advertisers, you must hide or remove the ugly."

This *is* an easy problem to solve, damn it. I understand this community is a drop of water in the ocean, but it's a darned high-quality drop. The "trolls" on the other websites, at least most of them, are perfectly decent people; they just need to be shown some respect and pelted with kindness. To heck with Reddit; I'm going to start Rockit. Somebody find me some seed money, please.

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I know barely nothing about Reddit, but there's a disturbing letter written by their retired CEO in today's Washington Post:

"Former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao: The Trolls Are Winning The Battle for the Internet"

Pao says, among other things:

 "This isn't an easy problem to solve. To understand the challenges facing today's Internet content platforms, layer onto that original balancing act a desire to grow audience and generate revenue. A large portion of the Internet audience enjoys edgy content and the behavior of the more extreme users; it wants to see the bad with the good, so it becomes harder to get rid of the ugly. But to attract more mainstream audiences and bring in the big-budget advertisers, you must hide or remove the ugly."

This *is* an easy problem to solve, damn it. I understand this community is a drop of water in the ocean, but it's a darned high-quality drop. The "trolls" on the other websites, at least most of them, are perfectly decent people; they just need to be shown some respect and pelted with kindness. To heck with Reddit; I'm going to start Rockit. Somebody find me some seed money, please.

"When the Internet's Moderators are Anything But" by Adrian Chen on nytimes.com

People in this industry don't know what they're doing.

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People in this industry don't know what they're doing.

They know exactly what they're doing.  It's all about drawing eyeballs without the traditional expense of creating content.  It doesn't much matter if the content is any good, as long as lots of people are reading it.  The vile content that inevitably results is often better for this purpose than anything useful or informative.  That's a sad commentary on "society," but such is the world in which we live.

That said, there is still a big market for useful, informative content.  As you've learned from the countless hours you've spent organizing and policing this site, it's just extremely costly to create.  Imagine what it would have cost to pay someone a decent salary to do it.  Then multiply that by every major market in the U.S.  Suddenly, we're talking about (many) millions in startup capital.

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They know exactly what they're doing.  It's all about drawing eyeballs without the traditional expense of creating content.  It doesn't much matter if the content is any good, as long as lots of people are reading it.  The vile content that inevitably results is often better for this purpose than anything useful or informative.  That's a sad commentary on "society," but such is the world in which we live.

That said, there is still a big market for useful, informative content.  As you've learned from the countless hours you've spent organizing and policing this site, it's just extremely costly to create.  Imagine what it would have cost to pay someone a decent salary to do it.  Then multiply that by every major market in the U.S.  Suddenly, we're talking about (many) millions in startup capital.

I don't want to parse your post to pieces (and me doing so is the only way we could possibly have a cogent discussion about this), but suffice it to say we disagree on numerous things - some fundamental, and others much more nuanced. That said, it doesn't matter, because you can have two drastically different philosophies, business models, or whatever you want to call them, and both can succeed.

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I don't want to parse your post to pieces (and me doing so is the only way we could possibly have a cogent discussion about this), but suffice it to say we disagree on numerous things - some fundamental, and others much more nuanced. That said, it doesn't matter, because you can have two drastically different philosophies, business models, or whatever you want to call them, and both can succeed.

Pity.  It would be an interesting discussion.  As the article you link to points out:

Companies like Facebook and Google try to create the illusion that their platforms are moderated by algorithms, not people. They quietly employ huge teams of human moderators, working under strict nondisclosure agreements, and yet these platforms feel the same pressure as Reddit to expand faster than their human resources allow. So an increasing amount of what once was moderation now falls to normal users like you and me.

Those "huge teams of human moderators" aren't cheap.  And, unfortunately, it would appear that far too many "normal users" either tolerate or enjoy content that you or I would find repugnant.

There's no shortage of trolls out there, and keeping them at bay is a lot of work.  My original point was only that the founders of Reddit knew this all along and chose to ignore it.  They're only addressing the issue now because they are big enough (and hence well capitalized enough) to do so.

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My original point was only that the founders of Reddit knew this all along and chose to ignore it.  

I'm not sure what to tell you except that you're talking to the wrong person. Up until about a week ago, I had heard the name Reddit, but had absolutely no idea what it was. And quite frankly? I still don't, other than that there's apparently some forum aspect to it.

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I'm not sure what to tell you except that you're talking to the wrong person. Up until about a week ago, I had heard the name Reddit, but had absolutely no idea what it was. And quite frankly? I still don't, other than that there's apparently some forum aspect to it.

It's DonRockwell.com meets the Wild West, except for any and every subject known to man.  And it's immensely popular.

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According to the always authoritative Wikipedia, they raised $50 million last year on a purported valuation of $500 million.

It's not quite as bad as no barriers to entry -- there are moderators.  And everything on the Internet will eventually be worthless.

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Reddit is such a sprawling phenomena.  Almost 10,000 total reddits or subreddits.  So many topics.  I wouldn't say they know exactly what they are doing, as when the internet opens to endless topics dominated by User Generated Content,(UGC) nobody knows where it goes or how it evolves.  But they do know how to open up Reddit to endless topics.   With the 10,000 active reddits there are also hundreds of thousands of attempts at topics that didn't go anywhere; virtually all started by users.  It has a healthy income stream, though one reportedly that still shows a small loss.   But they don't focus on high end monetization.   It is still a work in progress.

Back in late 2013 Reddit gained some notoriety as mods in a science subreddit turned off comments because the commentary turned brutal and brutish.

One can't control commentators once the attacks turn brutal on politics, religion, or another controversial topic.  The commentators have a mission and they simply won't stop.  If you cut them off at the beginning....and the topic touches on controversy....then attack controversy will fill the web about the effort to cut off commentary.  If one cuts them off later it gets attacked....as did the effort to limit discussion and eliminate the politics in that subreddit back in 2013.

There is no simple solution.  Cut off all commentary and the site loses tons of traffic.  Its a conundrum.   There is no simple solution.

Meanwhile its an enormous site.  Some who quantify these things suggest its the 10th largest site on the web.  Very huge.  Meanwhile as Mark Slater commented above there are many subreddits that are very cordial;  probably thousands of them.   But the controversial ones bring in tons of traffic and also a lot of controversial news.

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On 7/16/2015 at 5:34 PM, DonRocks said:

I know barely nothing about Reddit, but there's a disturbing letter written by their retired CEO in today's Washington Post:

"Former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao: The Trolls Are Winning The Battle for the Internet"

I just looked at this article again.

Remember I said this: The internet will one day have a form of regulatory government.

I want someone to pull this post up a century from now, and see whether or not I was right.

(I apologize for using the obsolete word "post," but I don't know what things like this will be called in 2116.)

Cheers,
Rocks

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On 12/5/2016 at 10:36 PM, DonRocks said:

I just looked at this article again.

Remember I said this: The internet will one day have a form of regulatory government.

I want someone to pull this post up a century from now, and see whether or not I was right.

(I apologize for using the obsolete word "post," but I don't know what things like this will be called in 2116.)

Cheers,
Rocks

The Internet as we know it started around 20 years ago. 20 years from now, it will be gone. I have no idea what it will become, or if this "post" will even be here. But it will always be one step ahead of any government regulation. Technology evolves faster than laws get passed and take effect. And people never voluntarily submit to rules, particularly when those rules purport to control ideas.

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5 hours ago, RWBooneJr said:

The Internet as we know it started around 20 years ago. 20 years from now, it will be gone.

The internet as *you* know it started around 20 years ago, but you don't have an M.S. in Computer Science from 33 years ago - the internet is here to stay; all you see is the interface to it. People have been conversing since the beginning of mankind, and the internet has brought the world together to be able to do it, instantaneously and essentially for free. In the past 20 years, use has grown by two orders of magnitude, and for it to grow by a third order of magnitude, world population would first need to quadruple - this is not exactly a sign of impending doom; the internet is the most permanent form of communication that there is, and a repository of information that is millions of times safer than Fort Knox.

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4 hours ago, DonRocks said:

The internet as *you* know it started around 20 years ago, but you don't have an M.S. in Computer Science from 33 years ago - the internet is here to stay; all you see is the interface to it. People have been conversing since the beginning of mankind, and the internet has brought the world together to be able to do it, instantaneously and essentially for free. In the past 20 years, use has grown by two orders of magnitude, and for it to grow by a third order of magnitude, world population would first need to quadruple - this is not exactly a sign of impending doom; the internet is the most permanent form of communication that there is, and a repository of information that is millions of times safer than Fort Knox.

I know the Internet is older than that and I don't think it's going away, but it will be very different from what we now know.  Mine was more a comment on how fast things change and our inability to predict that change.  And also that regulating the unpredictable in any real way is probably impossible.

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12 minutes ago, RWBooneJr said:

I know the Internet is older than that and I don't think it's going away, but it will be very different from what we now know.  Mine was more a comment on how fast things change and our inability to predict that change.  And also that regulating the unpredictable in any real way is probably impossible.

"The internet" will not change as much as you think; it's the *interfaces* to the internet that will change. AOL, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram ... these are interfaces, front ends; they are not the internet.

3D hologram porn played out directly on your bed. That will be an interface that merely uses the internet; not the internet itself. 

The internet will become faster and more secure in the future, and there's absolutely no reason why it can't be regulated: It's just a way of connecting devices and transmitting information from one place to other places. 

People are going to have two-way conversations and group discussions - always have, always will - and they'll use the internet, or whatever people want to call "that mode of data transmission."

Do I think people are going to sit at a keyboard typing in "dcdining.com" 100 years from now? Hell no.

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Speaking of Reddit I was looking at something bartending related and came across this thread having to do with customers commenting on bartenders  A total of over 6,000 comments.  A topic somewhat related to this thread in DR.com

Reddit and DR.com are as different as night and day.  Reddit is one of the largest websites in the world, more focused in the US than elsewhere, with a demographic that last I checked was more male than female, mostly in the 20's, and with lower incomes.  It can be a very snarky site, (with clever/snarky comments not unlike Arlnow.com) but has been used by web media to spot trends, among its many notable features.

Hmmm.   They are probably not fine diners but they probably drink a lot. 

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On 12/7/2016 at 10:45 AM, DonRocks said:

"The internet" will not change as much as you think; it's the *interfaces* to the internet that will change. AOL, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram ... these are interfaces, front ends; they are not the internet.

I hear you, but by your thinking the "internet" is "communication".  A million years ago it was grunts and drawings on the wall of a cave.  Then it was smoke signals.  Then it was the printing press.  Then the telegraph, then the telephone, then TV, then cable TV, then it was dial up, then it was ethernet, then it was 3G, 4G, 17G....

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On 12/8/2016 at 10:02 PM, Bart said:

I hear you, but by your thinking the "internet" is "communication".  A million years ago it was grunts and drawings on the wall of a cave.  Then it was smoke signals.  Then it was the printing press.  Then the telegraph, then the telephone, then TV, then cable TV, then it was dial up, then it was ethernet, then it was 3G, 4G, 17G....

And now it's a $1.7 billion valuation.

I guess this is a pun on "Read it?" [past tense] - regardless, the Red just turned Green.

Damn it I wish I wasn't injured. Two years ...

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