To stretch it a bit, I'd say there's an important difference between a fire door and reddit. The fire door knows its job is to prevent people burning to death. Reddit... does it know it's job is to prevent outraged reaction?
I think this is one of the things that made facebook so problematic on politics, it can't tell the the good likes, comments and shares from the bad ones. I'm not sure they really had a concept of better and worse. Some stuff isn't allowed, but otherwise?
Imagine one post, where Mrs X invites neighbors to meet a local candidate at her house for revolutionary thoughts and biscuits. Another post, where Ms Y rants about Macron voters, Trump, taxes and kids these days. Both are political. One is actually democratic and participatory. The other is cheap, nasty, unproductive and divisive. Does Facebook, in any meaningful sense, value one over the other? Does reddit?
Reddit has its non-censorship values. I respect that. It's important that someone does. I also think they want to house the weird, and I respect that too. But, I think unrestricted speech may be an insufficient value, like nondiscrimination or atheism. It's not enough to build on. You need positive values too.
Free speech is also problematic, when taken as 'all speech is equal.'
> First, the lack of a real threaded comment system.
> Second, the lack of a dislike/downvote, particularly an anonymous one.
I don't know. I agree that Facebook's commenting mechanism is ill-suited to deep discussion, but isn't the mechanism you're describing more-or-less exactly what exists on Reddit? And people are certainly able to self-segregate into bubbles on Reddit.
And for that matter, at least anecdotally I'd say that most of the political "discussion" that occurs on Reddit is low-quality, in that it tends to devolve into users shouting "fascist" or "cuck" at each other. (Some subreddits are better than others, admittedly.)
I suppose that Reddit users typically don't know each other in meatspace, though, and that Facebook is (mostly) different in that regard. Maybe that would make a difference. I don't know.
It's a little different. Reddit doesn't choose the content presented to users, they allow the community to self-sort into community-managed subreddits with their own cultures and preferences and voting behavior. In fact reddit only barely exerts any control over the selection of subreddit moderators (mostly stepping in only to resolve things in extremis).
Facebook's algorithms decide on everything in your feed. If you aren't interested in politics on reddit you might never see it at all. If Facebook thinks you might be a republican (and often that's just a demographic thing coupled with a few past clicks on political stories), they will literally fill your screen with paid advertising designed to drive your political preferences.
The point is that division is visible on Reddit (and everywhere), but driven and encouraged by Facebook. And that these are different phenomena. I'm not completely sure I agree, but the point isn't as simple as "division exists".
It's more free-speech than Reddit along the political spectrum, but less free-speech than Reddit along other spectrums. We're not allowed to insult each other on this site, for example, and posts that are specifically about politics are not allowed. Even Reddit has subs for different political groups.
I agree with the flaws you point out, but I still find reddit discussions to be of much higher value than Facebook discussions. I atribute it to the voting system.
The Facebook discussions (e.g. under posts by serious media in my country) are overrun by antivaxers, xenophobes and the like. It makes it seem like they hold the opinion of almost everyone.
I believe that's not the case, but most non-extremists are tired and don't have energy to argue with extremists all day long. And even when someone does, comments in the subthread only bump the innitial controversial comment to the top.
However people might find the time to at least downvote a neonazi when they see one.
How is Facebook different from Twitter or Reddit? I personally think Reddit is extremely dangerous because on the surface many subreddits appear lighthearted, but are actually gateways to extreme views.
/r/ActualPublicFreakouts promises some snarky laughs but is pushing the viewpoint that black people are inherently violent. And that is being heavily pushed by Reddit via the popular posts view.
For a lot of people the whole point of Reddit is the comment threads. The voting turn it into a game, and oppositional views are an intrinsic part of that. People learn which arguments are most insidious or effective. I don't think Facebook is like this as unsound arguments are more likely to be tolerated.
Reddit may have hotrrible offensive comments but they will often be razor sharp and highly effective at winning arguments. That makes it endlessly interesting.
Of course HN has this to a lesser degree. I live in fear of being accused of "anecodotal". Looking at this comment that is ironic.
For the most part, social media doesn't change people's opinions or beliefs. The beat of individual metronomes is not changed, instead social media acts as a filter that only lets through the loudest views, where loudness is a function of how many people hold a given view, and how strongly they feel about it.
The people that don't share those views? They continue not sharing them and get increasingly frustrated by social media platforms drowning them out.
This is a key aspect of the widening political left/right divide. Every meaningful topic is divided into two opposing categories, and then the people who hold the less loud view are drowned out. Voat.co was created when moderate/right leaning abandoned reddit. Now it's a bastion of the alt-right.
This forum is heavily moderated, its members are highly educated, it's also not very diverse, is not very large, and anything even slightly related to politics gets flagged to oblivion. FB is nothing like that.
fair point. but the same mechanism also suppresses minority views. which for them makes reddit worse. with independent sites everyone has to make their own judgement whether it is genuine or not. i can't say if that's better or worse, but i find the ability to express and share minority views to be important.
It’s one thing to enable people to seek out extremist communities on their own. It’s quite another to build recommendation systems that push people towards these communities. That’s putting a thumb on the scale and that’s entirely Facebook’s doing.
This is one example, and it’s quite possibly a poor example as it is a partisan example, but Reddit allows The_Donald subreddit to remain open, but it has been delisted from search, the front page, and Reddit’s recommendation systems.
The thing is, it is more complex than that. Reddit's authoritarianism is an important part of why some of those other social networks you listed became what they are in the first place and/or why they were created to begin with. The more censorship of political views that lean a certain way there are on big mainstream platforms like Reddit, the more likely it is that refugees from that censorship will move to other platforms, therefore leaning those platforms highly into the opposite ideological direction. That is even more true given that the people who care enough to want to move will tend to be the more ideologically extreme parts of the original network's user base.
Also, 4chan does not suck. /pol/ sucks because it has been completely overrun by right-wing political extremists and literally mentally ill people, so it is an echo chamber just as much as Reddit is, just less censored. But many of the other boards have discussion from varying perspectives.
Part of my point is that Reddit's platform leads to intense polarization, which could be alleviated by improving their platform. The default subreddits are hyper-Democrat (eg. to the point where dissent of COVID-19 restrictions was outright banned last year in many subreddits), and the conservative subreddits are hyper polarized in the same way in the opposite direction.
I think many just discuss this as if it's some inevitable human trends or feature of the internet, but I disagree. If platforms did better to reward higher quality discussion and a variety of viewpoints, then maybe there never would've been a /r/the_donald in the extreme form there was.
Reddit is just like Facebook. If you are seeing low quality content, it’s mostly the fault of self selection.
On Reddit, the serious subreddits don’t have a lot of memes and many prevent them. On Facebook if your feed is full of toxicity and politics, it’s because your friends are FB warriors and toxic.
I used to think Reddit users skewed too heavily in certain ways, and didn't make sense. One day, using some tool (removeddit, reveddit, etc), I noticed how many posts and comments were removed by moderators - things that went against the skew.
It's one of the reasons places like r/politics became such an echo chamber dumpster fire.
You're not comparing a heavily moderated site to an a lightly moderated one. You're looking at a site that's just as over-moderated as Reddit, just in favor of the opposite side of the political spectrum. A better comparison would be something like /g/
Sure, but so there is in FB. On Reddit you can have multiple accounts (all pseudonymous) and you can participate on whichever subreddits you like. If there's some sub that isn't too welcoming of your views, chances are there is another that is -- an echo chamber if you want it thus, sure, but no worse than FB.
For example during COVID, Reddit was extremely toxic and hostile to any questioning of COVID lockdown policies. You couldn't even talk about travel in travel forums without being shamed as some kind of murderer and downvote censored to oblivion, let alone questioning the justification of lockdowns, border restrictions, and vaccine mandates.
Reddit has had an extreme woke left bias for a long time such as in its main subs like /r/politics. Of course this extremity on one side breeds counter extremes on the other like /r/TheDonald. The hivemind nature of the site ultimately makes everyone more divided and worse off.
I've always wondered why social networks like Reddit make no attempt to throttle their loudest members. If you have a small minority who upvote/downvote an extremely high number of posts, they will easily drown out any votes cast by people who are more measured in their voting behavior.
It seems like there are so many fundamental ways in which the most popular social networks and discussion forums are flawed.
To stretch it a bit, I'd say there's an important difference between a fire door and reddit. The fire door knows its job is to prevent people burning to death. Reddit... does it know it's job is to prevent outraged reaction?
I think this is one of the things that made facebook so problematic on politics, it can't tell the the good likes, comments and shares from the bad ones. I'm not sure they really had a concept of better and worse. Some stuff isn't allowed, but otherwise?
Imagine one post, where Mrs X invites neighbors to meet a local candidate at her house for revolutionary thoughts and biscuits. Another post, where Ms Y rants about Macron voters, Trump, taxes and kids these days. Both are political. One is actually democratic and participatory. The other is cheap, nasty, unproductive and divisive. Does Facebook, in any meaningful sense, value one over the other? Does reddit?
Reddit has its non-censorship values. I respect that. It's important that someone does. I also think they want to house the weird, and I respect that too. But, I think unrestricted speech may be an insufficient value, like nondiscrimination or atheism. It's not enough to build on. You need positive values too.
Free speech is also problematic, when taken as 'all speech is equal.'
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