Crowd Control is when new user's comments to a sub are automatically collapsed.

I find these subs unusable. I don't want to have to uncollapse a comment to read it. It feels like a boring game of russian roulette. I'm just going to skip reading those comments. So, I know that nobody is going to read anything I write either.

If they are going to do that they should give individuals the choice to use crowd control or not. They shouldn't give that choice to the sub only. I should be able to override that choice. I don't think new users are automatically bots.

#Subs to Avoid:

r/news
r/worldnews
r/blueskysocial

Starting on or around November 20 2024 (ten days ago) I have seen at least one daily post reach my version of r/all from a sub called r/selfiedump and a couple of days from from r/selfierating and r/selfie. Prior to this I had never seen a post from these subs make r/all and can only recall just a few times (less than 1%) that pictures from r/faces made it to all.

I'm guessing that this is not random and there is some kind of effort to promote this kind of content, but just a guess.

Curious if anyone else has noticed this and/or knows what's happening here. Cheers.

Back when everyone used to use web forums, if someone stated something you disagreed with, the only course of action was to formulate an argument and express it in response.

With Reddit, people can make valid arguments, but since they contradict another person's viewpoint, they will just silently downvote. The comment having a highly negative score leaves people with the satisfaction that it must be wrong, and they happily move on without even bothering with a rebuttal. Onlookers become influenced by the score and end up less sympathetic to the downvoted opinion.

On a web forum, that score wouldn't exist, and the inability to express a rebuttal would produce the opposite result. Onlookers would view the comment as having more merit due to nobody being able to respond.

It also allows unpopular opinions to be buried, whether posts don't rise to the front page or comments end up collapsed at the bottom of a stack.

Web forums often tended to be much smaller in size than Reddit, so you would pay attention to the people making each post or reply. Their name and avatar were often more prominent from a UI design perspective.

On Reddit, people become interchangeable due to the sheer numbers, and you'll barely have reason to notice the username of the person you're talking to.

The opinions expressed melt together into one big hivemind, as do the silent, anonymous votes.

You’ve probably seen this a lot lately, all throughout Reddit people use redact as a form of privacy protection or protest (which can be annoying because you want to see what the comment said). I actually like Redact, but not because it’s effective, but because it’s incredibly ineffective.

I’m sure you know there are Reddit archives (reveddit, pullpush, etc) that archive removed, deleted, and edited posts and comments. These sites are pretty reliable when it comes to viewing hidden comments but when it comes to deleted and removed comments the archives are only able to display the original message if they were archived in time, meaning often times if a user deletes their own comment it will completely disappear off the face of the earth.

But with edited comments the archive is consistent. It displays the changes that were made in the edit, allowing you to view the original comment. If people simply deleted their comments it would be much less likely to be saved but because it’s only edited it’s almost guaranteed to be saved. This is what makes redact so weird, it doesn’t accomplish its goal of anonymizing messages or deleting messages at all. Is there a different reason why people use it? Does anyone have any insight?

Edit: Example

That is, payable with karma and/or require a comment.

I've become a serial upvoter. If I see a post that's not obvious trash with a vote count of 0, especially if it does not yet have any comments, I upvote it. Why? Because some human being put themselves out there and should be able to do so without some angry douche with no life taking it out on them randomly. Post karma is about trending and it's not a Facebook Like button. If you don't want something to trend, then at least do the courtesy of saying why.

With all that ... yeah, I'm a hopeless optimist. I do realize that this idea would likely turn into a-holes not only downvoting, but posting some randomized or hateful comment, if not an actual diatribe revealing how thoroughly they've devolved into douchebags. But, at least they'd be seen for what they are.

I was asked to take part in a survey today by Reddit because I moderate a medium large subreddit (about the same size as this one a little over 160,000 members)

All of the questions were about if we felt satisfied with other moderators,. If we felt capable of moderating our subreddits, "what we would do if we no longer had to do rule enforcement,"

It then asked how we would feel about an AI tool that helped users write better posts, followed by a test to see if we can tell the difference between AI generated posts and human written posts, followed by just straight out asking us how we would feel about all rules violations being handled by AI.

This is not good! and I am a person who is generally pro AI.

With no moderators Why would anyone start a new community if they don't have a hand in shaping it? What would the difference be between any two new subreddits? When there won't be moderators to make sure only on topic posts are posted?

Edit: It's really weird how this particular post doesn't register most of the up votez or comments regardless of the many comments on it... This issue has resolved! Yay!!!

I've noticed a few ways that redditors miss the point of a post. First and foremost, is only reading the headline and maybe the first few lines of text (sometimes presented by the app). The second way is even worse: simply scanning the words in the title to see if any trigger a feeling of defensiveness or anger and then writing a response based on the selective word cloud.

Once the comment is written, it reinforces all the other low-comprehension readers that, yes, that is what this post is about and all the discussion you thought you were going to have is now dominated by this other topic which you didn't intend and even sometimes explicitly argued against in the body of your post.

One attempted solution is to lard the very beginning of your post with all the things you are not saying. You won't get the headline-skimmers, but you will get the people who read the first few sentences. And those people are now able to recognize the point-missers in the comments section, hopefully hitting them with downvotes and stopping the spread of the contagion of ignorance. The problem with this solution is that you are not making your actual point in the introduction to the post and that's going to mean people are either not going to engage with the post, or, paradoxically, lean harder into the title.

Do you have any strategies to defeat this or are we just doomed?

Does up and downvoting posts affect what I see on my feed? For example, if I upvote lots of cat videos, will reddit show me more cat videos? Conversely, will downvoting political posts result in less political posts on my feed?

I rarely vote on either posts or comments but if voting actually affects what I see I might actually consider start voting.

Also, several subs, that are highly active, and that I'm subscribed to, never appear on my home feed. Why? Would voting on posts in them trigger them to appear on my feed? And if so, why does every other sub, who's posts I don't vote on, appear on my feed?

Just had one vile post come through that absolutely infuriated me, and need to understand why Reddit decided it should be thrown into such a high profile feed.

The real impact for many, and for sure me, it sure makes me want to completely get myself away from Reddit until they've a handle on this.

Edit: Reddit can't have it both ways. If they want to promote high comment count posts to encourage engagement/discussion, fine. However, these posts only allow "Flaired User Only" users to take part. So I get to see this shit, but can't react outside of downvoting it - which has no impact on it showing up for others.

These are some thoughts I had about Reddit's downvoting structure, especially seeing how the energy of Youtube, Instagram and Facebook seem to have shifted since they each did versions of limiting downvoting ability on comments and posts. This obviously is just an opinion, and it seems others have referenced this in past posts here but I wanted to put it into words from my own perspective.

It seems that the interface of Reddit, and in particular the downvoting ability, is designed to create echo chambers that impede authentic honest dialogue.

The reason the site permits this is because it generates more traffic and is more profitable. Living in an echo chamber is generally more pleasing, at least for people not consciously thinking about how the internet is a feedback loop.

If part of Reddit's aim can be said to foster open constructive dialogue, then this certainly hurts that goal because it so heavily disincentivizes dissent. This is especially dangerous as often times the most popular opinion is based on timing, not validity.

This is not Reddit's fault. As a corporation, Advance Publications' (Reddit’s parent company) first duty is to its shareholders. It legally cannot change the design until traffic (ie. advertising) or brand value are impacted, presumably by users getting tired of the negativity and choosing alternative discussion forums. Presumably thats what happened on some level at the other sites I mentioned.

Similar to McDonalds using the pandemic as an excuse to remove salads from its menu, Reddit is not obligated to have the most healthy discussion forum. In fact, if productive healthy dialogue reduces traffic, Reddit is obligated to prevent that from happening.

The website is legally bound to choose the interface that is the most addictive.

Edit: The fact that this post was downvoted into obscurity is ironic and troubling.

Even if it's as small as something like eating their food without knowing, its always 'Rethink the relationship, OP' or "If it were me, I would dump him" like what is this. Even if the other person was doing it maliciously, can you not just have a serious chat with them and perhaps not break up over chicken bake? Seriously, this stuff is so petty and would almost never fly in real world scenarios. Abuse (Genuine abuse like hitting, touching without consent and Gaslighting) is such a watered down word that when I see the word abuse on reddit its just somebody yelling at someone else. Obviously thats not a great word, but are there not better words for something like that rather than such a strong, emotion elliciting one? Overall, redditors are so quick to recommend cutting off instead of actually trying to get through to the person in question.

If a question has been answered in a megathread, it can't be found through searching. This means that people have to ask questions again and again, instead of one post with an answer that everyone can refer to. This is inefficient and annoying to both askers and answerers. Am I the only one who sees this as a problem?

We're seeing a significant uptick in questions about why Reddit has a given political lean, or about why certain subs support one political idea or other. This is not a political debate sub; there are plenty of those to post in if that's the goal. Extending at least through the US election, all such posts will be removed.

If it's a really burning question, there have been many of these types of posts; feel free to search the subreddit.

Fellow Redditors,

We had a good discussion about this in Lounge but decided to move it here and get some inputs.

Recently I saw an post that claim that these with higher streak will contribute more karma to posts they upvote. (One of originating post Which might be the source of Rumor - or actually a param in the magic sauce).

I sort of salute to this. While partially it goes spins arounds engagement - this could potentially in huge improve quality given that streak, apart from being a "showcase" now actually do put more value to an opinion of long term reddit family member compared to a "common joe", who heard about reddit yesterday, and most often than not - out of personal frustration, poor understanding of content, or simply "because he can" burry the content by downvoting.

Don't get me wrong I am talking about people who were not with us for years through good bad and ugly, rather newcomers with the "culture" which is everything but not the spirit of reddit.

While streak is one of the way to address this, putting more weight to accounts with higher streak - it's still far from perfect. I am sure there would be bots out there who would randomly build hard streak - which is even more dangerous considering there are even upvote / downvote marketplaces.

On the other hand, there are members who contributed a ton but can't afford to checkup everyday making this model unfair to them.

How would you regulate karma in "ideal world", in a way that veterans get's their votes weight more, followed by quality contributors. That would, sort of do a lot of "self moderation".

It's really a shame to see there are even services online that provide "buy downvotes / upvotes" depending if one wants to build up their karma or ruin someone else, essentially making good building up quality contributors building up quality content for years disappear if they don't like them, while building their accounts overnight and acting like a sheriffs.

Here's the take. We are all very aware Reddit is a social network light years ahead compared to others if we analyze quality. Compare it with TikTok for example and see how it looks when "democracy" chose what's hot or not. More or less, other social medias suffers the same issue. Empirically, it supports the hypothesis the "magic sauce" is considering not only upvotes / downvotes - but who is giving them.

Point of the post is to eventually collect some good ideas that could (or not) be presented to admins, or in general hear your take on this. Being that a speculation - or even better, unfold the supportive or counterclaims evidences for/against the hypothesis.

We put a pause in premium forum related to a matter till we get more "evidences" of the phenomena to gather breather opinion and ideally some evidences so we can take it from there.

Stage is all yours. Many of us are interested Interested in your take on this.

Important note: This is not about how you get karma, this is how your account influence karma of others when you upvote / downvote their posts based on your contribution and other parameters. (To name some but not necessary all , Streak, Achievements, age, contributions, karma etc...)

S.

This is getting wild. Especially when I think of subs like suicidal watch or other subs that deal with sensitive matters.. I feel sad for people who are struggling and are now being exploited for data.

Some people may also lean towards really bad places only by scrolling and seing the influx of bots posting dark shit just for engagement.

What Reddit think is gonna happen next when people realize that and become disgusted by it?

What is their long term plan?

They are selling our data to google and then what? They will send the plateform to die?

I've been here 18 years and I would love to look far back and review it all, but not by spending a week clicking "more". How about a "sort by old" for comments by profile?

Why does the feed just become good and suddenly turn to junk?

I know we should all just delete it. But over the last couple weeks I actually said to someone, damn, reddit feed is actually good again! New interesting relevant things, etc.

Within two days of that, my feed suddenly gets repopulated with every sub on the planet that I have no interest in, including almost all of the ones I’ve clicked “don’t show me this”.

To me it looks like it was repopulated so I can scroll more and thus view 6x more ads. Probably they need to hit certain ad revenue metrics soon. I did not change any settings.

I don’t want to scroll endlessly and wade through the dumbest irrelevant stuff on the planet. So I go through the work of taking off all the posts from random cities and subjects I’m never interested in, just to reset the feed.

In response, now all I get is 4-day old shit I’ve seen a million times, repeat posts, nothing interesting, etc. So then the option is to still scroll endlessly to find anything interesting. It feels like a punishment for not accepting abuse of my feed. What gives?

I've belonged to two subreddits that invited me, both seemingly at random. The first one turned out to be just people sharing about their lives. I remember one person was really into his warhammer figurines, another person posted their art. It was supremely wholesome. There were a few rules, the most important of which is that you had to post at least once a week or you would be dropped and replaced with someone else. It was a small group--maybe fifty people. I found it a really nice change from the total anonymity of reddit AND because, unlike Reddit's interest-based subreddits, I had nothing immediately in common with the other group members.

So I don't have any theory, just questions:

• What are these groups called?
• What are the various ways people are invited?
• What are the different ways to run these groups?
• Has anyone done any research on them?
• Are there any groups you can just volunteer to join?
• Are these groups trending up or down?

https://old.reddit.com/r/help/comments/1gae6uo/update_enabling_easier_access_to_your_content_on/

This is going to be a game-changer for many people who've wanted the ability to access everything they've ever written or shared on reddit but couldn't do so due to the 1,000 comment/post limit that has existed on reddit since forever. (For those who are unaware, when you visit any reddit profile (including your own), reddit only displays up to a thousand posts and a thousand comments on profiles no matter how many entries actually existed in those categories. So, if you'd written 5,000 comments, you'd only see the newest 1,000 on your profile).

A workaround (for those who were aware of it) was to change the sorting on their profiles (e.g., from "new" to "controversial", or "top"), and those different lists of items indeed returned some results that weren't found in the profile's default sorting; but for prolific commenters and/or posters, a lot of content was still left out on the profile page if those entries didn't fall under the sorting categories available and if they also fell beyond the 1,000 capped limit.

Over 12 years ago, there was a post about the limit of 1,000 entries on profiles on this very sub in which the OP and others expressed an interest in being able to see and/or download all their content: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/10t98v/ever_wondered_the_data_liberation_policy_of_reddit/.

^That thread taught me about how the limitation of reddit's lists made content invisible even to those who created it (unless they were aware of other methods to access it) - so, it's amazing to me that after all this time, we're finally going to have an official solution to this. (Note: according to the admin in the linked post, this will be in effect in the next week).

This is a HUGE 'win' for everyone who wants easy access to their long-forgotten or difficult-to-access content – and it may also create issues for prolific commenters who may not want some of their previously invisible, older content to suddenly become accessible to all on their profile pages. (Many of you are aware that there was always a way to dig into the long-ago, seemingly buried depths of reddit profiles, but the average redditor seems unaware of the tools or ability to do so).

Just wanted to know what the rest of you think of this upcoming change.

What makes Reddit addictive? I think part of it is that there's a learning curve to it, and it's rewarding once you figure out how to make posts that get traction.

Facebook is easy: Post a picture of a cute baby or animal and you'll get likes and maybe a couple comments.

But on Reddit, you're basically anonymous, and you're competing against a bunch of other New posts. You have to find subreddits you like, hang out there to become part of the community, and then, when you post, you may get some comments and upvotes, or you may not.

I'm not going to lie, I find myself typing old.reddit.com in my browser window frequently. My eyes immediately go up to the top right, to see if I have any notifications. Did someone comment on my post? Did I read the room correctly? Did my joke land?

Of the posts I make on reddit, I'd say probably half get no or only a few comments. And then there's a chunk that don't go over well, and just get negative comments.

Posts that actually get upvoted and get comments and discussion, maybe 25%? But when it happens, it's kind of a rush, and sort of addictive.

Once in a great while, you have a post that for whatever reason, hits the front page, and gets thousands of upvotes and hundreds of comments. That's fun for a day or two.

Now, I'm not trying to hoard imaginary internet points or anything. Why do I post on reddit? Honestly, because I'm a bit lonely. I work a desk job at a computer, and during my down time, I want human interaction. To some degree, reddit can provide that, whether it's a subreddit based around a sports team, a city, a hobby, etc...

I don't know exactly what point I'm trying to make here... I guess it's that: while Reddit is getting worse in a lot of ways, the other social media sites (esp Twitter/X and Facebook in my opinion) are getting worse even faster, and so, Reddit seems to be in a good place. It's a pretty engaging site, at least for me.

Have any of you noticed that posts you make seem to have very few upvotes compared to the number of replies?

If you look at my account, some of the more recent posts have over a dozen comments, often either neutral or approving in tone, yet the post has half or less the number of upvotes.

I first interpreted this to mean that upvotes were being subtracted by downvotes, which confused me due to the aforementioned reason. But now I am not so sure if the downvotes negate upvotes. Perhaps users who reply simply aren't upvoting, instead? This seems unlikely, too, given that the overwhelming majority of users (oftentimes thousands will view the post if the analytics are to be trusted) do not interact with the post at all, and I would think that if one were to go through the effort of commenting, then they would likely up or downvote the post as well.

Have you noticed this in your or other user's posts? What is your explanation?

Every time I see my streak, I think: "Damn, it's that high? I should delete the app for a bit..."

Reddit is an indulgence and I chastise myself for spending too much time here.

Does anybody actually try to maximize their streak and then shares it with their friends?

I'm a researcher aiming to get a benchmark of people's opinions on different topics across Reddit and measure how they change over time. I'm curious about finding places where encountering differing opinions is likely.

Just scrolling through the comment sections of e.g.  politics and news, I'm noticing that there isn't much back-and-forth. Most comment threads are opinion-homogenous: that is, the top-level comment states an opinion on a subject, and almost all replies to that comment agree. Disagreements to the top-level comment don't seem to get a lot of engagement, and have often been downvoted so much that they don't appear in most user's feeds.

Is this a safe assumption to make? Is there any data out there about this?

Thanks

I hate this algorithm change. It appears to push far more controversial content onto people's home feeds as a means to increase engagement. Controversiality is measured based on the ratio of upvotes to downvotes.

What Reddit doesn't realize is that any marginalized or minority related content absorbs more predjudice based downvotes by default, thus that content is more controversial by default.

By pushing more controversial posts wide as a means to chase higher engagement, Reddit has inadvertantly increased the likelihood that members of minority populations are made victims to bullying and hatred they otherwise would not have had to suffer. They have made safe spaces less safe.

I mod a mid-size city sub. There was a post that contained some LGBT related content that the new algorithm decided to start pushing to nonsubscriber's home feeds. There were plenty of posts with far more upvotes the algorithm could have chosen.

The resulting influx of homophobia and transphobia--to my normally tolerant sub--was severe enough to warrant roughly 30 bans, which is more than I've ever issued in a year. The post required my constant attention for two days.

There were also nearly a dozen instances of report abuse (users reporting things for false reasons to grief and bully the OP). It was reported for being hateful, for being porn, for having sexual content involving minors, for self harm, and more, all of which was just made up bullshit meant to cause harm to the OP who had done nothing more than make a completely benign post. (And has Reddit just stopped taking action with regard to report abuse? It's been over two weeks now, and I've received no response.)

I've been modding the same sub for 13 years. I've spent all of that time cultivating a place that is assuredly safe and tolerant. Now, in addition to a subscriber having had to endure such vitriol, my sub's reputation has been compromised. And, the level of hate? I've never seen anything like it on there. It was disgusting; it was disturbing.

At the expense of some potential growth to my sub, I have turned off Discovery > Get recommended to individual redditors. It may be working to prevent threads in my sub from being advertised, or the post may have just run its course. I don't know :c [Italicized text in this paragraph edited for clarification.]

I hate the direction this place is going. Is there anything else I can do to ensure this doesn't happen again? I already had subreddit karma minimums for posts and may implement them for comments as well. But more broadly, is this just gonna be how it goes moving forward? Reddit pitting us against one another to increase revenue?

^Edited ^for ^clarity.

Right now, 4 out of the top 10 posts on my Home feed have zero upvotes. That's 4 posts that people have decided are too shit to warrant even the mildest of praise yet for some reason they're appearing at the top of my feed.

Why is Reddit doing this? For engagement of course! When your only metric is engagement it doesn't matter whether the content is good or bad so long as it gets you to comment. A cool piece of artwork based on a show you love by a talented artist is all well and good, but will that engage you as much as a troll post designed to ragebait you into typing out a furiously worded indignant response, or a silly, oft-asked question that you can't help but reply to with a condescending remark?

And so, just as Reddit used to be a place that would aggregate the most interesting, funny or otherwise noteworthy content into a single feed for your enjoyment, it is now a site that is just as happy to make you irritated or angry with the state of the world by intentionally showing you content that is designed to piss you off. My Home feed used to be filled with stuff that I like and now it's turning into a feed of stuff that I hate. Thanks, Reddit.

I feel like I see way more comments and posts advocating against drinking alcohol, using drugs, having casual sex, and so on. Not saying there is anything bad with abstaining from these, but it feels very detached from actual attitudes I see in the real world. And it feels like a new phenomenon on here? It seems more focused on risk-aversion than values but the values play into it as well.

I've been using https://www.reddit.com/r/all/ since 2009. But it seems I might finally have to go to https://old.reddit.com/r/all/

For example: https://imgur.com/a/1CL46Ig

I have to click into the article to find out if it's an original Pizzacakecomic or not. Just kind of surprised me. The username that posted the article usually was an integral part of the ui. I guess reddit changed their priorities on that. Anyone know when this happened and why?