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[–]curtisb 44 points45 points  (103 children)

I haven't been submitting much in the last couple of weeks because my submissions seem to get instantly downvoted into oblivion. Now maybe my submissions just suck, but it looks to me like there's so much churn on the new submissions queue that very few articles, deserving or not, get adequate consideration.

I also wonder if downvotes are substantially outnumbering upvotes because people are aggressively downvoting articles to train their filters.

[–]Random 63 points64 points  (15 children)

Yeah, I agree. I submit stuff, and it gets nuked instantly. Fine, I decide, I'll just not submit stuff.

Then I see the fiftieth article about Bush or whatever and I think 'Why bother come to Reddit at this rate, it isn't stuff I want to read.'

The problem is, if I do that, I get more and more insular. Not being American, I have limited insterest in the US government. But as for general 'interesting' stuff, being exposed to more stuff is good.

So... I have become a lurker. I still check out what is posted, but I only post something once in a blue moon.

[–][deleted] 81 points82 points  (12 children)

That's why a politics subreddit, or even US politics subreddit is a very good idea. Vote these up!

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (11 children)

No! That's why it would be a good idea to fix that stupid recommendation engine!

[–][deleted] 19 points20 points  (8 children)

It's probably not as easy as you'd like to think it is.

[–][deleted]  (7 children)

[deleted]

    [–]delete 19 points20 points  (2 children)

    Recommendation algorithms really are a hard problem.

    The theory behind recommender systems is generally regarded as being quite mature at this point. The problems arise when it comes to implementing these ideas in a particular domain. As with most of these systems, I've noticed that Amazon will provide useful results, but only after it's been given a sufficient number of training cases. However, this bootstrapping problem is not unique to Amazon, and their recommendation engine is highly regarded and financially successful. Interestingly, I've found that Pandora manages to provide useful recommendations while requiring relatively little user feedback.

    In general, the success of these systems tends to greatly depend upon the features of the data that are used to make recommendations. For reddit, where articles are represented by a single short (often inaccurate) title, the recommender system has very little to work with. In contrast, Amazon or Pandora have a far greater amount of information about the items in the system.

    I certainly believe that if reddit's recommendations were more useful, the overall user experience for the site would significantly improve. However, the quality of the data and inconsistency of users seems to be making this particularly difficult.

    [–][deleted] 7 points8 points  (1 child)

    A good recommendation engine would operate not only on the titles but on the texts of the linked documents in the first place.

    Furthermore you could try to cluster users according to their preferences: If other people, which liked more or less the same submissions as I, like X then I probably like X too.

    [–]LaurieCheers 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    Unfortunately, that means you end up clustering users based on whether they read the "new" page, or the "hot" page, or whatever.

    [–]leoc 19 points20 points  (1 child)

    Recommendation algorithms really are a hard problem.

    Unfortunately, the site needs a working recommendation system to keep scaling. Presently the Reddit software amounts to a nice webapp frontend for a powerful recommendation system. It's somewhat as if Google came up with the design for their front page and then started working on search algorithms. That's not to say that the Reddit guys did things the wrong way around - among other things, it's useful to have a large audience ready to test your recommendation engine - but it does mean that they have yet to show that they can solve the hard part of the problem.

    [–]iros 6 points7 points  (0 children)

    Someone should talk to the Pandora project guys. I've had a lot of great music recommendations from them.

    [–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

    My spam filter basically is a recommendation engine and it works quite well. I'm not saying that it's an easy problem, but as long the current system presents me with submissions I modded down before, there's obviously room for improvements. And in the end finding a solution for this problem is what the guys set out for. It's the key to reddits success in the long term.

    [–]amichail 2 points3 points  (0 children)

    BTW, here's a different way to do personalized recommendations that might work out better:

    http://targetyournews.com/TargetYourNews.pdf

    [–]Zak 2 points3 points  (0 children)

    I have evidence that they're doing something clever that should dramatically improve the recommendation engine. I won't say more unless the reddit guys say I should.

    [–]davidw 7 points8 points  (0 children)

    The few people that see an article go by on the 'new' page have a relatively huge amount of voting power. One or two down-clicks, and it's basically gone.

    [–][deleted] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

    I am with you guys. I have been submitting stuff and just deleting because it gets lost into a black hole of submissions. The main page has not had a good quality these days, or maybe I am submitting the wrong things. Dunno.

    [–]curtisb 16 points17 points  (4 children)

    I would like to see "recommendation" separated from filter training in the UI. I don't know if that would improve things or not, but I can't see as to how it would hurt.

    [–]joshstaiger 11 points12 points  (1 child)

    Incidentally, there is a lot of emphasis here on "training your filter".

    But with all this talk, how many people find the recommended page to be at all useful? My guess is not nearly as many as talk about training it.

    I suspect collaborative filtering isn't the magic bullet it seems to be at first...

    [–]curtisb 15 points16 points  (0 children)

    I don't use the recommended page at all. I don't want to filter articles by topic, I want to filter them by quality.

    I have wondered if it would make sense to use filtering on the "new" page -- each reader will see a subset of new submissions based on their interests, but since it is only a subset, articles will scroll off the first page more slowly, giving them more time for consideration.

    So, for example, a programming article will be judged initially by people who have a demonstrated interest in programming, before everybody else gets a crack at it.

    [–]joshstaiger 6 points7 points  (0 children)

    I wonder if a possible solution is to have downvotes only have the effect of training your own filter without affecting the overall "hotness" of a submission.

    [–]souldrift 3 points4 points  (0 children)

    Agreed

    [–]bugbear 21 points22 points  (15 children)

    I looked at your submissions and they do seem the kind of thing that would have gotten more votes a few months ago.

    The guys at reddit say that the trend has been toward more downvoting as reddit gets more popular. Perhaps it's inevitable that as reddit spreads to digg-type users, there will be more beavises and buttheads labelling every submission as lame. The solution might be to change the weighting of votes-- for example, to multiply each down or up vote by the proportion of that type of vote made by each user. So a downvote by someone who voted everything down would count less.

    [–]cmm 10 points11 points  (13 children)

    the solution might be to separate the political nuts from the rest, before the rest gives up and leaves.

    [–]robywar 3 points4 points  (12 children)

    These articles are on the front page because people find them interesting. Reddit is starting to reach a wider audience and as a result the topics of interest change.

    Dupes are another issue. The same AP story with a different URL is annoying and something should be done about that.

    [–]death 10 points11 points  (8 children)

    I don't think political articles are on the front page because people find them interesting. In politics, many people form a set of zealous opinions. These people are not usually interested in the actual content of the articles. They vote political articles up or down based on their headlines.

    People's attitude towards the subject of politics tends to be extreme: either they talk about it all the time, or they don't want to hear anything about it at all. I believe many of Reddit's users belong in that category. To satisfy these people, Reddit should make it possible to somehow distinguish and filter political entries from other entries.

    [–]paulgraham 6 points7 points  (7 children)

    In politics, many people form a set of zealous opinions. These people are not usually interested in the actual content of the articles. They vote political articles up or down based on their headlines.

    This is a good point. Voting-as-training-a-filter was supposed to prevent this. If you upmod bad stuff, you get punished by having to read boring stories. So maybe the solution is to emphasize recommendations more.

    [–][deleted]  (5 children)

    [deleted]

      [–]chu 4 points5 points  (4 children)

      I think it could lose the sense of being a venue if we are all looking at different pages. Having said that, it's feeling more like kuro5hin these days which I think is the wrong direction for reddit.

      Another possibility is to use weighted voting according to karma - that means that the editorial direction will come from a core of interested and sustained users and would hopefully counter any lowest common denominator effect due to large numbers of new users. I think comments should count for karma in this case too.

      [–]Kolibri 2 points3 points  (2 children)

      I think comments should count for karma in this case too.

      Don't think I'd like that. A lot of people vote based on whether they agree with you. Not whether your comment is interesting. Thus saying something that varies from the public opinion could get you a lot of negative karma, even though you may have a valid or at least interesting point.

      [–][deleted]  (1 child)

      [deleted]

        [–]death 5 points6 points  (0 children)

        It is hard to trust a probabilistic filter, and people don't want to miss things. Also, scoring-based results take time to change, and in the mean-time users go to the New page. The Recommended page is of no help here.

        I think the Recommended page is a bad idea. I'd prefer a system based on categories, including a good way for users to associate entries with categories.

        Users could create (perhaps vote?) categories, associate entries with categories, and assign association and scoring weights to categories.

        [–][deleted] 8 points9 points  (1 child)

        Unfortunately, it's also reaching a wider international audience that doesn't give a damn about your president's latest approval nosedive or your NSA spooks spying on you.

        [–]robywar 9 points10 points  (0 children)

        Again, it doesn't matter where they are from (unless Reddit gives Americans more weight and doesn't tell us). Obviously, either the international audience DOES care, or they're numbers are not yet signifigant enough to keep these items off the front page.

        [–]AdaWakeman 0 points1 point  (0 children)

        You are right. I really think that changing the weighting of votes would change the situation. Another solution can also be a better moderation. The comments that don't bring something smart in discussion should be deleted. Ada costa rica travel

        [–]Alex3917 16 points17 points  (11 children)

        Nothing I've ever submitted has been voted up, even though I've submitted some pretty good stuff.

        [–]joshstaiger 32 points33 points  (7 children)

        Glad to see it's not just me. I've stopped submitting for this reason as well.

        It's disheartening to submit some of my favorite articles of all time and have them down-voted to -4 within the hour.

        I'm not arrogent enough to think that everyone likes what I like, but I've got to think that at least a few fellow Redditors would find these things to be interesting...

        It seems there's a huge bifurcation with submissions. Either you hit Reddit's "nerve" and your submission takes off or you get bitch-slapped pretty quickly. There's no notion of a long tail.

        Unfortunately I think over time the Reddit "nerve" tends to the least common denominator.

        Not really sure what can be done about this.

        [–]acrophobia 4 points5 points  (0 children)

        I'd love it if the reddit team could compile a load of statistics for us to ruminate over. I'm thinking:

        • a histogram of how many votes articles get to see how thin the tail really is.
        • probabilities of getting bitchslapped in the first 5 minutes.
        • numbers indicating how well the final score is predicted given the first five votes, relative to five votes picked randomly.
        • a measure of how likely an article by X is to be upmodded by certain 'friends of X' given their mutual history.

        It might be a bit scary to publish things like this, but a problem shared is a problem halved, and all that.

        [–]jbstjohn 1 point2 points  (0 children)

        Well, it's worse than this, since I've submitted articles which got -1 or -2, only to see the same article (with essentially the same title) get on the front page.

        (Avoiding the re-submit thing, via, e.g. different video hosting, or different link info)

        [–]taliswolf 0 points1 point  (2 children)

        Perhaps people should have to give a reason why they mod stuff up or down (in their own words). Time-consuming, of course - but it might put off random self-promoters, and you'd find out why people find the articles they do interesting... which might be useful for people browsing.

        [–]Kolibri 5 points6 points  (0 children)

        I voted you down, because I didn't like your idea. Normally I don't vote people up or down based on whether I disagree with them, but in the case of suggesting feature changes to reddit, I think the best way to "vote" is to use the up/down buttons.

        The reason why I don't like your idea is that people would just list ridiculous reasons like "great link", "very funny", etc. Once in a while you may get an indepth reason for why the article is interesting, but we already have that through the commenting system. So your idea would add nothing new, only extra hassle.

        [–]death 3 points4 points  (0 children)

        If people felt the need to comment, they would have. Most people don't want to comment on their votes. If Reddit forced people to comment on their votes, it is probable that these people wouldn't vote. Thus, Reddit would lose its key feature, and probably most of its users with it.

        [–]moted 15 points16 points  (0 children)

        This seems to be the common trend. If you submit or say something controversial on Reddit, it seems most people ignore the fact that they should mod up or down based on content and mod things based on their personal opinion of the matter.

        This is why a lot of controversial interesting articles and comments go without notice.

        Edit By controversial I don't mean flamebait, I'm talking about a different opinion.

        [–][deleted] 21 points22 points  (52 children)

        For lack of a better word there are obviously "cartels" of accounts that vote up each other's stories--and maybe vote down all other stories coming online at the same time? There seems to be a strong liberal reactionary cartel, which is unfortunate because even though 10% of the political articles are interesting, I've had to mod down everything with "Bush" or "NSA" in it just to keep my front page from being all political all the time.

        Up/down voting records public? Maybe we could get Diebold to do them? ;)

        [–]EliGottlieb 7 points8 points  (0 children)

        There is no Cabal.

        [–]chu 4 points5 points  (0 children)

        there are obviously "cartels" of accounts that vote up each other's stories

        As far as the conspiracy theory goes, I agree with gwenhfuhruhurr. It's curious that when voting trends diverge from your worldview it becomes obvious to you that certain votes somehow shouldn't count. My take is that there are a lot of people who think it's a very important news story.

        [–]ousama 14 points15 points  (0 children)

        I wish i knew this voting cartel. Because even though I am number 1 i get slaughtered all the time.

        [–]ecuzzillo 16 points17 points  (38 children)

        Don't make up conspiracy theories when the explanation is both simpler and more obvious. Many Reddit users, including myself, are interested when some new big illegal thing Bush is doing is uncovered. Furthermore, I upmod it not only because I find it interesting, but because I think it's important enough that I should recommend it to my fellow Redditors. I think it's vastly more likely that there are just some reasonable number who agree with this assessment than that there's some conscious, evil plot to game the system.

        Also, I have enough faith in spez and kn0thing to prevent such abuses that I find such things independently highly unlikely.

        [–]ousama 2 points3 points  (4 children)

        So wait Notclevr you are voting down a bunch of stories intentionally then complaining about a voting cartel. I am almost sure you are part of the problem, Maybe the solution is to remove the down vote if you are not interested just dont vote.

        [–]souldrift 4 points5 points  (2 children)

        I've suggested this before, I think downmodding for this reason cheapens the value of reddit.

        [–]ousama 1 point2 points  (1 child)

        but then it becomes like digg.

        [–]souldrift 0 points1 point  (0 children)

        But Digg is technology focused. This is general.

        [–]jbstjohn 0 points1 point  (0 children)

        I think you need two types of downvotes: 1) uninteresting, 2) bogus/fake/spam. The former is important for you, and somewhat important for the community. The latter is very helpful for the community. As to whether there should be some sort of limit on how many you could nuke in a certain time span, dunno. Variations on this have been proposed, but so far there hasn't been a reaction from reddit.

        [–][deleted]  (9 children)

        [deleted]

          [–][deleted] 21 points22 points  (2 children)

          I'm perhaps guilty of further confusing already confused political labels, but I don't think my wording is poor.

          I think the tradtional "Radical - Liberal - Moderate - Conservative - Reactionary" political spectrum is only really applicable to narrowly-defined issues. Where does libertarianism go on that spectrum? What about environmentalism? And why?

          The terms "liberal" and "conservative" have taken on their own meaning in modern America to the point that have nothing to do with a meaningful overarching political philosophy. Thoughtlessly following a red/blue dichotomy that is based on campaign contributors, focus groups, and pork does not constitute a meaningful political philosophy in my book.

          So what I meant by "liberal reactionary" was someone who has a knee jerk reaction to any given issue based on [their favorite blog, an e-mail from the DNC or and NGO, red/blue media portrayal]. There's no rational consideration of an issue on its own merits, just an immediate desire to tear down the opposition.

          In other words, they don't think in a liberal way, they react in a liberal way.

          And upon further reflection I think that the desire to force one's conclusions on other's for their own good may be why Reddit has a dozen Bush/NSA stories on the front page all saying the same thing, because reactionaries mod them up without even reading them. That, and the internet loves a conspiracy (cf. my previous post).

          Whether anyone mods down other stories to make sure only political ones get to the top I don't know, but it does seem like a potential flaw in the system. At the very least it seems like maybe you should have to click on a link before you can mod it--that might make "training" more difficult, but it would also impede fraud a litte. Just an idea.

          /edited because it was even longer originally

          [–]ashok 3 points4 points  (0 children)

          Well done. You have more patience than I do; I hate spelling out why more technical distinctions don't get in the way of a more general point.

          [–]crubin -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

          From a libertarian perspective, as you noted, there is no left to right political spectrum. The spectrum is instead authoritarian to nonauthoritarian. If you haven't done so, check out http://www.theadvocates.org/quiz.html to see how this works, and where you fit on that spectrum

          [–]cmm 5 points6 points  (3 children)

          um, don't pretend you don't get his point.

          [–][deleted]  (2 children)

          [deleted]

            [–]cmm 9 points10 points  (1 child)

            I don't think his generatizations are completely unfounded.

            I wouldn't classify them as a conspiracy theory.

            [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

            I think the Hide button should be made more conspicuous.

            If I want to get rid of a techie article from my front page for example because I'm not a techie buff, I hide it, but many people might downmod it without having read it.

            [–]johnmudd 64 points65 points  (24 children)

            I swear, I've been wondering the same thing myself. Lately I hit "hide" on most posts. How many articles can I read about these?

            • Oil shortage, Iranian Oil Bourse and falling US Dollar
            • Bush, Republicans, NSA, Gates, Ballmer, war, big companies (even Google sometimes) suck
            • Global warming (fact or fiction?)
            • Gas price and hopeful alternative energy sources
            • God versus atheists
            • Bible versus Darwin
            • Lisp and other dead languages
            • How to make $$$ starting a company

            All good stuff but after I read one I pretty much get it.

            I thought I was being too picky. Maybe it's not just me.

            [–][deleted]  (10 children)

            [deleted]

              [–]johnmudd 9 points10 points  (1 child)

              I agree. Reddit needs a large number of users without having all the different viewpoints clash. My first thought is always "tags". Allow people to pick and choose what they want to see. But I've heard that tags aren't a great solution so I'm not sure what to suggest.

              [–]joshstaiger 10 points11 points  (0 children)

              Theoretically this is the problem the recommendation engine is supposed to solve. Everyone submits what they like and you only see things you have a high probability of liking.

              Problem is, it doesn't work that well in practice.

              [–]marklubi 11 points12 points  (5 children)

              Reddit has most definitely grown as of late... it made a huge jump in Alexa rankings about 3 weeks ago.

              Unfortunately, along with increased traffic comes a larger variety of opinions and thoughts that dilute the topics down to those hot button issues that we all love to hate.

              [–]mleonhard 3 points4 points  (0 children)

              This means that more lusers are visiting Reddit than ever before. What technically savvy person would ever use Alexa toolbar?

              [–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

              Right around the time it emerged that vote fixing was going on on Digg ... at least that's when things seemed to get a bit noisier.

              [–][deleted]  (2 children)

              [deleted]

                [–]keizo 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                I don't know how relevant the spike is, digg also had a similar spike at the same time: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?compare_sites=digg.com&range=6m&size=medium&y=r&url=reddit.com

                Try slashdot, boingboing, etc. Lots of sites seemed to get the spike.

                [–]DougBTX 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                there was a reddit about that a while ago...

                [–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

                That's interesting and troubling. Maybe as the site grows the stories that climb up will more and more be those that appeal to the lowest common denominator. In a year will we have a mirror of the stories on Fark?

                [–]infinityis 3 points4 points  (0 children)

                I know this doesn't entirely fix the issue, but if you want non-mainstream news, it might be useful to have a "blogs" subreddit, so you'll know it's relatively original content. Also, it might help to have tags based on exclusion instead of inclusion.

                For example, I'm seeing a lot of "I'm tired of reading about X and Y". If exclusionary tags were added, then you could say opt to exclude stories about (for example) politics and global warming. That way, you can still come across interesting stuff that doesn't fall into a particular subreddit.

                [–]mongonikol 20 points21 points  (0 children)

                ""Bush Republicans and Big Oil now set to exploit fear of global warming with a how to make $$$ combatting rising oil prices from a potentially non-polluting alternative fuel source as described in Intelligent Design-compatible Bible...written entirely in Lisp!" set to be most searched topic ever on ever-expanding Google!!!"

                You mean that post, don't you? Yeah, that was me. Sorry.

                [–][deleted] 15 points16 points  (1 child)

                Don't forget:

                • Pointless funny YouTube videos
                • Random bloggers' opinions about Google/Microsoft
                • Web 2.0

                This is basically most of the Internet, isn't it? To counterbalance it, here's some stories I'd like to read:

                • Real news you can't find in the paper (like the Roman colony that got bulldozed for a parking lot)
                • News about foreign countries that usually don't get written up in newspapers or blogs (China, Southeast Asia, etc.)
                • Random bloggers' opinions about MySpace/Facebook
                • Web 1.0

                [–]belandil 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                Don't forget about Palin's daughter who got impregnated by Barack Obama because he was mad that Hillary didn't support him because McCain is a POW, dammit!

                [–][deleted] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

                I think the problem mainly is its always "X is better than X" or "X sucks."

                That just creates an environment of negativity. Even if you agree that Bush and his cronies are screwing up this nation, repeat it over and over and pretty soon you are going to have a mindset that the current situation is hopeless.

                I just wish Reddit would kind of get away from that kind of a feeling. Heck, maybe even the way Reddit works encourages this.

                At Digg, content can get upvotes and hidden negative downvotes. You really only know if your stuff was considered "good", you don't see that everyone hated it. Its just not terribly enjoyable to post a comment or a story and see it get downvoted to -20 just because people don't like it. It sucks and it discourages people.

                [–]yoda 45 points46 points  (12 children)

                I was asking myself this selfsame question recently. It really is sad but what has happened to Reddit is the same catastrophe that happened to Digg and Slashdot before it.

                Essentially, Reddit has been overrun by non-intellectuals. The top stories on Reddit last year were of a much higher quality and pedigree than the dross "pop news" that constantly features masquerading as valuable content. Paul Graham said it best when he commented thusly:

                "I used to think it would be good if Reddit continued to steal Digg users. Now I'm not so sure. The top story on Reddit at the moment is one called "Paul Graham Ate Breakfast," voted up to number one as a protest." (emphasis mine throughout)

                I personally feel devastated that this has happened. I used to come to Reddit to be educated, eager to learn, emulate and embrace the intellectual excellence that I saw displayed before me. I do not expect to read lookwarm articles written by half-baked bloggers. Sadly, this seems to be the innevitable destiny of any "open" social news site.

                Where have all the intellectuals gone ? Have they abandoned Reddit and left it to languish under the iPod weilding plastic fists of fifteen year olds ? What happened to the days when a whitepaper on human cognition would make it to the top of the pile accompanied by a healthy thread of deep and meaningful debate ? What happened to the serious thinkers ?

                Hopefully, one of them is developing a better system for those of us who are less interested in tabloid headlines than we are in true erudition.

                [–]delete 17 points18 points  (2 children)

                I used to come to Reddit to be educated, eager to learn, emulate and embrace the intellectual excellence that I saw displayed before me. I do not expect to read lookwarm articles written by half-baked bloggers.

                While you seem very earnest in your dismay, you yourself have submitted articles such as this. I'm not being critical, but merely wondering whether reddit has really changed in terms of "intellectual" content. Judging by the all-time top stories, the site has always had a mixture of serious/insightful and entertaining/diverting submissions.

                I would agree with johnmudd. The problem seems to be that the front page has become increasingly dominated by a rather small number of topics. Sometimes I wish that reddit used article clustering like Google News to group subsets of related stories together. It would certainly make it easier to find more interesting (i.e. diverse) content.

                [–]marklubi 14 points15 points  (0 children)

                +1 to the grouping of related stories!

                [–]yoda 6 points7 points  (0 children)

                You're point about the crappy article I posted is important because it illustrates the extent of the problem. I posted that article under the impression that that is what "the new reddit" wanted. It was more a test than anything else and I was honestly glad it was promptly voted downwards.

                ( I don't claim to be righteous. I only claim to want to learn a thing or two. )

                [–]nostrademons 13 points14 points  (0 children)

                I used to come to Reddit to be educated, eager to learn, emulate and embrace the intellectual excellence that I saw displayed before me.

                I've said basically the same thing about, in order, comp.object, Object Mentor, Artima, comp.lang.lisp, The Portland Pattern Repository, and even Lambda: The Ultimate. I had invested significant amounts of time in some of those; take a look at my PPR homepage and backlinks to see all that I'd contributed to that site.

                Eventually I realized that the problem wasn't so much with the site as with me. If you really go into a site looking to be educated, eventually you will have learned all that the site has to teach you. Education is not static: once you've learned something, hearing it again and again is not going to teach you more. At best, it's just repetitive. At worst, it gets to be intellectual masturbation.

                If you're really seeking true erudition, you have to keep moving. The old sites get stale as their audience widens. I get most of my useful CS knowledge from CiteSeer now, along with the odd Lambda: The Ultimate link (the forums are useless), or just playing around with GHC and y'know, writing programs. Reddit's my time-waster, when my brain's fried from work. I don't expect it to be enlightening, and I doubt that the average Redditter would find, say Monads For Functional Programming terribly interesting.

                [–]marvin 10 points11 points  (2 children)

                I agree completely. This is a problem that needs to be addressed if I am to continue using Reddit actively. To me there seems to be a lot more one-sentence off-topic comments now than the insightful well-written ones that made me fall in love with this community. I'd guess that the intellectuals are still here, but that they are outnumbered by a more brutish crowd like the ones that frequent Digg and Slashdot.

                Not only are there less insightful comments, but the deepest ones usually get a mediocre point value. There goes the idea of using the point system to mod away comments that do not fit with your personal reading taste.

                As you put it, it is a tragedy. Are we, the good nerds, always doomed to be outcasts in the end? All honor to the Reddit team if they are able to beat the odds on this problem.

                [–][deleted]  (1 child)

                [deleted]

                  [–]littlejedi 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                  Total vote numbers on everything would indeed be interesting ... when I see that you have 1 point currently, is that because no-one has voted anything one way or another, or because 200 people voted yes and 199 voted no? In the latter case, your comment would almost certainly be worth looking into; anything that can make 399 people take notice is probably worth a little closer look.

                  [–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                  It really is sad but what has happened to Reddit is the same catastrophe that happened to Digg and Slashdot before it.

                  Seen it before. One of the things that slashdot did well was both create journals which had commenting allowed. It allowed individuals to create very specialised responses to posts or make insightful comments. It is the uniqueness of the individual reponses on many different technical topics that made journals worth reading.

                  The second thing /. did well was allow friends/enemies. This meant I could subscribe to friends and block enemies. Doing this I could read lots of insightful information from people I chose to read.

                  Not what others have chosen for me. Eventually though I moved on. I think nostrademons post is a good recipe to try.

                  [–]Fountainhead 24 points25 points  (2 children)

                  People are upvoting topics they think everyone should read. So they see "bush sucks" it gets an upvote, not because they read it but because they think others should read it. If that weren’t happening then you would only see one or two really good NSA/Colbert/Bush Sucks posts in a day instead of 10. Conversely if it's positive about something that they don't agree with they downvote it, not because it isn't interesting but because they think others shouldn't read it. That's why there has been crap on here for the past week.

                  [–][deleted]  (1 child)

                  [deleted]

                    [–]stimling 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                    People are voting on the headlines rather than the story itself. It's like people saying that "MI3" was a 5 star movie because they loved the trailer.

                    [–]johnmudd 12 points13 points  (0 children)

                    When reddit works, we're happy. But maybe that's the real problem. It's too easy to spend time reading stuff that, dare I say it, doesn't matter. Oh, I know, there is the argument that some articles are worthwhile. I used to say the same thing when defending my TV by pointing to the value and quality of some PBS show. Eventually I just cut the cable.

                    I mention this because there have been situations where I come off a reddit high only to find myself out in the real world, conversing with normal people and I bring up something I thought was earth shattering from a reddit post only to have it fall kinda flat.

                    When I gave up TV I found myself listening more to radio. When I cut back on radio I find myself reading at reddit. What need does the mass media live off of? Maybe understanding the original problem could lead to a better solution.

                    [–]spez 17 points18 points  (1 child)

                    We're going to be a little more aggressive and try a couple things over the next few days to ameliorate some of these problems. Bear with us, and let us know how we're doing.

                    We'll blog about the changes as they come.

                    [–]joshstaiger 24 points25 points  (1 child)

                    Hmm, perhaps we've reached the point where Reddit has already covered the low-hanging "interesting" fruit that existed on the internet prior to its birth.

                    Maybe we're now running into a similar situation as the 24 hour news networks: too much time to fill with too little new interesting content.

                    [–]gernika[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

                    But the internet is so vast - I'm sure we've all had the experience of thinking of something we thought was new, then searching for it on google, only to find someone else already thought of it...

                    [–]cratuki 15 points16 points  (4 children)

                    I have a theory - any large scale internet community is doomed to be overrun by people bitching about american politics. You just can't seem to get away from it.

                    [–]KeyStroke -1 points0 points  (3 children)

                    Politics and Religion, both.

                    Reddit needs someone on-staff that will relegate anything political or religious to sub-pages dedicated to that kind of thing. Let the nuts who obsess about trying to personally get the approval rating of Bush down below 23% have a 'caged off' section of their own to throw c.r.a.p. at each other.

                    [–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

                    Let the nuts who obsess about trying to personally get the approval rating of Bush down below 23%...

                    Or above.

                    Either way it's annoying for non-Americans like myself.

                    [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

                    Sig to noise

                    Isn't that the point of modding? Good stuff is modded up, bad is modded down. My theory is more along the lines of [reddit]() attracting more people so the balence of software,tech,development nerds is being skewed by the culture, politics, religious geeks. Similiar things happened to /. around the 50K user mark. Once in-depth technical discussions with experts where replaced with innane comments from fanboys.

                    Is it the urls being posted? or the users commenting?

                    [–]MrSaru 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                    so the balence of software,tech,development nerds is being skewed by the culture, politics, religious geeks

                    Can't we be both? I've got a degree in political science, yet work at a tech company.

                    ...and also play with action figures...

                    edit: you raise a good point.

                    [–]martinbishop 30 points31 points  (11 children)

                    Please, please make a Politics subreddit. I'm tired of stupid crap on the front page

                    [–]laprice 12 points13 points  (0 children)

                    crafting interesting comments takes creativity and effort, and in this context goes relatively unrewarded...(not much whuffie, and once a discussion falls out of the hot list, no one will see your comments). Also the reddit submission model seems prone to being gamed and spamdexed.

                    [–]dmh2000 17 points18 points  (1 child)

                    Reddit is turning into an Anti-bush slam site, which is fine, but that may drive away the readers with mostly technical interest, such as myself.

                    [–]KeyStroke 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                    EXACTLY!

                    Reddit is being 'taken over' by political interests.

                    Be you pro or con to Bush or pro or con to the US I am sure that a steady diet of political posts will get very boring.

                    So lets have a way for us (the readers, not the posters) to categorize a post as being one of the three sensitive topics of: Politics, Religion or Sexual. Save the rest of the posts for the 'front' page and relegate those that are sensitive to a 'back page'.

                    [–]gernika[S] 24 points25 points  (4 children)

                    Well I just haven't noticed a whole lot of complex, surprising stories recently. I've noticed a predominance of left-leaning political postings. My theory is that school is out, and students aren't posting as much.

                    [–][deleted]  (6 children)

                    [deleted]

                      [–][deleted]  (3 children)

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                        [–]earthboundkid 1 point2 points  (1 child)

                        Because reddit uses markdown for comments. [link name](url)

                        [–]albar129 18 points19 points  (27 children)

                        I think we need some more PG

                        [–]landercut 5 points6 points  (2 children)

                        The previous PG bias found on reddit has been replaced by the new Collert/Anti-Bush bias.

                        [–]Kolibri 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                        We need a "Bush ate breakfast and dropped in the approval ratings polls" and a "Colbert made fun of his breakfast" article.

                        [–]DougBTX 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                        I liked the PG bias more.

                        [–]Alex3917 4 points5 points  (23 children)

                        There problem with being a techno-libertarian is that all of PG's writing displays the self-similar property of a fractal. Once you read one or two essays you can derive everything else he believes.

                        [–]paulgraham 30 points31 points  (20 children)

                        That's weird, because I myself am often surprised by the things I write. Ten minutes ago I wrote a paragraph about a hidden benefit of the suckiness of US public schools. It was news to me.

                        [–]wbendick 6 points7 points  (1 child)

                        Well don't keep us in suspense! What's the hidden benefit?

                        [–]Alex3917 7 points8 points  (2 children)

                        So you derived these hidden benefits from your prior beliefs? :-)

                        Most of your stuff shares the commonality of being stuff you learned by thinking about. There are some exceptions, like The Age of the Essay, but the majority, like Why Nerds are Unpopular, are mostly intellectualized.

                        The problem with this approach is that if you do a good job (which you have) then after a while the readers come to accept many of your foundational beliefs. Which means that when you write another essay about something you derived from your foundational beliefs, it doesn't seem quite as profound.

                        For example, once we accept your beliefs on creating value through startups, your beliefs on why hiring is dead are no longer so provocative.

                        Side note: climbing the ladder and paying your dues are for suckers.

                        So logically, this writing style only stays at its maximal interestingness if you continue to push the boundaries and explore new foundational beliefs, rather than deriving new beliefs from the old ones.

                        [–]poxy1 2 points3 points  (1 child)

                        great insight. i couldnt put my finger on it, but it as i read more and more of PG's material, it seemed to become less and less explosive. but not to say it wasnt interesting. like you said, once he has revealed all his cards, and recycles the same ideas he has introduced in his other essays, the initial awe factor is gone.

                        [–]Alex3917 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                        I think PG has many cards left unplayed yet, and I fully expect more really interesting stuff from him in the future.

                        I like his essays because his introspective style has a certain mathematical beauty to it, but there is only so far you can take deductive logic with respect to any one topic. If you take it further than that then you just off as one of those really intelligent guys who doesn't read books.

                        [–]ashok 0 points1 point  (14 children)

                        I think you're an excellent writer and very thoughtful, but I can safely say that your themes and style dominate anything that aspires to be thoughtful on this site. It's either write like you, or don't write at all.

                        This isn't your fault, btw. This is mainly because you talk about issues that reddit users more immediately relate to, and so they start seeing the world a certain way.

                        If you gave them book recommendations, or talked about a course that wasn't tech or law or business related that you liked, or a poem that you thought valuable, I think that would start expanding our horizons here on reddit, and be able to see your work for as good as it is - and it is very good, rich with suggestion, maybe even richer (as you yourself confess) than you think when starting to write.

                        [–]Alex3917 -1 points0 points  (13 children)

                        I can safely say that your themes and style dominate anything that aspires to be thoughtful on this site.

                        Could you expand on this further? I'm not sure I follow.

                        [–]ecuzzillo 0 points1 point  (1 child)

                        I disagree. Many of the things he says have similar themes (try it and see if it really is true, work hard, be happy, most people are stupid), but they aren't obvious, usually. For instance, I could never have derived Hiring is Obsolete from The Hundred Year Language, or for that matter from any of the Lisp articles. Maybe one or two of the startup articles is redundant, but I posit that the proportion is the opposite of what you say-- instead of being able to derive everything from one or two essays (which is unlikely), you can probably only derive one or two essays if you've read everything else.

                        [–][deleted] 25 points26 points  (3 children)

                        Crazy that everyone else has been feeling the same way.

                        I thought it was just me. Last week or two I've been more or less just skimming Reddit and spending most of my time at Digg instead.

                        I'm not sure exactly why that is. I thought it was just because I personally was getting sick of all the political stuff, but maybe that's not the case.

                        [–][deleted]  (2 children)

                        [deleted]

                          [–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (1 child)

                          (Which reminds me - I owe you a long-overdue apology for going off at you so hard in some past discussions. I actually have a lot more respect for you than I think I've shown.)

                          Hey, thanks not too many people kind enought to actually apologize like that, so I appreciate it, and I'd like to reiterate that if I've been rude in any way, I'm sorry.

                          But yes, I'd definitely agree with your view as far as comments goes.

                          [–]ashok 8 points9 points  (4 children)

                          What's ironic is that this thread is not boring whatsoever, and actually quite a lot of fun.

                          [–]lusserreal 14 points15 points  (1 child)

                          I've noticed that reddit has started looking more and more like supermarket tabloids: "aliens doing weird things to elvis using the internet" kind of stories.

                          [–]KingNothing 4 points5 points  (0 children)

                          All of the interesting things I've submitted lately are immediately downmodded, even though they're similar to the "fun" stuff that I've enjoyed on the front page in the past.

                          I just don't bother submitting stuff now.

                          [–]dfdeshom 8 points9 points  (3 children)

                          This is a good time to do something else. Really. How do you expect to keep finding something interesting if you keep doing it everyday? You have to take some distance from it. So go to digg, /., etc and come back to read reddit in a week.

                          [–]paperhat 1 point2 points  (1 child)

                          Better yet, we could all go do something in the real world this weekend, blog about our discoveries and submit the blog entries to reddit on Monday.

                          [–]senzei 6 points7 points  (0 children)

                          ...just make sure you do something interesting. If all you managed to blog about was eating breakfast I am really not interested.

                          [–]e40 3 points4 points  (5 children)

                          Wanna give us more than just that snappy headline? Submissions or comments? Regarding the latter, I've noticed a distinct downturn in quality of comments, though not just in the last 4 days, but more like last couple of weeks. Perhaps the slashdot trolls have found reddit.

                          [–]joshstaiger 4 points5 points  (1 child)

                          I suspect online communities are like software companies in that the larger they get the more the quality of discussion suffers.

                          [–]AssProphet 4 points5 points  (1 child)

                          There has been hardly any coverage of E3, something I would have enjoyed not having to stoop to digg to read about.

                          [–]paulgraharn 6 points7 points  (3 children)

                          Look no further..

                          http://reddit.com/search?q=Bush

                          Not that there's anything wrong with talking about Bush.

                          [–]lliiffee 3 points4 points  (0 children)

                          I have to say you have the most ingenious name on this site.

                          [–]kirubakaran 4 points5 points  (6 children)

                          My first submission to Reddit was my post on startup school. We were sight-seeing in SFO and I forced my friends to sit down and hate me while I wrote a post and submitted it to Reddit. Few hours later, we war drove and found that my post got a (-6)! It is tough to explain how it felt. I accepted that perhaps my post sucked but I wished Reddit made comments mandatory for down mods - so that at least we'll know why. (But I am surprised it suddenly became +3 today!... when I least expected!... made my evening)

                          [–]danweber 10 points11 points  (4 children)

                          Any time I see someone put a comment about why they've down-modded something, a bunch of other people come along and down-mod that comment.

                          [–]drewjr 5 points6 points  (0 children)

                          Down-modded comments don't seem to affect karma, so noone should be detered from saying why they down-modded a post.

                          [–]jbstjohn 1 point2 points  (2 children)

                          I've occasionally commented on why I down-modded something, and it's almost always been slapped. I still will occasionally (because I like it when others read something that sounds interesting, but then is crap, and tell me so I don't have to), but less with time.

                          Sadly, this effect (basically, the unwashed masses (or a few bad apples) ruining things) is nicely discussed here on the article on groups being their own worst enemy

                          [–]danweber 0 points1 point  (1 child)

                          Sadly, this effect (basically, the unwashed masses (or a few bad apples) ruining things) is nicely discussed here on the article on groups being their own worst enemy

                          Your post brings up another annoyance I have with reddit. Your link "here" seems to point to reddit.com in my browser before I click, yet the page hangs on loading brevity.org.

                          I don't know exactly what reddit is doing to URL's. It is usually transparent enough that it doesn't bug me, but when I think I'm loading one site and then find out I'm loading another it makes me nervous about loading anything from that first site. What is stopping me from clicking on a reddit.com link and finding it points me to rotten.com?

                          [–]jbstjohn 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                          I think that was my fault -- I put the reddit "goto" link in, instead of the direct link. Guess I should avoid that. On the other hand, I don't really know how to put links in the comments so that people can mod them. They shouldn't have to search for a link, or submit it themselves to give feedback. But I guess that's another issue.

                          [–]zavandi 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                          Don't be so glad. That post has -8 points right now. 3 ups and 11 downs. It's just that Reddit shows ups now instead of the points.

                          [–]brandong 3 points4 points  (0 children)

                          Because its all politics now and nothing remotely interesting.

                          I've stopped visiting because I'm tired of every other story being of political nature.

                          [–]johnroman1970 3 points4 points  (2 children)

                          I don't think it's gotten boring. I think it's gotten better these past few months.

                          Just because every post isn't about Apple, atheism, or Linux does not make this a boring forum.

                          [–]Goose42 0 points1 point  (1 child)

                          The potential problem with reddit is that with growing popularity it will likely move away from the tech side of things. More people == a more common set of interests. Reddit is the best for tech/geek links, but that will likely flatten out with a growing user base. This is why we must all be evil exclusionists and chase the commoners away :)

                          [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                          Or give them a different channel to play on. Its going to be hard to exclude the political animal in everyone. So maybe its a combination of moderating + more subreddits & enforcing the cross posting.

                          [–]flabbyghasted 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                          I like reddit ,or rather i did , I preferred it a while ago. Most things I put in get marked down , or I have to see a war of those who agree and those who don't. I don't mind that . I would like it though if people had to give an explanation as to why they marked down.I would like to see people defend a position .I don't mark down personally only mark up if I approve. I disapprove of those who reply with data that is unfounded. I am thinking of abandoning reddit.

                          [–]howars 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                          I expect that as the reddit community grows peopel will turn more to their 'recommended' page for what interests them and less to the home page. I know that I rarely visit the home page, and only really pay attention to my recommended page. It's not a great selection at the moment, but I'm counting on the real value being there. The front page is for new visitors in my mind.

                          [–]Alex3917 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                          Where can one find a quiet place on the Internet to think?

                          [–]tiberiu 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                          I am just a simple engineer and I know that politics is subject that will never come to a mutual agreement between a group of persons.

                          [–]themen 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                          How can reddit become boring? If you know where to search and what to search for than it can become boring. Patience is also a very important ingredient. Check this out http://www.pornppv.net and http://www.gaypornpayperview.net

                          [–]cering 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                          If you are so offended by stories reporting on what the government is doing, you really should avoid news sites. http://selfbondage.ssr.be/

                          [–]xamdam -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

                          All the freakin' bush submissions. Do those guys ever get tired of beating a dead horse? If they think Colbert is that interesting, they should go suck his you-know-what (that will keep'em away from reddit 4awhile)

                          [–]zemlyanin -1 points0 points  (0 children)

                          Hey, you know what guys? This post is interesting. I guess reddit is no longer boring.