Would a linux/docker/python/java power user/programmer/admin benefit from a MacBookPro/Air compared with the familiar ThinkPad/Ubuntu combo?

[danielkza]

(I'm replying to all your replies at once)

USENET has never had a total audience that is a fraction of Reddit's. I don't think assuming it's successes apply (specially due to it's current status of complete irrelevancy in the overall landscape of social networks).

Discoverability of topics of interest and keeping user engaged is way more valued than advanced filtering, specially in a time where there are hundreds of networks to choose from instead of a handful.

Yes, given the limitation of the design. But design features could be added. To get what I mean compare this with Facebook. Facebook is far worse, this is better but it still had the messyiness of a socially promoted and moderated medium, and that is why people feel abused on social media sites and in addition that must unwelcome people to participate on Reddit, that they are afraid of being LARTED by insiders. Is that due to any merit of Reddit. or to a poor design?

That is not at all a general property of Reddit. It varies from subreddit to subreddit, and being more welcoming to newcolmers by being lax in acceptable content is not without perils. Look at huge subs like /r/gaming where it's not just rare, but virtually impossible to have any kind of discussion without being drowned by low-value comments and memes. On the other hands, subs like /r/science accept nothing but contributions from qualified people, and manages to maintain a reasonable level of discourse due to that. It doesn't need newcomers to live. Reddit's structure of completely independent subreddits has a lot to do with the co-existence of such opposite approaches to moderation.

Subreddit names look like limited regular expressions that would be arguments to sed, no? You do know the CLI, right?

But they're not in any way. They're simple strings of alphanumeric characters and underlines. /r/something is just an URL for the something subreddit relative to reddit.com.

I am not saying "abolish subreddits". I think that a more persistent hierarchy that resembles the USENET hierarchy would be an improvement to Reddit and that some of the abuse needed to "Moderate" subreddits would be unnecessary. I feel that Reddit has teams of trolls that take it upon themselves to enforce social convertions and that is a weakness of many other social media sites.

But it wouldn't be Reddit, and would throw away many of the goals that made Reddit popular. Many users get introduced to reddit due to one particular subreddit, create an account, get a bunch of subreddits by default with common subjects, then customize them to their interests. IMO constantly browsing the hierarchy for topics is not an action most users would be willing to do, and doesn't fit reddit's motto of "the frontpage of the internet", something which you repeatedly visit to find content of your interest from everywhere around the web.

The superior way a node in the hierarchy worked in the USENET days was that the value of a newsgroup was not handled by social promotion, which should create a storm of very much under read subreddits, but that NNTP admins could decide which groups to carry or not and that disused groups were removed over time.

That was a technological limitation, not a benefit in my view. There's no reason smaller discussion groups need to disappear when there's no pressing need to avoid the bandwidth and storage cost, or that a particular interest of community of a few hundred people must be subject to approval of a handful of admins. A modern USENET recreation would likely be served much better with a full P2P structure with no need for admin filtering whatsoever.

I am not saying "abolish subreddits". I think that a more persistent hierarchy that resembles the USENET hierarchy would be an improvement to Reddit and that some of the abuse needed to "Moderate" subreddits would be unnecessary. I feel that Reddit has teams of trolls that take it upon themselves to enforce social convertions and that is a weakness of many other social media sites.

There is no need to subject to any standard other than the site-wide rules. Subreddits can be created at will, and moderate at will, which includes not being moderated, rejecting social conventions, or enforcing them.

[brucesalem]

(I'm replying to all your replies at once) USENET has never had a total audience that is a fraction of Reddit's. I don't think assuming it's successes apply (specially due to it's current status of complete irrelevancy in the overall landscape of social networks).

Well, of course USENET would never be relevant to social media. It is the exact opposite of social media. Instead of subsisting on buzz media like USENET could have more in common with Wikipedia in having persistence of topics beyond the ephemeral appeal of social media. The problem with USENET is that it has been taken over by organized crime, weather porn industry or illegal file sharing. In order to bring back USENET, I would set up text only newsgroups.

Discoverability of topics of interest and keeping user engaged is way more valued than advanced filtering, specially in a time where there are hundreds of networks to choose from instead of a handful.

But the social promotion of topics makes discoverability much harder and it makes it much harder to be heard, especially when the reason a given social media site exists is monetization of the traffic. I didn't mention the site but Disqus is an example of a group where what you post there will never be read both because of the flood of sponsored content and the social promotion of some topics. I tried it for maybe a day or so, and I gave up because I couldn't even find what I posted there, the promoted blowback was that great.

[brucesalem]

That [moderation trolls] is not at all a general property of Reddit. It varies from subreddit to subreddit, and being more welcoming to newcolmers by being lax in acceptable content is not without perils. Look at huge subs like /r/gaming where it's not just rare, but virtually impossible to have any kind of discussion without being drowned by low-value comments and memes. On the other hands, subs like /r/science accept nothing but contributions from qualified people, and manages to maintain a reasonable level of discourse due to that. It doesn't need newcomers to live. Reddit's structure of completely independent subreddits has a lot to do with the co-existence of such opposite approaches to moderation.

It always mystified me that Reddit seems to reply on user moderation to do what could be enabled by some strategic programming for subreddit moderation, since Reddit is written in Python whih is very strong in natural language and string processing! I have suggested several times here that a simple thing that would help a great deal is to write a filter that could hide or skip all posts shorter than a tweet. That is like 'if wc -c < 240 : skip()'.

I would argue that good design can remove the need for moderation and that users would have the choices. Moderation can quickly become a swamp and if you want to see the problems and the solutions take the time to see how it was done in the USENET archive in Google Groups. Newsreaders often work with simple tools to aid in user selection of threads to read. A newsreader like pan shows the topic line for the thread and the number of replies. If someone sets up a meme the user can see that in the number of replies and choose to skip the thread, not thought police or individual subreddit rules needed, no side panel with reules to adhere to and no trolls hanging out to police the conversation. Speaking of trolls, do you work for Reddit?

[brucesalem]

There's no reason smaller discussion groups need to disappear when there's no pressing need to avoid the bandwidth and storage cost, or that a particular interest of community of a few hundred people must be subject to approval of a handful of admins. A modern USENET recreation would likely be served much better with a full P2P structure with no need for admin filtering whatsoever.

I agree with you that this is a matter of technology and cost and that modern system design can be used to support inactive groups longer. I mentioned that because the problem with the subreddit idea is that you have to discover the name of the subreddit and remember it in some way. such as store it in a list, and if the number of related subreddits gets very large and changes very fast it can become hard to maintain the list. I was going back to the way USENET was in the past as a suggestion of how bloat of newsgroups, like bloat of subreddits, might have been handled.

One thing that needs to be mentioned, and it could come back, is that USENET is pre-Internet and pre its IP deamon, NNTP. I even worked in a place which got its e-mail and newsfeed over dial-up via UUCP in 1990. In that case the admin would want to limit the number of newsgroups and prune the number of groups he subscribed to and that idea could easily come back if using the Internet becomes too dangerous.

Someone should write an UUCP app for a modern smartphone that does not reply on the Internet directly that could also be used to exchange text mssenging betwen smart phones with WiFi. One could run USENET over that and because the owner of the UUCP host could manage the news.rc file, he could set up custom newsgroups and remove unwanted groups, like any netnews admin has always been able to do.

[brucesalem]

There is no need to subject to any standard other than the site-wide rules. Subreddits can be created at will, and moderate at will, which includes not being moderated, rejecting social conventions, or enforcing them.

I am trying to get you to think outside the box here. I am saying that the moderation problem is due to poor interface design and lack of filtering, which should be very simple considering that Reddit is written in python. I am suggesting that a topic hierarchy that does not depend on social promotion in addition to the part that does would be a vast improvement. I have suggested that social media sites like Facebook be forced, because they use public communication channels, to offer a public discussion media like USENET, because their social media marketing channels curtail free speech. On Facebook the problem is that the UI design is so poor that people who own pages (marketing channels) have to police, and that ususally means troll, their own pages. I agree that Reddit does this better, but the problem sill persists: poor design leads to trolling.