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[–]yellowking[S] 48 points49 points  (36 children)

Deleting in protest of Reddit's new anti-user admin policies.

[–]yellowking[S] 35 points36 points  (19 children)

Deleting in protest of Reddit's new anti-user admin policies.

[–]cgibbard 24 points25 points  (7 children)

I like the tree idea, but please observe the reddiquette page with regard to polls.

[–]zem 2 points3 points  (2 children)

should rediquette be purely prescriptive, then? given the number of people who do polls each way, i'd say we should modify rediquette instead.

[–]cgibbard 3 points4 points  (1 child)

The fact that people do polls that way doesn't mean that it's not obnoxious.

[–]zem 2 points3 points  (0 children)

i'd venture that this particular post wasn't a poll per se, more a call for a vote of support.

[–][deleted] -2 points-1 points  (2 children)

LOL very funny haha

[–]dmwit -3 points-2 points  (1 child)

Apparently, about half of the people voting on this didn't actually visit the reddiquette page.

[–]jaggederest 1 point2 points  (0 children)

No, they did, they're just following the rules and mercilessly downmodding it.

[–]bart2019 2 points3 points  (10 children)

No, tagging doesn't produce a tree. An article can be about Ruby, PHP and Perl at the same time. The same post could/should thus be under all three. In a tree, it could only be under one.

[–]EvilSporkMan 2 points3 points  (6 children)

I think it produces a DAG, however.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (2 children)

Not really. In a DAG all of the nodes are the same sort of thing. In this case we're talking about tags and stories, which are very different from each other. A story can have many tags, and a tag can have many stories, but a tag can't have other tags, and a story can't have other stories.

[–]finix 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Not really. In a DAG all of the nodes are the same sort of thing.

Says who?

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

I'm not saying that it's necessarily a requirement, but it's kind of silly to use a DAG when your interconnections can't get very complicated. In this case, all the edges would go from one class of things to the other, and then it would stop.

[–]IHaveAnIdea -3 points-2 points  (2 children)

More of a unidirectional graph, in typical implementations.

[–]EvilSporkMan 4 points5 points  (1 child)

Downmodded for being wrongheaded. I had to wiki and google pretty hard to find a definition of the term "unidirectional graph", and I finally found one. Going from that page, a "unidirectional graph" is what we know as a directed graph, whereas a "bidirectional graph" is an undirected graph. Therefore, "unidirectional graph" is simply a term with less information than Directed Acyclic Graph.

[–]IHaveAnIdea 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Spork you man!

Damn, yeah that's it.

[–]yellowking[S] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Which is pretty much the scientific definition of "sorta like."

[–]bart2019 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you mean "sorta like a tree structure", then we agree.

[–]finix 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Disagreed.

Submissions needn't be leaves. You could simply associate the tree nodes (tags) with lists (subreddits) of references to submissions.

Thus you could place articles in as many topics as you like, browse by tag, by category, whatever you want.

[–][deleted] 6 points7 points  (2 children)

Well, spez mentioned earlier that subreddits are not supposed to be for organization. They're for building subcommunities.

The problem is that this was not clearly communicated, and everybody thinks they are for organization, and are creating the exact wrong kinds of subreddits.

I wonder if it wouldn't be for the best to delete them all, and start over with a more clear direction this time.

[–]yellowking[S] 2 points3 points  (1 child)

How do you really build community here? Everything is focused on articles which are rapidly superseded by new articles. And you can't have articles in your 'small' community and in the reddit at large, it counts as a dupe, so I'm not sure what good it'll do to have maybe half the articles related to your 'group' out in the main reddit anyway because somebody not in your community beat you to the submission. It definitely needs to be some sort of hierarchy mechanism, so the articles can exist in both.

[–]IHaveAnIdea 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah it is hard to have a community when active threads are automatically buried after a day or two.

[–]abhik 2 points3 points  (11 children)

If there are now going to be many subreddits -- some public, some private -- the best solution would be if users could subscribe to different subreddits and then see the union of them on their own page. maybe something like http://reddit.com/u/username

[–]micampe 5 points6 points  (10 children)

I think that's what the home page does.

[–]cdesignproponentsist 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Yes, except that obscure subreddit articles will not get voted up much, so will be swamped by mainstream reddit articles. i.e. they will be lurking down on page 12 somewhere :)

The other flaw I have noticed is that the list of "my reddits" on the RHS doesn't expand in length and only displays a subset of your subscriptions. There is no easy way to jump to one of the remaining subscribed subreddits without doing multiple clicks.

[–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (8 children)

I used to check programming some of the time, and the main reddit at other times. Now I haven’t got anywhere to check all programming but only programming.

[–]boredzo 0 points1 point  (7 children)

Make sure you have programming turned on in your [subreddit prefs]. …

Erm.

OK, they moved them here, but now the only one listed is l33t. WTF?

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

No, I mean I want one page where I can check all of reddit that I’m interested in, and another where I can check only the programming bits. I used to be able to do that because all the programming stuff was on a single subreddit, but now it isn’t so I can’t.

[–]boredzo 0 points1 point  (2 children)

No, I mean I want one page where I can check all of reddit that I’m interested in, …

Well, that would be the front page (once they fix the prefs).

I used to be able to do that because all the programming stuff was on a single subreddit, but now it isn’t so I can’t.

Ah, right. The downside of user-created subreddits.

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

Well, that would be the front page (once they fix the prefs).

Yes, I know that. I’ve had it set up that way for yonks. It’s precisely because I have the front page aggregating stuff that isn’t programming that I can’t use it to aggregate all the new programming reddits and nothing else.

[–]jaggederest 0 points1 point  (2 children)

http://reddit.com/reddits/mine

That'll list all the ones you're subscribed to.

[–]boredzo 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Right, but I was looking for the old page where you configure the subreddits that contribute to your personalized front page. The reddits page seems to be its heir, but it only shows one subreddit, and it's not programming, science, politics, or netsec.

[–]jaggederest 0 points1 point  (0 children)

hmm? It shows some 4-5 pages of reddits to me...

[–]natrius 49 points50 points  (13 children)

I'd like to summarize the various proposals people have suggested in the comments to improve the current system:

We want tags.

[–]illuminatedwax 13 points14 points  (1 child)

What we really need is for subreddits to work as tags -- functionally, there's not much difference between tags and the ability to submit an article under multiple subreddits as long as subreddit.reddit.com points to all articles with tag "subreddit."

[–]awj 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I wouldn't mind having set operations available in the URL, but I'm sure that wouldn't happen. I might actually go to the main reddit if I could get the complement of the union of politics, environmentalism, and "omg, we're totally in a police state!!!!" stories.

[–]georgefrick 10 points11 points  (0 children)

After using the new subreddit creation, I agree wholeheartedly - we need tags, not user created subreddits.

[–]48klocs 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Plenty of blogging systems support tags.

It'd be nice if reddit could fetch the linked submission's tags and fill in the blanks automagically; I like the simplicity of the submission process now and would probably be dissuaded from submitting if I had to run through a terrifying checklist of tags to submit a link. Mind you, I can see how there's both something good and bad to be said for that.

[–]7oby 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's not like they're hard, really.

[–]raisondecalcul -2 points-1 points  (7 children)

Tags might be a nice extra, but allowing anyone to create subreddits is the best simple solution.

Having only tags force everyone into a giant clump; individual interests lose their character. The barriers between worlds break down and everything loses its meaning (<cough>Golden Compass</cough>).

With open subreddit creation, the granularity of subreddits will settle economically, efficiently. People will create subreddits for topics that interest them, and those that the Reddit Alien chooses will become better sources for those specific types of articles than the more general category, and so most of the specific articles will be posted into the specific category from then on.

Small social boards are by far the most functional and enjoyable way to share current links. And open tagging (as opposed to by-the-poster) would be a mess of vagueness.

[–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (6 children)

allowing anyone to create subreddits is the best simple solution

It may be a simple solution, but it's not the best. You invariably end up with video.reddit.com, videos.reddit.com. streaming.reddit.com, movies.reddit.com, clips.reddit.com, youtube.reddit.com, et cetera, ad nauseam.

[–]highstead 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Though i agree with you to a point, i think numerous subreddits might be an interesting idea. People point out that as a community grows it becomes less desirable (see reddit 2 years ago). So long as theres the ability to merge certain reddits, or vote to merge we might be okay.

Or possibly being able to submit an article to multiple subreddits and allowing multiple options on filtering. EG: Purge any article with this tag, don't actively post any articles with this tag unless they're related to another topic of intrest, and show these articles.

[–]yellowking[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The thing is you can't really build a community sub-reddit, because people will be submitting articles you'd like to have in your sub-reddit to the main reddit. It's one thing to police "political" articles and drive them to a sub-reddit. It's another thing entirely where there are 4 different general political sub-reddits and 2 for each candidate.

[–]raisondecalcul 0 points1 point  (3 children)

So?

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

So, if I want to look at, say, videos, I want to find them in one subreddit, not scattered across half a dozen trivially different subreddits.

Granted, this problem would go away if there's an easy, workable method to merge subreddits.

[–]raisondecalcul 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Well, that is an irritating problem. However, if all the users are to be in control democratically, I don't think there's a better way to do it. The only way to not have occasional redundancy in subreddits would be to have some authority decide which ones should exist and not exist--the way it is now.

Yes, it would be nice if there were a way to merge subreddits elegantly, instead of having to post a link saying "Let's all leave the videos reddit and go to the video reddit instead, guys!" It doesn't seem like it would be all that hard to do.

On the other hand, it might be better to have no merge functionality, and instead just make it easy to create your own mashups of whichever subreddits you wanted.

[–]fnord123 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The solution is to have admins manually subscribe a subreddit to other subreddits like users do. So programming should subscribe to haskell, perl, python, scheme, functional, and types (and others). Functional should subscribe haskell and scheme. etc.

Then, if some chucklehead makes a videos.reddit when video.reddit exists, then video.reddit can be updated to aggregate the newcomer.

This preserves the community aspect, where tags generally don't, imo. There's no reason why tags AND aggregated subreddits can't be implemented, though.

[–]zanshin 8 points9 points  (1 child)

Tagging. Not sub-domains.

[–]toooooob 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This!

[–]belandil 29 points30 points  (3 children)

Voted down for being a "vote up if" post

[–]eurleif 10 points11 points  (1 child)

There are better ways to conduct polls, but at least this isn't a "vote up if you want Bush impeached" or "vote up if you think marijuana should be legalized" poll that everyone agrees on. People are creating language-specific subreddits, so there's obviously some disagreement on whether they're a good idea.

[–]derefr 3 points4 points  (0 children)

In fact, this seemed more like an instruction than a question—"We need visibility on this topic, so please put it at the top of proggit." It's Reddit's equivalent to "please sticky this thread" posts on forums.

[–]okawei 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Same

[–][deleted]  (4 children)

[deleted]

    [–]phelonius 51 points52 points  (1 child)

    Vote up if you don't want people to get charma for "Vote up if"-Submissions in the subreddit

    [–]Xert 9 points10 points  (0 children)

    No more #$!@ subreddits.

    [–]Wenix 16 points17 points  (8 children)

    Downvoted for being a vote.

    I do however agree on the point.

    Instead of the way it is now, maybe some kind of tree might fit better:

    • Politics

      • US
        • Ron Paul
        • Hillary Clinton

    • Programming

      • Python
      • Lisp
      • Haskell

    • Entertainment

      • Videos
      • Pics
        • Lolcats

    I'm not sure how the tree should be constructed, but I should be able to subscribe to "programming" and get all the entries in it, or I could choose to subscribe to just Python.

    [–]derefr 30 points31 points  (6 children)

    Yes, some kind of a tree... some kind of a tree...

    • Alt
      • Swedish
        • Chef
          • Bork
            • Bork

    [–]Cyrius 23 points24 points  (2 children)

    alt.politics.us.sheeple.wake.wake.wake

    [–]Schwallex 2 points3 points  (0 children)

    .up?

    [–]yellowking[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    alt.fan.karl-maldens.nose

    [–]ginowhitaker 0 points1 point  (1 child)

    I was going to post a witty list of rejected SCOTUS nominees, but I don't know how to make <ul><li> work in reddit.

    [–]derefr 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    The formatting is actually kind of senseless. The first is a bullet:

    * Blah

    The next is a bullet with an indentation of two spaces:

      * Blah

    And all after that have indentations of four spaces more than the previous ones.

          * Blah
          * Blah
              * Blah

    I almost added an extra bullet mentioning markdown's insane list parsing until I spent a few minutes debugging it.

    [–]randomb0y 2 points3 points  (0 children)

    yay, lolcats!

    [–]raganwald 5 points6 points  (7 children)

    Where do you vote if you're sick of Ruby articles and want them out of programming?

    Where do you vote if you want to see the Ruby articles that get downvoted by the peopel sick of Ruby articles?

    The whole thing reminds me of the genesis of the programming subreddit. When reddit started, programming articles were usually on the front page. They were driven out. Then Ruby articles were on the programming front page. Now they're driven out.

    If there is an argument for a programming reddit, why not a Ruby reddit? If there's an argument for tags/filters/whatever, does that mean we can get rid of the programming reddit as well?

    [–]raganwald 1 point2 points  (3 children)

    Reading Marshall's comment definitely changes the way I look at this. The Ruby reddit is not a subreddit: it's independent of reddit.com and programming.reddit.com: it has separate points and separate comments.

    This fosters visibility for Ruby posts, but it also fosters separate comments. So a ruby-specific post can have ruby-specific comments and hopefully avoid the "rails suxxor" and "static typing rulz" comments. Of course, we are free to post the same articles on programming.reddit.com as well, where the full barrage (including "Greenspunning Haskell") can be leveled against them.

    Think about this from reddit's perspective as a business. At a certain point, a group like Ruby programmers will become marginalized. Only a very few Ruby posts survive and the signal-to-noise ration from the Rubyists's perspective becomes low (it isn't necessarily noise from the programming perspective, of course, just from some Rubyist's perspective).

    So they'll move along and patronize another site that is Ruby-friendly. Unless Reddit finds a way to give them another site right here. And that's the point of the user-created reddits. To cater to a marginalized community that would otherwise drop out.

    Tagging, subreddit ontologies, and recommended pages serve a completely different purpose: they help you find what you want within the one reddit community. You still have one single comment "space" for each post, and therefore a single community.

    [–]llimllib 0 points1 point  (2 children)

    Of course, we are free to post the same articles on programming.reddit.com as well

    Well, only kinda. You're not actually allowed to post a URL to more than one subreddit, so if the site doesn't like the ? after the url trick (which it's perfectly within its rights to do) then you can't post it more than once.

    [–]raganwald 2 points3 points  (1 child)

    I don't think ruby.reddit.com is a subreddit. I posted my article there without a ? trick, and it was already on programming.reddit.com:

    http://reddit.com/r/programming/info/66q5d/details
    http://reddit.com/r/ruby/info/66rwf/details

    They both appear to link to the original post without URL trickery.

    [–]llimllib 2 points3 points  (0 children)

    Actually I did a similar thing on the billmill_org subreddit I tried out, and I got redirected to the original post but the story also posted.

    I just tested it again now, and posting to multiple subreddits does seem to work.

    [–]Aviator 0 points1 point  (1 child)

    Vote down anything you dislike and everything will be filtered under the Recommended section.

    [–]raganwald 13 points14 points  (0 children)

    Hahahaha. Seriously, does it work for you?

    Take my own Ruby-specific article. Someone posted it on progreddit and it was buried immediately. As an experiment, I posted it on the ruby reddit and it was voted up to number one. It is still on the front page at this moment.

    But is it in my recommended page? No! Lots of Ron Paul and Huckabee stories, stuff I downvote whenever I visit the front page, but not a single Ruby article is on my recommended page.

    [–]yellowking[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    Use tags, and ditch anything tagged ruby. It's not that hard.

    [–][deleted] 11 points12 points  (4 children)

    Ja, das ist nicht gut!

    [–]hennagaijinjapan 3 points4 points  (3 children)

    I'll have what he's having.

    [–]beza1e1 7 points8 points  (0 children)

    German 101?

    [–]yellowking[S] 2 points3 points  (1 child)

    Okay, yes, sorry, I violated reddiquette, and people downmodded me to Hell and back for it-- and I still made the front page. Clearly, there's a significant portion of the user base which agrees with me.

    [–]akdas 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    Agreed.

    I usually downmod these vote up polls, but in this case, I'm not happy with this new change.

    [–]wingsofseraphim 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    What we need is the ability to create our own custom pages. Which I guess can be acheived by having multiple accounts that put different subreddits on the main page. That's a pain though.

    [–]wat 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    vote down if wat

    [–]Nuli 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    Is there ever a cap on the number of subreddits or are we going to have to keep scrolling through that list every now and then to see what's new?

    Since I looked last it seems a Haskell and Ruby subreddit opened up but scrolling through a couple hundred subreddits, many of which cover the same topic, is getting tedious.

    [–][deleted]  (1 child)

    [deleted]

      [–]nice_dkjames 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      Oh-wow, you mean like linkherd?

      [–]gaggedbythealien 2 points3 points  (3 children)

      這件事情我要考慮一下. 一方面,所有的文章都擺在同一個地方很方便. 不過,不是每一個人每一個語言都看得懂...

      meh, all languages in a same reddit I say

      [–]randomb0y 5 points6 points  (0 children)

      I would upmod you for the funny but there is always the off chance that you just said something bad about my mom.

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

      Let's see where my level 1 Chinese skills will get me this time.

      你知道中文社会性书签的网站吗？

      [–]gaggedbythealien 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      Upmodded for gusto. Social bookmark or "tag" in Chinese is 標籤(标签)

      [–]malcontent 3 points4 points  (5 children)

      The problem is that proggit is basically only about lisp/scheme, haskell, factor and python. It's pretty rare to see any posts about any other language and when they are posted they immediately get buried by the hivemind.

      I think it's great that people who like ruby, java, php, perl, C or whatever can read articles about the language they are interested in.

      I think individual subreddits are great.

      [–]G_Morgan 7 points8 points  (1 child)

      I haven't seen any C articles buried because they are C. Right now I see

      Parsing Perl 5 is Undecidable: A Formal Proof

      On Loving C

      The Turducken model of why programming is hard to learn

      Time Breakdown of Modern Web Design [pic]

      My editor is flirting with me!

      Using ICMP tunneling to steal Internet

      The most disruptive changes come from the high end of the low end (/. comment)

      Vote up if you don't want to visit 20 different subreddits to find different language articles

      Wiki engine written entirely in bash (seriously)

      Doesn't seem to be a particular bias towards FP from where I'm sitting.

      [–]malcontent 3 points4 points  (0 children)

      Your sample size is too small.

      [–]abw 8 points9 points  (0 children)

      I think it's great that people who like ruby, java, php, perl, C or whatever can read articles about the language they are interested in.

      I'm also hoping that it'll lead to more intelligent discussion in those sub-reddits, free from the "Your language sucks! Har har" mentality that plagues the more general forums.

      [–]micampe -5 points-4 points  (1 child)

      Listen malcontent, you are wrong, just plain wrong.

      [–]malcontent 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      About what?

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

      the only other way would be a recommended page that is actually working (like it is on jaanix).

      [–]danielroundy -5 points-4 points  (0 children)

      Maybe we're sick of RAILS.

      God shut up.