Hey, I wrote this article. We cover the internet and internet culture—Reddit is a massive, massive website that has very real impacts on the media and on what the average internet user sees on a day to day basis. As a reddit user, I saw dozens of threads complaining about the front page algorithm, so I decided to look into it. I emailed Reddit and asked what the deal was, and their CEO wanted to talk about it. We write about Reddit maybe 2-3 times a month and this took me only a couple hours to write. Felt it was important.
Reddit has major problems with its community and racism and sexism and the like, but it's still a hugely influential website so changes to how it works is important
> Reddit has major problems with its community and racism and sexism and the like
Do they though? Reddit's getting 200 million unique views every single month. That's approaching youtube/facebook levels of traffic. Reddit isn't a small community anymore. It's a massive website that represents everyone from all walks of life.
For example, you don't hear people claiming that facebook or youtube has a problem with "racism and sexism". Why is that the case, even though it does have a problem with those things? Because people expect it there due the sheer size of those sites. Well, reddit isn't some small community website any more. It's nearly the size of google/youtube and is about to overtake twitter in traffic. I think it's time we stop treating it like some small time website and start treating it like the behemoth it has become.
Reddit's getting 200 million unique views every single month. That's approaching youtube/facebook levels of traffic.
It's really not. Facebook was getting nearly 1.4 billion uniques/month in December 2014[1]. Youtube passed 1 billion uniques/month in 2013[2] and growth (in terms of hours of videos watched anyway) has actually accelerated since then.
you don't hear people claiming that facebook or youtube has a problem with "racism and sexism". Why is that the case, even though it does have a problem with those things? Because people expect it there due the sheer size of those sites
Facebook gets in trouble because they take down groups supporting breastfeeding moms. Reddit resisted taking a group called Coontown. It's a pretty significant difference.
I'm going to have to disagree. My point wasn't that reddit is becoming facebook or youtube, but that it is in the same ballpark as far as traffic goes. And if you're at a quarter billion unique hits every month, you are playing with the big boys. The point was one of relativity - reddit is a huge global website and not some small community.
Since it is so huge, we shouldn't treat it as some small BBS. Just because reddit doesn't have the exact same traffic as youtube doesn't invalidate my point.
Both Facebook and Google have terms of service that ban large classes of abuse that Reddit explicitly permits (or at least permitted until very recent changes). Facebook doesn't allow a "Coontown" group, and Youtube will take down a similarly themed video or channel.
People on Facebook don't see content unless they're somehow connected with it, and Youtube comments, while garbage, are a tiny (or nonexistent) part of most people's interaction with the site.
Reddit is different. The entire site is comments, and at least in some cases, you have organized groups targeting people who weren't even aware of their existence (e.g., the brigading that got fatpeoplehate banned). It's completely fair to say that Reddit faces community problems that go above what Facebook and Google face. Twitter's probably the much better analogy, but PR wise at least, even Twitter's problems are dwarfed by the public perception of Reddit.
Reddit still allows far more leeway than either of the others, but that's why I said "until recently" anyway. Reddit's PR problem was mostly formed prior to that though. Reddit became a place a lot of people only heard about when a story about child porn, upskirt pics, leaked celebrity nude photos, revenge porn, and other socially unacceptable material would make the wider press. The fact that they've made some tiny strides away from that now doesn't immediately fix the PR issue.
YouTube is primarily a video-hosting and search platform. Most users do not use the community features at all. That said, do you really want to hold YouTube comments up as a model of a good community? ;-)
Facebook filters each user's experience through their social graph, and explicitly prefers real identity. It's very difficult to create a ton of anonymous accounts and harass someone without their permission.
Twitter, where everything is public by default, is more analogous to Reddit, where everything is public by default. Both make it easy to create anonymous accounts and direct messages to any other user of the service. And Twitter, like Reddit, also has well-covered problems with virulent racism and sexism.
> And Twitter, like Reddit, also has well-covered problems with virulent racism and sexism.
Racism and sexism is all over FB too. It just doesn't go viral because it's all within private bubbles instead of out in the open, which is arguably more dangerous.
Spot on. "Reddit" is a highly diversified international community, and it is laughable when a charachteristic is attributed to it. It's millions of people, not some contiguous unit, so sure Reddit has racism, sexism and people who think Donald Trump is a great leader, but these are edge cases.
The FP algorithim doesn't matter too much. They need to do a flat minimal ui and fix search. They just dont have the money to hire engineers and their staff is out of bandwidth.
Facebook does have a problem with racism, not just that but the Germany's minister of justice and Angela Merkel have recently confronted Facebook about it.
I would also say because much of that does end up on the front page or at the top of comment threads. This is an extreme case, but look at what happened after fatpeoplehate was banned:
"massive website that has very real impacts on the media "
Top stories as of now that have real impacts on the media:
* This Lamborghini is hot
* Funny Face book picture
* My manager and I when the new intern showed up not wearing a bra
* cat picture
Unfortunately, they do have real impacts on the media. It's why there are 642 different Buzzfeed clones invading every aspect of your life and your local newspaper can't keep the lights on.
It's possible this is just a submarine after a few months of negative press. I have to imagine they hired a serious PR firm after all the drama over Ellen Pao and random firings.
Its the 11th most popular website in the US (according to Alexa) that many people rely on for information and entertainment. When you're that big and make a mistake, the backlash becomes the entertainment.
Reddit has major problems with its community and racism and sexism and the like, but it's still a hugely influential website so changes to how it works is important