[hungerstrike]

I am looking forward to the death of reddit because I think it can be done way better. One big thing I'd like to see changed is the very blunt upvote/downvote hammer that results in tyranny of the majority every time. Instead, I'd like comments to be sorted based on my "network of influencers", or users who I've rated positively...

Another thing I think should be changed is that mods shouldn't be all powerful and they shouldn't be able to just shut down.

[beirut_bootleg]

> Instead, I'd like comments to be sorted based on my "network of influencers", or users who I've rated positively...

This would in essence create your personal echo chamber.

[pbhjpbhj]

Echo chamber usually means it merely reflects back what you emit -- that's a possibility, but personally I like inciteful or thought-provoking comments more than I like comments that agree with me, and seeing more of them is also possible: this is one of the reasons I hate that pg (and thus HN) promotes downvoting for disagreement, and basically censors (with near invisibility) dissenting voices.

My favourite system has been Slashdot because you could promote your view of (moderated, and meta-moderated) content voted to be insightful, say, whilst reducing viewing pure joke posts, and such. You could also boost/nerf particular voices.

Reddit is too much "cutesy animal" content, I wish I could filter all of that, it just doesn't amuse me.

[glenstein]

Exactly, and this highlights what I've never understood about echo chamber arguments. You might genuinely like things that you learn from, things that change you. You might like a subject matter that encompasses a huge variety of types of content- for instance if you follow astronomy, and see an article about a new discovery, it seems like more is going on than a pre-existing belief being echoed back at you.

I'm not saying there's no such thing as echo chambers, but there's so much else going in when you engage with sources you select that doesn't have anything to do with whether a pre-existing belief is being echoed back to you.

[krapp]

A lot of people do want echo chambers, and a lot of social media is designed to exploit this.

People tend to consider content that appeals to and reinforces their biases and desires to be more interesting, of higher quality and more trustworthy than content that doesn't.

Even self-described "free thinkers" tend not to want their beliefs challenged or to be moved from their comfort zone too much.

[tristor]

I’m not sure your latter statement is true. I’m a “free thinker” (whatever that is supposed to mean these days) and run in those circles. Most of us have jobs, so we only have the time to digest articles that take less than an hour to read except in rare instances.

I’m very open to other ideas and I actively manipulate the mechanisms on sites like Facebook to prevent being put in an echo chamber. But I am difficult to convince using emotional arguments and I also don’t have time to read a 900 page dissertation on my lunch break. Long form journalism is amazing though, but unfortunately rare and often now corrupted by bias.

Most people in my circle are in the same boat. We are all welcoming of total mental shifts if warranted by the data. We’re happy to entertain an idea long enough to get through a lengthy article even if we’re not sure of it. But if you start with trying to gut wrench you’ve lost us.

Unfortunately the majority of people respond more strongly to pithy memes and emotional appeals, so that’s most of what I see both from those who putatively agree with me and those who don’t. It takes extraordinary effort to find good arguments about anything being written/presented by anyone.

[krapp]

I only have personal experience (and, admittedly, my own biases) to go by, but I suspect you're an outlier, and I'm referring to the norm, both within and outside the mainstream. I think the ways most people approach social media are the same either way, people want to be entertained and they want to feel emotionally validated.

[hungerstrike]

> Unfortunately the majority of people respond more strongly to pithy memes and emotional appeals...

This is why I want the described system. I can make it work for me by being selective about who or what I upvote.

(It wouldn't be just upvotes though. I'd like to apply all kinds of ratings. The whole point is that I'd be in control.)

[newen]

I don't know if a personal echo chamber is such a bad thing in a pseudo-anonymous internet community. Look at what happened to 4chan and voat, where a bunch a racists decided to take over those sites and it was relatively easy for them to do so. They destroyed whatever community was there before their takeover and now both of those sites are known as racist sites. Compare that to hubski, which has a built-in echo chamber mechanism (I think you when block someone, they can't respond to you), and it's much harder for the site to be taken over by an outside group. The community just blocks the outside group and the outside group just ends up talking to each other in their echo chamber.

[yedava]

Communities become echo chambers when a tiny minority of people who have too much time on their hands monopolize discussions. I'd even argue that this is the primary mechanism of echo chamber creation. Other mechanisms like the one OP mentioned aren't that significant a contributor in creating echo chambers.

[remir]

I think the percentage of the population that desire genuine and thought-provoking discussions may be smaller than those who simply want validation and being part of a like-minded group.

[colordrops]

We are going to live in echo chambers no matter what. I'd rather live in my own echo chamber than the one that Facebook or the DNC or RNC or Fox News or some Washington think tank has built for me.

[EpicEng]

How about none of the above?

[colordrops]

And how exactly do you extract yourself from a set of sources neither influenced by yourself or others? Not read news or forums at all?

[EpicEng]

By doing on your own research on issues you care about. If you have a strong opinion on something and you're only source of information is your own echo chanmber then you're just intellectually lazy.

If you don't want to put in the time then fine, but maybe you shouldn't hold a strong opinion one way or the other. Your own echo chamber is likely no better than any other.

[colordrops]

"doing your own research" is by definition your own echo chamber.

[sp332]

It's fine if you don't spend all your time there. Sometimes you want to visit a familiar place and talk to familiar people.

[criddell]

Now that's a perspective I haven't thought of before.

They could make it so that the more time you spend on Reddit, the less control you get over your feed. I know it's a complete non-starter for business reasons, but it's an interesting thing to think about.

[Bartweiss]

Depending on how it's done. Hubski is pretty similar to Reddit, with a 'follow' mechanic to see content liked by certain people. It can easily be an echo chamber if you want that, but if you follow a good scattering of different people then it comes out much more varied than Reddit's hivemind outcomes.

[Paul-ish]

Votes already create an echo chamber, but not a personal one. Which kind of echo chamber is better, who knows?

[ihsw2]

There's nothing wrong with that, considering everybody else is strenuously trying to pull you into theirs. Upvote/downvote brigades abound as well as the institutionalization of power-users.

We already build our own echo chambers with personalized multi-reddits (which I use to great effect, since the defaults are trash-tier) as well as the main sub-reddit subscription list. I quite like this idea.

Groups that try to pull you into their echo chamber almost always have dubious or selfish intentions, ranging from blatant advertising to astroturfing. This puts power back into the hands of users.

[Bartweiss]

You might be a fan of Hubski then - it's a pretty similar interface to Reddit, but in addition to a global top (i.e. frontpage) and tags (i.e. subreddits), you can follow other users and get a feed of the content they like. It's a pretty elegant approach, and helps you see a good range of content if you follow accordingly.

It's also a much better userbase to my mind, but that's probably a function of small size.

[pavel_lishin]

> mods shouldn't be all powerful

Modding is hard work; reddit barely provides the tools we really need. Note that _bionoid_ mentioned bots - you effectively need to use third-party tools to effectively moderate even a moderate sized sub.

I'm not sure what you mean by "just shut down", but the best subs tend to be the ones where rules are enforced strongly and consistently.

[Bartweiss]

'Just shut down' might mean "the sub", not "conversation". I don't think mods need weaker tools, but there's definitely a fiefdom problem where mods can't be dislodged by any means. A pair of examples:

For years, the /xkcd subreddit was run by a group of Holocaust deniers, simply because they got there first when an old mod left. They censored content, linked to bizarre white supremacist garbage, and generally did the reddit equivalent of domain squatting. Experienced users went over to /realxkcd or something, while new users just wandered into the garbage fire. I don't think that's a free speech or mod tools issue, I think that's an 'unhelpful labelling' issue.

Another sub, I believe /frission, had a head moderator who had a drug trip or religious experience or psychotic break or something. He kicked out all the other mods, announced that the sub had "served its purpose" by guiding him to this moment, and declared that he would delete all posts and then take the sub private in 24 hours time. There was a massive archiving effort and pleading with the site administration, but ultimately the only thing that helped is somebody talked the guy into restoring one other mod who could avert the meltdown.

Broadly, I'd like to see reddit massively expand the bot api and in-house moderator tools, because it's a thankless job to do right. But I'd also like to see some form of administrative or community review for the cases where moderators go utterly off the rails and destroy subs - even something extreme like >95% agreement would have handled these cases.

[pavel_lishin]

> there's definitely a fiefdom problem where mods can't be dislodged by any means

That's true. I do wish there was a way to wrest control away from absentee mods - or something like your example - but I'm not sure how such a system would work in a fair, hard-to-abuse way.

And I completely agree with your last paragraph, with that caveat of needing to think very hard about how to make it abuse-proof.

[rolleiflex]

I’m actually working on this. See ‘users controlling moderation’ section here: http://blog.getaether.net/post/175104485127/aether-news-upda...

[pjc50]

So who's responsible for removing the death threats, doxxing, hate speech, spam and other contaminants if not the mods?

Advogato tried the trust metric approach, but it now seems to be offline. https://web.archive.org/web/20161124203307/https://advogato....

[digi_owl]

IMO /. got right, more or less. Limited amounts of votes, can't vote and comment on the same topic, and both ups and down are hardcapped (-1 to +5, starting at 0 for anonymous, 1 for registered).

I just wish they never had tried to "modernize" their site, as the 2.0 commenting system is a downright mess.

[arbitrage]

Another large problem with /. is the ageing of their userbase. It's very overtly conservative, now, with few new users getting on board.

[pbhjpbhj]

I'm not sure if that's (just) aging per se, perhaps Conservatives are, er, more conservative and so less likely to leave to find something else. That would leave older sites that were once the mainstream to become automatically more [C|c]onservative.

[go1dfish]

https://notabug.io

https://github.com/notabugio/notabug

My goal is to replicate reddit, but the distributed nature of notabug would allow you to experiment with these ideas on your own peer, or possibly just a custom UI build.

[yifanl]

For some subreddits, the up/down point system can be pretty useful, there will some substantial comments that genuinely have better (or at least more) content than other comments.

But for the majority of subreddits, I have it sorted by newest comment first. I don't understand why social media sites today are moving away from that, 99% of high-scoring user-curated content just means it's a particularly popular or inciteful comment.

It doesn't promote good discourse if out of 10 comments, the one that naturally floats to the top is the most inciteful one.

[InitialLastName]

> I don't understand why social media sites today are moving away from that

They don't want you to know when to stop looking. If they present feeds "newest first", you can move on as soon as you get to an item you've already seen. With a "curated" ordering, you never know when you'll see new content, so you keep scrolling (and thus providing them your interest data and looking at ads).

[mateo411]

>inciteful

This is a very interesting word. I think you mean insightful, which is what people usually use to describe a clever or novel thought.

I've never seen the word inciteful before, but that would probably mean something that really riles people up and makes them angry. After rereading your last sentence, it seems like you actually meant inciteful, but it's not a word that's used very often.