| (this is a response to a comment that has been deleted while i was writing it i am not sure what the rules on this are, but i think the comment makes an important point that i believe should be discussed, so i am reposting it together with my response (without naming the author). if this is not ok, then i'll get it removed. if the original author of the comment has a
good reason to not have it posted, you may contact me by email (see profile)) the comment: I think this is a feature, not a bug. The economic precariousness that the author describes is what makes the opinions of small outfits like his suspect. It's just too easy for companies to influence them with special treatment or outright payments. Reddit, for all of its faults, is hard to bribe. That is by design. We built mechanisms to intentionally cultivate diverse and redundant communities. Even if you try to control the mods of some particular subreddit, you are probably just shifting where the definitive/highly ranked conversations on a topic end up happening. The author seems to decry Reddit as "not expert", but I think what its ascent has proven is the collective opinion of disinterested amateurs is often the best available. my response: that implies that every independent content producer is corrupt and only caters to the highest bidder. how does reddit help here? each community is independent even on reddit. there are good and bad ones. a small community on reddit would be just as susceptible to manipulation as would a small community of the same size on an independent site. and reddit is hard to bribe? well, maybe in specific cases, but reddit needs to cater to its advertisers just as well. reddit, youtube and any other large site will only be able to represent the majority views because they can't cater to minorities that conflict with those views. advertisers won't have it. an independent site can be completely onesided and be under the influence of some financial interest. or it can remain independent and actually represent the interests of its members in a way that reddit et al. can not. |
It's not hard to write a post with an ulterior motive (like embedding an affiliate link) on Reddit, but it's hard to get people to vote for it so it shows up at the top of the thread. Meanwhile, content producers that feel entitled to be in the SERP are just spamming their ads and aff. links everywhere. That's why Reddit is better.