Will this undermine most of what makes IAmA special? Probably. But Reddit leadership has all the funds they need to hire people to perform those extra tasks we formerly undertook as volunteer moderators, and we’d be happy to collaborate with them if they choose to do so.
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16-year Reddit account here. There was definitely a different atmosphere in the earlier days. The community aspect felt stronger.
They also hired exclusively from the community, and were part of it. All the early admins, myself included, came from reddit. The idea of an admin with a 1 karma account was absurd
I agree, and the difference is huge. As you say, there was much more community about it. Not because it was smaller IMO, it was plenty big when I started using it. But the users were different, and it wasn’t as toxic as it became later.
Definitely. Somewhere along the way, it was also missed that downvotes were intended to be for content that were off-topic or not constructive to the conversation rather than something one merely disagreed with. I’ve found much of my moderating had become about reminding people to keep it civil.
Yes absolutely, it’s bad rediquette to downvote just because you disagree, if it contributes to the debate.
I wonder how many even know that on reddit today? I bet most think they are just “like” buttons.
As someone who joined Reddit when it became mainstream, I didn’t know that something like “Reddiquette” existed, and that it had changed drastically in its history. I thought it just boiled down to social norms like “NO EMOJIS ALLOWED”, don’t ask obvious questions (which can be subjective), or answer a question that was meant to be rhetorical.
No the rules are actually quite good:
https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/205926439-Reddiquette
Notice also the point of linking to canonical persistent URL, today it’s absolutely riddled with amp links, that should be illegal IMO, because they infringe copyright, and remove traffic from content creators, and Google takes that traffic instead. I have no clue how that shit is legal.
Oh shit, it is. I don’t think I’ve ever read that, and most people probably haven’t too, if I looked at the comment section on any post on r/all I would see the reddiquette broken many times (I am personally guilty with non-transparent editing). Most of the behaviour I found annoying on Reddit were breaking the Reddiquette rules lol.
It’s probably pretty hard to imagine the actual difference in quality of debate when you haven’t seen it.
But I’m guessing it’s easy to imagine that there would be a difference.
More mainstream appeal and younger users joining doesn’t really help with the quality of the discussion. IIRC when I created an account at reddit in 2011, the active users is still under 50 mils compared to 500 mils. Eternal September is a very real thing.