1991: Reddit in Trouble?

I find online social networks a fascinating thing to observe and sometimes participate in. Twitter is the main one I’m a part of, and over my time using it I’ve been part of a number of different subcultures that make use of the site as a means of talking to one another about common interests, regardless of geographical location.

In this sense, social networks are a bit like real life; you tend to gravitate towards people with whom you have common interests, and you drift away from people you find objectionable or simply don’t mesh well with. It’s exactly the same online; I know exactly the sort of people I’m likely to get along with, and exactly the sort of people I want to avoid at all costs. The nice thing about online interactions is that you can — for the most part — take a lot more control over your experience than you can in reality. You can’t, for example, choose the people that you work alongside, so if you dislike, say, your manager or another member of your team, you can’t get away from them. You can, however, mute or block people you don’t gel with online; while there’s an argument that this can lead to an “echo chamber” effect in which people are unwilling to have their viewpoints and opinions truly challenged, for the most part I find this a good way of minimising the stress that social interactions (be they real or virtual) can sometimes cause me.

One social network that I’ve never quite managed to integrate myself into is Reddit, and that’s simply because Reddit as a whole is such a hugely sprawling entity that it’s difficult to know where to start. There are popular subreddits for pictures, jokes, games and all sorts of other things, as well as highly specialised subreddits for niche interests or simply running jokes. Effectively, each subreddit is like a forum with message threads and discussions that follow on from an original post, but there’s also a sort of “metagame” aspect to the site, where you earn points for posts and comments according to the community’s overall reaction to them. This metagame doubles as the site’s main means of automatic “curation” — high-rated content shifts to the top and becomes more visible, perhaps even hitting the front page of Reddit (which often describes itself as “The Front Page of the Internet”, though Facebook might like to believe differently) if it’s really popular and transcends its original context.

Reddit’s an interesting site to browse even if you don’t actively participate, though. It’s the birthplace of a number of now-commonplace Internet memes and jokes, and the community as a whole can usually be relied on for some highly entertaining, quick-witted responses as well as scathing takedowns of stupid, ignorant or bigoted people. Assuming the subreddit you’re in isn’t specifically designed for stupid, ignorant or bigoted people, of course.

Now, this latter aspect is where things have got a little bit interesting recently. Reddit has traditionally positioned itself as being a bastion of its interpretation of “free speech” online, trusting individual subreddit moderators to set the rules for their individual communities and enforce them accordingly, while at the same time ensuring that nothing actually outright illegal is posted, and if it is, that it is removed quickly. To date, it’s worked pretty well; while there are some subreddits that are the online equivalent of a notorious dark alley you probably wouldn’t wander into alone if you didn’t have a very good reason to be there, for the most part each individual community has kept itself to itself, content with its own little space of the Internet for its discussions, even when said discussions might not be welcome elsewhere on the Internet. (“Gamergate” subreddit “KotakuInAction” is a good example of this, and there are plenty of others along the same lines.)

But there have been Happenings recently. As someone who isn’t an active participant in Reddit, I haven’t really been following the whole drama, but so far as I can make out, Reddit brought on a new CEO recently known as Ellen Pao, and she has not been a popular “leader” for the site. The popular conspiracy theory is that she’s attempting to “clean up” Reddit prior to selling it off to the highest bidder — likely Facebook, who would doubtless very much like to get their hands on “the front page of the Internet” — and in the process is ruffling a whole lot of feathers of people who have traditionally found Reddit to be a good home for their discussions and activities.

Pao’s actions coupled with a widely-criticised lack of communication between the overall Reddit administrators (who run the site as a whole, and have the power to ban and “shadowban” users according to their behaviour) and the firing of a number of Reddit employees for seemingly questionable reasons have been causing rumblings of discontent for some time, but it seems that today, for whatever reason, was the tipping point; a number of popular subreddits, including front-page, “default” subreddits that are automatically included in a new Reddit user’s list of subreddits, have “gone dark” in protest against Pao’s management, the aforementioned lack of communication, a very inconsistent application of the “rules” for the site as a whole and, in some cases, a rather opaque sense of what the “rules” actually are. These subreddits have “gone dark” by setting themselves to “private” mode, meaning that only users who are already approved to post there (usually just subscribers to that particular subreddit) can see what is going on and being discussed; casual browsers, those who are not logged in or those who are not subscribed, meanwhile, are simply shown a default page explaining that the sub is private, and the reasons for it.

Over the course of the day, more and more subreddits have “gone dark” in protest, effectively crippling Reddit’s traffic as a result. It’s been absolutely fascinating to see, and while I don’t 100% understand the reasons for the protest at this time, I think it’s a potent reminder that when you create something as sprawling as a social network, as much as you’d like to think you can stay in complete control of it, ultimately the site it made or broken by its users. Without users, the site is completely useless, so if you piss off those users then you’re going to have a big problem.

It remains to be seen whether Reddit will pull through this debacle, or whether a young pretender like Reddit clone Voat is ready to pick up the baton and try not to make the same mistakes. (I mention Voat specifically because they have reported record amounts of traffic since the controversy really exploded today.) This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened, after all; Reddit originally grew to prominence thanks to the once-popular Digg fucking itself up beyond all recognition, so while it may seem dramatic to contemplate that this might be The Beginning of the End for Reddit, it’s certainly not beyond the realms of possibility.

Basically, the lesson from all this appears to be pretty simple: don’t think you know better than your users. Because you probably don’t.

#oneaday Day 528: Thoughts on Google+

You can’t say I don’t provide you with variety here, dear readers. Just yesterday I was talking about underage boys simulating anal sex in a school library in order to avoid doing work, and today I’m telling you about what may or may not be the next big thing in social networking: Google+, Google Plus, Googlyplus, G+ or whatever the hell you want to call it.

If you haven’t got in yet, don’t ask me for an invite at the moment as they’ve switched them off for now. Keep an eye on Twitter or Facebook, though — I’ll let you know if I have any more spare.

So, to business. What is Google+? Well, the cynical would say it’s a rebranded Facebook, and indeed we’ve already seen at least one article today bemoaning the fact that Google+ has some features in common with Facebook. I’m not sure why they felt the need to draw attention to this, as the features they show are pretty commonplace in all social networks.

But are those cynics right? Well… yes and no. Google+ does indeed resemble Facebook. You have a news feed, people can comment on posts, people can Like things (or “+1” in this case) and people can share content. The key difference between Google+ and Facebook is how it handles the way you interact with people. There are no “friend requests” on Google+, simply Circles. Circles is an evolution of Facebook’s Groups system, in which you can categorise your friends, acquaintances and family members into, well, categories. Then, when you post something on the network, you can choose which individuals or Circles it’s visible to — or even make it completely public. This is a nice idea. It allows people to tailor the content they spew out to different social groups without feeling that they need to have a “work” profile and a “professional” profile. So long as, of course, you remember to keep the stories about the hooker you threw up on to your “Drinking Buddies” Circle and don’t accidentally copy in your boss.

So the way you deal with people is different. But there’s more; the photo interface is simple, elegant and much better than Facebook’s slightly clumsy lightbox. While I think that the lightbox was a good addition to Facebook’s interface, many disagreed, and the fact it’s difficult to view the image and look at the comments at the same time unless you have the highest-resolution screen in the world is not great. Google+ takes a different approach. Not only does the service allow you to upload pictures at considerably higher resolution than the artifacted messes that Facebook’s compression creates, but the interface allows for simple inline commenting while still viewing the picture. It’s a simple case of putting the comments in a sidebar rather than underneath the picture, and it works beautifully well.

Then there’s the fact that the Photos feature on Google+ integrates with Google’s Picasa service. Anything you post on Picasa will be available on Google+, and vice-versa. You can even use Picnik to edit the photo, add text and generally arse about with it, save it back to Picasa (even overwriting the original if you don’t need it any more) and the modified version will be right there in your feed without you needing to refresh the page. Clever. Since Picnik is a third-party service, though, this isn’t integrated quite as well as it could be — an “Edit with Picnik” option when viewing a photo on Google+ would be nice, for example — but it’s early days yet. And Google+ allows simple iPhoto-style edits of colours and the like to be applied to pictures without having to leave the page, which is nice, particularly for those who either don’t know a lot about photo editing or don’t have the software to do anything fancy-pants.

This isn’t even getting started on the excellent Sparks feature, where you can subscribe to topics of your choice and be fed a constant stream of relevant articles — which can, of course, then be shared with the Circles of your choice if you see fit.

As you can tell, I’m quite enamoured with the new service and genuinely hope it takes off. My only worry is that it, like Facebook, might try and do too much. Facebook was an excellent service when it felt personal, but now it’s as much a home for businesses to engage with their clientèle as a means of communication, it’s becoming increasingly irrelevant to people who just want to talk to their friends. Google+’s simple elegance that it has at the moment doesn’t have any of that noise — and none of the associated spam from social games and endless “What Length of Pubic Hair Are You?” quizzes, for that matter. I’m sure it won’t stay that way, as social game and app developers are already pricking their ears up at the buzz surrounding the service, but I hope it stays that way for at least a little while. There’s definitely a market for a clean, clear social network with minimum fuss that offers something a little more than Twitter but a lot less than Facebook. And I think Google+ has the potential to be it if the developers handle it correctly.

#oneaday Day 517: Social Peril II: The Periling

As a social network, Facebook is arguably becoming less meaningful — that is, from the perspective of encouraging meaningful interactions with one another. This, I feel, is in part due to how cluttered it is these days — cluttered with people, cluttered with businesses, cluttered with applications. I long for the simplicity of the site as it was when I first joined it, when it didn’t even have a chat system and friend requests required you to indicate how you knew the person — kind of what LinkedIn does nowadays, only with people actually talking to each other instead of using phrases like “blueskying” and “monetization”.

A fine example comes up if you look at the Facebook Page for any social game, ever. You can pick any random example and this will happen. Look at something the producers of the game say, then look at the community comments. You might have 25% meaningful discussion (a somewhat optimistic estimate — if the game is popular you can reduce that down to less than 5%) and 75% people just going “add me”. This also happens on App Store reviews for “multiplayer” (and I use the term loosely) games.

It’s not just that, though. Posts on Pages vaguely related to Xbox/PS3 will bring the fanboys for both camps out in force, ranting and raving at each other and not even addressing the point that was made in the original wall post — burying any meaningful discussion amidst the usual spray of bile, hatred and testosterone.

Beyond that, though, a lot of the trouble lies with the changing way people use Facebook nowadays. When it was a simplistic, app-free system, people used it to communicate. People would write a status, other people who knew the original person would comment. People might post a link or a photo, people would comment. Simple, effective. Now, though, with the fact that everyone and his dog has a Share to Facebook button, this simple clarity of communication has been almost completely lost. You get the occasional aberration where a topical post can bloom into an interesting discussion between friends, but soon enough it’s lost in the never-ending cycle that is your News Feed, devaluing the interaction until it’s gone, forgotten, meaningless.

The simple answer is, of course, to adapt. Realise that Facebook is not about permanence and the long-term, it’s about the here, the now, the narcissistic. “This” is happening right now, so you share it. Here’s a photo. Here’s my new Bejeweled Blitz high score. I’m playing a game with farms in it. I took a quiz to determine which colour from the Dulux range I “am”. PAY ATTENTION TO ME.

Facebook’s new Messages system doesn’t help, either. Muddling your chats in with your actual messages is a dumb idea, because the sort of thing you write in a message is typically lengthier than what you write in a chat. And then it all gets jumbled together, so if you had a message thread with some meaningful information in it followed by a chat with said person about how much you heard they like cock due to whoever just facejacked their profile, then it becomes nigh-on impossible to find anything useful.

I’m not too concerned about the whole thing, though, to be honest. Facebook does what I need it to for now, which is to allow me to share links to my articles and work to people who might be interested or might not have another means of finding out about them, and occasionally proving to be the most reliable means of contacting people. As such, I’ll likely keep my profile there, but my usage of the platform is at a bare minimum these days, as I don’t feel like it’s really for me any more. Twitter, on the other hand, still does everything I need it to and still remains pretty much as pure and clear as it was the day I started using it. Let’s hope it stays that way.

(In other news, I had a lovely weekend away, as you may have surmised from that last post. Thank you to Andie for making it happen!)