4 ms·

Why reddit sucks: The broken economics of karma

20 points by jeffdechambeau 15y ago

BiWinning 15y ago
uh yeah reddit is a pos full of mediocre tools, I don't need some butthurt to write a blog post about it but thanks I guess.
- jeffdechambeau 15y ago
  You got my number bro.
monkeyfacebag 15y ago
This article makes a valid point about the hive mind, I'm just not sure that it's reddit-specific. If there were no karma on reddit, would we see markedly different behavior? Further, there's an assumption here that everyone has an opinion on everything, which isn't the case. I think a related, and potentially more insidious problem is that the first well-crafted opinion in a thread tends to inform the opinion of followers-on, accumulating karma all the while and becoming the default position of the group.
- spindritf 15y ago
  > If there were no karma on reddit, would we see markedly different behavior? I remember wild disagreements on usenet that would never happen on reddit because one side would quickly be voted down below the visibility level.
webwanderings 15y ago
Ironic that this post showed up at HN which is similar to reddit. From my perspective, what you are saying makes sense. Except that both of these platforms give less currency to the personalities/users and more currency to the content. Making users the king over the content is exactly what the typical Social-Networking model requires and I am for one glad that in this day and age of Facebook and G+, the sanity still prevails somewhere (though it has its cons as well).
ugh 15y ago
I don’t see that. Racism (oh the racism), misogyny, homophobia (etc.) are everywhere on Reddit. It’s full of shit. The content sucks. My pet theory is that a lack of moderation is responsible for that. Ask Science has excellent moderators and is doing well. Many other subreddits (especially the big ones) pick a very laissez faire approach and consequently manage to sound more like Stormfront in the end. All the horrible people who are thrown out everywhere else can just continue hanging out at Reddit.
ChuckMcM 15y ago
The challenges of karmic currencies (sorry couldn't resist) are well known. I totally agree that they tend to create a 'hive mind' type unity when there is a scalar value. That an be good in the sense that the community converges around a common set of shared beliefs and values, folks who don't share those beliefs and values get signaled to leave, and typically it seems they do. The 'center mass' of that community moves but only slowly over time. In one of pg's posts about the challenges of karma and Hackernews, I suggested that an interesting experiment might be to try making it a vector rather than a scalar. The idea is conceptually simple, you have 'more approve' and 'less approve' (upvote and downvote) but the person whose comment you are posting on defines the vector. It would work like this: Alice upvotes Bob generates vector [1, Bob] Alice downvotes Chuck generates vector [-1, Chuck] Bob upvotes Alice generates [1, Alice] Chuck dowvotes Bob [-1, Bob] So between Alice and Bob there are both positive upvotes. This creates a [Alice, Bob] nexus, there are negative votes away from Chuck by both Bob and Alice which creates a [Chuck, Chuck] nexus which is directionally 'opposite' the [Alice, Bob] nexus. Now if you work this over the community. Alice and Bob will have higher karma in the [Alice, Bob] community and lower in the [Chuck, Chuck] community. So when you show karma 'points' for Alice they represent Alice's conformance to that community and show Chuck as negative in their community. But when Chuck looks at his karma he is positive in the [Chuck, Chuck] nexus and Alice and Bob are negative. The question (and I don't know the answer of course)is whether or not you can create a discussion site which evolves several simultaneous communities by karma score within the same set of conversations. The ultimate test would be that the comments you see are always interesting and insightful to you but they may be differently rated than someone else seeing the same conversation. Anyway, one of those 'if I had a spare weekend I'd try this...' kinds of thoughts. The idea is public domain, I've got not personal claim on it, I'm not even sure its implementable!
- adrianpike 15y ago
  At first blush it seems like you'd eventually have sort of an auto-hellbanning community, where people wildly divergent from the rest of the community would have their comments isolated from everyone else's. It would be really interesting to see how it would eventually settle out - whether you'd have tons of really isolated clumps of homogeneous people, or whether the crazies would shard off by themselves and there would be a greater central community. Damn, now I really want to build it.
barrybe 15y ago
There is a cost to voting on Reddit, it's the time/attention cost of moving your mouse over and clicking a tiny button. Sometimes you even have to log in! For people browsing a web site, time & attention is a significant currency. It's true that karma is a flawed as an economic system or a measure of contribution. But, who cares if the numbers are theoretically unsound? The end goal is to generate usage, something which Reddit has been extremely successful at.
WalterSear 15y ago
you are using it wrong. subscribe to stuff that interests you. don't subscribe to subreddits you aren't. problem solved

uh yeah reddit is a pos full of mediocre tools, I don't need some butthurt to write a blog post about it but thanks I guess.

jeffdechambeau 15y ago
You got my number bro.

monkeyfacebag 15y ago

This article makes a valid point about the hive mind, I'm just not sure that it's reddit-specific. If there were no karma on reddit, would we see markedly different behavior? Further, there's an assumption here that everyone has an opinion on everything, which isn't the case. I think a related, and potentially more insidious problem is that the first well-crafted opinion in a thread tends to inform the opinion of followers-on, accumulating karma all the while and becoming the default position of the group.

spindritf 15y ago
> If there were no karma on reddit, would we see markedly different behavior? I remember wild disagreements on usenet that would never happen on reddit because one side would quickly be voted down below the visibility level.

webwanderings 15y ago

Ironic that this post showed up at HN which is similar to reddit. From my perspective, what you are saying makes sense. Except that both of these platforms give less currency to the personalities/users and more currency to the content. Making users the king over the content is exactly what the typical Social-Networking model requires and I am for one glad that in this day and age of Facebook and G+, the sanity still prevails somewhere (though it has its cons as well).

ugh 15y ago

I don’t see that. Racism (oh the racism), misogyny, homophobia (etc.) are everywhere on Reddit. It’s full of shit. The content sucks. My pet theory is that a lack of moderation is responsible for that. Ask Science has excellent moderators and is doing well. Many other subreddits (especially the big ones) pick a very laissez faire approach and consequently manage to sound more like Stormfront in the end. All the horrible people who are thrown out everywhere else can just continue hanging out at Reddit.

ChuckMcM 15y ago

The challenges of karmic currencies (sorry couldn't resist) are well known. I totally agree that they tend to create a 'hive mind' type unity when there is a scalar value. That an be good in the sense that the community converges around a common set of shared beliefs and values, folks who don't share those beliefs and values get signaled to leave, and typically it seems they do. The 'center mass' of that community moves but only slowly over time. In one of pg's posts about the challenges of karma and Hackernews, I suggested that an interesting experiment might be to try making it a vector rather than a scalar. The idea is conceptually simple, you have 'more approve' and 'less approve' (upvote and downvote) but the person whose comment you are posting on defines the vector. It would work like this: Alice upvotes Bob generates vector [1, Bob] Alice downvotes Chuck generates vector [-1, Chuck] Bob upvotes Alice generates [1, Alice] Chuck dowvotes Bob [-1, Bob] So between Alice and Bob there are both positive upvotes. This creates a [Alice, Bob] nexus, there are negative votes away from Chuck by both Bob and Alice which creates a [Chuck, Chuck] nexus which is directionally 'opposite' the [Alice, Bob] nexus. Now if you work this over the community. Alice and Bob will have higher karma in the [Alice, Bob] community and lower in the [Chuck, Chuck] community. So when you show karma 'points' for Alice they represent Alice's conformance to that community and show Chuck as negative in their community. But when Chuck looks at his karma he is positive in the [Chuck, Chuck] nexus and Alice and Bob are negative. The question (and I don't know the answer of course)is whether or not you can create a discussion site which evolves several simultaneous communities by karma score within the same set of conversations. The ultimate test would be that the comments you see are always interesting and insightful to you but they may be differently rated than someone else seeing the same conversation. Anyway, one of those 'if I had a spare weekend I'd try this...' kinds of thoughts. The idea is public domain, I've got not personal claim on it, I'm not even sure its implementable!

adrianpike 15y ago
At first blush it seems like you'd eventually have sort of an auto-hellbanning community, where people wildly divergent from the rest of the community would have their comments isolated from everyone else's. It would be really interesting to see how it would eventually settle out - whether you'd have tons of really isolated clumps of homogeneous people, or whether the crazies would shard off by themselves and there would be a greater central community. Damn, now I really want to build it.

barrybe 15y ago

There is a cost to voting on Reddit, it's the time/attention cost of moving your mouse over and clicking a tiny button. Sometimes you even have to log in! For people browsing a web site, time & attention is a significant currency. It's true that karma is a flawed as an economic system or a measure of contribution. But, who cares if the numbers are theoretically unsound? The end goal is to generate usage, something which Reddit has been extremely successful at.

WalterSear 15y ago

you are using it wrong. subscribe to stuff that interests you. don't subscribe to subreddits you aren't. problem solved