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How Reddit's CEO/Co-Founder Plans To 'Clean Up' Reddit (latimes.com) 196

An anonymous reader quotes the Financial Times: After what the company acknowledges as its "wild" early days, the 35-year-old co-founder is now trying to clean up the edgy website known for provocative discussions and fringe groups, while revamping its advertising offering in a bid to woo big brands and move toward profitability.... [T]empering extreme conversation while also maintaining Reddit's reputation as a radical bastion of free speech is a delicate balance, especially as many among its 330 million users are quick to accuse it of censorship... despite his optimism, the chief executive now faces the unenviable task of convincing prospective clients that their ads will not be associated with any unsuitable content -- without upsetting users who value the site for its freedom of expression....

His approach for wary advertisers is to give them control over where and how their brand is placed. Reddit now has a human-approved "whitelist" of communities that are deemed safe, while advertisers can also opt for "negative targeting" -- requesting that their content not appear near a certain keyword, for example. More broadly, Reddit is looking to clean up its content by investing in a combination of machine learning tools that recognize suspicious or badly behaved accounts, working together with human moderators who oversee the entire site, Huffman said.

The chief executive of the world's largest advertising company tells the newpaper that Reddit's new direction has now "helped make it a much more acceptable site for advertisers."
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How Reddit's CEO/Co-Founder Plans To 'Clean Up' Reddit

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  • by Joe Bill Schirtzinger ( 6245040 ) on Saturday October 05, 2019 @10:43PM (#59274464)
    When sites like reddit go corporate, that often means everything that made them good is gone.
    • by slashdice ( 3722985 ) on Saturday October 05, 2019 @10:55PM (#59274484)
      case in point: slashdot.
    • It has been dead for a long time now.
      I think the last time it convulsed, was around ... 2015?

      But large dinosaurs that had died took about 1 degrees Celsius a month to cool down due to their sheer mass. And here it is much the same.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It would be nice if someone could find a happy medium. On the one hand the various chan sites tend not to last long and are cesspits anyway, and on the other you don't want too much pandering to advertisers.

      In fairness Reddit's plan for a human curated whitelist doesn't sound bad. It's not like the various communities are reliant on advertising for income like they are on YouTube, so not being on the whitelist shouldn't be a disadvantage for them.

      I'm still waiting for Jordan Peterson's site to get up and ru

    • Strong argument for all those "freedom fighters" to start paying for the forum they're exercising those freedoms on. But then people don't like paying for freedom, do they? Either in blood or money.

    • They can always pull a dig and we all move back to slashdot where we all started ;)

  • by XArtur0 ( 5079833 ) on Saturday October 05, 2019 @10:44PM (#59274466)

    > while also maintaining Reddit's reputation as a radical bastion of free speech
    Don't make laugh

    • free as in beer
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Vrallis ( 33290 )

      Try supporting the second amendment in /r/news, /r/politics, etc. You will almost always get banned in short order. Free speech my ass.

      • by Powercntrl ( 458442 ) on Sunday October 06, 2019 @01:38AM (#59274744) Homepage

        It's freedom to participate in the echo chamber of your choosing. It's actually somewhat more pleasant than getting political on Slashdot, where you're almost guaranteed to piss off someone who has mod points and an opposing political agenda.

        I say somewhat, because if you have any ideas that fall outside of the groupthink, you'll still get modded straight to hell even if you're technically still on their "team". That is to say, legitimate criticism doesn't go over well (for example, suggesting that perhaps UBI is a terrible idea, or the poor won't be able to afford cars or meat if we go too far too fast with the "green" agenda). You'd assume a rational person would look at your previous comments and realize you're not a KAG-hat-wearing Trump supporter before smashing that downvote button, but... yeah.

        Come to think of it though, I'm 40 and don't ever recall a time when the internet was ever good for political debates. Seemed like even in the Mac vs PC days, people wanted to punch you through the internet for daring to have a different opinion about something.

        • Team-based politics seems like a bad idea, but you have to be empathetic here: how else are the rich people going to control the populace? Can't you think outside the box and sympathize with people with power for once?
        • " It's freedom to participate in the echo chamber of your choosing. "

          So much this. For a fine example of how well they support free speech, feel free to jump into say r/SandersForPresident and start asking hard questions.

          Questions like:

          How are we going to pay for all this free stuff you're promising everyone ?
          Why do you think it's necessary to promise free stuff in exchange for a vote in the first place ? You're not trying to buy votes are you ?
          Do you really think any of your ideas will go anywhere witho

      • Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)

        Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Try supporting the second amendment in /r/news, /r/politics, etc. You will almost always get banned in short order. Free speech my ass.

        But because the subreddits are individualy moderated, isn't there one where where you can find support, or if you wish a total echo chamber, for your views?

      • You get banned from the subreddit but I doubt you'd get banned from Reddit itself. I think that's what they mean. All the communities are user-run, user-driven, and there are alternatives to most of the heavy-handed popular ones.
    • by astrofurter ( 5464356 ) on Sunday October 06, 2019 @03:40AM (#59274868)

      "Reddit's reputation as a radical bastion of censorship"

      Fixed that for him

    • Waiting for the joint site of Radical Bastion of Free Responsibility to spring up beside it. Free speech should be as much about what and how one says something as the ability to say it. Ownership of the consequences of one's words would go a long way towards curbing the thoughtless tongue that's the current mark of radical thought. Say whatever one wants because? Eh, why not?

    • by Cylix ( 55374 )

      See they are going to clean up the site! There are still a few people who are posting the wrong ideological beliefs on Reddit. With a little more work they can shut all of that down and make the site “better!”

    • Caught that one also.

      I got banned from r/news for criticizing a person that bashed an old man's head with a cinderblock.

      She happened to be black (I didn't mention any race).

      Permanent ban.

      Some "bastion of free speech".

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday October 05, 2019 @10:46PM (#59274470)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by Kyogreex ( 2700775 ) on Saturday October 05, 2019 @11:07PM (#59274508)

      I think they're completely serious, and that's the scary part.

      Not summarily banning the political opposition and instead "quarantining" it, allowing anonymous commenting, etc. is enough to make a site a "radical bastion of free speech" in 2019.

      • Ways in which advertising can be detrimental:

        • Intrusively demanding users' time and attention
        • Potential conduit for malware
        • Privacy invasion/tracking
        • Reducing freedom of speech

        None of the above are _required_ for advertising to be possible, mind you, and not all advertising runs afoul. But advertising is so concentrated in the hands of a very small number of powerful corporations that the majority of the Internet is influenced by their policies.

        What I don't understand is with all the targeted advertising capab

  • You're either (Score:5, Insightful)

    by eggman9713 ( 714915 ) on Saturday October 05, 2019 @10:48PM (#59274474)
    For free speech or for brand-safe speech. There really isn't much middle ground. Any brand manager at almost any company that advertises will fight like a cornered animal to keep their brand from being associated with anything deemed controversial, unless they happen to be some sort of outlier supporter of your site's general cause, if it has one. But most of the time, once you go down the brand-safe road, you lose.
    • For free speech or for brand-safe speech. There really isn't much middle ground.

      The only truly brand-safe speech is no speech.

      Let that sink in.

      Strat

  • by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Saturday October 05, 2019 @11:13PM (#59274526)

    I only know them as the site of hyper-conformist groupthink circle-jerks deliberately designed to induce self-reinforcing filter bubbles.

    Did something change after I left as I could see the site degenerating into uselessness with nothing but Facebook memes (presumably forwards from mom), corporate PR/ads posing as memes (as always), and the most p.c.-censored content possible.

    Or did they create a ... code of conduct?

  • So, Reddit is going to try out the patented Flickr Plan For Success?

  • So (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AHuxley ( 892839 ) on Saturday October 05, 2019 @11:30PM (#59274566) Journal
    more censorship...
  • by soycuck ( 6276170 ) on Sunday October 06, 2019 @12:15AM (#59274618)
    Reddit has always maintained an open mind and welcomed speech from all sides. It's good to hear things will only get better and I look forward to a place where intelligent thought thrives. Slashdot has been very lucky in this regard. Please rate, upboat, and subscribe.
  • by ComputerGeek01 ( 1182793 ) on Sunday October 06, 2019 @12:18AM (#59274628)

    The only thing that keeps that cesspool afloat in ad revenue is their absurdly granulated porn categories. If they even pretended to be aware of where their click counts came from and then started allowing their advertisers to say "We don't want our products flashed across /r/hairyarmpits" (of course it exists) for example, they'd go broke in a month.

    • by shanen ( 462549 )

      Well, again I wish I could mod you up to "interesting". Maybe the reason Reddit always seemed to utterly pointless to me was that I wasn't looking for the "proper" cesspool.

      But your comment is interesting enough that I'm now wondering if I should have searched for porn there...

  • Are you motherfuckers smoking crack?

    They frequently quarantine and ban subs where people actually engage in free speech.

    LK

  • They have had offers, Ill bet thats what its is.
  • by Jarwulf ( 530523 ) on Sunday October 06, 2019 @01:51AM (#59274756)
    Haven't they've already banned almost every remotely controversial sub years ago? I guess its now the few subs that were too big to previously touch like theDonald and anything left of Trotsky.
  • Why don't you just take up herding cats as a hobby instead?

  • We're gonna need 8chan back

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • What topics on Reddit are actually useful?

      What I find it useful for is zeroing in on a controversy that is taking place in one particular locale, or involving a given project. Reddit tells you what people who are closest to the subject are thinking. The formatted discussions, like an Ask Me Anything day by some interesting person, can also be useful.

  • Money always wins, and the cleanup for advertising kills off the free speech (and porn popularity) that made the thing bigger to begin with.

    There was some ancient Groups site that got bought by Yahoo or Google, and shortly thereafter the porn got banned. Well I hope the sellers got well paid before the service died.

    And then there's the infamous Yahoo purchase of tumblr, which suddenly started hiding porno from its search feature.

  • Seriously, clean up reddit?
    That is like not asking people to be anonymous cowards or a*holes on the Internet. If you kick all the idiots, there won't be a reddit.

  • If you post anything even vaguely critical of anything you get perma-banned. Seriously, go to a cat forum and suggest your cat Fluffy is the cutest and you'll get a ban for disparaging other cats.
  • by Nocturrne ( 912399 ) on Sunday October 06, 2019 @10:00AM (#59275392)

    Interesting timing. Chinese Stasi front company Tencent invests $300mil in Reddit, then they start "cleaning up" the pro Hong Kong and Democracy threads. Let this be a warning. Chinese companies are 100% controlled by the CCP dictatorship and should not be allowed to invest in any country in the free world.

    • I run a few game servers and their respective Discord, IRC, and forum channels. I automatically and permanently ban anyone from China with the reason of "Denying the events of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre". Nobody complains because nobody likes the Chinese to begin with.
  • by Vandil X ( 636030 ) on Sunday October 06, 2019 @10:13AM (#59275438)
    This is code language to say they just want to censor conservatives and patriots to be more appealing to virtue-signaling investors and advertisers, while China pulls the board room puppet strings.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • So is your quest to make the site "a much more acceptable site for advertisers", or to have people using it?

    I mean, I know the answer, because Tumblr had the same problem too. But if you're just selling out your users to advertisers, you're already on life-support.

    For reference, like Twitter, apart from the occasional obvious sponsored article (strangely for Photoshop all the time lately) masquerading as a post, I don't see any advertising. So is your focus those ads? Those once every 50-posts or so thin

  • "Clean it up", IE: I want to lure a ton of money towards Reddit, then SELL it before it completely crashes.

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