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."
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."
That'll Help Kill It (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That'll Help Kill It (Score:5, Insightful)
Kill it? It's already dead. (Score:2)
It has been dead for a long time now. ... 2015?
I think the last time it convulsed, was around
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)
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
That'll Help Bill It (Score:2)
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.
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They can always pull a dig and we all move back to slashdot where we all started ;)
Re: That'll Help Kill It (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally any advertiser that thinks they have a right, in any way shape or form to dictate what is and isnt "objectionable" is a clear signal they can go fuck themselves with a tent pole while watching some beastiality before uploading the video to best gore.
Why should coke be afriad of appearing next to that video anyway. that sugar and caffine filled diabetes in a can is waaaaay more objectionable than the worst of right wing nut job im my own grandpa site that ever existed.
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The alternative is the advertiser pulling out. And then it'll be the platform second-guessing what advertisers will find objectionable, and banning or demonetizing such content. A bit like Youtube, where random (and often very popular) channel owners are told: "
Re: That'll Help Kill It (Score:2)
im sure if you read what you wrote you can see how you contradict yourself.
"advertises dont claim the right to control what people cannot say only what people can say"
whatever, if they want to do either they are playing social policy games they have no business playing, and can go fuck themselves. Platforms should just tell them to go stuck their money where the sun dont shine.
Anyway, if they dont they will just lose the users that made them interesting to the advertisers in the first place.
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They most definitely are not saying please, and even if they were it changes nothing.
Coke shows up in lots of Porn (Score:2)
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Thats fine.
Trying to force other people to not allow people to discuss fascism or terrorism or religion or whatever is not.
which is the topic of the OP.
radical bastion of free speech (Score:5, Insightful)
> while also maintaining Reddit's reputation as a radical bastion of free speech
Don't make laugh
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Try supporting the second amendment in /r/news, /r/politics, etc. You will almost always get banned in short order. Free speech my ass.
Re:radical bastion of free speech (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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" 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
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At risk of proving Powercntrl's point, you're a sexist idiot.
Hush now, and go find an adult to change your nappy.
What's the half-life of any society? (Score:2)
How long does it take the average society* to fall even without "let[ting] women have a little political power"? I ask this follow-up because it could be the case that the half-life of any society is less than 150 years regardless of women's power.
* Careful: I wrote and meant "average," not outliers.
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Really?
Which works out in your favour only if Margaret Thatcher is regarded as having being as fatal to the "society" of Queen Victoria as Lenin was to the "society" of Catherine the Great (still considered one of the greatest monarchs in Russian history).
Moreover, your thesis translates to the clai
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Every society that has ever let women have a little political power has fallen within 150 years.
The Kingdom of Japan is still going strong, despite having queens (eg Himiko and Suiko).Then there was Wu Zetian, empress of ancient China, which it should be noted that Chinese society is still around today.
And of course, there's Queen Elizabeth I, the grand dame herself. Did you fail to graduate from 5th grade? How did you forget her? These are just from my memory. If I do research I can find many more.
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Yep they made it all the way to 2016 before screwing themselves.
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Thanks for proving my point.
Re: radical bastion of free speech (Score:3)
Your ideas intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
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Obama was in during the global financial crisis. He had to fix that, while Trump inherited an economy that was doing well despite his actions.
Obama was right too, those jobs didn't come back. New ones were created, but coal is still dying and robots are still replacing factory line workers. Even H1B is still basically the same as under Obama, both in terms of the numbers granted and the 5 days it takes to exhaust all the available ones every April.
The new jobs often aren't so hot either. Lower wages, often
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Eight years of global financial crisis.
Whatever happened to the ARRA money?
Re: radical bastion of free speech (Score:2)
When did President Trump become a Liberturdian??
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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?
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Silencers are perfectly legal and there are a number of ways to acquire them.
Re: radical bastion of free speech (Score:5, Insightful)
"Reddit's reputation as a radical bastion of censorship"
Fixed that for him
radical bastion of free ownership. (Score:2)
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?
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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!”
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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)
Re:Reddit's reputation (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Ways in which advertising can be detrimental:
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)
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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
Provocative?? Fringe?? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Provocative?? Fringe?? (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope someone mods you up the rest of the way (but I never get mod points to give, for reasons that remain unknown).
Your description describes quite accurately my impressions of Reddit after several years of experimentation. You left out the description "cesspool", but other than that, I think you were pretty much spot on.
For a long time I was trying to rationalize the peculiar atmosphere. I thought there had to be some reason that Reddit seemed to be endless heaps of pointless drivel. Never found the explanation (and I still cannot imagine why any company would pay for an ad there).
One theory was that there was good stuff hidden somewhere, and I just wasn't smart enough to find it. Mostly that was an indictment of the search features, but after a while I concluded that couldn't be the explanation. Main evidence was actually from outside links that were described as pointing directly to the "best" bits of Reddit. "Where's the beef?" Nowhere on Reddit.
My more "sophisticated" hypothesis was that the system had been so traumatized by trolls that there was a high barrier to entry to the good stuff. The essence of that theory was that newbie visibility was quite restricted, but I eventually gathered enough evidence to refute this hypothesis, too.
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I thought there had to be some reason that Reddit seemed to be endless heaps of pointless drivel. Never found the explanation.
My explanation is that this applies to human conversation in general. Usable social media are those which allow you to winnow through to find the conversations that interest you personally.
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I thought there had to be some reason that Reddit seemed to be endless heaps of pointless drivel. Never found the explanation.
My explanation is that this applies to human conversation in general. Usable social media are those which allow you to winnow through to find the conversations that interest you personally.
I'm not sure if the best interpretation of that statement is something like "Good conversation is a lost art"? If so, then I do not agree that it has to be that way (and notwithstanding the abundant evidence). To me the mystery is how drivel-driven websites can create any appearance of economic "success".
However Twitter is a better example of fake "success" built on a massive foundation of garbage. It's a kind of worship of "big". The similarity is that Twitter and Reddit have defined metrics of bigness tha
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Ah, so the Slashdot moderation system Which you constantly criticize as being wielded by slack-jawed monkeys.
Public masturbation of 946416 (Score:2)
Z^-1
Re:Sexual assault by Shannon Jacobs (Score:2)
Japanese resident Shannon Jacobs up his game at 2:09 pm to now twice a day sexually assault those who have disagreed with his ramblings. And replies to every single comment. That's not a sign of anything...
Public masturbation of 946416 (Score:2)
Z^-3
Re:Sexual assault by Shannon Jacobs (Score:2)
Japanese resident Shannon Jacobs up his game at 2:17 am to now twice a day sexually assault those who have disagreed with his ramblings. And replies to every single comment. Lets go for three times per day.
Dance for me, shanen.
Public masturbation of 946416 (Score:2)
Z^-6
Re:Sexual assault by Shannon Jacobs (Score:2)
It's 2:18 am in Japan, and resident Shannon Jacobs is back, sexually assaulting commenters day and night
Public masturbation of 946416 (Score:2)
Z^-8
Re:Sexual assault by Shannon Jacobs (Score:2)
Japanese resident Shannon Jacobs drops everything at 2:15 pm to now twice a day sexually assault those who have disagreed with his ramblings. And replies to every single comment. Lets go for three times per day.
Dance for me, shanen.
Public masturbation of 946416 (Score:2)
Z^-9
Re:Sexual assault by Shannon Jacobs (Score:2)
Japanese resident Shannon Jacobs drops everything at 2:09 am to now twice a day sexually assault those who have disagreed with his ramblings. And replies to every single comment. Lets go for three times per day.
Dance for me, shanen.
Public masturbation of 946416 (Score:2)
Z^-11
Re:Sexual assault by Shannon Jacobs (Score:2)
Japanese resident Shannon Jacobs drops everything at 2:09 pm to now twice a day sexually assault those who have disagreed with his ramblings. And replies to every single comment. Lets go for three times per day.
Dance for me, shanen.
Re:Sexual assault by Shannon Jacobs (Score:2)
Because your average post is contentless drivel [slashdot.org].
Public masturbation of 946416 (Score:2)
Z^-2
Re:Sexual assault by Shannon Jacobs (Score:2)
Japanese resident Shannon Jacobs up his game at 2:17 pm to now twice a day sexually assault those who have disagreed with his ramblings. And replies to every single comment. That's not a sign of anything...
Public masturbation of 946416 (Score:2)
Z^-4
Re:Sexual assault by Shannon Jacobs (Score:2)
Japanese resident Shannon Jacobs up his game at 2:23 am to now twice a day sexually assault those who have disagreed with his ramblings. And replies to every single comment. Lets go for three times per day.
Dance for me, shanen.
Public masturbation of 946416 (Score:2)
Z^-5
Re:Sexual assault by Shannon Jacobs (Score:2)
It's 2:12 am in Japan, and resident Shannon Jacobs is back, sexually assaulting commenters day and night
Public masturbation of 946416 (Score:2)
Z^-7
Re:Sexual assault by Shannon Jacobs (Score:2)
Japanese resident Shannon Jacobs drops everything at 2:11 pm to now twice a day sexually assault those who have disagreed with his ramblings. And replies to every single comment. Lets go for three times per day.
Dance for me, shanen.
Public masturbation of 946416 (Score:2)
Z^-10
Re:Sexual assault by Shannon Jacobs (Score:2)
Japanese resident Shannon Jacobs drops everything at 2:18 am to now twice a day sexually assault those who have disagreed with his ramblings. And replies to every single comment. Lets go for three times per day.
Dance for me, shanen.
Public masturbation of 946416 (Score:2)
Z^-12
Re:Sexual assault by Shannon Jacobs (Score:2)
Japanese resident Shannon Jacobs drops everything at 2:12 pm to now twice a day sexually assault those who have disagreed with his ramblings. And replies to every single comment. Lets go for three times per day.
Dance for me, shanen.
Re:Provocative?? Fringe?? (Score:4, Insightful)
Frankly, I use their linguistics forums and programming forums sometimes, and they are quite good. I don't mind political correctness as long as I get intelligent content, as I don't really need to see the words n***er and f**ot spliced into technical explanations.
Hell, in terms of tech skills, I suspect that the average r/c++ user is more talented than the average slashdot commenter.
Re:Provocative?? Fringe?? (Score:4, Interesting)
IMHO, the big/default subreddits are full of groupthink. But they're also so large that it's not even discussion, it's just group yelling. Who expect to get anything out of a comment thread with 3k comments?
IMHO, there's an inverse relationship between quality and popularity on reddit. The more topically focused subreddits seem to be pretty decent. A handful seem to be overly moderated, but not for ideological reasons, just because they're trying too hard to be some kind of "serious" forum.
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Flickr (Score:2)
So, Reddit is going to try out the patented Flickr Plan For Success?
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Oooper, Tumblr, not Flickr.
So (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't want to go against the grain here (Score:5, Funny)
Reddit is a porn front (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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...
Radical bastion of free speech? (Score:2)
Are you motherfuckers smoking crack?
They frequently quarantine and ban subs where people actually engage in free speech.
LK
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They did just try and close part of the site used to discuss the inherent gender bias in the political, justice and education systems in the US.
But maybe you think gender equality is a bad thing.
Sell to the Chinese (Score:2)
What's Left to 'Clean Up'? (Score:5, Insightful)
Herding Cats (Score:2)
Why don't you just take up herding cats as a hobby instead?
We're gonna need 8chan back (Score:2)
We're gonna need 8chan back
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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.
It's the way it's been done for billions of years (Score:2)
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.
Reddit is the first floor, 4chan is the basement (Score:2)
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.
How much more clean can it get? (Score:2)
$300mil investment from China, duh (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Sensorit (Score:3)
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Sigh, the beginning of the end. (Score:2)
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
LMAO say goodbye to Reddit! (Score:2)