After action report: Reddit

OK, I’ll admit it: this title is a bit dramatic. Reddit isn’t dead. There’s a significant distance left in the enshittification pipeline between where it is now and where we start organizing a funeral. 

But - we don’t do after action reports exclusively on dead blasters, do we? An AAR comes after the close of a game or two or however much use leads to lessons worth posting. That is the spirit in which this is intended: we’re at the end of an era. The reactions back-and-forth between Reddit admins and users following the recent API changes have revealed things that cannot be unseen. Reddit admins can no longer be trusted. The forums of old were resilient because they were distributed and compartmentalized. If one went down, there were others. If one became crappy, we could vote with our feet. Centralization on Reddit brought us convenience at the cost of that resilience - a mistake which it is hopefully not to late to reverse. 

That centralization happened for reasons: there are things that Reddit did right and so there are lessons to be learned from it; lessons which may be vital in creating a non-Reddit renaissance. 

(I’ll spoil the conclusion of the post, which is that I’m cautiously optimistic about the Reddit alternative Lemmy. I expect to see a migration to some combination of old forums, discord, FB, and possibly Lemmy. I hope to see that migration go more towards old forums and Lemmy - but before we get to that, let’s cover what made Reddit great.)

 

Content

 

Aggregation

Reddit was an aggregator originally and to a large extent it still is. The nice thing about being an aggregator is that you don’t need to already have as many users to attract users. You aren’t competing with other websites to be the first place where something gets posted; a small userbase posting and curating links to other sites can generate a lot of good content.  

More generally, the easier it is to port exiting content onto a platform, the less the barrier to generating that critical volume of content that makes a site worth checking. If you are making an e.g. list of nerf clubs, it’d really help if each club could link their own website. If you want a place where people can show off blaster builds, it’d really help if people could link to their own writeup(s) which already exist elsewhere.  

Customizability

Reddit allows people to construct customized front page feeds of whichever combinations of subReddits they prefer. Do you like nerf, 3d printing, specifically functional prints, and specifically not a bunch of people asking for printer help? There’s a subReddit for each of those things. Do you also like this one obscure computer game? There’s a sub for that too. What makes this exceptionally good for users is the combination of all of this in one place: not just one website but one front page. It’s the digital equivalent of a convenience store catered specifically to you.

This is all far more important for casual users than for . . . oh, pretty much anyone who’s likely to read this. So, it’s easy to underestimate how important this is. Keep in mind that casual users are the bulk of the community and, longterm, where dedicated hobbyists start. 

Quality content boosting

The upvote system allows the content which generates the most immediately positive attention to rise to the place where it becomes the first thing that people see. This creates a good first impression, both on the first visit and the start of each browsing session. 

Someone who is passing by a page briefly (e.g. if they have a 5-minute break at work) will almost certainly want to see just the most popular stuff first as that’s all that they’ll see. Someone who browses often enough to see about half of what’s posted will probably prefer to see the more popular half. Someone who reads everything might not mind the order of presentation (but also see “options” further down). 

This applies to comments as well as posts. Your first impression of a thread under Reddit’s default sorting option will be a highly upvoted top-level comment, a highly upvoted reply, a highly upvoted reply to the reply, etc.

Self-moderation through voting...

 

...as a compliment to manual moderation

The upvote (and importantly also downvote) system serves to make communities mildly self-moderating in a way that serves as a valuable compliment (and to be clear, not substitute) for manual moderation. Compared to manual moderation, the self-moderating effects of voting are:

• Easier; content being downvoted takes up none of the moderators’ finite time and effort.
• Faster; downvoting moves bad content into a less visible position as soon as users see it, which will generally be faster as users outnumber moderators.
• More granular; moderators can either remove or not remove content. There’s a scale of quality, and a point on that scale where removal is too harsh but we don’t want the content to be prominent either.
• Not prone to perceived (and on some subs real) moderator bias.
• More democratic-feeling and therefore deserved-feeling for someone on the receiving end; a pile of downvotes requires a pile of downvoters. 

The ease, granularity, and democratic feel of self-moderation are especially beneficial to moderation for quality. The speed and freedom from perceived moderator bias are especially beneficial for moderation for civility.

...as a substitute for other forms of self-moderation

Every community has some form of self-moderation available to it, even if its just warning other users about manual moderation or sending other users nasty replies. Allowing users to downvote bad content serves as a pressure-relief valve for the desire to do something to fix the problem for the community that the bad content represents. Compared to other forms of self-moderation, voting is:

• Nicer; being downvoted sucks but it’s a lot better than being dogpiled.
• Provokes less backlash; being downvoted provides no specific targets to angrily lash out against.
• Less disruptive; backseat-moderating or nasty replies to bad content are themselves a form of bad content.

That last point deserves emphasis: voting means that bad content slides into obscurity quickly and generates less bad content as engagement: repetitive or vicious arguments, dogpiling, etc.

Have you ever seen threads that seem to never die on traditional forums, where people keep joining in an argument that goes nowhere because the thread is always visible, and the thread is always visible because people keep joining in? That’s one of the major downsides of sorting by engagement. Reddit-likes not only don’t do that, but with downvoting can do the opposite of that.

Presentation and functionality

 

Discussion

Reddit structures comment threads in a useful way: replies are displayed below the comment to which they reply, allowing several separate conversations to exist in the same comments thread without them mixing together. A reader can follow one discussion at a time. Reddit also indents replies, which makes the structure of conversations easier to follow. 

An online conversation is a tree (as in the data structure, not the plant). Representing that structure in a way that allows it to be displayed on a page is a nontrivial challenge. Traditional forums take the easiest way out: they just list every node in the tree, oldest first. Reddit’s approach requires more complex code but allows a reader to obtain a much clearer view of a discussion.

Density

The old Reddit interface fits a large amount of information into a given amount of screen space, with just enough bells and whistles to make the page easy to visually parse. It’s an old-looking (and actually old) style of web design, but it’s great in terms of functionality. Unlike traditional forums, no space is wasted on user icons and signatures on comment pages.

Sorting options

Reddit gives readers options for how they’d like content to be sorted, with new vs. top/hot/best being the major distinction. People who want to deep-dive a subreddit and read everything on it can do so. People who want to skim and just see the best stuff can do so too. This makes Reddit accommodating to both committed and casual users. 

Worth noting: the setting that serves casual users the best is “hot,” and that’s the default - which is appropriate as casual users are the ones who are less likely to change their settings. 

Traditional forums are fine for, and seem designed for, people who want to deep-dive and read everything. This unfortunately means that there’s a barrier to entry for casual readers: to find the “good” (from a casual user’s perspective) stuff, you need to dig for it. 

Interface options

Reddit has (at least for now) multiple interfaces which all let people interact with the same content while respecting different devices, preferences, and accessibility requirements. Old Reddit and new Reddit are the big two that we all know; there’s also an official mobile Reddit app and (though this is changing) various unofficial ones with additional moderation and accessibility features. There was also the now-defunct i.reddit, which was a simplified interface originally intended for mobile web browsers. 

Having multiple interface options is way down the list of important features - but it’s still nice to have, even if nowhere near worth the effort that it would require for most forums. 

Extensibility

One of Reddit’s greatest strengths was how much help it managed to bring in from volunteers. The browser plugins Reddit Enhancement Suite and Toolbox were developed by users, as were many useful moderator bots. All of these provided value to Reddit, at no cost to Reddit, all due to people’s desire to help the communities that exist on Reddit. (That’s not to mention that moderators themselves are also all volunteers!)

 

So . . . Lemmy? 

Lemmy is new and unfamiliar to us nerfers, so it gets its own section. 

Lemmy takes Reddit’s strengths, then dials some of them up to 11 while mixing in the decentralized strength of the old forums. It’s like Reddit, except distributed - there’s multiple servers (called instances) which each host a few “subreddits” (called communities) and share content with each other. The whole thing ends up being a lot like Reddit from a user’s perspective, with the connections (called federation) between instances being handled behind the scenes. 

Here’s an explanation of how it works. Lenny is part of a broader fediverse which, potentially confusingly, has multiple types of site which share some (but AFAIK not all) types of content: Lemmy, kbin (another Reddit alternative with more social-media-like features), and Mastodon (a twitter alternative). The reason why I’m focusing on Lemmy is that it’s the most like Reddit. 

So, lets run down that list of features:

• Resiliency through decentralization: yes. That’s kinda the whole point of the fediverse.We generated splinter subs as we expanded; with Lemmy we could have splinters on multiple servers.
  
• Aggregation, customizability, quality content boosting: yup, just like Reddit.
• Self-moderation through voting: Yes, with a quirk: some Lemmy instances don’t allow downvoting, but this is a feature that only affects people who use a no-downvoting instances. Content viewed from an instance with downvoting can be downvoted regardless of where it's from, and AFAIK those downvotes will be respected by other instances with downvoting.
  
• Discussion, density, and sorting options: yes, all very much like old reddit. Many Lemmy instances have an optional darkmode (like what RES did) that’s on by default.
• Interface options: believe it or not, yes, Lemmy even has this nice-but-nowhere-near-necessary feature. Each instance has its own appearance and the content from other instances which is viewed on it will be formatted to fit. Right now, all of the Lemmy instances that I’ve seen look a lot like old reddit but there’s no reason why that has to stay true. There’s even mobile support, with multiple apps hotly in development in anticipation of migration from the various soon-to-be-dead reddit apps.
• Extensibility: the whole thing is open source. You can’t get much more extensible than that. 

The only thing that Lemmy is missing right now is a critical mass of people, and that’s changing. 

I came here to talk about Reddit and ended up gushing about Lemmy instead, so I’ll stop here.

 

The future

 

Thus far, I’ve mainly been talking about lessons learned from Reddit and about that I hope will happen. The question of what I expect will happen is a different one, and we do need to talk about it a bit. Let’s talk about the places where nerfers could go:

• Stay on Reddit: this is the default option, and it’s probably going to be what a disappointingly large number of people do. For those that do, we can use Reddit to promote other platforms.
• Migrate to discord: kinda? There are nerfy discords, but discord is optimized for ongoing conversations with small groups of people. You can “keep up” with a conversation i.e. scroll through everything, or let yourself skip chunks - but there’s very little in the way of sorting, discovery, archiving, etc. That’s fine for conversations but terrible for aggregation and content discovery.
• Migrate to Facebrick: this is the elephant in the room that I haven’t addressed until now. Facebrick has become the de facto default for nerf clubs to keep in touch and share local news and organize upcoming events. The problem here is that Facebrick really really sucks. Fortunately it seems bad enough for discussing general news with a large community that we’ll hopefully stay away from pressing it into that use. Hopefully.
• Blogs: who here remembers blogs? (You’re reading one now!) Blogs remain an excellent place for hosting content that gets linked elsewhere and for a few other purposes, but blogs are no longer viable as a method of large-scale content discovery and sharing. The days when large numbers of reasonable people check a list of their favorite blogs regularly are largely over - it’s just inconvenient to check so many different websites for updates which might not even be there.
• Migrate back to the old forums (or to old-style new forums): this is going to be a great option for dedicated hobbyists and for those of us with long enough memories to have come to like to forums of old - but this can’t be the only place the NIC goes. Traditional forums can support the hard core but they aren’t friendly to the casual cloud that surrounds and feeds it. The migration to Reddit happened for reasons, after all.
• Migrate to a Reddit-like website, which is both most likely and most hopefully on the fediverse, and most likely Lemmy: this is the option that’s grabbed my attention. 

What I expect to happen if we just let this run its course is some combination of the first five options, tilted mainly towards Reddit and old forums plus some difficult-to-predict amount towards Facebrick.

What intrigues me is that migration to Lemmy is something that we could make happen alongside the other options. Lemmy might not become the de facto hub for the NIC (and I’m not sure if I’d even want it to) but it could very well be made to become a hub. It’s not the easiest path forwards in the short term but I believe that it would be beneficial in the long term, for reasons that I hope will be clear based on the rest of this post. 

I expect that the probability of success if we push Lemmy is high enough to make it well worth the attempt. 

Despite all of my talk about the value of decentralization, I do believe that we have the best chance of making Lemmy work if our efforts are focused in one place at the start. For every social media website, there exists a critical mass of users which generates enough content to keep people coming back - and whatever that mass is, the most critical thing is to not let yourself languish below that threshold. R/nerf started generating splinter subs when we got big - first nerfexchange, then nerfchatter and a bunch more. That’s what we expect to see eventually if we succeed, but it’s not how we succeed at the start. 

 

Actionable stuff

 

Go and support old forums. They already exist. Read the rules, of course - some of them are a bit idiosyncratic - but other than that you can go and post and read nerfy stuff on them right now. 

Seek nerfy communities off reddit whose format and functionality pleases you. Maybe you do actually like having a bookmarked list of blogs, if you’re reading this one.

If I’ve convinced you that Lemmy should be part of the NIC, then let’s work together and make one community to push first to attain a critical self-sustaining mass of users. (Also, on that subject: check the author of this post. I’m Herbert_W, not this blog’s usual author. Despite certain rumors to the contrary, we are not the same person. I'm still contactable on Reddit and will most likely have Lemmy contact info soon.)