I'm not at all against moderation. I'm against the idea that subs that don't moderate out memes and jokes and images are somehow "bad" and should be removed. There have been more than one hostile takeovers of more popular subs, driven by the idea that these subs need to change. To me, this behaviour is wrong, these people should be making new subs instead.
In short, we should stop saying that "low quality content subs" are a problem. They really are not. The problem is instead a lack of well moderated subs, and/or a lack of promoting these or inability to discover them.
As long as this is true, what's wrong with taking over a sub, if that's what the people want? Making a new sub requires getting everyone to change.
You might as well ask those who wanted the old sub behavior to make their own sub.
There's no inherently right decision as to what the default should be, and in particular that decision isn't "just do what the original mods/creators want".
Honest question: How do you (or whoever is doing the takeover) know "what people want"?
After all we are talking about subreddits that somehow got popular with what they were doing... So why does a popular subreddit have to change and why do the people who made the subreddit into the popular thing it was have to find a new place instead of whoever has a problem with how things are done making their own and new place?
Well, democracy answers this by asking people directly. So one way to do it is poll the sub's members. Or, you could see whether the stuff that gets deleted was highly voted before it was deleted. If people don't like certain content, it won't get voted up.
I'm not sure which cases of hostile takeovers they're referring to, so I don't know what happened there, but presumably they either had a mod on their side, or got an admin to step in. The mod's behavior must have been pretty bad if an admin intervened.
If you pull the "the majority decides" card then there is no decision necessary. Each subreddit is defined by the majority of its users. Simple as that.
Not necessarily. The algorithms that do the sorting might be biased toward certain content (for instance, if it highly values quickly upvoted content, it would be biased toward short memes and against long-form articles). Reddit voting isn't just a straight majority vote.
A subreddit is not a democracy. As a moderator, I can do mostly whatever I please and you're welcome to stay or start your own subreddit.
I don't understand why you'd say that if an admin did something then the mod's behavior must have been pretty bad. Define bad? Bad for reddit's public image? Bad for monetization?
Ironically - The lack of sub discovery is directly related to the development of auto mod.
If you remember when r/trees broke out of r/weed, people found out about the new sub because there was no auto mod bot which went and removed key words.
Echoing this 100%. People clearly enjoy memes, cat pictures, and so forth, or else they wouldn't wind up with thousands of imaginary internet points (and sites making nontrivial amounts of money off this exact content, like the cheezburger network) on a daily basis.
Those that want their heavily moderated spaces have them within easy reach, those that want their low effort internet junk food, likewise.
So what's the problem, again? It sounds like the system is working mostly as designed.
I think defaults are necessary when someone is not logged in. When an account is created, suggestions are given based on interest, such as it is with meetup.com - News, politics, sports, local, tech, animals, humor, etc. are recommended in their own categories, and people sub as desired.
I HATE it when I sign up for a newsreading service and the first thing it asks me is to pick topics I like. I just want to try out the product / interface.
Don't road block me with some set of tiles and vague "business, technology, fashion, music" screen.
Reddit has it right that a new account should have some baseline. Their discovery tools however are not intuitive, if you can even call them tools.
The designation of a sub as a default on reddit dooms it to be trashy and political, and reddit admins would never come out and say "avoid these awful communities, go find your local reddits!". So it goes.
This is actually what we're doing on Imzy! We ask people their interests and then show them what communities they may want to join based on that. Then they choose which ones they want to join. Hopefully by doing that, we'll decrease the circlejerking and increase the quality of conversations, since people only get there if they actually care about that topic and want to talk about that thing.
Sorry for posting in this thread, but I think you might want to know about this bug: I have a (completely valid) .coffee domain and you're actually the first to refuse my e-mail address. It's not just valid, it's got coffein!
I'm not at all against moderation. I'm against the idea that subs that don't moderate out memes and jokes and images are somehow "bad" and should be removed.
Obnoxious moderation is just as big a problem on reddit as the aforementioned.
In short, we should stop saying that "low quality content subs" are a problem. They really are not. The problem is instead a lack of well moderated subs, and/or a lack of promoting these or inability to discover them.