I'd go further and say their users don't provide content, but instead act as evaluators and filters for others' content. The thing is, almost anyone can evaluate content for basic human emotional or intellectual value. The community built up around shared interest and that is itself hard to replicate in a way that achieves critical mass.
> I'd go further and say their users don't provide content, but instead act as evaluators and filters for others' content.
my post was a bit unclear, i meant they literally provide it to the site by finding it and posting it. They act as the first tier of the filtering mechanism(votes being secondary).
> The community built up around shared interest and that is itself hard to replicate in a way that achieves critical mass.
reddit itself, and many other companies/communities are caught in the trap of placating a vocal minority and exercising to broad of a control on the culture. The Y-Combinator ethos is basically this. Make something that enough people love, rather than a lot of people really like.
This revolt is backlash against changing a well-ingrained culture to try an please discrete sub-groups. Whether these sub-groups are "right" or "wrong" was largely a question of the communities sentiment expressed in posts and votes. When reddit altered the culture here they lost critical mass.
It is happening on 4chan right now as well with people moving to various cloned image boards. Reddit needs it's users a lot more than users need reddit, so we will see what will happen. I am short on reddit and bullish on community choice though.
I basically agree with everything you've said here, so when I pose this question, just consider it food for thought:
Aren't reddit moderators the vocal minority? Indeed, they are the ones exercising a great deal of control over reddit and its community.
Critical mass is pretty ambiguous. Is it defined by people who run subreddits, people who visit them, people who vote on them, people who buy reddit gold?
I am still amazed that 4chan, with its insane volume, went so long with basically a small handful of moderators. It was possible because it was very hands off.
Even though reddit has a very open philosophy, moderators of subreddits are anything but hands off.
sort of, they def have power within their own space and can bargain collectively. People hate Pao for many reasons. She is changing the culture (not single handedly) but with special interests. There are social justice/politically correct views being handed down from the company thus removing certain subreddits and restricting topics. Various other interests like moderators and users oppose these changes. That is what I meant about special interest. Many communities within reddit are hostile to one another and have sort of been playing a proxy war. Although, gun to my head, i think many of the people that would happily trade insults with one another, have slowed for now to unite against Pao/Corporate Reddit.
> critical mass is pretty ambiguous.
yeah i was qouting another poster. I think it is just enough people to generate quality content and discussion and cycle through enough depth to not let everything go stale.
> I am still amazed that 4chan, with its insane volume, went so long with basically a small handful of moderators.
4chan had a coup d'état of sorts recently where many moderators and janitors were purged from the board. Moderation became much more strict and many were part of the social justice movement. They banned threads such as #gamegate briefly and some of the culture of the boards changed.
Also people are spreading to 8chan, wizchan, krautchan and irc further sharding out the culture that created many of the things that we regard as "internet culture"
