Reddit: Discussion is threaded... This is a good thing, conducive to actual discussion. Having a back-and-forth with someone doesn't spam the topic like on this forum, because it's all kept in a thread. If someone does want to follow that thread, it's laid out seamlessly for them. If it's interesting enough to get a lot of votes, it'll be near the top.
If it's popular enough to get a lot of votes - not interesting, it'll be near the top. And its layout isn't seamless, it's a trainwreck.
See, that's not actually true. I checked just now to be sure, and sure enough, first article I clicked on had threads out of vote-order.
I don't actually post on Reddit yet, but the way it was described to me is that it seems to factor in upvotes and downvotes. IE, downvotes may help a thread get seen. It's about whether a popular conversation is going on.
There's even a link on the main page for "controversial" threads, where I presume upvotes are weighted even less.
To follow a discussion on forum software like this, one must manually scan through intervening posts and try to parse who's talking to who.
That's why we have quotes, and this isn't even a problem without quotes.
Right, quotes. To quote your message as more than an unreadable mass of text, I have copy-pasted a line of BBCode and am manually typing /quote. For each interjection I make.
Why isn't it a problem? It's a very basic use case - read a controversial post, try to find a reply. On this forum that involves glancing over other posts, looking for an avatar or username, sometimes on multiple pages. On Reddit the replies are literally right there. On 4chan they're a mouse-hover and/or click away.
I feel like that encourages ignoring those intervening posts, which leads to counterproductive things. For example, taking the time to write up a proper reply... Only to find there have been a dozen replies as the discussion heated up. On Reddit or 4chan, that reply will be easily reached from the post you had in mind. On this forum, it gets dropped into the middle of a heated debate which has moved on and possibly spiraled.
The situation is exactly the same with reddit and 4chan, you can try post some shit after everyone's already moved on
The person you're replying to will see it. And anybody else can very easily see the post you're replying to - without having to fill the screen with duplicated text, as we do here. Basic UI.
There's no notification when your posts here are deleted.
Other than Toady, who rarely deletes anything anyways
Uh? Toady usually posts a nebulous notification that something was deleted, yeah. But there's no notification that my post was deleted. All the posts vanish, and it's pretty much forbidden to discuss what was deleted.
And it's super easy to get a conversation deleted... It's only rare because people learn to avoid rocking the boat. The serious discussion threads get pruned with regularity, and are living on borrowed time in my opinion.
Of course there's no record of any of that, even for people whose posts were deleted. I know I've seen a Toady post and been unsure whether one of my posts was deleted.
I'm not sure any of that is bad, but it's really weird. Normal forum moderators leave a record of that stuff. They also have time to do so with, though.
Not exactly the same thing, but yeah. And if the mods in a subreddit are bad, anyone can create another. Which results in a lot of echo-chamber subreddits, and some actual discussion ones.
Not the same thing at all because you get bollocks where mods infiltrate other suboards to coopt them and guide the narratives. Add to that the ebin upboat system which encourages everyone to push each other in the "correct" direction and you've got a massive, massive echo chamber. Worse still, one that appeals to the lowest common denominator, mass appeal and fosters some pretty creepy groupthink. And it's not like Redditors even try to have diverse opinions, they're all about fucking the free market of ideas - creating an echo chamber in response to an echo chamber does nothing for anyone.
I'm reminded of when the redditors got banned en masse from reddit and fled to fullchan (since the cuckening left 4chan a withered husk), where all the Anons were not surprised at all to find the redditors were being absolute dunces with zero self awareness banning everyone en masse on their containment board because they couldn't handle all the nazi jewish liberal authoritarian commies. The system breeds the echo chamber but also a cultural yearning to create echo chambers even in outside systems. I'm also reminded of that one hilarious Jewish guy talking about how on reddit with thousands of posts in a thread specifically asking for anyone who was against gay marriage to voice their opinion there were thousands and thousands of posts and none were from anyone opposed to gay marriage, because they didn't exist. It's pretty much a running joke on the chins where you ask reddit "how do you defend x" or "how do you oppose x" and just watch page after page of deleted comments accrue.
I'm still admitting that there are a lot of echo chamber subreddits
That is not a thing I stopped saying...
But who cares about them? They're pointless, gross, maybe even fun.
What you seem to be implying is that there aren't useful discussion subreddits, that the voting system makes them impossible. But I think you know that's not true.
It's like saying "/tg/ sucks, just look at /b/"! Doesn't follow.
Edit: And this is definitely at that length where almost everyone will skim, sigh, and maybe someone will suggest "take it to PMs". Because this is a bad way to have a discussion, and it's clogging up the topic. Threaded systems solve this problem.
Heck, when I edit this, it'll make the thread reappear for everyone in their "unread replies" queue. A queue which it's impossible to remove entries from, incidentally.
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14914337 times)