The demise of r/science AMAs on Reddit

I&#x27;m completely on the side of Reddit, here. Subreddit moderators have too much power. It&#x27;s all very well saying &quot;anyone can create a subreddit, if you don&#x27;t like one, make another&quot; but it&#x27;s impossible to compete with subreddits sitting on common names, like &quot;science&quot;.<p>The practice of <i>removing</i> higher-voted posts in order to keep their AMAs at the top should never have been allowed, and I&#x27;m glad that it now isn&#x27;t.<p>Abuse of moderator power is one of Reddit&#x27;s biggest problems.

Good journalism suffers if subjected to popularity algorithms. What a weird wave this has been, where Facebook&#x27;s News Feed used to be okay and then sucked, where my curated Twitter feed used to be okay and then sucked, etc.<p>There&#x27;s a difference between what people say they want (as interpreted by views, clicks, eyeballs), and what they want to want (as interpreted by values, what feels rewarding in hindsight, what they&#x27;re glad they did later). I wonder if these algorithms will ever evolve to start serving up metaphorical vitamins instead of potato chips.

At the start of the article I was revelling in the enjoyment of confimation bias washing over me around how reddit is changing, but then I read this<p>&gt; Allen admitted to the Daily Dot that he deleted popular r&#x2F;science posts so AMAs would be more prominently featured. But he argues the controversial action was required for his posts to gain widespread visibility.<p>Don&#x27;t think Reddit is in the wrong here...

&quot;My posts weren&#x27;t the most popular, so I had to delete the popular ones to get mine to the top of r&#x2F;science!&quot;<p>Did he really just say that post manipulation is allowed when he personally values the content and expected it to be accepted?<p>Reddit is so covered in arbitrary rules as it is. It&#x27;s harder to get a post to stick on Reddit than it is here on HN sometimes, and HN isn&#x27;t even for general discussion like Reddit is.<p>Now we&#x27;re finding out that the social media website with the most red-tape and outright hostile attitude towards it&#x27;s userbase deletes user content to substitute self-promotional content produced by organizers?<p>I think it&#x27;s time to find an alternative. Reddit wreaks of hostility towards users. It&#x27;s the online equivalent of a park bench with coin operated spikes to deter homeless people.

There seem to be two stages in the life cycle of social media sites that every one of them follows:<p>1) The site starts with transparent rules. The users are in power. Data access is open and easy. The user interface is friendly.<p>...the site becomes popular...<p>2) Rules become a secret. Power is taken away from the users. Data access becomes limited and more complicated. The user interface becomes bloated and hostile.<p>I really hope we will manage to get decentralized social media off the ground. It sucks that even after years of work, the content creators and community builders have nothing to show for it. They are just slaves to the platform owners.

&gt; First, the site replaced default communities—the 100 subreddits that once made up the front page of Reddit—with r&#x2F;popular, <i>which takes posts from all subreddits</i>. The changes were made to help smaller subreddits compete with the larger, more established communities.<p>That&#x27;s wrong as &#x2F;r&#x2F;popular explicitly excludes a bunch of sub-reddits. While one could see it as the Reddit staff catering it to what&#x27;s &quot;popular&quot;, a more cynical view is that the entire concept was created to shape the definition of &quot;popular&quot;. It&#x27;s pretty easy to tip the scales when you&#x27;re the one managing them.<p>Separately, does The Daily Dot have any sort of editing or review process? &quot;Huffman&quot; is misspelled &quot;Hoffman&quot;, extra confusingly in a direct quote from him.

&gt; Reddit has not confirmed what specifically it changed to prevent post manipulation but said it’s something it doesn’t support or allow.<p>Presumably some of these changes had to do with removing e.g. r&#x2F;The_Donald&#x27;s ability to spam the front page. This article is really incomplete without talking about the problems that the new rules were designed to solve.

The article is missing some context here where spez said that r&#x2F;science mods removed the popular posts in the sub during AMA for increased attention which is allegedly vote manipulation from their end.<p>Full reply : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;science&#x2F;comments&#x2F;8khscc&#x2F;rscience_will_no_longer_be_hosting_amas&#x2F;dz8nky8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;science&#x2F;comments&#x2F;8khscc&#x2F;rscience_wi...</a>

I noticed HN fixes inaccurate titles, can that be done here? I don’t think it’s fair for the title to imply Reddit is to blame, based on the CEO’s comment in the article, which goes into detail on the (completely reasonable) anti-abuse measures that resulted in this. The moderators were clearly manipulating the site to promote these AMAs (albeit with good intentions) so it seems things are more complicated than “Reddit censors science”<p>Edit: looks like it’s been changed, thanks!

I do agree that the r&#x2F;science moderator was wrong in attempting to game the frontpage algorithm (by removing popular r&#x2F;science posts, temporarily, so that AMAs could float to the top). But I don&#x27;t get why these AMAs, which ostensibly drew large audiences, wouldn&#x27;t already be at the top of r&#x2F;science at their peak?

They sure seem determined to re-enact the DIGG collapse.

On an possibly unrelated note it seems my account has developed an issue where the front page tabs only shows articles from the last 12 hours, at best.