Storming Reddit's Moat

Moats & Drawbridges - augment

In a world obsessed with moats, the open social web drops drawbridges

Reddit is still in turmoil | TechCrunch

Although Pao was seen as the driving force behind efforts to make Reddit respectable enough to appeal to advertisers, the company continued its clean-up

Reddit holds the secret to fixing Facebook

News discussion site Reddit offers a model for a fairer internet - if it can overcome its flaws.

RIP social media. What comes next is messy.

As social media splinters, how can we keep the new online spaces from devolving into toxic pits of despair?

Leaflet, Blogging, and How to Fix Social Media - Aaron Ross Powell

Decentralization, network overlap, and why we should all blog, too.

Reddit's disrespectful design

An overview of Reddit's adversarial and seemingly counter-productive changes.

The Reddit Protest Is a Battle for the Soul of the Human Internet

An esoteric battle over API fees and access is highlighting a power struggle between corporate overlords and unpaid moderators. It's worth understanding, and it's worth fighting for.

AI Is Poisoning Reddit to Promote Products and Game Google With 'Parasite SEO'

A market for manipulating Reddit using AI have emerged.

Introducing a network for thoughtful conversations

The quality of conversations on the Internet is terrible. Most platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, etc. optimize for engagement as their key metric. This spawns and rewards behavior that leads to bragging of gameable metrics such as likes and followers, self-feeding thought bubbles, knee-jerk reactions, “if you’re not on our side, you’re on their side” mentality, and thought policing even by people who think they’re fighting for a good cause. Today’s Internet doesn’t incentiviz

New Paradigms in Trust and Safety: Navigating Defederation on Decentralized Social Media Platforms

Defederation on decentralized social media offers new possibilities for online governance. Experts consider how it can be used responsibly, in a way that balances speech and safety.

Inside Reddit's Plan to Recover From Its Epic Meltdown

Much of Reddit briefly went dark this summer. Now its co-founder is back to bring it into the light.

Bubbles

Independent blog posts, ranked by the community. Good stuff bubbles up. The rest pops.

The echo chamber effect on social media

Significance We explore the key differences between the main social media platforms and how they are likely to influence information spreading and the formation of echo chambers. To assess the different dynamics, we perform a comparative analysis on more than 100 million pieces of content concerning controversial topics (e.g., gun control, vaccination, abortion) from Gab, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter. The analysis focuses on two main dimensions: 1) homophily in the interaction networks and 2) bias in the information diffusion toward like-minded peers. Our results show that the aggregation in homophilic clusters of users dominates online dynamics. However, a direct comparison of news consumption on Facebook and Reddit shows higher segregation on Facebook. , Social media may limit the exposure to diverse perspectives and favor the formation of groups of like-minded users framing and reinforcing a shared narrative, that is, echo chambers. However, the interaction paradigms among users and feed algorithms greatly vary across social media platforms. This paper explores the key differences between the main social media platforms and how they are likely to influence information spreading and echo chambers’ formation. We perform a comparative analysis of more than 100 million pieces of content concerning several controversial topics (e.g., gun control, vaccination, abortion) from Gab, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter. We quantify echo chambers over social media by two main ingredients: 1) homophily in the interaction networks and 2) bias in the information diffusion toward like-minded peers. Our results show that the aggregation of users in homophilic clusters dominate online interactions on Facebook and Twitter. We conclude the paper by directly comparing news consumption on Facebook and Reddit, finding higher segregation on Facebook.

Reweaving the web

A slew of startups is trying to decentralise the online world

Exclusive: Reddit in AI content licensing deal with Google

Social media platform Reddit has struck a deal with Google to make its content available for training the search engine giant's artificial intelligence models, three people familiar with the matter said.