Forget EA. Fight the Real Enemy: Reddit

Mike writes, "At the end of the day, I recognize that awarding Reddit with some symbolic token of their sh***iness is about as meaningful as doing it for EA. So here I am, being part of the problem I guess. The thing is though, if you're going to make some kind of statement about a corporation that truly does damage to Internet culture and engages in unethical and unseemly practices, then go after a real bad guy."

[broli4000]

I've always viewed Reddit as a place where a bunch of nerds get together to do exactly what they claim to hate. Someone get bullied? Then let's get 5000 people to bully the bully. Someone censor a group? We also like to censor groups that don't meet what we want said. A group trolled some of our members? Let's gather up a bunch of members to attack their website and troll them back. It's all reactionary garbage because they have sheer numbers on their side.

It would be 1 thing if the banning reason wasn't something that happens on their site daily by a million other sites that are accepted with open arms. It would be wonderful if Reddit stuck to it's own rules and had an even playing ground. Yet, they don't and by having it be so lopsided, they open themselves up to the criticism that they deserve. Unfortunately, like the little children that they act like, they will just turtle up, act hurt and try to come up with some moral high ground about yet another article condemning them.

[thechosenone]

It looks like we found us a motive. I wonder if we can get Twinfinite banned from N4G too. lol!

Check out kafe's comment below on why he and his site hates reddit.

"All of a sudden, everyone who has ever posted anything from Twinfinite was shadowbanned.Furthermore, any time anyone, including fans, tried to post a link to one of our articles, it would always get put in the spamfolder."

[grailly]

I use reddit quite a bit, and I like it a lot, but the banning thing is just stupid, the wole point of the site is to put the intersting stuff on top, if a another site consistently puts out bad articles it'll just never get to the top, which works fine.

[High_Art]

Reddit is scum.

[KrystofKage]

Reddit: child porn good, EA bad!

[Cirran]

Can be used for pretty much any internet community.

[KrystofKage]

Yea, except Reddit openly defended /r/jailbait. It was only shut down after CNN did a major report on it, and one of the admins personal info was leaked. They didn't give a shit they were encouraging pedophiles, they were only scared that their real life information would be revealed.

[FrostyZipper]

I agree and disagree. Some communities are terrible, others are slightly more sane or in tune with the world outside.

I accept that there are some Redditers who are decent folk, as well as forums/subforums of the site which aren't total hives of scum and villainy but, to me at least, its image will be forever stained by its generally uncreative, plagiarist meme kiddies and the constant 'le' bullshit. And let's not forget the HILARITY that rage comics bring us on a daily basis.

I suppose the main saving grace Reddit has is that it sucks up idiots, leaving some communities more free from lunacy than they would otherwise be.

[Cirran]

Eh You can find some decent stuff there. Just skim through the crap and its not so bad. As terrible as the comments section is on most sites (including this one) you find a gem now and then. Laugh/ignore and move on.

[grailly]

I see a lot of criticism of the reddit community, I'll just say that the r/games subreddit has a way better community than n4g, though less active.

[BLACKBIBLE]

Reddit considers any self promoted site whose not willing to pay for advertising spam.

[kafe]

Exactly. If it hurts their bottom line, it's spam. I even bought $100 worth of advertising for two days to advertise a giveaway for charity, and it was WORTHLESS. Negligible return, akin to tossing the money down a well. The same post, instead put on subreddits, performed far better than the ad. Advertising doesn't work for sites that don't sell a product, anyway, which is why small publications shouldn't be directed to "buy an ad" for popular articles.

[kevnb]

lets forget both of them and focus on companies who poison us...

[KillerPwned]

Reddit really? I go on it every day and personally never come into contact with the things people are taking about on here. But I have to say if that stuff is true coming from this site and many others its very hypocritical. Many sites do the same thing that people are claiming on here.

Instead of worrying about some websites bitch and moan over what is the worse how about we all worry about actual things in life that can ruin ones life.

P.S. It would make more sense to call out subreddits other than just reddit as a hole. Because yes their are some really bad subreddits but Reddit as a hole I must say is false in terms of it being so horrible. If you wanna think any site is bad go to something like 4chan.

[Parapraxis]

The Reddit gaming community is leaps and bounds better than N4Gs lol, i'm betting most of the people knocking it don't actually go to the site.

[TXIDarkAvenger]

Well that's where your wrong. 4chan isn't bad, its just /b/ which people think accounts for the whole of 4chan. Likewise one subreddit doesn't represent Reddit.

[megacowdung]

>4chan isn't bad, it's just /b/
>it's just /b/
>just /b/
Lol wut... Because /pol/ and a bunch of others aren't bad it's just /b/

[KillerPwned]

I understand what you mean as a person that browses 4chan quite a bit. I should of reworded my comment.

[TXIDarkAvenger]

@megacowdung

/b/ is bigger than /pol/ hence why I mentioned it.

[kafe]

This is Keith from Twinfinite. Let’s remember that Reddit “allows you to post personal content within reason”, and doesn’t give specific rules. We made a good faith effort in the past to post external articles as well as articles from our site- every time we found that one of our writers was posting more Twinfinite content than external content, we would tell them to stop. That’s about all we can do, but to Reddit, we’re all treated as a spamming hivemind.

Our articles regularly did very well when they were posted. Reddit is the only site on the Internet that can bring that many readers to an article, purely through grassroots. It has a built-in democratic system for deciding which content users should or should not see, but moderators and administrators also like to impose their own arbitrary definition of “spam”. Webster defines the word as: “Send the same message indiscriminately to (large numbers of recipients) on the Internet”, so I guess you could either say that every link on Reddit is spam, or none of them are, because no one at Twinfinite was posting the same link over and over. We aren’t selling a product, and we have, like, *one* ad, in an attempt to cover the base costs of running this site (not including flights to conventions and room-and-board, and no one gets paid for this). Seemingly Reddit’s rules on spamming are: “If you post affiliated content, and any one of our administrators decide that we don’t like you anymore, you will be shadowbanned.” Shadowbanned, for the uninitiated, means that, without notice, no one will ever see anything you post or comment. You just kind of figure it out yourself, when all of your comments stay at 1 upvote.

All of a sudden, everyone who has ever posted anything from Twinfinite was shadowbanned. Furthermore, any time anyone, including fans, tried to post a link to one of our articles, it would always get put in the spamfolder. Shadowbanning is the most cowardly form of censorship- it abdicates the administrators of Reddit of all responsibility for their actions. They don’t give a reason, they don’t give notice, they will never respond to you or any new accounts regarding the action, and they try to hide the fact that they’ve ever done it in the first place.

General public: do you know how hard it is to grow readership for a new publication? If not link-sharing websites, where is that traffic supposed to come from? Reddit claims to have a democratic process, but 1) Reddit cheated their own system in the first place, as referenced in Mike’s article, and 2) they prevent small businesses from using the democratic system in the way it was intended, simply because they are promoting their own content.

When asking the mods why we're considered "spam", I've been told to "buy an ad." Ignoring the fact that buying an ad only works if you're selling a product, I actually played along. I spent $100 for a two-day ad on an ad on /r/gaming (we were randomly giving away video games in return for ANY donation for a video game related charity event), and it failed miserably. Negligible results. I never even saw the ad visible, but my money was definitely gone. We created identical posts on a few subreddits, and they did great! I wonder if Reddit's intolerance of small sites posting their own content has anything to do with the fact that they make money from selling ad space, and need to artificially create demand for a lackluster service.

Reddit is now the king of sites used for grassroots link-sharing, which is how you grow a site’s readership. If I had an alternative, I would go there. If people overwhelmingly “like” the link, and I only submit it once, it’s pretty clearly *not* spam (and in our case, it’s probably an article that someone worked really hard on). Stop crippling indie sites that use your service to grow.

[My_Name_BTW_Is_Dante]

Nothing to see here. It's just an article about someone getting butthurt over being banned somewhere.

[broli4000]

I'm guessing since you have 2 speech bubbles, you routinely have nothing to say.

[shadowst17]

I can't stand when people think all 43 million redditors are child molesters, seriously just because about 10 people posted sick things instantly must mean everyone else is.

[Parapraxis]

These people clearly do not know much about Reddit.

[ALLWRONG]

Reddit is a good site when you know what to look for. As for the person who submitted this. You got banned Reddit :( So What! deal with it.

[broli4000]

I do have to say that I love all the comments on here about how there are parts of Reddit that are OK. There are also a lot of parts of Reddit that aren't OK in their moral standing as well as how the admins police themselves. The article while criticizing Reddit as a whole, because remember that Reddit is a company as a whole, is really shinning a light on their hypocritical behavior of banning members for submitting content while allowing pedophiles to submit content under the umbrella of free speech all while having some weird mob mentality when it comes to wrongs perpetrated on them, using the bashing of EA as the worst company for example.

Reddit bans people for behavior that it itself has used to become as popular as it has. It protects pedophiles citing the first amendment and yet shuts down meaningful content and content providers. There is no standard on that site, yet they ask people to uphold one that changes on the whims of the admins. THAT is the issue here.

[kikoano]

microsoft and sony(only console) are worse from all of them