This is the problem with Reddit as a community, definitely. You can't have good discussion without conflict. When you have a community with bad admins who remove people who disagree with them, or a karma system where only the consensus can be heard, the discourse inevitability degenerates into banality.

The problem with this view is that Reddit isn't a community and isn't trying to be. Reddit is a business which makes money by linking to content created by other people. It was a VC-funded Bay-area software startup which was acquired after a year by a major publicly-traded New York publisher, all well before it became popular. Their commenting system is hopelessly broken as far as community building is concerned, but it's working as intended because it keeps a simple plurality coming back. That's all they really care about.

That... certainly puts things into perspective. Thanks.

I'm giving Metafilter a shot, filtering by the following set of tags:



which results in a fairly uninformative feed of posts. Aside from a general dearth of Subject Matter Experts, the posts tend to have non-descriptive or obscure titles and abstracts. Add to that the fact that you don't see which tag it was that caused a post to show up, and the result is a very jarring experience.

In the end, my little experiment seems to have simply resulted in a poor approximation of the old Slashdot.

OTOH, just without filtering for any tags, I am finding the default Metafilter feed to have a lot of interesting discussion, just so long as I don't come with any expectations about what the subject matter is.

In unrelated news, TIL that people still use Usenet. Groups like comp.lang.c still get several posts every day.

That's why the level of discourse here is so top notch, my b's

Oh yeah, Reverend Jones? You think Reddit is not top-grade Internet source of ... greatness?

Well take a look at THIS

http://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/26ycjx/question_how_to_set_the_fov_in_deus_ex_nihilum/

Only after it was deemed necessary to waste the effort tyvm

All I see is this:


Also, for some reason the guy who posted that deleted his account. He's probably not even real. (Just a glitch in the matrix.)

Exactly.

FGR, this thread is not about DXN!

But is it about love ?

it's about jerking off in a circle

Speaking of circles:

/me takes the form of Nikumubeki's feet so that he can say: Gay!

It's true.

Have you heard of cDonald's Theorem?

Did you know that I am a Bokononist?

Those are some big words.

I'm more of a McDonald's Theorem kinda guy.

your educated stupid Finland!

Please sit down for class:

Sorry, don't know how to play this video :(
http://vimeo.com/13497928

alan am i a hypocrite or what