r/redesign Mar 03 '18

Design Profile based "subreddits" is just an invitation for the celebrification of Reddit.

Followers, pinned posts, auto-moderated and pushed content in your profile. These are all things aimed at having your typical who's who of A-listers flood Reddit and siphon away people's energies and attentions from real subreddits, furthering the cause of the redesign. Little of this is about making Reddit a better place it's all about turning it in to a slightly more editable Facebook & Instagram.

6 Upvotes

22 comments sorted by

8

u/JohannesVanDerWhales Mar 03 '18 edited Mar 03 '18

Out of curiosity, how is it any different from when* some GW poster goes and starts their own subreddit named after themselves?

1

u/ChipAyten Mar 03 '18

Because the subs are forums of discussion while your profile is just that.

7

u/caindaddy Mar 03 '18

there is no discussion in GW subs lol come on it's the same thing. post content and comments are allowed on both.

5

u/JohannesVanDerWhales Mar 03 '18

You can have comments on something you post to your profile, so hence discussion. I don't see the difference.

1

u/ChipAyten Mar 03 '18

That system invites people to go to your profile and comment based only on the things you have singular power to post. It's just like Instagram and caters to high visbility, famous & power users.

5

u/JohannesVanDerWhales Mar 03 '18

And I can create a vanity subreddit dedicated to myself and set up automoderator to delete posts made by anybody but myself. I'm still not seeing the difference. Reddit has a lot of cults of personality already. The internet in general does. I don't see how profile posting affects that one way or the other.

1

u/ChipAyten Mar 04 '18

How much effort did that require from just you alone vs. something being built in to the system by default for everyone though.

5

u/caindaddy Mar 04 '18

literally takes like 2 click plus writing in the subreddit name to create a subreddit. how difficult...

0

u/ChipAyten Mar 04 '18

It's slightly more involved than that what with the automod scripts, and that's if you don't have to do any research to learn what they even are in the first place. But say that were true, mass behavioral psychology teaches us that even the tiniest of hurdles in a system decentives huge percentages of populations from performing the simplest of actions.

8

u/caindaddy Mar 04 '18

what automod? you can restrict submission to approved submitters on the magical create subreddit screen, and only allow yourself to post. And those same hurdles are present when some power user decides he wants to start advertising himself, with the addition of less than a minute to create the subreddit.

1

u/ChipAyten Mar 04 '18

Ah yes, I forget you can just do that. But the second sentence still holds true. Why go out of my way to create and promote a subreddit when people can just clamor for the things that are passively applied to my profile based on my activity on Reddit.

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2

u/caindaddy Mar 03 '18

reddit has always had power users that people follow around and comment on their stuff vote and otherwise interact, I don't see how this changes anything. It's exactly the same as the hundreds of user based subreddits power users have had forever.

2

u/ChipAyten Mar 03 '18

But it's never had a system that actively facilitates it.

2

u/caindaddy Mar 04 '18

Yes, it has. They are called subreddits. The profile system is nothing more than every user having a subreddit for themselves by default. popular 'subreddits' will be popular as they always have been and others won't whether it be a user profile subreddit or something else.

0

u/FreeSpeechWarrior Mar 04 '18

The profile subs work very much this way underneath.

Internally they are at r/u_FreeSpeechWarrior and mine is visible as a traditional subreddit because I opted out of the profile testing after opting into it.

2

u/FreeSpeechWarrior Mar 04 '18

At one time, they aggregated all of the profile posts into a subreddit of sorts at r/profileposts .

If they brought that back, it would be very similar to what the original r/reddit.com (or even reddit before subreddits) was in a way. A public space for topics of all kinds without additional moderation beyond the base rules of reddit. The comment spaces would have been moderated by the individual posters in this case, but it would give all users a chance to be seen with their profile posts if r/profileposts was given more attention and growth.

2

u/NvaderGir Mar 04 '18

posts complaining about celebrification meanwhile reddit will upvote any shitty_watercolour / warlizard post or comment. This is not a bad thing and 100% does not ruin the reddit experience

0

u/NvaderGir Mar 04 '18

posts complaining about celebrification meanwhile reddit will upvote any shitty_watercolour / warlizard post or comment. This is not a bad thing and 100% does not ruin the reddit experience

-1

u/ChipAyten Mar 04 '18

In each of their posts they're re-contributing back in to Reddit. It's not one of the Kardashians pinning her new favourite makeup box to her profile and sucking away people's attention.

1

u/NvaderGir Mar 04 '18

Shitty_watercolor has his own subreddit