Quote:
Originally Posted by TimTheGreat
Why? If people upvote good comments and downvote bad (usually non-relevant comments that are far too common), wouldn't that help the madness of a thread such as the game hint one with >400 replies. People want to see game speculations that make sense. The best guess of this years game may be lost on page 15 somewhere...
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(Full disclosure: I fall firmly in the "hates game hint threads, game speculation threads, and overanalysis of FIRST's actions threads" camp. I'd be more than happy to see these topics move elsewhere, but that's another topic. I am also an active reddit user, and am quite familiar with how it works)
Threads like the game hint thread are one of the few examples where the format may be effective, just due to their sheer size. However, I think you'll find that even there, it may not work. On a reddit thread of comparable size, the vast majority of users only make a single post, and then leave. Popular comments develop comment trees off of them, also with most users commenting once and leaving. You don't get the repeat, back-and-forth type of discussion you see throughout a thread like that. On reddit, such comments would stack up to the point of invisibility behind "load more comments" buttons. Additionally, in order to get visibility, or pretend internet points, many people have made their own posts on r/frc for their game hint related content, whereas CD has done a pretty good job at keeping it in one thread (thanks in part to moderators, but largely due to the norms of our site as compared to reddit). As someone not interested in this kind of thing, r/frc us unusable to me at the moment, whereas CD is just fine.
Now, lets look at a whole bunch of cases where it wouldn't work at all:
- Discussion of news (blog posts, team updates, etc.). Again, these discussions tend to be highly back-and-forth in nature, whereas on reddit, it'll be a few highly voted opinions, and not much else.
- Pretty much anything controversial (Student/Mentor work distribution, Ri3D, etc.), which has a strong majority opinion among the community. On Chiefdelphi, posting a dissenting view will generate discussion, which makes for good, informative reading, and potentially changed views on both sides. On Reddit, it just gets hidden.
- Quick technical questions which only merit a few replies. With a popular enough reddit, these posts would need to accure mass interest in the form of upvotes to even be seen by the majority of the community. You end up being at the mercy of the general interest of your question in order to get meaningful answers.
- CAD reviews, robot releases, code releases, website releases, etc. All have the same root problem: Cool things from dominant teams will rise to the top, while the teams that need help and who can perhaps benefit the most from a community like this will sink, because people use the upvote button as an "Oh cool!" button, instead of a "get these guys visibility!" button.
- Discussion of anything of regional interest. Since most people won't care, it won't be seen. Here, you can filter.
Also, I'm going to go ahead and point out that of the top 25 posts of all time on r/frc, the breakdown is as follows:
- 9 mildly funny, but meaningless and tangentially related images (most being bad photoshop jobs)
- 8 memes
- A screencap from FRC Confessions
- A reaction GIF
- A joke CAD (Accumulating more than twice the votes of the highest voted legitimate CAD review post)
- A news item presented in GIF form
- A photo of another team's robot, with a title arguably making fun of it
- A post congratulating the 2014 championships winners (to their credit, top post of all time)
- A genuinely touching post about a user's FRC experience over the years
- A genuinely cool feat of engineering on an FRC robot
Interesting/funny? Maybe (I'd argue that various facebook pages are effectively filling this role). Comparable to ChiefDelphi in value? Not even close; I'm really only interested in three out of the 25. Increasing the community's size won't impact the kind of content that inevitably rises to the top with a voting system.
Others have also made excellent points about anonymity. On reddit, using your real name is frowned upon. Here, we can get to know each other as people.