Why don't we use reddit.com/r/frc

[Joe G.]

For the same reason Google Plus failed. An active, knowledgable, relevant, and above all large community is much more important for a website of this nature than any minor format improvements. And I would argue that for a vast majority of topics on Chiefdelphi, sorting based on voting would not add to, and in many cases would actively detract from, the effectiveness of the site.

[TimTheGreat]

Originally Posted by Joe G.

And I would argue that for a vast majority of topics on Chiefdelphi, sorting based on voting would not add to, and in many cases would actively detract from, the effectiveness of the site.

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 at this years game may be lost on page 15 somewhere...

[Joe G.]

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...

(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.

[Ekcrbe]

I think this thread itself is actually a good example of why we all like to stick with CD. Imagine if we all did use Reddit, and this thread came up. Now, obviously, it wouldn't because it's a moot point then, but imagine that you were proposing something else of the same nature.

Here, most people are not jumping on your side and are instead providing critiques and counterarguments. Nonetheless, a useful discussion is ongoing because this thread's activity is keeping it high on the Portal's Recent Activity list and people are seeing it. If this question were posed in a voting system forum, it would see a small reaction in the beginning and then be modestly downvoted (I presume, just based on how people are responding) because it's not a popular idea, and would be seen at the top no longer, essentially killing it off. None of this productive dialogue would occur, and that would be a shame. As a population, it takes challenging thoughts to keep us sharp and active, and we are making CD a better place because of it.

[TimTheGreat]

Originally Posted by Ekcrbe

If this question were posed in a voting system forum, it would see a small reaction in the beginning and then be modestly downvoted (I presume, just based on how people are responding) because it's not a popular idea, and would be seen at the top no longer, essentially killing it off.

You don't downvote because you disagree, you downvote "bad" posts. Like if someone posted a photo of a cat, you'd downvote that, not because you don't like the photo, but because it serves no purpose to FRC.

[Ekcrbe]

Originally Posted by TimTheGreat

You don't downvote because you disagree, you downvote "bad" posts. Like if someone posted a photo of a cat, you'd downvote that, not because you don't like the photo, but because it serves no purpose to FRC.

I think that's an overly-idealistic take on things. Anywhere there is voting involved, the end result to some degree reflects a popularity contest. And even if it didn't go down, it would probably stay not much better than neutral and would nonetheless be partially drowned behind hot-button or hugely popular threads like the game hint and the never-gonna-die over-3400-posts-strong "You know you've overdosed on FIRST when..." threads.

[EricH]

Originally Posted by TimTheGreat

You don't downvote because you disagree, you downvote "bad" posts. Like if someone posted a photo of a cat, you'd downvote that, not because you don't like the photo, but because it serves no purpose to FRC.

And how many people would actually adhere to that?

Again, you're giving too much credit to the humans around here. Look at Joe's post above: of the top 25 currently on there, 19 are that cat photo, or some reasonable equivalent!

[z_beeblebrox]

Originally Posted by TimTheGreat

You don't downvote because you disagree, you downvote "bad" posts. Like if someone posted a photo of a cat, you'd downvote that, not because you don't like the photo, but because it serves no purpose to FRC.

In theory, that's how it should work. In practice, people downvote what they don't like and that's a hard behavior to change.

[Joe G.]

Originally Posted by TimTheGreat

You don't downvote because you disagree, you downvote "bad" posts. Like if someone posted a photo of a cat, you'd downvote that, not because you don't like the photo, but because it serves no purpose to FRC.

Just because you and I don't, doesn't mean others won't.

In addition, when a subreddit reaches a certain size, "not upvoted" is basically just the same as downvoted. These communities are dependent on topics and comments catching the interest of the small percentage of users who browse by new in order to achieve widespread visibility. Again, see the list of posts I made which naturally gravitated to the top. All universally appealing for a quick laugh, but of very little genuine lasting value.

I think that's an overly-idealistic take on things. Anywhere there is voting involved, the end result to some degree reflects a popularity contest. And even if it didn't go down, it would probably stay not much better than neutral and would nonetheless be partially drowned behind hot-button or hugely popular threads like the game hint and the never-gonna-die over-3400-posts-strong "You know you've overdosed on FIRST when..." threads.

This brings up another interesting point: Reddit's algorithm results in all posts, no matter how popular, drifting off the front page after a few days (and I don't believe that individual subreddits can alter this). Here, on the other hand, you see threads like this remain relevant for years. During the season, hot-button threads generate discussion lasting weeks, which doesn't work with reddit's rapid-fire algorithm.

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

I'm a moderator at CodeRanch, a large programming forum. We have discussed a number of times the differences between our discussion forum and Stack Overflow's Q&A format. They are different and serve different purposes. Reddit is a little different, but I think much of the same still holds.

Discussion forums like this (chief delphi) and CodeRanch have a few benefits:

1. Build community
2. Mentor new members on good conventions (downvoting doesn't accomplish that. And often you are downvoted without any explanation of the actual problem)
3. Professionalism (or GP here) - both CD and CodeRanch encourage real sounding names. People tend to be nicer when talking to someone who sounds human
4. A "be nice" rule. CodeRanch calls it "be nice". Here we call it GP.

Different formats are good for different things. Reddit isn't "the one true way." Neither is CD.

[DampRobot]

Originally Posted by Andrew Lawrence

inb4 hivemind

This is honestly the main reason. r/FRC could in theory be a good community, but just happens not to be, mostly for historical reasons.

Originally Posted by EricH

Hah.

Ever watch someone's reputation bar turn red in under an hour? I have. Some folks have no trouble just dishing out negative reputation--and I'd be more than willing to bet that most of those folks would have no trouble just downvoting any thread that they felt was "in the way". No matter if the question was answered or not!

I'm honestly not so sure this kind of thing is bad. Some posters are real pieces of work, and I think they deserve to have that reputation follow them around for a while. Getting negreped is also a humbling experience, people who you know think what you said was really bad. I know getting negreped changed how I behave, and helped me be a better part of the community. I believe red dots can be a force for good, when sparingly (or sometimes not so sparingly) applied.

Originally Posted by Joe G.

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.

This is another great reason why FRC type discussion wouldn't fit well on reddit. Reddit for whatever reason tends to be basically democratized clickbait, and although there are some great communities on reddit (looking at you r/surfing), they involve images or questions that generate somewhat random discussion. The feel to the site even across different subreddits is very different from CD, in a way I'd argue is largely negative.

That's annother great thing about CD, even if a user is anonomous (which almost none are), I still can "get to know" their username, and find out their rep, how many posts they have, how long they've been posting, etc. Usually, I know a fair bit about their team or region, and sometimes even know them personally. On reddit, I essentially never care about who posted what, unless they are a mod or something.

[bduddy]

Reddit works better if you ignore the karma score for posts, and go to threads with the most comments. And it's not like CD is immune from the kind of behavior people are ascribing to Reddit - just take a look at any game hint thread...

I honestly think that a threaded discussion format is vastly superior for most of the kinds of discussions that take place here, and should be default, if not mandatory, here. The flat view generally used in CD means posts get lost incredibly easily, which is probably the best thing about Reddit - good posts get found, not buried.

[Ekcrbe]

Originally Posted by bduddy

The flat view generally used in CD means posts get lost incredibly easily, which is probably the best thing about Reddit - good posts get found, not buried.

But I think one of the big problems everyone is pointing out is that the rationale for what makes a post "good" vs. "bad" is too shoddy and unreliable. There's ample evidence that most of the highest rated posts will just be the ones that are mildly humorous or unoffensive and appealing to the greatest number of people. This is what leads to that hivemind claim, because the best way to get noticed is to go along with the mindset of the populous.

Polite, respectful disagreement is what drives deep, thoughtful discussion. Reddit inherently suppresses that, and I could flip your statement around and say the voting system generally used in Reddit means minority arguments get lost incredibly easily, which is probably the best thing about CD - good discussion gets promoted, not buried.

[Ekcrbe]

I agree with Joe, and would add that, as much as FIRST strives for outreach, a community like CD gains some benefits from being a little secluded. On here, it's FIRST and more FIRST (and yes, there can be some other small things, but you know what I mean). It maintains a unique and special level of FIRST GP and congeniality that, while not perfect, is better than many other places out on the high seas of the internet. And, if you look at Reddit, you'll quickly notice that it is a bit cold to the idea of users' identities. Comments come with a little username at the top, and that's it. It clashes with CD's style of presenting a much more communal feel. Each post is topped with an optional avatar, WAI picture, name, AKA, team, team role, and all that. These are people who know each other offline, and I think they all like being reminded of that a little bit.

Why do people still go to their local pub for years on end instead of the new chain restaurants? It's the same reason: the atmosphere.

[Anupam Goli]

CD is much easier to keep track of. Especially with the portal, I can be subscribed to the subforums I care about and actively browse. You can't really do that without making multiple subreddits.

Plus there's less anonymity here, and I like it that way.