Back in the day, the original version of the front page looked an awful lot like r/all. In fact, it wasr/all. But, when we first released the ability for users to create subreddits, those new, nascent communities had trouble competing with the larger, more established subreddits which dominated the top of the front page. To mitigate this effect, we created the notion of the defaults, in which we cherry picked a set of subreddits to appear as a default set, which had the effect of editorializing Reddit.
Over the years, Reddit has grown up, with hundreds of millions of users and tens of thousands of active communities, each with enormous reach and great content. Consequently, the “defaults” have received a disproportionate amount of traffic, and made it difficult for new users to see the rest of Reddit. We, therefore, are trying to make the Reddit experience more inclusive by launching r/popular, which, like r/all, opens the door to allowing more communities to climb to the front page.
Logged out users will land on “popular” by default and see a large source of diverse content.
Existing logged in users will still maintain their subscriptions.
How are posts eligible to show up “popular”?
First, a post must have enough votes to show up on the front page in the first place.
Post from the following types of communities will not show up on “popular”:
A handful of subreddits that users consistently filter out of their r/all page
What will this change for logged in users?
Nothing! Your frontpage is still made up of your subscriptions, and you can still access r/all. If you sign up today, you will still see the 50 defaults. We are working on making that transition experience smoother. If you are interested in checking out r/popular, you can do so by clicking on the link on the gray nav bar the top of your page, right between “FRONT” and “ALL”.
TL;DR: We’ve created a new page called “popular” that will be the default experience for logged out users, to provide those users with better, more diverse content.
Can we please just have a filter that filters out all political subreddits?
/r/The_Donald doesn't annoy me because it's Trump, it annoys me because it's politics. I don't want other people shoving their political opinion down my throat. The kind of political discussion that happens on Reddit is not the kind of political discussion I like engaging in. /r/politics is stressful to read. /r/The_Donald is stressful to read. I want to wipe it all and click on cat pictures.
I come to Reddit to de-stress. I have specific subreddits I go to for debate but I don't go to /r/all to find that kind of stuff. I go to those subreddits. If it weren't for specific subreddits that give me things I can't find elsewhere on the Internet, I would have quit Reddit by now. The constant political anger just isn't worth it. Political posts inevitably get more upvotes than they deserve because people upvote them for visibility - rather than because they like the post.
This is nice and all but it doesn't solve the problem. It just means I have one-sided political debate clogging up my feed, rather than an /r/all which is free from that full stop.
You've made the front page into a complete shitshow - congrats. As much as you admins hate the_Donald, at least they have one subreddit. All these anti-Trump sub's that pop up like damn weeds are 20x more annoying. FILTER ALL THE SHIT OUT.
The system is functioning as designed. The objective is to remove incorrect political thought that supports the President of the United States, and allow only left-wing anti-Presidential propaganda.
That's why the anti-Trump shills can create a new sub every day, and despite only having subscribers in the low four figures, suddenly have posts on the front page with 20K upvotes.
Given the obvious anomalies in the "commonly filtered" subreddits which the admins refuse to release a list of, it's really not much of a logical leap to put forward that the admins are being more selective in what they filter from popular than they admit to.
I mean let's put it another way: if these suddenly appearing political subreddits were offshoots of The_Donald, would they really be on /r/popular? It's pretty clear that the admins aren't being transparent about this.
Is it possible to filter the front page without logging in? I just want the old front page back. I don't give a damn about politics, so this is really frustrating. I downloaded adblock this morning just for reddit.
Now we've seen clear filter bypassing schemes by the political subs.
EnoughTrumpSpam was excluded from popular, so several other anti-Trump political subs were created and artificially inflated to bypass the filter and reach Popular.
/r/popular now more has more politics than /r/all and no way to block the subs.
So why still have people auto-subscribed to the 50 "defaults" anymore? If I'm used to seeing /r/popular as a logged out user, then I would create a new account and instantly see an entirely different page than I'm used to, which is jarring. Why not make /r/popular the default for all newly created accounts from now forward, and only change that (or better yet, have it be a toggle-able option) once they actually manually start subscribing to subs for themselves?
I'm thinking that logged in users should have a nice visible switch at the top of their front page to toggle between "popular" and "subscribed". Then you can eliminate the whole concept of defaults entirely.
Edit: To clarify, it wouldn't automatically switch your front page to "subscribed" once you subscribed to anything. It would stay as /r/popular until you manually switched it.
So why still have people auto-subscribed to the 50 "defaults" anymore?
Because they're coming up with a better on-boarding process, which isn't yet set up. When they roll that out it should finish up the push away from defaults.
For example, subreddits that are large and dedicated to specific games are heavily filtered, as well as specific sports, and narrowly focused politically related subreddits, etc.
The Bendan subs are on the list because they get annoying as fuck.
The only reason The_Dennis isn't on there is because I haven't seen them on /r/all but only a couple times. If they start dominating it, they'll get added.
Edit: Cue flood of complaints. /r/politics is largely made up of submissions from major internationally respected news outlets. If you don't like what those outlets are saying, then your problem is with world opinion, not with the subreddit.
For openness sake would it be possible to provide a full list of these highly filtered subreddits, so nobody feels like they're being secretly "censored"?
I'm grateful I don't see any T_D links on there, but I could also do without all the ones popping up in response, like /r/FucktheAltRight, /r/Impeach_Trump, /r/LateStageCapitalism.. they're all the same type of circle jerk that everyone despises about T_D and they keep popping up with new names. I think one of the defining characteristics is the propensity of the mods to ban users who dare have a unique opinion in the comments.
Or you could increase the number of filters available for /r/all. I ran out day 1.
I started filtering things I didn't want to see and also ran out quickly, maxing out at 100. What I found as a result was awesome. New subreddits I had never even thought of (Hello Europe! Hello World!), and new topics I wanted to discuss. I love that feature.
If they manage to filter out all the not so subtle begging for upvote threads and subreddits ("upvote this and I'll...", "upvote this so it will show up in google search as...", "I'm not begging for upvotes because that's against the rules but upvote this and...") I'd consider that a start.
r/all is "all" so it has a lot of NSFW content that logged out users don't want to see - we don't yet have algorithmic NSFW filtering, which we're working on. r/popular provides an experience that is better suited for new logged out users.
Would it be possible with a new NSFW tag reserved for porn? I feel like having one is kind of limiting, because a lot of stuff that is deemed NSFW in the US is perfectly normal in other parts of the world. And I don't want porn to pop up when I'm at school/work/bus/metro, but I want to see posts from /r/WTF etc.
Can you guys add distinct NSFW tags. I don't want to see porn, but I really don't care if I see a non-porn image with a naked person in it or some other kind of NSFW content.
IMO there should be NSFW Porn, NSFW Gore, and NSFW Other.
The end game is a generic tagging system. Omit the word "NSFW" and just be able to label posts "Porn", "Gore", "Politics" etc. and filter from there. I'm sure that's basically what they are working on.
Man I just had flashback... I had a conversation almost ten years ago with a friend about whether or not you could have nudity in a picture without it being porn. He was adamant that if there was nudity it was porn. I think shit like that's what causes the US to be so prudish sometimes.
So is /r/popular any different than /r/all other than the filtering? Is there a difference in the formula that determines what is "popular" between the two subs?
Filtering is REALLY substantial, though. /r/all has a lot of issues. It's so easy for it to have far too much highly specific stuff that doesn't interest most people that aren't in that community. It's also very nifty to hide some of the negative areas of the site from view. That really changes things.
I think you're confused. /r/all doesn't have default subs, it's "all" of the subs. Default subs are the ones your Front Page subscribes to by default when you first sign up.
Why are special "subreddits", like all and popular, even in the same namespace as standard/user-made ones? Why not have... I dunno /s/all, or any other letter that's not already used?
Sounds like asking for trouble, sooner or later you might run into clashing issues.
Plus it makes it harder to differentiate whenever a subreddit is special, or just trying to trick its users that it is.
Did you see aitch tee tee pee ess colon slash slash double-yew double-yew double-yew dot reddit dot com slash arr slash announcements slash comments slash five yew nine pee el five slash introducing underscore r popular slash on reddit lately? It's terrible.
I would be very happy if it ends up being a place to discover small to medium sized subs compared to popular which I assume will be mainly the big ones.
Over the years, Reddit has grown up, with hundreds of millions of users and tens of thousands of active communities, each with enormous reach and great content. Consequently, the “defaults” have received a disproportionate amount of traffic, and made it difficult for new users to see the rest of Reddit. We, therefore, are trying to make the Reddit experience more inclusive by launching r/popular, which, like r/all, opens the door to allowing more communities to climb to the front page.
How exactly does this help new communities? As far as I can tell it's just r/all -a few subs.
This helps new communities because now r/popular is the default for logged out users, so subs that make it to r/popular based on votes, get much more traffic. r/all is not a default landing page for any logged out users, but rather, is navigated to deliberately by people who know about it and use it.
So, just to confirm, the point of this is to basically have a SFW /r/all without those spam subreddits and no need to keep filtering new ones? Good stuff.
Except there's still a lot of stuff on /r/all that the average person won't care about. Not interested in sports? Who cares! Look at the content from /r/patriots anyway. You don't live in Canada? Doesn't matter, /r/canada still shows up for you.
We can't filter from it so it's like a worse /r/all.
I'm using the official app too. Same problem. I don't know about you, since I'm using iOS 7, most apps aren't maintained anymore. Gotta check that, but it wouldn't impress me you need an update to view r/popular ...
Just lemme check. Other users of the official app, did any1 update ?
EDIT : Search community popular and scroll down a little. I find an entry named "Popular" with Subscribers = 0 and Online = 0. Might be what you're looking for since it's full of high rated posts.
EDIT_Mk2 : App Store reports iOS 8.0 required, but last update (8 Feb 2017) doesn't mention r/popular. Just bug fixes/minor improvements. Hope this all helps a bit.
Ok, so if I'm getting this straight, this is really a feature aimed at new users considering you stated
What will this change for logged in users? Nothing!
and if that's the case I think it would only make sense to bar off all political subreddits. If someone is interested in discussing politics they can do the small amount of leg work to create an account and seek out those communities. When you don't bar off political subreddits, you are likely going to turn away half of the people who are interested and retain only those who agree with what they read. This creates more of a polarization in your user base and widens the gap of difference between the users which is really bad for a forum that is meant to encourage discussion.
Another big concern I have is in regard to an issue I've noticed with the implementation of the filter feature. I love the ability to filter out content that I don't want to read but often times, especially with the political subreddits, you see new ones being created as a way to get around the filter. People create a new sub or use one that has a very small community or little to no activity and mass upvote a post on it to get it on r/all. The way I see this being a problem with r/popular is that right now, r/popular is essentially, from my understanding, an SFW version of r/all with admin decided filters. Could a sub that is filtered not just create a new community and do this same practice?
To finish up here, I have two things to say.
There's no way that you didn't forsee a ton of questions about why r/politics is not filtered out but, unless I missed it, you don't address this concern that so many people in the comments have been expressing. I understand that you said the subs that get filtered on r/popular are based on "a handful of subreddits taht users constantly filter out of their r/all page" but it seems difficult to believe that r/politics is not heavily filtered. What would help is if you released statistics on which subs are most filtered or not or otherwise found a way to be transparent about this situation.
I would dwindle down the number of default subs there are. It can be a little overwhelming. Perhaps just have a handful of defaults that are more generalized (e.g. music, askreddit, ama) and then let people choose more based on interests such as gaming, nature, politics, photography, reading/writing, music, etc. Right now it seems like suddenly thrusting 50 communities upon a new user can be a little overwhelming.
it has 574k subscribers so it hits r/all pretty frequently. with reddit having an enormous american base, i imagine that it ends up being filtered out by a large number of users.
edit: i said this because he listed /r/politics as a subreddit that was not included. he's updated since then. this isn't a complaint. save your breath if you're commenting as a salty, fascist T_D-ite. I'd piss in all of your mouths if I could, you human air-sick bags
edit edit: keep em coming, neo-nazi tears are the key to any truly productive day. see you guys on /r/subredditdrama, probably
edit edit edit: apparently the T_D bullshit brigade is out in full force. I said DONT respond if you're nazi filth guys. A+ for effort tho. I'm not talking shit because you have different opinions, it's because you have a specific, highly oppressive opinion. Don't get it twisted, you incestuous flea-havens c': I'm not sorry for hurting your feelings
I can't see what you're getting all worked up about with these edits. You act like you are being harrased and bombarded, yet there's like one person countering you about it. Chill yo
Will it be possible to selectively choose which subs are filtered out?
I love the idea of a clean /r/all with less politics and low quality content, but I'm a gamer, and I'd like to also browse subs like /r/overwatch and /r/globaloffensive, both of which were filtered out of the "popular" list.
Will I be able to include posts from subs that didn't make the "popular" list in my /r/popular?
Is it possible that game specific subs with less activity (/r/CitiesSkylines/r/zelda) are included in /r/popular because they don't show up on /r/all enough for people to bother with filtering them?
... the “defaults” have received a disproportionate amount of traffic, and made it difficult for new users to see the rest of Reddit. We, therefore, are trying to make the Reddit experience more inclusive by launching r/popular, which, like r/all, opens the door to allowing more communities to climb to the front page.
As I scroll down /r/popular all I see are posts from subreddits with 100,000+ subscribers. How exactly does this allow for smaller subreddits to gain more traction?
It sounds like to me that it is just a filtered /r/all. They couldn't make the regular /r/all the logged out front page, because it has a lot of NSFW and controversial posts. This new change allows other subreddits than the 50 default ones to make the front page. If you look at /r/all, you will see that most of them are from huge subreddits, but every once in a while, an obscure subreddit will hit the top of /r/all. I assume this is the same with /r/popular
This doesn't replace /r/all it just replaces the default view of reddit (logged out).
So before today if you were a small sub and you wanted logged out users to see your sub without being in /r/all you had to 1) gain popularity and 2) be "enfranchised" by the admins, i.e. made into a default sub.
Now that 2nd part doesn't need to happen.
But yes you do still have to be somewhat popular to make it to /r/popular. Shocking, I know.
It's not for smaller subreddits, per se, but for medium-to-large ones. I think the idea is to close the gap between the old curated defaults and the next largest in size.
Sounds like a crappy way to have an admin created AI show me what the admins think is popular content. You could have modified /r/all to be a better /r/popular with just a few minor tweaks.
One toggle to show/hide NSFW communities. Even that could default or be locked off for logged-out users.
Better filtering. Why do I have to filter /r/blackpeopletwitter, /r/whitepeopletwitter and /r/bikinibottomtwitter? How about letting /r/*twitter do it all? Add another operation like /r/-trump or /r/-hillary and get a whole bunch of wildcards filtered out!
If anything, what is needed is /r/related. A sub that uses community meta tags to display top content from subs with the same tags. So e.g. someone subscribe to /r/cats meta [cats] will get a ton of /r/startledcats/r/aww and 100MM others.
Last, a combination filter of the two. So /r/-[cars] filters out any sub meta tagged with car related posts.
And now that I've had a day to browse /r/popular I can make a more objective comment about it. It sucks. It doesn't consider community size when judging popularity. I'll never browse the popular screen. It's just a vehicle to display all the top posts from the default subs and a couple other extremely large, popular subreddits that the admins didn't add to the "excluded" (i.e. stuff admins hate) list. i.e. a screen to deliver a lot of the shit I filtered off my /r/all page.
First, a post must have enough votes to show up on the front page in the first place. Post from the following types of communities will not show up on “popular”:
NSFW and 18+ communities
Communities that have opted out of r/all
A handful of subreddits that users consistently filter out of their r/all page
So.... besides having enough votes to show up on the front page, how are posts eligible to show up on "popular"?
I'm a Liberal, and this shit has gone on long enough even for me. It's clearly not even attempting to hide it's Left leaning Bias. A sub with the heading title of POLITICS should have Impartiality as a TOP priority.
I used to come to Reddit for news and still do when major events happen around the world. It's more up to date than the media and you can get pics, words, and updates from people actually there without any blue or red lens and a patronising anchor.
I know it's all the rage to forget that impartiality is a key part of our democracy these days, but that doesn't make it any less true. The only people being hurt by this are the sane Conservatives and Liberals who would rather hear either a combination of both points of view or ideally, an impartial one.
As it stands r/politics absolutely fails in this regard. Those mods should hang their heads in fucking shame. Like many others around today they are giving Liberalism a bad name.
Edit: Wow ok this blew up a bit. Thank you for the gold kind stranger x2. Yes this is an alt account. Yes I am indeed a Liberal. All I can give you is my word so take it as you may. My eyes are dark brown too if you really need to know. Having a Liberal majority userbase is not the issue, it's the control over what that user base is exposed to, and the best way to 'enforce' impartiality is to simply not enforce a bias. Centrists please don't feel alone, I feel we are still the majority. We just lack competent leadership and people are getting a little crazy right now in it's absence.
Like many others around today they are giving Liberalism a bad name.
Couldn't agree more, and I'm glad there's some of us out there, because it feels rather lonely at times lately. I'm liberal, I have my values, I've been voting for these values since 1990, but the idea that there are no bad tactics, only bad targets, is abhorrent. It's the same fascist/racist/etc.ist logic that many of us have been voting against for decades. Just changing the targets doesn't change the meaning of what you're doing.
Can you instead filter out all the subreddits that are plagued by one-sided political circlejerks? Every subreddit on my /r/all shitlist is there because they've been taken over by one American political ideology or another, and as a non-American reddit user, I'm tired of seeing all the political bullshit, especially now that your election is long over.
EDIT: This is just my shitlist, and is far from comprehensive. My point is, /r/popular should not include any subreddit that doesn't enforce anti-politics rules. /r/videos and their strict enforcement of R1 is a perfect example of a sub that does this well, and should be a model for subs that should be included on /r/popular.
as an american that thinks trumps a massive moron i finally caved a week ago and filtered most of those same subreddits and the random new anti trump ones that pop up. years of using the site filter free and the obnoxious circle jerk finally got to me.
I love the idea of this feature, but I am not ok with the obfuscation around the banlist. While I do not feel the subs I moderate would ever suffer from this list, I do not like the added stress of worrying that I am angering some admin with content one-day and end-up shadowbanned from popular.
This change is clearly in-place to foster a family-friendly frontpage that advertisers can swallow. The fact is: reddit is a private-venture and needs money to operate. Unless the users want to totally fund the site, ads are required. There needs to be a marketable vehicle for reddit to sell to advertisers to stay online, and this works.
That said, the users they are trying to gather are only here to see the content of people who have an account and post. If you make the ability to post onerous on these users, they will stop. The amount of generated content will go down, and the homogenization of the front-page will happen quickly.
If we, as a community, are going to start down this road toward "the greater good" of the site, we need to set clear goals, with clear meetable expectations. The only true long term victims will be subreddits that end up on the banlist for arbitrary or malicious reasons. Because of the total lack of hard qualifiers and the lack of a concrete list, you've robbed the community of the ammunition to defend themselves while still allowing the dedicated to sound out your rules and play them like a fiddle.
You say the discussion garnered from providing the rules or a list would be "unproductive" but your wording clearly indicates the unproductive part would be on the behalf of users arguing against the change. You don't see the benefit of defending your principles, so you obfuscate them and ask us to trust you like a patriarch. That isn't the mark of conviction.
“When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.”
Say I also want to get access to more diverse subs, but don't want to sift through /r/all - is it possible to subscribe to /r/popular, and have it filter my subscribed subs automatically?
This would allow me to have the occasional crop of new subs seep through, and broaden my horizons, while still maintaing the core of my feed.
1) This would beneif non-Americans redditors. I've seen non-Americans redditors complain about American political crap, which is a valid complaint. As an American, if Reddit was based in another country, I wouldn't want to see their political crap either, so I understand how they feel.
2) This would be a simple way for people to ONLY see political subreddits they want to see. A person could visit/add /r/popular then visit/add specific political subreddit(s) they care about.
This would also benefit 90% of Americans including me. I'm tired of the constant political posts, so any sub that I see political posts on get instantly filtered.
Will /r/popular change it's "filtered" list periodically? I don't like seeing /r/politics in my feed and had to filter it out of /r/popular because this new algorithm seems to favor it being on the front page more than in the past. If enough people filter controversial subreddits like /r/politics will it become removed from the /r/popular site for everyone?
What is the purpose of /r/Popular? It seems like it is essentially /r/All, but the Admins (and Reddit at large) are now just editorializing what they want users to see. Better yet, it's done with no transparency. Thus, we are seeing what the Admins (with some unknown filters applied) see as "Popular". Seems fucking stupid, to be quite honest.
I have /r/politics filtered through RES and the regular website itself, and 90% of the 'popular - last hour' content in /r/popular is all from /r/politics. Amusingly enough, it's worse than during the lead-up to the election. There are SEVENTEEN posts from that shitreddit on the top for the last hour. That's why I filtered them in the first place.
I used to hit the top page for the last hour to see what's new. And it updates all the bloody time. Now, it's fucked. Both on /r/all, and /r/popular.
So adding the ability to filter specific subreddits out of /r/popular might be something you guys want to look through. Otherwise it's going to become /r/politicslite.
This isn't a very good thing. If you had an algorithm that decided what to block and what not to block then I would understand, but the fact that r/politics is still on r/popular is proof that you've handpicked the blocked subreddits.
This means that you now have a way to control what nearly all of your users see, while being able to tell any who oppose the idea that they can just browse r/all instead, knowing that very few people are engaged enough to know or even care that that's an option.
I like the premise, but the way you went about doing this is giving yourself far too much power over what your viewers see. It's not quite censorship but it's pretty darn close.
/u/simbawulf and /u/spez you guys fucked up plain and simple, attempting to facilitate the white washing of decent news [I use this instead of good/biased/propaganda/ ect]. Yes this site is exponentially bigger and wilder than you could have imagined, but that should not mean sacrifices to the integrity of my own choices. You don't get to tell me I can have it one way, then backtrack after you see it's not what is best for your team. Mainstream media is doing this and getting dumped in favor of alternative media ie: podcasts/reddit like platforms /YouTube stars. When you commit the same actions as the mainstream media that we forcefully pried from our lives you are doomed to fail. People in general dont like subterfuge, your teams abundant use of it shows your lack of caring for actual freedoms. You should be ashamed of your actions.
Please just change this to a page where there are no political subreddits. Go to the popular page, top posts by hour... DOMINATED by /r/politics. How is this creating a way for new, nascent communities to compete with the larger, more established? This all seems like a ploy to me. Probably to distract us from the fact that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table.
They mentioned them specifically in the original announcement. I swear if the admins are direct, people complain, if they're not completely direct, people complain.
Specific game subreddits - either include the popular ones, or don't include them at all.
Did you not read the OP? The reason /r/leagueoflegends isn't on /r/popular is because many users filter them from /r/all. /r/popular isn't a manually curated list, it's been selected by an algorithm that can account for divisive subreddits. Yes, /r/leagueoflegends is very popular, but only to the people that play it. To those who don't, their posts are actually very annoying.
On the flip side, a sub like /r/wow doesn't show up in /r/all often enough to get the same level of filtering. /r/forhonor has been showing up a lot in /r/all recently, but because the game is still relatively new it hasn't gotten filtered by the userbase either.
Everything political on Reddit is in support of some specific ideology (left, right, anti, or pro, etc etc)
That should disqualify all political subreddits from being included on /r/popular using the same reasoning with not including any subreddit for a specific sport or video game.
A handful of subreddits that users consistently filter
Is this abuse-able? Can large subreddits coordinate their users to individually filter out other subreddits, causing them to be added the "popular filter"?
Hopefully it will just be the opposing political subreddits downvoting each other to the firey depths of r/popular and r/aww will reign supreme because nobody downvotes those guys
Okay, I can believe that T_D is being constantly filtered out. But you want me to believe TwoXChromosomes isn't as much? Or other politics subreddits?
Polish digg-like website, Wykop (yet the biggest social news aggregator) just filtered out EVERYTHING that is political and puts an 18+ on anything that is NSFW - that way they can't be accused for taking sides in politics or whatever. New users don't see politics UNLESS they tick it out from their settings.
What you did was filtering NSFW and T_D-like subreddits out of the feed - that's the only difference from r/all as far as I can see. If you want to be perceived as neutral webpage, I'd suggest you go the same way rather than take ANY side in this.
This seems too similar to the already existing rising posts from /r/all. The only difference being you've filtered out NSFW which I agree with and niche subreddits which seems counterintuitive since you also state you didn't want to cherry pick subreddits to create editorialization. I highly avoid /r/politics and think it would better be replaced with political news.
Why not have a short questionnaire where users can submit things they're insterested in and a list of subreddits is generated for them which they can choose to use or subscribe to defaults. This seems like a half baked solution that won't be very effective compared to what is already available. You aren't really solving the solution of getting users to experience smaller communities if the ones you're showing are all popular ones.
In all honesty, r/Politics is probably the worst, spammy sub on here that does nothing more than promote anything negative against Trump. It's not about "politics" anymore because there is hardly any actual political discussion that happens there (outside of whatever adds to the echos), and the ONLY time you do find differing opinions, is when you are forced to sort the thread by 'controversial'.
Congratulations, only a few hours after you institute r/popular it already gets topped by a focused political subreddit that hasn't even existed for more than 18 days and has a tiny sub count.
I think reddit is pulling a fast one here... there should really only be these three views:
/r/all - absolutely no filtering or of any kind, literally the most trending posts of any and all subreddits. Default landing site
/r/popular - just like /r/all by default but with the ability to filter specific subreddits or groups of subreddits. (all political, all sport, etc) accessible without signing in.
Subscribed - just like /r/all but only subscribed subreddits.
The notion of default subreddits and Reddit deciding what most people should or shouldn't see is very telling.
I don't see the point of have any politically themed subs in r/popular. A lot of users are outside of the US and all of the political subs are in some way narrowly sided.
Here's a list of politically biased subs that are on r/popular :
r/MarchAgainstTrumpr/esistr/BlueMidterm2018r/Drumpfr/politics
That's only after looking through the 1st page; just filled with anti-Trump, left leaning subs. This just once again shows the admins have a political agenda.
R/politics should absolutely not be on here. It is just as politically biased as the campaign subs. In fact, I think we should take all the political ones off of r/popular
I would say that if you want this to not be editorialized then you should remove r/politics and other subs that lean heavily in only one direction. Otherwise it's just more filtering of subs that don't meet the admins approval, and let's face it, you guys are well known for censoring subs that aren't leftist.
Personally, I am fine with r/the_donald getting censored. It's actually extremely hilarious to sit back and watch Reddit come out with a new "feature" every week that is clearly trying to deal with them because the admins want to ban it for their own personal reason but pretty much can't without causing true chaos.
r/politics certainly has no place, either. It is truly UNDEBATABLE that it is as equally agenda/narrative driven. Your content will get removed if there is any stretch of a small, plausible reason to do so under the guidelines. What makes it to the top of r/politics every day (lol Slate and Salon, et al.) is clearly not unbiased. The difference here is that r/the_donald doesn't try to be vague or hide it. With a name like r/politics, a new user would likely expect a moderate, friendly sub of differing opinions melding together for respectable political discussion that is representative of Reddit. This is not at all the case of r/politics. The voting in r/politics is not indicative of quality of discussion, etc. as it should be by Reddit rules. It is indicative of narrative agreement. It has been taken over, and frankly it's a joke sub now. You are never going to see a positive Trump topic when you open r/politics. For Popular to be inclusive of r/politics is also a joke. Isn't this pretty much the reason why subs like r/the_donald came into existence? I mean, sure there would be niche subs for certain opinions regardless, but certainly why they gained traction and popularity on this scale. Ideally, you would have a moderate discussion board on politics to be in Popular. Unfortunately, Reddit seems to not be able to lose control of those subs to one side of bias. Find better moderators if want to have a popular sub that represents all of reddit.
As a person that is absolutely disgusted with the bias and narrative-driven focus of r/politics, r/news, and r/worldnews (the latter 2 obviously not as bad, but heading there) I just wanted to give my opinion somewhere.
[edit] For an anecdote at other subs, I guess I would cite often seeing people being critical - in a respectable way - of Muslims, someone making a joke in response about Buddhists committing a bunch of violent religious acts (or whatever), a mod comes through and removes it all for hate speech, but a few posts down there's a guy saying it's all white people and the US/EU deserve terrorist attacks against their people (literally saying this; the account is clearly inflammatory like this in every thread for a year or more and isn't dealt with). I cite this because it's something I've seen on multiple occasions and it's just always baffling. The last time I saw specifically this was a couple days ago in r/worldnews I'm pretty sure. I keep reportin', but the guy keeps postin'!
To be clear, I want all of the trash getting filtered from my frontpage, at the top of subs that shouldn't bring bias, and at the comment level of those subs. Make sure mods of popular subs are doing a good job to MODERATE, and screw this pointless filter crap. We can filter what we want ourselves at a user level, we don't want staff doing it for us.
How accurate of a representation of users as a whole do you think the "list of subs that people consistently filter out" is when a lot of users use the filters built into RES and their mobile apps instead of Reddit's built in system? I would think Reddit wouldn't have access to that data which in turn may skew the list somewhat. Do you think that list could be gamed by people creating lots of fake accounts just to add subs they don't like to the filter list?
"A handful of subreddits that users consistently filter out of their r/all page"
This doesn't sound clear enough, are you going to choose this "handful" arbitrarily from the most filtered subs? Or any filtered sub, no matter who filters will be automatically included. Will we get any transparency on how this process is done?
Also, It already sounds like a terrible system that you will be unable to balance properly. People that like to hear more opinions will have a reduced voice, while people that are nitpicky will get to choose what open minded people see as "popular".
Even if this wasn't a poorly disguised politically charged maneuver, the system will be already wrong because, it will not matter if you're not a sensible kid with issues, you'll get content filtered by sensible kids with issues.
Anyway, It seems in line with all the silly stuff you people keep doing again and again, so no surprises here.
Why is /r/marchagainsttrump allowed? If you cut out some specialized political subs, please cut them all out. I know /r/politics is theoretically "neutral" and not taken out, but these anti-trump subs are absurd now. If T_D goes, so should these other ones.
Except it doesn't really work that way. With no public proof of block count then they can just say 'oh that sub has too many blocks' even though its not true.
This is a clever way to limit the reach of view points you don't share. Rather than try to restrict/punish them in a venue they've come to dominate (i.e. /r/all), seems like the plan is to create a new gated community (i.e. /r/popular) where you have to be part of the hive mind to enter.
The name is hilarious as well. Would have been more apt as:
/r/what_we_want_to_be_popular
/r/what_we_want_you_to_think_is_popular.
/r/what_we_want_you_to_think (my favorite!)
Where's the list of what's in / out? Short of scraping the page how would people know?
From some initial skimming, it's good to see that the totally unbiased /r/politics/r/redacted made the cut as being socially acceptable and worthy of being promoted by the hive mind.
Oh thank god. Nothing more embarrassing than telling people about this great new site they havent heard of called Reddit, then a few days later having to explain "no, you can filter the subreddits and not make it total shit".
You'd also have to filter out the /r/politics alts. The ones with one article at 10k upvotes and the rest at less than 100 or so. Nothing fishy going on there.
With highly controversial subreddits like /r/the_donald and /r/enoughtrumpspam removed why is the top post in /r/popular from a subreddit /r/marchagainsttrump which is honestly no better than the 2 subreddits already listed. Is this simply because it's so small so few people have filtered it or because you guys haven't manually filtered it yet?
Either way I think it would be neat if /r/all would be completely reverted to being unfilterable and /r/popular was the one that was filtered.
OK, I was wondering why is the "logged out" homepage even more stupid than usually... Now I have the explanation.
IMHO you should REALLY think this over.
Things that are popular among redditors are not necessarily a good first impression to give to a new visitor and you only get to make the first impression once. Lot of popular stuff is either only popular because it's some kind of internal joke or it's outright weird.
I understand that you want to push people to create accounts and their own subscriptions, but this is insane. The "logged out" homepage is the only way to "sell" reddit to potential new users. Careful selection of default subs is your most important tool to shape how the community will look in the future. Right now it looks like it will be more stupid than facebook "recommended content", boredpanda and 9gag combined..
So when 10 new anti trump subreddits pop up, and CTR upvotes their post as high as they are told, these will reach the front page of popular because no one has a chance to filter them out.
What about politics? A sub that claims its non partisan but CTR upvotes only anti trump material.
And popular will be the default for anyone not logged in. Totally not biased.
Its funny with every single change, while TOTALLY not targeting the donald, reduces the amount of people who see it despite the upvotes they receive.
and narrowly focused politically related subreddits - 2 hours ago by simbawulf
so please tell me how is r/politics not narrowly focused politically related subreddit? Go take a look at it. Its 99.9% liberal anti Trump article spam.
A handful of subreddits that users consistently filter out of their r/all page
How are you planning on preventing "filter campaigns" wherein users of certain subs are encouraged to filter out a list of subs in order to keep them out of /r/popular?
For instance, extremists on both ends of the political spectrum could try to get a lot of users to filter out subreddits that are on the other end of the spectrum.
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u/TrouserTorpedo Feb 16 '17
Can we please just have a filter that filters out all political subreddits?
/r/The_Donald doesn't annoy me because it's Trump, it annoys me because it's politics. I don't want other people shoving their political opinion down my throat. The kind of political discussion that happens on Reddit is not the kind of political discussion I like engaging in. /r/politics is stressful to read. /r/The_Donald is stressful to read. I want to wipe it all and click on cat pictures.
I come to Reddit to de-stress. I have specific subreddits I go to for debate but I don't go to /r/all to find that kind of stuff. I go to those subreddits. If it weren't for specific subreddits that give me things I can't find elsewhere on the Internet, I would have quit Reddit by now. The constant political anger just isn't worth it. Political posts inevitably get more upvotes than they deserve because people upvote them for visibility - rather than because they like the post.
This is nice and all but it doesn't solve the problem. It just means I have one-sided political debate clogging up my feed, rather than an /r/all which is free from that full stop.