No Redditting Allowed
So after my little kerfuffle with Reddit, my account was reinstated and there was a (somewhat rowdy) discussion on the topic on Reddit. During that discussion, I learnt that:
- The actual rules you have to agree to when posting on Reddit are, to say the least, a bit murky. The User Agreement says that Reddiquette actually are rules; the community thinks not. Since the User Agreement contradicts Reddiquette (and prohibits the majority of the published comments, a large portion of the subreddits and a hard-to-estimate fraction of all the posts on the site), but also says that Reddiquette are rules with the same legal weight as the User Agreement, it’s a confused situation.
- The community are of the opinion that submitting your own content is spamming; but submitting the content of others is good behaviour. I am not of that opinion. I am opposed to that viewpoint, in fact, for two reasons:
- If the submitter is financially benefitting from the submission, then to my mind it’s spam. That’s not the case with this blog. There are no advertisements, and no products or services for sale here. Never have been. I have no plans to introduce them. I cannot agree that original, real content, submitted without financial gain being sought or realised, is spam. It’s a daft position for Reddit to support.
- If I write something here, the sole reward I get is knowing others thought something I wrote was worth reading. As such, I want to be the one who gets to post the link to it on sites like Reddit. I don’t want someone else to draft the headlines to my work. The idea that Reddit believes they have a de facto right to do so is abhorrent to me. And the idea that my submission of my work is frowned on, but others submitting my work sees them rewarded, that is deeply abhorrent.
I’m not saying “Reddit Sucks” or anything so silly. Reddit own their own site, they can do as they wish and they do very well for themselves and they seem quite happy. That’s cool. But my work is mine and I don’t agree with how they use it for the above reasons.
So I’m withdrawing my work from Reddit. If you navigate from there to here, you are redirected to this page. Redditors are still very welcome here. They can use the sidebar links to look through anything and everything I’ve posted, or come to the site directly; and I hope they find it of interest or worth a laugh, or that they find something in it they needed. But I’m no longer allowing links from Reddit to here, at least not until the above two notes no longer hold true.
I agree with you, too bad everybody (me sometimes included) starts thinking AFTER a problem occurs…
>The community are of the opinion that submitting your own content is spamming
If that’s **all** you do, and you do it multiple times, even to different subreddits…yeah, you’re a spammer. Sorry.
No, sorry, I don’t accept that.
For something to be spam, it has to have some sort of monetary gain for the person posting it. There’s none here at all. Never has been. If you can define someone writing original content and freely posting it as spam, then your definition is fundamentally broken and needs review.
Mark,
Reddit is schizoid because its purpose is to make people money through spam. The successful spammers there post a whole lot of articles that agree with a very narrow view of the world (single, lonely, dysfunctional, socially alienated, week-willed people in their 20s whose “ideology” consists of equal parts self-pity and revenge on the more successful) and then link to affiliate programs and blogs they don’t PERSONALLY own yet are benefiting from. This is why Reddit is so evasive and capricious about the accusation of spamming.
Don’t get me wrong — the original community there were some stand-up people. Their goal was to start a dot-com and make millions. To do that, they pander to the people I described above. That means that Reddit is dripping with pretense of being goodwill-to-all-humans when in fact it’s about profit. The audience of people who go to Reddit are generally burnt-out American losers, so they’re not actually a valuable audience, but in the meantime, the money is rolling in for clickthroughs.
The people like yourself who go there to try to actually, you know, communicate are doomed. You’re seen as outsiders, and if there’s anything a herd of low self-esteem people likes, it’s a common enemy. That enemy does not have to have actually done anything wrong. You’re different, and that’s bad.
The software and admins are what makes Reddit great; the community, a.k.a. the hivemind groupthink, are disgusting. Perhaps 1% of the users there are intelligent, but the rest are purposeless people who are there to waste time throwing around memes and feeling superior to non-Redditors. You can see that attitude in what the weenies are posting in these comments.
You might want to check out hubski — it’s not yet infested with the herd mentality as badly.