Social media platforms: what’s wrong (part 2)

Social media platforms: what’s wrong (part 2)

Table of contents:

Problems with the community aspect of social media platforms:

1. Content and grouping is often disorganized

When I watch a TV show, I often try to see if I can read what other people are thinking of the TV show by finding the appropriate subreddit on Reddit. But there’s no rhyme or reason as to what the subreddit will be, because it’s created by users – do I guess that it’s /r/Fargo, or perhaps it’s /r/FargoTV, or maybe /r/FargoFX? You can usually tell by the subscriber count, but not always – is /r/Bitcoin with 7 million followers that much different from /r/BTC, with 1 million followers? And what’s the difference anyways?

Even within communities, it can be tough to discover what content I want. In one TV show subreddit they might label their episode discussions as:

  • S01E01 – “A New Hope Begins” @ 4PM ET – Discussion 

While another TV show subreddit might label their discussions as:

  • DISC – Season 1 Episode 1 – “A New Hope Begins” [AMC]

Note the differences:

  • DISC vs Discussion (along with the placement of these words – DISC at the front, vs Discussion at the end)
  • S01E01 vs Season 1 Episode 1
  • The time (4PM ET) on one, and channel (AMC) on the other

What this means is that if I’m trying to search for these discussions, the variations in how the titles are formed means that it may take me a few attempts to actually figure out what this specific community decided to use for its episode discussion formatting.

You can tell Reddit has tried to streamline some of these community inconsistencies as time as gone by — years ago, subreddits could style their communities as they wished with custom CSS, making some subreddits look drastically different from others1. But in the past few years, Reddit has made subreddit customization less of a priority – probably because people going from subreddit to subreddit were having a hard time adapting to the vastly different ways subreddit creators had formatted, styled, and shown their content.

2. Moderation and enforcement of rules is inconsistent across communities

On Reddit, there are some communities where I love the moderation work done by the moderators, as perhaps their moderation / content curation aligns with my own beliefs, or they act impartially, etc.

In other communities, I think the moderation is fine, as maybe I don’t really notice the moderation so I’m not bothered by it being too heavy handed, or perhaps the curated content is ok but not great, so I’ll deal with it.

But then there are the communities where I never visit despite being interested in the topic the community is organized around, because I find the moderation to be too heavy handed, too biased, the community is too immature, or the content is very meme/image-heavy centric, whereas I care more to read short to long form content.

I’ll speak more on moderators and their human faults later on in part 5, but as a more generic topic this lack of consistency of content across different communities due to a difference in moderation and community culture makes going into each community a bit of a crapshoot:

Substitute “fandom” for “community”, but same concept applies.

Up next:

“Part 3: Problems with the content of social media platforms”

Footnotes:

  1. You can still see many of these custom-styled subreddits by going to old.reddit.com, but you can tell reddit only keeps that around in order to quell complaints from old users of the site. ↩︎

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