Boards›Boards Feedback

Ripping off Reddit posts: Preemptively voicing a concern.

The All Tomato·8/12/2014, 8:26:48 PM·9 votes·7,078 views

TL;DR

Reposting content from Reddit could hurt the unique identity of the Boards and undermine its purpose IF it reaches a 'saturation point'. Please use discretion when posting / upvoting.

It's human nature to seek approval and post things that are guaranteed to get internet points. As the new Boards gain popularity (and landing lots of votes becomes more meaningful), copying successful Reddit posts to the Boards may become common.

I personally have only seen something like this done once thus far. (I am not meaning to accuse the poster of selfish intentions.) I hope I am not overreacting by making this post, but I wanted to address this issue immediately and see what the rest of the Boards community thinks. Please listen to what I have to say, and understand that it is said in the spirit of friendly concern, and with the desire to create a meaningful and positive community.

If you've spent time on sites such as Imgur or Reddit, you'll know how rampant reposting and copy / pasting from other sites is, and how detrimental it can be to the originality, individuality, and relevance of a community.

Riot wants to create a community that is distinct from Reddit, where players and Rioters can interact more directly, visibly, and conveniently. Why else create the Boards? It would be much simpler and resource-efficient to shut down the existing forums and move community interaction entirely over to Reddit, if this were not the case.

No one is forced to click a post link, but posts do take up real estate on the Boards feeds, no matter how they are sorted. What use are the Boards, if unique posts are drowned out by clones of Reddit posts? Why visit the Boards at all, if they become a copy of a pre-exisiting community?

To be clear, I think sister posts by OPs in both communities is fine. However, if the Boards become a mirror of the Reddit front page, there will be no point in visiting them. Please don't start this trend. Rioters, please consider moderating the Boards with this issue in mind.

12 Comments

RiotOldManYelling8/13/2014, 3:42:38 AM9 votes

So, this is interesting to me. I can only speak to my personal opinion here, but it seems to me I'd prefer having the best content cross-pollinate. I'm probably slightly biased, since it was really cool to see my articles pop up on reddit (thus linking to content on the boards), but still, I would contend that a reasonable number of links to reddit or other sites would be further curated by those of us hanging out here, delivering only the best content to the top for players like me (those using Discussion View). Exhales. That sentence ran away from me.

I'll pose a related question, would you enjoy seeing content like MOBAFire Guides or links to blogs like RiotPenguin's art or something like links to the community-run Factions events?

Tamat8/13/2014, 5:00:26 AM5 votes

Thank you for taking the time to post your concerns in the correct board! You have some interesting quotes that I want to dive into deeper.

I personally have only seen something like this done once thus far. (I am not meaning to accuse the poster of selfish intentions.) I hope I am not overreacting by making this post, but I wanted to address this issue immediately and see what the rest of the Boards community thinks.

Thanks for the example. It's always helpful for discussions like this. I'm having difficulty finding the problem with content like that being cross posted from other channels in the League of Legends community. The discussion you referenced is super positive, and it also has a fair bit of engagement by other players. Don't you think that is relevant to the League of Legends community? Sure, it was posted elsewhere first, but it's not a race. If a member of the Boards thinks that people here would find value in something, then we absolutely DO want them to bring it here. Stuff likes this makes the platform better, not worse.

Riot wants to create a community that is distinct from Reddit, where players and Rioters can interact more directly, visibly, and conveniently. Why else create the Boards? It would be much simpler and resource-efficient to shut down the existing forums and move community interaction entirely over to Reddit, if this were not the case.

The aim for the Boards is to create a platform that becomes the most commonly used social channel for the League of Legends community. We want everyone to use it, and that's going to include users that help populate the Boards with cool content. It makes me sad when Dunkey releases a new video and no one posts it here. I learned a very valuable lesson from Sky last night when he posted a video in response to Robin Williams passing. Such a heartfelt message from one League player to another. Neither of these made it to the Boards, but they made it to Reddit, and that's a problem that we have to solve together.

To be clear, I think sister posts by OPs in both communities is fine. However, if the Boards become a mirror of the Reddit front page, there will be no point in visiting them. Please don't start this trend. Rioters, please consider moderating the Boards with this issue in mind.

We definitely don't want a mirror image or clone of /r/leagueoflegends ... we want something greater! We want these Boards to belong to you, and have something for everyone. I believe that the League of Legends community is deeper than any one person can know. Reddit doesn't have everything. There's often amazing content that never makes it to Reddit, but it circulates on Facebook or Twitter. Some of the best League of Legends videos I've ever seen eventually made it there, but only after it had circulated the fansite ecosystem for a few days. If the Boards becomes a place that hosts everything going on in the community, then we will have succeeded together.

**Tl;DR ** - We want tons of content from all over the community posted here, and then we want you to vote on the stuff based on how valuable you think it is.

Would love to hear more thoughts.

Daen8/12/2014, 8:29:48 PM2 votes

Assuming the Boards' algorithms for determining visibility are accurate, is it necessarily a problem for cloned reddit posts to populate the Boards? Even if they are technically moved from another community, they are still considered valuable by the Boards users if they are prominently visible here.