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So the problem is Reddit..

xXCaptainPlanetx·2/19/2014, 3:49:17 AM·4 votes·693 views

So the problem isn't that people hate the community beta. It's that they hate Reddit.

They hate Reddit because unpopular posts disappear; as they should. Reddit self moderates by using a new post section for each SubReddit. If you want to see what's happened recently you can look at that section and upvote or comment on what you think is cool. If lot's of people like the post it moves to the frontpage.

But people hate the concept that popular posts will be the easiest to find. Coincidentally this makes it quicker to read through what's trending in the community and comment on it. It's essentially a hyper bump.

Lastly people find nested replies hard to read. Personally I don't want to read through 100 pages of a forum post. I'd rather look at the rito responses and those of people with interesting input; in the end what's important is the idea and not the journey to the idea.

And so as far as I'm to understand the purpose of this forum model is to remove the clutter and downtime issues. Remove downtime by having a forum system engineered to deal with the traffic the LOL community provides.

3 Comments

ratcharmer2/19/2014, 11:49:59 AM3 votes

There's a couple other issues I'm noting as well.

The first couple upvotes/downvotes have an excessive amount of influence over a threads fate. If the first couple people to see a thread downvote no one else will see it, and on GD I know I've seen plenty of threads the started out negative and then went on get net a lot of upvotes.
It's exploitable. I won't go into details, but I can already see plenty of ways to "game the system" using smurf accounts etc. A lot of these ways involve doing really unpleasant things I'd rather not see encouraged on forums
Even a popular thread will usually disappear pretty quickly if Riot simply ignores it. There's been a couple of times when Riot has reacted to a fairly major issue by simply pretending it doesn't exist, and the new format makes that easier for them.

Pryotra2/19/2014, 11:31:19 AM2 votes

Well... Yes and No. Keep in mind I have given this a fair shot, but it still did not appeal to me.

Thing is, I don't like it, because it falls into all the same traps reddit falls into. Circle-jerking still king, Well formatted posts that are lenghthy get ignored regardless of quality, and even now there is still no good way to sort comments. These are 3 of many, many problems.

However, aside from that, they never really answered GD's biggest problem, which is lack of visible moderation. If you want to quote Self moderation, guess what: GD has a voting system too. At the end of the day, self moderation can only do so much on a forum.

Honestly, The upvote/downvote system is a flawed method of moderation, as it doesn't measure quality, but rather popularity. There is infact a difference. Observe the topic where IronStylus gave a few valid points, all of which are downvoted. By the logic of popular=upvotes=quality, he is a terrible poster. Now find my post there in that topic. Good luck, I came too late to the party. If you have figured out the HUGE holes I am poking in this, congradulations, you found the point.

NoxiousIce2/19/2014, 6:06:27 AM1 votes

This seems to be the case. Nested replies could be done different visually to help with some of the issue though, and this is the kind of thing that people need to be talking about not just "rarara reddit suxs, rabblerabble change is scary and I don't like it."

Honestly I hate the way that the web page is formatted. When forum browsing I really don't need these huge side bars that just show the background image, and the sub communities bar is too wide as well.

I think that perhaps instead of communities and sub communities a better option might be tags, and then the most popular tags or tags that riot is most interested in could be placed in the side bar where sub communities currently is.

Additionally if Riot had a few more sorting algorithms beyond "best" and "new" it might help mitigate the fear of minority opinions being completely buried.

Another part of the problem is that if people don't receive a red response they think that they're being ignored. They don't really acknowledge the fact that riot could have read it, and decided not to post for one reason or another.

Edit: It might help if Rioters decided to post a weekly "lets talk about X" or "Give me your opinions on Y." The subject could be stickied, and people would feel more comfortable in knowing that at least on that issue, a Rioter very likely read the whole thread.