Hi Readers! I don’t have too much time to spend writing this today since I’m working on a grant for Asteroid.Ventures, but a community I have helped shape recently achieved a major milestone today! For the last two-ish years, I’ve been a moderator on the sub-reddit called Futurology, and today (5/7/2014), we are being indoctrinated as a default sub-reddit. (Which means new reddit users will be automatically subscribed.)
The community itself has certainly grown. It started in mid-2012, and really started picking up steam around Q4 of that year. Which I think is about where I became involved. Having been well read with loads of science fiction and enamored with the concept of the technological singularity, it was refreshing to find a host of people who shared (mostly) the same forward thinking ideology.
Concurrently, work in Futurology prompted me to make my own community, /r/Simulate. Which is focused on sharing all things related to simulation, be it academic, industrial, gaming, or conceptual like A-Life. While I don’t expect /r/Simulate to ever have the staying power of Futurology, I do greatly appreciate the hacker-culture we’ve put together there.
Back to Futurology though, it really has been impressive to watch the subscriber base increase so dramatically:
Granted, a lot of the current growth might have been attributed to the recent “technology-gate,” where events conspiring around keyword censorship actually made international network news. The trouble was started when a user first noticed that /r/technology had been censoring Tesla posts. /u/Gamion made this post to the Futurology page, for which I had this response. We were in a really tricky situation here, we didn’t want to encourage turning Futurology into witch hunt against Technology, but we still wanted to keep our discussion platform open and transparent.
This later gave rise to /u/Multi-Mod starting the transparency page and domain blacklist to ensure that going forward, there was no miscommunication with users about what should and should not be deleted. The most contentious thing right now is the dividing line between spammers and real content creators. The reddit has policy not to share more than 10% of your own domains, but if you share more than 10% of content from a major news site, that is acceptable. However, we’ve even seen that blog authors at certain outlets like the Huffington Post are prone to blatantly spam also, and people who post only their own Youtube videos also can be ousted for spam. To abide by the stricter policies, I won’t post my blog to Futurology anymore.
However, I think a more pertinent measure than a 10:1 ratio for submissions would be a 25:1 ratio in terms of comments to submissions. Reddit’s strength is in its comments, and many content creators don’t want to spend all day posting content in order to be allowed to share. Many content producers see this as a “hurdle” to jump in order to self-promote. Really though, I think there are two forms of self-promoters, content producers who want bonafide feedback on their work by means of reddit comments, and promoters running some SEO nonsense trying to pull in ad-money. Most non-news blogs receive under 20k views a year, which means about $10 every two years through google adsense. By favoring major news outlets over small private blogs, there is some sense of big corporate bias that just feels a slight bit unsettling. (This is a reddit-wide thing not a Futurology thing.)
If you want to follow some Futurology related blogs and help share their voice, please follow these guys and share their content for them (if you like their stuff):
Now, back to topic, one thing that’s interesting is to watch the data show the fallout from technology-gate: (you can see the dramatic rise in /r/tech and /r/technews)
Of course, Futurology received an influx of subscribers as well, but our rank was already pretty high at that stage. We’ve been climbing through the ranks for quite some time, hitting the top 200 in January and becoming the daily #1 non-default several times prior to our inclusion as becoming a proper default. At this rate, I would not be surprised if our subscriber base surpassed 1 million by the end of Q3 2014.
Of course, with great power comes great responsibility, and a ton more work. Moderation used to be all fun and games, now it’s become a constant debate over what to delete and who shouldn’t be deleted when. To assist, Multi-Mod installed the Auto-Moderator bot used by many of the defaults, but we’ve also set most features to “report” posts instead of auto-deletion. Humans working with Robots instead of against them or for us… That’s really what Futurology is all about.
Moreover, we have a surplus of secondary subreddits which support the primary one:
- /r/FuturologyModerators - Anybody can come openly discuss moderation policy
- /r/FuturologyRemovals - Anyone can see all of the posts being removed and challenge their removal
- /r/FuturologyAppeals - The Courthouse for Bans or domain blocking
It is interesting to see Futurology starting to branch out and function as a type of “Virtual State.” Mainly because we’re always listening to our own echo chamber that promotes virtual policy participation.
Which brings me to the final promotion I need to make, /u/Xenophon1 who started Futurology also started the “Futurist Party!” Will we ever amount to any real political force? Who knows, maybe if we institutionalize something now we will hold some power a generation from now (around 2030). Our platform looks something like left libertarianism with a strong emphasis on open source technology and space exploration. We think that automation threatens the traditional taxed labor model, and that poor regulation of the internet (Looking at you Tom Wheeler) will destroy our economic surplus. This also caused me write the Nucleus Proposal as a technological means to connect motivated workers with interesting projects and necessary monetary resource. I really need to revamp /r/Nucleus, and have had some help from /u/EdEnlightenU.
So that’s it for now, my hour and a half post about all the big changes on reddit and Futurology! (I could have written this as a self-post on the sub itself, but I wanted Xenophon1 or MouthSpeakWords to have that honor.) Now the shameful part, if you like my work you should give me a $1 monthly donation with Gittip! I’ve been going for broke with Asteroid.Ventures and could use the help!
Cheers!
http://ift.tt/1jBo4ne http://ift.tt/1jBo4ng Uncategorized, admins, analysis, asteroid ventures, blogs, future, futurist, futurology, metrics, moderation, nucleus, politics, reddit, simulate, space, technology
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