Since I had written an earlier editorial on OregonLive Reddit about its wealth of potential, I thought it appropriate to post that—until further notice—that potential is now completely gone.
Why? Because now OregonLive Reddit stories make the front page of the OregonLive not as a result of their popularity or user voting, but as a result of the order in which the OregonLive Reddit articles were submitted.
That’s right.
It’s important to note that the OregonLive home page now features the most recent submissions, and not the hottest posts.
And here’s my favorite part…
This change took place about one week ago in order to keep the Reddit posts fresh on the home page.
Perhaps the folks at The Oregonian and OregonLive are even more Web 2.0 than I thought, given that the new system follows the logic that “shiny and new” far outweighs “relevant and interesting.”
So go ahead and vote the Silicon Florist submissions up or down. It doesn’t really matter.
-1 for social media
At a time when the OregonLive Reddit user base was in the midst of asking good questions and having deep discussions about the nature of the service—at a time when many were working to embrace the potential of this feature—the team at OregonLive chose to remove the one and only thing that made the feature worth using: the voting that allowed the populous to determine what appeared on the front page.
Currently, the social feature has absolutely no bearing on what appears on the front page. It’s all chronological.
Kind of like, oh I don’t know, a printed newspaper?
I hear you, “Sounds like sour grapes to me, Turoczy. You’re just mad that you can’t keep content on the front page.”
You’re right. You’re absolutely right.
But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.
As I mentioned in my earlier editorial, I felt this service was one of the more promising avenues to give startups in town some of the much needed limelight they deserved from traditional media. And I find it unfortunate that that avenue—an avenue that I thought had so much potential—has taken a hit.
Here’s hoping they reconsider this move.
Until that point, I’ll continue my search for other resources that truly have the potential to highlight the great work many of you are doing here in the Silicon Forest.
Because the people around here need to see the amazing things you’re doing.
Just not on OregonLive, I guess.
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Aaron, quality still matters on the Oregon Reddit page. This move actually makes people less inclined to try to game the system with the sole purpose of getting front page linkage, hence the voting is less skewed on Oregon Reddit.
It makes Oregon Reddit more useful, even if the rest of the OregonLive site still belongs somewhere in the last century.
I submit that if anybody was using Oregon Reddit for the sole purpose of getting a link on the front page of OregonLive, they had a fundamental misunderstanding of how social bookmarking sites are intended to work.
Mike said “Betcha this changes again as they learn more about the medium.”
What frustrates me is that the rest of the internet learned about the Digg/Reddit-style medium a few years ago. For some reason, OregonLive has decided that popularity doesn’t matter and instead they’re just going to display whatever’s been submitted latest.
That’s fine, god knows that OregonLive doesn’t do anything else that makes sense, but it means that the traffic incentive is totally gone for bloggers. Instead of writing interesting content in the hopes of some sustained local traffic for a few hours, one can now just post shit, and it’ll take it’s place on the OregonLive homepage.
The reddit section used to be the only place on oregonlive.com where quality mattered. Now, quality is completely ignored.
Oregon Reddit: Now slightly less broken!…
For a while now, I’ve been using Oregon Reddit, a local version of the social bookmarking site hosted by OregonLive, the sort-of Web front for that dying dinosaur of Portland media,The Oregonian.
For a while when it first started, before people r…
And … if it weren’t for Reddit, I would have NO IDEA this blog even existed. And now it’s my homepage.
The point of Reddit is to share stories, news and blogs from across the internets with other users of Reddit.
It’s not about who has the most points, or who’s the King of Reddit. Who cares? What are you gonna go to Starbucks in the morning and tell the barista how many points have on Oregon Reddit? It’s about submitting stuff and sharing stuff you find interesting with the peeps.
The main Reddit page displays the hottest, http://reddit.oregonlive.com/
And the new page displays the newest, http://reddit.oregonlive.com/new
Or you can search Reddit. It’s sortable by how the user wants to experience Reddit.
You can still vote on it if you really want. But I think the purpose is share. I don’t even downvote things. If I like it, I vote it up.
Just because it doesn’t show up on the Oregon live homepage doesn’t mean it’s not good. All the stuff that stayed there as hot was just political junk anyway.
I think Mike Mathews is right. It’s new still and kinks are still being hammered out.
A swing and a miss, just to say in the seasonal parlance. As a “news” org, they have a need to display the latest, but it’s a mis not to also show what readers are most interested/concerned/flabbergasted/frustrated/etc. about.
Betcha this changes again as they learn more about the medium.
Annnd now I will no longer use the OregonLive Reddit. Isn’t that completely counter to how Reddit itself even works?
If there =really= that worried about the most popular story self selecting and creating an echo chamber then I’m sure that they can modify how there pulling to do a bit of both sides:
score = (votes + comment_count) – ((today – post_date) * 2 )
then order by score. I’m sure that the math could use some work but if there is no current desire for the story then it will slowly drop in the ranking, giving the ability to float for ‘new and shiny’ with out totally stomping on the readers ability to vote and comment.
wow, talk about taking a step backwards! I wasn’t a user/fan and I realy am not now.
Great post, thanks for sharing.
Amazing. Just when I think that the Oregonian and OregonLive couldn’t get even more webtarded, they go and prove me wrong.