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/r/Overwatch petition and content performance on Reddit

Hey folks,

I’m very busy working on my next project, but I wanted to write down a few thoughts on the /r/Overwatch petition. You can find it here: https://www.change.org/p/moderators-of-r-overwatch-bring-more-diverse-content-to-r-overwatch

One of the assumptions I see people making in the conversation around this petition is the idea that 1) the desirability of content by people in a subreddit and 2) how well it performs on that subreddit are related. I want to talk about a few factors that may cause 1) and 2) to be unrelated.

First, there’s the “new” page. What many casual users of Reddit don’t realize is that most posts are not even seen by the vast majority of users of a subreddit. Most posts get downvoted into oblivion - or upvoted to high visibility - by the tiny fraction of users that bother to look at the “new” page.

As a result, the people who regularly look at the “new” page and vote on content essentially act as gatekeepers of what content becomes visible on a subreddit. The idea that the type of person who does this - the type of person so dedicated to that subreddit’s content and so eager for more that they actively throwaway the benefits of looking at “hot” in favor of “new” - is reflective of the community at large doesn’t make any sense. What’s popular on a subreddit is reflective of the most active and dedicated users of that subreddit. I’m not stating an opinion on whether that’s good or bad, only stating that this is a separate concept from what the whole subreddit wants.

Second, there’s the way voting in Reddit works. Users can vote regardless of whether they’ve looked at a piece of content or not. I don’t think most users of Reddit are malicious and downvote longer-form or “more serious” content; I think like everyone else they’re very busy, and they generally only vote on things they’ve actually watched or read. Hence why “low-effort” content does so well - if it’s liked by many people, many people will upvote it because they can easily consume it in its entirety.

To say that low-effort content performing well on Reddit is “reflective of the community” is not really correct - it’s reflective of how Reddit’s voting system works. Once a post is doing well as a result of 1) and 2), it snowballs - its high visibility allows it to gain more and more upvotes.

Finally, “low-effort content” is rarely “low-effort”, at least in my experience. For instance, my average in-depth game design video runs about an hour of work to an hour and a half of work for every minute of video footage - so, a twenty minute video will take twenty to thirty hours (including the time required to actually play the game). Maybe more, maybe less, it depends on the game.

Contrast that with “low-effort” content. Those funny little gifs or image memes are often created in Premiere or Photoshop with the same attention to detail as something I’d create, except they’re way shorter. A fifteen second GIF might take someone two hours to put together - that’s the equivalent of 8 hours of work per minute of footage.

This is really inefficient - in the above example, 5x to 8x more inefficient than what I do (which is inefficient to begin with because it requires writing a script). Reddit’s voting system thus incentivizes content creators to spend their time less efficiently than they otherwise would. Does the community want someone to spend hours making a GIF instead of doing a stream or adding a few minutes to a pre-produced video? I think it’s unlikely, but that’s what Reddit incentivizes.

To summarize:
-- How much visibility content gets has almost nothing to do with the overall community’s opinion
-- The up/down votes on content that does get visibility has a lot more to do with the ease-of-consumption of that content than on whether it’s good or bad
-- Easy-to-consume content is not always (or even generally) easy-to-make content

The conversation around this petition often seems to assume that this is a question of doing what the community wants vs. encouraging more quality content that may not be as popular. I think that’s the wrong way to frame it - how content performs on a particular subreddit and what people within that subreddit want are not necessarily related due to the above factors.

I’ll be clear in saying that I don’t think that’s justification for the moderation team acting as dictators and pushing content that they think is what people want - when people choose to use Reddit, they are implicitly opting in to the way the site works, for better or for worse. It’s possible that Reddit attracts people who like “low-effort content”, for instance, because they know the voting system gives that type of content high visibility. That's a huge issue that I haven't even touched in this post - the inherent bias in who chooses to participate in a subreddit to begin with, and who gets discouraged from doing so.

In general, I think a regular and vibrant discussion within a community, open-mindedness from the moderation team and willingness to try new things go a long way in keeping a community healthy. I’m always suspicious of petitions because they come across to me as very aggressive; if it’s come to the point that this is the only way to engage the moderation team of /r/Overwatch, then it’s probably too late to fix it anyway.

Here’s the part where I plug the Overwatch game design content I’m working on for late Q2 of this year. Follow me if you’re interested. All the best!

- brownbear