Reddit is essentially a message board with a voting system that decides which topics and comments are most visible. Topics can be text posts, links, or images. It is divided into subject-oriented "subreddits" that are created and managed by volunteer moderators. There are a set of default subreddits that appear on reddit.com if you don't have an account, and which you are subscribed to by default when you create an account. By creating an account, you can unsubscribe to the defaults and subscribe to any of the thousands of other subreddits that exist.

Subreddits range from amazing, to inane, to noxious. The good include /r/personalfinance, which offers great financial advice; /r/askscience, which offers expert responses to interesting scientific questions; and /r/iama, which regularly hosts celebrity Q&A sessions, most famously once with President Obama. A more niche one that I enjoy is /r/colorizedhistory, which colorizes historical photographs. Other subreddits are arguably the best place on the internet to discuss the particular topic at issue--true for many video game and sports oriented subreddits (e.g. /r/mma and /r/magictcg). I myself got involved with reddit because the developers of Minecraft treated /r/minecraft as essentially their official forums.

The inane unfortunately includes a fair bit of what you find in the default subreddits, and contributes to people thinking that reddit is dumb. Stuff like /r/showerthoughts, /r/adviceanimals, /r/aww, and /r/til. But hey, maybe you like inane stuff to read on the toilet. Reddit is good for that too if that's what you want; you just need to subscribe to what interests you.

There are also tiny subreddits devoted to hateful things. Many are just created by trolls to be offensive on purpose to rile people up. Some are genuine hateful communities. These are largely invisible to redditors themselves, but get outsize attention from media with an ax to grind who seek them out in order to "expose" reddit.

As far as recent controversy goes, there are essentially two main issues. First, reddit was historically set up as, in the words of one of the founds, a "bastion of free speech." The plan was to censor only illegal things to allow people to freely discuss ideas. That's why the noxious subreddits were allowed. Recently, the reddit admins have been changing that policy and want to start policing the community more heavily. Some users are happy about this because they want the noxious communities gone. Some users are unhappy because they are part of the noxious communities themselves. The majority of redditors, I would guess, are no fans of the noxious communities but are fine to let them exist because they worry about where the admins will draw the line once they are free to censor things.

The second issue is the lack of support for moderators. Reddit's moderation tools are apparently atrociously bad, and Reddit's paid administrators communicate poorly with the unpaid moderators. This came to a head recently when Reddit fired the one administrator who did provide moderators with a lot of help, causing temporary chaos for a few major subreddits who relied on her. In protest, many huge subreddits shut down for a couple of days. Reddit responded by promising improved tools by a certain date. Bust just yesterday, Reddit's chief engineer just quit because she said that Reddit can't deliver on that promise.

The drama aspect comes in with Reddit's temporary CEO, Ellen Pao. She was widely blamed for the issues above by users, and stepped down this week. But now information is coming to light that the board, particular one of the founders, was really responsible. So people who care about making drama are turning that all into a big thing.

InBlack wrote on Jul 14, 2015, 02:26:

Brym wrote on Jul 13, 2015, 13:24:
I can't say whether the watch is flopping or not (although I have my doubts about the data they rely on), but I can say that I've found mine indispensable in the month that I've owned it.

Do tell!

I find that the increased accessibility of having functions on my wrist means that I use those functions more often. I set a lot more reminders now that I can just raise my wrist and say "Hey siri, remind me..." I receive and respond to texts instantly (if I want to), rather than whenever I happen to pull out my phone and see the notification. I use Apple Pay whenever I can now that it doesn't require accessing my pockets, and is therefore actually more convenient than using a credit card. I'm a lawyer, and I'm now using a watch app to track my hours, finally replacing my old pen-and-paper method. This saves me a ton of time.

Glanceable information is also valuable. Now that my next upcoming meeting is on my watch face, I'm no longer surprised when I get my 15-minutes-before meeting reminder. Having the current weather on the face also saves me some time.

But rather than just list features, let me give you some experiences I've had where I've found it useful.

-When my wife and I go out to dinner now and neither of us has to keep a phone on the table to make sure we receive any calls or texts from the babysitter.

-When I took my daughter out to an outdoor music festival, and was able to check on when our train home was leaving and text my wife when we would be home, all while still holding my daughter so that she could see the stage.

-When I've been able to Apple Pay at a store, also without having to put down whichever kid I'm holding.

-When I was at Disney World recently with my extended family, and my wife and I became the designated text-messagers whenever the group split up, because we were so much more able to text while on the go throughout the park and could be relied on to get our messages instantly. We also were always the ones being asked when the rain was supposed to come--again, because we could access that information while on the go much more easily than the rest of the group.

I can't say whether the watch is flopping or not (although I have my doubts about the data they rely on), but I can say that I've found mine indispensable in the month that I've owned it.

The Apple Watch article rings true to me, as a fellow watch guy. I went to the Apple store on Friday for a try-on appointment all ready to preorder, but after seeing the Watch in person, I decided to wait.

The problem is that for current watch wearers, Apple needs to convince us to replace something that we already love and wear every day. That's a high bar. I would be much more excited for the product if it were not completely gauche for me to wear it *in addition* to my normal watch.

My wife is getting one, so maybe after spending more time with hers I'll become more convinced that the trade-off is worth it. Or maybe I'll be waiting for the next generation.

Ars really needs to get a lawyer on staff if they want to keep doing these legal articles. The author expresses confusion over whether Blackberry settled or has an upcoming trial, something that can be easily clarified by pulling the docket sheet for the case.

*EDIT* - I just pulled the docket sheet. Blackberry settled. Given that the author said the opposite in his article, that should tell you what you need to know about his credibility.

The author also spends a lot of time on legally irrelevant details, such as when Bluetooth 1.0 (which apparently didn't practice the patent) was invented, and whether the creators of Bluetooth 2.0 collaborated with the inventor of the patent. None of that has any relevance, under the law, to the merits of the case.

Maybe this case is totally frivolous, and the verdict is a total miscarriage of justice. Or maybe it's perfectly valid. The author gives us no detail that would support either conclusion.

Eurogamer is "dropping review scores" only in the sense that they are no longer assigning numbers. The recommend/essential/avoid/no label system is essentially a 4-star system. But I guess now they can benefit from the nonstop internet circle jerk about how review scores are ruining games.

That said, I think the policy changes look good overall. I don't personally care whether Eurogamer uses a 4-point scale or a 10-point scale for their scores, so long as there is some sort of score I can quickly look at when I don't want to read an entire article from them. The new system will work fine for that.

If you're losing in under 10 minutes, you were either trying to exploit the system or you were terrible. Either way, you don't deserve your mark.

Even if Blizzard had a huge pop-up warning at the start of their program saying "W3 ARE SPYING ON JOO!!1@!" it would only turn off maybe 1% of their users (the tin-foil hat crowd). Personally, I would let Chris Metzen come to my house and rummage through my underwear drawer if it helps keep WoW free from hacks.

Happy 9th from a longtime lurker (although I can't say how long... but I would guess 8 years).

Just wanted to point something out: game prices have *not* stayed the same for the past 15 years, they've actually decreased dramatically. Yes they cost $50 both now and then in *nominal* terms, but with inflation games now are a good 30%-45% cheaper than they were in the 80s.

Got silver way back when just so I could play CS:S early, and I'm sure glad I did now. I never played DoD for HL1, but I'm loving it now. The maps are great and the gameplay is tops. Nice change of pace from counter-strike.

He meant frost nova

I live in Michigan, and I think this is sad. The penalties are waaaay out of line with the "crime", for one thing. Also, why can movies, television, and music (even books) police themselves but games can't?

You can't blame this only on the democrats though. My local republican congressman (Fred Upton) was leading the investigation in the House into the Hot Coffee mod. This idiocy affects both sides of the aisle. If you want to blame anyone, blame all the religious zealots who voted for anti-gay marriage amendments last year and scared the democrats into finding a "moral issue" of their own.

I was kind of hoping for a fix to one of the 2 bugged, uncompletable quests in desolace. No wonder that zone is so deserted all the time...

It seems like the early patches had a lot more bug fixes. I remember they did actually fix the 2 bugged quests in stonetalon just after I had finished up that zone.

Anyone else think that the purchase price would have been a LOT higher without the Madden exclusivity deal? $24 million seems pretty damn low to me.

I'm currently studying abroad with only my ibook to keep me company, so at first I thought this was great news. Then I realized that you can only play on mac demo servers, only through the crappy gameranger browser, and there's no dedicated server. The biggest game I could find had six people in it, and it still ran like crap. It doesn't exactly give you a good impression of the full game, does it?

On the topic of mac gaming: I wish more companies were like Blizzard. Because they release their games as PC/Mac hybrids on the same CD, I already own the mac versions of all their games. I'd love to play UT2004, for instance, but I'm hardly going to go out and buy another copy of a game I already own.

This comment was edited on Sep 25, 01:31.

This comment was edited on Sep 25, 01:32.

A better headline:

"EA Corners The Market on Football, Evil"

Actually, there is PvP.