I rarely use reddit and someone just told me to look at the hots reddit threads and see the vastly different perspectives and culture they created.
Over the last few weeks, just been reading a few threads and yes it’s a completely different world and user mentality.
What I gathered is that reddit users are very hots fanboy on the level of Apple fanboys where any type of criticism or constructive feedback that may seem negative will have reddit users flurry in with negative comments and back up hots like it’s the holy grail.
While in these forums, any type of criticism or constructive feedback, most of the time, other users will chime in with counter arguments and empathy/sympathy towards such topics and it’s more constructive here whereas reddit, dare to speak up, you’ll get an army of hate.
What’s up with that?
Also I now know why Blizzard prefers reddit because their egos are stroked too much over there and don’t want to hear real feedback.
While if I ever google search anything, the HOTS forums never show up, but reddit does. Reddit is easily accessible, has a thumbs down button to shut down anyone they deem unworthy, and has poor design.
gonna venture that people that are still around here don’t bother with using reddit, so, at best you’re going to get generational speculation: forums are old and reddit is ‘new’ by comparison.
Due to their upvote system, it promotes particular comment formates in a way that increases exposure for some things and reduces it for others. For a regular user, it reinforces popular actions making it easier for people to contribute to that momentum, especially if they’re just skimming on their mobile.
While you speculate an ‘ego’ issue, functionally reddit is significantly more used than the forums and the sorting tools do make it easier for them to respond from skims rather than needing to dive and read more posts to find anything of note, especially in topics where I’m posting unwanted wordy walls. So for an AMA format, higher exposure and non-chronological tools gets better feedback than what they generally get here.
To note, working in creative jobs sucks hard – long hours, crunch projects, insufficient pay, lack of job security (sweeping layoffs are a seasonal norm) – so if people can manage to get a small token of appreciation, that’s probably a little better than the usual scapegoating they get for things largely out of their own control.
While I am not a reddit goer, some of the youtube channels I follow pick up comments from them, and reddit is far less regulated and way more bias than forums such as these. So that combined with the aforementioned upvote system, as well as reddits on ‘feels’ on certain subjects, and it is recipe for very childlike behavior as well as breeding ground for toxicity. Also, reddit overall pushes towards a certain direction, with anything going the other way likely to get shut down.
It was probably like that a bit when HotS was, well, hot, but because Blizzard regulated these forums it was not as obvious. I have seen forums for games that were not as regulated devolve into such pits of zealous protection, and you can most definitely find them on Steam discussions concerning games, developers, and distributors who most definitely do not deserve such praise. I’ve been on the receiving end of some of the mobs for discussing games that had glaring flaws.
Back 4 Blood, Warner Bros. recent 4 player DC game (not sure if I can write the title here), and many others will have fans who are so dedicated as is alarming at how vicious they are in defending their holy grail of a game.
As for HotS forums itself, many of the fair weather players have long since left leaving behind a group of people who enjoy the game but are not afraid to point out issues that the game has or give down to earth advise. There isn’t enough actvity, nor anyone new stumbling in, to keep the ‘zealous’ players happy.
Occasionally we get some redditor, troll, or whatever wandering into our neck of the woods to stir the pot so to speak, but they leave after a while due to us either ignoring them or wising up faster than they would like.
Arguably Reddit Upvote/Downvote is both a positive and negative. It promotes popular comments and detracts negative. Most of the time this is likely a good thing, but could lead to good but potentially less popular ideas being downvoted for no reason.
While it took a while to get used to the comment sorting and format of Reddit, it’s probably newer and more streamlined.
It also contains other forums so you can jump between different topics. Also overall it’s much more popular.
Blizzard forums used to have more direct input from devs, so you felt you could get through better (but they are leaning towards Reddit especially with HOTS).
Personally I like the ascetics of HOTS forums and having to read through everything means I feel like I take more of the conversation in, even if not as efficient.
After using both, I think maybe why it seems like there is due to the numbers and alot of Puʻupuʻu that are here would get downvoted and pushed to the bottom so they get ignored; Good. But there some good ideas but less popular might also get pushed down; Bad.
As someone who has been in top level jobs before and which forced me to have to deal with both suck ups, constant whiners and high pressure work, I’d much rather go to a place where the majority of negative opinions are pushed out of my mind IE downvoted to the bottom and can focus on positive stuff or things that people actually want, so as you say if they were given a choice, I’d go Reddit to.
At least with WOW it can only be active people on their forums, while here anyone can create and account and post there negative views. I know anyone can make a Reddit account and complain but I feel like here people think that have a direct line to bliz (as it’s their forums) so more likely to get those real 1 time complainers just being negative cause they lost 1 match.
I’m far from a fan of reddit, but the forums are the place with the fanboys. On the subreddit, they can at least accept that the game does actually have a problem stacks ruining QM. Look even at one of the top threads in the sub right now: “Why are there so many griefers in hots?”.
The top 12 parent level comments are either supportive or neutral and non-confrontational. A thread like that in these forums would have you reading walls of text about how acksually it’s all just in your head and it is really your fault for choosing to interpret choices of players with a different style as “griefing” rather than examining the potential blind spots in your own understanding of how the game should be played. Then another poster chimes in to tell you how human memory is biased toward negative events and how you’re probably too dumb to account for that when forming your impression of how many griefers there are in the game. Then another poster telling you how he remembers you’ve posted a critical thread on the forums 7 months ago and why this proves you must be a troll.
Well if you either don’t read comments, or approach this forum with a myopic eye, that could explain why you haven’t noticed that most of the forum regulars do take issue with stacks ruining QM.
Oh, I’m one of those, btw. The divide on this issue usually revolves around exactly how common it is for very high win rate stacks to be placed vs solo players.
When someone posts “I encounter 98% win rate 5 stacks every second game I play”, that’s an obvious overstatement. Usually this is the source of any disagreement, and because people disagree with that particular nuance, you will label all of them (us) as fanboys.
On reddit you can hire an army of bots to promote only 1 point of view, not only Blizzard - almost all companies do it. If somehow Hots forum was also one of the most popular resources on the planet - there would be bots armies here too. Companies are just doing their business.
In today’s world I think people have already learned to understand this and clearly see where they purposefully translate the topic or minus, many people do not pay attention to it and continue to dialog.
I would even say - it has almost no effect on the company itself, if people do not like - they just stop buying - and this is the best voice i think
Pretty much. I have seen sub-reddits where people have been massive downvoted for telling the truth just for them to upvote sad truth again months later. Its just a cave forum.
Atleast any troll would get downvoted on that site while they get to do thier stuff with no punishment on this forum. More of a reason why you see more trolls coming to this forum.
Found the troll that does exactly what I said. Swarming to this forum casue you know no punishment will be given to you while staying away from Reddit where you atleast would get downvoted and hidden from public.
Reddit is the sh*thole of the internet. It’s not only that negative comments get down voted and any sort of criticism can’t be raised there, it’s also that it’s often moderated by private persons who don’t need to respect free speech. Threads get deleted or not even approved very frequently.
A place to avoid for users. For developers it is more pleasurable since it’s overly positive. I can understand that, especially because they read stuff in their spare time. However Blizzard had one flop after the other and it’s important that any sort of feedback arrives. Otherwise you are flying blind.
Reddit is a place for average people who don’t have much individuality. They gave their critical thinking ability away long ago, content to let authority think for them.
The poor design you are talking about must be the voting system entirely. It is the single worst thing you could implement into a discussion and it could go either direction depending on the time of day or mood of readers. Once the feeding frenzy starts more votes quickly add up instead of replies.
People aren’t good readers either, on the top comment they will overwhelmingly agree with me and not even notice that I am repeating the same thing a few lines below where they overwhelmingly disagreed with my next comment which repeats the same thing but in a slightly different way, in my attempt to clarify somethings further.
If you have nothing good to add people will just skip you altogether, but if someone starts quoting you to death, they are either mentally ill or you may just have made a few good points along the way. You may like it or not but this this is what a forum was meant to be.
Moderators exist for a reason but in this modern environment they fail to live up to the name and instead of someone replying why your views may be wrong and flawed your contribution will be hidden completely only because less than half of the readers disagree with it.
Yeah, the mods here get paid, however little. It’s just a job for them. When they mod you unfairly, it’s because users reported the post and they don’t want to work too hard.
The reddit mods don’t get paid, though, so it’s a select group of people -likely of a similar mindset to yours - who will work for free so that they can punish the “trolls” who dare to peacefully express a differing view.
The voting system is suppose to follow upon the Reddiquette.
Now to put this in practice is a different story but this is just the issue of 15 years ago vs today, the platform grew so much that even thought this type of reddiquette is encouraged doesn’t apply to mainstream topics.
Thankfully r/hots remain consistent with this mindset that I still see unpopular opinions getting voted fine and discussion going and that’s perfectly normal while downvotes remain mainly for off topics or just inappropriate conduct.
I’m talking about bad design as in, how the user interacts with reddit, how it looks, how information is presented.
I like the giving a heart thing without the thumbs down. It at least indicated people are interacting without having to say anything.
Having a thumbs down brings negativity and hate in an easy way.
Just from looking, a post can have no likes or very little replies which could indicate people didn’t like the post without actually saying anything. People would have to put in effort to type their dislike, easily exposing their dislike. I could see the psychology in not having a dislike button.
Reddit has some nice places for some niche topics/subjects, I enjoy it on that level. I think my biggest issue with Reddit isn’t with the voting system, but how most new threads live and die over (at best) a 24-hour cycle.
This is primarily why I like old-fashioned forums like this one, conversations have days to breathe, people can take pause to reflect on the topic at hand, this alone can mean less impulsive/emotional posting. Topic longevity also allows for the kind of discussion that can lead to posters changing their mind about an issue.
Reddit is what it is, a good aggregator of information, and it is useful for technical advice, as there are many skilled people there who share their knowledge freely, but like all things, you still need to do your homework and not take any advice at face value.
A sibling of mine who loves Instagram perhaps summed up Reddit well, “It looks like it is just comments?” An assessment that is a little unfair, but not terribly off the mark.
I don’t visit reddit for general comments but instead real time troubleshooting and headlines. Every morning I open up the bookmark folder containing 50 different categories and and just scan through the titles over the next minute or so. If there’s anything interesting I open up a link for later but unfortunately sometimes I don’t read these for a full week so tabs keep piling up.
