Is Reddit A Good Platform for PoE Players?

Now, PoE Forum and Reddit are two major platforms PoE players are quiet familiar with. Both of the platforms are full of posts about information, official news, guides and comments related to PoE. Most of PoE players choose to communicate with others on these platforms. However, there is a big difference between them: PoE Forum is a platform held by the official while the Reddit is a third party platform. So recently a debate on whether Reddit is a good platform for PoE Players has raised many people's attention. Views vary from person to person. Below we show your players' opinions. 

 

 

Some people pointed out the advantages of Reddit: 

 

First, Reddit has rich content because much information are posted by PoE players on Reddit everyday, which offer players wider vision. On the contrary, the update of posts on PoE Forum is relatively left-behind and after-thought by comparison. 

 

Second, the upvote mechanism. Prioritization of topics can be recognized easily through the upvote mechanism. This allows devs to know what's perceived is more important thus helping devs to answer the question from players and receive the feedback. That is good for the improvement of the game.

 

Third, threaded conversations. Within a topic, you can have different conversations responding to specific people on subtopics or tangents, which is very convenient for people to look through information.

 

Fourth, the preference of GGG. GGG seems to be glad to endorse Reddit over their own forums and it is more active on Reddit than on PoE Forum.

 

However, the disadvantages of Reddit were also be criticized. The cons are as follows:

 

First, vote manipulation. There's no accountability, since account creation is easy. Certain Twitch streamers have used this to their advantage - despite the sub being generally conversation heavy, certain streamers have high upvote posts with zero discussion. The same services are used to downvote other content creators.

 

Second, mod abuse. The previous and current moderator set had been largely reasonable. However, it takes just one overzealous and immature moderator to ruin the system. One person has been selectively enforcing rules, and occasionally shadow banning people and removing comments and overriding other mod objections in the process. People get banned for light sarcasm, other people are allowed to harass and have their hate-filled commentary upheld because that mod seems to agree with the virulence. The censorship and harassment

 

Third, Reddit is a third party. It is a third party site with volunteer moderators which sometimes rivals the official site for news and announcements. When a game actually relies on them, it places entirely too much power in the wrong hands. GGG doesn't have the ability to exert any influence on how participants are treated, which is dangerous.

 

Fourth, Reddit is like a social media. Some information it provides to players are not so related or useful to PoE players. On social media like Reddit, quality of news go down because people watch the stream of the useless going in and out their ears while quality news content is down prioritized for flashy headlines and popular opinions.

 

In fact, Reddit, built for in-the-moment style, lends itself nicely to quick reply and answer, which is better than PoE Forum. However, PoE Forum, built for prolonged conversation, is much better for patch notes and overall organization. You don't really get a chronological layout on Reddit. Reddit has its cons as well as pros, so does everything in the world. 

 

As far as I am concerned, a good platform means that specific employee preference and player saturation play into it, and important information should absolutely be in front of player's eyes wherever they are. The primary hurdle at that point is to ensure meaningful organizational information (re:official announcements, patches, etc) are always available on the primary website. The secondary hurdle is proper moderation when spread so thin over all of the outlets. We can say Reddit is not bad but it has to fix some problems after being fully satisfied by most people.