"Trolling the trolls" is a very stupid euphemism. The mainstream media is losing all credibility built in the past decades and seems to not be able to figure out how to halt the proccess (while changing nothing about the "values" [and people] they protect).
Top down narrative. Reddit CEO didn't troll the trolls, it was a huge mistake that can put in check the entire company. TechCrunch could write 99 better stories about this issue than this piece of propaganda.
It also reminds me Hillary campaign (and their MSM friends) calling half of US voters deplorable.
That's very childish and lame for Steve Huffman to say "Ellen wasn't the first Reddit engineer, so she probably lacked the expertise to do it, and even if she did, she was smart enough to not".
I cannot understand how the board hasn't dismissed him over the comment editing subterfuge. It's simply not how a CEO should behave. No matter what is being said about him.
Basically, by not firing him, the board is sending a message. It is saying that 1. The platform and it's comments cannot be trusted. and 2. That it's ok for employees to surreptitiously edit comments. If the CEO did it and didn't get fired, then how could they fire a lower level employee for doing it?
The CEO has set the standard through his own behaviour. And that is now the culture of reddit. By not dismissing the CEO, the board has sent the message that they accept this behaviour.
I think you're misreading this. I understand it to mean: "She didn't have the technical knowledge of the internals nor the past experience of doing such hacks to do this"
This is a good time to mention the https://archive.is/9RFIp fiasco (I think there is another example just after she left Reddit). I am thinking of Yishan-style CEOs seriously now, including in public companies too. As another example, here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11666857
He's saying, "Ellen probably didn't know how to edit any comment on reddit, but she was smarter than me anyway and wouldn't have done it in the first place."
Sounds like you're reading more into it than he said. I didn't hear him say "she's not smart enough to do it", I heard "she didn't write the code so she's not intimitely familiar with how to exploit it". Hell, he even closed with a compliment: if she does know, she's not as stupid as I am.
I would hardly call this an apology. Also kind-of bold of him to use this as a platform to implement new abusive rules. I don't like the subreddit, but selective enforcement and targeting a single community is very toxic to what little trust I had left in the reddit admins.
The problem is they aren't their own little community. They actively target, brigade (large group upvoting/downvoting), and intentionally troll other communities with their only goal being to fuck with people and overwhelmingly push their rhetoric.
Reddit strives to have a positive community and when you let the trolls run the system, you end up with an utter cesspool (e.g. https://voat.co/), and that kills your company's value.
Reddit (nor Twitter) is under no obligation to be a platform for free speech, and it's completely within their right to dictate who gets to participate and what they're allowed to discuss.
If that is true, then they should present evidence of such action and ban it! Applying rules with extremely heavy discrimination is never the way to manage a community.
They have, overwhelmingly. The problem is it's an anonymous platform and bans are irrelevant for most internet users today. This was all nicely summarized by John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory in 2004.
I think they wish they could but are avoiding doing that if they can due to the (much more) immense backlash that would ensue. Which seems, well, reasonable to me.
Was not familiar with the theory - I disagree with it. This site is a wonderful example of the opposite. My experience with reddit (6+ year old account, at this point) is that, just like in life, most people on reddit are fine. The illusion of toxicity comes from a large vocal minority.
HN isn't really. Take any thread which talks politics and you'll notice it gets flagged, removed very quickly. HN works because it's heavily moderated. It's the equivalent of "No politics discussion!" instilled by many American families over this Thanksgiving.
Even with the tech topics: Try talking about the positives of PHP and you'll also see this community has a lot of hostility beneath the surface.
HN has made me leave several times for being so god damned ridiculous. We're not special. Wander into any Apple, Google, or Microsoft thread and watch the idiocy. Or anything to do with poliics (not even US politics, I've seen so many flame wars about countries I didn't even know existed).
> they should present evidence of such action and ban it!
How would they do that adequately without a public display of user activity?
> Applying rules with extremely heavy discrimination is never the way to manage a community.
It's less than ideal but when the targeted group seeks to ultimately control or destroy your platform then what you have is a cancer that will spread unless it's removed.
> They actively target, brigade (large group upvoting/downvoting), and intentionally troll other communities with their only goal being to fuck with people and overwhelmingly push their rhetoric.
[citation needed]
I'm there every day and I don't know about that, quite the opposite.
We don't link outside the sub, heck we are not even allowed to mention /r/politics in post titles under threat from Reddit admins. It is now know as /r/[redacted] for that reason.
> Centipede Central is the chat Reddit is referring to—a chat room within the Slack-like Discord program ... its users have encouraged the harassment of other moderators, artificially inflated the vote count on posts, rigged off-Reddit polls, and posted John Podesta’s personal Netflix login information for the chat’s 1000+ members to use at will.
/r/all is now a safe space for people who can't handle seeing certain text !!
And the stupidest part is : Reddit is a commercial enterprise.
300k t_d subscribers. Instead of embracing a customer base and working out how to profit from it, he's pissed everybody off my repeatedly kicking the nest. Either directly or by letting CTR take over r/politics. They should have had a sales team focussing directly upon us and building an income stream. Instead they've generated a whole bunch of people who actively boycott buying Reddit Gold, will never click on your ads, even in other subreddits.
What would you give for 300k high energy cross demographic customers with a tight focus on conservatism. I wouldn't be giving them annoyance and grief.
"Front Page of the Internet" is the greatest joke of all
What's there? For the citation, ask any mod of a decently large non-pro-altright subreddit. I've personally witnessed it in several gaming subreddit (/r/hearthstone, /r/overwatch) but the mods pretty quickly crack down on it.
I have tried on many occasions to read posts on that sub but I found the hatred, the ALL CAPS, the doublethink and the crushing of any dissent nauseating. For example, members of that sub demonised a pizzeria owner with no evidence whatsoever, spreading lies and harassing him and anyone tangentially related to him. This incident is only the most recent one, by no means the worst.
What do you love about it that makes you go there everyday?
For example, members of that sub demonised a pizzeria owner with no evidence whatsoever
I'm guessing that you say that based mostly on media coverage like the recent New York Times article? I think Scott Adams (author of Dilbert) has a more accurate view, which is that there is in fact a mountain of "obvious" evidence, but despite this almost all the connections and conclusions are likely false. I think it's worth the time to contrast his view with the "no evidence whatsoever" explanation that most of the media has taken: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/153821538056/about-pizzagate.
Would you be satisfied if I amended "no evidence" to "no credible evidence"? Because that's how I see it. I didn't see a single valid thing being said throughout that fiasco.
Could you elaborate? What are these coincidences and what is remarkable about them? And please don't say "read the emails!" or "watch David Seaman!" like the others.
I'll give you one example. And remember, this is a timeline, not working backwards from JP is a paedo. I'm not adding credence to the claims, but they are remarkable coincidences. The sort which would get a visit from the police if it was me and my brother.
You read JP's emails for political reasons, you find known paedo / child trafficing jargon in them (Cheese Pizza is Child Porn, various flavours of food describe children etc.). So you dig a bit deeper and then you look at this photo [1] where they look very similar to the police wanted images of Madeline McCann. Wow that's weird.
So you look at his email and find that at the time of the abduction, JP is out of the country and someone else is replying to his emails for him, something that doesn't happen regularly.
And then you find he is friends with suspected paedophile Clement Freud, who lives 1/3 of a mile from where the McCanns were staying. [2] And that they knew each other.
I think this is good example: if one accepts all these pieces as true, this counts as credible evidence. But the ones that are most certain aren't that damaging, and the ones that are most damaging (I don't think) are that certain.
Jumping to the most damaging, the second article you link says "One of our FBI insiders can confirmed the Intelligence community indicates John and Tony Podesta were in Praia da Luz, Portugal on May 3rd 2007– the day Madaline McCann vanished. The Podesta brothers were staying with a friend named “Clem”."
So far as I can tell, other than this assertion, there has been no evidence uncovered that the either Podesta brother was in Portugal at the time of the girl's disappearance. You reduce the article's claim that "they were staying a friend named "Clem" to saying only that they knew each other, but I haven't seen any proof of even this level of association.
As 'nindalf' asks, how do you balance the goal of finding the truth with the responsibility to avoid terrible damage to a innocent person's reputation based on something that (at this point) is based largely on trusting an unaccountable anonymous source?
I'm 'satisfied' that you seem to have to have considered Adams' argument, even if you then reject it. It takes significant good will just to read a suggested link, so I thank you.
Saying "no credible evidence" might technically be correct, but I don't think it explains why some people are so convinced that the evidence is conclusive. I think it's more accurate to say that some of the evidence appears credible, but the conclusion is unsupported because of the biased manner in which the evidence was collected.
I agree with Adams when he says "Confirmation bias looks EXACTLY LIKE a mountain of real evidence. And let me be super-clear here. When I say it looks exactly the same, I am not exaggerating. I mean there is no way to tell the difference." And I think he's right that other aspects of the political divide may have similar origins.
Where _is_ this evidence? I've actually read some of the articles and everyone seems to make vague references to "mountains" of evidence, but there doesn't seem to be any. I read your comment, I read your article, I still can't find anything apart from "its all there in the emails!"
Here's one article with surprisingly good grammar - http://therightstuff.biz/2016/11/27/pizzagate-2/. His evidence? NYT and WaPo are defending a pizza shop owner. Why would they stake their credibility on defending an insignificant pizza shop owner? Clearly there must be something afoot! Add it to the mountain of evidence!
Right now, I'm putting you on the spot. Come up with something even halfway credible.
I agree, it's tough to come up with anything stands alone as even halfway credible.
Most of it is persuasive only if you already hold a particular set of beliefs. For example, if you are a conservative Christian (I am not) showing that Podesta participates in (arguably) Satanic rituals is credible evidence that he more likely to abuse children. Is it "evidence" that his brother has risqué art depicting children on his walls? Yes, if you believe that only a pedophile would possess such art, or condone someone else's possession of such. I believe these conclusions are wrong, but are logical within a particular moral framework (that I don't share). So without knowing your beliefs, I may not be able to come up with anything that you view as credible.
For me, I find the NYT's portrayal of Alefantis as "just a pizza store owner" to be sufficiently disingenuous to be of note. Regular pizza store owners don't get listed as one of GQ's 50 Most Powerful People in DC. Alefantis was the romantic partner of David Brock (the founder of Correct the Record) and was a losing co-defendant with Brock in a lawsuit characterized as "blackmail". If you start with suspicions about someone, and then later find that someone has been successfully sued another party threatening to "spill the beans", I think this is weak but credible evidence that your suspicions may be justified.
Last, I think that the discovery of prior accusations of Podesta's involvement in pedophilia is relevant. A year before his death, Andrew Breitbart tweeted that Podesta was a "world class underage sex slave op cover-upperer": https://twitter.com/AndrewBreitbart/status/33636278100561920. As an accusation without proof, it means very little, but if an independent path leads to the same conclusion, it becomes stronger. Still weak, still circumstantial, but if the discovery was truly independent, it seems like enough of a coincidence to justify looking closer.
But yeah, I find all the evidence to be weak and circumstantial. With a different set of beliefs/prejudices -- or if you have a strong intuition for the power of confirmation bias -- coincidence is the best explanation. But I think it's worth trying to understand why a subset of people genuinely do find the evidence to be credible, even if it's not.
> it's tough to come up with anything stands alone as even halfway credible.
Thanks for your candid response. We're both agreed that the evidence is highly circumstantial and its maybe worth a second look if the police have some slack. However, amongst many online communities, this circumstantial evidence was enough to start a witch hunt, harassing and intimidating people who just work at a restaurant, serving food.
The issue is that when we say "look maybe something is there, there's no smoke without fire", it encourages exactly those people who verbally and physically intimidate innocent people. The more responsible thing to do would be to say "guys, pipe down. There might be something here but its innocent until proven guilty".
This isn't what's happening, and they don't have the same conciliatory, nuanced approach you're taking. That saddens me.
Downvotes are not citations, but citations are, and when you ask for and receive citations and then pretend they don't exist you get downvoted.
(Admittedly I don't know the order of your downvotes, your edit, and the replies to your comment, but this is a pattern that happens all discussions about that subreddit. "There's no evidence for X" posters maintain their stance by simply ignoring all the evidence that gets readily supplied. It's absolutely infuriating to deal with.)
"The problem is they aren't their own little community. They actively target, brigade (large group upvoting/downvoting), and intentionally troll other communities with their only goal being to fuck with people and overwhelmingly push their rhetoric."
If you post something that doesn't conform to the current left-leaning narrative, you will be down voted by massive amounts of users because of your beliefs.
I don't see much difference than these brigades. Except it's done by 75% of the community, rather than the bottom 1%. A minority subreddit is being discriminated against and blamed for all of the bad behavior on Reddit.
I suppose the CEO isn't all that much different that the people on the alt-right.
"Reddit strives to have a positive community and when you let the trolls run the system"
Yeah, well, if this is really the case and not just a childish political stunt, why are only Trump-related groups targeted?
I'm really tired of a 'positive community' being used an excuse to stifle opposing political opinions. It's becoming really clear that it only has to do with politics based on the abhorrent behavior of site owners and moderators (the CEO purposely altered user comments that he doesn't like. He should have been fired on the spot).
"Reddit (nor Twitter) is under no obligation to be a platform for free speech, and it's completely within their right to dictate who gets to participate and what they're allowed to discuss."
So it's fine for private organizations to discriminate against people simply based on their political beliefs? Do you really want to live in a world where this is accepted?
I find that this is being used an excuse to silence divisive political viewpoints and left-leaning organizations are purging their sites of anyone that disagrees with them.
Most left-leaning media sites have banned all comments for exactly this reason.
Lately, the only sites that are truly free are the right-leaning ones. Fox news, for instance, doesn't ban anyone for merely stating a political opinion...unless you are harassing other users (stating an opinion isn't harassment).
The irony is that people voted Trump because of this behavior by the media (which has slowly been getting worse since the 90s). Continuing to do this will not only create more of a divided nation, but many will be more likely to re-elect Trump.
> So it's fine for private organizations to discriminate against people simply based on their political beliefs? Do you really want to live in a world where this is accepted?
An employee who keeps on yelling, throwing stuff around, harassing people and disrupting the workplace should be warned and eventually kicked out. Political views have absolutely nothing to do with this.
The extremists minority are being used as an excuse to go after anyone with a certain political view.
If this weren't the case, why isn't Reddit and Twitter banning the countless examples of left-wing extremists harassing and abusing people just as badly?
I think abusers and harassers should be kicked out, but Trump winning the election has brought out the true colors in many business owners and other people that would rather use their power for personal grudges.
This might be cynical, but I'm not sure it's possible to have an online community that doesn't function this way, more or less.
I think there's a general law of online communities: so long as there are rules of any kind, there will always be users who push into the gray area (e.g. by finding ways to follow the letter but not the intent), and then keep pushing until stopped(). The moderator is then always left with the choice between punishing only the bad actors (which will be interpreted as selective enforcement or unfair targeting), or changing the rules to make things stricter for everyone (disallowing behavior that wasn't causing problems apart from the bad actors).
() I read once in a parenting guide that children crave boundaries, and tend to escalate bad behavior until punishment occurs in order to establish where the boundaries are. Probably there's an analogy to be made there.
Reddit already has a history of killing subs it doesn't like via 'quarantine' or outright bans.
"Restrictions on a quarantined community include:
Requiring an account with a verified email address
Requiring an explicit opt-in
No custom images
Will generate no revenue, including ads or Reddit Gold"
Reddit is a business, not a bastion of free speech. They have killed communities for less than what The_Donald was doing. I'll let you speculate on the motives (:
I don't really want to comment - but I'd just say to anyone (including the writer of this article) to imagine someone artificially limiting the impact of your favorite platform of free expression.
Hell just turn the mental corner and consider your arguments FOR net neutrality. Or try to recall your disappointment every time you read about some site being banned in China or Iran.
To China and Iran - facebook is a "disruptive community." To use reddit's language.
Its a sad moment in history that the people calling themselves liberals don't actually know what it means.
It's more along the lines of fixing a bug in the system. It's not about flushing out an ideology like TD wants you to think. They're exploiting Reddits code to have more weight than similarly sized communities. Reddit is balancing that.
It has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with these guys actively exploiting the voting system.
I don't buy the argument that they are exploiting anything - but I do recognize that their community is very overly active but I wouldn't call that exploiting
The vote totals aren't anything like any other subreddit has been. They were also using the pinning in a way no other subreddit did.
Just google – the_donald upvote script – to get an idea. Several tools were released for users to upvote or downvote everything targeting a subreddit or user. It's a sort of grassroots vote manipulation scheme.
Well I could write a r/hillaryclinton upvote script and post on gists in a few minutes - doesn't really prove anything. The only people who could have real evidence of rule breaking would be the admins and from the little we know we know the admins hate TD - if they are being botted they'd be gone already
You could; I'm not talking about the existence of such things but the prevalence. There probably wasn't much blatant botting, but a lot of mild botting which is much more difficult to detect and lives in a grey area.
One of the issues the admins were upset about was pizzagate. Basically they found some emails where Podesta mentioned pizza and cheese. So after a lot of time investigating they decided that Podesta and Clinton were deeply involved in a child sex trafficking ring centered a local D.C. pizzeria. There was an NYtimes story about how the owners been receiving death threats. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/technology/fact-check-this....
This whole witch hunt/conspiracy started and kept going with trolls from the_donald. People getting death threats from getting doxxed on reddit threads should not happen.
Also, during this trolls kept accusing spez of being a pedophile. While changing user comments is extremely inappropriate, I think that the_donald has some extremely toxic trolls. So I'm definitely ok with reddit admins shutting some of that activity down. I would have found it completely understandable if reddit had shut the_donald down with that with the whole pizzagate thing. But that sub has a ton of activity with a lot of politically active posters, and so I don't think reddit really wants to shut it down.
My buddy got doxxed and harassed by those the_donald pizzagate folks. reddit shut down the pizzagate subreddit (constantly posting personal information for the_donald fans to call/email/text to harass) but allowed the_donald to persist.
The counterargument is that loopholes in the mechanics allowed the community in question to artificially limit the impact of everyone else's favorite platform of free expression. The charitable view is to call what's being done a bandaid to fix a broken mechanic.
It's also not an understatement to say that the level of rule-breaking (doxxing, vote brigading, abuse, etc) from the community, sanctioned (or at least not nearly adequately curtailed) by its moderators, is probably justifiably grounds for banning the whole community (since it's failing to self-moderate) but that can't really happen because it would cause a much larger and more problematic fallout.
The last sentence of your comment is ignorant and needlessly incendiary. I'm sure you'll find that the people you're talking about probably do know what it means. You can disagree with "people who identify as liberals but argue for different actions based on their best judgment than you do" (and there's plenty of fruitful discussions and arguments to be had around those judgments), without snidely saying that they're ignorant schmucks who've lost track of their purpose.
It's pretty clearly explained in Spez's post that it's a loophole, not a bug. The loophole is that there's an override for how sticky posts show in /all, used to elevate topical events -- which was being abused, against the spirit of the override, by pretty much only that one subreddit, for different purposes. There is probably a technical solution to this but it's probably complicated and this bandaid gets the job done for now.
I disagree. I don't think it crosses the line. But that's a value judgment, I guess, so there's not a lot of point arguing it out.
I especially think it was acceptable because it solves the urgent problem with a quick solution, whereas a technical solution would take a lot longer, and I do strongly believe that the problem was very urgent.
Trouble is that too is your opinion. As a frequent of r/all after the first TD purge I see 2-3 TD links there a day. Nothing so outrageous.
It kind of bothers me that people let companies like facebook, twitter, google, reddit, etc push their agendas and bury conservative news. Recent data suggests facebook "fake news" alone could have swung the election. Social media being the primary source of news these days.
I'm all for these platforms having the right the police their own site - but they have to be open and honest about it. Otherwise you end up with conspiracy theories going viral making one side super pissed and willing to elect Donald Trump over the beneficiary of what they perceive massive conspiracy to silence people.
I think it's a bit of a stretch to say this is burying conservative news, it's more like burying conservative meme-spamming. Especially because, well, now TD is going to be able to get on the page the same way every other subreddit normally does, which seems.. almost.. fair?
Certainly if you turn your head one way it's fair.
It's not inherently discriminatory for one-of-two political camps to have behavior that breaks the intended functionality of a platform and necessitates a response. You can argue that in this case it was, and that's fine, but I disagree.
Would it appease you if r/politics or a hillary subreddit had the same treatment? It wouldn't change anything but at least it would 'feel better'?
And I'd like to point out that one reason I'm defending spez and the reddit admins on this is that I think they've been extremely open and honest about it (barring the one idiotic mistake of Spez's). I like the guy because his admin posts have none of the veneer of bullshit that literally-every-CEO's has (ie Zuckerberg's "our mission is to bring the world together" drivel). It's super candid; he answers every question, even the sensitive ones; he's very open about mistakes and changes and motivations. It's rare for a company to display it and I value it highly.
I totally agree that doing special-case stuff to a community already obsessed with conspiracy theories about censorship is maybe a bad move, but I also think it's justifiable and probably justified. And also, there are tons of worse moves, in the game of not-pissing-everyone-off, in a generally shitty situation (such as banning the whole subreddit).
No what would appease practically everyone would be if r/all - the "frontpage of the internet" - had clearly defined rules as to what that means. Is it a collection of top up-voted content from a collection of subreddits? Apparently not due to this and other "algorithm changes."
Take twitter shadow banning people as its an easier example.
The rules of twitter are simple - someone tweets and it gets put at the top of a follower's feed. This is accepted as "the truth of twitter." When this truth is altered and all of a sudden some individual's tweets are NOT showing up in follower's feed people should be rightly pissed. No matter who the target is - because the accepted rules of the platform have been twisted to push an agenda. It is no different than propaganda and an insult to free expression.
> If you turn your head one way it's fair
Anyone can certainly justify anything if they are willing to turn their head with the breeze. I would point out the blatant mod and brigading bias in r/politics as an example of something you as a presumed liberal should be equally mad about. The content there is laughable and part of the reason why people even subscribe to the TD to get what little news is there.
Reddit has a problem - and its been written about before. Mods are dictators of their own communities and have complete control to push their own agendas within places that should be neutral. I don't see much of a future for the platform if this is not solved.
Re the first paragraph: your "apparently not" is incorrect. This change helps restore it to being a collection of top up-voted content from a collection of subreddits, where previously it was not following that as much, due to the special-treatment of sticky posts.
I don't like the bias in r/politics, but I don't think it's nearly as bad. Certainly not equal.
I meant "turn your head" in the sense that there are two palatable perspectives and they can be sort-of chosen between. It's not taking on any perspective without discrimination.
I agree with your last paragraph, except that I don't think it impacts the 'future' that much; I think reddit will go on existing even if it's not solved and still be about as popular as it is. It's a small but vocal minority who care deeply enough about it to actually quit.
[this dictator-mod problem is huge in my city's subreddit, r/seattle; a competitor (r/seattleWa) recently emerged and everyone jumped ship because the mods of the first were so awful and refused to relinquish power. So I certainly agree this is an issue.]
> To China and Iran - facebook is a "disruptive community." To use reddit's language.
There is a vast difference between the government banning you and reddit banning you (which they are not actually doing here, but for the sake of argument).
You have the right to free expression. You do not have the right to free expression on someone else's platform. reddit is not the Internet - if reddit does not like what you say, you can set up your own space on the Internet. If the government does not like what you say, then there is literally no legal alternative. That's the difference.
Oh, and stop confusing net neutrality with this issue. It's not the same.
Fiber lines are someone else's platform. If Comcast was limiting access to huffingtonpost.com it would be their right as its their platform.
I don't think I'm confusing anything.
> There is a vast difference between the government banning you and reddit banning you (which they are not actually doing here, but for the sake of argument).
It isn't all about public vs private. There is another frame to view this subject in which is shared culture.
In China the majority of those running the firms agree with the government's positions on Internet use.
In the USA, Washington and large parts of the media have identical political perspectives.
The problem with this is insidious. Where you're surrounded by like minded people you grow kinds of assumptions that in another context are absolutely crazy.
Recently for example I heard a university professor claim biological sex does not exist. Further he claimed all scientists believe that biological sex does not exist.
This tends to happen in groups where dissenting opinion has been culled. Isolation does not generate balanced perspective.
> You do not have the right to free expression on someone else's platform. reddit is not the Internet
The problem with this reasoning is that the entire Net is private. The feeling of the public sphere is a kind of collective illusion similar to how we perceive the Net to be a 'space'.
I would hope that doesn't mean the use of a server doesn't have to be contingent on what political views I held yesterday or today.
Calling people you disagree with "trolls" and dismissing censoring as just "trolling" is a poor attempt at an apology. And that's coming from someone who hates /r/the_donald.
There were a lot of comments whos only content was "fuck u/spez". I saw quite a few and I don't subscribe to the donald. This is obviously not constructive commenting, its just plain abuse. If you insult the donald mods you'll be instantly banned (from the subreddit), so it's not like the subreddit should find banning users for abuse strange.
Calling trolls 'trolls' is pretty reasonable, though, so what you're really saying is that you don't think they're trolls, whereas other people do? We could run a poll or something to find out, or listen to arguments from both sides, to get to the bottom of that.
I don't want to do that. I just want to highlight that it is very plausible that many people view them as trolls. Not because of their views, because of their behavior (there are thousands examples, right?). So then we have a problem --
If your default stance when someone disagrees with you (about whether the word 'troll' is fair here) is asserting that they're manipulating language for political reasons, when there's clearly a very reasonable argument for the use of that language (whether or not you accept it, you have to agree there's an argument), then you're committing the same crime they are - manipulating language to unfairly vilify them.
reddit does not owe alt-right assholes a zero-dollar platform to have a free forum.
If alt right people want to run their own web forum they are more than welcome to find sufficient technical clue to rent a $250/mo dedicated server and install some http/https based forum software on it.
people cry "censorship", but it's a private company, and if you're paying $0 they don't owe you anything. Set up your own system if you don't like what their management is doing. You'd think that ultra right wingers, of all people, would appreciate the irony of depending on somebody else's free forum because they're too lazy, incompetent or feckless to do it themselves.
This isn't about left or right, it's about a CEO censoring opinions that he doesn't agree with. If it helps you understand, pretend he censored Hillary or Bernie supporters.
It's not a CEO censoring anything, it's a subreddit of people who troll for the lulz having a minuscule example of their own tactics turned around upon them, for the fleeting amusement of somebody with admin access on the servers.
Nothing new and nobody should be surprised. Over 5 years ago I moderated a community that had extensive problems with a subset of very problematic users. This lead to real world problems and ultimately intervention from local law enforcement.
It was during this time that I learned the admin team dealt with these times of users by working, not dealing, with them.
It became evident that [a]dmins had been tipping off these users, keeping them one step ahead. As these admins were called out they would fall silent and the cycle would begin again.
* The steps to allow for censorship in the software and diminish the visibility of asshattery is a necessary thing.
* It is unfortunate that it wasn't done before.
* It is a pattern that has repeated itself many times over the decades.
* Read A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy.
* Web 2.0 puts too much work on too few people.
Long version:
One of the talks that was passed around (I think it was Everything2 that introduced me to it, but I could be wrong) is A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy ( http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html ). This goes to the problems and some necessary designs for social software - reddit is one such example.
The story in that talk that this current episode reminds me of is that of Communitree:
----
> Communitree was founded on the principles of open access and free dialogue. "Communitree" -- the name just says "California in the Seventies." And the notion was, effectively, throw off structure and new and beautiful patterns will arise.
> And, indeed, as anyone who has put discussion software into groups that were previously disconnected has seen, that does happen. Incredible things happen. The early days of Echo, the early days of usenet, the early days of Lucasfilms Habitat, over and over again, you see all this incredible upwelling of people who suddenly are connected in ways they weren't before.
> And then, as time sets in, difficulties emerge. In this case, one of the difficulties was occasioned by the fact that one of the institutions that got hold of some modems was a high school. And who, in 1978, was hanging out in the room with the computer and the modems in it, but the boys of that high school. And the boys weren't terribly interested in sophisticated adult conversation. They were interested in fart jokes. They were interested in salacious talk. They were interested in running amok and posting four-letter words and nyah-nyah-nyah, all over the bulletin board.
> And the adults who had set up Communitree were horrified, and overrun by these students. The place that was founded on open access had too much open access, too much openness. They couldn't defend themselves against their own users. The place that was founded on free speech had too much freedom. They had no way of saying "No, that's not the kind of free speech we meant."
> But that was a requirement. In order to defend themselves against being overrun, that was something that they needed to have that they didn't have, and as a result, they simply shut the site down.
----
To me, Reddit is facing this exact same problem. It wants to be a place for free speech, but the right type of free speech. It also hasn't designed the necessary infrastructure of code to allow the community of not t_d to defend itself and maintain the type of content that that core community wants.
And thus, backchannel slack channels to try to get people to tone it down a bit - because the software didn't support the necessary structures to prevent it from happening.
That passage quoted above goes on:
> Now you could ask whether or not the founders' inability to defend themselves from this onslaught, from being overrun, was a technical or a social problem. Did the software not allow the problem to be solved? Or was it the social configuration of the group that founded it, where they simply couldn't stomach the idea of adding censorship to protect their system. But in a way, it doesn't matter, because technical and social issues are deeply intertwined. There's no way to completely separate them.
> What matters is, a group designed this and then was unable, in the context they'd set up, partly a technical and partly a social context, to save it from this attack from within. And attack from within is what matters. Communitree wasn't shut down by people trying to crash or syn-flo...
98 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 191 ms ] threadIt also reminds me Hillary campaign (and their MSM friends) calling half of US voters deplorable.
Seems like a (mild) form of trolling to me.
In this case it would be appropriate to put quotation marks in the article title.
I think this guy needs to grow up.
Basically, by not firing him, the board is sending a message. It is saying that 1. The platform and it's comments cannot be trusted. and 2. That it's ok for employees to surreptitiously edit comments. If the CEO did it and didn't get fired, then how could they fire a lower level employee for doing it?
The CEO has set the standard through his own behaviour. And that is now the culture of reddit. By not dismissing the CEO, the board has sent the message that they accept this behaviour.
Reddit strives to have a positive community and when you let the trolls run the system, you end up with an utter cesspool (e.g. https://voat.co/), and that kills your company's value.
Reddit (nor Twitter) is under no obligation to be a platform for free speech, and it's completely within their right to dictate who gets to participate and what they're allowed to discuss.
Even with the tech topics: Try talking about the positives of PHP and you'll also see this community has a lot of hostility beneath the surface.
How would they do that adequately without a public display of user activity?
> Applying rules with extremely heavy discrimination is never the way to manage a community.
It's less than ideal but when the targeted group seeks to ultimately control or destroy your platform then what you have is a cancer that will spread unless it's removed.
[citation needed]
I'm there every day and I don't know about that, quite the opposite.
We don't link outside the sub, heck we are not even allowed to mention /r/politics in post titles under threat from Reddit admins. It is now know as /r/[redacted] for that reason.
EDIT: downvotes are not citations
> Centipede Central is the chat Reddit is referring to—a chat room within the Slack-like Discord program ... its users have encouraged the harassment of other moderators, artificially inflated the vote count on posts, rigged off-Reddit polls, and posted John Podesta’s personal Netflix login information for the chat’s 1000+ members to use at will.
I am one of those who have never even heard of that chat room, nor visited. And I am on T_D all day long every day since February.
We have posts with 7k+ points and 56% upvoted.
https://i.redditmedia.com/RbqqP0Cpfs-o-B1DVWIwIqtUU8-dtxUahf...
If anyone is under attack, it is us.
Even the famous Ellen Pao thinks Spez made a huge mistake and says "I would have immiediately fired anyone did that [edited user posts]"
https://i.redditmedia.com/-VmuoYhuKv-Uj-Ild8_FAhGgQgXM68OsuN...
/r/all is now a safe space for people who can't handle seeing certain text !!
And the stupidest part is : Reddit is a commercial enterprise.
300k t_d subscribers. Instead of embracing a customer base and working out how to profit from it, he's pissed everybody off my repeatedly kicking the nest. Either directly or by letting CTR take over r/politics. They should have had a sales team focussing directly upon us and building an income stream. Instead they've generated a whole bunch of people who actively boycott buying Reddit Gold, will never click on your ads, even in other subreddits.
What would you give for 300k high energy cross demographic customers with a tight focus on conservatism. I wouldn't be giving them annoyance and grief.
"Front Page of the Internet" is the greatest joke of all
What do you love about it that makes you go there everyday?
I'm guessing that you say that based mostly on media coverage like the recent New York Times article? I think Scott Adams (author of Dilbert) has a more accurate view, which is that there is in fact a mountain of "obvious" evidence, but despite this almost all the connections and conclusions are likely false. I think it's worth the time to contrast his view with the "no evidence whatsoever" explanation that most of the media has taken: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/153821538056/about-pizzagate.
It might not be convincing and certainly not conclusive but there are a series of remarkable coincidences.
Could you elaborate? What are these coincidences and what is remarkable about them? And please don't say "read the emails!" or "watch David Seaman!" like the others.
You read JP's emails for political reasons, you find known paedo / child trafficing jargon in them (Cheese Pizza is Child Porn, various flavours of food describe children etc.). So you dig a bit deeper and then you look at this photo [1] where they look very similar to the police wanted images of Madeline McCann. Wow that's weird.
So you look at his email and find that at the time of the abduction, JP is out of the country and someone else is replying to his emails for him, something that doesn't happen regularly.
And then you find he is friends with suspected paedophile Clement Freud, who lives 1/3 of a mile from where the McCanns were staying. [2] And that they knew each other.
[1] http://www.thedailysheeple.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/20...
[2] http://victuruslibertas.com/2016/11/do-john-and-tony-podesta...
Jumping to the most damaging, the second article you link says "One of our FBI insiders can confirmed the Intelligence community indicates John and Tony Podesta were in Praia da Luz, Portugal on May 3rd 2007– the day Madaline McCann vanished. The Podesta brothers were staying with a friend named “Clem”."
So far as I can tell, other than this assertion, there has been no evidence uncovered that the either Podesta brother was in Portugal at the time of the girl's disappearance. You reduce the article's claim that "they were staying a friend named "Clem" to saying only that they knew each other, but I haven't seen any proof of even this level of association.
As 'nindalf' asks, how do you balance the goal of finding the truth with the responsibility to avoid terrible damage to a innocent person's reputation based on something that (at this point) is based largely on trusting an unaccountable anonymous source?
Saying "no credible evidence" might technically be correct, but I don't think it explains why some people are so convinced that the evidence is conclusive. I think it's more accurate to say that some of the evidence appears credible, but the conclusion is unsupported because of the biased manner in which the evidence was collected.
I agree with Adams when he says "Confirmation bias looks EXACTLY LIKE a mountain of real evidence. And let me be super-clear here. When I say it looks exactly the same, I am not exaggerating. I mean there is no way to tell the difference." And I think he's right that other aspects of the political divide may have similar origins.
Here's one article with surprisingly good grammar - http://therightstuff.biz/2016/11/27/pizzagate-2/. His evidence? NYT and WaPo are defending a pizza shop owner. Why would they stake their credibility on defending an insignificant pizza shop owner? Clearly there must be something afoot! Add it to the mountain of evidence!
Right now, I'm putting you on the spot. Come up with something even halfway credible.
Most of it is persuasive only if you already hold a particular set of beliefs. For example, if you are a conservative Christian (I am not) showing that Podesta participates in (arguably) Satanic rituals is credible evidence that he more likely to abuse children. Is it "evidence" that his brother has risqué art depicting children on his walls? Yes, if you believe that only a pedophile would possess such art, or condone someone else's possession of such. I believe these conclusions are wrong, but are logical within a particular moral framework (that I don't share). So without knowing your beliefs, I may not be able to come up with anything that you view as credible.
For me, I find the NYT's portrayal of Alefantis as "just a pizza store owner" to be sufficiently disingenuous to be of note. Regular pizza store owners don't get listed as one of GQ's 50 Most Powerful People in DC. Alefantis was the romantic partner of David Brock (the founder of Correct the Record) and was a losing co-defendant with Brock in a lawsuit characterized as "blackmail". If you start with suspicions about someone, and then later find that someone has been successfully sued another party threatening to "spill the beans", I think this is weak but credible evidence that your suspicions may be justified.
There are leaked Stratfor emails where Pizza appears to be the name of one of their projects: https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/13/1326067_testing-the-pi..., https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/13/1319020_pushing-pizza-.... This lends credibility to the idea that "pizza" might be a code word in emails like this: https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/23757. Personally, I read this as testament to the quality of New Haven's apizza (http://www.eater.com/2014/3/18/6264277/the-definitive-guide-...) but I can see why someone not familiar with foodie culture would have trouble taking Clinton's response literally.
Last, I think that the discovery of prior accusations of Podesta's involvement in pedophilia is relevant. A year before his death, Andrew Breitbart tweeted that Podesta was a "world class underage sex slave op cover-upperer": https://twitter.com/AndrewBreitbart/status/33636278100561920. As an accusation without proof, it means very little, but if an independent path leads to the same conclusion, it becomes stronger. Still weak, still circumstantial, but if the discovery was truly independent, it seems like enough of a coincidence to justify looking closer.
But yeah, I find all the evidence to be weak and circumstantial. With a different set of beliefs/prejudices -- or if you have a strong intuition for the power of confirmation bias -- coincidence is the best explanation. But I think it's worth trying to understand why a subset of people genuinely do find the evidence to be credible, even if it's not.
Thanks for your candid response. We're both agreed that the evidence is highly circumstantial and its maybe worth a second look if the police have some slack. However, amongst many online communities, this circumstantial evidence was enough to start a witch hunt, harassing and intimidating people who just work at a restaurant, serving food.
The issue is that when we say "look maybe something is there, there's no smoke without fire", it encourages exactly those people who verbally and physically intimidate innocent people. The more responsible thing to do would be to say "guys, pipe down. There might be something here but its innocent until proven guilty".
This isn't what's happening, and they don't have the same conciliatory, nuanced approach you're taking. That saddens me.
(Admittedly I don't know the order of your downvotes, your edit, and the replies to your comment, but this is a pattern that happens all discussions about that subreddit. "There's no evidence for X" posters maintain their stance by simply ignoring all the evidence that gets readily supplied. It's absolutely infuriating to deal with.)
Which is all chat from Moderators which openly want us banned. It is rather one sided because our mods didn't respond.
Gizmodo is owned by Univision Communications, not exactly objective.
If you post something that doesn't conform to the current left-leaning narrative, you will be down voted by massive amounts of users because of your beliefs.
I don't see much difference than these brigades. Except it's done by 75% of the community, rather than the bottom 1%. A minority subreddit is being discriminated against and blamed for all of the bad behavior on Reddit.
I suppose the CEO isn't all that much different that the people on the alt-right.
"Reddit strives to have a positive community and when you let the trolls run the system"
Yeah, well, if this is really the case and not just a childish political stunt, why are only Trump-related groups targeted?
I'm really tired of a 'positive community' being used an excuse to stifle opposing political opinions. It's becoming really clear that it only has to do with politics based on the abhorrent behavior of site owners and moderators (the CEO purposely altered user comments that he doesn't like. He should have been fired on the spot).
"Reddit (nor Twitter) is under no obligation to be a platform for free speech, and it's completely within their right to dictate who gets to participate and what they're allowed to discuss."
So it's fine for private organizations to discriminate against people simply based on their political beliefs? Do you really want to live in a world where this is accepted?
I find that this is being used an excuse to silence divisive political viewpoints and left-leaning organizations are purging their sites of anyone that disagrees with them.
Most left-leaning media sites have banned all comments for exactly this reason.
Lately, the only sites that are truly free are the right-leaning ones. Fox news, for instance, doesn't ban anyone for merely stating a political opinion...unless you are harassing other users (stating an opinion isn't harassment).
The irony is that people voted Trump because of this behavior by the media (which has slowly been getting worse since the 90s). Continuing to do this will not only create more of a divided nation, but many will be more likely to re-elect Trump.
An employee who keeps on yelling, throwing stuff around, harassing people and disrupting the workplace should be warned and eventually kicked out. Political views have absolutely nothing to do with this.
If this weren't the case, why isn't Reddit and Twitter banning the countless examples of left-wing extremists harassing and abusing people just as badly?
I think abusers and harassers should be kicked out, but Trump winning the election has brought out the true colors in many business owners and other people that would rather use their power for personal grudges.
It's pretty disgraceful.
I think there's a general law of online communities: so long as there are rules of any kind, there will always be users who push into the gray area (e.g. by finding ways to follow the letter but not the intent), and then keep pushing until stopped(). The moderator is then always left with the choice between punishing only the bad actors (which will be interpreted as selective enforcement or unfair targeting), or changing the rules to make things stricter for everyone (disallowing behavior that wasn't causing problems apart from the bad actors).
() I read once in a parenting guide that children crave boundaries, and tend to escalate bad behavior until punishment occurs in order to establish where the boundaries are. Probably there's an analogy to be made there.
"Restrictions on a quarantined community include:
Requiring an account with a verified email address Requiring an explicit opt-in No custom images Will generate no revenue, including ads or Reddit Gold"
This effectively kills subs unless it's lifted.
Subs targeted for this range from offensive to innocuous (E.g. freckles, female ejaculation, a racist anti-black community) https://www.reddit.com/r/GoldTesting/comments/3fxs3q/list_of...
Reddit is a business, not a bastion of free speech. They have killed communities for less than what The_Donald was doing. I'll let you speculate on the motives (:
To China and Iran - facebook is a "disruptive community." To use reddit's language.
Its a sad moment in history that the people calling themselves liberals don't actually know what it means.
It has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with these guys actively exploiting the voting system.
They're not attacking free expression but trying to reign in abuse of their platform.
Nobody really knows what "liberal" means because it's been used in several very opposite ways in different times and places.
Just google – the_donald upvote script – to get an idea. Several tools were released for users to upvote or downvote everything targeting a subreddit or user. It's a sort of grassroots vote manipulation scheme.
This whole witch hunt/conspiracy started and kept going with trolls from the_donald. People getting death threats from getting doxxed on reddit threads should not happen. Also, during this trolls kept accusing spez of being a pedophile. While changing user comments is extremely inappropriate, I think that the_donald has some extremely toxic trolls. So I'm definitely ok with reddit admins shutting some of that activity down. I would have found it completely understandable if reddit had shut the_donald down with that with the whole pizzagate thing. But that sub has a ton of activity with a lot of politically active posters, and so I don't think reddit really wants to shut it down.
It's also not an understatement to say that the level of rule-breaking (doxxing, vote brigading, abuse, etc) from the community, sanctioned (or at least not nearly adequately curtailed) by its moderators, is probably justifiably grounds for banning the whole community (since it's failing to self-moderate) but that can't really happen because it would cause a much larger and more problematic fallout.
The last sentence of your comment is ignorant and needlessly incendiary. I'm sure you'll find that the people you're talking about probably do know what it means. You can disagree with "people who identify as liberals but argue for different actions based on their best judgment than you do" (and there's plenty of fruitful discussions and arguments to be had around those judgments), without snidely saying that they're ignorant schmucks who've lost track of their purpose.
If there are bugs with the reddit platform that are being exploited, there would be no reason to "prevent stickied posts from showing on r/all"
But I think you knew that.
I especially think it was acceptable because it solves the urgent problem with a quick solution, whereas a technical solution would take a lot longer, and I do strongly believe that the problem was very urgent.
It kind of bothers me that people let companies like facebook, twitter, google, reddit, etc push their agendas and bury conservative news. Recent data suggests facebook "fake news" alone could have swung the election. Social media being the primary source of news these days.
I'm all for these platforms having the right the police their own site - but they have to be open and honest about it. Otherwise you end up with conspiracy theories going viral making one side super pissed and willing to elect Donald Trump over the beneficiary of what they perceive massive conspiracy to silence people.
Certainly if you turn your head one way it's fair.
It's not inherently discriminatory for one-of-two political camps to have behavior that breaks the intended functionality of a platform and necessitates a response. You can argue that in this case it was, and that's fine, but I disagree.
Would it appease you if r/politics or a hillary subreddit had the same treatment? It wouldn't change anything but at least it would 'feel better'?
And I'd like to point out that one reason I'm defending spez and the reddit admins on this is that I think they've been extremely open and honest about it (barring the one idiotic mistake of Spez's). I like the guy because his admin posts have none of the veneer of bullshit that literally-every-CEO's has (ie Zuckerberg's "our mission is to bring the world together" drivel). It's super candid; he answers every question, even the sensitive ones; he's very open about mistakes and changes and motivations. It's rare for a company to display it and I value it highly.
I totally agree that doing special-case stuff to a community already obsessed with conspiracy theories about censorship is maybe a bad move, but I also think it's justifiable and probably justified. And also, there are tons of worse moves, in the game of not-pissing-everyone-off, in a generally shitty situation (such as banning the whole subreddit).
Take twitter shadow banning people as its an easier example.
The rules of twitter are simple - someone tweets and it gets put at the top of a follower's feed. This is accepted as "the truth of twitter." When this truth is altered and all of a sudden some individual's tweets are NOT showing up in follower's feed people should be rightly pissed. No matter who the target is - because the accepted rules of the platform have been twisted to push an agenda. It is no different than propaganda and an insult to free expression.
> If you turn your head one way it's fair
Anyone can certainly justify anything if they are willing to turn their head with the breeze. I would point out the blatant mod and brigading bias in r/politics as an example of something you as a presumed liberal should be equally mad about. The content there is laughable and part of the reason why people even subscribe to the TD to get what little news is there.
Reddit has a problem - and its been written about before. Mods are dictators of their own communities and have complete control to push their own agendas within places that should be neutral. I don't see much of a future for the platform if this is not solved.
I don't like the bias in r/politics, but I don't think it's nearly as bad. Certainly not equal.
I meant "turn your head" in the sense that there are two palatable perspectives and they can be sort-of chosen between. It's not taking on any perspective without discrimination.
I agree with your last paragraph, except that I don't think it impacts the 'future' that much; I think reddit will go on existing even if it's not solved and still be about as popular as it is. It's a small but vocal minority who care deeply enough about it to actually quit.
[this dictator-mod problem is huge in my city's subreddit, r/seattle; a competitor (r/seattleWa) recently emerged and everyone jumped ship because the mods of the first were so awful and refused to relinquish power. So I certainly agree this is an issue.]
There is a vast difference between the government banning you and reddit banning you (which they are not actually doing here, but for the sake of argument).
You have the right to free expression. You do not have the right to free expression on someone else's platform. reddit is not the Internet - if reddit does not like what you say, you can set up your own space on the Internet. If the government does not like what you say, then there is literally no legal alternative. That's the difference.
Oh, and stop confusing net neutrality with this issue. It's not the same.
It isn't all about public vs private. There is another frame to view this subject in which is shared culture.
In China the majority of those running the firms agree with the government's positions on Internet use.
In the USA, Washington and large parts of the media have identical political perspectives.
The problem with this is insidious. Where you're surrounded by like minded people you grow kinds of assumptions that in another context are absolutely crazy.
Recently for example I heard a university professor claim biological sex does not exist. Further he claimed all scientists believe that biological sex does not exist.
This tends to happen in groups where dissenting opinion has been culled. Isolation does not generate balanced perspective.
> You do not have the right to free expression on someone else's platform. reddit is not the Internet
The problem with this reasoning is that the entire Net is private. The feeling of the public sphere is a kind of collective illusion similar to how we perceive the Net to be a 'space'.
I would hope that doesn't mean the use of a server doesn't have to be contingent on what political views I held yesterday or today.
I don't want to do that. I just want to highlight that it is very plausible that many people view them as trolls. Not because of their views, because of their behavior (there are thousands examples, right?). So then we have a problem --
If your default stance when someone disagrees with you (about whether the word 'troll' is fair here) is asserting that they're manipulating language for political reasons, when there's clearly a very reasonable argument for the use of that language (whether or not you accept it, you have to agree there's an argument), then you're committing the same crime they are - manipulating language to unfairly vilify them.
If alt right people want to run their own web forum they are more than welcome to find sufficient technical clue to rent a $250/mo dedicated server and install some http/https based forum software on it.
people cry "censorship", but it's a private company, and if you're paying $0 they don't owe you anything. Set up your own system if you don't like what their management is doing. You'd think that ultra right wingers, of all people, would appreciate the irony of depending on somebody else's free forum because they're too lazy, incompetent or feckless to do it themselves.
* The steps to allow for censorship in the software and diminish the visibility of asshattery is a necessary thing. * It is unfortunate that it wasn't done before. * It is a pattern that has repeated itself many times over the decades. * Read A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. * Web 2.0 puts too much work on too few people.
Long version:
One of the talks that was passed around (I think it was Everything2 that introduced me to it, but I could be wrong) is A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy ( http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html ). This goes to the problems and some necessary designs for social software - reddit is one such example.
The story in that talk that this current episode reminds me of is that of Communitree:
----
> Communitree was founded on the principles of open access and free dialogue. "Communitree" -- the name just says "California in the Seventies." And the notion was, effectively, throw off structure and new and beautiful patterns will arise.
> And, indeed, as anyone who has put discussion software into groups that were previously disconnected has seen, that does happen. Incredible things happen. The early days of Echo, the early days of usenet, the early days of Lucasfilms Habitat, over and over again, you see all this incredible upwelling of people who suddenly are connected in ways they weren't before.
> And then, as time sets in, difficulties emerge. In this case, one of the difficulties was occasioned by the fact that one of the institutions that got hold of some modems was a high school. And who, in 1978, was hanging out in the room with the computer and the modems in it, but the boys of that high school. And the boys weren't terribly interested in sophisticated adult conversation. They were interested in fart jokes. They were interested in salacious talk. They were interested in running amok and posting four-letter words and nyah-nyah-nyah, all over the bulletin board.
> And the adults who had set up Communitree were horrified, and overrun by these students. The place that was founded on open access had too much open access, too much openness. They couldn't defend themselves against their own users. The place that was founded on free speech had too much freedom. They had no way of saying "No, that's not the kind of free speech we meant."
> But that was a requirement. In order to defend themselves against being overrun, that was something that they needed to have that they didn't have, and as a result, they simply shut the site down.
----
To me, Reddit is facing this exact same problem. It wants to be a place for free speech, but the right type of free speech. It also hasn't designed the necessary infrastructure of code to allow the community of not t_d to defend itself and maintain the type of content that that core community wants.
And thus, backchannel slack channels to try to get people to tone it down a bit - because the software didn't support the necessary structures to prevent it from happening.
That passage quoted above goes on:
> Now you could ask whether or not the founders' inability to defend themselves from this onslaught, from being overrun, was a technical or a social problem. Did the software not allow the problem to be solved? Or was it the social configuration of the group that founded it, where they simply couldn't stomach the idea of adding censorship to protect their system. But in a way, it doesn't matter, because technical and social issues are deeply intertwined. There's no way to completely separate them.
> What matters is, a group designed this and then was unable, in the context they'd set up, partly a technical and partly a social context, to save it from this attack from within. And attack from within is what matters. Communitree wasn't shut down by people trying to crash or syn-flo...