I can't say that I agree with that. There are plenty of subreddits that are not the official ones that have great communities and do great things for its members... (/r/learnprogramming or /r/askamechanic and such)
Reddit is just a reflection of the world. There is both good and bad there. It is very easy to avoid the bad. Only visit the subreddits that you know are good. For instance, I'm a boardgamer and r/boardgames is a very friendly place. Other subreddits I frequent like r/woodworking, r/bodyweightfitness, r/campingandhiking are likewise places that positively contribute to the world.
Reddit is a reflection of the internet world. Don't forget how many people don't use the internet at all, or people who interact with the internet in only a minor way during their day to day (a debit card transaction, a text message, a social media notification...)
Yeah I read a number of hobby subs including r/woodworking and it is pretty amazing how helpful and positive these subs can be. I do not ever go except for specific subs. r/vacuumcleaners helped me find a vacuum etc. Without reddit I would find a lot of bad info on google thats often just paid advertising.
The problem is that the site leaks in a way which doesn’t have a real world analog. Your favorite coffee shop doesn’t have random skinheads show up as soon as someone starts talking about e.g. sexism or racism. If it did they’d be limited to who lives nearby and the manager could kick them out when they started bothering people.
None of that happens on reddit and while intense moderation works (I love /r/AskHistorians for example) it’s expensive.
Except, in the subreddits I frequent nobody brings up sexism, racism, politics, etc. so the skinheads (or whoever) don't have a toehold to start bothering people.
Lucky for you but that doesn’t help anyone who is targeted for some reason – remember all of the city subreddits getting “helpful” contributions from racists highlighting crimes committed by black people? The Internet shouldn’t just be for white guys even if we’ve gotten used to thinking of ourselves as the default.
Reddit user for 10 years. I have never seen a random skinhead pop into the comments. And if they were to do so, they would get downvoted to oblivion...
Anecdotally, I’ve also been there for 10 years and have seen that. Beyond e.g. GamerGate one really annoying group used to spam city subreddits with stories about black people committing crimes (not even in that city) and the usual “some people are just more criminal” racism talk. They’d get a few downvotes but also had their buddies upvote them enough to show why that’s not an effective solution.
I have been on reddit for years, and I am noticing far more karma 'gatherers' and seeming bot accounts than I used to. Political shills, karma farms, spam... you name it. A lot of it is on the front page.
Reddit wouldn't be so toxic if the vote counts were hidden, but echo chamber validation is the ultimate badge of honor there. There is so much in this document that applies to all things Reddit (please note that I wrote it inspired by my time on Reddit): https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Avoiding_Tr...
There are some subreddits where they are hidden for a period of time (not sure how long, but it's quite a while). I wonder if anyone has analyzed those?
Low-effort comment, but: I really appreciate your content, both here and on Reddit. It's refreshing to see anyone doing any of this sort of analysis, and it takes a lot of effort to do it, and you do it really well and at a rate that's mind-boggling.
/r/politics is aggressively left-wing, so much so that I'd doubt anyone interested in real discourse is trying anymore. I'd think an experiment like that would need to be done on a clean subreddit that isn't bringing in any baggage, or a pre-existing ideology-based ban list, to test its validity.
Was /r/politics given a vote-hiding feature that other subreddits didn't have? Votes and downvote buttons are typically hidden with custom CSS that users can disable, which would completely invalidate these results. Votes can be hidden for real for a short time, but cannot be disabled completely.
r/politics said it didn’t make much difference, but they left it that way anyhow.
The feedback based ranking implicitly supports echo chambering, but there’s not much of a way around that.
> The feedback based ranking implicitly supports echo chambering, but there’s not much of a way around that.
Traditional topic-based forums are better, because you can't suppress unpopular-but-correct opinions by downvoting. Even if you don't care about Fake Internet Points (and the reason they exist is because we do, gamification works), if you state something that goes against the prevailing hivemind your opinion will literally be hidden unless users go out of their way to find them.
(and yes, I browse HN with showdead=yes for the same reason)
I strongly disagree. Whether the points are displayed or not, voting is what revolutionized forums. I find voting forums almost universally better than non-voting ones, because voting sorts by relevance by default.
I still dread the (lack of) content quality that I've come to associate with phpbb forums (and their ilk).
"High Quality Level" is a relative measure though. It's really easy for a heavily moderated discussion forum to become an echo chamber for the moderator's views.
The problem with the upvote/downvote system is that it's too simplistic. If you have an opinion that goes against the status quo, a lot of people will downvote your comment simply because they disagree with what you said on some emotional level.
Of course, past a certain number of downvotes, you post will be buried, so you have basically an echo chamber.
Echochamber sounds bad, resonant frequency response sounds neutral, and it's needed for harmony. The real problem then is kakophonie, noise, and choosing the instrument to play on with a nice timbre, noise floor, etc. The internet is large and finding the right venue and audience is difficult.
There is value in being told to have hit the wrong tone.
This is why shorter messages and twitter are important, it allows a finer grained ... censorship? (Zensur in German also means grade, shool mark). That's why many people, I at least, discuss online, looking for light conversation, so emotional feedback should be welcome as ''the basic unit of exchange in communication''.
People can sense when there's harmony in music, but what about an opinion? To me, the real problem is lack of emotional distance.
I was in a thread where a woman declared that all men are inherently abusive/violent toward women. I pointed out to her that this is not only a ridiculous statement, but also quite insulting. How can we make such sweeping generalization?
I was down-voted and told that my feeling didn't matter. Soon, other angry people joined in and my reply was buried. My comment went against a certain narrative.
It's not ironic. My feeling don't matter in the discussion with the women, she just said my feeling don't matter, probably to invalidate what I said to her.
I'm not sure hiding vote counts is sufficient, since comments are still displayed based on them. The 'Theory of Reddit' sub did some pretty compelling analyses showing that the first 3-5 votes almost completely predict eventual vote direction, and that the top comments in a thread will consistently be the first handful of upvoted comments.
Which also explains complaints of the shape "Reddit hates X one day, but loves X the next!" Whoever shows up first with an idea people don't hate ends up becoming the dominant voice of that specific conversation.
A subreddit solely dedicated to auditing the quality of moderation on various subs would go a long way to give reddit the tools to remove problematic moderators. Ultimately the quality of the mod makes the quality of sub.
I read about one strategy on my favorite subreddit. A user admitted to posting memes and cheap content there, then going into /new and downvoting every other post and upvoting his own with a couple alternate accounts.
I don't actually comment in reddit threads with more than 15 comments for this reason: there's no point, no one will read it. And if they do, they won't care.
The vote thing is true. If I'm the first to comment I'm usually at the top, or near the top, of the thread.
Fundamentally the problem, I think is anonymity. On the Internet no one knows you're a dog.
I have both pseudonymous handles on reddit and also I go by my own name. On Hacker News I only go by my own name. And I have found that it made me a much, MUCH better person when posting. So now I post on reddit about 95% of the time under my own name as well.
When you have no skin in the game -- such as your reputation to uphold, no superego to hold yourself in check -- a person's id reveals itself. And it's not pretty.
I disagree. Anonymity allows you to express unpopular views that you wouldn't be able to in real life. But the existence of downvoting basically defeats that, except in unpopular echo chambers, of course.
Who decides what is "trolling"? I think there should be moderators but that it's possible to see what moderators have done and impossible for them to actually delete posts. That way each person can decide if they are happy with the moderation being done.
> Fundamentally the problem, I think is anonymity. On the Internet no one knows you're a dog.
No, anonymity is not new to the internet and is actually one of the beneficial aspects, since it makes people more likely to say what they think, and less likely to be a target for others. Lots of anonymous BBS are moderated just fine. Meanwhile, Facebook can be very vitriolic.
The fundamental problem is the assumption that moderation is not needed and free speech is everything. It seems to have gotten popularized by Reddit in particular.
Nobody who has spent lots of time on BBS, IRC, and other typically moderated spaces would think anonymity is even relevant.
We've seen with facebook that have real names doesn't improve the level of discourse that much.
I think it's the protection (or at least the apparent protection): you can't be a jerk in person in a public place without exposing yourself to immediate negative repercussions. That's why online forums with harsher moderation are usually much better (one of the best examples being /r/askhistorians).
What does "private garden" mean here? People have no problem showing up on public Facebook groups, visible to all, and posting racist stuff in their real names.
I think, and totally admit it is pure speculation, that the hate foments in the private garden until the person is brainwashed enough to believe their hate is a normal and acceptable viewpoint. It is at that point that it leaks out into the public groups, visible to all.
Indeed I 5hink it's the missing direct personal contact.
It takes a lot of, say, training, to learn to use communication media, too. You just can't have a chat as if face to face, in writing. And most people aren't well educated at authoring, either. At the worst, some wouldn't even know how to lead a conversation anyhow. Online forums just expose that. And I think we as a society at large, are still figuring this out, since 50 to 100 years, so it's a mess.
Yes, but that needs to be balanced by the distorted form of reputation people get even when they are polite and thoughtful due to the lack of any emotional channel in text-based web forums. Add to that the fact that in real life, people have many sides to their personalities, which are inhibited or eccentuated in different contexts; but the impression the web gives of people lacks those contexts.
Then, consider the good that anonymity has allowed for; think of all the things people have able to speak out about anonymously which would have gone unsaid.
> Then, consider the good that anonymity has allowed for; think of all the things people have able to speak out about anonymously which would have gone unsaid.
Maybe you "become a better person" when you post under your real name, but Facebook, which has a real name requirement, is a cesspool, and this community, where most people use pseudonyms, is relatively civil.
You can have an identity and "skin in the game" without using your real name. You can also use your real name and not care/be aware of the consequences of things you say online.
Agreed, but note that for a lot of people on Facebook, their primary audience are friends, family & acquaintances; people who will mostly tolerate your (contrarian) views, whether you display tact or otherwise. People are the center of conversations on FB.
This contrasts with a place like HN which has no concept of friends and family -- the center of everything here is the comment box. That's a great trade-off as it allows us to focus attention on debating contrarian ideas, and less on the one who is airing it.
As a thought experiment - would slavery in the US have ended sooner or later if we had anonymous internet from the 18th century on? I'm not implying there is any clear answer, but I think it is a simple way of immediately seeing much of the nuance of this issue that you might miss at a cursory consideration.
Self censorship due to social pressure certainly keeps some people (as has been mentioned Facebook shows clearly enough that lots of people simply don't care) from discussing things that they would not feel comfortable discussing under their real name. And those things that they might not feel comfortable discussing can be negative, but they can also be positive. In either case, I think it's probably a net positive for society when people can discuss things they actually feel instead of things that they think others think they should feel, even though those others might not even feel that way! Shouldn't society operate in a way that we think it should operate instead of the way that we collectively think everybody else thinks we think it should operate?
HN has a different audience and moderation so i m not sure its just your name. When people are posting with real name, it changes the dynamic, the post becomes part of the social signaling, which can lead them to refrain from saying some truths, or to support things they don’t really believe but align well with their real life identity.
That's a great point. In the end it's an identity problem. This is one place where I think that blockchain technology might actually help. (Jesus, now I'm one of them.)
There has to be pseudonymous/anonymous channels for information, but the bile has been so intense lately that it makes me think that the majority of communications need to be positively identified.
Would you have used your real name if you were gay in 1950?
The internet is not where politics are decided, but at the very least that’s where a good part of the debate happens. Use real names and you’ll be able to blackmail people into approving things they disapprove. What about publishing everyone’s votes, while you’re at it? No, people need a safe space to experiment debating about good and bad ideas without risk.
Real name policies are only about the ability to blackmail and coerce.
Pseudonyms are just a symptom, I guess. A name is another channel for communication. For real names, origin was usually intimitly tied to identity. John Doe or Lisa Muller is as much a pseudonym as JDog123 would be, without further references. Real Name policy much relates to overlap between internet and local interactionnand discoverability. If I don't need to be discovered by non locals (as defined by my off-line reach; which today is a false schism, but anyway), I can use my name for artful expression.
There are cases where I don't want to be discovered, too. The latter, Obscurity (hiding), shouldn't be confused with the former, Security (literally without worry or need).
Vote counts on HN are hidden - doesn't stop a lot of toxic behavior on here.
The problem is down votes are not a good comment tool. Especially combined with hiding and such. Upvote only systems are much more resilient to the kind of gaming mechanics you see here and on reddit.
What is meant by "gaming mechanics you see here"? Could you be more specific? Of course, voting does affect what gets posted, but that's the point. If your authentic voice doesn't appeal to HN voters, then develop another voice that does appeal to us!
Isn’t that how you get a popularity-driven echo chamber? If only certain points of view will get upvoted or avoid downvotes, only those points of view will be posted or get discussed.
Yes it does encourage some posts and discourage others. At times it might seem that is based on "points of view", but more often it's about form, logic, salience, or substance. Preferences probably vary on those measures, but keeping the discussion within tighter bounds in these senses is just a part of HN.
I post here a lot and my posts get downvoted and upvoted a lot. I don't see any "gaming mechanics", whatever that is. If you have a reason to believe that stuff is happening, please share that with the rest of us.
Also, you overstate this "compatibility". For humans, loss hurts more than gain feels good. Voting with negative as well as positive reinforcement is simply more effective at changing comment styles.
That blob is (ironically) extremely ideological/generalising. Doesn't mean I don't disagree with it though, maybe just the approach/tone.
I believe you may be grouping strong (and maybe not always right) opinions with flat out chaotic evil trolls (whom there are actually extremely few).
It's been intruiging to grow up witnessing the appearance of the term "troll", initially designated to IRC and other net spammers, to it's present and increasingly meaningless, nebulous definition of "mean people on the internet". It's a big difference, which your linked blob quite interestingly evidences :D
What I can never reconcile with is that when mainstream media means 'toxic' they are never referring to the /r/latestagecapitalism plastered all over the front page of reddit. They protest the fact that somewhere, hidden from popular view a minority of people hold a different view from the extreme leftist one.
Admins do nothing to prevent extreme moderation as occurs on there from deleting any comment with an alternative viewpoint. Yet it appears quite consistently on the front page with only agreement in its comments section.
right, because the rules of the subreddit indicate that. The subreddit has its own mods that follow its own rules. And the Admins of reddit do not get involved unless they're peventing a lawsuit. Which is kind of how the internet should be run. Free and safe from mass control, but communities controlling themselves.
I agree wholeheartedly, but I also think it should be called into question if something like that belongs on the front page. Admins have added specific rules banning right leaning subreddits from appearing, but not even the most extreme left leaning subreddits get that treatment. And if nothing else it makes for a toxic default view.
What right leaning subreddits have been banned in contrast to extreme left? Inciting hate and violence is a reason to be banned, and that seems a common thread in those subreddits.
Which would be fine, if the community had a way to control themselves. But moderators are literally chosen by being the first person to squat on a particular subreddit name. There is an incredible amount of inertia to controlling a popular "domain name" (eg popular brand names), and no recourse if the person who squatted it first turns out to be a huge shithead.
There have been plenty of instances where someone just turns off a subreddit, now nobody gets to use it, have a nice day. Let alone the more subtle problem of a toxic person who should not be moderating a sub in the first place.
Maybe one should be able to put a subreddit in 'unmoderated' view and see what's getting moderated out so the community has a little more transparency. Yeah, you'll have to wade through some sewage, but at least you can opt-in on occasion to make sure you're not being unwittingly moderated into an echo chamber.
I think this hits on the underlying problem I see with Reddit and similar forums, though. Look at the evolution of subs like /r/LateStageCapitalism or /r/FatPeopleHate or /r/Incels or T_D or TRP or Flat Earth or Broneyism or whatever. I don't think in all cases the communities started out as extreme as they eventually became.
I'm not defending their original charters by any means, I just think there's some kind of sociological reality or formula these subs are tapping into that allows them to purposefully moderate/evolve into echo chambers and bring a community of followers along with them, to a point where the community even starts to self-moderate to the extreme -- but they don't just start out that way.
It's almost like you can take some ridiculous idea or some interesting but archaic belief system, build some interest in it using humor or shock value, then once you have an audience with critical mass slowly turn it into a cult without anyone noticing, like the boiling frog analogy (hmm, the irony of that comparison just now struck me). I almost want to try this myself with something absurd just to prove the theory.
And I'm sure this isn't a new concept in sociology or anthropology and there are people researching how it works at Internet scale. Can anyone point me to what it's called?
They're a straight up communist sub. Why wouldn't they? You seem to be complaining that a board game site bans you when you repeatedly post "board games are stupid, you should play video games."
Yes, I'll admit to that to some extent, but it's a toxic environment when a subreddit like that regularly appears on the front page yet disallows any sort of significant discussion. For similar toxicity reasons they hid The_Donald from the front page, which I'd say is about equally as toxic. So why's the treatment different here?
Toxic and hate speech are recently invented terms to curtail free speech. If I said anyone who wanted communism were hateful (they hate capitalists) and supporting a historically violent ideology, I'd be as right/wrong as people on the left doing the same.
Anti free speech are a means to an end really, power.
I generally agree with you here actually, I wouldn't want any of this to be used to completely suppress speech, but I don't think it's unreasonable to hide by default communities which are higher friction to some degree.
I can definitely see a completely open alternative viewpoint, but reddit has already gone in a very different direction.
Board games aren't an abstract concept greatly up for debate and they don't influence the minds of thousands of young kids and adults who will and do vote.
It's not as if there aren't meme-heavy right-wing subreddits who do something similar. r/the_donald was all over the front page for a long while, and has a notoriously strict moderation policy. It's just that the right wing subs just don't happen to be as popular right now - or they get banned for lack of moderation and for having their members advocating extreme violence (like r/physicalremoval).
latestagecapitalism's output is relatively tame, and given that they have a politically contentious subject matter, heavy moderation is necessary in order to keep the subreddit free of people from any part of the spectrum who'd turn it into a monkey-flinging shitfest.
Also, it's nowhere near the front page today; it's nothing on what r/The_Donald used to be like.
Wrong. TD is made up from both genders and many races who are conservatives and support the president. Its style is glossy trolly. They are anti political correctness, against sjws and groups that oppose others free speech. Reddit has site wide rules against racism, and those subs that don't remove it are banned. TD mods remove anything racist quickly - almost exclusively posted by few day old accounts .
Also, have a nice day.
Reddit has special code to discriminate against /r/The_Donald. Without that special code, /r/The_Donald would still be all over the front page.
Sometimes the truth leaks out, for example in the interface that advertisers use. The number of subscribers listed there was over 6 million, far in excess of what a normal reddit user would see. In various ways, inconsistencies reveal that all the numbers are being manipulated to suppress /r/The_Donald.
It's not like it's the only subreddit with this kind of moderation. See r/thedonald for a right wing example or r/spacex for a not-really-political example. The things that end up on the front page reflect the userbase, not the admins.
I agree with a lot of the jokes/memes posted there that make it to the front page but the actual rules for discussion within the subreddit are kind of far out there. I guess one might call it the (publicly acknowledged) equivalent of the unspoken rules for the r/the_donald subreddit where many things written in opposition to trump are deleted by the moderators.
Um, the fact that it's named after a concept from a failed ideology that caused several at least Holocaust-sized genocides in the span of 20th century?
Although I disagree with the subreddit, nothing really wrong with it being on front page of reddit. It just shows how pro-left reddit is, but despite this the mainstream media only reports on minority of people practicing their free speech. This willing blindness to the truth of the situation is to me a form of misinformation. I think NYT would gladly welcome a violent Maoist style revolution if it increased its subscription numbers. Hence articles like this: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/style/black-bloc-fashion..... Extreme content like this free to parade around but god forbid some people are making pepe memes somewhere and garnering 12 views. The state (increasingly communist) must fight to protect those poor minority leftists from the evil empire.
> The incentive structure is simply growth at all costs. There was never, in any board meeting that I have ever attended, a conversation about the users, about things that were going on that were bad, about potential dangers, about decisions that might affect potential dangers. There was never a conversation about that stuff.
This externality-disregarding culture was idolized in SV for the last decade or so. It's nice to see some self-reflection, but unfortunately the VC community, without heavy regulation, is structurally unable to value anything other than growth.
Regulation doesn't solve all the problems. In and of itself, regulation can create just as perverted incentives as the existing VC culture. With the perceived impact that Facebook had on the election, I'm starting to believe our culture is evolving into one that won't allow such disregard with or without laws enforcing it.
Fundamentally, the problem with the site is that Reddit was happy getting growth on the back of people searching for jailbait[1] and creepshot porn and white supremacists for years and they have a user base that reflects that. A lot of the power mods that run the largest subreddits are just awful human beings. I don't see how they fix that short of nuking the whole site from orbit and starting over.
These people exist and no amount of censorship will eliminate that. Protective bubbles exist in the form of moderated subreddit and other forums outside of Reddit.
I think there is a very important distinction that needs to be made. The popular reddit experience is vastly worse than the customized reddit. It took me a while to realize that my reddit experience was vastly improved once I was very picky about which subreddits I follow.
I think this is an important distinction. I could never quite understand what all the hub-bub was until I realized that.
I've used my account to comment since before they added subreddits. And I never stumble across one of the "toxic" ones except for the rare occasions when one of the other subreddits links to those ones.
Seeing the 'average' number of upvotes rise steadily was a really strange experience for me. Hearing people in my various social groups talk about reddit though, was really strange, and sometimes it still feels strange how I can mention reddit to people with the assumption that at least they've heard of it and understand the basic concept.
Reddit back in 2005-2006 was a lot like HN, but smaller. No pictures, no memes. Lots of stuff about lisp, functional programming, etc. Many early users came from Slashdot.
Some folks complain about the Digg debacle and how that negatively affected the Reddit userbase, but IMO what truly fucked Reddit as a tech news source was the introduction of images.
Actually, it was very much like HN is today, or as /r/programming is today.
As an ordinary user, I thought that the creation of subreddits was a clever solution to the Eternal September Problem.
The initial pool of users were folks that were sniped away from Slashdot and Digg. There was quite a bit of frustration about the editorship of Slashdot, and having a system that was effectively user-edited was quite attractive.
But as the readership grew, a wider array of material started showing up, frequently accompanied by the typical grumbling about relevance.
The solution was to split off new user groups into more specialized subgroups. The initial set of subreddits were effectively curated by Reddit itself, based on the categories of stuff that was showing up in practice. User-generated subreddits didn't come until later.
>The solution was to split off new user groups into more specialized subgroups. The initial set of subreddits were effectively curated by Reddit itself, based on the categories of stuff that was showing up in practice. User-generated subreddits didn't come until later.
Everyone wanted tags for posts (myself included), and when they announced subreddits, there was a lot of belly aching. I thought the choice of using subreddits was a technical one to make the site more easily partitionable but they gussied up the reasoning behind the concept of communities. I think they made the right choice.
When I first started using reddit, there were no accounts/logins and no comments! Just vote buttons for each story. Truly "reddit" as in "I read this [and it was interesting so I'm sharing it here]". Slashdot without all of the noise.
The best things about HN and (a narrow, personalised) Reddit are the comments.
A knowledgeable, enthusiastic community provides lots of background, alternative views, tit bits of related info and random facts. Without comments and discussion most of the value is gone.
Oh, agreed! At very first blush I thought comments would sully reddit's simple essence, but I very quickly realized how wrong I was when I grew to really appreciate the comments and the discussion.
I mentioned this merely as a historical footnote to show how far reddit's come.
I completely agree. There are some fantastic engaging subreddits with great people. I personally don't use it as much but I highly recommend finding those cult following subs.
I think you're wrong. Only follwing subreddits you like will not create a better experience, but a worse one. You will only be exposed to material that you already enjoy, which is kind of boring. It's like having a party but only inviting yourself. I love reading /r/all because I'm always surprised by the type of stuff that's upvoted.
I'm interested in politics, however /r/politics has awful comment quality and isn't a great sub to visit.
I'd also like to hear about people's favorite subreddits in terms of comment quality, as I'd happily read a passionate and informative stance on something I'm usually not interested in compared to what I read on /r/politics.
Edit: I meant to use it as an example -- I'm actually interested in any type of subreddit, I meant to explain! So thank you for the suggestions and I'll definitely check them out :)
This is bizarre to me - the average comment quality on /r/politics is both more informed and higher level than about 90% of subreddits.
Granted it's center-left most of the time (from a US perspective anyhow - as a European it is at best centrist) but that's more a function of a reaction to the current climate than anything else.
So I guess I'd ask: "what kind of comments are you looking for?" because outside of the science communities you're not going to find better discussion threads.
/r/politics does have quality comments that also get upvoted. However, you have to dig through 90% of bad comments.
For instance, you get one article about Trump's nickname for Sessions being Mr. McGhee. The comments decide this is bad. Then you read the comments on other stories and people are gleefully calling him a racist elf.
That's just pointless and is a disincentive to visiting. But I keep returning to the subreddit because of how helpful it is in keeping up with the Russia stuff and because of the rarer insightful comments that give reasonable perspectives you will never hear a major publication speculate on.
/r/neutralpolitics - It's not necessarily trying to be completely neutral, but it's trying to be factual and requires sources to be posted.
/r/christianity usually has fairly high quality comments and conversations among Christians and non-Christians.
/r/netsec has high quality posts and comments.
/r/hockeyplayers has a very helpful community but probably not of interest if you're not a hockey player.
/r/goodyearwelt has awesome reviews and information about high quality footwear
/r/malefashionadvice is one of the better run larger subreddits that has writers from major publications that post and comment
/r/askhistorians is very heavily moderated which means a lot of the most interesting questions remain unanswered for a long time, but the answers that are provided are very well thought out and sourced
/r/asksocialscience is similar to /r/askhistorians just different content
/r/spacex is very Musk-fanboyish, which I guess is to be expected. The overall positive energy there these days is nice though, and the dedication that peaks in quasi-corporate-espionage is pretty cool.
/r/askhistorians is regarded as pretty much the "perfectly moderated" subreddit others strive for
/r/science and /r/programming aren't bad
After that you should just check out niche communities and see if they've been taken over by trolls. So far /r/motorcycles, /r/ultralight, /r/camping etc have been fine, as opposed to the many iterations of /r/onebag which generally suffer from power-grabbing moderation.
r/iamverysmart - funny screenshots of the Dunning-Kruger effect and people generally thinking they're God's gift to intellectual life.
r/holdmyredbull - extreme sports cousin of "hold my beer". Other fun ones in this circle include "hold my juice box" and "hold my fries". I tend to think of watching someone go skydiving without their own parachute as universally interesting, ymmv.
r/AskReddit - Good survey of the current human experience, usually leave here with a feeling that your questions about the world and lives of other people aren't as unique as you though. Sometimes it's banal/off topic, though.
r/ELI5 - "Explain like I'm 5" usually contains layman's questions about science, maths, history, and other sometimes unapproachable with great responses from people who know their stuff. Almost always leave here with something new to think/talk about.
r/ProgrammerHumor - I'm a programmer, but even some of my non-programmer friends can enjoy the jokes over here.
The same could be said about the internet in general. Take a stroll away from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc and you can find some really interesting places with extremely insightful and meaningful content.
The problem is that a majority of people are just absolutely manipulated by their emotions and dive head first into the feedback loop designed by social media to provide an addictive stream of never-ending engagement.
Are you assuming they would have sought out longer form or higher tier content otherwise?
My dad was extremely happy using Stumbleupon for years. It was about as high-pace low-quality you could get on the internet. I showed him sites like Reddit and elsewhere but he was very content with just Stumbling.
People like to blame FB/Twitter for low quality content without considering the huge market for that stuff. People aren't the ignorant sponges who can be pushed/pulled in whatever direction other people think is better for them, which is how everyone seems to treat the average internet user or voter. Much like trying to blame the whole "obesity crisis" on some evil capitalist food producers, without considering the natural evolution of the workplace, evolving urban environments, technology, chemistry, or just standard irrational human behaviour to be lazy and knowingly make bad choices.
I'm sure quite a few ivory tower intellectuals had their way they'd ban tabloids like National Enquirer and trashy reality TV like Big Brother. But I doubt that would suddenly make these demographics any better informed or better citizens.
We can try to push back against straight up lying, at least when it goes beyond entertainment, but demand will always find supply in the marketplace...
I definitely think that dumb content makes the consumer dumber with repeated exposure just like smart/educational content makes them smarter (well, in simple terms). I don't think there is a baseline intelligence level for each person below which they can't possibly fall regardless of what they do.
So yes, platforms making dumb content more available do make people dumber long term. I don't know what to do about it, but at least we have to recognize that this is a legit problem.
> I definitely think that dumb content makes the consumer dumber with repeated exposure
Sure, but even if that turns out to be the case what concerns me is how often people automatically take the next step and assume that it should or CAN be controlled top-down, and that doing so will surely result in the average/lowest common denominator consumer suddenly becoming smarter and less ignorant.
Basically the assumption that it is such a significant problem, that people would be far better informed/smarter if we just banned/regulated what some central organization or individual mega-corporations deem as not good content.
That's a significant leap - and one that I feel is very often disconnected in these discussions. Just because problem X exists, doesn't mean solution Y will solve it. Or that problem X is a significant enough problem that the rewards will warrant the costs/risks of attempting to fix it.
I would say the general public's level of intelligence in general, and the effect of dumb content on it specifically is definitely significant enough to need a solution. Many solutions, probably.
Of course no one will seriously suggest a gif prohibition (I hope), but regarding fake news specifically, regulation such as the FCC Fairness doctrine could possibly work.
The point is not to eliminate undesired behavior entirely, but to make it less available and less desirable compared to alternatives. For example, smoking cigarettes is being largely successfully solved by education, promotion of general health, gross packaging, putting cigarette cases out-of-sight in supermarkets, and taxes, not outright prohibition.
I don't think that just because the content is digital you can't do anything about it without introducing worse problems for freedom of speech and such. Tons of industries are successfully regulated, this one is not special enough to be unsolvable.
The Supreme Court ruled that the fairness doctrine was justified given the scarce nature of the radio spectrum. The doctrine never applied to cable TV and certainly wouldn't be able to be applied to the internet.
You can certainly apply and enforce such regulations on mainstream media, both TV and online. The world will benefit even without US getting onboard with it, and without the need to police every last website.
There is actually research showing that exposure to a series of fake headlines - even though you are told that they are fake - makes similar fake headlines more believable to you.
Editorialization is far, far different than outside parties or platforms controlling content...
The key difference is that editorializing affects individual outlets, or groups of outlets under one owner. In that case other parties can simply create the own competing outlets to provide a balance, aka a marketplace of ideas. But when it's a top down control from government or mega-corps then the controls applies across the entire marketplace and across all organizations/mediums, and is therefore far more harmful, open to abuse, and ultimately chills speech.
Not to mention in the top-down scenario the source of what's "appropriate content" is usually the most vocal special interest groups, lobbyists, or worse the latest public outrage of the day - not some editor/company trying to deliver what they think consumers want most. But instead other parties trying to control what content other people should and should not be allowed to produce/consume.
The only way to push back is by rallying your own outrage, lobbyists, and special interest groups - a highly unoptimal process, valuing the powerful and entrenched parties, not what is "right" and moral. And if history is any indication, bad laws/regulations rarely get removed anywhere near as quickly as they are added.
Really? I find "really interesting places with extremely insightful and meaningful content" all the time.
If not for Facebook or Twitter I likely would've never found The Athletic, a newer news media website for sports. I doubt they'd have just advertised on ESPN or some other sports broadcast channel website. Some of the content there has been incredibly insightful and meaningful. I even find articles from there on Twitter that I wouldn't normally have seen since I have the content from there filtered to what I like in my day to day consumption.
I might argue that you are in a minority there. I don't doubt that finding good content is possible on Facebook and Twitter, but to be fair it was outside those conclaves that the quality content was actually residing. Back in the day I definitely discovered new things on those platforms, but it has been some time. Most things I see there now are short attention span low quality memes and crap. Might have more to say about who I follow and friend compared to who you follow and friend than anything else. To that I say, good job, I wish I had the time and patience to curate my social graph better.
I used to think that I knew how to use Facebook properly and that it was everyone else who was using it wrong and getting the wrong rubbish things in their feed. Then I realised what was more likely the case was that only a small proportion out of my friends going back over a decade is interesting in any way. And out of that segment, only a small number are on my level reciprocally communicative terms - the rest are way above my "league" (I don't comment on their posts, and they don't comment on mine).
So here was the conundrum: Continue trusting the sorting algorithm by posting and sharing links to a very small obliging audience (as well as continuing to read and comment on links shared by another, but not necessarily the same small group), or change something? I went for the deactivation experiment. So far so good (I think?).
At least Twitter has a larger pool of "talent" to start with, but it still doesn't make "curation" any easier and most users* would probably concede it's a massive waste of time. Admittedly, Facebook Memories has made me realise that past-me is a poorer version of current-me and if the trend (hopefully) continues, future-me will also cringe at current-me.
* Of course, there's probably a minority who have gotten employment or work connections through Twitter but I'd say that's a small minority compared to main userbase.
>At least Twitter has a larger pool of "talent" to start with, but it still doesn't make "curation" any easier and most users* would probably concede it's a massive waste of time.
I know it's not optimal because Twitter neglects it, but I find the lists feature to be useful enough for curation.
I follow quite a few accounts on separate lists that I wouldn't want to follow all the time in my main feed.
Most of the very interesting publications (including The Atlantic) I've found have been through Longform.org or Digg. The latter might be remembered as the site that came to a demise the same time as reddit's rise, but they've since reinvented themselves to become a curator of news features and other amusing tidbits, picked out by reasonable editors (on average).
That said, all this is for nought - what is it that we actually do with said day to day consumption? Ever since I started asking myself two questions for any issue - 1) "What's the issue/problem?" 2) "What am I going to do about it?" - I've realised that most of what I pick up is largely for pointless entertainment and time wasting (not to mention that very few friends truly care about me knowing more "stuff"). With that in mind, I've started to curb my news junkie habit with the goal of focusing on more important stuff.
Last month I was kicked from twitter, since I was trying to be more productive I didn't trigger the reset process.
I did spend less time refreshing some timeline. But
1) I did miss some of my "audience" (feels like an audience more than friends, but I'm twisted)
2) I'm now way less aware of lots of news. Two days ago was the first time in years that I thought to myself "what ? I didn't know that" about an event. Not sure if this is bad or good, but it's an important difference.
> 2) I'm now way less aware of lots of news. Two days ago was the first time in years that I thought to myself "what ? I didn't know that" about an event. Not sure if this is bad or good, but it's an important difference.
I would suggest it's good. Most news in my view is "junknews", even from reputable outlets (including independent media). Why? Very rarely is any news actionable in any way. It's likely that very little of what you and I see each day fundamentally changes how we live our daily lives.
Most of it is entertainment and us humans just like to "know" things - there are more effective ways to be informed about the world if that is the honest objective. Spending an equivalent amount of time reading books or going outside into the streets/community is likely far more useful for nearly everyone. Outsource getting the most important updates to people you know; they'll enjoy knowing "stuff" and keeping you up-to-date.
Catching up on news can always come later anyway (e.g., if you need to cram for an "exam"; i.e., voting).
I do agree to some extent, I mostly despise the mass medias. Especially when you're tech saavy and with the web, they're mostly blurry and late to everything. Also they do create emotional bubbles on stuff that do absolutely nothing (say greece debt, which was the end of the world, then onto the next fad). So I often wanted to disconnect from this. But still my surprise about that event I missed was high and genuine. Maybe I could "quantify" that as higher surprise newsfeed process :p
The problem is that a majority of people are just absolutely manipulated by their emotions and dive head first into the feedback loop designed by social media to provide an addictive stream of never-ending engagement.
Wow, harsh. My sense is that the problem is that these other sites are simply not very findable, and Google search results have been getting steadily and measurably worse over the last several years.
Someone needs to build a search engine that does'nt depend on page rank. Page rank is the thing that filters out 99.9% of the internet: it's the millions of pages you don't see that could potentially have better answers in it. Now, surely, there's a lot of junk in that 99%, but I'd be willing to bet there's a lot of gold nuggets in there too.
Google's fundamental assumption and it's biggest weakness is that: Excellent content will always have an excellent source to upvote it with links. This isn't always true. If ever another search engine were to supplant google, it would probably take advantage of this weakness. This weakness is even bigger in niche areas that google AI is not able to recognize.
I don't know how much Google realizes it, but "walled gardens" are a fundamental threat to the quality of their search. Since most "normal user" internet activity is now locked up behind login pages on Facebook, the value of PageRank grows more dubious by the day.
This leaves institutional and commercial websites as the corpus of "open content" available for Google to index/test, and while they are sometimes useful, the incentives are much less straightforward when you bring in money and organizational politics.
Depending on the organic voice of the users who were publishing personal web pages and just wanted to discuss their interests and share the best information available got Google where it was, but now that lifeblood is locked down and thoroughly controlled by Google's competitors. Nowadays, many hobbyists and small businesses even forgo the web site entirely and just operate out of a Facebook page or group.
Worse still, open forums typically either completely disallow links with accurate anchor text or explicitly tell search engines to ignore them with rel=nofollow. This makes PageRank even less valuable, because the shared URL is not associated with link text. Some forums will transparently place anything containing a URL in a moderation queue, leaving no information at all for a search crawler to extract (ostensibly to prevent spam, but I've found in practice it's more often used by niche forum operators to block out competitors and get higher prices for ads; you can even see this on reddit, as many subreddit mods configure AutoModerator to filter any URLs pointing to unapproved domains).
Google was designed for the web as it stood in 1999. It's not 1999 anymore. Sadly, hyper-aggressive legal restrictions like the CFAA and the RAM Copy Doctrine mean that a useful search for the 2018 web is unlikely to materialize (at least in the U.S. or countries that impose similar restrictions).
How many results with missing terms are high in the SERP, whether and how news entries[1] are in the SERPs, etc. Also, Google knows which page the result(s) you click on was on.
True, but The_Donald is always leaking. I've seen plenty of sexist/racist content on subreddits for cities, sports teams, memes, etc. Reddit has allowed itself to be a platform used in part for really despicable content, and the despicable people who generate that content regularly venture outside their cesspools.
There's a certain sub I like that is full of sexist and racist stuff and nobody there likes Trump at all. What I mean to say with this is, when you see stuff you don't like on Reddit, that does not mean it's coming from T_D, or that getting rid of T_D would get rid of stuff you don't like.
Yes, and even places that are anti-racism, anti-sexism, and hate trump are often filled with emotionalism and thoughtless group think shouting. Comments decrying anything bad in a caustic way are near useless.
Comments decrying anything bad in a caustic way are near useless.
Yes. The kind of mentality which is drawn to social condemnation has been a mental substrate to all kinds of bad stuff throughout history. No matter how positive the cause for which it's done, it often becomes toxic and authoritarian. Witness various religions throughout history, as well as the high ideals of the early international communists.
Those subs only last long if they manage to stay under the radar. I am afraid someone in here might know someone who works for Reddit and... you know the rest ;P
You're just asserting that though. There was a study done on the removal of two of the racist/hate subreddits on reddit that indicated a positive affect.
"In this paper, we studied the 2015 ban of two hate communities on Reddit, r/fatpeoplehate and
r/CoonTown. Looking at the causal effects of the ban on both participating users and affected communities,
we found that the ban served a number of useful purposes for Reddit. Users participating
in the banned subreddits either left the site or (for those who remained) dramatically reduced
their hate speech usage. Communities that inherited the displaced activity of these users did not
suffer from an increase in hate speech. While the philosophical issues surrounding moderation (and
banning specifically) are complex, the present work seeks to inform the discussion with results on
the efficacy of banning deviant hate groups from internet platforms."
I've always been skeptical of this study, mostly because of how fluid reddit accounts are.
I have at least three accounts that I know of (I've probably forgotten about others).
I'm sure people who participate in terrible behavior like that probably also have multiple accounts.
How does the study account for those users simply abandoning the accounts they used for those hateful subreddits? I find it far more likely that they didn't "leave the site entirely", and instead just migrated to their other accounts not associated to the banned subreddit.
I only use one account and I’ve been called off multiple times in the “mainstream” subs for posting to the right-wing ones, sometimes when not even talking about politics. I’m sure most people who post to right-wing subs keep two accounts or even more to keep their activity “segregated”.
That paper I imagine terrifies Reddit. They depend upon their users to create and engage with content, if they're willing to leave to create and engage elsewhere they then become another Digg.
This was done with small "hate" subreddits too. Imagine they did that with some of the largest controversial subreddits, that would probably make half the users pack up and go.
It seems like a right-wing contingent has taken over the moderation of a lot of smaller subreddits, specifically city/country subreddits, and both the content posted and the commentary reflects that.
It's a dangerous trend for both society and reddit itself.
Seems incredibly biased to say that right-wing moderators are dangerous to society. Just because someone has a more conservative outlook, doesn't mean they are a menace. A little bit shocking that needs to be pointed out.
I didn't read OP as saying that right-wing moderators are per se are "dangerous to society", but that it being just one viewpoint represented (especially if, as "a right-wing contingent" implies", it's a single group of people) could be,].
If you're a left-wing moderator or a right-wing moderator, there is no way I should know that unless you tell me. Any moderator that is actively and purposely applying their political philosophy to a forum that reaches thousands of people is dangerous to society.
What ever happened to neutrality? Moderators shouldn't be promoting an ideology left or right. I understand that Reddit admins themselves don't want to promote an ideology either -- they want to remain neutral -- but they are sacrificing their platform to people who don't hold he same ideals.
The biggest change I've noticed is just how political the city/country subreddits have become. A few years ago, they used to be more fun places but now nearly all the content is very hateful and polarizing.
But even judges attempt to be neutral. There are law/rules and you attempt to judge every case/comment based on that. As a moderator, I don't simply delete comments because they don't fit my political views -- I'm capable of that and so are most other people.
That's entirely different from people that are explicitly not trying to be neutral and are trying to promote a specific political ideology. I expect that majority of moderators on Reddit are not trying to promote anything. However there is definitely a growing contingent that don't want neutrality and they are taking over.
Banning nothing is fine if you want your community to die.
In theory, everyone has equal ability to share their opinions and all have equal weight. In reality, you have a lot less influence than someone willing to post 24/7 everywhere they can. The quickest way to drive away reasonable people is to do nothing.
> they used to be more fun places but now nearly all the content is very hateful and polarizing.
I don't think this is a reddit thing - it's a societal thing.
Other platforms are also getting far more acerbic in general. City council meetings, local news, etc. It seems the country is in a period of time where politics is both forefront and rather contentious.
I feel the stuff on-line is simply reflecting the greater societal trends - jut with the typical amplification everything on-line breeds.
Right, so people are arguing against that baseline rule.
A baseline rule prohibiting threatening violence, most people agree with, but apparently it is a controversial attack on free speech if a private website wants to moderate the use of its platform to promote hatred against people based on the color of their skin.
And banning racism is being held as an example of liberal bias! Amazing.
There is "right wing" and there is "far right nationalism." Reddit has an issue with the latter. I have talked with many conservatives lamenting the loss of their given subreddits to trolls and /r/t_d devotees.
Furthermore, it is the internet - I've never been convinced by any argument that HN or reddit or even facebook has any obligation to give "fair time" to far-right nationalism. For as long as Fox News exists and promotes itself as an actual news agency (HAH!), I don't think community-generated content websites need to bother.
Why doesn't the far-right just "pull itself up by its boostraps" and make a reddit for the far-right? (sidenote, sometimes this does happen, and it almost always is full of the most comically hateful people: see voat)
sidenote, sometimes this does happen, and it almost always is full of the most comically hateful people: see voat
I'd feel much better if reddit and twitter were even handed with their condemnation of comically hateful people. As someone on the Left, what I've seen is that Left-leaning media bias tends to give indirect license to the most extreme authoritarian and even toxic fringes of the Left. It also fuels a reaction from the far Right.
For as long as Fox News exists and promotes itself as an actual news agency (HAH!)
The mechanism I cite above has been in operation at Fox, just in the other direction.
"Why doesn't the far-right just "pull itself up by its boostraps""
Umm, why would they do that when they can instead use reddit?
Reddit sells itself as being a strong supporter of free speech. THEY SELF-identify as being a neutral platform.
If the censorship supporters want to interact in a censored forum, then they can make their own subreddit and moderate it how ever they feel like, or make their own website.
The right doesn't need to do anything, because reddit wants to be neutral.
The far-right/neo-fash has numerous platforms that never censor them and will gladly embrace their content: gab, voat, 4chan/8chan to name a few.
I honestly don't see what the big deal is. For example, lots of lefty subs have banished "Tankies", communists who think Stalin did nothing wrong, from their communities.
Ultimately, neither a fascist nor communist can oppose such a purge/restriction without being a hypocrite. Such actions are well within either group's ideological wheelhouse and therefore they should stop complaining.
My suspicion is that whatever entity is behind massive twitter troll farms of far-right content (as well as inflammatory far-left content) is also doing everything it can to stir the shitpot over at reddit. /r/conspiracy is another one "lost" to the far-right. I even catch whiffs of it in the bay area subreddits sometimes.
I'd say the same for /r/shitredditsays but for the far-left, except it's been that way for as long as I can remember (LONG before any of the bot farm stuff).
If you stick to very niche subreddits, you'll mostly escape it, but the reach seems to basically be increasing on a month by month basis at this stage.
To be fair, half the time I make even the slightest conservative arguments on Reddit I get told to bugger off to TD, a subreddit I've literally never visited.
The internet is not your save space. Neither is reddit. If everbody were thinking your way, those posts would be downvoted into obliviation. I am sorry that you have to face the fact thst many people don't share your personal value judgement of what is considered to be racist/sexist.
I think this is an oversimplified view, especially when it is nearly a known fact reddit's votes are manipulated by automated imposters/"troll farms"/etc. The internet is not my safe space, but I think it's very reasonable for the subreddit about Canada to be moderated as a "safe space" free of racist ramblings. The people holding those opinions can go elsewhere, for example to The_Donald, where any dissent is quickly deleted by moderators. Even beyond the manipulation question, moderation exists to refine a community beyond mob rule.
I think it's very reasonable for the subreddit about Canada to be moderated as a "safe space" free of racist ramblings.
The problem with even mild forms of censorship, is that bad actors can combine it with emotional manipulation and media manipulation to push their own agenda.
Right now, bad actors on the far left are using outrage as a tool to push their own authoritarian agendas. In this, they are aided and abetted by the far right. Both extremes thrive on outrage, especially the outrage that comes from intellectually dishonest censorship.
Weird, that sounds a lot like the billboards I used to see in South Carolina along the lines of "if you don't like [guns, god, trucks], you can GIIIIIIIT OUT!"
Are you telling me I shouldn't be exercising my free speech right to argue that reddit should remove alt-right subreddits? Are you placing barriers around acceptable free speech?
You can do whatever you want. That's the great part about places like reddit.
I am merely informing you of the fact reddit isn't going to go along with your idea to engage in mass censorship because they are strongly pro free speech, and only ban subreddits in very rare situations.
They aren't perfect on free speech, but Id give them a solid A-.
You have lots of other options if you like censorship, and you can feel free to use those instead.
That's the great thing that reddit offers. You can join moderated communities as well as unmoderated. It's your choice which to engage in, and reddit isn't going to take away OTHER people's choice because you say so.
I don't know why you seem to think I have some kind of authority. I feel like I'm being propped up as some sort of powerful villain here, or maybe that there are strikes being taken at my agency.
>Reddit isn't going to take away OTHER people's choice because you say so
Why use language like this? I bring it up because this is exactly the sort of haughty writing style I'm used to hearing when I engage t_d users... I don't know if it's a dialect or simply an artifact of shared mindset.
Reddit does censor, don't forget! They've even banned self proclaimed safe spaces such as mgtow hangouts.
I'm also curious where you get your sense of authority, saying things like "I'm informing you of the fact that reddit...". That's powerful language! Do you work at Reddit? If so, can you offer further insight?
Using words like "facts" seems silly. Given enough advertiser pressure, I bet reddit would content tweak. If t_d lost it's fragile control over it's users and went full blown hate speech, I bet it would vanish. So, where does this confidence come from?
EDIT: Shit, we've hit the reply depth limit or whatever. I'm happy to continue this conversation privately if you wish, my email's in my profile.
To reply in an edit, I agree that typically spez has taken a pro-free speech line, but given that we're discussing this in an article that contradicts this from an insider perspective with lines like
>and then, ultimately, these things will bubble up, make it into the press, and then we would make a decision to change things. We would deal with the immediate impact, which was painful, would last a week or two, and then it would go away.
Which leads to my belief that if t_d lost just a little bit of control, and the press caught wind, that reddit would cave and ban it.
You're talking about a world where Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, The Jersey Shore, and gameshows where you pick your spouse from a group of strangers are hit television shows. I think you may have tastes which are outside of the mainstream.
This is the problem that so many people miss when they extol the virtues of a customized Reddit. If you make a site that is attractive to racists, bigots, sexists, and homophobes, those people are going to be using the whole site and not just their tiny vile corners.
This phenomenon might be easier to understand with a specific example like the recent Ghostbusters remake. It was by most accounts a bad movie. If you browse any movie related subreddit you will see plenty of valid criticism of that movie. Mixed in with that are comments about how that movie never should have been made with an all female cast and that is what caused the movie to be unsuccessful because women aren't funny. It is easy for some naive kid to see that and think "yeah, I saw that movie and it wasn't funny, maybe that comment has a point". Meanwhile it might never occur to them the user who originally left that comment came to Reddit to be a member of an incel community that is notoriously sexist and anti-women. This allows these communities to grow their size by spreading hate and feeding off the rest of the site.
I kinda think if the balance can be maintained instead of reaching a tipping point that the interactions between those bigots etc. and the rest of us may actually ward off their bigotry. A bigot having a conversation with a non-bigot in a context that doesn't start off adversarial is probably the best context we can get for people to slowly drop their bigotry.
Sure, it can go the other way too, and that's scary.
Now, I dunno. Clearly we can't expect independent well-meaning anti-racists to be as effective as extremely carefully crafted propaganda appealing to baser tribalist instincts. It's already uphill battle to get people to be open-minded. Those who argue for reinforcing people's existing biases have it easier.
But if there's any chance of getting the bigots to change their views, it seems it will be in respectful conversation with others, which Reddit at least is capable of, though I guess it doesn't seem the trend, unfortunately…
I agree with your premise, but I don't think that is something that realistically happens very often on the internet, especially on social media. The discourse dissolves too quickly once a comment has been called out for being hateful.
Another part of the issue is that not all hateful content has a big blinking sign on it saying "I am being hateful". It is often a lot subtler than that. One big example is how the Reddit community has handled the Me Too movement. If the big subreddits are your only source of news you might think that Terry Crews is the primary victim of Hollywood's sexual misconduct. There is nothing wrong with telling Crew's story. He is clearly a victim and he deserves for his voice to be heard. A single post or comment about Crews is not sexist, however he has been the primary focus of this discussion on Reddit. It is important to think about it deeper and why his story dominates this topic. Maybe it is because a sizable portion of Reddit simply doesn't care about female victims the way they care about male victims. This type of bias is only visible holistically and therefore is much harder to combat with open debate as you describe.
Well, FWIW, internet communication is still pretty damn new. No grown people are the kids of internet-natives even (i.e. no adults today were raised by parents and teachers who themselves grew up with the internet). So, in the long-run, we can see that this is pretty new still.
I am myself aware of all sorts of ideal communication habits that address the common failings. Perhaps there's some slim hope that this wisdom will eventually reach far more people and become dominant to where we actually learn how to communicate better than we do today.
I think of the cases where people met their trolls in real-life and had reconciliation of sorts, or that woman who grew up in the Westboro Baptist Church and got convinced to leave after someone on Twitter responded empathically and intelligently instead of antagonistically, leading to long-term exchange of perspectives… these stories are the exception today, but we have that at least…
There was plenty of sexist and racist garbage on reddit prior to the creation of T_D. It's probably more virulent now, but it's definitely not new. Good mods are the key to keeping bad content off good subreddits.
I feel that leftist movements are leaking much more than T_D.
Comments which — without being racist or sexist — go against the popular & politically correct leftist stance are downvoted to oblivion. Meanwhile, extremely statist stances are tolerated and celebrated by users.
which makes sense. It seems to have been built on libertarian principles and rejects authoritarian principles. not sure how much more liberal you can get.
Libertarians are at least related to liberals, but it seems the words left, liberal, and libertarian are often confusing, and they're not very fine grained descriptions anyway.
In the US they are related to conservatives as well. Libertarians share very little with liberals when it comes to views on what the government should regulate.
The thing they have in common is social liberalism (allow gay marriage, individual drug use, etc).
So heres the problem I'm seeing here. Liberal is not the opposite of Conservative. Conservatism opposes Progressivism, Liberalism opposes Authoritarianism. For the most part people in the US are liberal, they believe in general equality and freedom. Progressives are also generally liberal but also tend to stir the pot and want change. It is also very possible to be conservative and liberal, which a large minority in the US are. I'd also argue there are a lot of authoritarian conservatives and authoritarian progressives. But I think most believe in the basic principles of freedom and equality that define liberals.
The way I see it, the authoritarians in the US hijacked the word liberal and want to conflate it with progressive, despite the derivation of the word itself. If one is a proponent of liberty, forcing people to do things/ not do things is authoritarian, and therefore, not liberal. I'm all for change, but I despise force (other than Gandhi's 'force of truth', Satyagraha: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyagraha).
It is worth noting that Russia's goal with its initial propaganda efforts was not necessarily to elect Trump, but instead to sow dissent against a likely Clinton presidency. This included a heavy pro-Trump campaign, but also a sizable pro-Sanders campaign. Therefore the extremist views you see on Reddit on both sides of the aisle have likely been spiked by Russian propaganda. I'm not saying Reddit doesn't lean liberal, just that the "ultra-liberal" side of the site that appeared during the 2016 primaries might not be completely genuine.
Originally, the word referred to classical liberalism, which has freedom as its primary value.
Modern 'liberals' — the one's you're referring to — have values very different to the original liberals. They are, in fact, opposite in the current political landscape.
It's worth making the distinction to avoid confusion.
Isn't this a symptom of a site growing to reflect the broader population? When communities are small, they typically cater to a niche audience, who invites their friends who are directly or tangentially related to that niche.
Once the site grows beyond those 1st, 2nd and 3rd degree connections, you get exposed to those 4th, 5th and 6th degree connections that might have some values and opinions that are shocking to you because they don't run in your orbit.
I feel bad that the author contributes his time to making a world a worse place. I see Reddit as giving more visibility to the world. It's true there's some crazy stuff from some loud people, but my guess is if it was quantified it would still be a small percentage of actual content on Reddit. But just like in life, a rare shocking event dominates our consciousness much more than persistent normal events.
What does that mean though? People who post in one sub aren't allowed to be in any other sub?
People in TD can write in others subs too, as can people from late stage capitalism.
Wanting to forcibly segregate and silence people with different opinions is I think at the heart of the problem with silicon valley right now.
'remove those who disagree with me' has killed hundreds of millions over the years, and is a common and dangerous kind of groupthink.
It’s not about forcible removal but following the rules. People who came for a toxic subreddit tend to use the same style, memes, etc. everywhere and often go back to their home base to encourage fellow believers to back them up. Over time that spoils communities because reasonable people aren’t as driven to post as frequently as the ideologues.
We have this debate over and over again in r/berkeley, a community which I used to be an active part of. Essentially, every time Berkeley makes national news the sub gets brigaded by TD. Some of those trolls stick around and then post tired tirades anytime there is something remotely political on the sub. And some of them even try to pose as Berkeley students.
Almost everyone on the sub is tired of the constant brigading and would like more active moderation of the trolls. The main moderator refuses to do anything and has similar views to your own, thinking that we should welcome them with open arms. This has the effect where Berkeley students and residents can't even talk about things affecting their community as they get drowned out by the mass of right-wing trolls. And this usually comes at times when its most crucial for there to be an avenue for Berkeley students/residents to have a platform to speak with each other (e.g. protests, riots, local political issues).
I had similar issues running /r/ronpaul where there was a sustained, concerted effort by opponents to disrupt the conversation. One of said opponents went on to found /r/the_donald.
It's fairly hard to ban people on a site where account creation is as easy as it is on reddit. Moderator tools have improved a little since, but remain inadequate for dealing with sustained brigading.
As a moderate on reddit I see leaking from both sides, but leaking from r/the_donald is much more contained.
It is particularly annoying when a hobby subreddit gets swarmed by the fanatical social justice crowd and kills all conversatamd community that existed previously.
The leaked content from r/the_donald are downvoted to oblivion. The leaked contentent from r/shitredditsays has much more power.
However, if you are simply seeing conservatives from r/news posting, and assuming they are crazies from r/the_donald, then you are assuming bad intent and may need to re evaluate how many conservatives live on the internet. Regardless of your political affiliation, you will see opinions you disagree with and that’s a good thing for the most part.
It’s not really relevant to what the author is trying to say at all. Actually, it’s the opposite.
Because of the excess of disinterested capital that only values growth, a thing that could be a positive and productive thing is instead a cancer — it grows and grows without purpose. That’s why Reddit (and Tumblr) have massive porn sections that aren’t spoken about and Reddit is a watering hole for white supremacy and political propaganda.
The porn thing is really interesting in other ways. Hosting images and video is mostly hands off, so it begs the question of what shady things are the third party media hosting people doing to make money and what is Reddit’s business relationship with them.
Comparing porn to white supremacy is just that kind of political view that feels completely alien to me. It was not many years ago that Monty Python poked fun at a whole nations conservative view about nudity and porn, and it seems like globally we have taken a few new step backwards toward the 19th century views about those topics.
The biggest porn section in reddit is currently ranked 61 of all subreddits. Cat picture section is ranked 6 and is 18 million subscriptions vs 1.4 for the porn. Do reddit have some 18 times more sinister business relationship with cat shops, veterinarians, and cat food, or should we just conclude that reddit reader are human with human interests and as that goes most people prefer looking at a cat picture while a smaller minority goes to reddit for a dose of nudity.
Go to http://redditlist.com/all and look at what the people want to consume. Celebrate that science is where it is.
I think you can read a lot of intent and purpose of a website if the default is directing people to cat pictures.
Regardless of defaults, I doubt there is a single metric that show that porn on reddit is more popular than cat pictures. There is doubt in any method that collect metrics, but if we define them as insignificant then the same metric can not later then be used to say that porn is significant on reddit. Uncertainty cut both ways. Subscriptions can be bots, could be mistakes, might be from users not reading the site, or simply made up. Same goes for view counts or "activity".
You’re missing the point, it’s not about being pro/con either topic or prudishness.
Porn and white supremacy constituencies are similar in the context of a VC backed company whose trajectory is tied to an equity event. That is that they drive lots of engagement and probably more time on site.
Reading the article, the author’s point was that pursuit of growth at all costs creates bad situations like echo chambers for racists.
Other sites like Stackoverflow avoiding this sort of situation by being intelligent and strategic about pursuing growth.
I think they both tie together... the thing is, extremism and toxic behavior is not what a lot of people are looking for when it comes to social media (as seen by the top group lists). However, toxic personalities often are very loud ones, and they often get out-sized attention by the press. This can negatively affect an entire site if one isn't careful.
Porn offends some people as well (and is not meant to be viewed in certain social scenarios, of course). Reddit has a "safe for work" and "not safe for work" category, and as far as I'm concerned this dividing line is probably better than the no-nudity-period type policies of Facebook (which leads to dramas over non-pornographic nudity, eg breastfeeding photos, a famous Vietnam photo, etc.). It seems like cute pictures and jokes drive more growth to me at first glance then porn, anyways.
Managing "toxic behavior" is a lot trickier, from what I see -- over-heavy moderation also can lead to issues. But "growth at all costs" social media, without checks, leads to factors such as bullying, abuse, and harassment listed as negatives in articles on your growth prospects.
I sometimes think that news and media overblow the nasty sides of the Internet (the sexist / racist side, the trolls, etc.) way out of proportion. For a taste of what average Redditers are interested in, I perfectly think subscription count is reasonable (more so than activity -- people can be very passionate / post a lot about something that is overall a minority opinion).
I cannot comment on the actual communities themselves other than what I see from a quick skim (I don't use Reddit much), but the top community subjects don't feel very toxic. Jokes, knowledge, games, pictures, cuteness, music. Maybe the big news subs (eg worldnews) get political, for all I know, didn't seem too bad on a quick skim.
None of the top list screams "white supremacy" or "political propaganda" to me (some say "politics", sure, but propaganda?). Due to size, of course, I would expect some moderation is needed for those super-huge communities, but that's expected these days. r/conspiracy (probably the biggest community that steps a little bit into a more paranoid worldview) has a lot of people, but r/science has 30x more.
I would even argue that gonewild (the top "porn" subreddit) is atypical compared to most commercial Internet porn sites, which is probably why it actually cracks the top 100.
> That’s why Reddit (and Tumblr) have massive porn sections that aren’t spoken about and Reddit is a watering hole for white supremacy and political propaganda.
That's the core of reddit, which was founded as a normie 4chan at the beginning of a time when many sites were trying to monetize the energy coming from that corner of the internet. The parts that you like are an outgrowth of that, and originally essentially subsidized by it. The fact that when you remove that element completely, you don't have a business (there have been many attempts at a "civil" reddit), shows that it still is.
There was already a metafilter. If part of you, at least part of the time, wasn't attracted to the id of reddit, you probably would have been on metafilter.
Tumblr is a different case - just a blogging site with social extensions - and there have always been porn blogs (and nazi blogs, but the social element of tumblr happened to pull it into a different direction.)
That's important from a product point of view. I see redditors unhappy about a specific community, I'm always confused why they're visiting that community.
It's a good distinction, but it doesn't solve the issue that problematic subreddits will continue to exist, even if I've customised Reddit to avoid them. I understood that was more Dan McComas's issue with Reddit, and with Twitter.
reddit has been in an identity crisis since they sold out to Conde Nast. They've made themselves too much of a factor. They should move to a behind-the-scenes operation and let communities bear responsibility for themselves.
This only sort of works. Reddit being a combined system, subs tend to leak into each other. If you are into something very obscure, benign, and uncontroversial, like, fountain pens, you're probably fine.
If you're into anything gaming related, good luck. I've been on some subreddits of popular games and it's basically just like the rest of Reddit. In particular, Reddit's system just doesn't work well when there's a lot of users. And the drawback is that these subreddits tend to dominate the space so people do not make private, limited gaming BBS boards as much anymore.
This is definitely the way to handle reddit. I mostly stick to local sports subreddits and a few general interest subreddits (i.e. not /r/funny, /r/pics, etc) and I think reddit is a great tool.
I think it's the same thing with most social apps though. Small discord servers allow you to build up groups of online friends, but if you just go into the specific game ones you're going to end up with a mix of good and bad.
Overall it's just an issue of popularity bringing out the worst in people.
> Overall it's just an issue of popularity bringing out the worst in people.
I don't really agree, it's the issue of aggregating everything relevant to a subject, which makes the popularity relevant.
BBS were not aggregated by subject. They're aggregated by the BBS itself. For a given game, there may be 10 BBS. That's how it was before. You'd go to the BBS with the community style you prefer. You have a choice.
Now, you're just stuck with one subreddit/Discord server/etc., which just reduces the quality of it all. And given the poor organizational ability of those services, it becomes entirely driven by a mix of popularity and posting speed.
[also no skin in the game for the BBS owner, as there is no BBS owner. No BBS competition]
It's the same with most "social apps", yes, because discussion shouldn't occur on "social apps", it should occur on private moderated spaces.
That's sort of the inherent flaw of aggregators. There's a lot of shit that gets vacuumed up into the general site, but the onus is really on the user to dig through and find what's meaningful to them.
I actually disagree with this. I find that customized Reddit leads to the same feedback loop/conveyer belt feeling that made me quit Facebook out of annoyance with always seeing the same ideas propagated out again and again. Browsing Reddit without an account lets you avoid the urge to comment on things and also turns you on to loads of new things that you otherwise might not've found on customized Reddit. Granted, I still have an account I use sometimes, I just get more enjoyment out of the front page when I don't have any control over what I'm seeing.
I think that fine-grained subreddits naturally tend towards echo chambers, because it has become easier and easier to find and interact with people that think just like we do.
I don't have a Reddit account but I lurk there regularly, in my experience that only works as long as the subreddits are very niche and not well known. As soon as they get popular since there's effectively no barrier of entry for the general Reddit population you effectively get the same community everywhere.
Normally when people find a forum that interests them (like, say, HN) they need to bother creating an account, often validating an email etc... It only takes two minutes but that's enough friction to weed out the vast majority of the people who just stumble randomly on one of your posts. On Reddit once you have an account you just have to click a button to subscribe to any community you like. It's "eternal september" on steroids. 4chan had "lurk more", Reddit is "repost more".
So your post sounds a bit to me like "Twitter is great if you know the hashtags to follow" and it's probably true but at this point is it really representative of the website? If you need to filter 99% of the content to make it usable, maybe there's a bit of a problem still? I just went to /r/all and had a look at the subreddits available there, I find 16 million accounts subscribed /r/gifs, 3 millions to /r/politics, 17 millions to /r/gaming, 18 millions to /r/pics etc...
So yeah, I'd believe you if you told me that /r/common_lisp, /r/mongolia/ and /r/treepics/ are amazing communities but I don't think it's enough to redeem Reddit as a whole.
/r/Polandball being a shining example to the contrary. There's a whole other discussion to be had about the importance of strict moderation and rules to improving a subreddit's quality.
> As soon as they get popular since there's effectively no barrier of entry for the general Reddit population you effectively get the same community everywhere.
Strict moderation can still be effective once obscurity is lost. /r/SpaceX is an example of an excellent subreddit that has survived an explosion in popularity.
> So your post sounds a bit to me like "Twitter is great if you know the hashtags to follow" and it's probably true but at this point is it really representative of the website? If you need to filter 99% of the content to make it usable, maybe there's a bit of a problem still?
You're just making the observation that the majority of internet users aren't sophisticated intellectuals. Demanding that the website you visit are sophisticated everywhere is just a demand that they are hidden or ignored by most people. I don't see how this is different than having hidden/ignored hashtags, subreddits, or filters.
You can subscribe to X subforums. and only ever see those same X subforums.
But you can NOT see "All" excluding only things racist subforums for example. So it is either your little bubble, or the full blown promoted/paid xenophobic posts.
> But you can NOT see "All" excluding only things racist subforums for example. So it is either your little bubble, or the full blown promoted/paid xenophobic posts.
For /r/all, there is the ability (on the right sidebar) to filter subreddits. You can add whatever subreddits you wish to exclude when browsing "All".
I am becoming more and more picky about which subreddits I follow.
I have even unsubscribed from some that are partially interesting to me like androiddev (I work as an Android engineer) because they were 10% interesting information, 90% circlejerk/toxic.
I'm fine with the "Google Reddit Experience" - when I search for something and I end up reading an answer to my question on Reddit. I didn't actually know there was any other Reddit experience.
Funny you should mention that... my first exposure to reddit was exclusively through /r/programming. (To give a sense of the scale of the site at the time, I distinctly remember a post celebrating 65,536 subscribers.)
At some point shortly after, they added the ability to create subreddits, the site blew up in overall scale, and I was completely oblivious to it all for years, being that I only read /r/programming.
Point is, the site gives you a lot of useful ability to curate what you read.
I've significantly reduced my time on Reddit. Used to pull up the website out of curiosity every day but the atmosphere is incredibly toxic. My front page was riddled with Russiagate stuff too for some reason and every time you'd bring up an argument that isn't the norm you get a mob after you.
It's hard to bring up without being attacked, even off of Reddit, but for long-time heavy users it's been obvious for a while that Reddit has purposefully undergone several changes to control the narrative at the behest of advertisers and the powers that be.
I feel similarly. No matter how politely arguments are framed, or how carefully and respectfully made, downvotes and ridicule follow my every post. It's obvious that Reddit (and the media at large, honestly) is intentionally and structurally designed to promote a narrative that is blatantly pro-vaccination. It's maddening. The bias is everywhere you look. Try and say "vaccines cause autism" almost anywhere on Reddit! Downvotes, ridicule, and anger will be your only responses. It's all part of the pro-vax narrative that everyone has bought into.
I think it's more that Reddit grew so much that the original community gets drowned out by everyone else. You can't have a community that big without it becoming filled with, for lack of a better word, normies.
What narrative supports The_Donald and the numerous left leaning subreddits both being there? Honestly I hear this a lot and am curious. I believe it is because they are focused on retention numbers which thrive off focused insular communities to be clear.
I’m not sure that is actually what is happening overall, but the narrative that you hear a lot (and that would explain fairly intolerant subreddits like T_D and worldnews) is about filter bubbles and more generally the idea that we now have the ability to ignore other people’s dissent, and become complacent of more one-sided, prejudiced ways of presenting information. To take examples outside of reddit: it’s fairly easy to watch several hours of television every day, entirely about news, think that you know very well what is happening and be completely flabbergasted that anyone (reasonable) supports President Trump or reciprocally, that anyone (reasonable) doesn’t. This feels fairly new, not entirely driven by internet (more by the increase in news sources, i.e. likely the drop in production costs, and ad technology).
I suspect that this is happening more than before, but that the opposite (people finding structured, intelligent opposing viewpoints) is also happening more --people spend a lot more time informing themselves overall-- but that the more constructive phenomena is less destructive therefore harder to notice.
I did the same and no longer login or use the front page.
I found that just going to a few subreddits on topics of personal interest that I can browse through for new ideas, user stories, etc. results in a much more positive experience.
Smaller communities for specific hobbies/videogames/etc (in most cases) seem to be less polarized on the platform.
I hate the default experience since it is purely low effort posts. The cute gifs are entertaining but I feel I am wasting my time compared to discussions on interesting topics.
By logging in you can select your subreddits which lets you filter out subreddits you don't care about and add ones you do care about.
Browsing subreddits is the best way to check out a particular topic but I do find their algorithm is okay at pulling up an okay overview of your subreddits if you login. (assuming you remove all the noisy defaults)
The default/popular subreddits are toxic. The smaller, niche subreddits are rarely toxic and usually good communities.
As for the Russiagate stuff, the front page is riddled with it because it's a very important subject in the US, Reddit's user base is primarily people from the US, and there are bombshells dropping every day.
There is nothing, except a large paid hoax propaganda campaign. With the same team we could make mother Teresa seem like an imperialist religious nut. But anyway, let's agree to disagree. Because the world is nicer that way.
How so? None of those seem to imply anything about a Trump/Russia connection so far.
If you start a fishing expedition for the Loch Ness monster, you're bound to find some fish but that doesn't prove the existence of the Loch Ness monster.
Why does Trump keep hiring people who are implicated with Russia? Why did his son meet with a Russian agent @ Trump Tower? What is the deal with Trump "special" relationship with Putin and why did he secretly meet with Putin for hours without a translator? Why do we often learn of US policy from Russian media before the White House? Canceled sanctions on Monday is the latest example.
Your attitude of batching everything not matching the "side" you happened to pick and calling it a "large paid propaganda campaign" is dangerous and the world is certainy not "nicer that way".
This attitude is something you find everywhere because it's simpler for people who believe something strongly, to also believe that anyone who disagrees has been paid to do so. So it's attractive to dismiss anti-trump articles as "paid propaganda", and dismiss people like you as russian bots.
But you're going to have to wake up from that attitude at one point or another because it's going to catch up with you. As others have said, arrests and indictments aren't a "nothing burger". You won't get to the truth by dismissing sources you've been told not to like.
> As others have said, arrests and indictments aren't a "nothing burger"
Arrests and indictments for things unrelated to illegal dealings with Russia, except for maybe failing to renew registration as a foreign agent but that's a stretch.
City specific subreddits are really hit or miss. Often it's people complaining about newcomers and how the drivers "here" are the worst drivers anywhere ever. Sometimes a good news story comes through. Some are better than others but that kind of discussion/complaining bores me.
>As for the Russiagate stuff, the front page is riddled with it because it's a very important subject in the US,
Not really. Describe how each news articles has impacted your day-to-day life. It's only important in that it keeps readers coming back who are excited about a big conspiracy taking down the president they don't like.
The most recent example? It was revealed in a court testimony that Cohen has Sean Hannity as a client (after Hannity explicitly denied being a client on twitter) which raises a ton of questions regarding Fox News and Hannity as a source of "news" and not just state-run propaganda. It's probably the other way around (media-run state) considering how much Trump watches Fox and Friends, but it's still a pretty big bombshell.
If you go onto subreddits that mostly focus on non-US news whenever Trump comes up it's pretty obvious that the majority of the world views Trump's White House in a negative light.
Unsubscribe from /r/politics. Unsubscribe from /r/worldnews. Find the handful of subreddits that are bothering you and unsubcribe from them. The discussions I read on Reddit are overall nicer than those on HN, not because the userbase as a whole is better, but because it has sewers where the crap is concentrated -- and you can easily avoid them. That's one of their most important features.
I would go a step further and say the first thing a new Reddit account should do is unsubscribe from everything, then selectively subscribe to your interests. Every default subreddit is horrible.
In my experience, the academic subreddits found in the defaults are pretty civil (i.e. science, philosophy, space, history). But they all have well-defined mission statements and heavy-handed moderation (e.g. no memes or any other kind of offtopic discussion).
That said, starting from zero is still a good idea.
I would extend that further to _unsubscribe from all default subreddits_.
Start from a blank slate and search for subreddits that actually interest you and seem reasonable. Yeah, you're also creating an "echo chamber" if you participate in polarizing topics, but hopefully you're aware that you're doing that to yourself.
This is a valid complaint for non-technical users, but I don't understand why HN users don't customize reddit to suit their tastes instead of complaining. Signing up doesn't even require an email. Is there a better alternative? It's arguably the best feature that reddit brings. Don't like a sub-reddit? Remove it and add something else. You can even create your own and moderate to your taste. You can even grab someone else's reddit customization under multi-reddits. Here are some examples:
Because its one of, if not, the biggest story in the world right now? I mean, of course its going to occasionally top /r/politics and /r/worldnews.
The president and the highest levels of the GOP are directly targeted in an investigation that has brought 20+ indictments with several guilty pleas with apparently more to come.
This is a bit like saying the news in 1974 was too focused on Watergate.
> I mean, of course its going to occasionally top /r/politics
Have you actually ventured over there? Saying Russiagate/Trump stories are "occasionally" at the top of /r/politics is a bit of an understatement. They're obsessed over there.
Yes, a lot of negative stories about the Republican party are posted on /r/politics but that is because negative things keep happening. Last week the deputy finance chair of the RNC was exposed as paying $1.6M to buy silence for an aborted lovechild with a playboy model and that wasn't even the biggest story of the day.
Honestly, no major scandal in the last few days is the exception now, not the norm.
Every time you see a post on the front page you don't like, filter that sub from your front page. So easy. Unfortunate that Reddit limits you to filtering 100 subs from your front page.
Sometimes I want to see what’s popular on Reddit as a whole without the politics, video games, atheism, anime, etc. circlejerks.
There’s some surprisingly entertaining stuff that floats to the top. I don’t always want to see the posts on /r/gardening but when somebody grows a zucchini the size of a baseball bat, yeah I’ll look at it.
I had a pretty well-curated list of subscribed subreddits but reddit decided some of my interests are problematic and I deleted my account. Posting links to licensed firearm dealers legally selling firearms is too taboo for a site that has subreddits organized around linking videos of people dying.
I personally go to Reddit to relax and not fret about the state of the world. So, I unsubscribed to all of the serious or semi-serious subreddits (all news, politics, etc.).
Turns out if you unsubscribe from all of those types of subs, Reddit becomes a really funny and interesting time killer where the community actively tries to come up with ways to make you laugh.
It's the commentary that's toxic. Nobody is allowed to criticize anything about the investigations or tenuous connections to Russia without being labeled a russian propagandist and downvoted out of visibility.
Don't see any problems with what you posted. It's commentary on a commentary site within the community guidelines of that site. There are good posts there, I am sure, just as I am sure there will always be noise.
People say that a lot, but, although there are a lot of people I don't agree with on there, I don't know about the applicability of the analogy "toxic". Most times, when people say reddit is "toxic", they're referring to a specific subreddit that I won't name here, but it's mostly just full of innocuous posts like "we have the greatest president, don't we?" - clearly designed to ruffle some feathers, which I suppose is in itself counterproductive, but "toxic" as in, leaches out into the surrounding area and makes it unusable? Seems a bit of an overstatement to me.
Etc. Etc. Etc...
This is the Truth!
I need your immediate help now!!!
My Quantum Technological Revolution (and the theft of it) – John Brennan is a Murdering Torturing Thief as is this entire CIA / FBI / CSIS / CAF.
This is Russia-Gate; Murder-Gate
Russiagate is a botched CIA murder operation to have been conducted in Russia planned in conjunction with CSIS (little league CIA of canada) the root of which is the theft of my intellectual property to line their pockets - originally my millions (my Secure Administrative Management System) then my Trillions (the Quantum Technological Revolution that I own – Quantum Radio et al.). The purported leaders of our United States and this Earth have stolen my intellectual property and body and life with the full expectation of my murder (after multiple previous attempts). This is the Truth.
These people are all guilty of High-Treason.
As many on Hacker News know, I've been an avid fan of Reddit and believe that their data and community, and there's still a lot more that can be done that can be derived from that data that can't be found anywhere else.
That said, from an administrative perspective, the intense hands-free policies are baffling. You'd expect a company based off the nature of community would engage with their community and their needs. Admittingly, that's not very profitable.
But they did get engaged! They banned all subreddits related to the trading/purchasing of firearms and alcohol. /r/beertrade, a subreddit for trading beer, had a strict policy that users were not allowed to sell beer for money (something that's actually illegal) and only allowed people to post about trading beer. Even someone like me, who doesn't ship beer and only trades in-person, is no longer allowed to talk about trading.
They did after realizing they would be facing lots of regulatory problems.
Organizationally, it should be very obvious to anyone who thinks that things like facilitating anonymous gun and alcohol sales, etc is probably not a good idea.
They actually went back and corrected some of those subs which were link aggregators essentially. r/gundeals was reinstated and they have a stickied post describing what needed to be done to be brought back to life. The main takeaway is that there is no p2p transactions allowed, only links from stores/manufacturers.
Thinkpads for sale admin here. I think all of the above markets really worried about this rule, but I've already checked to make sure that Reddit is OK with us and they have stated that they plan on taking no actions with our subreddit at the moment.
And that's the fundamental problem with "getting engaged". As soon as you do, everybody's going to criticize not just where you did poke your nose, but also where you _didn't_.
> That said, from an administrative perspective, the intense hands-free policies are baffling. You'd expect a company based off the nature of community would engage with their community and their needs.
That's always the thing I liked about Reddit, and something I never found baffling at all. 'Here's our platform; please don't break the law' is a nice, easily understandable, easily followable policy. 'Here's our platform; please don't violate the social mores of this hour' is much trickier.
I hate many of the foul subreddits (like /r/ShitRedditSays), but I can easily ignore them. It's easy to ignore what one doesn't want, but much more difficult to use something one's not allowed to have. And then there are issues of fairness, e.g. will Reddit ban subreddits on one side of issues but not another? Does it selectively enforce its rules?
I think "platforms shouldn't censor" is arguably one of the core values of the early internet. For the first half of its life to date, reddit seemed to share that value.
Unfortunately, it's hard to take a strong stand on that position in the face of public pressure when the thing people want censored is something as close to child pornography as people can find without stepping over the legal line, or Nazis calling for innocents to be harmed. I think I'm in the majority when I say that those things are bad.
On the other hand, I firmly believe that the existence of uncensored platforms is good. A history of caving to demands to censor bad things says that censorship in on the table and demands to censor anything someone doesn't like might be successful. Already, reddit has ventured beyond banning things that are horrible to banning things that have some mild potential for regulatory issues (trading beer and selling firearms is not affected by FOSTA, so far as I am aware).
Yeah, reddit is contradictory here. They have strong open-source ideals that they're trying to tie to a for-profit hosted platform model. They should accept their role as one or the other.
Reddit is the only popular website where rational discourse can actually happen, thanks to the infinitely threaded conversations and complete markdown.
While there is objective rude comments on there, this is why some people call it, "toxic," because their ideas are challenged, and they'd rather preserve their ideological bubble than seek to understand reality.
>Reddit is the only popular website where rational discourse can actually happen, thanks to the infinitely threaded conversations and complete markdown.
Except comments people don't like can be downvoted to oblivion, causing no one to see them (unless they purposely sort by controversial).
Downvoted is ok (and usually, when it happens, completely warranted). My problem is when they're deleted entirely by unaccountable moderators with their own agendas.
It's toxic because a relatively small number of mentally ill people can effectively overrun any conversation. These people are not interested in rational discourse. You can't spin that as "the challenging of ideas".
Reddit has been fully gamed at this point and engaging in the most popular areas is just frustrating.
Also because those same mentally ill people are the exact same people with the time and desire to become internet moderators (no offense to dang or anyone else here, the moderation here is good!). Reddit needs to take control of subreddits back from moderators; too many subreddits are curated echo chambers, moderators are always trying to make money through bullshit like referral links, there's no transparency, etc.
Keep in mind that reddit skews younger than here, and probably considerably less educated as well. It's just too big to have the kinds of discussion you can have here
That's certainly an option, but choosing which subreddits to replace leadership on is a very tricky task. You can't realistically say all subs and picking and choosing will cause riot if there's any possibility of political reasoning. The way I see it they'd need guidelines that are automatically enforced. Even then though some subreddits work quite well with extremely strict, almost echo chamber, levels of moderation. For example it would really be a shame if askscience or askhistorians were caught up in it even though they're very strict with what they allow.
>It's toxic because a relatively small number of mentally ill people can effectively overrun any conversation. These people are not interested in rational discourse. You can't spin that as "the challenging of ideas".
you know what is truly toxic? internet armchair psychologists.
I run a forum and I've had to deal with mentally ill individuals, you don't understand frightening that can be.
They have all the time in the world to hack your software, doxx you, create entire blogs to attempt to publicly ruin your reputation, call your family, your employers, etc. You give them a podium to post their views and they will use it. Internet armchair psychologists more toxic than that? You should only hope so.
There are many, many topics that are completely untouchable there - I wouldn't say that rational discourse can happen there, but I would say that reddit comes closer than anything/anywhere else.
This is going to be an increasingly common realization, especially in Silicon Valley. Which got way too caught up in the idea that everything was making The World a Better Place.
But Zynga and Facebook are like fast food companies.
This realization started really kicking in with Free to Play mobile games a few years ago (also mostly here in the Bay Area). I worked in F2P early on, left and moved to a non-F2P company. One of the most common things we heard from interviewees is that they were looking to get out of the F2P side of the games industry.
I still can't get over the fact that their official mobile app stops rendering comments past a certain level of nesting. There's no indication that anything is missing, no "continue this thread" link, nothing... the comments just aren't there. I don't understand how one of the world's largest social media platforms could have a mobile app that silently hides content from the user. Just blows my mind.
Wow, thanks for that link. I was having the same problem as the parent comment, I definitely don't want their app but I also don't want a giant pop-up in my face every time I load the mobile site.
I don't understand what you mean... The official reddit app on iOS show comments as deep as you want, as far as I can tell. They default to collapsed the further you go deep/down in subcomments, but have buttons that say things like "6 more replies".
Beyond a certain level they stop indenting, so the actual hierarchy is no longer clear, but that's necessary because there wouldn't be enough horizontal space otherwise. But the content is still all there, as far as I can tell.
If you're not by a desktop, you can verify the missing comments by viewing the link in mobile Safari (in an ironic twist, Reddit's mobile web view is actually more functional than their native app).
I wonder how many people are out there, like you, who have no idea this is going on. The terrible thing about silently hiding comments is that there's no indication that anything is missing, so most people don't even realize it's happening. The only reason I know about this is because my subreddit, /r/AskOuija, often has deeply nested comment threads (due to the nature of the subreddit). Reddit's broken mobile app is actively interfering with the functionality of my subreddit, resulting in a lot of redundant comment replies from people using the mobile app (since it appears to them that these nested comments have yet to be replied to).
> mobile web view is actually more functional than their native app
Thank goodness for that! Reddit isn't so complicated that I need a special app for it. It's a website and it works well as a website. It could be better but there's nothing happening on the site that a browser can't natively handle just fine.
If you're on iOS, I recommend Apollo for reddit, I actually was using Alien Blue for the longest time because I also hated the official app, but I switched to Apollo a few months ago and it has been great.
> I still can't get over the fact that their official mobile app stops rendering comments past a certain level of nesting. There's no indication that anything is missing, no "continue this thread" link, nothing... the comments just aren't there.
More than that, half the time I go into a reddit profile on my desktop and try to click a link to a comment, it just doesn't work. Literally does nothing. They changed the rendering a short time ago from straight links to some type of JS, and now profiles are broken half the time.
It feels like increasingly they are shifting away from focusing on the comments and discussion, to trying to get readers to click, consume, leave and keep scrolling (to generate more impressions).
I'm saddened by this, and in digital battlegrounds (and I'm not using that term lightly) like /r/politics or /r/worldnews where it has been very obvious for a long time that hostile foreign nations are conducting operations there, it can result in a lot of the important meta-chatter being pushed down, or troll comments being gamed to the top without the accurate counter-response being visible anymore. This results in further distortion of the truth (or at the very least exposure to multiple sides of an argument).
They're suffering the same problem as Facebook & YouTube. They're leaderless, being driven by and reacting to the mob of users, instead of the producing a planned product that understands people.
The problem with social media is that they don't have people telling the public that their ideas are crap, so everyone thinks they're awesome.
Editors get to make sure people understand that, no, they are not awesome.
Social media, like any advertising-driven media, needs editors to tune their site. They're trying to have it all - the profit of big advertising with the automation of tech, but advertisers only want something specific, and automation isn't going to get what advertisers want. No major advertiser wants their beautiful fashion brand ad nexts to a post of child mutilation on Reddit. And editors get to tell people that their content is garbage or great.
And editing means people are going to be unhappy. You are officially taking a certain viewpoint, and are literally filtering out incompatible expression. The people that get edited out, they'll get mad, but they'll have to deal with it, like the millions of other people that get edited out by various editors around the world and deal with it appropriately.
To fix it, Reddit & other social media needs Editors-in-Chief. Just tell the users: "This is the boss. Keep that person happy. Want to be pissy about it? Go somewhere else."
YouTube is now trying that with their kids channels.
In the long-run, things work out better with editors.
No, Discord wasn't around at the time of the Boston Bombing. I believe (though don't know) that he's referring to some of the white nationalist stuff, like Charlottesville perhaps.
Only just getting started reading this, but I had to jump into comments to give a shout-out on how amazing 924 Gilman was for me as a kid growing up in the East Bay. I wasn't there for the glory days of the 80s/90s, and I have no idea to what extent Dan played a role in its founding, but as a space for playing and watching music, I've never found a venue in my life that comes even close to what they were able to achieve. We actually had a great scene in the East Bay, with a decent number of spots for young, local punk/hardcore/metal bands to play. But as a teenager, it was frustrating when an overzealous security guard would go off on a 15 year old kid for moshing, or when a skating rink would flip the lights on and kill the power an hour and a half before the bands had agreed earlier.
924 Gilman had none of that. I remember the first time I saw this sign[1] and then realizing that there were no security guards to enforce those rules. And yet, the punk ethos was strong enough that folks were just generally good to each other.
Or the graffiti all over the walls with a graffiti code of conduct posted every so often: don't tag over color with black and white, don't put doodles over real art, that sort of thing. Sure, it wasn't 100% followed, but people really respected it for the most part.
Or the 25 cent bottles of water and cans of soda. No profit, just kids handing out there zines and making sure no one goes thirsty.
Anyway, I'm going to go finish the article now, but if this guy got 924 Gilman, and wants to take that ethos into the internet, I couldn't be more supportive. Godspeed.
Gilman was a huge part of my life and I played various roles in participating and helping to manage it over the year, though I don't want to take ANY credit for this, it's not my place and no person should. But, the experience I had there showed me what is possible when things are started with good intentions and managed that way going forward. There were and are rocky times at Gilman, but overall it's a model that should be studied.
Also, we made and shared a lot of great music with the world, which is the real upside of gilman. I miss that time in my life.
Oh yeah, it certainly wasn't perfect, but the good far outweighed the bad IMO. Also, I'm now realizing there are probably a lot of parallels in building those sorts of communities with the Eternal September problem: getting too big and people betraying the ethics. It'd be a fun historical analogy to explore...
> I miss that time in my life.
Me too. I'm still in my 20s, but given that I now have a lot more means working in the tech world than I had when I was a teenager, I've been thinking a lot about how I might be able to help foster communities like that for younger generations (opening a venue, starting a small label, patronizing high school bands that want to record, etc.) Curious if you've thought about the same?
EDIT: Holy crap, just realized you're the subject of the article. Definitely didn't mean to imply you didn't play a role, FYI, but I imagine you played a large part given your humility on the matter. ;) Keep up the good fight, man.
We're rooting for you.
The fundamental problem I have with reddit is that it seems extremely easy to game and astroturf. Things like /r/politics felt like a Democratic party propaganda platform around the 2016 election for example.
The entire Hollywood mythology was built around being "discovered," and elevated to fame and stardom, and arguably it's main product wasn't movies, it was hope.
If I were Conde Nast, I would use reddit as a farm team for finding, creating, and monetizing internet celebrities through its "legit," properties the way that movie studios created vehicles to profit from actors.
Costs them hardly anything to talent scout redditors and try them out in other publications, then promote the story back of how success story X was "discovered," on reddit.
Keeps their monetization platforms hands clean, while bringing a steady stream of talent to market. The difference between hollywood and Conde Nast is that now, Conde Nast literally owns that talent source instead of relying on a bunch of agents.
Good color. Single party has control of Conde Nast and Reddit, so while there is a legal distinction, this isn't a correction to the basic business dynamic.
The introduction indicates that this is part of a series that NY Mag has been running called "The Internet Apologizes", where it appears they specifically seek out influential people willing to say bad things about online communities and properties.
This series can probably be reasonably interpreted as part of the traditional media smear campaign against democratized speech platforms -- they quite prefer speech controlled by their fancy executives and programming directors.
While it doesn't necessarily diminish anything the interviewee states, it's important to understand the context and framing of the discussion.
"They believe that if they have a billion unique visitors a month, that they have a property that is going to be worth a ton of money in some way eventually."
This is stupid; users are fickle and visitors mean nothing if you can't monetize them. And usually attempting to monetize visitors causes them to leave to the next platform trying to reach a billion unique visitors.
I can't believe intelligent people think this is a valid way to run an Internet business. It might work for small startups looking to be bought out by a larger company (who will then try and monetize it, driving away all the users) but for a company like reddit it's a bit ridiculous.
I think the idea of reddit collapsing entirely is much harder than a single news site for instance. It's not one product, it is hundreds of strong communities that have gathered from different places on the web. There are discussions and communities that I would not know how to find elsewhere on the web.
Reddit is not profitable. Your strong communities are supported by investors hoping to get a return on their investment. If the growth stops, the investment stops, and the servers go away.
The fact that the communities are strong matters not.
A lot of the banned subs were downright abusive if not criminal. Shaming, harassing, threatening. Reddit is not obligated to provide them a platform and that's not a free speech issue.
But I have no real solutions. Maybe even if we censor things, we work as hard as possible to keep the censorship records transparent and to make the censored stuff accessible and have some complex accountability system?? I dunno. maybe it's all hopeless.
No, the first amendment of the constitution of the United States (which describes the US government's responsibilities in regards to freedom of speech) has nothing to do with Reddit. Freedom of speech as a concept can be applied to anything: reddit, the government, hacker news, you or I.
American corporatism and singular definition of 'freedom of speech' as being 'the amendment' really polluted the well of any discussion of the topic on English-speaking platforms.
We, in Europe, have limited freedom of speech. You can't do things like denying the holocaust. But that doesn't mean we don't recognize the concept of freedom of speech, and that we don't have discussion platforms that feature freedom of speech -within the limits of our laws-. Censorship is still censorship, even when it's done by a corporation.
Listening to americans there can be no debate as to whether censorship even exists if it's done by a corporation because corporation are free to do anything and we shouldn't even debate what they do and whether we should boycott a place and move onto something else because corporations can do no wrong and exerting individual judgement, opinion, and sharing them, encouraging the growth of freer online platforms and the likes is heavily discouraged. No, everything has to do with the law and if the law doesn't call it bad then it's not bad and it shouldn't be judged as bad. That worship of the law and constitution as the only sacred values in human societies is disgusting.
That confirms the actions of what Spez usually does. He remains silent on the rampant abusive subreddits UNTIL someone publishes a news article about it, then he steps in with the whole "We're dedicating ourselves to stepping up regulating these harmful subreddits, and other blanket PR statements". Like most, I enjoy the hobby specific subs(tech related for me) like sysadmin, networking, netsec, etc. Those communities are often very closely monitored by moderators who don't want off topic things floating in. I do browse the news sections everyday but it's normally not terrible. Most people have caught on now to the bot comment structure so those accounts get their comments downvoted to invisibility.
I think the biggest problem is that Reddit has created a poison with two perfect ingredients. 1) Having little to no moderation on abusive/illegal topics due to fear of PR backlash. 2) Creating a platform that allows people all over the world the communicate.
Mix those together and suddenly you have extremists, criminals, and just outright mentally sick people joining together to create massive communities where that behavior and mentality is allowed to prosper. When insane people have insane views, they typically have them amongst themselves or in a very small groups. Their not going to go around telling the town about their views and intentions, so it can be hard to find others to connect with that are in the same boat. That isolation I think tends to lead to towards those ideologies to fizzle out, or continue in private but without the backing to do any harm. When you suddenly have hundreds/thousands of these small groups of insane people banding together in a place where they can share their views publicly with anonymity, things get out of hand.
Take Incels for example, which is a now banned sub that was made up of generally unappealing men would very likely never experience intimacy with a female due to their own shortcomings. It's one thing for a guy to think in a brief moment "I really want to do X with a female, maybe I should just do it forcefully". That's just a personal thought and likely to fizzle out because it has no backing. Now when you have an entire echo chamber of like minded individuals saying things like that, now it's leading to encouragement and active planning of those illegal actions. All because Reddit refuses to step in.
Reddit truly doesn't offer much in terms of positives. Sure the easy going, user friendly, rolling forum type setup makes it easy for people to discuss hobbies and interests. However, forums have been doing just that since the internet began. Sure you can get news, cooking recipes, tech help, etc in a fast, easy going manner but you can get all of those from plenty of other sources too.
Think of it like this: In many areas down south in the US, militant groups are living in the forests. Generally they are white extremist, pro gun nuts who have small communities being self sufficient in the deep woods. These groups hate government interference and usually have a shoot on site policy. By themselves, these groups are nothing. Even the ones who threaten the public, pretty much never do anything. Now what if these groups had a way to find and communicate with each other in as efficient a manner as Reddit provides? Now you go from harmless threats to a potential, real world problem that could lead to violence and destruction since many groups would now have banded together.
>Think of it like this: In many areas down south in the US, militant groups are living in the forests. Generally they are white extremist, pro gun nuts who have small communities being self sufficient in the deep woods. These groups hate government interference and usually have a shoot on site policy. By themselves, these groups are nothing. Even the ones who threaten the public, pretty much never do anything. Now what if these groups had a way to find and communicate with each other in as efficient a manner as Reddit provides? Now you go from harmless threats to a potential, real world problem that could lead to violence and destruction since many groups would now have banded together.
That kind of logic is what leads to events like the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII
Dan wasn't there when Spez came back. Spez's first order of action after coming back was to create tools and systems for cleaning up the site. Dan never saw any of that. So take what Dan says about Spez and the site in the context of 2015.
This is just a collection of stereotypes of journalism that are already commonly believed among the tech crowd.
Just one example: it’s insulting and hurtful to any quality journalist (ie at the NYT, WSJ, or Economist) to suggest that their reporting is motivated by personal financial incentives, or their employer’s.
I'll respectfully disagree. Financial incentives influence everyone, including the editors at top publications who are constantly looking at what is read, watched, and shared to decide what to invest in and feature.
You might really like "All the News That's Fit to Sell" which is written by a media economist that digs into how market incentives influence coverage (he's the director of the journalism program at Stanford). There's lots of discussion as well about media coverage decisions in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election at even the national networks.
Even at the top publications, financial incentives influence choices. It's not as malevolent as someone paying off a journalist.
For example, at most top tier newspapers, there is an incentive for "if it bleeds, it leads". This is an economic outcome, as this elicits the most reader interest and also increases profitability. (See my data analysis on this in the NY Times: https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html )
However stereotypes about journalists from the tech crowd doesn’t have much visibility.
The journalist crowd thinks a bunch of stereotypes about tech. And they have the platform to broadcast their prejudice to the world. Some of their stereotypes are quite insulting to any quality Engineer.
Why is it bad when we stereotype them, when they have been doing it aggressively for years?
Rather, I believe it is our duty to start reporting on the media and our opinions about the media, as no one does. The media holds all the power in broadcasting opinions on the populace, and there are very little entities that check their power.
Speaking from one of his nine yachts over a satellite phone, Spammy Tachsdodger McScrapyface said "What we did at Zynga was terrible and should be regulated. My new company is available to consult on how that should be done."
With the complaint that VCs are incentivised to favor short-term metrics and over emphasise growth, how would you go about fixing that? Also, as a founder, how would you seek investors that wouldn't pressure you to scale too fast?
That's the problem with VCs in general, and it doesn't fit their business model from a math perspective if you are low-growth. There are some investors who are trying a new model (see Indie.vc).
The alternative is either to go without funding (at the expense of an ad or subsciption model), or have your users help fund you through something like an ICO or equity crowd fund or patreon etc.
Or you find a way to remove infrastructure costs through some technical decentralization or open-source and treat development/support as a hobby, but that doesn't scale to this size.
617 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 468 ms ] threadNone of that happens on reddit and while intense moderation works (I love /r/AskHistorians for example) it’s expensive.
And reddit admins must know about it.
(for clarification, the linked statistical analysis isn't mine)
I think there's a subreddit-level setting for that, but the max is only something like a couple of days.
Just checked - Reddit mod /r/askelectronics
If it makes little difference either way, perhaps they left it on to quiet those who would keep suggesting they try it even though they already have.
Traditional topic-based forums are better, because you can't suppress unpopular-but-correct opinions by downvoting. Even if you don't care about Fake Internet Points (and the reason they exist is because we do, gamification works), if you state something that goes against the prevailing hivemind your opinion will literally be hidden unless users go out of their way to find them.
(and yes, I browse HN with showdead=yes for the same reason)
Strong moderators are the only thing I've ever seen keep online forums at a high quality level. Voting is the weakest kind of moderation.
I still dread the (lack of) content quality that I've come to associate with phpbb forums (and their ilk).
Of course, past a certain number of downvotes, you post will be buried, so you have basically an echo chamber.
Echochamber sounds bad, resonant frequency response sounds neutral, and it's needed for harmony. The real problem then is kakophonie, noise, and choosing the instrument to play on with a nice timbre, noise floor, etc. The internet is large and finding the right venue and audience is difficult.
There is value in being told to have hit the wrong tone.
This is why shorter messages and twitter are important, it allows a finer grained ... censorship? (Zensur in German also means grade, shool mark). That's why many people, I at least, discuss online, looking for light conversation, so emotional feedback should be welcome as ''the basic unit of exchange in communication''.
I was in a thread where a woman declared that all men are inherently abusive/violent toward women. I pointed out to her that this is not only a ridiculous statement, but also quite insulting. How can we make such sweeping generalization?
I was down-voted and told that my feeling didn't matter. Soon, other angry people joined in and my reply was buried. My comment went against a certain narrative.
But did I "hit the wrong tone"? I don't think so.
I don't understand. True, objectivity is an ideal. But language is inherently subjective.
At that your annecdotal evidence, for example. Ironic, isn't it?
> insulting
Of course you appealed to emotion.
Also you assumed her gender, big mistake on the internet.
Which also explains complaints of the shape "Reddit hates X one day, but loves X the next!" Whoever shows up first with an idea people don't hate ends up becoming the dominant voice of that specific conversation.
Though of course some of the worst shit-shows are also heavily moderated.
At the end of the day, heavy moderation is not unlike absolute monarchy, it's a high-risk high-reward management system.
http://reddit.com/r/dsmr/wiki
http://reddit.com/r/blueribbon/wiki
The vote thing is true. If I'm the first to comment I'm usually at the top, or near the top, of the thread.
I have both pseudonymous handles on reddit and also I go by my own name. On Hacker News I only go by my own name. And I have found that it made me a much, MUCH better person when posting. So now I post on reddit about 95% of the time under my own name as well.
When you have no skin in the game -- such as your reputation to uphold, no superego to hold yourself in check -- a person's id reveals itself. And it's not pretty.
No, anonymity is not new to the internet and is actually one of the beneficial aspects, since it makes people more likely to say what they think, and less likely to be a target for others. Lots of anonymous BBS are moderated just fine. Meanwhile, Facebook can be very vitriolic.
The fundamental problem is the assumption that moderation is not needed and free speech is everything. It seems to have gotten popularized by Reddit in particular.
Nobody who has spent lots of time on BBS, IRC, and other typically moderated spaces would think anonymity is even relevant.
I think it's the protection (or at least the apparent protection): you can't be a jerk in person in a public place without exposing yourself to immediate negative repercussions. That's why online forums with harsher moderation are usually much better (one of the best examples being /r/askhistorians).
Yeah, okay. How about: real names + no private gardens.
It takes a lot of, say, training, to learn to use communication media, too. You just can't have a chat as if face to face, in writing. And most people aren't well educated at authoring, either. At the worst, some wouldn't even know how to lead a conversation anyhow. Online forums just expose that. And I think we as a society at large, are still figuring this out, since 50 to 100 years, so it's a mess.
Then, consider the good that anonymity has allowed for; think of all the things people have able to speak out about anonymously which would have gone unsaid.
Of course.
You can have an identity and "skin in the game" without using your real name. You can also use your real name and not care/be aware of the consequences of things you say online.
This contrasts with a place like HN which has no concept of friends and family -- the center of everything here is the comment box. That's a great trade-off as it allows us to focus attention on debating contrarian ideas, and less on the one who is airing it.
Self censorship due to social pressure certainly keeps some people (as has been mentioned Facebook shows clearly enough that lots of people simply don't care) from discussing things that they would not feel comfortable discussing under their real name. And those things that they might not feel comfortable discussing can be negative, but they can also be positive. In either case, I think it's probably a net positive for society when people can discuss things they actually feel instead of things that they think others think they should feel, even though those others might not even feel that way! Shouldn't society operate in a way that we think it should operate instead of the way that we collectively think everybody else thinks we think it should operate?
There has to be pseudonymous/anonymous channels for information, but the bile has been so intense lately that it makes me think that the majority of communications need to be positively identified.
The internet is not where politics are decided, but at the very least that’s where a good part of the debate happens. Use real names and you’ll be able to blackmail people into approving things they disapprove. What about publishing everyone’s votes, while you’re at it? No, people need a safe space to experiment debating about good and bad ideas without risk.
Real name policies are only about the ability to blackmail and coerce.
There are cases where I don't want to be discovered, too. The latter, Obscurity (hiding), shouldn't be confused with the former, Security (literally without worry or need).
The problem is down votes are not a good comment tool. Especially combined with hiding and such. Upvote only systems are much more resilient to the kind of gaming mechanics you see here and on reddit.
Also, you overstate this "compatibility". For humans, loss hurts more than gain feels good. Voting with negative as well as positive reinforcement is simply more effective at changing comment styles.
I'm talking about gaming in the abstract psychological and problem theory sense.
Feel free to research & teach yourself basic game theory if you like but it’s too much to fit into a HN comment either way.
I believe you may be grouping strong (and maybe not always right) opinions with flat out chaotic evil trolls (whom there are actually extremely few).
It's been intruiging to grow up witnessing the appearance of the term "troll", initially designated to IRC and other net spammers, to it's present and increasingly meaningless, nebulous definition of "mean people on the internet". It's a big difference, which your linked blob quite interestingly evidences :D
They delete anything questioning their viewpoint, not just spam, hate speech, harassment etc.
Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/8crq8r...
There have been plenty of instances where someone just turns off a subreddit, now nobody gets to use it, have a nice day. Let alone the more subtle problem of a toxic person who should not be moderating a sub in the first place.
I think this hits on the underlying problem I see with Reddit and similar forums, though. Look at the evolution of subs like /r/LateStageCapitalism or /r/FatPeopleHate or /r/Incels or T_D or TRP or Flat Earth or Broneyism or whatever. I don't think in all cases the communities started out as extreme as they eventually became.
I'm not defending their original charters by any means, I just think there's some kind of sociological reality or formula these subs are tapping into that allows them to purposefully moderate/evolve into echo chambers and bring a community of followers along with them, to a point where the community even starts to self-moderate to the extreme -- but they don't just start out that way.
It's almost like you can take some ridiculous idea or some interesting but archaic belief system, build some interest in it using humor or shock value, then once you have an audience with critical mass slowly turn it into a cult without anyone noticing, like the boiling frog analogy (hmm, the irony of that comparison just now struck me). I almost want to try this myself with something absurd just to prove the theory.
And I'm sure this isn't a new concept in sociology or anthropology and there are people researching how it works at Internet scale. Can anyone point me to what it's called?
Read their sidebar. I don't think that's exactly "in the eye of the beholder".
Toxic and hate speech are recently invented terms to curtail free speech. If I said anyone who wanted communism were hateful (they hate capitalists) and supporting a historically violent ideology, I'd be as right/wrong as people on the left doing the same.
Anti free speech are a means to an end really, power.
I can definitely see a completely open alternative viewpoint, but reddit has already gone in a very different direction.
latestagecapitalism's output is relatively tame, and given that they have a politically contentious subject matter, heavy moderation is necessary in order to keep the subreddit free of people from any part of the spectrum who'd turn it into a monkey-flinging shitfest.
Also, it's nowhere near the front page today; it's nothing on what r/The_Donald used to be like.
There's kind of a difference there.
Sometimes the truth leaks out, for example in the interface that advertisers use. The number of subscribers listed there was over 6 million, far in excess of what a normal reddit user would see. In various ways, inconsistencies reveal that all the numbers are being manipulated to suppress /r/The_Donald.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Its absolute cringe, and it is humbling to me that I dont get why anyone joins such a place.
This externality-disregarding culture was idolized in SV for the last decade or so. It's nice to see some self-reflection, but unfortunately the VC community, without heavy regulation, is structurally unable to value anything other than growth.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20110429125747/http://www.alexa.c... (check the top search terms)
I've used my account to comment since before they added subreddits. And I never stumble across one of the "toxic" ones except for the rare occasions when one of the other subreddits links to those ones.
It seems crazy. I can't imagine Reddit without subs.
Some folks complain about the Digg debacle and how that negatively affected the Reddit userbase, but IMO what truly fucked Reddit as a tech news source was the introduction of images.
As an ordinary user, I thought that the creation of subreddits was a clever solution to the Eternal September Problem.
The initial pool of users were folks that were sniped away from Slashdot and Digg. There was quite a bit of frustration about the editorship of Slashdot, and having a system that was effectively user-edited was quite attractive.
But as the readership grew, a wider array of material started showing up, frequently accompanied by the typical grumbling about relevance.
The solution was to split off new user groups into more specialized subgroups. The initial set of subreddits were effectively curated by Reddit itself, based on the categories of stuff that was showing up in practice. User-generated subreddits didn't come until later.
Everyone wanted tags for posts (myself included), and when they announced subreddits, there was a lot of belly aching. I thought the choice of using subreddits was a technical one to make the site more easily partitionable but they gussied up the reasoning behind the concept of communities. I think they made the right choice.
A knowledgeable, enthusiastic community provides lots of background, alternative views, tit bits of related info and random facts. Without comments and discussion most of the value is gone.
I mentioned this merely as a historical footnote to show how far reddit's come.
Reddit didn't even have comments at first!
https://web.archive.org/web/20050804002153/http://www.reddit...
I'd also like to hear about people's favorite subreddits in terms of comment quality, as I'd happily read a passionate and informative stance on something I'm usually not interested in compared to what I read on /r/politics.
Edit: I meant to use it as an example -- I'm actually interested in any type of subreddit, I meant to explain! So thank you for the suggestions and I'll definitely check them out :)
Granted it's center-left most of the time (from a US perspective anyhow - as a European it is at best centrist) but that's more a function of a reaction to the current climate than anything else.
So I guess I'd ask: "what kind of comments are you looking for?" because outside of the science communities you're not going to find better discussion threads.
For instance, you get one article about Trump's nickname for Sessions being Mr. McGhee. The comments decide this is bad. Then you read the comments on other stories and people are gleefully calling him a racist elf.
That's just pointless and is a disincentive to visiting. But I keep returning to the subreddit because of how helpful it is in keeping up with the Russia stuff and because of the rarer insightful comments that give reasonable perspectives you will never hear a major publication speculate on.
/r/christianity usually has fairly high quality comments and conversations among Christians and non-Christians.
/r/netsec has high quality posts and comments.
/r/hockeyplayers has a very helpful community but probably not of interest if you're not a hockey player.
/r/goodyearwelt has awesome reviews and information about high quality footwear
/r/malefashionadvice is one of the better run larger subreddits that has writers from major publications that post and comment
/r/askhistorians is very heavily moderated which means a lot of the most interesting questions remain unanswered for a long time, but the answers that are provided are very well thought out and sourced
/r/asksocialscience is similar to /r/askhistorians just different content
/r/askhistorians
/r/apple
I am forgetting a few more.
Good link content however.
/r/science and /r/programming aren't bad
After that you should just check out niche communities and see if they've been taken over by trolls. So far /r/motorcycles, /r/ultralight, /r/camping etc have been fine, as opposed to the many iterations of /r/onebag which generally suffer from power-grabbing moderation.
r/holdmyredbull - extreme sports cousin of "hold my beer". Other fun ones in this circle include "hold my juice box" and "hold my fries". I tend to think of watching someone go skydiving without their own parachute as universally interesting, ymmv.
r/AskReddit - Good survey of the current human experience, usually leave here with a feeling that your questions about the world and lives of other people aren't as unique as you though. Sometimes it's banal/off topic, though.
r/ELI5 - "Explain like I'm 5" usually contains layman's questions about science, maths, history, and other sometimes unapproachable with great responses from people who know their stuff. Almost always leave here with something new to think/talk about.
r/ProgrammerHumor - I'm a programmer, but even some of my non-programmer friends can enjoy the jokes over here.
If you're into woodworking, take a look at r/woodworking
r/hiking if you like hiking
r/campinggear for gear
r/baking if you like baking
etc. Just do a search for your hobbies and see what subreddits show up.
The problem is that a majority of people are just absolutely manipulated by their emotions and dive head first into the feedback loop designed by social media to provide an addictive stream of never-ending engagement.
My dad was extremely happy using Stumbleupon for years. It was about as high-pace low-quality you could get on the internet. I showed him sites like Reddit and elsewhere but he was very content with just Stumbling.
People like to blame FB/Twitter for low quality content without considering the huge market for that stuff. People aren't the ignorant sponges who can be pushed/pulled in whatever direction other people think is better for them, which is how everyone seems to treat the average internet user or voter. Much like trying to blame the whole "obesity crisis" on some evil capitalist food producers, without considering the natural evolution of the workplace, evolving urban environments, technology, chemistry, or just standard irrational human behaviour to be lazy and knowingly make bad choices.
I'm sure quite a few ivory tower intellectuals had their way they'd ban tabloids like National Enquirer and trashy reality TV like Big Brother. But I doubt that would suddenly make these demographics any better informed or better citizens.
We can try to push back against straight up lying, at least when it goes beyond entertainment, but demand will always find supply in the marketplace...
So yes, platforms making dumb content more available do make people dumber long term. I don't know what to do about it, but at least we have to recognize that this is a legit problem.
Sure, but even if that turns out to be the case what concerns me is how often people automatically take the next step and assume that it should or CAN be controlled top-down, and that doing so will surely result in the average/lowest common denominator consumer suddenly becoming smarter and less ignorant.
Basically the assumption that it is such a significant problem, that people would be far better informed/smarter if we just banned/regulated what some central organization or individual mega-corporations deem as not good content.
That's a significant leap - and one that I feel is very often disconnected in these discussions. Just because problem X exists, doesn't mean solution Y will solve it. Or that problem X is a significant enough problem that the rewards will warrant the costs/risks of attempting to fix it.
Of course no one will seriously suggest a gif prohibition (I hope), but regarding fake news specifically, regulation such as the FCC Fairness doctrine could possibly work.
The point is not to eliminate undesired behavior entirely, but to make it less available and less desirable compared to alternatives. For example, smoking cigarettes is being largely successfully solved by education, promotion of general health, gross packaging, putting cigarette cases out-of-sight in supermarkets, and taxes, not outright prohibition.
I don't think that just because the content is digital you can't do anything about it without introducing worse problems for freedom of speech and such. Tons of industries are successfully regulated, this one is not special enough to be unsolvable.
That's a name I haven't heard in a long time.
Just because there is a demand for something, doesn't mean we shouldn't fight the urge.
Netflix chooses which shows to show in its spotlight section / email blast. TV stations decide which shows to put in prime time slots.
Newspaper editors decide which articles get placed where. Your friends decide which articles to share in their feed (and thus expose you to them).
Companies advertise their products on TV, create retail spaces in our neighborhoods, to entice us to consume their products.
If you’re worried about a world in which people decide these things for others, the sad reality is: we’re already in that world.
The key difference is that editorializing affects individual outlets, or groups of outlets under one owner. In that case other parties can simply create the own competing outlets to provide a balance, aka a marketplace of ideas. But when it's a top down control from government or mega-corps then the controls applies across the entire marketplace and across all organizations/mediums, and is therefore far more harmful, open to abuse, and ultimately chills speech.
Not to mention in the top-down scenario the source of what's "appropriate content" is usually the most vocal special interest groups, lobbyists, or worse the latest public outrage of the day - not some editor/company trying to deliver what they think consumers want most. But instead other parties trying to control what content other people should and should not be allowed to produce/consume.
The only way to push back is by rallying your own outrage, lobbyists, and special interest groups - a highly unoptimal process, valuing the powerful and entrenched parties, not what is "right" and moral. And if history is any indication, bad laws/regulations rarely get removed anywhere near as quickly as they are added.
If not for Facebook or Twitter I likely would've never found The Athletic, a newer news media website for sports. I doubt they'd have just advertised on ESPN or some other sports broadcast channel website. Some of the content there has been incredibly insightful and meaningful. I even find articles from there on Twitter that I wouldn't normally have seen since I have the content from there filtered to what I like in my day to day consumption.
So here was the conundrum: Continue trusting the sorting algorithm by posting and sharing links to a very small obliging audience (as well as continuing to read and comment on links shared by another, but not necessarily the same small group), or change something? I went for the deactivation experiment. So far so good (I think?).
At least Twitter has a larger pool of "talent" to start with, but it still doesn't make "curation" any easier and most users* would probably concede it's a massive waste of time. Admittedly, Facebook Memories has made me realise that past-me is a poorer version of current-me and if the trend (hopefully) continues, future-me will also cringe at current-me.
Seriously, there's so little time to waste: https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html
* Of course, there's probably a minority who have gotten employment or work connections through Twitter but I'd say that's a small minority compared to main userbase.
I know it's not optimal because Twitter neglects it, but I find the lists feature to be useful enough for curation.
I follow quite a few accounts on separate lists that I wouldn't want to follow all the time in my main feed.
That said, all this is for nought - what is it that we actually do with said day to day consumption? Ever since I started asking myself two questions for any issue - 1) "What's the issue/problem?" 2) "What am I going to do about it?" - I've realised that most of what I pick up is largely for pointless entertainment and time wasting (not to mention that very few friends truly care about me knowing more "stuff"). With that in mind, I've started to curb my news junkie habit with the goal of focusing on more important stuff.
I did spend less time refreshing some timeline. But
1) I did miss some of my "audience" (feels like an audience more than friends, but I'm twisted)
2) I'm now way less aware of lots of news. Two days ago was the first time in years that I thought to myself "what ? I didn't know that" about an event. Not sure if this is bad or good, but it's an important difference.
I would suggest it's good. Most news in my view is "junknews", even from reputable outlets (including independent media). Why? Very rarely is any news actionable in any way. It's likely that very little of what you and I see each day fundamentally changes how we live our daily lives.
Most of it is entertainment and us humans just like to "know" things - there are more effective ways to be informed about the world if that is the honest objective. Spending an equivalent amount of time reading books or going outside into the streets/community is likely far more useful for nearly everyone. Outsource getting the most important updates to people you know; they'll enjoy knowing "stuff" and keeping you up-to-date.
Catching up on news can always come later anyway (e.g., if you need to cram for an "exam"; i.e., voting).
Wow, harsh. My sense is that the problem is that these other sites are simply not very findable, and Google search results have been getting steadily and measurably worse over the last several years.
I have an inclination to agree, but how is that measurable?
Google's fundamental assumption and it's biggest weakness is that: Excellent content will always have an excellent source to upvote it with links. This isn't always true. If ever another search engine were to supplant google, it would probably take advantage of this weakness. This weakness is even bigger in niche areas that google AI is not able to recognize.
This leaves institutional and commercial websites as the corpus of "open content" available for Google to index/test, and while they are sometimes useful, the incentives are much less straightforward when you bring in money and organizational politics.
Depending on the organic voice of the users who were publishing personal web pages and just wanted to discuss their interests and share the best information available got Google where it was, but now that lifeblood is locked down and thoroughly controlled by Google's competitors. Nowadays, many hobbyists and small businesses even forgo the web site entirely and just operate out of a Facebook page or group.
Worse still, open forums typically either completely disallow links with accurate anchor text or explicitly tell search engines to ignore them with rel=nofollow. This makes PageRank even less valuable, because the shared URL is not associated with link text. Some forums will transparently place anything containing a URL in a moderation queue, leaving no information at all for a search crawler to extract (ostensibly to prevent spam, but I've found in practice it's more often used by niche forum operators to block out competitors and get higher prices for ads; you can even see this on reddit, as many subreddit mods configure AutoModerator to filter any URLs pointing to unapproved domains).
Google was designed for the web as it stood in 1999. It's not 1999 anymore. Sadly, hyper-aggressive legal restrictions like the CFAA and the RAM Copy Doctrine mean that a useful search for the 2018 web is unlikely to materialize (at least in the U.S. or countries that impose similar restrictions).
1. https://twitter.com/ericghill/status/987220242605617152
Yes. The kind of mentality which is drawn to social condemnation has been a mental substrate to all kinds of bad stuff throughout history. No matter how positive the cause for which it's done, it often becomes toxic and authoritarian. Witness various religions throughout history, as well as the high ideals of the early international communists.
why even post this comment if you're not going to name the sub?
"In this paper, we studied the 2015 ban of two hate communities on Reddit, r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown. Looking at the causal effects of the ban on both participating users and affected communities, we found that the ban served a number of useful purposes for Reddit. Users participating in the banned subreddits either left the site or (for those who remained) dramatically reduced their hate speech usage. Communities that inherited the displaced activity of these users did not suffer from an increase in hate speech. While the philosophical issues surrounding moderation (and banning specifically) are complex, the present work seeks to inform the discussion with results on the efficacy of banning deviant hate groups from internet platforms."
http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf
I have at least three accounts that I know of (I've probably forgotten about others).
I'm sure people who participate in terrible behavior like that probably also have multiple accounts.
How does the study account for those users simply abandoning the accounts they used for those hateful subreddits? I find it far more likely that they didn't "leave the site entirely", and instead just migrated to their other accounts not associated to the banned subreddit.
This was done with small "hate" subreddits too. Imagine they did that with some of the largest controversial subreddits, that would probably make half the users pack up and go.
It's a dangerous trend for both society and reddit itself.
Wouldn't squashing the voices of the "right-wing contingent" just lead to an (already implied) echo chamber of leftist thought?
Your one single comment sums up the problem I have with user-moderation systems like reddit (and HN).
That implies it's only possible to be "right-wing" or "leftist".
The biggest change I've noticed is just how political the city/country subreddits have become. A few years ago, they used to be more fun places but now nearly all the content is very hateful and polarizing.
That's entirely different from people that are explicitly not trying to be neutral and are trying to promote a specific political ideology. I expect that majority of moderators on Reddit are not trying to promote anything. However there is definitely a growing contingent that don't want neutrality and they are taking over.
Or at the very least only ban something when the authorities literally force you to do so.
In theory, everyone has equal ability to share their opinions and all have equal weight. In reality, you have a lot less influence than someone willing to post 24/7 everywhere they can. The quickest way to drive away reasonable people is to do nothing.
I don't think this is a reddit thing - it's a societal thing.
Other platforms are also getting far more acerbic in general. City council meetings, local news, etc. It seems the country is in a period of time where politics is both forefront and rather contentious.
I feel the stuff on-line is simply reflecting the greater societal trends - jut with the typical amplification everything on-line breeds.
A baseline rule prohibiting threatening violence, most people agree with, but apparently it is a controversial attack on free speech if a private website wants to moderate the use of its platform to promote hatred against people based on the color of their skin.
And banning racism is being held as an example of liberal bias! Amazing.
If you don't think that is a problem then... well, I can't help you.
Furthermore, it is the internet - I've never been convinced by any argument that HN or reddit or even facebook has any obligation to give "fair time" to far-right nationalism. For as long as Fox News exists and promotes itself as an actual news agency (HAH!), I don't think community-generated content websites need to bother.
Why doesn't the far-right just "pull itself up by its boostraps" and make a reddit for the far-right? (sidenote, sometimes this does happen, and it almost always is full of the most comically hateful people: see voat)
I'd feel much better if reddit and twitter were even handed with their condemnation of comically hateful people. As someone on the Left, what I've seen is that Left-leaning media bias tends to give indirect license to the most extreme authoritarian and even toxic fringes of the Left. It also fuels a reaction from the far Right.
For as long as Fox News exists and promotes itself as an actual news agency (HAH!)
The mechanism I cite above has been in operation at Fox, just in the other direction.
Umm, why would they do that when they can instead use reddit?
Reddit sells itself as being a strong supporter of free speech. THEY SELF-identify as being a neutral platform.
If the censorship supporters want to interact in a censored forum, then they can make their own subreddit and moderate it how ever they feel like, or make their own website.
The right doesn't need to do anything, because reddit wants to be neutral.
I honestly don't see what the big deal is. For example, lots of lefty subs have banished "Tankies", communists who think Stalin did nothing wrong, from their communities.
Ultimately, neither a fascist nor communist can oppose such a purge/restriction without being a hypocrite. Such actions are well within either group's ideological wheelhouse and therefore they should stop complaining.
Here's a lot of users talking about how it happened to /r/canada
https://www.reddit.com/r/onguardforthee/comments/7z1wap/forg...
https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/7z706y/whats_...
My suspicion is that whatever entity is behind massive twitter troll farms of far-right content (as well as inflammatory far-left content) is also doing everything it can to stir the shitpot over at reddit. /r/conspiracy is another one "lost" to the far-right. I even catch whiffs of it in the bay area subreddits sometimes.
I'd say the same for /r/shitredditsays but for the far-left, except it's been that way for as long as I can remember (LONG before any of the bot farm stuff).
The problem with even mild forms of censorship, is that bad actors can combine it with emotional manipulation and media manipulation to push their own agenda.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LofV6cJzILA
Right now, bad actors on the far left are using outrage as a tool to push their own authoritarian agendas. In this, they are aided and abetted by the far right. Both extremes thrive on outrage, especially the outrage that comes from intellectually dishonest censorship.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiRnbNT5uE
Reddit is fully within its right to support free speech. It is the reason why it is successful.
Are you telling me I shouldn't be exercising my free speech right to argue that reddit should remove alt-right subreddits? Are you placing barriers around acceptable free speech?
I am merely informing you of the fact reddit isn't going to go along with your idea to engage in mass censorship because they are strongly pro free speech, and only ban subreddits in very rare situations.
They aren't perfect on free speech, but Id give them a solid A-.
You have lots of other options if you like censorship, and you can feel free to use those instead.
That's the great thing that reddit offers. You can join moderated communities as well as unmoderated. It's your choice which to engage in, and reddit isn't going to take away OTHER people's choice because you say so.
>Reddit isn't going to take away OTHER people's choice because you say so
Why use language like this? I bring it up because this is exactly the sort of haughty writing style I'm used to hearing when I engage t_d users... I don't know if it's a dialect or simply an artifact of shared mindset.
Reddit does censor, don't forget! They've even banned self proclaimed safe spaces such as mgtow hangouts.
I'm also curious where you get your sense of authority, saying things like "I'm informing you of the fact that reddit...". That's powerful language! Do you work at Reddit? If so, can you offer further insight?
Using words like "facts" seems silly. Given enough advertiser pressure, I bet reddit would content tweak. If t_d lost it's fragile control over it's users and went full blown hate speech, I bet it would vanish. So, where does this confidence come from?
EDIT: Shit, we've hit the reply depth limit or whatever. I'm happy to continue this conversation privately if you wish, my email's in my profile.
To reply in an edit, I agree that typically spez has taken a pro-free speech line, but given that we're discussing this in an article that contradicts this from an insider perspective with lines like
>and then, ultimately, these things will bubble up, make it into the press, and then we would make a decision to change things. We would deal with the immediate impact, which was painful, would last a week or two, and then it would go away.
Which leads to my belief that if t_d lost just a little bit of control, and the press caught wind, that reddit would cave and ban it.
They self identify as being strong supporters of free speech and strong opponents of censorship.
They literally founded their platform based on these ideas.
This stuff isn't a secret or some mystery. Just listen to the actual words that come out of their mouth and read the things that they actually write.
And they aren't shy about this kind of stuff. They speak frequently on these topics, both online, in person, and in their public official media posts.
This phenomenon might be easier to understand with a specific example like the recent Ghostbusters remake. It was by most accounts a bad movie. If you browse any movie related subreddit you will see plenty of valid criticism of that movie. Mixed in with that are comments about how that movie never should have been made with an all female cast and that is what caused the movie to be unsuccessful because women aren't funny. It is easy for some naive kid to see that and think "yeah, I saw that movie and it wasn't funny, maybe that comment has a point". Meanwhile it might never occur to them the user who originally left that comment came to Reddit to be a member of an incel community that is notoriously sexist and anti-women. This allows these communities to grow their size by spreading hate and feeding off the rest of the site.
Sure, it can go the other way too, and that's scary.
I was pretty much in the sunlight-best-disinfectant camp until I heard https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/08/25/546127444/epis...
Now, I dunno. Clearly we can't expect independent well-meaning anti-racists to be as effective as extremely carefully crafted propaganda appealing to baser tribalist instincts. It's already uphill battle to get people to be open-minded. Those who argue for reinforcing people's existing biases have it easier.
But if there's any chance of getting the bigots to change their views, it seems it will be in respectful conversation with others, which Reddit at least is capable of, though I guess it doesn't seem the trend, unfortunately…
Another part of the issue is that not all hateful content has a big blinking sign on it saying "I am being hateful". It is often a lot subtler than that. One big example is how the Reddit community has handled the Me Too movement. If the big subreddits are your only source of news you might think that Terry Crews is the primary victim of Hollywood's sexual misconduct. There is nothing wrong with telling Crew's story. He is clearly a victim and he deserves for his voice to be heard. A single post or comment about Crews is not sexist, however he has been the primary focus of this discussion on Reddit. It is important to think about it deeper and why his story dominates this topic. Maybe it is because a sizable portion of Reddit simply doesn't care about female victims the way they care about male victims. This type of bias is only visible holistically and therefore is much harder to combat with open debate as you describe.
I am myself aware of all sorts of ideal communication habits that address the common failings. Perhaps there's some slim hope that this wisdom will eventually reach far more people and become dominant to where we actually learn how to communicate better than we do today.
I think of the cases where people met their trolls in real-life and had reconciliation of sorts, or that woman who grew up in the Westboro Baptist Church and got convinced to leave after someone on Twitter responded empathically and intelligently instead of antagonistically, leading to long-term exchange of perspectives… these stories are the exception today, but we have that at least…
Comments which — without being racist or sexist — go against the popular & politically correct leftist stance are downvoted to oblivion. Meanwhile, extremely statist stances are tolerated and celebrated by users.
The thing they have in common is social liberalism (allow gay marriage, individual drug use, etc).
Originally, the word referred to classical liberalism, which has freedom as its primary value.
Modern 'liberals' — the one's you're referring to — have values very different to the original liberals. They are, in fact, opposite in the current political landscape.
It's worth making the distinction to avoid confusion.
Once the site grows beyond those 1st, 2nd and 3rd degree connections, you get exposed to those 4th, 5th and 6th degree connections that might have some values and opinions that are shocking to you because they don't run in your orbit.
I feel bad that the author contributes his time to making a world a worse place. I see Reddit as giving more visibility to the world. It's true there's some crazy stuff from some loud people, but my guess is if it was quantified it would still be a small percentage of actual content on Reddit. But just like in life, a rare shocking event dominates our consciousness much more than persistent normal events.
I think Hacker News referenced it somewhere too but I can't find it now (maybe it's in the signup process).
People in TD can write in others subs too, as can people from late stage capitalism. Wanting to forcibly segregate and silence people with different opinions is I think at the heart of the problem with silicon valley right now.
'remove those who disagree with me' has killed hundreds of millions over the years, and is a common and dangerous kind of groupthink.
Almost everyone on the sub is tired of the constant brigading and would like more active moderation of the trolls. The main moderator refuses to do anything and has similar views to your own, thinking that we should welcome them with open arms. This has the effect where Berkeley students and residents can't even talk about things affecting their community as they get drowned out by the mass of right-wing trolls. And this usually comes at times when its most crucial for there to be an avenue for Berkeley students/residents to have a platform to speak with each other (e.g. protests, riots, local political issues).
It's fairly hard to ban people on a site where account creation is as easy as it is on reddit. Moderator tools have improved a little since, but remain inadequate for dealing with sustained brigading.
It is particularly annoying when a hobby subreddit gets swarmed by the fanatical social justice crowd and kills all conversatamd community that existed previously.
The leaked content from r/the_donald are downvoted to oblivion. The leaked contentent from r/shitredditsays has much more power.
However, if you are simply seeing conservatives from r/news posting, and assuming they are crazies from r/the_donald, then you are assuming bad intent and may need to re evaluate how many conservatives live on the internet. Regardless of your political affiliation, you will see opinions you disagree with and that’s a good thing for the most part.
Because of the excess of disinterested capital that only values growth, a thing that could be a positive and productive thing is instead a cancer — it grows and grows without purpose. That’s why Reddit (and Tumblr) have massive porn sections that aren’t spoken about and Reddit is a watering hole for white supremacy and political propaganda.
The porn thing is really interesting in other ways. Hosting images and video is mostly hands off, so it begs the question of what shady things are the third party media hosting people doing to make money and what is Reddit’s business relationship with them.
The biggest porn section in reddit is currently ranked 61 of all subreddits. Cat picture section is ranked 6 and is 18 million subscriptions vs 1.4 for the porn. Do reddit have some 18 times more sinister business relationship with cat shops, veterinarians, and cat food, or should we just conclude that reddit reader are human with human interests and as that goes most people prefer looking at a cat picture while a smaller minority goes to reddit for a dose of nudity.
Go to http://redditlist.com/all and look at what the people want to consume. Celebrate that science is where it is.
New accounts get subscribed to the defaults automatically -- hence the top ~50 subreddits by sub count are or were defaults.
"User Activity" is probably more accurate. Even then, how are they determining activity? Views? Comments? Up/downvotes?
Regardless of defaults, I doubt there is a single metric that show that porn on reddit is more popular than cat pictures. There is doubt in any method that collect metrics, but if we define them as insignificant then the same metric can not later then be used to say that porn is significant on reddit. Uncertainty cut both ways. Subscriptions can be bots, could be mistakes, might be from users not reading the site, or simply made up. Same goes for view counts or "activity".
Check out this marketing pitch for Reddit ads. https://www.slideshare.net/webjoe/reddit-26009093
Think of the dimensions of use here. I'm sure cat pictures get lots of hits, but I doubt cat pictures drive 20m average visit time.
Porn and white supremacy constituencies are similar in the context of a VC backed company whose trajectory is tied to an equity event. That is that they drive lots of engagement and probably more time on site.
Reading the article, the author’s point was that pursuit of growth at all costs creates bad situations like echo chambers for racists.
Other sites like Stackoverflow avoiding this sort of situation by being intelligent and strategic about pursuing growth.
Porn offends some people as well (and is not meant to be viewed in certain social scenarios, of course). Reddit has a "safe for work" and "not safe for work" category, and as far as I'm concerned this dividing line is probably better than the no-nudity-period type policies of Facebook (which leads to dramas over non-pornographic nudity, eg breastfeeding photos, a famous Vietnam photo, etc.). It seems like cute pictures and jokes drive more growth to me at first glance then porn, anyways.
Managing "toxic behavior" is a lot trickier, from what I see -- over-heavy moderation also can lead to issues. But "growth at all costs" social media, without checks, leads to factors such as bullying, abuse, and harassment listed as negatives in articles on your growth prospects.
I sometimes think that news and media overblow the nasty sides of the Internet (the sexist / racist side, the trolls, etc.) way out of proportion. For a taste of what average Redditers are interested in, I perfectly think subscription count is reasonable (more so than activity -- people can be very passionate / post a lot about something that is overall a minority opinion).
I cannot comment on the actual communities themselves other than what I see from a quick skim (I don't use Reddit much), but the top community subjects don't feel very toxic. Jokes, knowledge, games, pictures, cuteness, music. Maybe the big news subs (eg worldnews) get political, for all I know, didn't seem too bad on a quick skim.
None of the top list screams "white supremacy" or "political propaganda" to me (some say "politics", sure, but propaganda?). Due to size, of course, I would expect some moderation is needed for those super-huge communities, but that's expected these days. r/conspiracy (probably the biggest community that steps a little bit into a more paranoid worldview) has a lot of people, but r/science has 30x more.
I would even argue that gonewild (the top "porn" subreddit) is atypical compared to most commercial Internet porn sites, which is probably why it actually cracks the top 100.
That's the core of reddit, which was founded as a normie 4chan at the beginning of a time when many sites were trying to monetize the energy coming from that corner of the internet. The parts that you like are an outgrowth of that, and originally essentially subsidized by it. The fact that when you remove that element completely, you don't have a business (there have been many attempts at a "civil" reddit), shows that it still is.
There was already a metafilter. If part of you, at least part of the time, wasn't attracted to the id of reddit, you probably would have been on metafilter.
Tumblr is a different case - just a blogging site with social extensions - and there have always been porn blogs (and nazi blogs, but the social element of tumblr happened to pull it into a different direction.)
It's a good distinction, but it doesn't solve the issue that problematic subreddits will continue to exist, even if I've customised Reddit to avoid them. I understood that was more Dan McComas's issue with Reddit, and with Twitter.
If you're into anything gaming related, good luck. I've been on some subreddits of popular games and it's basically just like the rest of Reddit. In particular, Reddit's system just doesn't work well when there's a lot of users. And the drawback is that these subreddits tend to dominate the space so people do not make private, limited gaming BBS boards as much anymore.
I think it's the same thing with most social apps though. Small discord servers allow you to build up groups of online friends, but if you just go into the specific game ones you're going to end up with a mix of good and bad.
Overall it's just an issue of popularity bringing out the worst in people.
I don't really agree, it's the issue of aggregating everything relevant to a subject, which makes the popularity relevant.
BBS were not aggregated by subject. They're aggregated by the BBS itself. For a given game, there may be 10 BBS. That's how it was before. You'd go to the BBS with the community style you prefer. You have a choice.
Now, you're just stuck with one subreddit/Discord server/etc., which just reduces the quality of it all. And given the poor organizational ability of those services, it becomes entirely driven by a mix of popularity and posting speed.
[also no skin in the game for the BBS owner, as there is no BBS owner. No BBS competition]
It's the same with most "social apps", yes, because discussion shouldn't occur on "social apps", it should occur on private moderated spaces.
I think that fine-grained subreddits naturally tend towards echo chambers, because it has become easier and easier to find and interact with people that think just like we do.
Normally when people find a forum that interests them (like, say, HN) they need to bother creating an account, often validating an email etc... It only takes two minutes but that's enough friction to weed out the vast majority of the people who just stumble randomly on one of your posts. On Reddit once you have an account you just have to click a button to subscribe to any community you like. It's "eternal september" on steroids. 4chan had "lurk more", Reddit is "repost more".
So your post sounds a bit to me like "Twitter is great if you know the hashtags to follow" and it's probably true but at this point is it really representative of the website? If you need to filter 99% of the content to make it usable, maybe there's a bit of a problem still? I just went to /r/all and had a look at the subreddits available there, I find 16 million accounts subscribed /r/gifs, 3 millions to /r/politics, 17 millions to /r/gaming, 18 millions to /r/pics etc...
So yeah, I'd believe you if you told me that /r/common_lisp, /r/mongolia/ and /r/treepics/ are amazing communities but I don't think it's enough to redeem Reddit as a whole.
Oh well.
Strict moderation can still be effective once obscurity is lost. /r/SpaceX is an example of an excellent subreddit that has survived an explosion in popularity.
> So your post sounds a bit to me like "Twitter is great if you know the hashtags to follow" and it's probably true but at this point is it really representative of the website? If you need to filter 99% of the content to make it usable, maybe there's a bit of a problem still?
You're just making the observation that the majority of internet users aren't sophisticated intellectuals. Demanding that the website you visit are sophisticated everywhere is just a demand that they are hidden or ignored by most people. I don't see how this is different than having hidden/ignored hashtags, subreddits, or filters.
You can subscribe to X subforums. and only ever see those same X subforums.
But you can NOT see "All" excluding only things racist subforums for example. So it is either your little bubble, or the full blown promoted/paid xenophobic posts.
For /r/all, there is the ability (on the right sidebar) to filter subreddits. You can add whatever subreddits you wish to exclude when browsing "All".
I am becoming more and more picky about which subreddits I follow.
I have even unsubscribed from some that are partially interesting to me like androiddev (I work as an Android engineer) because they were 10% interesting information, 90% circlejerk/toxic.
https://i.imgur.com/Ybmk6fZ.gifv
All the subreddits I want to see I subscribe to directly. For everything else I browse All with these filters.
At some point shortly after, they added the ability to create subreddits, the site blew up in overall scale, and I was completely oblivious to it all for years, being that I only read /r/programming.
Point is, the site gives you a lot of useful ability to curate what you read.
/s
I suspect that this is happening more than before, but that the opposite (people finding structured, intelligent opposing viewpoints) is also happening more --people spend a lot more time informing themselves overall-- but that the more constructive phenomena is less destructive therefore harder to notice.
I found that just going to a few subreddits on topics of personal interest that I can browse through for new ideas, user stories, etc. results in a much more positive experience.
Smaller communities for specific hobbies/videogames/etc (in most cases) seem to be less polarized on the platform.
By logging in you can select your subreddits which lets you filter out subreddits you don't care about and add ones you do care about.
Browsing subreddits is the best way to check out a particular topic but I do find their algorithm is okay at pulling up an okay overview of your subreddits if you login. (assuming you remove all the noisy defaults)
As for the Russiagate stuff, the front page is riddled with it because it's a very important subject in the US, Reddit's user base is primarily people from the US, and there are bombshells dropping every day.
Share blue for example was given a budget of 40+ million a year to do just that. (Over 100k a day)
The other paid campaign is 'deplatforming' (their term). They do your best to silence opinions which don't match the paid script.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correct_the_Record
But you'd have to be willfully blind to describe the events up to now as a "nothing burger."
If you start a fishing expedition for the Loch Ness monster, you're bound to find some fish but that doesn't prove the existence of the Loch Ness monster.
These questions are not nothing.
This attitude is something you find everywhere because it's simpler for people who believe something strongly, to also believe that anyone who disagrees has been paid to do so. So it's attractive to dismiss anti-trump articles as "paid propaganda", and dismiss people like you as russian bots.
But you're going to have to wake up from that attitude at one point or another because it's going to catch up with you. As others have said, arrests and indictments aren't a "nothing burger". You won't get to the truth by dismissing sources you've been told not to like.
Arrests and indictments for things unrelated to illegal dealings with Russia, except for maybe failing to renew registration as a foreign agent but that's a stretch.
Wouldn't be too hard considering the amount of valid concerns regarding her practices.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Mother_Teresa
Not really. Describe how each news articles has impacted your day-to-day life. It's only important in that it keeps readers coming back who are excited about a big conspiracy taking down the president they don't like.
If you go onto subreddits that mostly focus on non-US news whenever Trump comes up it's pretty obvious that the majority of the world views Trump's White House in a negative light.
That said, starting from zero is still a good idea.
Start from a blank slate and search for subreddits that actually interest you and seem reasonable. Yeah, you're also creating an "echo chamber" if you participate in polarizing topics, but hopefully you're aware that you're doing that to yourself.
https://www.reddit.com/user/A_UPRIGHT_BASS/m/uplifting/
https://www.reddit.com/user/DrPropulsion/m/science/
https://www.reddit.com/user/bodaciousbecca/m/motivation/
Because its one of, if not, the biggest story in the world right now? I mean, of course its going to occasionally top /r/politics and /r/worldnews.
The president and the highest levels of the GOP are directly targeted in an investigation that has brought 20+ indictments with several guilty pleas with apparently more to come.
This is a bit like saying the news in 1974 was too focused on Watergate.
Have you actually ventured over there? Saying Russiagate/Trump stories are "occasionally" at the top of /r/politics is a bit of an understatement. They're obsessed over there.
Honestly, no major scandal in the last few days is the exception now, not the norm.
I ended up blocking like every state subreddit when the front page was nothing but net neutrality posts.
There’s some surprisingly entertaining stuff that floats to the top. I don’t always want to see the posts on /r/gardening but when somebody grows a zucchini the size of a baseball bat, yeah I’ll look at it.
Turns out if you unsubscribe from all of those types of subs, Reddit becomes a really funny and interesting time killer where the community actively tries to come up with ways to make you laugh.
Look at this commentary from just today: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/8da2uu/trump_wel...
Do you think this is constructive? https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/8da2uu/trump_wel...
What about this? https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/8dga0r/trump_tol...
There is no intelligent discourse occurring in those comments. It's just a big echo chamber.
People say that a lot, but, although there are a lot of people I don't agree with on there, I don't know about the applicability of the analogy "toxic". Most times, when people say reddit is "toxic", they're referring to a specific subreddit that I won't name here, but it's mostly just full of innocuous posts like "we have the greatest president, don't we?" - clearly designed to ruffle some feathers, which I suppose is in itself counterproductive, but "toxic" as in, leaches out into the surrounding area and makes it unusable? Seems a bit of an overstatement to me.
Is this starting to make sense to you?!?
https://www.citizenfreepress.com/breaking/john-brennan-saman... https://beta.townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2018/... http://washingtonsblog.com/2018/03/lets-investigate-john-bre... https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/03/29/hanson-is-there-a-dan... http://ussanews.com/News1/featured-op-eds/benjamin-allen-sul... https://iamamalaysian.com/2018/03/12/cry-for-help-by-benjami...
Etc. Etc. Etc... This is the Truth! I need your immediate help now!!!
My Quantum Technological Revolution (and the theft of it) – John Brennan is a Murdering Torturing Thief as is this entire CIA / FBI / CSIS / CAF.
This is Russia-Gate; Murder-Gate
Russiagate is a botched CIA murder operation to have been conducted in Russia planned in conjunction with CSIS (little league CIA of canada) the root of which is the theft of my intellectual property to line their pockets - originally my millions (my Secure Administrative Management System) then my Trillions (the Quantum Technological Revolution that I own – Quantum Radio et al.). The purported leaders of our United States and this Earth have stolen my intellectual property and body and life with the full expectation of my murder (after multiple previous attempts). This is the Truth. These people are all guilty of High-Treason.
I need your help now or I will be killed.
“Power is a Nation of Free People - Debt Free” - Benjamin Allen Sullivan http://www.basrc.biz/help
That said, from an administrative perspective, the intense hands-free policies are baffling. You'd expect a company based off the nature of community would engage with their community and their needs. Admittingly, that's not very profitable.
Organizationally, it should be very obvious to anyone who thinks that things like facilitating anonymous gun and alcohol sales, etc is probably not a good idea.
https://www.cpsc.gov/Recalls/2018/lenovo-recalls-thinkpad-la...
That's always the thing I liked about Reddit, and something I never found baffling at all. 'Here's our platform; please don't break the law' is a nice, easily understandable, easily followable policy. 'Here's our platform; please don't violate the social mores of this hour' is much trickier.
I hate many of the foul subreddits (like /r/ShitRedditSays), but I can easily ignore them. It's easy to ignore what one doesn't want, but much more difficult to use something one's not allowed to have. And then there are issues of fairness, e.g. will Reddit ban subreddits on one side of issues but not another? Does it selectively enforce its rules?
Unfortunately, it's hard to take a strong stand on that position in the face of public pressure when the thing people want censored is something as close to child pornography as people can find without stepping over the legal line, or Nazis calling for innocents to be harmed. I think I'm in the majority when I say that those things are bad.
On the other hand, I firmly believe that the existence of uncensored platforms is good. A history of caving to demands to censor bad things says that censorship in on the table and demands to censor anything someone doesn't like might be successful. Already, reddit has ventured beyond banning things that are horrible to banning things that have some mild potential for regulatory issues (trading beer and selling firearms is not affected by FOSTA, so far as I am aware).
While there is objective rude comments on there, this is why some people call it, "toxic," because their ideas are challenged, and they'd rather preserve their ideological bubble than seek to understand reality.
Except comments people don't like can be downvoted to oblivion, causing no one to see them (unless they purposely sort by controversial).
Reddit has been fully gamed at this point and engaging in the most popular areas is just frustrating.
Keep in mind that reddit skews younger than here, and probably considerably less educated as well. It's just too big to have the kinds of discussion you can have here
you know what is truly toxic? internet armchair psychologists.
They have all the time in the world to hack your software, doxx you, create entire blogs to attempt to publicly ruin your reputation, call your family, your employers, etc. You give them a podium to post their views and they will use it. Internet armchair psychologists more toxic than that? You should only hope so.
There are many, many topics that are completely untouchable there - I wouldn't say that rational discourse can happen there, but I would say that reddit comes closer than anything/anywhere else.
But Zynga and Facebook are like fast food companies.
This realization started really kicking in with Free to Play mobile games a few years ago (also mostly here in the Bay Area). I worked in F2P early on, left and moved to a non-F2P company. One of the most common things we heard from interviewees is that they were looking to get out of the F2P side of the games industry.
Third party apps make Reddit so much more usable.
There is no guarantee that this will keep working indefinitely.
Perf is user experience. It’s a feature!
Beyond a certain level they stop indenting, so the actual hierarchy is no longer clear, but that's necessary because there wouldn't be enough horizontal space otherwise. But the content is still all there, as far as I can tell.
Do you have screenshots?
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskOuija/comments/89rukm/hey_vsauce...
If you're not by a desktop, you can verify the missing comments by viewing the link in mobile Safari (in an ironic twist, Reddit's mobile web view is actually more functional than their native app).
I wonder how many people are out there, like you, who have no idea this is going on. The terrible thing about silently hiding comments is that there's no indication that anything is missing, so most people don't even realize it's happening. The only reason I know about this is because my subreddit, /r/AskOuija, often has deeply nested comment threads (due to the nature of the subreddit). Reddit's broken mobile app is actively interfering with the functionality of my subreddit, resulting in a lot of redundant comment replies from people using the mobile app (since it appears to them that these nested comments have yet to be replied to).
> Mobile people stop replying it’s there just u can’t see
Thank goodness for that! Reddit isn't so complicated that I need a special app for it. It's a website and it works well as a website. It could be better but there's nothing happening on the site that a browser can't natively handle just fine.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/tqoooN7gJ7zNKZLB3
Maybe it's an Android thing?
https://ibb.co/nPtibn
More than that, half the time I go into a reddit profile on my desktop and try to click a link to a comment, it just doesn't work. Literally does nothing. They changed the rendering a short time ago from straight links to some type of JS, and now profiles are broken half the time.
I'm saddened by this, and in digital battlegrounds (and I'm not using that term lightly) like /r/politics or /r/worldnews where it has been very obvious for a long time that hostile foreign nations are conducting operations there, it can result in a lot of the important meta-chatter being pushed down, or troll comments being gamed to the top without the accurate counter-response being visible anymore. This results in further distortion of the truth (or at the very least exposure to multiple sides of an argument).
The problem with social media is that they don't have people telling the public that their ideas are crap, so everyone thinks they're awesome.
Editors get to make sure people understand that, no, they are not awesome.
Social media, like any advertising-driven media, needs editors to tune their site. They're trying to have it all - the profit of big advertising with the automation of tech, but advertisers only want something specific, and automation isn't going to get what advertisers want. No major advertiser wants their beautiful fashion brand ad nexts to a post of child mutilation on Reddit. And editors get to tell people that their content is garbage or great.
And editing means people are going to be unhappy. You are officially taking a certain viewpoint, and are literally filtering out incompatible expression. The people that get edited out, they'll get mad, but they'll have to deal with it, like the millions of other people that get edited out by various editors around the world and deal with it appropriately.
To fix it, Reddit & other social media needs Editors-in-Chief. Just tell the users: "This is the boss. Keep that person happy. Want to be pissy about it? Go somewhere else."
YouTube is now trying that with their kids channels.
In the long-run, things work out better with editors.
Which incident is this referring to?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunil_Tripathi#Misidentificati...
924 Gilman had none of that. I remember the first time I saw this sign[1] and then realizing that there were no security guards to enforce those rules. And yet, the punk ethos was strong enough that folks were just generally good to each other.
Or the graffiti all over the walls with a graffiti code of conduct posted every so often: don't tag over color with black and white, don't put doodles over real art, that sort of thing. Sure, it wasn't 100% followed, but people really respected it for the most part.
Or the 25 cent bottles of water and cans of soda. No profit, just kids handing out there zines and making sure no one goes thirsty.
Anyway, I'm going to go finish the article now, but if this guy got 924 Gilman, and wants to take that ethos into the internet, I couldn't be more supportive. Godspeed.
[1]: https://www.flickr.com/photos/61992100@N03/23226226149/in/al...
Also, we made and shared a lot of great music with the world, which is the real upside of gilman. I miss that time in my life.
> I miss that time in my life.
Me too. I'm still in my 20s, but given that I now have a lot more means working in the tech world than I had when I was a teenager, I've been thinking a lot about how I might be able to help foster communities like that for younger generations (opening a venue, starting a small label, patronizing high school bands that want to record, etc.) Curious if you've thought about the same?
EDIT: Holy crap, just realized you're the subject of the article. Definitely didn't mean to imply you didn't play a role, FYI, but I imagine you played a large part given your humility on the matter. ;) Keep up the good fight, man. We're rooting for you.
If I were Conde Nast, I would use reddit as a farm team for finding, creating, and monetizing internet celebrities through its "legit," properties the way that movie studios created vehicles to profit from actors.
Costs them hardly anything to talent scout redditors and try them out in other publications, then promote the story back of how success story X was "discovered," on reddit.
Keeps their monetization platforms hands clean, while bringing a steady stream of talent to market. The difference between hollywood and Conde Nast is that now, Conde Nast literally owns that talent source instead of relying on a bunch of agents.
Block me on Twitter!
This series can probably be reasonably interpreted as part of the traditional media smear campaign against democratized speech platforms -- they quite prefer speech controlled by their fancy executives and programming directors.
While it doesn't necessarily diminish anything the interviewee states, it's important to understand the context and framing of the discussion.
This is stupid; users are fickle and visitors mean nothing if you can't monetize them. And usually attempting to monetize visitors causes them to leave to the next platform trying to reach a billion unique visitors.
I can't believe intelligent people think this is a valid way to run an Internet business. It might work for small startups looking to be bought out by a larger company (who will then try and monetize it, driving away all the users) but for a company like reddit it's a bit ridiculous.
(Edit fixed typo)
The fact that the communities are strong matters not.
That is scary to me.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/08/25/546127444/epis...
But I have no real solutions. Maybe even if we censor things, we work as hard as possible to keep the censorship records transparent and to make the censored stuff accessible and have some complex accountability system?? I dunno. maybe it's all hopeless.
Listening to americans there can be no debate as to whether censorship even exists if it's done by a corporation because corporation are free to do anything and we shouldn't even debate what they do and whether we should boycott a place and move onto something else because corporations can do no wrong and exerting individual judgement, opinion, and sharing them, encouraging the growth of freer online platforms and the likes is heavily discouraged. No, everything has to do with the law and if the law doesn't call it bad then it's not bad and it shouldn't be judged as bad. That worship of the law and constitution as the only sacred values in human societies is disgusting.
I think the biggest problem is that Reddit has created a poison with two perfect ingredients. 1) Having little to no moderation on abusive/illegal topics due to fear of PR backlash. 2) Creating a platform that allows people all over the world the communicate.
Mix those together and suddenly you have extremists, criminals, and just outright mentally sick people joining together to create massive communities where that behavior and mentality is allowed to prosper. When insane people have insane views, they typically have them amongst themselves or in a very small groups. Their not going to go around telling the town about their views and intentions, so it can be hard to find others to connect with that are in the same boat. That isolation I think tends to lead to towards those ideologies to fizzle out, or continue in private but without the backing to do any harm. When you suddenly have hundreds/thousands of these small groups of insane people banding together in a place where they can share their views publicly with anonymity, things get out of hand.
Take Incels for example, which is a now banned sub that was made up of generally unappealing men would very likely never experience intimacy with a female due to their own shortcomings. It's one thing for a guy to think in a brief moment "I really want to do X with a female, maybe I should just do it forcefully". That's just a personal thought and likely to fizzle out because it has no backing. Now when you have an entire echo chamber of like minded individuals saying things like that, now it's leading to encouragement and active planning of those illegal actions. All because Reddit refuses to step in.
Reddit truly doesn't offer much in terms of positives. Sure the easy going, user friendly, rolling forum type setup makes it easy for people to discuss hobbies and interests. However, forums have been doing just that since the internet began. Sure you can get news, cooking recipes, tech help, etc in a fast, easy going manner but you can get all of those from plenty of other sources too.
Think of it like this: In many areas down south in the US, militant groups are living in the forests. Generally they are white extremist, pro gun nuts who have small communities being self sufficient in the deep woods. These groups hate government interference and usually have a shoot on site policy. By themselves, these groups are nothing. Even the ones who threaten the public, pretty much never do anything. Now what if these groups had a way to find and communicate with each other in as efficient a manner as Reddit provides? Now you go from harmless threats to a potential, real world problem that could lead to violence and destruction since many groups would now have banded together.
That kind of logic is what leads to events like the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII
https://github.com/nemild/hack-an-engineer
(Think Reddit influences so much of engineering thought from things like r/learnprogramming to all the cryptocurrency subs)
Just one example: it’s insulting and hurtful to any quality journalist (ie at the NYT, WSJ, or Economist) to suggest that their reporting is motivated by personal financial incentives, or their employer’s.
You might really like "All the News That's Fit to Sell" which is written by a media economist that digs into how market incentives influence coverage (he's the director of the journalism program at Stanford). There's lots of discussion as well about media coverage decisions in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election at even the national networks.
This Cecil the Lion example at the Washington Post has always been illuminating to me: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/17/business/where-clicks-rei...
Even at the top publications, financial incentives influence choices. It's not as malevolent as someone paying off a journalist.
For example, at most top tier newspapers, there is an incentive for "if it bleeds, it leads". This is an economic outcome, as this elicits the most reader interest and also increases profitability. (See my data analysis on this in the NY Times: https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html )
The journalist crowd thinks a bunch of stereotypes about tech. And they have the platform to broadcast their prejudice to the world. Some of their stereotypes are quite insulting to any quality Engineer.
Why is it bad when we stereotype them, when they have been doing it aggressively for years?
Rather, I believe it is our duty to start reporting on the media and our opinions about the media, as no one does. The media holds all the power in broadcasting opinions on the populace, and there are very little entities that check their power.
The alternative is either to go without funding (at the expense of an ad or subsciption model), or have your users help fund you through something like an ICO or equity crowd fund or patreon etc.
Or you find a way to remove infrastructure costs through some technical decentralization or open-source and treat development/support as a hobby, but that doesn't scale to this size.