If I were either of them, I'd be frantically doing whatever I could to disassociate myself from Reddit. Five years from now Reddit will have slid off the Alexa rankings. It will be replaced by two upstarts: one for moderate users, and one for "edge lords."
All of the alt-right and other controversial users moved there. And with the recent banning of dozens of subreddits like greatawakening the trend will only continue.
Reddit still has the rampant porn and misoginism courtesy of incel, kia, mensrights type subs which will continue to dissuade women from being interested in the site but it's definitely becoming more mainstream with every coming day.
Voat is too extreme to ever challenge Reddit. I think it's a given that we'll see a new wave of social media companies that put "moderation/censorship" first. Many users won't like that. If anything, what remains of Reddit will be better positioned to become the new Voat, and cater to people who don't want strict moderation. But since Reddit has been taking baby steps away from that for the past couple years, it would be an awkward reversal.
I've been to more than a few meetings about the future of discourse online, and where I used to believe anonymity was ascendant, I now think identified use is on the up. It makes for better dialogue.
I fully understand some people need anonymity and pseudonimity. But the general case, very quickly goes to a descent to the bottom.
To further that point, many open discussions of sensitive issues are not going to to be 'figured out' publicly, under a real name, where my family reads. Anonyminity is powerful for open discussions without taboo that will have repurcussions elsewhere. Facebook et al are possibly the worst forum for hard discussion.
> I now think identified use is on the up. It makes for better dialogue.
I haven't seen this at all. It oppresses ideas from surfacing that are currently seen as unpopular by whatever vitriolic group, which leads to a large misrepresentation in the public discourse because the only ones supporting it usually have "nothing to lose".
Identified use is great if you don't want any controversial discourse and just need a quick way to verify identity (reduce spam, coordinate local events, etc). Otherwise it's just a recipe for reflecting popular opinion given the online community's proclivity for reaching for pitchforks.
> I fully understand some people need anonymity and pseudonimity. But the general case
I think we often underestimate the need to have these spaces active and available just to leave room for such people.
If /b/ is where people post bizarre anonymous trash, and Facebook is where people have serious conversations about serious issues, what do the people who need anonymity do? Go on Facebook and tell their families "hey, you should go have some of this discussion in those weird anonymous forums you've heard are full of evil people, no reason, nothing to do with me having a trait you'd hate me for"?
I don't mean to be snarky, this is a genuinely hard problem. But "people who need anonymity" are by definition a group you can't wait to accommodate when they speak up and ask for it.
Facebook's real name policies regularly cause problems for everyone from American trans people to Bangladeshi atheists, and go far beyond that in silencing discussion on topics where a totally conventional opinion might offend an employer or family member. (Or perhaps Customs and Border Patrol, which can't prove how many Reddit accounts someone has but apparently challenges claims of not having a Facebook profile.)
I don't think anonymity has to be a descent to the bottom. Comparing different subreddits, or HN to 4chan, or any other pair of anonymous sites, demonstrates that. I do think anonymity and the need for moderation tend to trade against one another; anonymous fora without oversight quickly become toxic, or are simply eaten by spammers.
But I'm very concerned that real name policies look good because anonymity causes highly visible bad behavior, while identity silently pushes vulnerable people out of the discussion.
Wow, sorry but I strongly disagree! Reddit has good value as a customizable and personal web site. Over time I adjust the subreddits on my home page as my tech interests change and I enjoy seeing the community top ranked pictures every morning. I have met and talked with Alexis and this article provided interesting background on how he and Steve got back into running the company. He explained to me why he and Steve dropped the Lisp version of Reddit.
BTW, I gave you +1 Your honest opinion does not deserve to get downvoted.
There's plenty of positives to Reddit. The trouble is that the prevailing philosophy behind Reddit (and FB, Youtube, etc) doesn't accomplish what everyone thought it would. We have been operating under the assumption that "filter bubbles are bad" and that private businesses should uphold "free speech" the way the judicial system does in the public realm.
In practice, it looks as though online conversations aren't constructive unless the participants share a certain amount of common ground (eg: "first principles" like whether the strong should dominate the weak, or whether all "MSM" are part of a conspiracy and untrustworthy). I think in the future social media startups will have a "point of view" and not try to cater to everyone.
>We have been operating under the assumption that "filter bubbles are bad"
The entire premise of Reddit is that filter bubbles are the solution. You get to create bubbles for your own views called 'subreddits' where you can moderate out any wrong-think until the remaining subscribers reinforce the correct-think with their upvote/downvote mechanisms.
A system that operated under the assumption that "filter bubbles are bad" would not allow its members to upvote/downvote each others' content so simply.
I worded that poorly. I mean filter bubbles are the right idea, but don't go far enough. A site should should hold specific enough values that its users can debate each other in good faith, and so that admins can stamp out (what they consider to be) toxic behavior without shocking half their users.
Just because two people are, say physicists or atheists or believers in liberal democracy, doesn't mean they agree about everything (or even much at all).
The past few years make me think that without sufficient common ground, rational debate is impossible:
•Alice: "Rosemary's Baby is the best film ever."
•Bob: "Devil woman! Satan is speaking through you. But you can't fool me!"
•Alice: "My father just died. Everyone, give your dad a hug. You'll miss him when he's gone."
•Bob: "Cry me a river, loser! Cow farts. Cow farts. Hitler was right!"
•Alice: "I didn't vote for Trump, but I am glad he's talking to North Korea"
•Bob: "Of course you are, Russian bot! I hope your handler is happy"
•Alice: "I used to be a cop, and this video is way over the line."
•Bob: "Antifa scum! How much does Soros pay you to write this BLM propaganda?"
•Alice: "Just a reminder that you can get a free vaccination today, if you live in Charleston."
•Bob: "Great, free autism everybody! Bet you'll trot out your MSM 'facts' now. Science is the new religion."
The web is so full it's bursting with "debates" like these. They are not worth having. They do not change anyone's mind. They cause people to dig in. They just further divide society.
Moderators don't scale very well though. Those filter bubbles are really just letting the users do their own moderation. This reduces the scope of the site moderators job down to enforcing the rules.
If you try to do everything through the global site moderators you immediately get pulled into arguments like this:
User 1: You need to ban User 2 because he is a racist.
User 2: I only said that User 1's views are not supported by evidence.
User 1: My views are well supported by my life experiences, and there is no good evidence because the government outlawed funding for research into them.
It's a no win situation, and neither side is going to change their mind and there's no clear winner. They're going to bicker and raise your noise floor constantly though. It's much better for site health if they can be isolated from one another, and better for your moderator's health if they do it automatically by themselves.
Maybe we could help determine opinion from referencial material so that we can speed up verbal communication rather than trying to evolve it.
YouTube and Wikipedia working together are good strides. LinkedIn offers suggestions on how to respond to people, then the new Gmail came out with that same feature, I hope Airbnb does too.
Maybe, when using curse words/slang AI could suggest something more intelligible?
If we connected our brains to an emotional evaluator, we could include all the necessary emoji automatically, so we don't accidentally forget that winky face when point out an irony or satire (satire; often mistaken for sarcasm due to different emotional attachments).
We need a way to determine if the debate responses are rational (not currently possible on free text without super non-existent AI or human moderators).
Trying to find common ground just eliminates useful debates because your solution ends up being "put the people who agree with each other together". Also, people having common ground doesn't mean they will behave rationally when they run into differences.
I would rather debate socialism with someone rational who believes in it rather than a strawman portrayed by someone else in the capitalist bucket I get thrown into.
Notably, by this standard Reddit isn't a site. Each subreddit, or cluster of subs with common moderators, is functionally a distinct site.
Obviously this isn't absolute. The site has a common structure for debate, the default subreddits have common traits (and common troll/bad-faith factions), and the media perception is of a unified site.
But the functioning of /changemyview, /askhistorians, and other highly structured subs is vastly different from "the reddit experience", and lots of other subs with less structure still have mod-enforced debate boundaries. As an example - the sub for "late capitalism" memes bans defenses of capitalism or debates on the merits of socialism to create shared values for discussion, while linking to /debatecommunism to provide space for a different debate.
Honestly, this is my biggest frustration with talk about reddit as "an alt-right site" or predictions that it will die out from ideological conflict. It's not Facebook, where things pass arbitrary distances along a graph. It's not Tumblr, where the basic communication structure is "here, talk to people who hate you". It's a siloed system where a huge fraction of users never experience any of what's popularly described as 'Reddit'.
>As an example - the sub for "late capitalism" memes bans defenses of capitalism or debates on the merits of socialism
Tangential: I honestly don't understand why someone would willfully participate in such obvious propaganda (even if you 100% believed eliminating capitalism is the solution). It's willfully burying your head in the sand to pretend that your ideology that would replace the modern western world isn't open to criticism.
The best argument I can give about "open to criticism" is that it's meant as space to vent. These same people might be over in /debatecommunism, but they want a place to laugh about what they see as obvious flaws and evils without an endless string of debates.
That's an impulse I can understand, but the exposure-to-propaganda part I can't get my head around as easily. Even political cartoons/memes that align with my positions mostly just feel slimy these days - like they're not about humor or solidarity, but pushing people to take the angriest, most simplistic takes possible on an issue. Most of /latestagecapitalism or /libertarianmeme or anything else is completely misleading no matter what politics you subscribe to.
People say this all the time, but I absolutely do not see it. The main subreddits are troll cesspools and the ones that are interest-specific are generally not nearly as good as other purpose-built communities on the internet. For any topic I have significant personal experience with, the general discussion on most subreddits seem to me to be amazingly uninformed, and I am sure that pattern is not limited to the tiny part of the world I know well.
Not even a chance. They'll just slowly ban/purge all the crap. So long as the leave the vast majority of the porn alone, which they probably will because frankly porn is "moderate" nowadays they'll be fine.
You might be right. On the other hand, Reddit is already long in the tooth. It is easier for a new company to start fresh, than Reddit to drastically change itself (enough to banish its uglier subreddits and users). Nobody will complain that a new network is "selling out" etc. A new company won't have turmoil as its employees (well, the most libertarian ones) quit or push back against new SOP.
Alternatively, the moderates have Reddit, and the fringe has Voat. (Perhaps not 'edgelords', since there's not much irony to that one.) And, unremarkably, Voat is a ghost town.
The reason sites attract a lunatic fringe is in large part the same reason they attract anyone else; they're active and enjoyable to use. Even 4chan offsets /b/ and /r9k/ with a host of less famous boards where people have basically normal conversations you could see anywhere online.
I think you're dead on - userbases don't schism into more and less intense factions, they form around frameworks that match their interests. 9gag and Imgur are "here's some rapidly entertaining content", Tumblr is blogs with mutual audiences, Reddit offers a mix of hyper-curated content, 4chan is a place where things are just happening on a topic and you can jump right in if you can stand the pressure.
Reddit is already a site for moderate users and edgelords. Subscribe to The_Donald and ImGoingToHellForThis for edgelorderie, avoid them for a moderate experience.
I know somebody that is in the explicit business (as in this is their profession) of getting tech companies to aggressively add stronger moderation to their platforms. It's an objective with some admirable aims, but what I will never understand is how the reddit solution isn't already considered to be the perfect one. I literally read 0 The_Donald content, ever, and yet I see its existence referenced pretty frequently as "proof" of why reddit is actually run by Trump sympathizers. I am not exposed to it at all, I don't see what the issue is. Working exactly as intended.
The moderation culture varies so incredibly between subreddits, you really can find things that are perfectly suited for your tolerances. If you can't, then you can make a subreddit for the same type of content, where the distinguishing factor is that the culture of moderation is different from the one that didn't suit your taste.
It's hysteria from people who are appalled reddit admins won't ban communities they find disagreeable, despite the fact all of reddit's current and former executives have been quite left-leaning on social issues and the fact they've heavily ramped up subreddit permabans in the past year.
I don't like Trump or his subreddit either, but I also literally never see it, and don't need a quasi-common community carrier like reddit to evict everything controversial. The idea that reddit is harboring fascists or that the admins or executives are fascist-sympathizers or even Trump supporters is pretty ridiculous.
I don't feel great about spending time on a website that hosts content like this: https://np.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTears/ I guess I'm old, but that doesn't seem absurdly prudish to me.
Reddit is full of stuff like that ( see: https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/ ). If it were my company, I would have some system to vet subreddits before they went live. It would kill me to host a website full of toxic garbage.
The toxic stuff is a relatively small percentage though. If you look at Reddit's top subreddits by subscribers (http://redditlist.com/all/), the biggest subs are by far dominated by general interest stuff -- humor, AMAs, gaming, cute, music, general knowledge stuff. From what I see, you have to go all the way down to #148 r/ImGoingToHellForThis -- a sub that has like, what, 3-4% of the subscribers that r/funny has -- to find the first sub that's in "that direction" (shock / tasteless / un-PC humor in this case, which occasionally veers into toxic territory). Many of the hate communities listed in r/AgainstHateSubreddits/ are very, very tiny, eg 1000-2000 people only.
I think Reddit is going to get more moderate over time, though. They are owned by a big mass media company after all (Advance Publications) and are advertiser driven in nature. I don't think many companies would want to advertise anywhere near a hate community -- most likely even r/ImGoingToHellForThis is too much. I'm sure Reddit also wants to avoid negative publicity, and hate communities and other toxic subreddits can generate oversized amounts of it (as happened during the 2015 "user revolt" where it seems like all you heard about Reddit in the news were communities like r/fatpeoplehate).
Currently Reddit tends to quarantine, delist, and de-advertise toxic communities that don't violate their rules. That might be enough -- the volume of news articles on toxic sub-reddits is nowhere near what they were during the 2015 "user revolt". But if it's not, I'm sure pressure will come to crack down further, as is happening on other big advertiser-driven social media platforms.
> toxic stuff is a relatively small percentage though
I've come to view Reddit the way Dennis Ritchie viewed The Unix Hater's Handbook:
"[Reddit] is a pudding stuffed with apposite observations, many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain life for some. But it is not a tasty pie"
Explicitly racist subreddits have been disallowed for a long time. That one you just linked will likely be removed pretty soon. As you can tell, it's tiny and only has a few posts, so the admins may just not be aware.
I would disagree with many of the characterizations of hate speech according to /r/AgainstHateSubreddits, as they seem to consider /r/The_Donald and similar conservative subreddits as hate speech which needs to be banned (when in reality the issue usually tends to be a few racist or sexist posts out of millions, which usually end up getting very few upvotes and/or get removed by the mods of the subreddit; right-wingers could easily play the same game pointing out a few non-representative extremist comments in left-wing subreddits which, and they often do, but it's just as absurd)
Not to mention that subreddits that do get posted there seem to get removed by reddit admins pretty quickly. Reddit is even removing conspiracy theory subreddits like the QAnon ones, for supposedly inciting violence, though that seems a bit dubious and has not been demonstrated by reddit staff at all (yet).
The pro-censorship side is definitely winning on reddit and has been winning for the past few years; I really don't understand some of the criticisms of reddit as some kind of alt-right safe haven. I'm pretty liberal and reddit is easily the most liberal site I use, perhaps next to HN (though I think reddit is probably more liberal than HN). Huffman and Ohanian, and the previous two CEOs (Wong and Pao) are all pretty outspoken liberals who don't like Trump. Huffman, the current CEO and reddit founder, even abused his admin power to troll Trump supporters on a number of occasions (not that I can blame his frustration, but I think that was extremely unprofessional of him). reddit is derided as essentially a hyperleftist safe space by most people who would consider themselves even a little to the right (not even remotely to the extent of "far-right" or "alt-right" beliefs), and I don't think that's an unreasonable criticism.
Some years back when /r/jailbait and /r/FatPeopleHate were explicitly allowed by staff for free speech reasons, your side definitely had a point, but the pendulum has swung quite a bit within the past few years, so I'm not sure where all the criticism is coming from. I don't think reddit could be anymore pro-censorship when it comes to subreddits than they are right now.
Vetting subreddits before they're created sounds very unsustainable and kind of defeats the point of reddit, in my opinion. I think the default position for a common carrier-type platform like reddit or Facebook or Twitter should be to allow everything, and only censor when there is no other option. Again, I think people sometimes forget reddit is not like some big bulletin board. The point of the site is to allow as much user autonomy as possible when creating, managing, and posting in their own communities.
For a lot of people, none of this is nearly good enough (let's do the math here: it takes a month+ to respond to a racist sub, but a new sub can be created instantly). Reddit was designed to optimize for "free speech." A lot of people, including myself, don't care if the site they visit for light entertainment is a bastion of liberty. Reddit has its priorities, but they aren't super compatible with a growing number of their users.
Yes, the sub has been up for 4 months, but look how small it is. You can't expect that to easily get on their radar; as you say, anyone can make a new sub.
Do you have any documented evidence of reddit admins acknowledging its existence and then doing nothing? Has it been posted in one of those /r/AgainstHateSubreddits things? I'm sure if they were made aware of it, they'd remove it.
Ah but thats the beauty of liberty, your opinion as a private citizen ought not silence another citizen.
But the thing about liberty is that its more focus arouns the government, not citizen to citizen so you'd be in your right to purge toxicity if you hosted.
Reddit has started pivoting to cater to the moderate users a few years ago, and is still working on shutting down the more extreme segments (iirc there was a ban wave not long ago). The "edgelords" have moved to Voat. In time that one will probably die out from a lack of engagement, or be shut down by legal procedures for hosting illegal content.
It always bugged me that /r/all dangled women like you’re picking out meat from a supermarket. Why not men too, or neither?
That said, incelism is a retaliation against the false idea that everyone has an equal chance at finding a mate. It didn’t have to be like this. It’s what happens when childhood feel-good stories are taken as belief.
Unless you propose to ruthlessly ban everyone who forms communities, Reddit is merely a reflection of ourselves. Humans are a messy species and always have been.
And that's fine if those people would stay within those communities. But they don't. And so they present their warped vision of the world in front of women who just reel in shock and leave the site.
My point is that the overwhelming trend is for Reddit to become more mainstream. Which means leaving some communities behind.
That’s step one in losing your throne as the cool place to go. The Reddit founders understand this, but few others seem to respect how deadly it can be to social software.
Consider: “YC is so large that we need to suppress negative stories on HN.” What are the diffs between that, which is clearly a tactical mistake, and rooting out your list of unfavorable du jours? Are you sure it’s an invalid comparison?
For a brief time in the late 1970s, wearing a swastica and defecating in public was cool. That was punk rock. A decade later, kids wore bell-bottoms and the zeitgeist was "peace love unity and respect."
The criteria for the "cool place to go" can change on a dime.
I've always find the idea that subreddits are communities laughable. I know communities are some kind of brand and advertiser wet dream but it's just not working. I'm not part of the Apple community if I like their page on Facebook.
At best reddit is a food court. So of course the same person will post in many different subreddits, that's the entire point on the site.
Is there any source about women being so shocked that they leave reddit? They don't seem so scared on TwoXChromosomes or Gonewild.
Imgur is also a mainstream site and in the comments women are as thirsty as men.
> Unless you propose to ruthlessly ban everyone who
> forms communities, Reddit is merely a reflection
> of ourselves. Humans are a messy species and always
> have been.
I think that's panglossian. There was no public place with the type of content on Reddit 30 years ago. It didn't exist outside of zines. Things change.
This isn't the best of all possible worlds. This is the 1930s, compared to the 1920s. It's the 1970s, compared to the 1960s. A reversal in attitude is inevitable.
And Reddit is not a good representation of humanity, even now. It skews to certain demographics (eg: advertisers, certain types of adolescents, interest groups, etc).
Is "ruthless moderation" ever okay? Is it okay to "ruthlessly moderate" a website if people post kiddie porn? Or bomb-making instructions? Or leaked private photographs? I wouldn't get used to the way things are now, because the backlash to all the destructive garbage on the internet is likely to turn it all upside down.
I moderate, and we mods are not paragons of virtue.
They’re unpaid volunteers who have to make complex censorship decisions, which have very complex knock on effects.
Moderations is quickly becoming the drone wars of free speech. The free speech question of the 90s is dead, and the issue now is how much can we automod and how much can we socially engineer to manage the workload.
And this is not healthy, users can get banned or removed for just going to the wrong forums. Review of bans is dependent on people having the time to care about you.
My mod team doesn’t want this, but we don’t have a choice. As a result we are increasingly at odds with our community and the point of the core mission is increasingly alien to our daily tasks.
The point is that what’s coming is worse. The new tools are more subtle, and it’s decisions often un-appealable.
You can easily denounce kiddie porn.
Can you even know that there’s a watch list for keywords which gets updated regularly to identify new and emerging malignant behavior? Ideas which just don’t get play in forums?
I’m happy with my team, but if most of us were replaced by mods who had an agenda then it’s pretty much game over. Auto mod is a tool. The. Ore powerful it gets the greater the scope for it to be used in unhealthy ways.
And what’s the true effective result of auto mod ? A better idiot filter, and a reduction in work load.
Moderation just doesn’t scale enough to solve the problems of human nature. Automatic tools are too dumb to understand intent, and positively terrifying if they come close to figure it out. (All moderation tools are one step away from being weaponized to seek out dissent)
The future is bleaker. Once the obvious kiddie porn is sent back underground, those tools made to keep the peace are going to be used to “ensure future peace”.
You probably care about moderation more than Reddit C-level execs do.
Do you think you would personally feel more, or less, comfortable than Steve Huffman about hosting content from a hate group on your servers? I don't mean he intentionally supports it, but he tolerates it.
> unpaid volunteers
That's probably related to why your task is impossible. Reddit's valuation is $2 billion.
It’s the same at Facebook and other places, and it’s just going to get worse.
This is the kind of messy iob people are going to hate.
And for the record, I predict that the job is going to split. Community management and community policing. Part of the job now is specializing and identifying attackers, which was something never imagined before.
incelism is a retaliation against the false idea that everyone has an equal chance at finding a mate. It didn’t have to be like this. It’s what happens when childhood feel-good stories are taken as belief.
Most people handle the disappointing but universal discovery that not all childhood beliefs reflect reality without taking up rabid misogyny.
Yes, but when your parents tell you something that doesn’t match reality as if it were fact, you start questioning everything you know.
We’d never tell someone “Don’t worry about acquiring skills. A job will be given thanks to your charming personality.” But we’re perfectly fine telling teenagers this about love. It’s no wonder they rebel.
Argument from experience is only valid when the dataset is large. On average, introverts won’t have success in love unless they work hard for it, just like everything else in life. It’s the lucky few who are the exception to the rule.
Consider that your phrasing could also be called victim blaming, depending on how you classify those in question. Are people with genetic deformities allowed to feel upset that they are less likely to find love?
It’s not a healthy way to deal with the situation, since it will only push people deeper into their entrenched communities, rallying those you label. After all, if the world thinks you’re a villain, why not act like one?
I also know many introverts who have never been in a relationship and are technically "involuntarily celibate", yet they don't become misogynists and don't adopt this weird incel ideology.
There's nothing wrong with being bad or awkward at romantic and sexual interactions. It's the people who already have a lot of issues that become misogynists as a result of romantic failure (or romantically fail because they were already misogynists).
I've read many posts on /r/braincels and didn't see any misogyny. Just lots of depressed men who will vehemently reject any notion that they can improve their situation. From what I observed their hatred was either self directed or used to attack straw men caricatures of people trying to offer advice. They seem to be just depressed, frustrated people who cannot get into relationships and hang out and lick their wounds with juvenile defense mechanisms.
The situation is only going to become more divisive if we don’t find a way to come together and work out differences. Especially with those we don’t like.
> That said, incelism is a retaliation against the false idea that everyone has an equal chance at finding a mate
That's an incredibly poor interpretation of "there's someone out there for everyone". And whatever version of that your parents told you, opining that women should be forced into sexual slavery is not a valid response.
Why is this not allowed to be discussed here dang?
What's going on on reddit is something never before seen and has directly lead to the rise of extremism in the US. Every thread about reddit should be about this, nothing else matters in the context of what's going on here - on topic or not. How are more people not paying attention or maybe they are and OK with it, which is even scarier.
You've done the same to my comments about this exact issue in the past. You're denying visibility to an issue so much more important than some inc fluff piece, on the grounds of what - making YC funded companies look bad? Being off topic? Too political?
The admin team has shown a flagrant and criminally negligent disregard for the ethical and social impact of their platform which has lead directly to the loss of human life on more than one occasion, the rise of extremism and fascism but we're not allowed to talk about it here on any threads, why?
Right, but the topic here was Reddit’s actions with regards to certain subreddits, and why they can’t simply purge everybody that people wish they would.
It was also on-topic regarding what I replied to, so it was more than a little surprising to see it detached as off-topic. And I find it intellectually gratifying to analyze group dynamics.
Either way, it’s your site, your rules. There are better things to discuss.
An interesting question: how did the founders of Reddit make it worth their time to return to Reddit after having sold to Conde Nast? There must not be many startups where founders have sold and then returned, right?
Given it's one of the top 10 websites of the world, I'm sure their corporate overlords opened up their wallets, gave / returned them some stocks, that kinda thing. Pay really isn't or shouldn't be an issue for companies that big.
Depends on who you ask I believe. Both Reddit founders have gone on record stating that he was not a co-founder. Wikipedia says Paul Graham says he was, but he wasn't technically there since the beginning. He joined forces with them through a merger of his project called Infogami six months into Reddit.
To be fair and a little blunt, this is about founders returning to their product and gives a backstory about those returning. Aaron can't really return, so it makes sense he's not mentioned in this article.
I believe he's mentioned in the book the article is excerpting, "We Are the Nerds".
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadAll of the alt-right and other controversial users moved there. And with the recent banning of dozens of subreddits like greatawakening the trend will only continue.
Reddit still has the rampant porn and misoginism courtesy of incel, kia, mensrights type subs which will continue to dissuade women from being interested in the site but it's definitely becoming more mainstream with every coming day.
I fully understand some people need anonymity and pseudonimity. But the general case, very quickly goes to a descent to the bottom.
But I take your point. It is no guarantee of success, just to require people to be identified.
I haven't seen this at all. It oppresses ideas from surfacing that are currently seen as unpopular by whatever vitriolic group, which leads to a large misrepresentation in the public discourse because the only ones supporting it usually have "nothing to lose".
Identified use is great if you don't want any controversial discourse and just need a quick way to verify identity (reduce spam, coordinate local events, etc). Otherwise it's just a recipe for reflecting popular opinion given the online community's proclivity for reaching for pitchforks.
I think we often underestimate the need to have these spaces active and available just to leave room for such people.
If /b/ is where people post bizarre anonymous trash, and Facebook is where people have serious conversations about serious issues, what do the people who need anonymity do? Go on Facebook and tell their families "hey, you should go have some of this discussion in those weird anonymous forums you've heard are full of evil people, no reason, nothing to do with me having a trait you'd hate me for"?
I don't mean to be snarky, this is a genuinely hard problem. But "people who need anonymity" are by definition a group you can't wait to accommodate when they speak up and ask for it.
Facebook's real name policies regularly cause problems for everyone from American trans people to Bangladeshi atheists, and go far beyond that in silencing discussion on topics where a totally conventional opinion might offend an employer or family member. (Or perhaps Customs and Border Patrol, which can't prove how many Reddit accounts someone has but apparently challenges claims of not having a Facebook profile.)
I don't think anonymity has to be a descent to the bottom. Comparing different subreddits, or HN to 4chan, or any other pair of anonymous sites, demonstrates that. I do think anonymity and the need for moderation tend to trade against one another; anonymous fora without oversight quickly become toxic, or are simply eaten by spammers.
But I'm very concerned that real name policies look good because anonymity causes highly visible bad behavior, while identity silently pushes vulnerable people out of the discussion.
BTW, I gave you +1 Your honest opinion does not deserve to get downvoted.
In practice, it looks as though online conversations aren't constructive unless the participants share a certain amount of common ground (eg: "first principles" like whether the strong should dominate the weak, or whether all "MSM" are part of a conspiracy and untrustworthy). I think in the future social media startups will have a "point of view" and not try to cater to everyone.
The entire premise of Reddit is that filter bubbles are the solution. You get to create bubbles for your own views called 'subreddits' where you can moderate out any wrong-think until the remaining subscribers reinforce the correct-think with their upvote/downvote mechanisms.
A system that operated under the assumption that "filter bubbles are bad" would not allow its members to upvote/downvote each others' content so simply.
you agree with me? great. wonderful debate thanks guys
The past few years make me think that without sufficient common ground, rational debate is impossible:
•Alice: "Rosemary's Baby is the best film ever." •Bob: "Devil woman! Satan is speaking through you. But you can't fool me!"
•Alice: "My father just died. Everyone, give your dad a hug. You'll miss him when he's gone." •Bob: "Cry me a river, loser! Cow farts. Cow farts. Hitler was right!"
•Alice: "I didn't vote for Trump, but I am glad he's talking to North Korea" •Bob: "Of course you are, Russian bot! I hope your handler is happy"
•Alice: "I used to be a cop, and this video is way over the line." •Bob: "Antifa scum! How much does Soros pay you to write this BLM propaganda?"
•Alice: "Just a reminder that you can get a free vaccination today, if you live in Charleston." •Bob: "Great, free autism everybody! Bet you'll trot out your MSM 'facts' now. Science is the new religion."
The web is so full it's bursting with "debates" like these. They are not worth having. They do not change anyone's mind. They cause people to dig in. They just further divide society.
If you try to do everything through the global site moderators you immediately get pulled into arguments like this: User 1: You need to ban User 2 because he is a racist. User 2: I only said that User 1's views are not supported by evidence. User 1: My views are well supported by my life experiences, and there is no good evidence because the government outlawed funding for research into them.
It's a no win situation, and neither side is going to change their mind and there's no clear winner. They're going to bicker and raise your noise floor constantly though. It's much better for site health if they can be isolated from one another, and better for your moderator's health if they do it automatically by themselves.
This is the messy messy world of real life.
YouTube and Wikipedia working together are good strides. LinkedIn offers suggestions on how to respond to people, then the new Gmail came out with that same feature, I hope Airbnb does too.
Maybe, when using curse words/slang AI could suggest something more intelligible?
If we connected our brains to an emotional evaluator, we could include all the necessary emoji automatically, so we don't accidentally forget that winky face when point out an irony or satire (satire; often mistaken for sarcasm due to different emotional attachments).
Trying to find common ground just eliminates useful debates because your solution ends up being "put the people who agree with each other together". Also, people having common ground doesn't mean they will behave rationally when they run into differences.
I would rather debate socialism with someone rational who believes in it rather than a strawman portrayed by someone else in the capitalist bucket I get thrown into.
Obviously this isn't absolute. The site has a common structure for debate, the default subreddits have common traits (and common troll/bad-faith factions), and the media perception is of a unified site.
But the functioning of /changemyview, /askhistorians, and other highly structured subs is vastly different from "the reddit experience", and lots of other subs with less structure still have mod-enforced debate boundaries. As an example - the sub for "late capitalism" memes bans defenses of capitalism or debates on the merits of socialism to create shared values for discussion, while linking to /debatecommunism to provide space for a different debate.
Honestly, this is my biggest frustration with talk about reddit as "an alt-right site" or predictions that it will die out from ideological conflict. It's not Facebook, where things pass arbitrary distances along a graph. It's not Tumblr, where the basic communication structure is "here, talk to people who hate you". It's a siloed system where a huge fraction of users never experience any of what's popularly described as 'Reddit'.
Tangential: I honestly don't understand why someone would willfully participate in such obvious propaganda (even if you 100% believed eliminating capitalism is the solution). It's willfully burying your head in the sand to pretend that your ideology that would replace the modern western world isn't open to criticism.
That's an impulse I can understand, but the exposure-to-propaganda part I can't get my head around as easily. Even political cartoons/memes that align with my positions mostly just feel slimy these days - like they're not about humor or solidarity, but pushing people to take the angriest, most simplistic takes possible on an issue. Most of /latestagecapitalism or /libertarianmeme or anything else is completely misleading no matter what politics you subscribe to.
The reason sites attract a lunatic fringe is in large part the same reason they attract anyone else; they're active and enjoyable to use. Even 4chan offsets /b/ and /r9k/ with a host of less famous boards where people have basically normal conversations you could see anywhere online.
I think you're dead on - userbases don't schism into more and less intense factions, they form around frameworks that match their interests. 9gag and Imgur are "here's some rapidly entertaining content", Tumblr is blogs with mutual audiences, Reddit offers a mix of hyper-curated content, 4chan is a place where things are just happening on a topic and you can jump right in if you can stand the pressure.
I know somebody that is in the explicit business (as in this is their profession) of getting tech companies to aggressively add stronger moderation to their platforms. It's an objective with some admirable aims, but what I will never understand is how the reddit solution isn't already considered to be the perfect one. I literally read 0 The_Donald content, ever, and yet I see its existence referenced pretty frequently as "proof" of why reddit is actually run by Trump sympathizers. I am not exposed to it at all, I don't see what the issue is. Working exactly as intended.
The moderation culture varies so incredibly between subreddits, you really can find things that are perfectly suited for your tolerances. If you can't, then you can make a subreddit for the same type of content, where the distinguishing factor is that the culture of moderation is different from the one that didn't suit your taste.
I don't like Trump or his subreddit either, but I also literally never see it, and don't need a quasi-common community carrier like reddit to evict everything controversial. The idea that reddit is harboring fascists or that the admins or executives are fascist-sympathizers or even Trump supporters is pretty ridiculous.
Reddit is full of stuff like that ( see: https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/ ). If it were my company, I would have some system to vet subreddits before they went live. It would kill me to host a website full of toxic garbage.
I think Reddit is going to get more moderate over time, though. They are owned by a big mass media company after all (Advance Publications) and are advertiser driven in nature. I don't think many companies would want to advertise anywhere near a hate community -- most likely even r/ImGoingToHellForThis is too much. I'm sure Reddit also wants to avoid negative publicity, and hate communities and other toxic subreddits can generate oversized amounts of it (as happened during the 2015 "user revolt" where it seems like all you heard about Reddit in the news were communities like r/fatpeoplehate).
Currently Reddit tends to quarantine, delist, and de-advertise toxic communities that don't violate their rules. That might be enough -- the volume of news articles on toxic sub-reddits is nowhere near what they were during the 2015 "user revolt". But if it's not, I'm sure pressure will come to crack down further, as is happening on other big advertiser-driven social media platforms.
"[Reddit] is a pudding stuffed with apposite observations, many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain life for some. But it is not a tasty pie"
I would disagree with many of the characterizations of hate speech according to /r/AgainstHateSubreddits, as they seem to consider /r/The_Donald and similar conservative subreddits as hate speech which needs to be banned (when in reality the issue usually tends to be a few racist or sexist posts out of millions, which usually end up getting very few upvotes and/or get removed by the mods of the subreddit; right-wingers could easily play the same game pointing out a few non-representative extremist comments in left-wing subreddits which, and they often do, but it's just as absurd)
Not to mention that subreddits that do get posted there seem to get removed by reddit admins pretty quickly. Reddit is even removing conspiracy theory subreddits like the QAnon ones, for supposedly inciting violence, though that seems a bit dubious and has not been demonstrated by reddit staff at all (yet).
The pro-censorship side is definitely winning on reddit and has been winning for the past few years; I really don't understand some of the criticisms of reddit as some kind of alt-right safe haven. I'm pretty liberal and reddit is easily the most liberal site I use, perhaps next to HN (though I think reddit is probably more liberal than HN). Huffman and Ohanian, and the previous two CEOs (Wong and Pao) are all pretty outspoken liberals who don't like Trump. Huffman, the current CEO and reddit founder, even abused his admin power to troll Trump supporters on a number of occasions (not that I can blame his frustration, but I think that was extremely unprofessional of him). reddit is derided as essentially a hyperleftist safe space by most people who would consider themselves even a little to the right (not even remotely to the extent of "far-right" or "alt-right" beliefs), and I don't think that's an unreasonable criticism.
Some years back when /r/jailbait and /r/FatPeopleHate were explicitly allowed by staff for free speech reasons, your side definitely had a point, but the pendulum has swung quite a bit within the past few years, so I'm not sure where all the criticism is coming from. I don't think reddit could be anymore pro-censorship when it comes to subreddits than they are right now.
Vetting subreddits before they're created sounds very unsustainable and kind of defeats the point of reddit, in my opinion. I think the default position for a common carrier-type platform like reddit or Facebook or Twitter should be to allow everything, and only censor when there is no other option. Again, I think people sometimes forget reddit is not like some big bulletin board. The point of the site is to allow as much user autonomy as possible when creating, managing, and posting in their own communities.
Do you have any documented evidence of reddit admins acknowledging its existence and then doing nothing? Has it been posted in one of those /r/AgainstHateSubreddits things? I'm sure if they were made aware of it, they'd remove it.
But the thing about liberty is that its more focus arouns the government, not citizen to citizen so you'd be in your right to purge toxicity if you hosted.
A bunch of subs related to QAnon were just banned, the most significant one being r/thegreatawakening.
A couple of past sweeping bans include:
- r/jailbait and some other subs with questionable sexualized content
- r/fatpeoplehate, which I think also came with a bunch of bans on other hate subreddits
That said, incelism is a retaliation against the false idea that everyone has an equal chance at finding a mate. It didn’t have to be like this. It’s what happens when childhood feel-good stories are taken as belief.
Unless you propose to ruthlessly ban everyone who forms communities, Reddit is merely a reflection of ourselves. Humans are a messy species and always have been.
My point is that the overwhelming trend is for Reddit to become more mainstream. Which means leaving some communities behind.
Consider: “YC is so large that we need to suppress negative stories on HN.” What are the diffs between that, which is clearly a tactical mistake, and rooting out your list of unfavorable du jours? Are you sure it’s an invalid comparison?
The criteria for the "cool place to go" can change on a dime.
At best reddit is a food court. So of course the same person will post in many different subreddits, that's the entire point on the site.
Is there any source about women being so shocked that they leave reddit? They don't seem so scared on TwoXChromosomes or Gonewild.
Imgur is also a mainstream site and in the comments women are as thirsty as men.
This isn't the best of all possible worlds. This is the 1930s, compared to the 1920s. It's the 1970s, compared to the 1960s. A reversal in attitude is inevitable.
And Reddit is not a good representation of humanity, even now. It skews to certain demographics (eg: advertisers, certain types of adolescents, interest groups, etc).
Is "ruthless moderation" ever okay? Is it okay to "ruthlessly moderate" a website if people post kiddie porn? Or bomb-making instructions? Or leaked private photographs? I wouldn't get used to the way things are now, because the backlash to all the destructive garbage on the internet is likely to turn it all upside down.
They’re unpaid volunteers who have to make complex censorship decisions, which have very complex knock on effects.
Moderations is quickly becoming the drone wars of free speech. The free speech question of the 90s is dead, and the issue now is how much can we automod and how much can we socially engineer to manage the workload.
And this is not healthy, users can get banned or removed for just going to the wrong forums. Review of bans is dependent on people having the time to care about you.
My mod team doesn’t want this, but we don’t have a choice. As a result we are increasingly at odds with our community and the point of the core mission is increasingly alien to our daily tasks.
The point is that what’s coming is worse. The new tools are more subtle, and it’s decisions often un-appealable.
You can easily denounce kiddie porn.
Can you even know that there’s a watch list for keywords which gets updated regularly to identify new and emerging malignant behavior? Ideas which just don’t get play in forums?
I’m happy with my team, but if most of us were replaced by mods who had an agenda then it’s pretty much game over. Auto mod is a tool. The. Ore powerful it gets the greater the scope for it to be used in unhealthy ways.
And what’s the true effective result of auto mod ? A better idiot filter, and a reduction in work load.
Moderation just doesn’t scale enough to solve the problems of human nature. Automatic tools are too dumb to understand intent, and positively terrifying if they come close to figure it out. (All moderation tools are one step away from being weaponized to seek out dissent)
The future is bleaker. Once the obvious kiddie porn is sent back underground, those tools made to keep the peace are going to be used to “ensure future peace”.
Do you think you would personally feel more, or less, comfortable than Steve Huffman about hosting content from a hate group on your servers? I don't mean he intentionally supports it, but he tolerates it.
That's probably related to why your task is impossible. Reddit's valuation is $2 billion.This is the kind of messy iob people are going to hate.
And for the record, I predict that the job is going to split. Community management and community policing. Part of the job now is specializing and identifying attackers, which was something never imagined before.
Most people handle the disappointing but universal discovery that not all childhood beliefs reflect reality without taking up rabid misogyny.
We’d never tell someone “Don’t worry about acquiring skills. A job will be given thanks to your charming personality.” But we’re perfectly fine telling teenagers this about love. It’s no wonder they rebel.
Maybe incels have trouble _because_ they are raging misogynists?
Consider that your phrasing could also be called victim blaming, depending on how you classify those in question. Are people with genetic deformities allowed to feel upset that they are less likely to find love?
It’s not a healthy way to deal with the situation, since it will only push people deeper into their entrenched communities, rallying those you label. After all, if the world thinks you’re a villain, why not act like one?
There's nothing wrong with being bad or awkward at romantic and sexual interactions. It's the people who already have a lot of issues that become misogynists as a result of romantic failure (or romantically fail because they were already misogynists).
I've read many posts on /r/braincels and didn't see any misogyny. Just lots of depressed men who will vehemently reject any notion that they can improve their situation. From what I observed their hatred was either self directed or used to attack straw men caricatures of people trying to offer advice. They seem to be just depressed, frustrated people who cannot get into relationships and hang out and lick their wounds with juvenile defense mechanisms.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Braincels/comments/9gq4q8/average_2...
The situation is only going to become more divisive if we don’t find a way to come together and work out differences. Especially with those we don’t like.
That's an incredibly poor interpretation of "there's someone out there for everyone". And whatever version of that your parents told you, opining that women should be forced into sexual slavery is not a valid response.
Reddit is mostly full to the brim of dudes.
What's going on on reddit is something never before seen and has directly lead to the rise of extremism in the US. Every thread about reddit should be about this, nothing else matters in the context of what's going on here - on topic or not. How are more people not paying attention or maybe they are and OK with it, which is even scarier.
You've done the same to my comments about this exact issue in the past. You're denying visibility to an issue so much more important than some inc fluff piece, on the grounds of what - making YC funded companies look bad? Being off topic? Too political?
The admin team has shown a flagrant and criminally negligent disregard for the ethical and social impact of their platform which has lead directly to the loss of human life on more than one occasion, the rise of extremism and fascism but we're not allowed to talk about it here on any threads, why?
It was also on-topic regarding what I replied to, so it was more than a little surprising to see it detached as off-topic. And I find it intellectually gratifying to analyze group dynamics.
Either way, it’s your site, your rules. There are better things to discuss.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Aaron-Swartz-and-Steve-Huffman...
I believe he's mentioned in the book the article is excerpting, "We Are the Nerds".