It's controversial because people are now wondering if money is involved. Getting mod control of that number of subreddits doesn't come about for being dilligent and helpful.
This only shows us the ones that are blatantly using the same account.
There are mods that are smart enough to have different accounts for each sub - so that only Reddit admins would be able to tell that they are the same person.
...but the reality is that those Reddit admins are also some of those "power mods".
I once have a conversation with a mod, who admitted that he was an admin as well - I wish I had saved the exchange.
More people should be concerned how well the political related subs are pretty much PAC managed at this point. This is from a relative who receives what she laughs as her marching orders about what to up/down etc though reddit is not the only site on their list.
people seem to forget how easy manipulation of information is and sites with voting mechanisms are the easiest of all to manipulate especially those where you can silence with relative ease.
Interesting. Reminds me that one of the reasons I still mostly like Reddit is because of all of those subs listed, I subscribe to only one (r/mildlyinteresting)
Classic example of why you never, ever look at vanilla served up for you Reddit. Just make it your own.
I think it's important to note: in most cases they are not the only moderators on those subreddits. For example, /r/relationship_advice has 10 listed moderators. However, the list is correct about the five users being moderators for those subreddits, and the elephant in the room about the few controlling the many is definitely still the elephant in the room.
They deleted the original post from the first reddit, then locked this version so that people can't comment.
I'm curious if they're reddit employees (in which case you could imagine reddit choosing to have mods on the more popular subreddits), or just internet randoms.
That said the original post seems perfectly reasonable so shouldn't have been deleted - if the goal was to avoid conspiracy nonsense they just Streisand'd themselves by "proving" that they want it to be secret.
HN does something similar, though I don't know the metrics, and it's more of a "you're allowed one post every 20 minutes on a 60 minutes rolling window".
Why do people use Reddit for political or controversial discussion? I think everyone knows by now that it's a circle jerk. There are plenty of other forums out there and you can set one up in 5 minutes.
Marginal Revolution is run by Tyler Cowen who is an economist. He has largely libertarian views and uses economic theory to justify them over the span of about a blog post. I personally don't think that's enough time to make a point about the sorts of things he talks about.
But Marginal Revolution is well known for having the worst comments on the internet. Literally nothing but edgy one-sentence snark. It’s just a step above caveman grunts.
Marginal Revolution is more interesting than HN precisely because "X is widely believed, therefore X is true" doesn't fly as a line of argument over there.
Online in a forum format? I haven’t seen it exist, the medium simply isn’t conducive to it. It requires very heavy handed moderation, which in turn stifles political discussion. It’s why HN largely bans it all-together as simply not worth it.
I've found the New York Times's comment section to be surprisingly decent for some reason. But that's in comparison to my very low expectations for these things.
Could this have to do with the fact that the site is paywalled and not open to the bots and trolls that overwhelm other news organizations' comment sections?
There's something about having a public political decision that turns it into combat in front of an audience instead of a collaboration between two partners trying to better their situation.
There are a few dozen smaller Discord servers whose community nature allows you to engage with more interesting political viewpoints and discuss. There are still incidents, but in general if its possible for a communist to debate an anarchocapitalist in good faith, most political discussion should be possible.
Reddit, up until some years ago, was great for political discussion. Simply ignore low quality opinions and focus on the few people who have actual knowledge.
Then the "safe space" movement started and anything that wasn't mainstream opinion was banned all over the place.
Suddenly, political discussion became impossible, because you could not discuss any non trivial things without few of being misunderstood and your account getting banned.
It is indeed bad, but there are gems to be found. Some of those gems may not always avoid this issue, but they at least strive to. For example /r/geopolitics. It's obscure enough and the mods participate well enough that generally you can find some really good discussion there. There are a few subs like this, but they are rare and the exception.
r/geopolitics has been on the downturn from at least a couple of years. Mods try very hard to keep it academic, but it’s hardly that anymore with opinions (without sources) being passed off as academic routinely.
It’s still great for analysis related to American foreign policy, but it’s hard to take any other analysis seriously especially when it comes to Asian countries as the quality is lacking.
Geopolitics has really degenerated. It is now dominated by users that post unending barrages of unrealistic, low-quality "fall of China" articles.
Incidentally, I was banned for saying that China would end up with less deaths due to the coronavirus than the US, as a result of their stricter interventions, which turned out to be true. The moderators of that subreddits decided that it was such an egregiously incorrect point-of-view that it had to be deleted, and the poster banned.
So no, r/geopolitics isn't really good anymore. It was interesting a few months to years back, though. But now it's mostly biased, moralistic and americentric takes with artificially limited debate, with such scathing and interesting discussion as "Western culture is the best culture, and that's why the US will be an eternal empire", or "China will be sublimated by the US just like the US beat Japan". This is a stark contrast to the more realpolitik, realist discourse of yesteryear. Non-China related threads are better, though.
Because for the 1% that have a legitimate disagreement/different opinion, there are 99% of "new posters" that act like that sub was worldnews or some other frontpage subreddit
Then it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff and the mods, (as much as I agree that in some subs are totally going for the echo chamber) have a lot of work to do.
It's a feel good mechanism. A circlejerk aligned to your views is the best place if you want to do virtue signalling and get quick cheap validation and dopamine hits for your views.
Up until five years ago, it was great for political discussion. One of the few places where you could actually find a knowledgeable person once in a while.
But open discussion is now largely banned. Each sub only allows you to repeat their own ideology else you get banned.
I deleted Reddit when that started, around 4 years ago.
I know HN has some bad moments, but I actually still learn quite a bit here and get introduced to new ideas. That's a lot less common on Reddit, even though I'm only subscribed to niche, specific subreddits.
Nothing is perfect but I feel more informed and otherwise safer having discussions here.
I agree regarding being exposed to new ideas, but turning on "show dead" has given me some doubt. Plenty of regular comments get flagged and killed, e.g. this [1] comment that I vouched for. I can only assume, but it feels like people are feeling attacked because they enjoy the circlejerk and feel they must censor this comment that call them out.
Generally on HN the Principle of Charity shines through. People respond thoughtfully to the strongest version of a commenter's statement. Not always, but often.
On Reddit, especially in large or political subs, it's the exact opposite.
You're a racist, sexist, white, cis, male homophobic, transphobic monster until and unless you preface your thoughts with lip-service to all groups concerned, even if you're not discussing politics or social issues.
Try taking non-liberal positions e.g. try defending men in tech against the notion they're inherently sexist. You'll burn a lot of karma and get a whole lot of snarky replies "educating" you about the correctness of feminist ideology.
Even new topics like COVID are hardly better. Try making an argument and support it with evidence posted on some conservative or even just non-liberal source: about 50% of the time or more someone will reply with something of the form, "I didn't read it but your source is bad so you are bad".
After years of observing this kind of behaviour, and watching /r/ukpolitics be taken over by the same sort of extremists that trashed /r/unitedkingdom, I concluded the problem isn't really internet forums. Some of their mechanics like downvoting don't help as they conflate "I disagree" with "I think this post is low quality", something Slashdot for instance tried to avoid. But the underlying problem is liberal ideology. Specifically:
1. The belief that words are powerful and thus dangerous words need to be suppressed and replaced with enlightened words.
2. The belief that conservative views are dangerous.
The combination of these two beliefs causes them to repeatedly attempt to take over forums, often by becoming moderators, and then systematically "cleanse" those forums of conservative viewpoints. This behaviour isn't reciprocal - outside of forums specifically devoted to conservative views like maybe /r/TheDonald I practically never encounter this kind of behaviour, as the conservative mindset is that words/ideas aren't dangerous and thus free speech is to be valued and encouraged.
When one side in a conflict prioritises taking over and controlling conversation, and the other side doesn't, the natural outcome is that with enough time any forum for discussion ends up controlled by those who want to control it. Hence the widespread feeling amongst conservatives that the "mainstream" is biased against them. It's not so much an argument a specific set of groups but rather the general feeling that with time any popular forum gets taken over by people who view them as enemies.
Do you believe that injecting bleach into your veins and shoving a flashlight with an ultraviolet lightbulb where the sun doesn't shine is dangerous, or is it safe because it was recommended as a treatment for Coronavirus on national television by the leader of the conservative Republican party himself?
If conservative viewpoints like that are dangerous to your health, then why shouldn't they be "cleansed"? Or did you follow those recommendations? How is it working out for you?
a) Strawman at least twice (once for bleach, once for "recommended"),
b) divide the question.
3. Paragraph 2: Assumed premise, personal attacks.
DonHopkins, for such poorly presented incorrect, biased and angry attacks (the term "argument" does not apply) you certainly have a high karma! For that reason I should examine your other posts on this forum.
I wrote a longer response, but realized I probably shouldn't spend much time engaging you. I think you might be trolling, but I also think on this forum we should give other commenters the benefit of the doubt. So in case you're being genuine: Your line of thinking is deeply flawed and I think critically examining it from a different viewpoint might be eye opening.
It becoming somewhat of an echo chamber might be an unfortunate natural phenomenon: if there’s even a slight lean to one political view, people with contrasting views will shy away from the abuse, leaving only people with the same view, which will make the problem worse and worse. Similar to how the rich get richer, big stars in the galaxy get bigger, etc. Definitely the upvoting/downvoting system and various corrupt mods make it worse.
For example, try posting about Intel in pc building subs. Or try advocating for anything other than passive index investing in /investing. Or say you like PHP for making websites in /programming.
Any idea outside a sub's main approved-idea-space is rewarded with hate and downvotes.
I have been on Reddit for 5+ years now, and agree that it seems to have gotten worse over this period.
Do you think that the removal of the downvote capability solves this problem? What solutions are available?
I think the main issue is that Reddit has become more mainstream. My theory is that when a new website like reddit is created, the early adopters are typically more open-minded people by their very nature. Later as the platform is recognized as successful, the mainstream population joins. These mainstream users, less likely on average to accept new ideas than the initial early-adopter user base, then begins to drag the discussion into group-think.
My most pronounced experience with this phenomenon was with r/wallstreetbets. In the early days, it was actually a very interesting and unique community with rapidly evolving conversations. With the mass influx of new users in 2018 and 2019, the comment sections slowly shifted into parroting of the subs common phrases and group think. Now in 2020, you can almost predict the comment sections before you open it up.
Perhaps due to its lack of promotion and UI, HN has been more resistant to this shift, but is not immune.
My personal solution to this problem is to keep jumping to new platforms if an old one becomes too bias. When my favorite subreddits start hitting r/all, I begin looking for new ones that follow the same topics.
I deleted my reddit account and read it read-only-accountless now. Having zero inclination to post there keeps my reading habit super lightweight. I don’t even bookmark subreddits. Just dip and dive out. I just can’t handle more than that amount of exposure to what it’s become.
For even lighter reading, try https://popular.pics – a picture/video viewer for Reddit I’m working on. I find it excellent for browsing image-heavy subreddits.
> Do you think that the removal of the downvote capability solves this problem? What solutions are available?
It's a classic case of a variant of the WWW-Eternal-September virus that had been plaguing the interwebs since the dawn of forums. There is no solution other than quarantine and moving to unaffected places.
It's been plaguing non-interweb groups since always. The dynamic goes something like:
- A thing becomes possible. Some people enjoy the thing, get together and form a community doing the thing.
- the community quickly stratifies into "creators" - the people who actually do the thing and do it well, "community builders" - the people who don't actually do the thing very well, but are good at building the community around it, and "fans" - people who can't really do the thing, but enjoy the community and hang around in it.
- if the creator:fan ratio stays within reasonable limits, the community will continue to be enjoyable and fun
- if the community attracts more fans, though, the community is destroyed. Either the urge to monetise overwhelms and fans become customers, creators become rockstars and the community becomes an industry.
- Or it drowns in its own bile. Fans don't actually contribute to the community, they just soak up every else's contribution. If there are too many fans, they drain the energy and ability of the community to self-sustain. Community builders "burn out" and creators become reclusive, staying away from the community.
Anything that gets too popular gets either turned into an industry, or destroyed by its own popularity.
What I think on the subject is longer than I have space for here. But briefly - I think healthy communities spot these characters early and isolate them. It's not until the communities become toxic that the sociopaths can operate freely. So the sociopaths are a symptom, not the cause.
Removal of downvote is not necessarily enough, it doesn't stop differing comments from being drowned out in an echo chamber.
I really think that the problem is somewhat embedded in two things: human nature, and practical limits of our attention. For the former, what I mean is that essentially discussions tend to get driven towards extreme or biased views, because people with moderated, centrist, or less extreme views are less likely to say anything. As the community grows, eventually there are enough people with extreme views that the limit of how many comments you are willing to read through is saturated with them. Eventually one view becomes predominant. And I guess, the last factor would be that people enjoy seeing their beliefs echoed back to them, as a form of validation - aannd we've hit peak echo chamber.
I honestly have no real solution to this, other than trying to stay within smaller subreddits, where the middling opinions are not yet drowned out. And preferably ones that are well moderated, and have expectations of quality posts (you mention HN, and the self-moderation of the community here is a good example, jokes and other shitposts are regularly voted into oblivion, although this trend has been slowly diminishing over the years). As for specific subreddits that are great examples, it is hard to point out, because they are so specific.
It's not the fact of the pushback that it is important, but how it is expressed. One of the great HN advantages is community's focus on substantive comments and a strong dislike of any personal attacks.
HN: "php sucks because of those technical reasons". Reddit: "php sucks, period, and you are a moron".
I think there is also another aspect that is not talked about when discussing downvotes and eco-chamber: the shills.
Companies/lobbyists/govs have realised a few years back that reddit was big enough/influential enough to shape some aspect of public opinion, it is now quite obviously that they are paying PR companies to defend their lobbies/brand/products on reddit.
The other day I commented on a european sub-reddit, where they were discussing the move away from coal power plants as an energy source. I pointed out that the move away from coal was great but that we should remain sceptical of the "green" "clean" energy marketing around bio-mass power plants and also natural-gas power plants.
Immediately the comment became controversial with wildly varying scores of up and downvotes. All the comments that followed where quite adversarial and flippant, mixed with bland marketing statements filled with buzzwords about how bio-mass is sustainable and 'renewable'. I doubt this situation would have occurred 6/7 years ago. In this case it was so obvious that I couldn't care less but probably for some users they would be intimidated to continue to comment on the topic after this.
It's not just Energy lobby, you could say the same thing about Pesticides, Pharma, <insert major lobby group>.
Also on the shills, I used to go to reddit as a source of legitimate product reviews and recommendations, now it's obviously that every marketing person uses the platform to name drop their product and do stealth marketing companies.
As so many others before it, reddit has become a victim of its own popularity.
> Or say you like PHP for making websites in /programming.
To be fair, advocating for new PHP projects here on HN is met with ... scrutiny to put it lightly, too... same for going against the "groupthink" when it comes to libertarian capitalism, gig economy or the latest JS framework.
This also makes it hard to find new information. The movie and moviesuggestion subreddits for example always recommend from the same small subset of movies. There used to be people who would post really interesting galleries of "Movies you may have missed in 20xx" and they were almost always movies I had missed that flew way under the radar but were great. Ir's like that with every subreddit though, they have this corpus of knowledge they refer to and won't consider anything outside of it, everyone is just parroting someone else.
Same thing happens on HN. Comments that go against the kooolaid-driven white saviour ethos of certain VC-backed ideas are often downvoted. Still not as bad as popular Reddit subs though.
There is so much dystopian doublespeak in startup marketing, and people continue to believe it, because not doing so threatens their careers. Of course there are also many startups out there that actually do improve lives, but I wouldn't say it's the majority.
That's why on certain subreddits you just sort threads and replies by controversial. This will give you the opposite point of view. Or not so opposite, because sorting by controversial on /r/politics will often give you pro-Biden threads rather than pro-Trump threads, because the mainstream hivemind is overwhelmingly pro-Bernie.
While group-think is real, the views that are allowed to be expressed on Reddit were not selected because a majority of users held them and pushed out those who disagreed. They were selected by the corporate owners of the site to promote their ideological beliefs, and to appease the very similar ideological beliefs of the major corporations who buy ads there.
Contrary opinions were driven off the site simply by repeatedly deleting the subreddits and users who expressed them. Down-voting or any other organic user interaction had nothing to do with it.
Placing corporate representatives as moderators is just a way of preventing the organic accrual of power to those with popular opinions that challenge the ideologies of the site owners.
Reddit contains massive left and right wing communities, and on both sides there widely-held that are antithetical to the corporate establishment, so this narrative doesn’t seem true at all.
There seems to be a lot more left than right. Something that ought to be neutral such as r/barcelona has a heavy left wing slant to it. The delete posts about crime in case anyone notices any demographic patterns involved. And they have now turned into the corona gestapo, posing pictures of people not social distancing enough for their standards all in the name of "saving lives".
Perhaps this isn't a conspiracy but actual mainstream political thought in Barcelona? The city has a very rich leftist history, being one of the centers of Spanish anarchism during the civil war, for example.
> The delete posts about crime in case anyone notices any demographic patterns involved
Probably because, just as in every other country, demography is the confounding variable and poverty/inequality the actual predictor of blue collar crimes?
> corona gestapo
Because, after Belgium, Spain has the highest per capita Covid death rate in the world?
Football matches and Womens March right when the cases were starting to get bad must have been a contributor. Spanish and Italian culture are quite physical compared to the UK, people greet with kisses. Cities are quite dense.
Now that the virus is out there, they are trying to make up for it retroactively with overly strict measures.
> Probably because, just as in every other country, demography is the confounding variable and poverty/inequality the actual predictor of blue collar crimes?
Is that a good reason to not be allowed to discuss the problem?
> Because, after Belgium, Spain has the highest per capita Covid death rate in the world?
We also had the strictest lock down in Europe. Children were allowed out for the first time with their parents on 5 weeks and were being shamed for standing too close by some reditors standard.
It's gone from "flatten the curve so the hospitals aren't overwhelmed" to some bizarre sort of virtue signalling where the more you complain about the actions of others the more virtuous you are.
If you look at this study, outdoors doesn't seem such a problem. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.04.20053058v...
And? Social distancing during the epidemic saves lives indeed. Perhaps public shaming is not the best way to deal with the problem, but the general idea is correct.
> And they have now turned into the corona gestapo, posing pictures of people not social distancing enough for their standards all in the name of "saving lives".
If you view social distancing as a left wing/right wing issue, you should reassess your approach to politics.
> Reddit contains massive left and right wing communities
But are they really massive?
If you take a look at a lot of those "massive" subs you'll find that certain posts from certain accounts always get tens of thousands of upvotes, and all of the posts from their real users get tens of.... well... tens.
If a reputation system on the internet exists, it has been exploited / manipulated.
Well, it's owned by China, Peter Thiel, A18Z, Snoop Dogg and the Ohanian klan. So the bias is balanced, in that Bay Area industry gets to silence opposing voices just like the CCP does...
I literally deleted Reddit app a week ago, and my mental health is in a better state. I can't imagine how much Reddit affected my mood.
I usually used it for fun, and had subscribed to some innocent technical subreddits, and memes that had nothing to do with politics or relationships; but eventually got dragged into these spiteful, petty, sort of ugly side of Reddit full of bad takes, top posts awarded for repeating same things over and over, namecalling, bullying kids, censoring people, etc.
The downvote button is used as a "The hivemind disagress with you, here is your -50 karma" and is never used for it's actual purpose which goes against the purpose of that feature.
Worst subreddit you should never visit are amitheasshole, relationshipadvice, programmerhumour, cats (they only post their dead cats for karma), pewdiepiesubmissions, dankmemes, worldpolitics, to name a few.
There are lots of popular karmawhores at the top of Reddit (like a shithead called u/gallowboob) that repost/steal posts from other subreddits to get karma shamelessly and he mods popular subs so he gets a pass, and he censors people that expose him.
Really, the Reddit drama is never ending and I'm glad I decided to come out of the pettiness of it all.
I mean, where else are you going to find something like that? Not twitter.
Dunno. I've sort of embraced the dumpster fire and am happy to warm myself with the flames. It smells pretty bad at times, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a more amusing circus.
I enjoy it still. But every day I have to remind myself not to argue with people on the internet. I'm not a perfect human being; I often fail at this simple task.
It became awful around 2016. One of my interest areas is political and usually pretty controversial. I have a degree in the area and decades of practical experience.
Reddit was one of the few places where I occasionally found people with similar background to discuss more than just superficially.
That completely changed in 2016. Everybody with actual knowledge on the subject was banned from all related subs. Knowledge became a threat, only the "correct" ideology was allowed to remain.
Tbh, I was pretty shocked how easily people are radicalized.
You have to know what to discuss and which holy grail to avoid.
Reddit is overwhelmingly populated by left-wing teenagers and college students -- so politics or economics discussions are shallow and fruitless.
HN is overwhelmingly populated by techies, heavily biased towards FAAMG and bay area, heavily biased towards web dev. Economics discussion here seems to be saner though with a massive US-centrism and anti-tax skew as people are 1%ers and many never experienced life outside the US, but if you dare criticise the big 5 companies or their products, prepare to be buried...
100% of Hacker News is moderated by the same people
Power laws are a thing, we shouldn't be surprised if 80% of the moderation is done by 20% of the people (& remember, power laws are recursive)
A lot of the subreddits in the image seem related. Almost as if the people who create the most popular subreddits tend to create more than 1 subreddit & know how to effectively run them. We can argue about how effective reddit is, but "being one of the most popular subreddit" should work for this point
I say this as someone who doesn't frequent the most popular subreddits or recognize who the mods are. But I do notice moderators tend to receive quite a bit of flak which isn't always warranted
Which is to say, I'd be interested if there were some citations of other moderators claiming these mods were injected or whatnot. But this "just stating facts" 5 people fact doesn't seem relevant
There's also a matter of scale. Any one of the top 50 subreddits probably get more activity than all of HN. 10000 comments on a single post isn't uncommon, but 1000 posts on an HN topic is pretty rare.
Even more given how much of a hassle it is moderating any kind of online community. I had to deal with smaller ones and would never do that job for free again...
I mean, so is Reddit. Subreddit moderators are public information. All the original image did was take this data and aggregate it onto one chart. HN doesn't say "100% of posts are moderated by the same people" anywhere on the site in the same way that Reddit doesn't say "our top 100 are mostly moderated by 5 people."
On others, not so much. There's been much discussion on HN with how it handles users from shadowbans, hidden rate limits, story weighting and so forth. I don't personally have a problem with those concepts at all, but it does seem weird to me that people here blast Reddit for doing the same things that HN does. There's been instances here of mods editing titles in order to appeal to the trolls (in hopes of removing flame wars, but an appeal nonetheless) for example.
Now there's a full different discussion with how HN and Reddit use these tools to try and curate quality however.
> 100% of Hacker News is moderated by the same people
While they seem to do a great job, I think that's a bad thing.
Why should one person's opinion on what's okay to post matter more than the community's opinion? Isn't the point of voting-based communities like HN and Reddit to give the community power over what should be at the top?
What would happen if these communities were entirely auto-moderated? Software could automatically remove posts that break rules. I wonder whether that would help avoid issues like we're seeing here - where power is concentrated in the hands of the few, and those few have biases that can lead to unjust moderation.
Except the 92 are some of the biggest subs which are constantly upvoted to frontpage. Some of those 92 subs get more traffic and frontpage time than 93-500 combined.
Reminder: If you swap out the 'r' in the 'reddit.com' URL for 'c' (meaning censored), you can read the deleted comments.. Nowadays that's a must when reading "controversial" threads on Reddit.
> Reminder: If you swap out the 'r' in the 'reddit.com' URL for 'c' (meaning censored), you can read the deleted comments.
That's true if ceddit scanned the thread prior to the message being deleted. In a heavily trafficked and modded thread, many comments will be deleted in-between scans and those will be lost to everyone but reddit admins.
The only surefire way of seeing every censored comments is for reddit to provide the option to the users, but they are too pro-censorship and too pro-mod to allow that to happen.
It's important (when considering censorship) to quantify the impact of the UX as well.
If you post an opinion that gets downvoted a lot, your account will be given a 10 minute timer before you can reply to anyone, or post a new comment.
As a result, users must weigh the implications of compromising their ability to use all the features of the website, versus having the freedom to voice their opinion. In most cases if you want to express your opinion on some topic which is against the prevailing narrative, and you don't want it to affect your ability to post about completely unrelated things like Power Tools or Automobiles, then your only options are to self-censor, or use a different account, or wait 10 minutes between comments.
The ceddit website will show you censored content, but there are likely millions of similar comments that users did not post because the algorithm discourages wrongthink
It’s frustrating to see people talk about niche subreddits and not mentioning any or talk about leaving reddit and not mention what they replaced it with.
You don't need to replace reddit with anything. We functioned fine without it most of our lives. It's time better spent doing a hobby or reading a book or even watching soap operas
Nothing, really:\ Unfortunately, the direct competitors (Voat et al.) failed to attract enough content or users to be real competitors outside of very narrow communities/interests; ex. /v/linux existed, but it was basically dead, so there was nothing to go there for. So, I use HN more, browse more news aggregators, and hope the fediverse or something can come to fill the void.
Given the state of r/The_Donald at the time what spez did was kind of funny, and I would like to think that any self respecting HNer would do something similar in that situation.
If you think of reddit as a service to the public and not your personal troll site, doing that kind of thing is terrible. It's like the CEO of a utility company shutting down electricity to people they have a private disagreement with. It hurts society if you let that pass (or encourage it), as you now need a competitor to enter the market or you'll have to submit to whatever private wishes the CEO has.
Reddit is not a utility company - people do not organise their lives through Reddit like they do Facebook etc. It's, at best, a sometimes vaguely informational entertainment site.
Of course, in the end Reddit doesn't want to be a utility, it wants to be a cash grab. And it's fine to do whatever if your only goal is to get as much money as possible with no concern for anything else.
Yes, surely any superior HN user would downright alter the content of other people and try to sweep it under the rug when it is discovered - simply because he doesn't like those people. That truly is the right thing to do. And it's funny!
Such a cringe website; like ResetEra for the masses. There are probably only a handful of subreddits that are alright i.e. not full of living bots.
Everything else is just groupthink and tribalism, just look at r/politics or r/news. What's worse is that even neutral subreddits like r/gaming are prone to the mods a.k.a janitors being pissy and deleting anything that doesn't conform to the status quo (looking at you r/TheLastofUs).
If you spend all your time digging into the corners of reddit, the niche hobbyists' zones, it's still pretty useful. But it is a constant fight against entropy and the rubes.
Oh yeah no doubt. they're informative, helpful, and good for legitimate discussion. It's just such a shame that the broader subs that aren't niche happen to be so toxic.
IMO, reddit is the last remaining place to find genuine, user opinions on products. I've taken to adding "reddit" to all my google searches when I'm researching which product to buy; for example, I typed "DT 770 reddit headphones" in google when I was looking up which headphones to buy. Reviewers rave about that pair, but looking up real user experiences of them made me decide they weren't for me. Over time even that's becoming less useful, as memes overtake the platform and you can't find people talking about more niche products, but that's still the most useful any social network has been for me.
For me, reddit's use is both the case for product reviews and finding collections of good beginner-intermediate level information for some hobbies.
The sidebar wikis of hobbyist communities is packed full of good content, curated over years by the community so usually it's a very good "starter pack" knowledge to save time on your own research.
Dealers have crowded a lot of the markets, yeah. VPNs are another one, if you look for VPN advice you're very likely to find people trying to get you to use their referral code or lying about things.
I just replied to another comment saying i do exactly the same and how the rest of the internet is mad up of copy-pasted (many times faked) reviews and auto-generated content (or auto translations) which is just infuriating.
The thing is, at some point this is probably gonna happen to reddit as well, so enjoy it while it lasts. Just the other day i read in a subreddit about people being offered things in return for favorable reviews on certain products on those subreddits. Sigh.
It's the r/juststart amazon affiliate way. I'll be really happy when Amazon finally cuts commissions to zero. There's just so much unbelievably poor content on google results.
Reddit is utterly useless for honest product reviews. The only place to reliably find genuine product reviews is from people you know IRL. Your friends, family, coworkers, etc.
It's getting worse over time but you can generally find good, honest reviews. If you're doubtful about the authenticity you can usually just ask them a question about something specific and you can judge it from their response (or lack thereof)
It's funny how people get upset at a niche gaming forum like they control the games industry. I remember years ago it was neogaf that was the big bad gaming forum, but now nobody talks about it.
Also Reddit and other forums are just forums. There's plenty of other places to have discussions.
In fact Reddit allows anyone to create sub reddits.
Why can't a group of like-minded people who want to have "non-status quo" discussions create their own communities for it?
That's how Reddit overtook Digg.
But I think what's really the complaint here is that people don't like that they don't have a mainstream audience.
They want to have their posts have the widest reach possible for ego and they don't like moderators deleting their posts or being downvoted.
At the end of the day none of it really matters. Why are people waging pointless online wars about internet communities?
I can imagine teenagers that are still developing their personal values, and exploring the site, are most suseptible to being influenced by the big subs.
Considering gallowboob openly admitted to landing a job off his ability to do just that, I would say that is likely. People don’t realize how much influence things like memes or other seemingly innocuous posts can have.
We shouldn't downvote or ban people from which reddit community because we disagree with their opinion? /r/BeatingWomen? /r/Gore? /r/Incels? /r/FatPeopleHate? /r/Pizzagate? /r/The_Donald? /r/MensRights? /r/ShitN_ggersSay? /r/TransF_gs? /r/CreepShots? /r/TheRedPill? /r/WatchPeopleDie?
Why, because it hurts their feelings? To protect them from the consequences of what they said, and ensure everyone has a chance to hear it? Downvoting is an exercise of free speech, too, you know.
A friend and an old boss used to work in accident forensics and as an EMT respectively. First guy said, never stand with your toes over the curb. Second guy said two things. Never put your thumbs in the wheel. Because airbags will dislocate your thumbs. And if your toddler slips his car seat pull over then and there. Because in an accident toddlers go head first into the windshield.
/r/MensRights isn't controversial except to feminists. Have you looked at it? It covers topics like:
- Biased justice systems
- Double standards by feminists e.g. engaging in sexism
- Anti-circumcision
- False accusations
- Unfair child custody practices
and so on.
The fact that you're conflating advocacy of men's rights with beating women is exactly why online forums have such horrible problems - people like you routinely try to shut down reasonable discussion by ludicrous comparisons to violence. I hope you certainly don't moderate any forums!
A funny thing happened yesterday. I started seeing hits from Reddit. A lot of hits. Fully a fifth of my traffic came from a particular thread on Reddit — despite my being in a slow blogging period, posting my one post I managed very late in the day, and despite the long tail on my bigger posts already waning.
So I clicked through to see what I was linked from, Turns out, it was r/MensRights, and they were opining that I’m a terrible human being, a beta mangina, and a sop for the Gynocracy because of this post.
One of the top gathering points for MRAs, because they really needed more of those. Notably, /r/mensrights was flagged by the Southern Poverty Law Center in a report about online misogyny.[97]
>Reddit: Mens Rights: A “subreddit” of the user-generated news site Reddit, this forum describes itself as a “place for people who feel that men are currently being disadvantaged by society.” While it presents itself as a home for men seeking equality, it is notable for the anger it shows toward any program designed to help women. It also trafficks in various conspiracy theories. “Kloo2yoo,” identified as a site moderator, writes that there is “undeniable proof” of an international feminist conspiracy involving the United Nations, the Obama Administration and others, aimed at demonizing men.
Essentially full of outdated anti-feminist conspiracy theories, their contest to find the worst woman on the planet, and whining about any joke ever made with men as the punchline, while contributing fuckall to any gender debate. RationalWiki also annoys them.
How Reddit Is Used to Indoctrinate Young Men Into Becoming Misogynists.
Reddit’s “involuntary celibate” group was taken down earlier this month after its anti-woman debate turned violent. But the problem is much larger than one subreddit.
Amid a global conversation about sexual assault, a group of men complaining about their "involuntary celibacy" have lost their central platform.
In the r/incels subreddit, young men wrote about how they couldn’t find women to have sex with. The subreddit, which had 40,000 users a week ago, was a casually misogynist forum that compared women to Nazis and so-called “Incels” to Jews, posited that rape is “just sex” and argued that we need to include “reverse rape”— not having sex with someone—in the #MeToo conversation.
But it wasn’t until last week that the sub was banned for violent content, shor...
Looking at https://sandhoefner.github.io/reddit/, "MensRights" and "Feminism" looks pretty similar in term of words, and the most common words used on both is the exact same one.
But then that is just one objective analyze of the subs. It would be interesting to know what kind of definitive standard tool we could use in order to define which subs should be banned.
Looking at the Wikipedia article, their definition is that a sub is controversial if a reliable source (primarily a news paper) call a sub controversial, and such it list one feminist sub and one mens rights sub. It not the best definition of truth, as people in the education system and research community commonly points out, but as an approximation it gives the outline of the issue.
"For political views" is what they want you to think, but it was actually for threatening, harassing, and abusive behaviour, and for the mods of the sub in question not dealing with the problem.
Anyone pushing the "political views" story knows that, of course.
The_donald was removed because it supposedly called for violence against the police. This was not true at all, but is still a regular occurrence on subreddits like news and politics, without mods ever blocking such posts and comments.
You should also take a look at the leakrd conversations by mods and admins scheming to frame them.
No matter your political beliefs, you should be alarmed by this.
It was a common occurrence to see things like pictures of muslim women wearing headwear and a title of “It’s a diaper for their shit brains!”. There is casual racism, hatred towards minorities, and to top it all off, participants seemed to believe that there was nothing wrong with any of this, like you see above.
I was a near daily T_D reader up until the resent mod debacle forced everyone to .win. In it's prime, it was a useful way to see what the 'other' perspective was for whatever was on the front page of reddit.
Unfortunately, reddit seems to have disabled searching in The_Donald, so I can't poke around for what you describe. I'm not saying what you describe didn't ever happen, I'm sure it did, but calling it "common" is a strange exaggeration.
There was __plenty__ to dislike about T_D. No need to invent extra stuff.
>Unfortunately, reddit seems to have disabled searching in The_Donald, so I can't poke around for what you describe.
Do you really use reddit search? Because it is a steaming pile of uselessness. You can still visit or subscribe to /r/the_donald, so I don't know if you're making this up or if you just don't know how to use reddit.
Maybe they all followed their glorious leader's advice, and injected bleach into their veins, and shoved a flashlight with an ultraviolet lightbulb where the sun doesn't shine?
the_donald was quarantined, not removed, because mods failed to remove active calls for violence against individuals, who happened to be police.
- Are there subreddits where people call for violence against police in general? Yes, and mods tend to remove it when reported but it generally exists.
- Are there subreddits where people call for violence against individuals? No, because admins step in pretty fast if mods do not remove it quickly.
People know it because it's the standard lie repeatedly told to people to justify censorship. Lets be honest here, it was the_donald which was harrassed and abused because some authoritarian types wanted it off reddit. If threatening, harassing and abusive behavior is grounds for quarantine then many other subs like politics, news, worldnews, atheism, [many others] deserve censorship.
Also, considering you aren't american, why are you so supportive of censoring political speech in the US?
> it was the_donald which was harrassed and abused because some authoritarian types wanted it off reddit
By googling around I can easily find that members of the_donald created a list of thousands of addresses and phone numbers of people who are anti-trump. Or is that 'fake news'? The thing that actually got the_donald quaranteened (not even banned!) were calls to violence..
> Hopefully all State Police in Oregon refuse, hes serious. No problems shooting a cop trying to strip rights from Citizens. If he calls for help I'd come.
How can you defend that? Are you just disregarding all that because you have to be victim somehow?
When did those other subs call for 'shooting cops'??
> Also, considering you aren't american, why are you so supportive of censoring political speech in the US?
The US political landscape has a direct effect on the rest of the world. If your political speech consists of racism, sexism, and calls to violence then I personally believe we should absolutely censor that.
> By googling around I can easily find that members of the_donald created a list of thousands of addresses and phone numbers of people who are anti-trump. Or is that 'fake news'? The thing that actually got the_donald quaranteened (not even banned!) were calls to violence..
Honestly, everything you wrote is "fake news" or one-sided nonsense. It's the same nonsense parroted by the exact people I described. Every sub I listed has had members call for violence. Especially against the right, "nazis", cops, "bigots", "sexists", "racists", "trump supporters", republicans, etc. Considering you are virtue signaling against "racism,sexism", I'm betting you called for violence many times on reddit. How right am I?
> Are you just disregarding all that because you have to be victim somehow?
How am I a victim? I wasn't subbed to the_donald, didn't support trump, didn't vote for trump, etc. But this year I might because people like you are dangerous. Though I suppose in a sense we are all victims because speech got restricted but I personally was not victimized. Thanks for caring though.
> The US political landscape has a direct effect on the rest of the world.
Are you russian? Because I was told for many years that foreign interference was destabilizing the american political system. Funny how you support foreign interference and the destabilization of the US.
> If your political speech consists of racism, sexism, and calls to violence then I personally believe we should absolutely censor that.
Racism and sexism are protected political speech whether you like it or not. Otherwise, people like you wouldn't be allowed to use sexist terms like "toxic masculinity". But I'll defend your right to use those silly words because I believe in free speech.
The Donald broke rule after rule for years. Similar rule-breaking caused other subs to be shut down. But The Donald was treated with kid gloves. Given only reprimands until finally the quarantine order came down. But the quarantine didn't stop anyone's "free speech". T_D kept on with their schtick until the sub's mods thought it was time to cash in. They closed posting down and redirected people to their forum on a new URL.
On Reddit, and elsewhere, there's no shortage of people loudly proclaiming their love of the President. Sure, Trump isn't very popular on Reddit as a whole and posts involving him will be voted down when they show up outside of the usual echo chambers. But the posts and comments are still there. As well as being a constant presence on Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube. Political speech in the US is far from being censored in any way.
"The problem is, you cannot have it both ways: either free speech is paramount, because it changes things in the real world, or allspeech is meaningless because it has no effect."
Wonderful little strawman with a dash of false dichotomy. The argument for free speech really derives from constitutional rights not on its effectiveness. Just like your right to life and liberty doesn't derive from how valuable others deem your life/liberty.
> You cannot build a large-scale, significant communications system without moderation ...
More strawman. Nobody is against moderation. I'm against censorship. I'm for sub moderation but also allow users to view the censored content if they choose so. Frankly, I'm more in support of allowing users to moderate more and mods moderating less. Let the community drive the sub rather than mods ruling the sub.
> any more than you can create a large-scale city without sanitation and public health systems, or a global rapid transportation network without commensurate epidemiological detection, management, and controls.
Okay, I'll try to enlighten you a bit. The question is what qualifies as "feces, garbage, disease". Would you be okay with /r/politics being banned? What about lgbt subs? What about atheism subs? What about feminist subs? What about /r/twoxchromosome since that is "transphobic"?
We'll try a categorical imperative. You have the right to ban subs but that right extends to everyone else. Would you support that? I doubt that. I'd bet you'd hypocritically scream "free speech" if the toxic subs you support were banned. How about let everyone enjoy the toxic shit of their choice as long as it is legal?
What I find interesting about Reddit is how the community overwhelmingly publicly writes about how inclusive they are and how important it is to be inclusive. Yet there are subs that frequently get to all whose main goal is to exclude and make fun of people such as FragileWhiteRedditor, inceltears, iamatotalpieceofshit, and TheRightCantMeme
There is no Reddit community. Reddit is one of the largest and most popular sites on the web. There’s probably no subculture that isn’t represented there.
That's like saying that there is no American culture because there are 328.2 million residence. I bet that if you swap the residence of Indonesia (273 million residence) with the residence of America, you will notice a lot of cultural differences.
I should have said "there is no singular Reddit community".
Pedantic notes aside, the point is that it's the least surprising thing ever to find that some subreddits have one attitude towards $THING and other subreddits have a different attitude. The site has hundreds of millions of active users.
Reddit has an audience of tens of millions and is not a single hivemind.
It could certainly be the case (and it is probably the case) that most subreddit communities strive to be inclusive -- while there are still hundreds of subreddits with tens of thousands of redditors which promote and endorse assholery and/or bigotry.
I realized recently Ive spent a ton of years being a reddit user. Somehow that's where I settled. Politics, covid19, and memes have really been making me rethink where I spend my time on the internet, its stopped being fun. I think the person that posts on reddit has changed. I thought it might be an interesting thing to reflect in a longer format blog post thing, but not sure.
there really is a toxic undertone to a lot of subreddits. Even the niche one's have some crazy people wandering in.
My problem is i don't know what to really replace it with. I don't think the alternatives are great. Forums seem deadish, the format isn't great to use on mobile. Reddit is nice to use in an app, makes it easy to post and read. It almost feels like the social web has run its course.
Yeah sadly I started browsing reddit in 2011 when the f7u12 memes and subreddit were popular and it really has gone down in quality and the people posting like you mentioned has changed drastically. I can't wait for the day when a new forum experience replaces it.
I was having a lot of the same thoughts lately! Back in 2012-2015 I was SUPER active on some forums, but I visit them nowadays and they're just... dead. It makes me really sad because I don't know of any other alternatives; Reddit is awful for a lot of my interests, but there's no real communities I've found that can compare... I miss the forums I used to browse.
It's weird how the sense is community that existed on forums just doesn't exist on Reddit. You just don't have the same connection to the other posters that you would on tight knit forums. You might as well not even have usernames.
It's a bit different on smaller, more focused subreddits, but not by much.
I used to think that Reddit was a better place to be than Twitter or Facebook, but now I'm not so sure. I've definitely had a harder time cutting it out of my life than those other two, even though I think it's had a pretty bad effect on my mental health.
I think a part of this is how forum members tend to populate avatar/signature/location/etc and the interface shows it prominently. On reddit you just see a username and occasionally some flair, so you rarely even realize that what you're reading was written by someone you've read from before.
Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. I think the other part is that discussions don't live for longer than a day or two. Things fall off the page and everyone moves on to the next posts. (Same deal here on HN of course.) With forums, you have long living threads where you engage in discussions with the same people for months or even years.
True. Reddit has several sort options, and none of them remotely facilitate the "necro bump" that a single forum post can achieve.
But when you're searching for a quick answer (rather than browsing/debating) there's nothing better than upvote sort (see also: stack exchange) which far exceeds any chronological sort forums have.
I do this too, it's like wikipedia for general sentiment on a topic, good to get a starting of idea. There are some gem posts out there.
I think its also a symptom of google searches just not being that great and dominated by people that play the seo game well instead of actual good sources. But thats a rant for another time...
I'm the same! Or to search for reviews of some obscure gear of one of my hobbies, find recommendations on specific tastes in literature/movies, discover similar art to some artist.
Whatever needs some human knowledge and thought I add a `site:reddit.com` to my search and try to gauge from there.
Product reviews are also much more trustworthy (and sometimes more in-depth) from a collection of reddit posts than anywhere else on the internet.
That certainly seems true now, and hopefully it will be for a good while. r/HailCorporate is good at spotting ads/shills but it's not a perfect science. Given the way AI-authored blog posts are getting incrementally more convincing, this could become a serious issue.
Same! The web is full of auto generated crap and copy-pasted reviews and whatnot. Reddit is the new google in this regard. We'll see how long it lasts.
>> It's weird how the sense is community that existed on forums just doesn't exist on Reddit. You just don't have the same connection to the other posters that you would on tight knit forums. You might as well not even have usernames.
> I think a part of this is how forum members tend to populate avatar/signature/location/etc and the interface shows it prominently. On reddit you just see a username and occasionally some flair, so you rarely even realize that what you're reading was written by someone you've read from before.
I don't think that's it. I'd probably attribute the anonymity more to size and the deliberate lack of friction for someone to move between subreddits.
To get a sense of community, you need a space where you commonly interact with the same people over and over, not a fire hose of different ones.
That's also a major component for larger subs, but I do actually see the same people over and over in small subs (my city, etc.) if I bother to look at usernames. My eye isn't drawn to the usernames as often as it would be drawn to avatars.
That’s noticeable here too; it’s not uncommon for to see a thread where it’s clear that at least one person is unaware that they’re responding to the same person. Without avatars and signatures all the posts blend together.
HN just avoids the worst of it by being very small on average.
You can still get this on reddit but it requires small subreddits and good/active moderation. Once a sub gets over the 5k-10k subscriber mark a hivemind really sets in, getting on to /r/all once or twice is enough to ruin a sub.
The fact you need browser extensions to rework core features and make reddit usable also doesn't help either.
Even worse, in smaller subreddits, where there was for a time a real sense of community, it's slowly being eroded with the population growing. Some users want to keep that community feel, some others want none of it and just an aggregator of content on a subject. The way subreddit grows kill any sense of community, with time, and at one point most users want that. They want it to just be a place they can scroll forever, without any more tangible social connection. Just consuming stuff.
I guess not individual forums, some are active. I meant more like how many there are. Before reddit there it always seemed like to me there was a large number of them for different interests, you could kind of pick which forum fit for you.
What don't you like about forums on mobile? The default phpBB skin is fairly good on mobile in my experience. I don't regularly participate on other forum softwares.
Some are okish. My biggest problems are ads pushing content off the limited screen space, "please download our app", some just don't render well and skip around.
Funny enough, i went back to find some examples of ones that really drove me crazy and they have gotten better(snowboardforum, nasioc and wetcanvas). One's even got a big announcement about their ui update on the front page.
I do think the threaded style of comments is much better then the forums though. Ignoring the problems of upvotes.
I started using reddit is fun years ago, so i guess i do use an app for that. My account defaults to old.reddit.com I have no idea what the new ui looks like, except for the login screen.
There are maybe 10, 20 reddit accounts that I recognize. Most of them come from fitness subs. Everyone else might as well not have usernames.
The problem with forums isn't that they are dead. It's that you are trying to have them do what reddit does right now, which is endless content and interaction 24/7. But that just doesn't work with a smaller number of people. Forums make sense as the thing that you visit once or twice a day and browse for a bit in a relaxed environment. I guarantee you that doing so from your phone during your commute or your 10 minute break isn't the same. It won't create comments of the same quality.
> The problem with forums isn't that they are dead. It's that you are trying to have them do what reddit does right now, which is endless content and interaction 24/7.
This is interesting, something I think i had a feeling about, but seeing it put in words, you're probably right. Ive probably changed a bit in my browsing habits and been conditioned to expect constant content.
One of the reasons I'm building 20-things.com. Imagine a much smaller community with 100 (this is a goal, currently very few people know about it) daily active users or so. It doesn't have to be huge, quality over quantity.
I stopped using Reddit as I've come to the same conclusions. I feel like I'm missing very little now
What I did was slowly unsubscribe to all subreddits over the course of 6-8 months; slowly 1-3 subs at a time. In the end when there was only one sub left, I lost the habit of going to the site.
After a few years I decided that I should only see the sub-reddits I actively used/followed. As each became increasingly painful to visit I unsubscribed. Like you I ended up with just one, a local sub-reddit (/r/denmark), but that too was just an echo chamber of one particular world view. During the last Danish election I promised my self that I would close my reddit account after the election. I wanted to follow and debate the election on Reddit, but I pretty much gave up as it because clear that I'm apparently wrong about anything, according to the users on Reddit.
Reddit and Facebook groups pretty much killed the forums, but the communities are somehow much worse. I suspect it's somehow related to how users would previous cluster in smaller forums, but now everyone descents on one Facebook group or one sub-reddit.
Having both Facebook and Reddit is interesting though. It more or less proves, at least to me, that anonymity is not what makes people behaving badly towards others. The Facebook users are just as bad as those on Reddit. I believe that it's the social distance to others that makes some users behave like jerks.
I unsubscribed from every generic subreddit and only view the subreddits for my hobbies. I avoid any subreddit where news, current events or politics may be referred to. Those are extremely toxic.
My strategy for the past couple of years has been using RES [1] to browse /r/all, filter out everything I consider a waste of time (irrelevant, toxic, or just dumb) and subscribe to the few subreddits that caught my eye. This has had limited success - it's a lot of work, but it did surface some gems. I'm sorry to say it's literally like panning for gold.
Yes. They do actively work together to shape discourse across subredits. I have seen it happen myself on /r/worldnews a lot of times.
Consider if you are a big/rich autocratic nation state (read China, Saudi) that wants to censor and shape discourse outside their borders. You just buy these 5 people and boom, you get instant powers to shape and censor the discourse on the most viewed forums on Reddit and the wider internet.
Reddit constantly hates on Russia/North Korea/Saudi Arabia/China/Israel/India to the point that I've never seen a positive post related to those countries and have seen nothing but negative circlejerks whenever they're mentioned. Despite this, it seems people are convinced that these countries are secretly censoring Reddit and bring it up constantly. It's a disturbing denial of reality.
One day there was a post there about free 5 bucks for some PlayStation stuff. The post received 30k comments. Thats all you need to know about the reddit audience.
What would improve the content quality is a requirement to maintain membership by answering a complex enough question once a month. Questions could be prepared by mods. But then all the reddit audience would be gone, and with them the reddit's power to influence the lazy internet crowd.
Reddit corporate really wants a high valuation, and they have devoted everything to growth. They don't care if the website devolves into the comments section of YouTube. Growth and money are all that matter.
They have no interest in setting up barriers or vetting members. Dumb engagement is easier than building tools to support content creation. Infinite scroll, embedded videos. It's becoming Zuckerbergian.
wait until you hear about the blockchain they just released for the fortnite subreddit. You can earn "bricks" in order to gain features like posting gifs and emotes.
While reddit's never been amazing it feels like the quality is going downhill faster than before slowly turning into youtube level comments.
>Wow. Reddit really is just a pile of rubbish now. So glad I found HN.
i agree and i disagree.
hn is really nice, but it can be as circlejerky as any subreddit. also, sometimes i just want some light-memey-fun, and i can't have that on hn.
also, as someone that follows a lot of sports (football, NFL, NBA, tennis, f1, mma and others), reddit is a godsend. the discussion is not "high level", but it's lighthearted enough to have fun without feeling like everybody is trolling.
The problem on Reddit is the problem of all social media. HN is better simply because it is too small to be targeted by the bigger more well funded PR campaigns.
Also, it probably helps that this community is not particularly demographically diverse compared to the average. There is less value to a PR company in sockpuppeting here, unless they are specifically trying to reach tech workers specifically.
The problem on reddit isn't the fact that they're succumbing to PR campaigns. The problem with reddit is that they have by far the worst monetization strategy. Facebook probably has the best. So reddit runs this site, making basically no money. Then people act surprised when someone comes along and goes "Oh, I can totally monetize this". As a result the monetization is happening covertly. This means all the incentives are mis-aligned - because the people making money from the site aren't the same people who are running the site. Should moderators be vetted? Probably. In fact they are on the most controversial sub-reddits. Are they vetted? Well not as a general rule, because that would cost money, and the people doing the vetting aren't making any money.
The perfect example of this was /r/wallstreetbets. Its sole purpose was to funnel money into some weird crypto trading company simply because one of the moderators decided on it.
Controlled is a strong word that doesn’t quite describe it very well. For example, while gallowboob is a mod of r/til he isn’t active as a Mod and doesn’t “control” like the word implies. Also there’s a large mod team that is behind something like TIL that isn’t just this group of 5 ppl.
Reading these complaints about Reddit, and having been a long time member of HN as well as Reddit, I would say there are pluses and minuses for HN and Reddit.
There are some great sub-reddits (world news, education, Ask Historians, Ask Science etc.) and there are some echo chambers.
Similarly, there many corporate shill types and 'stuck up' bookish-types on HN , but I found useful stuff in the submissions and comments as well.
660 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 407 ms ] threadThere is certainly a scratch my back and I'll scratch yours across subs so you get moderators who don't really even know the sub.
Absentee moderators is common as subs drift off topic/ don't filter spam and etc.
/r/ruby still has jamesgolick as a mod. ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8804624
One way to do that is to push paid content (or remove content).
Ultimately, these channels of revenue become more profitable and those folks buy more and more subs.
Here is the complete list in good quality.
https://i.redd.it/bfhl8s6o2fn41.png
Mirror https://imgur.com/a/rjE8YuW
There are mods that are smart enough to have different accounts for each sub - so that only Reddit admins would be able to tell that they are the same person.
...but the reality is that those Reddit admins are also some of those "power mods".
I once have a conversation with a mod, who admitted that he was an admin as well - I wish I had saved the exchange.
people seem to forget how easy manipulation of information is and sites with voting mechanisms are the easiest of all to manipulate especially those where you can silence with relative ease.
Everyone took a HEADLINE, with a single table as their proof!
Even here on HN.
This is the WORST of content I had to deal with - a virus that forces a decision just by glancing at it.
How are these mods in "control", they aren't even top mods.
How are they "controlling" reddit?
None of that is explained, none of that is proved.
The person posting it was spamming the content all over the place and seems to be driving drama.
And people swallowed this? Hook line and sinker? Discussion here is sans reflection of the facts?
I looked at the top 5 subreddits in the table, where it looks like a single person is controlling them. They have 145 distinct mods.
Controlling reddit? lol
Classic example of why you never, ever look at vanilla served up for you Reddit. Just make it your own.
I'm curious if they're reddit employees (in which case you could imagine reddit choosing to have mods on the more popular subreddits), or just internet randoms.
That said the original post seems perfectly reasonable so shouldn't have been deleted - if the goal was to avoid conspiracy nonsense they just Streisand'd themselves by "proving" that they want it to be secret.
Like most HN folks, I have a few narrow interest subreddits I go to on non controversial subjects.
The rest of the site is just groupthink tribal warfare for bitter professional victims.
Although of course they do lack civility.
See https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/115014792387-Comm...
Generally, when unmoderated, the loudest user(s) will drown out everyone else
Reddit, up until some years ago, was great for political discussion. Simply ignore low quality opinions and focus on the few people who have actual knowledge.
Then the "safe space" movement started and anything that wasn't mainstream opinion was banned all over the place.
Suddenly, political discussion became impossible, because you could not discuss any non trivial things without few of being misunderstood and your account getting banned.
The "wholesome" movement on reddit seems like an example of that.
Mods are typically great though. They seem to try very hard to keep the discussion academic.
It’s still great for analysis related to American foreign policy, but it’s hard to take any other analysis seriously especially when it comes to Asian countries as the quality is lacking.
Incidentally, I was banned for saying that China would end up with less deaths due to the coronavirus than the US, as a result of their stricter interventions, which turned out to be true. The moderators of that subreddits decided that it was such an egregiously incorrect point-of-view that it had to be deleted, and the poster banned.
So no, r/geopolitics isn't really good anymore. It was interesting a few months to years back, though. But now it's mostly biased, moralistic and americentric takes with artificially limited debate, with such scathing and interesting discussion as "Western culture is the best culture, and that's why the US will be an eternal empire", or "China will be sublimated by the US just like the US beat Japan". This is a stark contrast to the more realpolitik, realist discourse of yesteryear. Non-China related threads are better, though.
Then it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff and the mods, (as much as I agree that in some subs are totally going for the echo chamber) have a lot of work to do.
It's bad, but really understandable
But open discussion is now largely banned. Each sub only allows you to repeat their own ideology else you get banned.
I deleted Reddit when that started, around 4 years ago.
So ... just like HN?
Nothing is perfect but I feel more informed and otherwise safer having discussions here.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23175556
You can have good discussions, but they must be at the margins, and stay away from the subjects that HN is known to fail at discussing.
On Reddit, especially in large or political subs, it's the exact opposite.
You're a racist, sexist, white, cis, male homophobic, transphobic monster until and unless you preface your thoughts with lip-service to all groups concerned, even if you're not discussing politics or social issues.
Try taking non-liberal positions e.g. try defending men in tech against the notion they're inherently sexist. You'll burn a lot of karma and get a whole lot of snarky replies "educating" you about the correctness of feminist ideology.
Even new topics like COVID are hardly better. Try making an argument and support it with evidence posted on some conservative or even just non-liberal source: about 50% of the time or more someone will reply with something of the form, "I didn't read it but your source is bad so you are bad".
After years of observing this kind of behaviour, and watching /r/ukpolitics be taken over by the same sort of extremists that trashed /r/unitedkingdom, I concluded the problem isn't really internet forums. Some of their mechanics like downvoting don't help as they conflate "I disagree" with "I think this post is low quality", something Slashdot for instance tried to avoid. But the underlying problem is liberal ideology. Specifically:
1. The belief that words are powerful and thus dangerous words need to be suppressed and replaced with enlightened words.
2. The belief that conservative views are dangerous.
The combination of these two beliefs causes them to repeatedly attempt to take over forums, often by becoming moderators, and then systematically "cleanse" those forums of conservative viewpoints. This behaviour isn't reciprocal - outside of forums specifically devoted to conservative views like maybe /r/TheDonald I practically never encounter this kind of behaviour, as the conservative mindset is that words/ideas aren't dangerous and thus free speech is to be valued and encouraged.
When one side in a conflict prioritises taking over and controlling conversation, and the other side doesn't, the natural outcome is that with enough time any forum for discussion ends up controlled by those who want to control it. Hence the widespread feeling amongst conservatives that the "mainstream" is biased against them. It's not so much an argument a specific set of groups but rather the general feeling that with time any popular forum gets taken over by people who view them as enemies.
If conservative viewpoints like that are dangerous to your health, then why shouldn't they be "cleansed"? Or did you follow those recommendations? How is it working out for you?
a) Strawman at least twice (once for bleach, once for "recommended"),
b) divide the question.
3. Paragraph 2: Assumed premise, personal attacks.
DonHopkins, for such poorly presented incorrect, biased and angry attacks (the term "argument" does not apply) you certainly have a high karma! For that reason I should examine your other posts on this forum.
For example, try posting about Intel in pc building subs. Or try advocating for anything other than passive index investing in /investing. Or say you like PHP for making websites in /programming.
Any idea outside a sub's main approved-idea-space is rewarded with hate and downvotes.
Do you think that the removal of the downvote capability solves this problem? What solutions are available?
I think the main issue is that Reddit has become more mainstream. My theory is that when a new website like reddit is created, the early adopters are typically more open-minded people by their very nature. Later as the platform is recognized as successful, the mainstream population joins. These mainstream users, less likely on average to accept new ideas than the initial early-adopter user base, then begins to drag the discussion into group-think.
My most pronounced experience with this phenomenon was with r/wallstreetbets. In the early days, it was actually a very interesting and unique community with rapidly evolving conversations. With the mass influx of new users in 2018 and 2019, the comment sections slowly shifted into parroting of the subs common phrases and group think. Now in 2020, you can almost predict the comment sections before you open it up.
Perhaps due to its lack of promotion and UI, HN has been more resistant to this shift, but is not immune.
My personal solution to this problem is to keep jumping to new platforms if an old one becomes too bias. When my favorite subreddits start hitting r/all, I begin looking for new ones that follow the same topics.
It's a classic case of a variant of the WWW-Eternal-September virus that had been plaguing the interwebs since the dawn of forums. There is no solution other than quarantine and moving to unaffected places.
- A thing becomes possible. Some people enjoy the thing, get together and form a community doing the thing.
- the community quickly stratifies into "creators" - the people who actually do the thing and do it well, "community builders" - the people who don't actually do the thing very well, but are good at building the community around it, and "fans" - people who can't really do the thing, but enjoy the community and hang around in it.
- if the creator:fan ratio stays within reasonable limits, the community will continue to be enjoyable and fun
- if the community attracts more fans, though, the community is destroyed. Either the urge to monetise overwhelms and fans become customers, creators become rockstars and the community becomes an industry.
- Or it drowns in its own bile. Fans don't actually contribute to the community, they just soak up every else's contribution. If there are too many fans, they drain the energy and ability of the community to self-sustain. Community builders "burn out" and creators become reclusive, staying away from the community.
Anything that gets too popular gets either turned into an industry, or destroyed by its own popularity.
https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
I really think that the problem is somewhat embedded in two things: human nature, and practical limits of our attention. For the former, what I mean is that essentially discussions tend to get driven towards extreme or biased views, because people with moderated, centrist, or less extreme views are less likely to say anything. As the community grows, eventually there are enough people with extreme views that the limit of how many comments you are willing to read through is saturated with them. Eventually one view becomes predominant. And I guess, the last factor would be that people enjoy seeing their beliefs echoed back to them, as a form of validation - aannd we've hit peak echo chamber.
I honestly have no real solution to this, other than trying to stay within smaller subreddits, where the middling opinions are not yet drowned out. And preferably ones that are well moderated, and have expectations of quality posts (you mention HN, and the self-moderation of the community here is a good example, jokes and other shitposts are regularly voted into oblivion, although this trend has been slowly diminishing over the years). As for specific subreddits that are great examples, it is hard to point out, because they are so specific.
You used to get downvoted for disagreement. Nowadays, you get banned from the sub altogether.
HN: "php sucks because of those technical reasons". Reddit: "php sucks, period, and you are a moron".
Companies/lobbyists/govs have realised a few years back that reddit was big enough/influential enough to shape some aspect of public opinion, it is now quite obviously that they are paying PR companies to defend their lobbies/brand/products on reddit.
The other day I commented on a european sub-reddit, where they were discussing the move away from coal power plants as an energy source. I pointed out that the move away from coal was great but that we should remain sceptical of the "green" "clean" energy marketing around bio-mass power plants and also natural-gas power plants.
Immediately the comment became controversial with wildly varying scores of up and downvotes. All the comments that followed where quite adversarial and flippant, mixed with bland marketing statements filled with buzzwords about how bio-mass is sustainable and 'renewable'. I doubt this situation would have occurred 6/7 years ago. In this case it was so obvious that I couldn't care less but probably for some users they would be intimidated to continue to comment on the topic after this.
It's not just Energy lobby, you could say the same thing about Pesticides, Pharma, <insert major lobby group>.
Also on the shills, I used to go to reddit as a source of legitimate product reviews and recommendations, now it's obviously that every marketing person uses the platform to name drop their product and do stealth marketing companies.
As so many others before it, reddit has become a victim of its own popularity.
To be fair, advocating for new PHP projects here on HN is met with ... scrutiny to put it lightly, too... same for going against the "groupthink" when it comes to libertarian capitalism, gig economy or the latest JS framework.
There is so much dystopian doublespeak in startup marketing, and people continue to believe it, because not doing so threatens their careers. Of course there are also many startups out there that actually do improve lives, but I wouldn't say it's the majority.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_attachment
While group-think is real, the views that are allowed to be expressed on Reddit were not selected because a majority of users held them and pushed out those who disagreed. They were selected by the corporate owners of the site to promote their ideological beliefs, and to appease the very similar ideological beliefs of the major corporations who buy ads there.
Contrary opinions were driven off the site simply by repeatedly deleting the subreddits and users who expressed them. Down-voting or any other organic user interaction had nothing to do with it.
Placing corporate representatives as moderators is just a way of preventing the organic accrual of power to those with popular opinions that challenge the ideologies of the site owners.
> The delete posts about crime in case anyone notices any demographic patterns involved
Probably because, just as in every other country, demography is the confounding variable and poverty/inequality the actual predictor of blue collar crimes?
> corona gestapo
Because, after Belgium, Spain has the highest per capita Covid death rate in the world?
Now that the virus is out there, they are trying to make up for it retroactively with overly strict measures.
Is that a good reason to not be allowed to discuss the problem?
> Because, after Belgium, Spain has the highest per capita Covid death rate in the world?
We also had the strictest lock down in Europe. Children were allowed out for the first time with their parents on 5 weeks and were being shamed for standing too close by some reditors standard.
It's gone from "flatten the curve so the hospitals aren't overwhelmed" to some bizarre sort of virtue signalling where the more you complain about the actions of others the more virtuous you are. If you look at this study, outdoors doesn't seem such a problem. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.04.20053058v...
If you view social distancing as a left wing/right wing issue, you should reassess your approach to politics.
When the left says to smash capitalism Big Social suppresses it.
Go figure.
But are they really massive?
If you take a look at a lot of those "massive" subs you'll find that certain posts from certain accounts always get tens of thousands of upvotes, and all of the posts from their real users get tens of.... well... tens.
If a reputation system on the internet exists, it has been exploited / manipulated.
What data do you have to support this claim?
I usually used it for fun, and had subscribed to some innocent technical subreddits, and memes that had nothing to do with politics or relationships; but eventually got dragged into these spiteful, petty, sort of ugly side of Reddit full of bad takes, top posts awarded for repeating same things over and over, namecalling, bullying kids, censoring people, etc.
The downvote button is used as a "The hivemind disagress with you, here is your -50 karma" and is never used for it's actual purpose which goes against the purpose of that feature.
Worst subreddit you should never visit are amitheasshole, relationshipadvice, programmerhumour, cats (they only post their dead cats for karma), pewdiepiesubmissions, dankmemes, worldpolitics, to name a few.
There are lots of popular karmawhores at the top of Reddit (like a shithead called u/gallowboob) that repost/steal posts from other subreddits to get karma shamelessly and he mods popular subs so he gets a pass, and he censors people that expose him.
Really, the Reddit drama is never ending and I'm glad I decided to come out of the pettiness of it all.
Did you see the one about the guy who ate 3 feet of a 6 foot sandwich? https://www.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/comments/ca7bdz/aita_...
I mean, where else are you going to find something like that? Not twitter.
Dunno. I've sort of embraced the dumpster fire and am happy to warm myself with the flames. It smells pretty bad at times, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a more amusing circus.
What is that post?! Can't tell is it's satire or people are seriously buying that.
Reddit was one of the few places where I occasionally found people with similar background to discuss more than just superficially.
That completely changed in 2016. Everybody with actual knowledge on the subject was banned from all related subs. Knowledge became a threat, only the "correct" ideology was allowed to remain.
Tbh, I was pretty shocked how easily people are radicalized.
Reddit is overwhelmingly populated by left-wing teenagers and college students -- so politics or economics discussions are shallow and fruitless.
HN is overwhelmingly populated by techies, heavily biased towards FAAMG and bay area, heavily biased towards web dev. Economics discussion here seems to be saner though with a massive US-centrism and anti-tax skew as people are 1%ers and many never experienced life outside the US, but if you dare criticise the big 5 companies or their products, prepare to be buried...
100% of Hacker News is moderated by the same people
Power laws are a thing, we shouldn't be surprised if 80% of the moderation is done by 20% of the people (& remember, power laws are recursive)
A lot of the subreddits in the image seem related. Almost as if the people who create the most popular subreddits tend to create more than 1 subreddit & know how to effectively run them. We can argue about how effective reddit is, but "being one of the most popular subreddit" should work for this point
I say this as someone who doesn't frequent the most popular subreddits or recognize who the mods are. But I do notice moderators tend to receive quite a bit of flak which isn't always warranted
Which is to say, I'd be interested if there were some citations of other moderators claiming these mods were injected or whatnot. But this "just stating facts" 5 people fact doesn't seem relevant
HN is open about it. That's the difference.
On others, not so much. There's been much discussion on HN with how it handles users from shadowbans, hidden rate limits, story weighting and so forth. I don't personally have a problem with those concepts at all, but it does seem weird to me that people here blast Reddit for doing the same things that HN does. There's been instances here of mods editing titles in order to appeal to the trolls (in hopes of removing flame wars, but an appeal nonetheless) for example.
Now there's a full different discussion with how HN and Reddit use these tools to try and curate quality however.
While they seem to do a great job, I think that's a bad thing.
Why should one person's opinion on what's okay to post matter more than the community's opinion? Isn't the point of voting-based communities like HN and Reddit to give the community power over what should be at the top?
What would happen if these communities were entirely auto-moderated? Software could automatically remove posts that break rules. I wonder whether that would help avoid issues like we're seeing here - where power is concentrated in the hands of the few, and those few have biases that can lead to unjust moderation.
In this case: ceddit.com -> https://snew.notabug.io/r/interestingasfuck/comments/gitwbo/...
so: https://www.removeddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/gitw...
good to have backup services.
edit: It also works if you disable Enhanced Tracking Protection in FF
That's true if ceddit scanned the thread prior to the message being deleted. In a heavily trafficked and modded thread, many comments will be deleted in-between scans and those will be lost to everyone but reddit admins.
The only surefire way of seeing every censored comments is for reddit to provide the option to the users, but they are too pro-censorship and too pro-mod to allow that to happen.
If you post an opinion that gets downvoted a lot, your account will be given a 10 minute timer before you can reply to anyone, or post a new comment.
As a result, users must weigh the implications of compromising their ability to use all the features of the website, versus having the freedom to voice their opinion. In most cases if you want to express your opinion on some topic which is against the prevailing narrative, and you don't want it to affect your ability to post about completely unrelated things like Power Tools or Automobiles, then your only options are to self-censor, or use a different account, or wait 10 minutes between comments.
The ceddit website will show you censored content, but there are likely millions of similar comments that users did not post because the algorithm discourages wrongthink
Of course, in the end Reddit doesn't want to be a utility, it wants to be a cash grab. And it's fine to do whatever if your only goal is to get as much money as possible with no concern for anything else.
Everything else is just groupthink and tribalism, just look at r/politics or r/news. What's worse is that even neutral subreddits like r/gaming are prone to the mods a.k.a janitors being pissy and deleting anything that doesn't conform to the status quo (looking at you r/TheLastofUs).
And surprise surprise, the post got removed. xd
The sidebar wikis of hobbyist communities is packed full of good content, curated over years by the community so usually it's a very good "starter pack" knowledge to save time on your own research.
The thing is, at some point this is probably gonna happen to reddit as well, so enjoy it while it lasts. Just the other day i read in a subreddit about people being offered things in return for favorable reviews on certain products on those subreddits. Sigh.
Most of the smaller, niche communities I follow are full of nice and helpful people. One example being /r/MTB.
Also Reddit and other forums are just forums. There's plenty of other places to have discussions.
In fact Reddit allows anyone to create sub reddits.
Why can't a group of like-minded people who want to have "non-status quo" discussions create their own communities for it?
That's how Reddit overtook Digg.
But I think what's really the complaint here is that people don't like that they don't have a mainstream audience.
They want to have their posts have the widest reach possible for ego and they don't like moderators deleting their posts or being downvoted.
At the end of the day none of it really matters. Why are people waging pointless online wars about internet communities?
Do they think they're shaping society?
Resetera is the neogaf successor, so you're more correct than you realize
I am thinking that they think "yes".
I can imagine teenagers that are still developing their personal values, and exploring the site, are most suseptible to being influenced by the big subs.
All advertising platforms consolidate over time.
Seriously, has anyone seen those mods control those subs?
Have they removed other mods and run the subs according to their evil designs?
What evil design?
People all over this thread are talking about this as if it was fact.
This is a point where people stop being effective on HN, and offload their thinking to assumptions of trust, jsut because its posted here.
This thread, and this post mean that this isn't a fair thing anymore.
Apparently it's a touchy issue.
https://www.reddit.com/r/publicmodlogs/
Why, because it hurts their feelings? To protect them from the consequences of what they said, and ensure everyone has a chance to hear it? Downvoting is an exercise of free speech, too, you know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
for starters always check eye contact with driver of big truck in front of you plan to cross the road
i think i was already before shielding myself behind poles at junctions
- Biased justice systems
- Double standards by feminists e.g. engaging in sexism
- Anti-circumcision
- False accusations
- Unfair child custody practices
and so on.
The fact that you're conflating advocacy of men's rights with beating women is exactly why online forums have such horrible problems - people like you routinely try to shut down reasonable discussion by ludicrous comparisons to violence. I hope you certainly don't moderate any forums!
Denying the obvious and then blaming feminists certainly undercuts your own argument. Stop excusing and whitewashing misogyny.
https://the-orbit.net/lousycanuck/2013/08/27/rmensrights-rem...
r/MensRights reminds me why I don't Reddit
A funny thing happened yesterday. I started seeing hits from Reddit. A lot of hits. Fully a fifth of my traffic came from a particular thread on Reddit — despite my being in a slow blogging period, posting my one post I managed very late in the day, and despite the long tail on my bigger posts already waning.
So I clicked through to see what I was linked from, Turns out, it was r/MensRights, and they were opining that I’m a terrible human being, a beta mangina, and a sop for the Gynocracy because of this post.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/1l5783/male_fem...
[...]
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Reddit#Extreme_misogyny
Extreme misogyny
/r/mensrights
One of the top gathering points for MRAs, because they really needed more of those. Notably, /r/mensrights was flagged by the Southern Poverty Law Center in a report about online misogyny.[97]
[97] https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/...
>Reddit: Mens Rights: A “subreddit” of the user-generated news site Reddit, this forum describes itself as a “place for people who feel that men are currently being disadvantaged by society.” While it presents itself as a home for men seeking equality, it is notable for the anger it shows toward any program designed to help women. It also trafficks in various conspiracy theories. “Kloo2yoo,” identified as a site moderator, writes that there is “undeniable proof” of an international feminist conspiracy involving the United Nations, the Obama Administration and others, aimed at demonizing men.
Essentially full of outdated anti-feminist conspiracy theories, their contest to find the worst woman on the planet, and whining about any joke ever made with men as the punchline, while contributing fuckall to any gender debate. RationalWiki also annoys them.
https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/gyj3yw/how-reddit-is-used...
How Reddit Is Used to Indoctrinate Young Men Into Becoming Misogynists.
Reddit’s “involuntary celibate” group was taken down earlier this month after its anti-woman debate turned violent. But the problem is much larger than one subreddit.
Amid a global conversation about sexual assault, a group of men complaining about their "involuntary celibacy" have lost their central platform.
In the r/incels subreddit, young men wrote about how they couldn’t find women to have sex with. The subreddit, which had 40,000 users a week ago, was a casually misogynist forum that compared women to Nazis and so-called “Incels” to Jews, posited that rape is “just sex” and argued that we need to include “reverse rape”— not having sex with someone—in the #MeToo conversation.
But it wasn’t until last week that the sub was banned for violent content, shor...
But then that is just one objective analyze of the subs. It would be interesting to know what kind of definitive standard tool we could use in order to define which subs should be banned.
Looking at the Wikipedia article, their definition is that a sub is controversial if a reliable source (primarily a news paper) call a sub controversial, and such it list one feminist sub and one mens rights sub. It not the best definition of truth, as people in the education system and research community commonly points out, but as an approximation it gives the outline of the issue.
Anyone pushing the "political views" story knows that, of course.
You should also take a look at the leakrd conversations by mods and admins scheming to frame them.
No matter your political beliefs, you should be alarmed by this.
It was a common occurrence to see things like pictures of muslim women wearing headwear and a title of “It’s a diaper for their shit brains!”. There is casual racism, hatred towards minorities, and to top it all off, participants seemed to believe that there was nothing wrong with any of this, like you see above.
Unfortunately, reddit seems to have disabled searching in The_Donald, so I can't poke around for what you describe. I'm not saying what you describe didn't ever happen, I'm sure it did, but calling it "common" is a strange exaggeration.
There was __plenty__ to dislike about T_D. No need to invent extra stuff.
Do you really use reddit search? Because it is a steaming pile of uselessness. You can still visit or subscribe to /r/the_donald, so I don't know if you're making this up or if you just don't know how to use reddit.
https://maglite.com/collections/full-size/products/flaglite-...
Only the ones trying to fight reddit admins were removed: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/fi4ojg/the_...
- Are there subreddits where people call for violence against police in general? Yes, and mods tend to remove it when reported but it generally exists.
- Are there subreddits where people call for violence against individuals? No, because admins step in pretty fast if mods do not remove it quickly.
This is the dichotomy that you are missing.
Also, considering you aren't american, why are you so supportive of censoring political speech in the US?
By googling around I can easily find that members of the_donald created a list of thousands of addresses and phone numbers of people who are anti-trump. Or is that 'fake news'? The thing that actually got the_donald quaranteened (not even banned!) were calls to violence..
> Hopefully all State Police in Oregon refuse, hes serious. No problems shooting a cop trying to strip rights from Citizens. If he calls for help I'd come.
How can you defend that? Are you just disregarding all that because you have to be victim somehow?
When did those other subs call for 'shooting cops'??
> Also, considering you aren't american, why are you so supportive of censoring political speech in the US?
The US political landscape has a direct effect on the rest of the world. If your political speech consists of racism, sexism, and calls to violence then I personally believe we should absolutely censor that.
Honestly, everything you wrote is "fake news" or one-sided nonsense. It's the same nonsense parroted by the exact people I described. Every sub I listed has had members call for violence. Especially against the right, "nazis", cops, "bigots", "sexists", "racists", "trump supporters", republicans, etc. Considering you are virtue signaling against "racism,sexism", I'm betting you called for violence many times on reddit. How right am I?
> Are you just disregarding all that because you have to be victim somehow?
How am I a victim? I wasn't subbed to the_donald, didn't support trump, didn't vote for trump, etc. But this year I might because people like you are dangerous. Though I suppose in a sense we are all victims because speech got restricted but I personally was not victimized. Thanks for caring though.
> The US political landscape has a direct effect on the rest of the world.
Are you russian? Because I was told for many years that foreign interference was destabilizing the american political system. Funny how you support foreign interference and the destabilization of the US.
> If your political speech consists of racism, sexism, and calls to violence then I personally believe we should absolutely censor that.
Racism and sexism are protected political speech whether you like it or not. Otherwise, people like you wouldn't be allowed to use sexist terms like "toxic masculinity". But I'll defend your right to use those silly words because I believe in free speech.
On Reddit, and elsewhere, there's no shortage of people loudly proclaiming their love of the President. Sure, Trump isn't very popular on Reddit as a whole and posts involving him will be voted down when they show up outside of the usual echo chambers. But the posts and comments are still there. As well as being a constant presence on Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube. Political speech in the US is far from being censored in any way.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23184110
Probably a lot just like with every major sub.
> and to what effect regards your argument?
Doesn't affect it a single bit.
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23184110
"The problem is, you cannot have it both ways: either free speech is paramount, because it changes things in the real world, or allspeech is meaningless because it has no effect."
Wonderful little strawman with a dash of false dichotomy. The argument for free speech really derives from constitutional rights not on its effectiveness. Just like your right to life and liberty doesn't derive from how valuable others deem your life/liberty.
> You cannot build a large-scale, significant communications system without moderation ...
More strawman. Nobody is against moderation. I'm against censorship. I'm for sub moderation but also allow users to view the censored content if they choose so. Frankly, I'm more in support of allowing users to moderate more and mods moderating less. Let the community drive the sub rather than mods ruling the sub.
> any more than you can create a large-scale city without sanitation and public health systems, or a global rapid transportation network without commensurate epidemiological detection, management, and controls.
Okay, I'll try to enlighten you a bit. The question is what qualifies as "feces, garbage, disease". Would you be okay with /r/politics being banned? What about lgbt subs? What about atheism subs? What about feminist subs? What about /r/twoxchromosome since that is "transphobic"?
We'll try a categorical imperative. You have the right to ban subs but that right extends to everyone else. Would you support that? I doubt that. I'd bet you'd hypocritically scream "free speech" if the toxic subs you support were banned. How about let everyone enjoy the toxic shit of their choice as long as it is legal?
It shows which subreddits, and their popularity rank, are moderated by 5 people who are moderators of the most subreddits at once.
Pedantic notes aside, the point is that it's the least surprising thing ever to find that some subreddits have one attitude towards $THING and other subreddits have a different attitude. The site has hundreds of millions of active users.
It could certainly be the case (and it is probably the case) that most subreddit communities strive to be inclusive -- while there are still hundreds of subreddits with tens of thousands of redditors which promote and endorse assholery and/or bigotry.
there really is a toxic undertone to a lot of subreddits. Even the niche one's have some crazy people wandering in.
My problem is i don't know what to really replace it with. I don't think the alternatives are great. Forums seem deadish, the format isn't great to use on mobile. Reddit is nice to use in an app, makes it easy to post and read. It almost feels like the social web has run its course.
It's a bit different on smaller, more focused subreddits, but not by much.
I used to think that Reddit was a better place to be than Twitter or Facebook, but now I'm not so sure. I've definitely had a harder time cutting it out of my life than those other two, even though I think it's had a pretty bad effect on my mental health.
But when you're searching for a quick answer (rather than browsing/debating) there's nothing better than upvote sort (see also: stack exchange) which far exceeds any chronological sort forums have.
I think its also a symptom of google searches just not being that great and dominated by people that play the seo game well instead of actual good sources. But thats a rant for another time...
Whatever needs some human knowledge and thought I add a `site:reddit.com` to my search and try to gauge from there.
Product reviews are also much more trustworthy (and sometimes more in-depth) from a collection of reddit posts than anywhere else on the internet.
> I think a part of this is how forum members tend to populate avatar/signature/location/etc and the interface shows it prominently. On reddit you just see a username and occasionally some flair, so you rarely even realize that what you're reading was written by someone you've read from before.
I don't think that's it. I'd probably attribute the anonymity more to size and the deliberate lack of friction for someone to move between subreddits.
To get a sense of community, you need a space where you commonly interact with the same people over and over, not a fire hose of different ones.
HN just avoids the worst of it by being very small on average.
The fact you need browser extensions to rework core features and make reddit usable also doesn't help either.
Funny enough, i went back to find some examples of ones that really drove me crazy and they have gotten better(snowboardforum, nasioc and wetcanvas). One's even got a big announcement about their ui update on the front page.
I do think the threaded style of comments is much better then the forums though. Ignoring the problems of upvotes.
So, like Reddit?
to;dr eternal september = constant influx of many new users didn't allow the 'culture' from before to survive.
The problem with forums isn't that they are dead. It's that you are trying to have them do what reddit does right now, which is endless content and interaction 24/7. But that just doesn't work with a smaller number of people. Forums make sense as the thing that you visit once or twice a day and browse for a bit in a relaxed environment. I guarantee you that doing so from your phone during your commute or your 10 minute break isn't the same. It won't create comments of the same quality.
This is interesting, something I think i had a feeling about, but seeing it put in words, you're probably right. Ive probably changed a bit in my browsing habits and been conditioned to expect constant content.
What I did was slowly unsubscribe to all subreddits over the course of 6-8 months; slowly 1-3 subs at a time. In the end when there was only one sub left, I lost the habit of going to the site.
Reddit and Facebook groups pretty much killed the forums, but the communities are somehow much worse. I suspect it's somehow related to how users would previous cluster in smaller forums, but now everyone descents on one Facebook group or one sub-reddit.
Having both Facebook and Reddit is interesting though. It more or less proves, at least to me, that anonymity is not what makes people behaving badly towards others. The Facebook users are just as bad as those on Reddit. I believe that it's the social distance to others that makes some users behave like jerks.
* [1] https://redditenhancementsuite.com/
So that’s about one fifth. Divide by five, so each of them is averaging 20 of the top subreddits.
Is that a lot? Do these people work together? I need more context before assuming a strong opinion.
Consider if you are a big/rich autocratic nation state (read China, Saudi) that wants to censor and shape discourse outside their borders. You just buy these 5 people and boom, you get instant powers to shape and censor the discourse on the most viewed forums on Reddit and the wider internet.
"Reddit defiantly needs to restructure their moderation teams."
Wow. Reddit really is just a pile of rubbish now. So glad I found HN.
What would improve the content quality is a requirement to maintain membership by answering a complex enough question once a month. Questions could be prepared by mods. But then all the reddit audience would be gone, and with them the reddit's power to influence the lazy internet crowd.
They have no interest in setting up barriers or vetting members. Dumb engagement is easier than building tools to support content creation. Infinite scroll, embedded videos. It's becoming Zuckerbergian.
While reddit's never been amazing it feels like the quality is going downhill faster than before slowly turning into youtube level comments.
Apparently they are ERC-20 tokens, and in the CC sub, there are frontpage posts already asking how to buy "Moons".
The voting/modding mechanics here on HN are not immune to the poison of becoming popular.
i agree and i disagree.
hn is really nice, but it can be as circlejerky as any subreddit. also, sometimes i just want some light-memey-fun, and i can't have that on hn.
also, as someone that follows a lot of sports (football, NFL, NBA, tennis, f1, mma and others), reddit is a godsend. the discussion is not "high level", but it's lighthearted enough to have fun without feeling like everybody is trolling.
Also, it probably helps that this community is not particularly demographically diverse compared to the average. There is less value to a PR company in sockpuppeting here, unless they are specifically trying to reach tech workers specifically.
The perfect example of this was /r/wallstreetbets. Its sole purpose was to funnel money into some weird crypto trading company simply because one of the moderators decided on it.
Yeah, about that... If you thought Reddit censorship is annoying, wait until Ian Murdock's friends-in-need get a hold of you ;-)
There are some great sub-reddits (world news, education, Ask Historians, Ask Science etc.) and there are some echo chambers.
Similarly, there many corporate shill types and 'stuck up' bookish-types on HN , but I found useful stuff in the submissions and comments as well.
Let's not make this a Reddit vs HN issue.