Not if it relates to a superinjunction in effect: it could potentially render Reddit and/or Conde Nast liable for criminal sanctions/contempt of court proceedings.
Reddit suspended one of ukpol's mods. The rest of them had no clue what was going on, so they hit the big red button hoping that would give them time to figure out what was happening.
More mods getting banned. They didn't know what the banned one did, so the precaution is to ensure nobody does anything until they figure out what got reddit angry.
Orwell wasn't wrong, that's for sure. It was always obvious that centralizing web middlemen were going to end up as totalitarian failures, but seeing it actually play out is chilling.
Does anybody have pointers to forums where this topic can be freely discussed, just on principle?
edit: if I click on the two bitly links in this reddit post, I get articles about a specific person. Is she the Voldemort, or is it someone else?
Lol. Yes. From the tone of the post, it looks like the subs' admins are not happy with the mothership's censoring activity, and are effectively skirting around it.
One thing that people who compile these lists never seem to take into account is that the flagged discussions are only interesting to the extent that HN remains an interesting community, and that would not be the case if the site weren't moderated and users didn't flag off-topic submissions and flamewars.
The better HN does at fulfilling its mandate, the higher-quality the audience becomes, and the more people want to use it for other things (usually a marketing agenda or a political/ideological agenda). Often these people complain that the site isn't available to them for these purposes and demand that the filtration system be dismantled (censorship! suppression!). But if the filtration system didn't exist, HN wouldn't be a desirable target in the first place. It would in fact suck, because the best users—who come here to avoid getting barraged by marketing and political/ideological agendas—would have left. In other words, if you understand the dynamics correctly then these arguments refute themselves.
Firstly, thank you for doing such a great job here.
A couple of questions, as I worry that "flagging" can be abused by small groups of motivated people who are not representative of the broader user base.
Do you have ways to prevent "flagging abuse"? e.g. Do you review why things were flagged, and reinstate them if for example the thread has a lot of upvotes and isn't a total flamewar, or if the flaggers weren't particularly good citizens?
Yes, we review flagged posts. I wouldn't say we review why things get flagged, exactly, because we can only guess at that. But we try to keep an eye on things and turn flags off when the article seems substantive and able to support a substantive discussion. We also rely on users giving us heads-ups at hn@ycombinator.com when they think we should take a closer look at a thread.
Most stories and threads that get enough flags to win the tug-of-war against upvotes are just not very good or on topic for HN. Partisans of one side or the other on an issue tend to feel strongly about it, but the bulk of the audience is here for interesting things to read, and the site has a very clear mandate that way: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor..., https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. So most of the time, when people feel strongly that a story shouldn't be flagged, we end up disappointing them; fighting these battles is not really what HN is for. Still, there are fairly frequent exceptions.
I should add that when an account has a habit of flagging submissions that are on-topic and good submissions for HN, we eventually take away their flagging privileges.
Thanks very much for the detailed reply. That all sounds very sensible!
I'm sure most of us would agree that the quality of the moderation here is the reason this site has been so great for so long - thanks again for all your efforts.
Firstly, thank you for keeping the site's standards high. The embarrassing amount of time I spent here is a testament to that.
I feel like posting this story was warranted as it appears to be about a possible conflict of interest and abuse of power by a Reddit employee. Reddit normally takes a hands-off approach to everyday goings of the community.
What we're being told by the volunteer community mods is rather worrying, and clearly an arbitrary and unwarranted use of the site's doxxing rule against a single mod - and by extension the entire community. This is rather unprecedented and warrants more scrutiny.
I am afraid people only see keywords like "politics", "transgender" and "moderation policy" and assume it's some sad Reddit flamewar leaking to HN. But it's not about that, not at all. It rather sounds similar to the case where Jimbo Wales abused his admin powers on Wikipedia to suppress information about his girlfriend's criminal activities.
Well, maybe. I mean you guys know all the details and I don't, but (a) I haven't seen a lot of (if any?) intellectually interesting conversation about this, and (b) that matches my gut feeling that the story, while intensely sensational, is of secondary significance.
Wait, I'm not making any argument here. I personally think that the wonderful moderation of HN generates, as a byproduct, very interesting (if controversial) threads, which deserve to be collected somewhere. These lists are not necessarily a critique to the moderation of this site, IMHO.
> Often these people complain that the site isn't available to them for these purposes and demand that the filtration system be dismantled (censorship! suppression!). But if the filtration system didn't exist, HN wouldn't be a desirable target in the first place.
This makes obvious sense when the things getting flagged are the abortion debate or similarly off-topic flamewars.
The problem comes when it's a story like tech censorship which is both on-topic and political. On-topic specifically in that it's a debate where the people here are directly affected and have a particular domain-specific knowledge and ability to affect change. The abortion debate you can go have anywhere.
Because a site like this will out-compete others for its population demographic. The alternative space where the same demographic might discuss political stories with direct relevance to them is defeated and disappears, leaving only this space to do it in. If it's then stamped out in this space too, there is nowhere left and the population demographic here is effectively disenfranchised.
And it goes double when the topic of conversation is censorship and manipulation of speech on major platforms, because having the discussion on the incumbent platforms would subject the anti-censorship efforts to the censorship.
I've vouched for this (then dead thread) and a reminder to others that if you see a thread that you think has been unfairly killed, check to see if you have a "vouch" option under the title.
Always good to go by the content though rather than your assumption of it from the URL :).
The title and content would be of interest to anybody who cares about the freedom of speech on dominant platforms, which is certainly a frequent subject here.
Obviously if there is a neutral article on it on a third party platform that might be better, but this seems a good substitute in the meantime as it's external to the origin of the issue (which has a habit of disappearing), and contains a clear summary of what's going on.
However, I shall bear your admonition in mind for future (no snark).
> The title and content would be of interest to anybody who cares about the freedom of speech on dominant platforms,
That's not true. It's clear from the comments in these threads that this isn't a story that HN is going to have an interesting discussion of. If there's anything here other than Reddit drama and HN metadrama, I missed it.
Are you saying HN will not have an interesting discussion of content being removed and users being mentioned on an influential internet social platform "Reddit" based on a mention of single person?
I'm saying that saying 'no thanks' to Reddit drama has been a function of HN moderation for as long as HN has existed. There are exceptions, of course, but as I've explained half a dozen times today, I don't see that this story clears the bar for that. I'd be willing to be wrong, but the low quality of the comments that have been posted about it so far has strengthened my sense that I'm not. The story is intensely interesting in a sensational way but that's not the same thing as intellectual interest, which is HN's mandate.
By the way, I'm not saying that out of snobbish disrespect for Reddit. Reddit's an amazing place and an incredible achievement. HN is just a different sort of forum and moderation's job is to preserve the sort of forum HN is.
31 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 75.6 ms ] threadIt's sadly fairly common to see them employed for situations where it is alleged that libel or slander could result from press coverage.
Seems like a reasonable precaution to me.
Does anybody have pointers to forums where this topic can be freely discussed, just on principle?
edit: if I click on the two bitly links in this reddit post, I get articles about a specific person. Is she the Voldemort, or is it someone else?
Lol. Yes. From the tone of the post, it looks like the subs' admins are not happy with the mothership's censoring activity, and are effectively skirting around it.
Dear HN users, if you flagged this or the previous thread, what was your reasoning? I'm curious about what's going on.
The better HN does at fulfilling its mandate, the higher-quality the audience becomes, and the more people want to use it for other things (usually a marketing agenda or a political/ideological agenda). Often these people complain that the site isn't available to them for these purposes and demand that the filtration system be dismantled (censorship! suppression!). But if the filtration system didn't exist, HN wouldn't be a desirable target in the first place. It would in fact suck, because the best users—who come here to avoid getting barraged by marketing and political/ideological agendas—would have left. In other words, if you understand the dynamics correctly then these arguments refute themselves.
A couple of questions, as I worry that "flagging" can be abused by small groups of motivated people who are not representative of the broader user base.
Do you have ways to prevent "flagging abuse"? e.g. Do you review why things were flagged, and reinstate them if for example the thread has a lot of upvotes and isn't a total flamewar, or if the flaggers weren't particularly good citizens?
Most stories and threads that get enough flags to win the tug-of-war against upvotes are just not very good or on topic for HN. Partisans of one side or the other on an issue tend to feel strongly about it, but the bulk of the audience is here for interesting things to read, and the site has a very clear mandate that way: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor..., https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. So most of the time, when people feel strongly that a story shouldn't be flagged, we end up disappointing them; fighting these battles is not really what HN is for. Still, there are fairly frequent exceptions.
I should add that when an account has a habit of flagging submissions that are on-topic and good submissions for HN, we eventually take away their flagging privileges.
I'm sure most of us would agree that the quality of the moderation here is the reason this site has been so great for so long - thanks again for all your efforts.
I feel like posting this story was warranted as it appears to be about a possible conflict of interest and abuse of power by a Reddit employee. Reddit normally takes a hands-off approach to everyday goings of the community.
What we're being told by the volunteer community mods is rather worrying, and clearly an arbitrary and unwarranted use of the site's doxxing rule against a single mod - and by extension the entire community. This is rather unprecedented and warrants more scrutiny.
I am afraid people only see keywords like "politics", "transgender" and "moderation policy" and assume it's some sad Reddit flamewar leaking to HN. But it's not about that, not at all. It rather sounds similar to the case where Jimbo Wales abused his admin powers on Wikipedia to suppress information about his girlfriend's criminal activities.
This makes obvious sense when the things getting flagged are the abortion debate or similarly off-topic flamewars.
The problem comes when it's a story like tech censorship which is both on-topic and political. On-topic specifically in that it's a debate where the people here are directly affected and have a particular domain-specific knowledge and ability to affect change. The abortion debate you can go have anywhere.
Because a site like this will out-compete others for its population demographic. The alternative space where the same demographic might discuss political stories with direct relevance to them is defeated and disappears, leaving only this space to do it in. If it's then stamped out in this space too, there is nowhere left and the population demographic here is effectively disenfranchised.
And it goes double when the topic of conversation is censorship and manipulation of speech on major platforms, because having the discussion on the incumbent platforms would subject the anti-censorship efforts to the censorship.
If so, please use it.
More: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/mb1vpb/rukp...
The title and content would be of interest to anybody who cares about the freedom of speech on dominant platforms, which is certainly a frequent subject here.
Obviously if there is a neutral article on it on a third party platform that might be better, but this seems a good substitute in the meantime as it's external to the origin of the issue (which has a habit of disappearing), and contains a clear summary of what's going on.
However, I shall bear your admonition in mind for future (no snark).
That's true! (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...)
> The title and content would be of interest to anybody who cares about the freedom of speech on dominant platforms,
That's not true. It's clear from the comments in these threads that this isn't a story that HN is going to have an interesting discussion of. If there's anything here other than Reddit drama and HN metadrama, I missed it.
By the way, I'm not saying that out of snobbish disrespect for Reddit. Reddit's an amazing place and an incredible achievement. HN is just a different sort of forum and moderation's job is to preserve the sort of forum HN is.