I regularly get accused on Reddit of pushing misinformation and conspiracy theories for saying things that on Hacker News warrant merely a nod or a shrug.
Reddit's group-think has become more extreme in recent years, along with its tribalism and gate-keeping.
You can make a list of about a dozen Reddit-acceptable thoughts for any given subreddit, and anything outside that list is labeled the propaganda of the Enemy.
Poor overworked mods have to go around reprimanding or banning me for commenting perspectives that weren't explicitly on the allow list.
Yep. Reddit is pretty terrible if you have any opinion outside the approved opinions of the mods. You’ll get banned quick and it turns into a circlejerk dumpster fire.
They should look at it as a business opportunity. Sell the usernames to crypto pump and dumpers, Nigerian princes, tax agency scammers, and Alex Jones.
IMHO, this says more about Alberta than about reddit.
For reference, country side Alberta is like a Canadian Texas: a land of conservative and libertarian cowboys denying global warming, with the lowest vaccination rate in the country. The kind of people that carry Confederate flags on their trucks even if Canada had absolutely nothing to do with American Civil War.
Edmonton, the capital, is like Houston: progressive and liberal leaning. The mods on that sub are Edmontonians.
I want to stay out of politics here, but after this past election I feel I have to point out this kind of divisive and tribal language based on peoples identities. As if no other groups have ever spread convenient falsehoods or parroted misunderstandings of complex and nuanced realities. Reddit is absolutely full of it and so are many of our top news sources.
I'll bite. Tell me the equivalent of Qanon on the left. Or Alex Jones. Or even Rush Limbaugh the recipient of the higher civilian honor in the US who said this to his 15 million followers:
>"It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump," Limbaugh said Feb. 24 on his radio show. "Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus … I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks."
>"The drive-by media hype up this thing as a pandemic," Limbaugh continued.
I don't understand why they're act surprised. What they built is a social website, devoid of any content produced by Reddit - everything is provided by users. Their knowledge has more or less normal distribution, so by definition misinformation is everywhere, it's the very fabric of any social website.
This is one of those articles that only appears to make sense because the term "misinformation" is so vague. The moderators are reporting that random Albertans are angry about vaccines and like to make incorrect posts about them; people saying dumb stuff on the internet is an old, well-known problem which clearly cannot be solved by Reddit policy or regulatory intervention.
The problem discussed really has two parts: ban evasion/harassment and misinformation. I'll get to both of them, but let's discuss the ban evasion and harassment. Reddit is a site where anyone can create an account and post. The admins already IP ban repeat offenders, but IP addresses are cheap anyway. Without changing the fundamental functions of the site, the ban evasion problem is going nowhere. Same with harassment, which will be a problem as long as anyone can post. Trolls are a problem as old as online communication.
Facebook is worth 100x as much as reddit and has a bigger budget, yet even they cannot solve this problem. Are we going to deploy more questionably reliable AI systems that harm legitimate users?
Now on to the misinformation problem. I straight up don't think that's the administration's responsibility. Politicians, site moderators, etc. hound various social media sites from Facebook to Reddit to remove this content without realizing that they're asking for an essentially impossible problem to be solved. First of all, what is or isn't misinformation can be entirely different six months later. Some things are obviously bunk, such as 5G conspiracies, but other things are more up for debate. Even a legitimate, nuanced debate can get filed under misinformation. Second, removing such content isn't like a simple DELETE SQL query. You either have people manually review everything, which isn't necessarily realistic, or you deploy some automated system that will almost certainly screw up on the regular (Facebook, YouTube, etc.).
The problem is that one platform with one ideology cannot scale to effectively service such a large range of users, functionality, and individual utility needs.
When reddit was smaller and more tight knit it was better because smaller groups are easier to accommodate and moderate.
As reddit grew, they began to reduce features that kept users happy and in control of content. As reddit grew to encompass hackers, media attention, politics, and so many other aspects , the pressure for moderation overwhelmed them and they also needed to balance moderation with profit to fund the mass they grew into. This drives businesses to do shady things to keep the lights on, which also drives away core supporters and OC creators.
Perhaps every major app/site has a shelf life, and perhaps we need to just embrace that. Also it's an opportunity to build several new local communities and to put the user community first over growth into a monopolistic machine that gets you onto TV news.
I help manage 10+ local newspaper websites, and moderation is a constant issue for us as well.
We want to provide a place for the local community to have civil discussions, but many folks are misinformed and pridefully vocal about their ignorance. We see constant racism, personal attacks, and off-topic comments.
Our approach has been to turn comments off on some stories, and even whole publications. We have human moderation and machine moderation.
A local hospital requested that we consider turning comments off on covid articles, because the commenters are littering the conversation area with false information and political attacks.
I used to think that I would love to see a censorship resistant internet experience like TOR replace our centralized systems, but I don't know now. George Carlin said it best; people are dumb. The less misinformation folks are able to access, the better our society will be.
I think folks should be able to discuss topics freely with an audience, but they need to build that audience on their own. They can use email, messengers, host a forum, etc. Online public/general forums are notoriously ineffective and a huge waste of time, unless there is a barrier to entry and repercussions for misbehavior.
Newspapers used to solve this problem by severe throttling. Anyone could write a letter to the editor; almost none of them were printed. "Default deny" may have helped the newspaper maintain a monopoly on "truth", but it also kept it from turning into a sewer of trolls, propagandists, and the (sometimes deliberately) misinformed.
The internet worked just fine before we decided that free speech as a societal value was an inconvenience. Turns out being the thought police is hard work though, so that's good. Maybe you'll save us all the trouble and stop?
Judging from the people in this article and my experience with the cesspool that is Reddit and their mods, I'd rather go back to relying on my own brain than them telling me what the contents of it should be.
Reddit has turned into an agenda based and undercover money generating platform. OC posting is no longer a commodity regarded as a desirable on the site.
This is why reposts and triggering content are so common. Now when I look thru r/all or even the front page I'm likely to encounter lots of TikTok style reposts, subtly placed ads, and even videos of people dying and getting seriously hurt.
Reddit fosters this engineered content to drive attention and doom scrolling so that the underlying advertising and payola machine can push messaging in between watching content that has already garnered proven popularity or attention on other platforms.
Meanwhile there are life-long users who are still clinging to the idea that "good old reddit" will return, and some people posting OC in hopes of gaining traction to make it to the front page in futility.
Reddit's demise was first signaled when they chose to stop displaying how many downvotes were registered on posts (quite a while ago) in my opinion... The same way most platforms crawl towards the slow death and inevitable karma of turning "free membership" platform models suddenly and undercover into "full profit" models. Sorry for being a pessimist about it, but it happens every time. Tom was a genius, he knew when to jump off the gravy train.
21 comments
[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 53.9 ms ] threadReddit's group-think has become more extreme in recent years, along with its tribalism and gate-keeping.
You can make a list of about a dozen Reddit-acceptable thoughts for any given subreddit, and anything outside that list is labeled the propaganda of the Enemy.
Poor overworked mods have to go around reprimanding or banning me for commenting perspectives that weren't explicitly on the allow list.
Reddit certainly has a strong authoritarian / fascist streak. Good riddance to reddit.
For reference, country side Alberta is like a Canadian Texas: a land of conservative and libertarian cowboys denying global warming, with the lowest vaccination rate in the country. The kind of people that carry Confederate flags on their trucks even if Canada had absolutely nothing to do with American Civil War.
Edmonton, the capital, is like Houston: progressive and liberal leaning. The mods on that sub are Edmontonians.
>"It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump," Limbaugh said Feb. 24 on his radio show. "Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus … I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks."
>"The drive-by media hype up this thing as a pandemic," Limbaugh continued.
Or this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAh4uS4f78o
I'll wait.
Facebook is worth 100x as much as reddit and has a bigger budget, yet even they cannot solve this problem. Are we going to deploy more questionably reliable AI systems that harm legitimate users?
Now on to the misinformation problem. I straight up don't think that's the administration's responsibility. Politicians, site moderators, etc. hound various social media sites from Facebook to Reddit to remove this content without realizing that they're asking for an essentially impossible problem to be solved. First of all, what is or isn't misinformation can be entirely different six months later. Some things are obviously bunk, such as 5G conspiracies, but other things are more up for debate. Even a legitimate, nuanced debate can get filed under misinformation. Second, removing such content isn't like a simple DELETE SQL query. You either have people manually review everything, which isn't necessarily realistic, or you deploy some automated system that will almost certainly screw up on the regular (Facebook, YouTube, etc.).
Just like the porn subs.
r/alberta community has ~150k readers. So guessing ~150 posters and ~1,500 commenters.
Cleaning up this mess is straightforward and feasible.
PS- For comparison, r/gonewild has 3m readers.
When reddit was smaller and more tight knit it was better because smaller groups are easier to accommodate and moderate.
As reddit grew, they began to reduce features that kept users happy and in control of content. As reddit grew to encompass hackers, media attention, politics, and so many other aspects , the pressure for moderation overwhelmed them and they also needed to balance moderation with profit to fund the mass they grew into. This drives businesses to do shady things to keep the lights on, which also drives away core supporters and OC creators.
Perhaps every major app/site has a shelf life, and perhaps we need to just embrace that. Also it's an opportunity to build several new local communities and to put the user community first over growth into a monopolistic machine that gets you onto TV news.
We want to provide a place for the local community to have civil discussions, but many folks are misinformed and pridefully vocal about their ignorance. We see constant racism, personal attacks, and off-topic comments.
Our approach has been to turn comments off on some stories, and even whole publications. We have human moderation and machine moderation.
A local hospital requested that we consider turning comments off on covid articles, because the commenters are littering the conversation area with false information and political attacks.
I used to think that I would love to see a censorship resistant internet experience like TOR replace our centralized systems, but I don't know now. George Carlin said it best; people are dumb. The less misinformation folks are able to access, the better our society will be.
I think folks should be able to discuss topics freely with an audience, but they need to build that audience on their own. They can use email, messengers, host a forum, etc. Online public/general forums are notoriously ineffective and a huge waste of time, unless there is a barrier to entry and repercussions for misbehavior.
Judging from the people in this article and my experience with the cesspool that is Reddit and their mods, I'd rather go back to relying on my own brain than them telling me what the contents of it should be.
This is why reposts and triggering content are so common. Now when I look thru r/all or even the front page I'm likely to encounter lots of TikTok style reposts, subtly placed ads, and even videos of people dying and getting seriously hurt.
Reddit fosters this engineered content to drive attention and doom scrolling so that the underlying advertising and payola machine can push messaging in between watching content that has already garnered proven popularity or attention on other platforms.
Meanwhile there are life-long users who are still clinging to the idea that "good old reddit" will return, and some people posting OC in hopes of gaining traction to make it to the front page in futility.
Reddit's demise was first signaled when they chose to stop displaying how many downvotes were registered on posts (quite a while ago) in my opinion... The same way most platforms crawl towards the slow death and inevitable karma of turning "free membership" platform models suddenly and undercover into "full profit" models. Sorry for being a pessimist about it, but it happens every time. Tom was a genius, he knew when to jump off the gravy train.
i felt a genuine shift in the volume/quality of posts pre-Gamestop/meme stonk era vs. post-