I took over some big subreddits this way and I've had big subreddits taken away from me because I forgot to log in and comment on the account I used to create it. Even though I was active on a non-creator/non-mod account. It's actually how I found out about the "feature".
A very poorly implemented feature given the potential value of subreddits and all the work it takes to grow one.
So if you run a subreddit that you care about, remember to assign some active mods even just to avoid someone taking over your subreddit.
It seems to me like some people made it their business to "hack" Reddit with automated scripts. Taking over subreddits, promoting content to the front page, that sort of thing.
Once they got good at that, they had a saleable product, as well as a worldview that treats online discussion as a resource strata to be exploited and shepherded, not nurtured.
Reddit itself is tracked as a social platform in the same vein as twitter or FB. Its astroturfed to hell and back, and there's no way to know who is posting what.
Governments have the resources to dedicate people to doing things like this. Once they have the ability to shape discussions, they will.
Russia doesn't care if Black Lives Matter or not. They promoted inflammatory postings on both sides of the issue simply because chaos and weaking public trust is a goal for them. Sure, you might not care about the issue and don't visit those subreddits, but it still affects you because the community you live in.
I don't think this is a very strong point. In this case we're talking about a Reddit user who has been an active redditor for a long time moderating various subreddits. What's the issue exactly? That he may sell his account or otherwise be influenced by state agents? That also applies to the CEOs and board members of Reddit, the regulators and lobbyists, and polticians. There are plenty of worse things to be concerned about than how many subreddits Gallowboob is moderating.
Someone watching that many subreddits can't have a good grasp on context. They'll end up moderating in a way that seems fine if they don't understand the culture of the subreddit.
Realistic example: someone makes a comment about something nice his boyfriend did. Someone else replies "sounds pretty gay, dude." Could one of these supermods understand that this is a normal and silly thing for queers of a certain age to say to each other? Maybe. I wouldn't count on it. They can't go and dig into each poster's history to see that they post in the same communities and often swap silly comments. The volume in their mod inbox is just too high.
You assume that the user account is anything more than a user-Agent. Accounts do not at all bind one-to-one with people. They never have, never will, and the push to try to make it so is a fool's errand.
That account could just be the tip of the spear of an entire department of information warfare specialists.
This is why the old tongue in cheek wisdom "On the Internet, no one knows you're a {dog,child,FBI Agent,Special Information Warfare Directorate Agent,Nymphomaniacal Grandma} " never stopped being relevant. User-Agents!=Users.
Don't get into the habit, lest the ones who don't run circles around you.
I will never cease to find it hilarious adults are afraid of Russians (as opposed to "Russia") posting on Reddit or Twitter, or buying a few ads on Facebook or whatever. Not, say, Israelis or Saudis or the Mujahedin-e Khalq buying congress and actively bribing our politicians: Russians posting on Reddit.
I didn't say it was only Russia. I wasn't writing a dissertation, and picked Russia as the most obvious and document example.
Also, countries don't post, people do. It is a well documented fact that Russian had a full time time operating thousands of fake accounts. Russians are posting those messages and spreading memes, but it it is in their official capacity of Russian agents that they do it.
I'm not worried about random Russian citizen posting their thoughts.
>Russians are posting those messages and spreading memes, but it it is in their official capacity of Russian agents that they do it.
I realize it's a popular, even government approved conspiracy theory, but it seems more like psychological projection (the US is absolutely doing such things, and has been long before the internet existed -for example[1]) rather than anything for which there is actual evidence.
Whether or not Russian agents are posting official FUD on Reddit is kind of irrelevant. The idea that anything on Reddit (or twitter for that matter) matters at all is what is so bloody funny about it.
Saying that the US intelligence does these things in not way refutes the point I was making. "Your honor, yes, I'm covered in exploding ink-pack stains, but Bonnie and Clyde have stolen from lots of banks."
What aren't you willing to dismiss by invoking the magic words "conspiracy theory?" Is this just a joke?
>What aren't you willing to dismiss by invoking the magic words "conspiracy theory?" Is this just a joke?
Lol, well, I'm definitely willing to dismiss the idea that reddit, twitter and facebook are why Trump is president if that's what you mean. I suppose Obama won the 2008 election because of some dank memes posted in 4chan, and Bush won in 2000 because of funny things some weeb posted on Usenet.
As far as why people continue to say it: as I said, it's projection. The US has done 1000x worse than whatever imagined ridiculously effective Reddit posts the Rooskies have done. The fact that adult humans with day jobs who are somehow able to feed themselves without choking to death on their tongues are able to believe in such nonsense will never ever cease to amuse me.
If you actually believe such things, you really need to learn how to count.
A pretty visible example of this is Iran on r/worldnews. Back when there was the US-Iran conflict in early January, the front page was filled with pro-Iranian content [0]. This is after hundreds of civilians were killed for protesting. It could just be that the people on that subreddit support Iran, but given that on many of the posts the comments were full of people saying they disagreed, and given that Iran has been previously found spreading propaganda on that subreddit in particular [1], I think it is suspicious. The posts seemed to mostly stop after they decided to shoot down a civilian airliner.
In all fairness this can be abused by any country not just Russia or China.
US and Israel could just as well use it to shape and support the endless wars and warmongering.
It could be used by left/right wing extemists just as well to push their own narative.
The fact that it can shape what is seen by your average joe to that extent is the problem regardless of who does it.
'Could' and 'Currently has a well know and active program dedicated to' are two entirely different things. Kind of moot to worry about hypotheticals when the existing reality is problematic enough.
Reddit is one of the largest international websites in the world and many careers, lifestyles and organizations have sprung up from it. If millions of dollars are being spent on this and the industry continues to swell, blaming passive observers for being concerned seems to be backwards.
Some companies (like gaming companies) "sponsor" a subreddit and give out prizes and benefits in small contests and whatnot. Those subreddits employ moderators who will delete, alter or chastise any negative content relating to that company and ban anything but positive reinforcement of that company.
cough Stadia cough - it is against Reddit ToS that employees (or at least reddiquette) to have a paid employee of a company moderating a subreddit for that company's product [1].
“Doritos are the best for walking tacos.” “Fritos make the best walking tacos.” Lord savior Jesu i never even had heard of walking tacos until this morning but then leave it to reddit to first inform me of something new and then to tell me the specific products I should use.
My poor colleague was incredulous when I told him reddit was gamed. Dear summer child, it is not just the obvious product placement for Doritos. It is also entire subs that are heavily modded to the point of being useless. r/sanfrancisco is endless pix of the gg bridge, thanks mods! It also divides the discourse into red team blue team with red team bad blue team good. High karma users sell their handle so trolls and sock puppets can have a vernier of credibility. Like San Francisco fromwhere it originates reddit is a cesspool that if you practice active denial, selective ignorance, ignore cognitive dissonance and pretend like all the bounders, freaks, fairies, bohos, hippies, punks, transhumanists, burners, and hackers that came before that everything is beautiful man, its a great place that can still surprise and delight on occasion.
Let me give you a different example. The main Indian subreddit r/india has been taken over by information warfare specialists and actually anything that does not match left leaning viewpoints are deleted. You can see all the power abuse chronicled on a subreddit called r/indiadiscussion. One mod is actually a Pakistani !
Shouldn't country subreddits be sacred ? Should'nt there be a due process to call out mod excesses, some kind of quasi legal means. Instead they continue their information warfare unabated banning anyone that goes against their viewpoints. They also actively browse people posting in other subreddits and ban them.
The beauty of federations of user-managed communities like Reddit, 8chan or Mastodon is that the friction to "voting with your feet" is low enough to be practical. Migration of user communities from hijacked subreddits happens all the time.
While I agree that there should ideally be a process to deal with obviously maliciously confusing community names, a country is an entity too big and diverse to have a single centrally-moderated conversation platform for anyway. Control of the exact country-name subbreddits could be offered to official governments, but is that in any way interesting? We already have country TLDs as official government communication platforms on the web.
They may not be handled over to the Govt, however the mods should not get so powerful that they create their own quasi dictatorship in terms of what is allowable and what is not. There should also be recourse for people to raise their issues at a neutral subreddit where supermods can arbitrate.
IMO, a little transparency into the subreddits' mod activity would alleviate this completely. People don't leave subreddits that are modded in a heavily biased way because they have no way to know.
I don't see why I shouldn't be able to unhide all modded posts if I choose to.
that's the secret sauce of the information warfare era. Keep non curious people in their own bubble without a way to find out if there are other options there. They cannot leave the bubble due to network effects and no one can do this all the time. Always project that your bubble is the cleanest one.
The abuses of mods in some subreddits if it were happening in real life would be subjects of class action lawsuits.
Lots of people get advice on what to buy. Imagine if company’s are able to manipulate buyitforlife, HomeKit, personalfinance, babybumps, travel subreddits etc.
Probably the best form of advertising. Have people just insert your products in random stories.
“I remember back when I was a kid and mom would make a cake with Betty Crocker icing”
I’m automatically suspect of any post mentioning products. Probably happens on hacker news too. And instagram. And everywhere else. We have ad blockers, but now the ads will move into the content itself.
There’s product placement, and then there is inserting a literal advertisement into the story itself and having the actors talk about it, e.g. watching a car commercial when they get in a car and discuss all of its features.
Could be that the subverting of posts has gotten better and the users who submit there are still looking for gifs of guys drinking refreshing cans of Pepsi™ after a crossfit workout
We need more alternatives to Reddit with different moderation practices that allow competing narratives to surface. I used to view Reddit as "what's popular on the internet?", but it's definitely become more "what's the Approved Narrative?" these days and though I do think there's plenty of danger content that calls for violence or is some other form of abuse, it's frustrating that there are many subs in which questioning the Approved Narrative will get censored.
I think content moderation could be done by the community flagging problematic content. Flagged content could be temporarily hidden, with the reason it was flagged. The OP could then write a short defense of the content, and then a "jury" of randomly selected users (who are over 18) could vote on whether to permanently remove the content or to allow it. Content couldn't be flagged again for the same reason if the jury had previously approved it. There would be a public record of content removal decisions, and perhaps even a restricted way to somehow request the removed content as a matter of public record, without surfacing it into public view.
Obviously, there would need to be some experimentation to get a better system. Which is my whole point. I wish there were more systems experimenting with this.
It's not just happening on reddit.The whole media industry works like this. If your point of view does not fit within the 'accepted bounds', it will not get the attention it should get.
Attention is one thing. What scares and frustrates me is censoring by banning accounts, removing post, and to a lesser degree echochamber downvoting hidding the content.
Any new resource will be either too small or it will contain only "approved content" or it
will be labeled white-supremacist or similar (if it is a free site, controversial/revolting content may be added by adversaries).
There is Tildes. It’s open source and non-profit, maintained by donations and has privacy by default. The community is heavily moderated and, while we do have liberty, we do not venerate free speech. There’s a great focus on civility. Most of our users are also on Reddit, and Tildes creator also created Reddit’s /u/automoderator.
Image posts do not exist and we usually prefer medium to long text and videos that are dense with content. It’s not entirely formal though, and there are avenues for conversation and personal expression.
The announcing post: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes
> The community is heavily moderated and, while we do have liberty, we do not venerate free speech. There’s a great focus on civility.
If someone made a civil argument with citations, leading to a conclusion you find immoral, but you didn't have the expertise to find errors, would you delete it or leave it up?
I don’t know I’m not a moderator. It’s hard to say without a concrete case, but if such immorality was also against Tildes principles than yes, probably.
Tildes is definitely not a place for free speech absolutists.
I haven't been around Tildes in a while, but they are doing the right thing when it comes to producing an alternative to Reddit - which is focusing on building a community rather than focusing on building a platform. After all, if you find Reddit to be terminally flawed, you will not solve those problems simply by duplicating Reddit.
The Tildes founders looked at Reddit, then what happened to Voat and identified the problem as a social one, not a technical one. The problem with Reddit and Voat lies between the keyboard and the chair. This is why they focus on the quality and good faith of the discourse, instead of metrics like growth or mass appeal. They aren't aiming to be a clearing house for all means of social interaction in the way that commercial social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit are.
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.
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.
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.
One thing I constantly realize is that commenting is broken on reddit, for one simple reason. Once a thread is popular enough, and reaches a high amount of comments, any new comment is going to be drowned by upvoted ones.
The algorithm should decrease the value of old comments even more. There's already a formula, something like
position_score = score/(age^2)
Unfortunately the more a comment is upvoted, the more it's visible, so it's snowballing upvotes faster than the 1/age^2 can decrease its position.
Also the more a thread is popular, the sooner it should be locked.
I think a big upgrade for both HN and Reddit would be so simply collapse all child comments by default and only show top-level comments. That way every person doesn't have to scroll past the first thread to find the second top-level discussion.
I don't think threads should be locked, though. There is nothing on Reddit more annoying than not being able to reply to someone because of an arbitrary decision (like a mod locking the entire submission). There are better solutions. But it just seems silly to shut down discussion when people want to have it on a social site.
Even sinking a thread to the bottom is better than locking it.
One website that I think has nailed comment moderation is the website Tweakers.net. A Dutch tech website and forum.
On Tweakers you (as a user) can apply for mod rights and it allows you to rate each comment from -1 to +3.
+3 = must-read
+2 = informative
+1 = on-topic
0 = off topic
-1 = spam / insult
There's an alogrithm that gives your rating more weight if they (retroactively) allign with what the supermods (employees of the site) rate comments.
On Tweakers you almost never read insults and "and my axe" repititive comments because they are hidden by default, and the +2 and +3 comments automatically get places at the top.
This has so much over a simple +1 / -1 system. I wish more website would think about their comments systems and how they can achieve a good incentive and moderation structure for informative comments to be lifted up and unwanted ones down.
Tweakers is Dutch but to get an idea here's a news thread with a lot of comments:
Similar to the excellent Slashdot moderation system. Moreover on Slashdot you couldn't just moderate at will, occasionally you would find yourself with 5 moderation points to spend upvoting or downvoting 5 comments.
Even more occasionally you would find yourself with some 'meta-moderation' points - where it displays some moderation decisions and asks whether you agree/disagree that this was good moderation
Slashdot's moderation has still yet to be beaten IMO, when up/downvoting a post you had to specify why you were doing so from a defined list, including things like Funny, Informative, Flamebait, and Trolling. Then as mentioned meta-moderation would occasionally ask a user to review those votes, asking the question "Was this post funny" for example. User's who's moderation points were upheld in meta-moderation would be more likely to get given more than someone who flung them out at random.
The real genius of the system though was the amount of configurability attached to those topics. Each user could define what those categories meant to them, so if you only wanted the serious stuff you could say Funny didn't get a +1 boost when displaying comments, and give it a -1 instead. Or -5 if you really hated Slashdot humour. In the other direction lovers of a good flame war could boost comments flagged as flamebait up in the sorting order. This also extended to relationships, where you could flag people as either friends or foes, allowing you to make sure you always saw comments from people who's comments you enjoyed, and squash anything by people you just didn't like.
All of that was an absolute nightmare for performance I'm sure, which is probably why we don't see it these days, but it was a thing of beauty.
Another great thing about the Slashdot moderation system was the "overrated" and "underrated" tags. A comment could get moderated as "-1 Flamebait" then get moderated as "+1 Underrated" all the way up to "+5 Flamebait". My personal favourite quirk of the system.
Slashdot's mod system was ... reasonably good at deprecating garbage. It did poorly at elevating true quality, however. The mod activity was too thin and non-convergent (each moderation moved. by a full point on a +5 -- (-2) scale).
I'd been on the site since before registration and moderation existed, and had a very low UID, back when that ... still really didn't matter.
Kuro5hin's "mean of moderation" system converged (within a five point scale, much like Amazon star ratings), though in practice people vastly overaward high scores.
Explicit scoring systems are difficult to design. They also leak insane amounts of personal information.
While the Tweakers system might be nicer in some ways, I think the problem of new comments having no visibility still applies to the site in practice. Maybe that's less of an issue because it's a news site, but still.
Sidenote: what's ironic in your linked post is that the only comment with a +3 rating is factually incorrect. The author claims that there is no currently known quantum algorithm that breaks ECDSA.
I think the actual values of the upvotes should be hidden, but the different upvote types should just be names - informative vs funny, vs analytic, etc...
Not sure it should be all children. But maybe 2 deep or something. For instance your comment would be unseen if it was collapsed at the top level, but yours is what sparked my reply. It does get weird though, because then people would just be incentivised to reply at the top level. And end up a longer thread there. I guess if its not completely collapsed there is always going to be some attempt to reply in the right place because you will get more views there instead of a top level comment.
Also curious about being able to make a web extension that collapses at a certain configurable level. Or even reordering. Not that it helps most users. But would be interesting.
Interesting idea. If the reply chain is expanded by default, whichever top-level comment rises to the top tends to steer the direction of the discussion. This is especially troublesome on Slashdot where comments are shown in chronological order, regardless of score.
> But it just seems silly to shut down discussion when people want to have it on a social site.
Locking is meant to be used when a thread is filling with toxic bile and there's little chance of things improving. I don't think it's always wrong for mods to lock a thread.
They have some form of that already as it is, but I'm not 100% sure how it works. Some comment replies have the first few replies and then it shows a 'Show 43 more comments' button to expand that depth level, but some comments go 3,4,5 levels deep.
Maybe if it was more predictable and shallower it would be good, the problem is its annoying to keep clicking show replies to load more levels
Such a bad idea. A set of comment threads is going to be a tree of some type and you need to decide if it will be deep or wide. This promotes wide with very little justification beyond 'I didnt get in early on the discussion but still want a high-ranked comment' while the idea of allowing people to necro old threads is so bad it does not even merit discussion (seriously, go try out some forum that allows this and it will take you no time at all to realize that this is a phenomenally bad idea.)
I think both ideas are good, and I don’t find your dismissive objection persuasive. The point of hiding all but top-level posts wasn’t about making comments.
It was about reading them. Specifically that with fully expanded comments, users have to scroll past even downvoted, flagged responses to the top comment before seeing the second-highest voted top-level response.
One thing I'd like to see would be a comment section that uses a multi-armed bandit algorithm based on upvotes, or by something like Thompson sampling. So each time you refresh, comments that have more upvotes tend to be shown earlier, but the fewer votes in total they have, the more it's up to chance where they appear.
If it uses a deterministic MAB algorithm, it would put unvoted posts at the very top. The MAB algorithm is constructed to find the best choices (here, most liked posts), and it can't know what the true score of a comment is if nobody has voted on it yet. Thus the need for exploration would push those posts/comments very high.
This is way less of a problem than you'd think, as long as the default "best" sort is used. Also, I don't think age is taken in to account on reddit, are you thinking of this site instead?
As someone who browses both reddit and hacker news (obviously), I'm regularly frustrated by the way this site hijacks your attention to ask you to judge some recent comment, rather than showing you the ones worth reading at the top. It's still never going to get enough votes to keep that position, and it makes more sense to ask people who've scrolled to the bottom to judge comments with few votes, once they've already read the current frontrunners.
When you see big subs with old comments with a lot of votes at the top on reddit, it's probably because there's nothing else worth showing towards the bottom. I scroll further than I probably should, and the more the subreddit appears to have the early-replier problem, the less I care how those comments are ordered.
I would like an option of defaulting subreddits for all users to chronological order and bumping threads to front page as soon as someone posts in it. Reddit is really bad for actual discussions. It was designed for link sharing not a forum and incidently algorithmic feeds have since becoume standard due to advertising for some reason.
There also seems to be an uptick in threads being locked, usually with some lame excuse like "you people can't behave" but is more likely that the mod doesn't agree.
score = upvotes/view_count is probably a good metrics that takes popularity into account. But there is certainly some statistically trickery needed to compare a popular post with lower score and a less popular post with higher score.
So, another instance of "rich get richer." I wonder if your fix or something like it would work in other systems like twitter (e.g. the more followers you have, the less I hear from you), in science (see Sabine Hossenfelder's critique of voluntary peer review), traditional media and even capitalism itself.
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.
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.
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.
Two people have now commented assuming this is some sort of ad-hominem against the user. I think it bears elaborating in-thread that the notable thing here is that this otherwise-normal Redditor has been systematically persecuted by these same mods, since posting this, completely baselessly. They do not want this discussed.
I think that's been quote mined.
Here is a link to a comment by a moderator on /r/interestingasfuck that includes the context. Followed by more discussion about why he was banned from more subreddits.
Seeing him getting banned from all those big subs at once (as in, the same minute) is pretty insane. And confirms what I've thought for a long time, all those big subs are controlled by the same people, no matter which usernames are listed. Also this post is interesting https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/comments/gj2843/so_t... as it was removed by "Anti-Evil Operations" which AFAIK are ran by the company and you're not allowed to go against them. Are these power mods not just the admins in disguise?
Wow that's a disgusting reaction by the mods and further widens the distrust between the community and the mods. Either the admins are complicit or they're oblivious, neither of which is good.
Please take the time to follow the link I posted before commenting.
The link is to evidence of widespread discrimination by Reddit moderators against this user, based (seemingly) on the fact they chose to post this image. It shows that they're going to far greater lengths than just censoring the original post: they're engaging in a concerted campaign against this user in response.
Not sure why you would think I was criticising the user if you did follow the link. Pretty clear from their comment history that they're under attack from Reddit moderators (which I thought worth highlighting)
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
The inadequacies of Reddit make me miss the message board days of old. Around 2001, I was active on a niche message board for a Gameboy Advance game. The board was only vaguely about the game itself; most topics were just random news and conversation. At its peak, there were probably a few hundred posters, tops, but everyone had an avatar, a screen name and a recognizable identity. I never met any of these people in real life, but nearly two decades letter, I can still remember the various screen names and personalities. This sort of thing just doesn't exist anymore, simply because the subreddit version of X would destroy a (non-Reddit) budding community before it had a chance to grow.
Reddit is a reflection of the broader societal trend away from local or small communities toward an anonymized, faceless megacorp one, replete with all the problems that usually entails. I hope that somehow we can get back to the human feeling of the early internet.
I miss forums too, I really like reddit for finding interesting stuff, but the community aspect isn’t there so much.
Back in the late 90s early 00s I was a member of a forum for a chain of video game stores in the UK, it was an amazing community. The store went bust in ‘05 and one guy created his own forum software where most of the displaced members flocked to.
That forum is still going, although there’s probably only 10 or so regulars left - but we still talk on it every day. I’ve even met a few of them in the real world.
EDIT: I think you've hit the nail on the head, the thing that was so great about forums is, while the original point of the forum was to bring together people with a like minded interest (video game(s)/whatever) - the forum would also have separate boards to discuss cross over topics or something completely unrelated. This meant you were talking to people who you might recognise from other areas of the forum and share other common interests, so could build that sense of community.
Whereas reddit just feels more siloed, I wouldn't recongise anyone who visits subreddit X who also happens to be on Y etc
The best part of forums was that they didn't have much temporal dependency. People posted things there, and it was expected that other would reply days or months later. It made for a much more calm and lively discussion.
When Reddit puts something on the hot tab, there's one hour or two for anybody to say what they want to say, no time for anybody to reply, and it's gone. HN is slower, but not very different. It's a completely different kind of site.
Also my lamenting the loss of newsgroups for just that effect.
Used to be in alt.callahans and I can't imagine how many threads I just collapsed and moved on because I knew that conversation wasn't a topic of mine. And still managed to ping in at least a few dozen messages of varying size/quality a week.
i think this may be strongly correlated with the end of dialup and the rise of always-on internet, and then again in the rise of always-on-hand smartphone internet usage (and its pervasive push notification capacity), each stage raising the ground state of expected response times. speed then proceeded to kill everything in its way.
I believe this is the dividend and curse of Web2.0. Things can be so easily mixed, matched, shared and are federated. Boundaries have been eroding in the digital as in the real world. We've lost the sense of closed group, community and with it some natural short feedback loops.
There are huge benefits to this like minorities gaining scale to be heard. But I feel a lot of benefits are of the type of taking something very good and scaling it up to a global level. What is less seen is the destruction of a lot of other good solutions elsewhere which might have had a chance to develop into something even better with a little more time. We are loosing diversity in products and ideas.
Finding ways to restore smaller scale in some areas may be beneficial but it is not clear how to make it work. Arbitrage across boundaries levels differences. The benefits of tearing down the boundaries accrue with the rule breakers who gain scale. Google+ was an attempt to stem the tide. It may have been flawed but it also tried something fundamentally hard.
Forums have a dark side though. It's a full-fledged social context. Lots of drama can take place in one. Over 10 years ago I got involved in forum drama and it changed me as a person. I got too close to some people there. I've never been comfortable in online communities after this. It's become a lot harder to open up and meet people online. Privacy and anonymity became a priority for me because of stuff like that.
counter anecdote - I met people on gaming forums in the late 90s and early 2000s I'm still very close to today. We all talk with each other every day in a Whatsapp chat, and we still play games together. We meet up about once a year in person to hang out. They're by a wide margin my best friends, and they live all over the US and Canada.
Made some great friends on IRC in the 90s. Made some enemies, too - but the friendships last longer and cross over to real life, whereas the enemies typically stay online and fade away.
College football messages boards are still alive and well. Especially the paid ones that keep out most of the trolling.
If you head over to rivals.com there's a paid site for each team with a private board. Obviously, some are more active than others and there are competitor sites out there as well...but it's the same experience that you're describing.
I've been on those boards for about 20 years now and it's exactly what you describe. Regulars who talk some sports, but also news, random conversation, recommendations for contractors (since many of the members live within 100 mile orbit of the Clemson), advice on investments and fiances, restaurants, etc.
It's worth every penny for the resource it's been.
I don't know what it is, but college football fandom is one of the most fun, entertaining fandoms out there. So many memes (not an image macro, but shared consciousness ideas).
I'm only a casual cfb fan, but during my forays into the online representation of the cfb fandom (mostly through reddit/r/cfb) I always marvel at the depth and breadth of the creativity, humor, and information in the fandom.
I could see where some people (and let's be honest, it's mostly men ages 18-30 or so) could immerse themselves in that subculture and have a lot of fun.
I imagine there are multiple subcultures that are large and immersive enough to totally lose yourself in and I think it's great.
(Of course there's also an element of avoidance of the real world in there, but that's more on the individual than the community)
CFB has this great mix of alumni loyalty, in game competition, storylines and then all of the actual university rivalries with it. Other sports, state rivalries, academics, conspiracies about rival school grads and their influence.
It’s an affiliation you never lose and so many people end up coming back throughout the season for games that it turns into a large family gathering.
I'm not much of a cfb fan but somehow I started tracking a Univ. of TX Austin board called "Shaggy Bevo"[1] and found the banter surprisingly entertaining as noted in this subthread. The creative taunting of rivals (mainly A&M) especially.
This was my experience with early 00s subject-based message boards as well.
It seems to me like Discord provides a similar experience for today's kids. But of course the medium itself is quite different (long-form vs quippy, preserved vs ephemeral) and informs the experience accordingly.
Much as I somewhat romanticize the BBS experience I think it's going to occupy less and less of this type of social space, just by the nature of the way people communicate now.
I learned a lot by browsing years old posts in forums and usenet but with ephemeral messaging I would not be able to do that. Makes me wonder how the new generation will deal with that.
It is also about centralisation vs each community hosting their own servers and not having to adhere to the arbitrary rules that some company enforces upon them.
Most established Discord servers have moderated channels that have strict on-topic guidelines, have slow modes, as well as pins, etc. The result is that a spectrum of long-form content to rapid messaging is achievable in Discord.
If you don't like Discord managing your chat data, Matrix.org is an option.
At its peak, there were probably a few hundred posters, tops
This is mostly the crux of the matter. It doesn't matter if you're talking about Reddit, phpBB, discord, imageboards, whatever. As a community grows, it becomes harder to deal with and more "faceless". I've been in great sub reddits. I've had to leave message boards on other platforms for the problems you describe (and others).
If I remember correctly trying to fix this is what killed Digg. A high percentage of their content were the same power users rushing to post content from the same well liked sites. They tried to do away with it by just dumping the sites RSS feeds into their site. Everyone fled and because Reddit didn't make those changes it became where they fled too.
I think the main improvement of reddit over message boards was just the small but extremely useful concept of messages being ordered by votes in a tree format. Nostalgia aside, navigating a flat, chronologically ordered message board post is extremely frustrating once you've tried the better way.
To a lesser extent, the lack of friction caused by not having to register individually to each message board to stop lurking, and the lack of friction creating new communities also matter, but none of those improvements require a centralised site to exist - niche reddit communities should be relatively easy to move from the site if such tooling existed, much easier than moving people from social networks at least.
I disagree that organizing by votes is inherently better than a chronological view. You simply end up with different problems. I’d probably argue that diversity of thought is much penalized in a voting system, which might be worse in the bigger picture. A better way forward would somehow combine the two.
Perhaps I should have clarified that I meant better in a UX sense.
Those cons you mention definitely do exist, they're an emergent problem of the conversations and communities that arise, but opinion bubbles never seem to be a bottleneck for a platform gaining popularity - which makes sense since they, by definition, favor the majority's opinion.
I'm also not convinced that chronological ordering is better for diversity of opinion: comments might not be hidden directly, but they can be drowned. In a reddit-like system each user can downvote you just once, while in a message board system each user can post N times, with each post making your opinion a smaller portion of the conversation.
What chronological posts are better at is favoring power users over casual users: there is a clear advantage for those who can post early and/or often. For everything besides the starting post of the thread, it also rewards short and not very thoughtful posts (since posting later is punished in visibility). The result is also a bubble, and one dictated by the people that spend their lives on the boards.
And in my personal opinion, there's not a lot of overlap between the people that lead interesting lives and are great at their fields and those willing to spend a great portion of their life in a message board.
Hmm. Maybe a solution to this is a limited number of posts per day/week. Or a limited number of upvotes/downvotes to give out. It would (helpfully) people to be concise and thoughtful with their comments.
I'm still active on a forum for those types of games. They're still probably about as active as they've ever been. It's obvious why it would never work on a large scale though. Each post got the user profile next to it, their signature, and a lot of space.
I would not call reddit anonymized, that title would fit something like 4chan a lot better. On reddit it is common to attack someone based on their comment history or karma.
Maybe anonymized is the wrong word. I mean more that Reddit lacks a sense of enduring identity; while a log of past posts does exist, the site is designed to prioritize the content of a comment more than the identity of its author.
This leads to shallow takes and groupthink, IMO, as comments become upvoted or downvoted based only on what's in that specific comment and not the overall identity of the author. If Reddit were the real world, it would be like starting an entirely new conversation with every single person you meet (even close friends or family members), a kind of endless first impression, in which small things are over-magnified.
> the site is designed to prioritize the content of a comment more than the identity of its author.
The site design is similar to HN on this front. I think that it is culture that separates the two instead.
> as comments become upvoted or downvoted based only on what's in that specific comment
This is desirable imo. It should not matter who makes a post but rather the quality of the post itself.
Regardless, I think that groupthink is an inherent problem of upvoting/downvoting and that this is the main cause of it. The best system that I have seen so far is the one that slashdot and its clones use.
> and not the overall identity of the author
This instead leads to personality cults, where for example tptacek's comment will get to the top regardless of its contents and bury superior comments by "irrelevant" users. Plus it is not like groupthink does not exist in HN either.
> it would be like starting an entirely new conversation with every single person you meet
I do not see what you mean by that. Repeating the same things? If so, I do not see how this would be the case. Rather, I think that being able to discuss with others and evaluate what they post in face value without letting your prejudice and opinion of the person itself get in the way is ideal.
> The site design is similar to HN on this front. I think that it is culture that separates the two instead.
Agreed. Culture is important.
Regarding my comment on identity: I'm trying to make a more subtle point, which is that it's difficult to build a long-lasting relationship via an online community if every comment is essentially speaking to a broad, new audience. I can't say, "Hey User-X, you mentioned this last week and I was thinking about it yesterday, and wanted to say this...". There is no continuity and no relationship-building.
Another (poor) metaphor would be: imagine your job is a traveling elevator repairman/repairwoman. You go from building to building, working at each for a few days. Sometimes, you go back to the same building. Maybe you strike up a conversation with each building's maintenance staff, but the fact that you have no enduring identity, means that you never quite get to know anyone, even if you recognize some of the same faces.
Forums didn't have this issue, largely because of avatars, signatures, and basically being forced to read every comment.
> This is desirable imo. It should not matter who makes a post but rather the quality of the post itself.
I think this makes sense at first glance, but the downsides (personality cults) are a separate issue that arises from the voting system. If you had comments/posts organized chronologically, 'cult leader' comments wouldn't be at the top. This also only seems to happen when the community is large enough for an individual to be anonymous within it.
I wrote a Python script to delete my comments every other day to take care of people pulling small quotes out of context and attacking me for it, or worse what boards I posted to and gatekeeping me based on that alone.
So in other words you never write anything worth keeping. People deleting themselves is massively annoying and a major dick move to the rest of us who have to guess what was said to understand the context.
Does reddit actually delete posts from their systems? Or do they just flag it as deleted in their database? I always assume websites keep deleted data around.
If you really want to be safe, you probably need to utilize multiple online identities. Give the squeaky clean one to your employer if they ask.
Just don't give them anything then. What he's doing now is like handling the corporation a piece of writing on paper, letting people take pictures of it, then grabbing the paper back, ripping in up and dropping the paper thrash on the street. It doesn't serve anyone.
It's very similar, you leave thrash around for others to deal with. And it's just not "one's online content", you also degrade the online content of the ones who spent time replying to you and participating in the thread.
I mean it's quite simple. It serves the user at the cost of the community at large.
HN has similar problems because you can edit your post after people have replied to it. This means you can retroactively change history and how prior arguments were framed, which can make other people look like idiots or completely destroy a comment chain.
If you're really concerned about anonymity or your history being used against you, then create throwaways. Otherwise you're not stopping corporations from keeping tabs on you, the moment you hit post that data's already been scraped and stored somewhere.
This is a great example of why they had to write a python script to delete comments to prevent getting attacked later. People want to throw fits over everything
So what? What other people may chose to do is their issue. Dicks are easy to ignore, but don't be a dick to others in order to prevent potential dickiness reaching you.
Wow. I feel like this is a bit of the pot calling the kettle black, at this point. I delete all of my comments, popular and hated. Equally. I don't pick and choose. There's a 48 hour clock on it. No one cares about a conversation 48 hours later on Reddit... No one cares 12 hours later, really. But if you want to think I'm a "dick", because I only give someone 48 hours to have my opinion on Reddit, well I'm old enough to live through that =) message boards don't have to be as permanent as they want them to be.
> No one cares about a conversation 48 hours later on Reddit
I do. All the reddit threads that I look at are from online searches regarding some sort of question that I have. Most of them tend to be months old, some even years. You just make the experience of people like me significantly worse. I wish that services like ceddit stored the content of user-deleted posts.
Deleted comments are also easy to ignore. Deleting your comments regularly might be construed as a dick move by some people, but as you say, dicks are easy to ignore.
I make a lot of HN accounts because of this. Every reply includes more information that can't be deleted but can be used to tie it to my real-life identity. I don't want to have to precede every reply by pointing out it's my views and not my employer's.
Do you think this is because no one was profiting from your message board community? I'm sure there's several factors, but it takes people who love something to build a presence without motivation for profit.
If you were a frequent visitor of r/politics in 2015 and 2016 you will have noticed something very strange in the front-page posts and top upvoted comments, which seemingly happened overnight during the days of the DNC Primary. It was like watching a mask slip.
As an experiment I'm going to leave this comment ambiguous because I want to see if this description alone is relatable to users who were frequent visitors at the time.
Yup. I wasn't a frequent visitor, but r/politics always seemed like a level-headed intellectual political forum. After the 2015-2016 election the tone totally changed. For the most part, it changed to favor politics that I prefer, but it's hysterical and anti-intellectual and not a place I want to get information from or be associated with.
It pretty much turned into a hivemind where you would be suddenly be assaulted 300 people with the a new opinion you would never have seen before. Sunday mornings seemed to be when the information was disseminated.
It was most blatant when Hillary basically collapsed in front of the van. First wave was it was hot everything is fine, second was that she was feeling a bit under the weather due to the heat, and then it just a one off thing she's perfectly fine now look at the cute girl who greeted her. You would see hundreds of posts saying this exact thing and then change within 5 minutes.
* Reddit counter culture movements and backlashes. Seems to be bipolar with pro China / anti China every day of the week.
* Reddit nice guys who have account names like "Iliketitties" or something really depraved. Along with all the other hypocrites
* Reddit Admins and big personalities driving content trends on the site e.g. (/u/gallowboob)
* Recycling of posts / knowledge, since there are always new people joining. You get things like "TIL that bananas are sterile" trending once every month. Which is frustrating for veteran users
* Reddit arm chair generals/economists/politicians. The points system rewards trendy content and doesn't necessarily mean quality. Unlike points in Stackoverflow, there is some degree of confidence in the users competency.
* The fact that Reddit is mainly populated with technologically proficient people, who probably have some sort of issue, whether it be mental, psychological. Sure we all suffer from our demons but the amount of stuff I read on there makes me cringe at times.
* The "Reddit Contrarian", waiting to snipe your post with their immense intellect
Sure there are many more that could be extrapolated to any other social network.
Folks are replying to you saying that HN has the same problems. I don’t entirely disagree with them, but I do think that Reddit is much worse.
It may be the more conscious moderation style on HN, but it’s much more likely you’re going to get interesting content and thoughtful discussions here than on most subreddits, particularly those that show up on r/all or r/popular.
HN definitely has issues with performative intellectualism and people being unnecessarily argumentative, but I don’t think equating it with reddit is accurate.
Comparing Hacker News with mainstream and general discussion subreddits is misleading, as is comparing it to Reddit as a whole. Obviously Reddit is going to come up worse in every conceivable metric (although, also, better) simply because of scale.
A more accurate comparison would be between HN and niche subreddit of roughly equal size and traffic. Not that I am or am willing to put in the work to make such a comparison, but I suspect the quality differential then would be smaller than a lot of people assume.
HN is more of an echo chamber than reddit because the moderation can be effectively done by just dan and there's no subreddit niches on HN to allow diversity of opinions.
HN usually allows controversial comments to stand as long as they don't generate poor discussion. Sticking to the facts, presenting evidence and avoiding broad generalization helps. People often talk about controversial topics without being censored.
Many Reddit moderators straight up ban people who post stuff they don't agree with.
Sample size 1, great argument buddy. Go look at all the comments that get flagged every day, not for being inflammatory, but just for being unpopular. And unlike reddit you can't even read them on HN after they die. They're so afraid of dissenting narrative enough downvotes means deletion.
In practice, who the editor is and how they execute the task matters tremendously.
There's a frequent mantra by a certain segment of the population, tending to "but who should judge?", or the more pointed "what gives you the right to judge?"
My answer to the first is "someone who's quite good at it, and takes the responsibility seriously".
To the second: "who are you to say I cannot?" We are all judgement-making machines, so long as we have a functioning intellect. We're trying to fit our heads around an external reality, and, generally, make better rather than worse choices.
I'm a fan of systems with checks and balances, with principle, and with transparency. HN scores well on some points, less so on. others (notably transparency). A problem with transparency reports is that excessive detail is tedious and cantip off malevolent actors, insufficient can hide many sins.
Not OP, but it would be nice in my opinion if we knew a title was edited (either by mods or OP). It's weird to me when a post has been up for hours and the title gets edited. Can totally change the context of the comments.
Nearly every bullet point you mentioned can be sensibly argued regarding Hacker News. Particularly the fourth, sixth, and overwhelmingly the last. I have also seen a regular username here containing “penis” in an intentional fashion and a number of people with clear mental and psychological issues, as well. Perhaps the problem isn’t the specific forum.
These issues apply to any internet forum once sufficiently popular. Digg and Slashdot had the same issues, and were slowly strangled by them. The plebs dragged the average down to... well... the average, and then people moved on. Right now YC seems to be the "hip new place to be", but you mark my words, it's going to go down the same path.
HN has existed since October 6, 2006. It's maintained quality at a higher level, for a longer time, than Slashdot, Kuro5hin, Digg, Reddit, and numerous other fora.
That's good to know, and gives me hope, but this trend is generally a function of popularity, not time. Once a decent fraction of the population is on a platform, inevitably it is dragged towards the lowest common denominator.
Just recently someone on YC asked about "mind bending books" and the #1 response was Permutation City by Greg Egan.
I've read this book, and it was an amazing, nearly life altering experience for me. But lets just say... his style of science fiction is not for everyone, and it's certainly not mainstream. Even in my relatively techy circle of friends, nobody has read any books by Greg Egan. Not one. This indicates to me that the current YC crowd is an extremely narrowly filtered subset of the general population.
Can you imagine going to Facebook, Reddit, or even Slashdot and having such books be even in the top 100? The common people upvote Tolkein, Pratchett, and J K Rowling.
Notably, even in the early days, Slashdot had... crazies. Conspiracy nuts, creationists, UFO true believers, and the like. I've noticed that YC is one of the few forums where the one or two Creationists present are mercilessly voted down and their arguments are rejected out of hand. Such trolls get no traction here. But recently... there has been an increase in such talk. It's still small, but I've noticed the trend.
HN takes a number ofvfairly deliberate steps at maintaining its limited appeal, including a decidedly and intentionally lacklustre appearance, limited features, near total lack of gamification (leader list excepted, and I've thought that maybe should be tossed), and the gently but firm hand of moderation nudging content and discussion.
Look at the "new" queue to see what fails to make the cut, much of it auto-killed.
"The fact that Reddit is mainly populated with technologically proficient people, who probably have some sort of issue, whether it be mental, psychological. Sure we all suffer from our demons but the amount of stuff I read on there makes me cringe at times."
Perhaps back when Reddit used to be a niche site, it was "mainly populated with technologically proficient people", but now it's the seventh most-popular site in the US. The days of "fellow Redditors" meaning anything concrete are long gone.
A few other characters I'd add (that appear both here and on Reddit):
* "The Pedantic Nitpicker". He will respond to your long, 50 sentence comment and say something like: "That one sentence said 'all' and should say 'some' because here is a counterexample. Therefore, YOUR ENTIRE POST IS WRONG."
* "The Sealioning Scientist". No matter what you say, she will ask for linked academic sources, and goad you into arguing, all while acting sincere and curious. If you fail to cite them, then obviously you are writing fiction, and she wins.
* "The Silent Downvoter". Skims through posts, looking for ones that violate some established groupthink or simply go against the current subreddit's zeitgeist, downvotes and sneaks off into the dark. Nobody knows their username because they never comment or explain their downvote.
"The Silent Downvoter". Skims through posts, looking for ones that violate some established groupthink or simply go against the current subreddit's zeitgeist, downvotes and sneaks off into the dark. Nobody knows their username because they never comment or explain their downvote.
I think we all wish that we could see the reasons people had for downvoting, but I've accepted that it's just like real life: people will disagree or dislike you and judge you, and you might end up none the wiser, and that's just how it goes.
I think this combination of phenomena, getting downvoted for going against groupthink as opposed to not contributing to the conversation, commenters trying to call out their downvoters, commenters accusing their downvoters of being sheep, is more illustrative of a different general issue: people have a tendency to perceive negative social signals as attacks. We all understand defensiveness as a phenomenon, but humans in general are also much better at spotting defensiveness in others than in themselves, so the calmness disappears when it's you being downvoted.
Downvoting as a mechanism seems to do an approximate job of social regulation at best, and I think that's specifically because the wisdom of the crowd is only good for some things and specifically not good for handling nuance or dissent.
"No matter what you say, she will ask for linked academic sources, and goad you into arguing"
My favorite are the people who demand sources for every assertion of yours, while making numerous factual assertions of their own without providing sources.
Bonus points for disregarding sources once provided, e.g."everyone knows Snopes and Politifact are fake and just anyone can write on Wikipedia".
'The "Reddit Contrarian", waiting to snipe your post with their immense intellect'
This one is interesting to me. I could certainly be accused of being this guy, you could probably make an argument that I'm being this guy right now.
We're all here and participating for different purposes, and one of my purposes is to sharpen my writing skills and my rhetoric. Arguing with strangers on the internet is the most effective way of doing this that I've found, that doesn't affect my personal/professional life.
Another thing you mentioned - people with immense issues. We've all got plenty of issues, and one of the best things about commenting anonymously on the internet is that there is no punishment for revealing them.
I think that there are positive perspectives you could take on some of these bullet points
> We're all here and participating for different purposes, and one of my purposes is to sharpen my writing skills and my rhetoric. Arguing with strangers on the internet is the most effective way of doing this that I've found, that doesn't affect my personal/professional life.
> I think that there are positive perspectives you could take on some of these bullet points
Arguing with someone on the Internet is positive only if the other party also wishes to argue.
Kind of like going out to the street and physically fighting with a random person. It'll definitely sharpen your fighting skills, but it's not a positive if the random stranger doesn't want to fight.
There are many differences between arguing and fighting. One that comes to mind is arguments ability to be productive.
I feel you've made an argument towards me with your comment, and it was welcome because you posed it rationally and without making it personal. It's impossible to pose a fight with a stranger rationally and impersonally, so I'm not sure that that analogy is a good fit.
> There are many differences between arguing and fighting. One that comes to mind is arguments ability to be productive.
I think the distinction is that while it is productive for you, it may be the opposite for your interlocutor. People have conversations for different reasons, and the reasons you have are a strict subset of those. And in real life - outside of academia and some of the tech world - their reasons rarely align with yours.
> In HN you can simply not reply when you don't want to argue.
If you're addressing the physical fighting analogy, yes - it is an imperfect one. It is also not the main thrust of my argument.
If you're referring to the wider point, I don't see the relevance. It's not a given that the purpose of commenting on HN is for sharpening writing skills and rhetoric. It no doubt is the purpose of some on HN, but not everyone.
To take the statement to a pointless extreme, you can also choose not to reply to someone who is openly insulting you on HN. That doesn't make it OK to do so.
I don't think arguing with strangers on the internet presents a valuable feedback loop for learnings in real-life discussions. It's just a very different world with different repercussions.
It's a very different medium which is why is presents a valuable feedback loop. It presents a rare opportunity to build the skill of making a strong argument, without putting your reputation at stake.
In my work I'm able to make a convincing argument as to why a given architecture is the right way to do it, why a given tool isn't worth using, etc. This allows me to participate in high-level design discussions and be a major contributor to them, even though I have relatively little experience. I attribute that almost entirely to my experience as an internet commenter, as odd as that sounds.
I coached high school debate teams, neither that nor arguing shit over the internet are the real world because you aren't actually risking anything and they are, as we are exploring in this very post and thread, predictable.
If it was the same as the real world it wouldn't make for very good practice, now would it?
When I played sports, we spent a fraction of our practices trying to mimic the real world scenario (scrimmaging). And even in a scrimmage, it's risk free, there are no stakes.
The lack of risk is exactly what makes it great practice.
I can't agree with the idea that physical repetition is a suitable analog for any social interaction. For example, a hetero male can't get better at attracting women without being in the actual, concrete situation as it unfolds, which is exactly what is happening in coached dating situations as well.
Edit: I would go a step further and wager our brains aren't calibrated for arguing random other human beings in person we don't share assumptions, behaviors, and/or appearances with; I mean people have a hard enough time communicating with the people they've chosen to commit the rest of their life too, it's hard to conceive of being able to master a marriage without being in the marriage.
* Hacker news counter culture movements and backlashes. Seems to be bipolar with pro Rust / anti Rust every day of the week.
* Hacker news nice guys who have account names like "mothsonasloth" or something really depraved. Along with all the other hypocrites
* Hacker news Admins and big personalities driving content trends on the site e.g. (/u/patio11)
* Recycling of posts / knowledge, since there are always new people joining. You get things like "TIL that microservices are awesome" trending once every month. Which is frustrating for veteran users
* Hacker news arm chair generals/economists/politicians. The points system rewards trendy content and doesn't necessarily mean quality. Unlike points in Stackoverflow, there is some degree of confidence in the users competency.
* The fact that Hacker news is mainly populated with technologically proficient people, who probably have some sort of issue, whether it be mental, psychological. Sure we all suffer from our demons but the amount of stuff I read on there makes me cringe at times.
* The "Hacker news Contrarian", waiting to snipe your post with their immense intellect
> * The "Reddit Contrarian", waiting to snipe your post with their immense intellect
I began thinking twice before commenting on anything, and then eventually stopped. Even in the most benign subs, you can quickly escalate to Hitler if you deviate from the hive-mind.
“No one could possibly believe this, they must be a paid stooge” is an extremely optimistic view of human nature. Plenty of people in real life with incomprehensibly awful opinions, too.
I guess you missed the part where I pointed out browsing their post history makes it pretty obvious they aren't a random US/European citizen expressing their personal thoughts.
I see this opinion often yet people who share it don’t explain how exactly a complete lack of censorship is supposed to ward against manipulation. It also ignores the flip side where a lack of moderation can help misinformation to spread faster than it would otherwise.
The traditional solution for this on mailing lists and Usenet was to tell the misinformation spreader in no uncertain terms that he is an idiot.
There was a reason for the tone back then and it worked.
Flames however are also censored nowadays, since it is essential for the people in power to maintain polite meaningless conversation that will never lead to any actions.
Gallowboob has it as a fulltime job, I believe he gets paid to run a few facebook pages. He gets onto mod lists saying that he'll deal with any comments that say anything against him.
Haven't read the article and I am not an avid Reddit user (just regularly frequents and posts every month in a sub dedicated to a boxing manga, anyway...) but I wonder: if the activity brings in money, wouldn't they just outsource it while keeping the keys ?
Just for fun, I went to the front page of Reddit and clicked on the usernames of a few of the top posts. The very second one was "peke_f1"[0], with a post about an F1 announcement. Checking his post history reveals that he is very unpopular for somehow always managing to get the karma for large announcements, with someone accusing him of being "Gallowboob's karma farmer". Indeed, someone actually beat him to it this time - and yet his post is the one on the front page, and a post pointing this out has been removed [1].
So I assume that even many subreddits not obviously controlled by "central management" are still part of the hierarchy.
It is funny you happen unto this exact one, since I follow the F1 subreddit.
Indeed, peke_f1 is always the account that has posted major announcements. The moderators are often accused of deleting posts that were earlier in favor of peke_f1. Even if the link and title were exactly the same.
They also edited the voting algorithm for the_donald subreddit to suppress its content and the only way we know that is because they fucked it up on the first try and made the entire frontpage ONLY TD content for an hour or more.
I'm a regular on r/formula1 and I've always wondered how that user has big announcements in before everyone. That user even posts some really interesting videos and insights, but I never came across this. Because I check Reddit once or twice a day, I don't sort by new often
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.
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'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.
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...
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.
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
If you control the top subreddits then I doubt you're actually moderating them. You're in fact just a manager over these subreddits. It's a hierarchical management structure with 5 people at the top of certain major subs.
Which makes this even stranger because why would these people want to be at the top? What's the motivation? Either pure power, or money.
Would that be legal in the US?
(Intentionally deleting/promoting material as moderator without disclosing that you have been hired to do so and marking it as advertisement)
Reddit is a "private" platform, mods are free to do as the please so long as they don't breach the terms of service.
In this instance I'd say the T.o.S. needs a major overhaul.
it's private in the sense of ownership but it most certainly isn't private in the sense of impact on the public. same deal with other social networks like facebook. i don't see that much difference between a publicly and privately owned psy-ops weapons which open social networks have become.
A less known fact is that /r/The_Donald was created and moderated by a group loosely called “Nolibs” that have been pushing pro-Israel, pro-police propaganda for years through thousands of sock puppet accounts. They were in control of various subreddits and were heavily agenda driven.
It all fell apart for them a year or two ago though when they had internal problems and one of them came clean.
Their antics were closely followed on the subreddit /r/NoLibsWatch.
Some reading can be had here[0] about one of the members who eventually went to jail/psych ward over a bomb plot, with his stated goal being to start a religious war.
Summary: it looks like Reddit posted on their blog about the "most reddit-addicted cities", and Eglin Airforce Base was near the top. It didn't take long for people to allege that it's due to sock puppetry and propaganda coming from the military, which was legalized in 2013.
Also not well known is that /r/canada was taken over and is now run by white supremacists. The articles and comments there as a result lean towards pro-racism and pro-authoritarianism and are not representative of the general population of Canada.
There is no conspiracy here. Anyone saying there is simply doesn't understand the dyanmics of moderating large subreddits. Moderating sucks. It's thankless volunteer work babysitting a bunch of children and adults acting like children. The biggest subreddit I manage has 6000 subscribers, 1000x smaller than some of these, and I've had to ban people for harassing users, being racist, and posting NSFW content when one of the rules is literally don't post NSFW content. It's not a fun job. It's janitorial work. Voluntary janitorial work. It's not easy managing a community of several million users. I doubt many of you would actually want the responsibilities it requires to do at minimum a decent job of it.
In regards to the users in the OP, I've personally talked to cyXie, Gallowboob, awkwardtheturtle, and siouxie_sioux, and they all seem to be nice people who simply enjoy participating on reddit [1]. I don't necessarily agree with all the things they do or decisions they make (particularly in regards to moderation) but it really is not malicious. If you start moderating one big sub it means you can be trusted at least enough to do it for another sub. If you think this alone is evidence of a conspiracy then you don't have enough experience with content generation on reddit.
[1] My source is anecdotal; I have several hundred thousand karma so I run in some of the high-karma circles.
From my anecdotal source, I've been banned a few times, and only once was it justified. The other times, the mods not only could not tell me what rule I violated, but resorted to insults just for my asking. There's entire subreddits dedicated to this type of piss-poor and outright abusive behavior from the mods. I'd wager that, from the perspective of the average user, the mods are the "bunch of children and adults acting like children". To me, they're like the DMV or TSA - small people who "volunteer" just for a small amount of power to make themselves feel like big people by abusing that power. Unfortunately, thus far, I have very little evidence to the contrary.
I got permanently banned from r/space for posting a funny comment. It didn't demean anyone, and I didn’t even know the sub banned jokes. Total power tripping there.
Honestly your post comes off as pretentious. If it sucks so bad then why take charge of so many subreddits?
> I doubt many of you would actually want the responsibilities it requires to do at minimum a decent job of it.
You'd be wrong. I'm sure there's no shortage of people willing to help moderate, so pretending there's a small pool of people available or brushing them off under your own arbitrary definitions of "less qualified" definitely comes off as condescending.
> a bunch of children and adults acting like children.
Which is exactly what these mods are doing now by banning that user from all the subs, so your point doesn't hold water and further highlights a superiority complex.
>If it sucks so bad then why take charge of so many subreddits?
I mean, having lots of big subs under your control definitely does give you a little feeling of power, which some people like. Personally it doesn't outweigh the responsibilities, which is why my subs are <10k.
>I'm sure there's no shortage of people willing to help moderate
Probably true. But with every new mod you run the risk of getting one who goes rogue or otherwise _seriously_ abuses power. This is simply a self-fulfilling prophecy:
1. conspiracy that a small network of mods have censorship power*
2. mods censor posts because it inevitably leads to a witchhunt
3. goto 1
*mods do have basically unchecked power in subreddits, so it's not really a conspiracy. For a very long time, /r/xkcd was squatted on by white nationalists and admins refused to step in for months.
I think the debate in this thread is the current moderators are abusing their power and furthermore are being paid (suspected - no proof yet I don't think) for their positions thus it's no longer a volunteering gig and now more susceptible to corruption.
I've been a forum admin and forum moderator in the past and yes there's always a risk of people going rogue or power-tripping, but that can happen with literally anyone. If it happens, it also tends to end very rapidly as the other moderators clean-up the actions of the rogue quickly. That's why you vet people based off their history and hope it works out. In my experience it's better to have a larger group of trusted moderators to maintain a balance of power then for a small group to act in an authoritarian manner; the latter of which seems to be the case here.
If there's a perception of a witch hunt then the moderator action of ultimate banishment only fuels that fire, seems counter-intuitive for people supposedly acting in good faith.
I think these five moderators share power with the other moderators on each subreddit and each subreddit's mods can see each other's actions. Does this put this into the former category?
As far as what happened here the moderator for /r/interestingasfuck has been talking about it. He seems pretty open to answer questions. Maybe he could be asked if he gets paid to moderate?
The /r/InterestingAsFuck mod, /u/ibleeedorange, says this [1]:
>I really don't know every sub he was banned from and if/what he did, but from looking at his post history he seemed to have just posted his QQ in a bunch of subs which then got him banned because he broke rules there, then he harassed mods and posted misleading comments like the ones I had to remove in IAF.
It's worth noting that /u/ibleeedorange is a high-profile user, but does not moderate the same subreddits as those mentioned in the OP.
It's not only the user who was banned from a broad range of subs, the mass deletion of comments (which from reading them on ceddit are not objectionable) is additionally egregious.
I haven't even started referencing the pretty inarguable range of referenced personal accounts of behaviour of these mods.
There's a point at which the idea of this being emergent and unproblematic is still plausible. We appear to be beyond that point.
bold assumption ;) other options include being retired or having a partner provide for them
>how many hours people spend
I'm not one of them, but I'd probably guess it's anywhere from 2-6 hours a day. Depending on job, one could easily can work that in before/during/after work. /u/GallowBoob, the user with the most karma on reddit, actually managed to turn it into his job. He was originally a landscape architect whose reddit habits got him a job at those awful viral licensing companies, although now he does social media directing at an eSports company.
Reddit used to truly feel like the front page of the internet. My siblings would never send me cool things because I had probably already seen it. More often than not, they were right. Now, that's not the case.
Yeah. /r/politics ceased being useful around 2016. Many others have followed suit. Even /r/coronavirus has a rather toxic group making/upvoting comments.
These days I lurk in a very small number of still-useful subs, and definitely don't have an account. For many topics, the interesting stuff has moved elsewhere.
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Reddit serves its purpose well. It's a honeypot for lazy emotional people: reddit offers them space to procrastinate and gets to influence them in return (ads, politics).
You’re just describing all advertising-supported media, from TV to magazines to large swaths of the web.
Do you honestly think HN is in a different category? Why do you think this site exists? And how many billions of collective hours of procrastination have been spent here?
Granted, this site is relatively well-moderated and high signal to noise, especially for its size, but so are many subreddits. The top subreddits are a dumpster fire but there are thousands of smaller niche subs that are delightful.
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.
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.
Basically, manged social networks like Reddit are all terrible. You get unsocialable people who eventually join, and then that begets moderation, which begets misbehavior, which begets more extreme moderation.
Ad infinitum.
What my experience is is that everyone who has seen this on reddit (or facebook or twitter) is doing is just making their own curated network on Discord or something. Slack, even, since the free version is pretty okay. I suppose that just moves the problem to the hosts of the channel but honestly it cannot be worse than reddit since there wouldn't be any corporate influence, which this post seems to strongly suggest is happening at scale on reddit. You see this a lot already, with youtube personalities and devs even saying "join my Discord!" in their videos and on their blogs.
Frankly, this is a good step forward ... but my comment about corporate influence is a little tongue-in-cheek, since eventually those companies (Slack, Discord, etc.) will face pressure (from their owners and investors, from powerful outsiders) to police the content that exists within their platform. I have no idea how to solve this problem. I don't like the idea of any network being vulnerable to the whims of some corporate overlord, so if anyone can figure out how to do a distributed social networking protocol that would be very nice and I'd sign up immediately.
In my opinion Mastodon lost its only value proposition (to be censorship free) when people started hunting for ways to block Gab, with ruthless social media harassment against admins who refused to block instances. They also adopted a 'server covenant' (https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/05/introducing-the-mastod...) that automatically takes political stances that are incompatible with open discourse.
> Basically, manged social networks like Reddit are all terrible
Manged is the word I use when I'm referring to management that's been done badly. I'm sure yours is a typo, but if not, it's a word that should catch on.
Use in a sentence:
My Manger just asked me to do two tasks, which they don't even realise are mutually exclusive.
The Mangement is taking this company down the tubes.
That project was manged into the dismal failure you read about in yesterday's paper.
I deleted my reddit account over a year ago and I swear it was one of the best decisions I’ve made in a long time. I don’t even lurk. The closest I get is clicking on a google search result that takes me to reddit.
Not just the moderators the people who post the articles are the same as well look at bunyipouch on r/movies basically every post on hot is by this one account.
The information in this thread is the final nail for me. I just uninstalled reddit from my phone and will delete my account when I get back to my PC. I have known about some shady stuff with reddit before, but reading through here somehow made it click that even as mostly a lurker, I am being used and manipulated.
Genuine question: Do Reddit mods get paid for being mods? Someone here posted a link to all the sub-reddits in question. These see so many posts generated all day. Im actually curious how someone has so much time to go through them. Is being a mod their full time job? Or more of a side-hustle/interest?
There's a conspiracy theory that the mods of the really active subreddits get paid to promote particular sorts of content - not by reddit, but more like a sort of "sponsorship" sort of thing. The alleged sponsors range from corporations to the Chinese government.
Looking at all those problems and issues with social media platform one could come to the conclusion that the real issue is not with the platforms but with the entity using it.
I mean quarantining /r/wuhan_flu was the signal for me that it is no longer a friendly space for free speech.
Whether or not you think Trump acts like a drunken sailor, the fact is the quarantined an entire part of the website because it hosted people talking about what’s now on the news every day.
Not surprising. Subreddits are basically like totalitarian institutions. I've been banned, or even worse shadow banned, for the stupidest most nonsensical stuff. Everytime I've responded to the message asking me to respond if I wanted to contest my ban, I've never gotten a response. The worst are those ultra-strict subreddits that act as "safe spaces", censoring any dissenting discussion that challenges whatever propaganda the mods are trying to peddle (the most ironic are probably /r/socialism and /r/latestagecapitalism).
A lot of people will say "yeah that's unfortunate, but Reddit can do whatever they want because they're a private company." I don't quite agree with that. When you have 430 million active users (that would make it the 3rd most populous country) and market yourself as a "community of communities", and your site is the go-to for people looking for discussion, I think your site needs to be held to a higher standard. If /r/economics with its 810k subscribers automatically censors comments that don't conform to its handful of mods' neoliberal agenda, that's a real imbalance of power that has serious consequences, not just within the Reddit community but to the world at large. If /r/politics with its 6.1m subscribers is censoring viewpoints that don't align with its agenda, that has serious implications. Humans are unfortunately extremely susceptible to hivemind bias.
In any case, Reddit is generally not the best place for meaningful discussion ever since ~2009 or so when it devolved into a watering hole for memes and pun threads (thankfully the pun thread thing died). Top comments seem to consist of 1-2 sentences of sarcastic jokes. The default subreddits range from the internet equivalent of junk food to outright propaganda. HN is great, but it'd be nice to have some alternative places to go to discuss the more non-tech things (eg. politics/economics) and niche topics.
Our present epistemic systems are undergoing kind of the same shock that the online community underwent when transitioning from BBSs and Usenet to the commercial web to social media.
We were used to a very high content-to-BS ratio because it took a certain amount of intelligence and intense domain-interest for people to be there in the first place -- and we've now transitioned to a situation where many people are there more or less accidentally and (the worst part), because of a high percentage of the population being present, there is now substantial power to be had by influencing the discussions that take place.
Science is much the same. For a long time, it was this small thing operating off to the side; only elites could afford to indulge in it, and their discoveries affected very few -- so the truth value could remain high because there was relatively little to be gained by distortion. People's lives were largely governed by things that had been around long enough that the culture had evolved to deal with them more or less reasonably, so they didn't need advice from domain experts to provide accurate information -- and where expertise was needed, it flowed from parent to child and from master to apprentice as part of a cultural process that everyone understood.
Obviously that's not the case anymore. The culture can't keep up.
This is sort of a reiteration of the last paragraph of my previous comment:
"the actual problem is (1) the increasing complexity of our society, requiring ever more knowledge to discern truth from anti-truth, and (2) anti-information being actively injected into the system by those who seek to manipulate public opinion."
But I wanted to highlight what I think is happening when people decry the death of expertise as this article does: it's sort of a form of retro-voodoo: 'in order to have the reliable information we once had, we need to restore the old forms'. Bring back BBSes and usenet, and we'll have civil internet dialogue again. Trust experts, and we'll have valid science again.
It doesn't work that way. The external conditions have changed, the bandwidth needs are higher and the noise-rejection needs are greater. The old systems are failing under the increased information demand (which we can't just wish away, nor would we want to) -- and so we need new processes that are better able to deal with that heavier load.
The sentiment is similar to what earlier media theorists have noted: Shoshana Zuboff's eponymous three laws, Elizabeth Eisenstein on the social impact of the printing press, Noam Chomsky and Ed Hermann in Manufacturing Consent, Marshall McLuhan, Hannah Arendt, the Frankfurt School, George Seldes, Walter Lippmann, Edward Bernays, back to Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, and before.
Opposition to this notion tends to run to one of two, or often both, contradictory arguments:
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. Once you move off either pole, you're in a land where 1) speech matters and 2) careless, indifferent, or malicious speech has deleterious consequences.
Even John Start Mill, in "On Liberty", directly addresses this: "the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution, is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes...."
You cannot build a large-scale, significant communications system without moderation 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.
In all, the lack leads to the same consequence: a cesspit of disease, infection, and death.
This is why the nintth and ultimate mechanism of technology is hygiene factors.
"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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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, shortly after a young man turned to the forum to talk about his roommate, who he called “suicide fuel.” The user said it was painful to see his roommate, a “better human being,” have a girlfriend and talk about his close-knit family. Other members jumped in to offer advice to this man about his attractive roommate, a so-called “Chad” in incel speak. They encouraged and instructed the poster to castrate his roommate.
Like other anti-women subreddits, r/incels has been catching heat for a while. It even spawned its own watchdog community r/inceltears, which remains to chronicle incel extremism. Reddit has not said what the exact comment was that led to their banning the subreddit for inciting violence.
"Communities focused on this content and users who post such content will be banned from the site,” their statement said. “As of Nov. 7, r/Incels has been banned for violating this policy.”
Reddit recently announced that they plan to re-tool their policy regarding violent content on the heels of an additional $200 million in venture capital funding. It began by cracking down on Nazi and white supremacist subreddits including r/Nazi, r/DylannRoofInnocent and r/farright. However, many misogynist subreddits, like r/MensRights, are still thriving.
This isn’t Reddit’s first attempt to clean house: Its first round started after CEO Yishan Wong’s resignation in 2014 after a flurry caused by a Gawker expose on a Redditor heavily involved in subreddits like r/jailbait and r/creepshots. Interim CEO Ellen Pao, famous for suing Kleiner Perkins for sexism, instigated the first major cleanup, to user revolt: Many Redditors didn’t want to give up any subreddits, including those devoted to hating fat people or leaking celebrity nudes. Pao, squarely vilified during her tenure, did not last the full year as interim, leaving after eight months. (Pao later went on to describe how exclusion is entrenched in tech.)
The glue of communities like r/incels is obvious: Men feel held back by the women who “have it easy.” And as with most online communities open to anyone with Internet connectivity, indoctrination is easy for an outsider to spot. (Though under special circumstances, open subreddits go underground: r/incels went private recently after a member posed as a woman in r/legaladvice for tips on getting away with rape.)
If cults have taught us anything, it’s that the first rule of indoctrination is you (try to) get them while they’re young. Most Redditors are young men, and Reddit offers them unfettered ability to form and engage with “misogyny clusters”—anti-women communities that share DNA, but have distinct personalities and creeds. R/incels is a cousin of many other misogyny clusters on Reddit, including r/MensRights, r/MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way—those who opt out of the “mating dance”), and r/TheRedPill.
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.
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.
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.
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".
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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?
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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...
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...
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.
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.
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.
I find the groupthink on reddit to be impossible to deal with. Many subreddits have a particular dogma then stick to and if you variate at all you get downvoted into oblivion no matter how obviously correct you are.
It even happens on subreddits that aren't as popular. Many years ago I posted frequently on /r/astrophotography, using very crappy equipment[0], but focusing on the processing part, even sharing my own python scripts.
Then one mod decided to actively undermine me, even banned one of my posts, because I didn't use PixInsight (like the rest of "the pros" do). I got my post back up, but that ruined the subreddit for me.
Funny thing, I grew up, graduated CS/software engineering, specialized in image processing and lo-and-behold, my techniques, though rudimentary, were pretty solid.
[0] old binoculars steampunk-ly tied to an old digital camera -- being a teenager with no income meant $0 budget -- but worked better than you'd imagine!
Sorry for the tangent, but that sounds really interesting! Would you feel comfortable sharing more info about how you did the processing? Astrophotography is a hobby I've been wanting to get into and learn about, but I can't justify purchasing an expensive camera for just one hobby.
Well I never formalized it in library or code that has survived to this day. But in a general sense, what you do is load your images as raw as you're comfortable working with them, and then define a pipeline that can:
* Stack or integrate: this means turning 100 high-noise images into a single, low noise image. To do that, you need:
* Registration or alignment: this is simply making sure that the stars are placed consistently on the same (x, y) location so that when you stack you don't get trails or blurring. High quality registration can go as far as sharpening your end result if you manage sub-pixel alignment (or you can strecth for super-resolution).
* Post-processing: it can be anything from removing light pollution (important if you're shooting from within a city), remove gradients (airglow, or residual light pollution even if you are far away from a city), sharpening (Lucy-Richardson deconvolution is king here using gaussian kernels, but if you can aproximate a Point Spread Function -or PSF for short- you can get even better results), color correction, high dynamic range processing. Of course, this is an un-ending place.
PixInsight is a great tool, I won't deny that. But I had a great joy in learning how to program this things, and to me it's a lot more interesting researching how to do something, learning it and programming it, rather than having it done by somebody else, clicking a button and moving away.
Luckily for both you and I, Bennedict Bitterli has written a C++ pipeline for processing with great detail that covers registration, stacking and removing gradients. That's a great read that you can find here[0]. You can still visit /r/astrophotography and treat yourself to the wiki if you want something more down to earth and with less programming involved.
The one thing most redditors there forget is that AP, on a budget, can be as fun (and frustrating too!) as throwing thousands of dolars worth of equipment to the problem. If you have a DSLR (new or old, or a mirrorless, or a compact camera, even some phones have good enough cameras) and a tripod you can do widefield astrophotography.
Isn't that the case everywhere else? I posted some stuff here that got downvoted faster than you could blink,while it would have brought hundreds of upvotes should in certain platforms. It's just an extension of people's teal life social bubbles.
Is this necessarily a problem? Reddit is social media- just as there are popular youtubers, twitterers, and twitchers, there are popular redditors. You could argue that popular redditors are actually more benign since the monetization opportunities are limited, and they seem to be making interesting communities for the love of it.
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
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.
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.
I don't really see the big deal - the most popular subreddits share moderators (perhaps reddit employees? EDIT: doesn't even look like cyXie is an employee) - so what? For example gaming has 26 moderators, out of that 1 from this list:
Dacvak (114459) 8 years ago full permissions
synbios16 (28642) 6 years ago full permissions
gamingmoderator (5816) 6 years ago full permissions
mookler (6506) 5 years ago full permissions
Rlight (12185) 4 years ago access, flair, mail, posts, wiki
Analtoast (3337) 4 years ago full permissions
delicious_cheese (34636) 4 years ago full permissions
MisterWoodhouse (62091) 4 years ago full permissions
Redbiertje (59120) 3 years ago full permissions
Umdlye (9139) 3 years ago full permissions
MikeyJayRaymond (55501) 3 years ago full permissions
Greenbiertje (150) 3 years ago posts
TonyQuark (76908) 2 years ago full permissions
TurtlesgonnaTurtle (1466) 2 years ago full permissions
relaxlu (7013) 2 years ago full permissions
IwataFan (22448) 2 years ago full permissions
phedre (301354) 2 years ago full permissions
AutoModerator (8074) 1 year ago full permissions
MAGIC_EYE_BOT (399) 1 year ago posts, wiki
wrproductions (35774) 7 months ago full permissions
cyXie (2104178) 7 months ago full permissions
Hawkmoona_Matata (31402) 7 months ago full permissions
leakycauldron (1991) 7 months ago full permissions
How? Just ask: https://old.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/
I took over some big subreddits this way and I've had big subreddits taken away from me because I forgot to log in and comment on the account I used to create it. Even though I was active on a non-creator/non-mod account. It's actually how I found out about the "feature".
A very poorly implemented feature given the potential value of subreddits and all the work it takes to grow one.
So if you run a subreddit that you care about, remember to assign some active mods even just to avoid someone taking over your subreddit.