Reddit has declined so significantly in quality and (in particular) moderation that it's hard to get much out of it. I used it from the very beginning and now overall quality (both posts and comments) is as low as I can recall. Mods have ridiculous power over any users that actually participate in the comments and, in my opinion, the "weaponization" of moderator ability as well as of reddit's newer mod tools has gotten to the point where you participate at your account's peril.
If you want to graze it on the toilet, fine. If you participate in a niche subreddit where the mods value a lack of censorship, fine. Outside of that it has become a place for reposted content, low quality commentary (literally the opposite of a place like this) and a rapidly increasing moderator tyranny.
For me it's the groupthink mentality where anything but the status quo is downvoted to oblivion.
Other than that I don't get much out of the site, because most the subs I would enjoy are so small, I can just visit once or twice a year and sort by best of the year, and stop when the quality drops. That was I never even need an account.
The groupthink mentality has gotten way out of hand.
While you might think a subreddit is a place for fans of X topic to gather, it seems to end up as a place for superfans to gather. This can be a problem since their viewpoints are extreme and niche.
Instead of merely enjoying topic X and thinking of X in generally positive thoughts, the superfans treat topic X as the BEST EVER. Any discussion of X's shortcomings is met with downvotes or negative comments.
A moderator must moderate vigorously or the admins will eventually take over the sub or shut it down, or both. Every sub of decent size if you search the mod logs has admin activity at some point, even if it is infrequent. I don't see this trend reversing, Anderson Cooper put fear into Condé Nast, and I would imagine all those who run the site and many who don't believe rightly so.
So many repost bots too. I don't even browse reddit that much and I see the same posts over and over or videos and images reposted and taken out of context. It's becoming similar to the gutter press tabloids that aim for shock value and reaction.
The moderator issue has been a problem for a long time. You yourself may have only recently discovered it, but it's been a problem since subreddits have existed.
- There are groups of moderators that maintain lists and if you get on that list you're banned from umpteen different subreddits as a result. For example... I once had an /r/The_Donald post pop up in my main feed and I posted on it not even realizing what subreddit it was. Next thing I know I'm getting messaged from a dozen or more moderators of other subreddits telling me I've been banned for posting on /r/The_Donald. The sad part is I was disagreeing with what someone said, so I was effectively probably more in-line with these moderators than /r/The_Donald in particular.
- I've had moderators send me messages telling me I was getting put on such and such list and then watching myself get ban message after ban message from subreddits I didn't even know existed.
__REDDIT MODERATORS SHOULD GET BANNED FOR DOING THIS__ But they never will. This is what the reddit admin's are for (cross subreddit moderation). But having said that...
- I once had someone on /r/emulation start using other accounts to start responding to me in ways that strongly implied I was harassing them across subreddits. It was a _COMPLETE_ fabrication but that didn't stop a reddit admin from contacting me directly and threatening to give me a sitewide ban. There's no way this person did that randomly, I guarantee you it works and the only reason I avoided it was by contacting the general reddit admin team and pointing it out with all the evidence that I had had no interaction with these accounts in the past.
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There are also plenty of subreddits I've chosen not to frequent anymore due to either treatment of myself, treatment of others, or just general policy changes. Those include, but are not limited to:
In particular, /r/patientgamers and /r/fitness make me sad. I enjoyed them until the moderators decided there needed to be a "woke agenda".
The /r/patientgamers moderator decided it was a good idea to declare to everyone how they would be banned unequivocally for discussions around LBTQ+ issues. I think it was around the broujaja of the Baldurs Gate 3 trans character, but I could be misremembering.
/r/fitness at one point decided they had to have a female moderator. The moderator absolutely had to be female and the sole reason this moderator was to enforce womens rights issues because men can't do it.
I left both w/i days and haven't been back to either. I understand a policy of banning people who step over a line, I don't understand a policy of hiring a moderator whose sole purpose is to look for and preemptively ban behavior that the person being responded to doesn't even think is problematic. And I've seen that happen, I've found myself defending someone who got moderatored for their response to me. If I'm the target of that response and even I don't think it's a problem, where's the problem?
/r/rpg_gamers brought on a mod who is just a dickhead, full stop.
/r/bedbugs banned me for posting a link to amazon, I posted it as a response to a someone giving a recommendation of a strategy to use. Another moderator contacted me a few months later to tell me that mod was a problem and they removed him.
There absolutely NEEDS to be a way for the community to protect itself from moderators.
Nowadays I don't really visit or post on reddit much. Too much noise anyway. I posted this mostly to point out that this isn't nearly a new problem.
The moderator problem is a tough one, because you want them there to remove spam and illegal content, but that's about it. You can't tell them that, because they personally do it to stroke their ego--like a make-believe New York Times editor, swaying the public.
So how do you continue to trick them into doing their $8/hour broom jobs for free, but prevent them from injecting their dumb politics into everything? I don't think you can.
I moderate a geo sub. I've backed away from it because it is thankless and you see the worst comments all the time. And then comments like this that assign bad faith to any decision you don't like.
I signed up to do it because I didn't want my geo sub to be swamped by spam, trolls and the like, and at the time I was online two or three hours a day.
I do think some subs have terrible mods, and that some larger subs are manipulated and astroturfed by organizations we don't know about by supermods. But give some of the smaller subs some slack.
Separate issue: on the internet, it is near impossible to tell good faith discussion from bad when a comment makes any kind of snarky tone or logical fallacy. And there is so much trash on the internet that it can be easy to delete really shitty low effort comments - you may imagine some young troll getting their kicks on stirring things up. But it may be just as likely they're just someone with some bad ideas who can't do rhetoric well.
And so when you delete their comment, you think "yes, cleaned up a troll" while the person who tried to engage in conversation just sees censorship.
Upvotes and locking comments are better than deleting or banning. Again, Slashdot has the best moderation and filter system.
Agreed. I'm progressive and try to engage in good faith, but have been banned from a number of subs such as whitepeopletwitter (racist name), politics, latestagecapitalism, and several others because they are safe spaces. They are agitation echo chambers. I get that sometimes, skilled trolls play devil's advocate to take conversations off the rails, but the banhammer falls far too quickly on the large subs. It really is propaganda trash.
Reddit is alright for municipal subs, hobbies, and technical stuff. As well as mindless entertainment, my favorite is idiotsincars and catastrophicfailure. Anything where inside jokes are rampant or memes are allowed is trash (political compass memes, programmer humor). Political subs are good sometimes, only if you find a good highly up oted comment with good sourcing of data. But the bulk is just as simple minded as a fox news comments section.
I was banned from a pro-ccp sub and reported to reddit (and received a warning for this). My comment was literally, "Finding a subreddit like this is like discovering the Upside Down from Stranger Things". That's it. No back and forth, no other comments. Simply those words. For that reddit threatened me (someone active on the site for 14 years, with hundreds of thousands of their "karma", a subreddit moderator and who has "reddit gold") with a ban.
Right wing strategists must love these "leftist" totalitarian safe-space bullies, successfully alienating everyone from a more centrist/moderate viewpoint, destroying careers of people who said ignorant things 10 years ago, while Roe V. Wade and Miranda rights get overturned. They'd be happily winning internet points as democracy fails around them.
They're just as responsible for the issues in America as the extreme right.
Why are you complaining about morons on Reddit who have no effect on real world politics when moderate Dems have had political control for most of recent history? Its funny that you’re not blaming “everyone from a more centrist/moderate viewpoint” for their own failure of doing nothing to codify Roe for the last 50 years.
I'm only an occasional reddit user so have not looked for such clients yet my guess is most heavy users are already using such tricks as it's unbearable to put up with the magnitude of advertising on reddit
Note to reddit: rethink your advertising strategy as it's unforgiving to be pummeled by ads incessantly
narwhal: has "Usage Data Advertising Data" under "Data Used to Track You" and "Data Linked to You", has anonymous analytics/usage/crash logs, and uses your device id
Apollo can have analytics disabled. Any 3rd party client defeats ad engagement tracking. You can curl their API yourself and you have defeated tracking. If the client isn't serving ads, like Apollo and Tweetbot, there isn't any engagement to track. It's limited to what you interact with while logged in. This is how every service works. The analytics for 3rd party clients are purely for the developer to improve their app, they don't care about what you do on it, that information isn't relevant to building a 3rd party client.
Security/Privacy all depends on your threat model and what compromises you are willing to make.
When Reddit goes public and everyone EXCEPT the subreddit moderators make millions/billions, I wonder how long Reddit will stay around for?
It’s the subreddits and the moderators that make what Reddit is today, and they are the ones that do all the hard work and yet somehow they are the only ones that won’t profit from an IPO.
Well, users upload content to FB /TickTock which are then monetized and the users don't get any money. So it is like that for almost all web 2.0 companies
Gen-pop on Reddit is terrible, but as someone else pointed out, it’s massive and very specialized. I’m in a forum about CPAP machines, mechanical keyboards, my city, coffee, and UX dark patterns. That’s not stuff that works on HN. They are completely different needs / value.
I've been brainstorming a site that uses HN usernames to validate identity and have a comment floor of 500 on HN to participate. It would be like HN but for political and non tech articles.
My first thought was that this is a great idea. My second is that the 500 karma metric can become a target, and lead to lower quality posts on HN. I’m not sure which is correct.
The Facebook was a whole lot of fun before the news feed, when only university students and faculty could join. Was it the wider membership, or the wider scope, that ruined it?
There's a niche subreddit for everything and they often contain valuable information that's hard to find elsewhere. It also used to be full of real posts and opinions from real people but covert advertising is now rampant on the site. I seriously hope that never happens to HN.
Lol. There are a few chemistry for the sake of drug subs. Judging by the level of discussion though, there aren't a lot of people who really know what they're doing. Most drug production involves some pretty advanced chemistry
egg_irl and all the other subs like that are incredibly scary: They are pretty much grooming echo chambers painting transsexuality and transition as hip and trendy things that solve all your issues.
> Blatant transphobia. If we applied your argument to r/conservative, it would be child grooming to become a racist school shooter.
Here's a post from within a week I found in a few minutes[1] with the top-comment being "The pipeline" about a 16 year old (minor). This is child-grooming. And if /r/conservative has a "pipeline", it's child-grooming too. Children shouldn't be encouraged in making major life decisions by internet strangers, period.
> Then you aren't Googling correctly. Once you are an expert in a field you will realize how much reddit gets wrong and the most upvoted solution can be completely incorrect.
You must not Google much. Appending "reddit" to Google search queries has been a solid strategy for years. I'm not alone. Check the top comment on this post titled "Google Search Is Dying"[2].
> Your reddit experience is entirely up to what you subscribe to. I imagine your experience is just misogyny.
Your imagination is wrong. My "experience" is /r/all which is no different than MSNBC or CNN, aka US astro-turfed media, which you conveniently avoided replying to. Reddit puts on a strong front as a "global link aggregator" but in reality it's just a heavily censored trash pile that bans anything anti-Saudi, anti-Israel, or anti-child-grooming (anti-US-trends).
An entire subreddit dedicated to castrating young people. How progressive.
The egg_irl post you picked. Sigh. Picking apart meme content and comments is stupid. But sure, lets do this to support this 'child grooming' nonsense transphobic discussion.
What you're criticizing isn't someone making a major life decision based on feedback from internet strangers. Its a person who has made a major life decision reflecting and joking about the experience in a space assumed to be for trans people trying to deal with (via jokes and memes) the overwhelming hatred they've dealt with.
A) this is clearly a stupid meme post that IN THE MEME itself indicates the person is no longer 16 (in fact if you look at post history they're now at college so > 18).
B) was responded to with a meme in an of itself. The idea of an LGBTQ+ pipeline is well known to LGBTQ+ people. Yes they'll make fun of it in response to a meme post. In ACTUAL discussion, they will earnestly discuss that transitioning isn't for everyone; don't stop because of other people, but also if you're not comfortable or transitioning isn't make you happy, you learned something about yourself (you might not be trans).
But to put a fine point on it: Telling children that they have options for self-expression besides the default gender binary isn't child-grooming. Full stop. And in marginalized communities, you may only have internet strangers to deal with (if your family/friends or local community have no safe spaces). Obviously, for such a large decision you should be working with a therapist (if there's a non-transphobic therapist in your area AND you can afford it/its available) to work through this rather than internet strangers; and that is OFTEN discussed. No one is under the impression that these are small decisions. They're just demanding that they be understood as VALID decisions.
But to boil down a trans-support group (with your 'I call it how I see it'/'won't somebody think of the children' type bullshit) as 'castrating young people' means that you're not as logical / unbiased as you think you are, you clearly DON'T know what you're talking about, AND, as the OP stated, you are transphobic.
Whether or not this is considered "grooming" is irrelevant. The truth is that only in the past 4-5 years has it started becoming commonplace for the medical establishment to provide "gender-affirming" care (aka irreversible via surgery or puberty blockers), if my child has the slightest suspicion that they, too, are one of the tiny percentage of intersex/trans people.
And if that were the case, and I refused to recognize one of my child's weekly fantasies (he likes to pretend to be a cat, but we don't take _that_ seriously), I would be considered a toxic and "transphobic" parent. That these medical procedures and gender "counseling" could provided to my child without my input or approval (in the name of "safe spaces") should be alarming to most parents.
We need to understand what's going on in our schools and with our children before we smear people with this "transphobia" neologism, because it's not productive nor conducive to discussion.
> Whether or not this is considered "grooming" is irrelevant.
It isn't irrelevant if people are using the word grooming to sensationalize the discussion and bias it towards being terrified of the 'trans epidemic/agenda'.
> if my child has the slightest suspicion that they, too, are one of the tiny percentage of intersex/trans people
That is not how any of this works. Someone doesn't go on puberty blockers or get Hormone Therapy because they have 'the slightest suspicion'. If you say to a Dr "I think I might be trans", they don't schedule you for any gender-affirming care. They'd refer you to a therapist so you can work through that (and no, the therapist isn't going to talk you INTO being trans, again, not how that works, far more likely to try to talk you OUT of being trans).
> And if that were the case, and I refused to recognize one of my child's weekly fantasies (he likes to pretend to be a cat, but we don't take _that_ seriously)
Pretending to be a cat and being trans are not comparable.
I would hope as a parent you can distinguish between these weekly fantasies and serious thoughts, feelings, and questions that your child is having about who they are.
> I would be considered a toxic and "transphobic" parent
Yeah... If your kid tells you something big (and potentially to them shameful/scary) about themselves (whatever it is) and you brush it off, that would be kind of toxic and shitty.
> That these medical procedures and gender "counseling" could provided to my child without my input or approval (in the name of "safe spaces") should be alarming to most parents.
In all states, minors who seek transgender treatment need parental consent.
> We need to understand what's going on in our schools and with our children before we smear people with this "transphobia" neologism, because it's not productive nor conducive to discussion.
I agree that this is a complex topic that requires us to have thoughtful in depth discussions, one way to do that is to stop spreading Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt you pulled from a book full of cherry-picked anecdotal stories designed to spread FUD.
> That is not how any of this works. Someone doesn't go on puberty blockers or get Hormone Therapy because they have 'the slightest suspicion'. If you say to a Dr "I think I might be trans", they don't schedule you for any gender-affirming care. They'd refer you to a therapist so you can work through that (and no, the therapist isn't going to talk you INTO being trans, again, not how that works, far more likely to try to talk you OUT of being trans).
I'm afraid that's not true, or not true anymore. Last year, via SB 5889, Washington Democrats forced insurers to cover gender dysmorphia treatment and gender-affirming care for minors between 13 and 17, without parental consent. It mandates that insurers deal directly with the patient without requiring the policyholder’s authorization. The same is true in all states except for 4 red states. [1]
Yes, if my child were serious about transitioning, we'd talk about it. But if my child is being encouraged to talk about his gender in his 3rd-grade class, which is weird and another problem in itself, that's not the same thing.
So why is it the case that "People who are aged 18 to 24 are more likely to identify as transgender"? [2]
For many of the girls in Shapiro's book, the gender craze is an unhealthy mental preoccupation, who encounter support sites on Tumblr which encourage young girls to question their gender identities and celebrates "transitioning". The concern is that the number of people transitioning due to social pressure _massively_ exceeds those who legitimately need to transition.
What's odd is that it's unacceptable to encourage kids _not_ to transition.
> I'm afraid that's not true, or not true anymore. Last year, via SB 5889, Washington Democrats forced insurers to cover gender dysmorphia treatment and gender-affirming care for minors between 13 and 17, without parental consent. It mandates that insurers deal directly with the patient without requiring the policyholder’s authorization.
I had seen references to SB 5889, though not many places other than the article you linked really discussing it.
Importantly, I don't think this is worrying. You jumped to addressing my statement that all states require parental consent (which, based on SB 5889, was wrong), but didn't address that Drs aren't giving children Gender-Affirming Care based on the 'slightest suspicion'. Even if there are isolated instances, I DO NOT see that happening broadly or epidemically. In fact, the medical community (to the detriment of all parties involved) is still very much BEHIND on dealing with trans patients. (Though getting better with WPATH etc).
> The same is true in all states except for 4 red states.
I searched the article you linked and that didn't seem to be included. I can't find evidence of 46 states allowing GAC without parental consent. Further, 15+ states are looking at passing laws BANNING GAC WITH parental consent and that's just not acceptable and seems counter to this fact.
> talk about his gender in his 3rd-grade class
What do you mean talk about his gender? When I was in 3rd grade we talked about boys and girls a lot.
Or do you mean talk about trans / non-binary people? Because you want to shield your child from the existence of people?
> So why is it the case that "People who are aged 18 to 24 are more likely to identify as transgender"?
Acceptance? LGBTQ identification has also risen over time with acceptance. It turns out that if people discourage you and tell you that what you are is disgusting, people tend not to publicly identify with it?
These aren't trans people being created, they're trans people finally identifying themselves. And it is more noticeable in younger generations because they haven't built an entire life around themselves.
> For many of the girls in Shapiro's book, the gender craze is an unhealthy mental preoccupation, who encounter support sites on Tumblr which encourage young girls to question their gender identities and celebrates "transitioning". The concern is that the number of people transitioning due to social pressure _massively_ exceeds those who legitimately need to transition.
I assume you mean the book you linked previously? I'm not going to comment or speculate on anecdata. For those girls it might have been tough to navigate and I feel for them, that doesn't mean it is an epidemic, it just means the book alleges its an epidemic.
The assertion that the number of people now identifying as trans/non-binary "_massively_ exceeds those who legitimately need transition", isn't born out by current evidence, seems potentially explained by acceptance, and seems very akin to the shock people had at how many people were LGB when that started gaining acceptance (and the idea of being gay because you thought it was cool).
> What's odd is that it's unacceptable to encourage kids _not_ to transition.
I don't know what to say if you earnestly think that's the minority view. It isn't. Which is why being trans sucks...
As I said before (then flippantly, now more seriously), yes this is a complicated topic made more so by the discussion of children and transition. But
sensationalizing, fear-mongering, and irrationally banning things because technically my kid COULD (with a shitty dr and a slight suggestion) get GAC is just going to make things worse.
I too worry about the trend of pushing children too soon into transgenderism and especially chemical induced changes.
OTOH, calling it grooming is out of line and I personally get really tired of people trying to appropriate negative words to further their own personal agenda. It's possible to disagree without calling it grooming.
If this is grooming, then so is teaching a child that loyalty and trustworthiness are important. It's grooming in only the most technical sense, which is not what that word means in common vernacular.
The people involved in this are earnest in wanting to prevent harm (albeit misguided imo), an actual groomer is someone who is purposefully shaping a person so as to __cause__ harm.
I don't see how it's "transphobic" to acknowledge that transitioning is an attempted solution to a mental disorder that we should not be appearing to encourage people in. There is a difference between being accepting, kind, and equal in treatment towards trans people, and encouraging it with young people. It really is a different subject than "mere" sexuality.
> transitioning is an attempted solution to a mental disorder
It is not a mental disorder, APA updated guidance and removed it from the DSM in 2012[1]. Though gender dysphoria caused by being trans is. That's an important distinction; you aren't trans because something is wrong with you and being trans isn't something that's wrong with you.
> that we should not be appearing to encourage people in.
Is being trans something that can be encouraged in non-trans people? Not a single cis person that I know (when asked) has ever said they'd thought they might be a different gender. Didn't even cross their minds. And after being asked about it for 2 seconds they all instantly responded "no, definitely NOT trans", without hesitation.
> There is a difference between being accepting, kind, and equal in treatment towards trans people, and encouraging it with young people.
I appreciate that you emphasized accepting, kind, and equal in treatment here. But a few thoughts:
- When does a person go from encourage-able young person to fully fledged trans-person? Who draws that line?
- This sounds a bit like making young trans people go through a discouraging crucible and if they grow up to be trans it must be true. Which just sounds like a way to guarantee that trans people have terrible child hoods.
- Despite your phrasing, in the context of the rest of your post, it sounds more like you're willing to humor trans-people than truly considering them valid. (If I'm wrong, sorry and ignore) If that's the case, thank you for prioritizing treating people well, but trans people are valid. They don't need people to humor them, they need people to just believe what they say about their own bodies.
Whats funny is that 12 or however many years ago digg was practically demolished for taking down that blu ray encryption code but now all the censorship and astroturfing on reddit is absolutely fine as long as it confirms peoples’ biases. I’ve given up on r/all and just use r/home, even though its top5 results aggressively suggest you keep going back to the last 2 subs you visited.
> the most upvoted solution can be completely incorrect
This is correct. The value you get from a good Reddit conversation is like a good Wikipedia page; it gives you the lay of the land an an idea of what people believe, which is surprisingly valuable.
Wikipedia feels like a weird cross of social media, Ted Nelson's Xanadu and good publicity. Opinions will show up; if the opinion show up in another media source, it can be repeated as fact.
Moreover, Wikipedia has its own social grouping dynamics and it's own equivalents of gamification; it just seems 'serious' as the outcome is something that masquerades as factual. (This is an admittedly cruel take on Wikipedia, but there are plenty of comments about the inaccuracy of many Wiki articles that back my opinion)
A good Reddit opinion-based conversation is often useful, much like a good Wikipedia article can be. "How does the soup taste at Pho Daddy" is better answered by a social media post with a dynamic trust list than a list of ingredients.
(We don't really have the trust list, but we do have a list of previous posts that can use on Reddit to see if the person seems similar enough to us)
If you want to graze it on the toilet, fine. If you participate in a niche subreddit where the mods value a lack of censorship, fine. Outside of that it has become a place for reposted content, low quality commentary (literally the opposite of a place like this) and a rapidly increasing moderator tyranny.