241–250 of 278 posts
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Conservative is the wrong word but a lot of people on Reddit hate everyone that's not a white socialist atheist anti-Zionist middle class man
The correct word is "alt-right". https://www.google.com/search?q=alt-right
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Justification of some truly abhorrent methodology aside, it's quite a stretch to call the people SRS picks fights with "the worst trolls on the internet". What are you alluding to here, gamergate? I'd think the GNAA would rank high above them.
SJ people online deal with a constant barrage of threats of violence and rape - look at the crap Sarkeesian has to deal with - actual IRL threats to meatspace events. That's a bit worse than getting rickrolled with GNFOS. That doesn't justify the nastiness of the SJW blogosphere, but it definitely explains it.
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My story, 'Electronic Taxi Dispatch, v1.0' was the last to post. I saved my diaries and stories about my adventures in the taxi, I guess I should buy a domain of my own.
Please do that. I enjoyed your stories, particularly 'Who Are Your Lifelines?'
Rusty appeared above and told what happened (datacenter moved), and said k5 might come back some day. I rarely use twitter, but I'll put a link to my site here: https://twitter.com/taxicabjesus
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Consider donating it to the Internet Archive. This is precisely the kind of thing they really do a good job with, and it's worth saving.
Yeah I don't really mind continuing to host it -- in archived form it wouldn't be any burden. But I'll talk to people.
Also, [insert gushing praise here], I loved k5 back in the day.
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As someone who follows /r/ShitRedditSays and /r/SubredditDrama on and off I find it completely unsurprising. For years reddit has been fertile recruiting ground for racists, sexists, anti-semites, homophobes, transmisogynists, and ableists. This is largely the fault of Reddit's administrators who had a strict laissez-faire approach to content on their site and refused to remove content that was overtly any or all of…
> strict laissez-faire approach You mean they allowed speech that didn't tread on the rights of others? I think racism is shitty too, but I'm not going to ban it. And that makes me sound like a bad person, but people's definitions of racism vary extremely widely. It's not possible to say something without offending someone out there. If you think taking down posts that simply offend you is a good idea (rather than ig…
"If you don't like the moderation just start your own sub" is a nice idea but breaks down in practice. The very reason you visit Reddit is to discover and discuss links. If you don't like how a sub is moderated you can start your own but that doesn't mean anyone else will use it over the other one. If there is a general sub for topic X just starting a sub that is "X with stricter moderation" isn't very likely to attract a lot of users. However, if you frame it as "X for people [pro/anti]-hate" you are going to draw in the passionate minorities of users on either side which will cause extremification rather than moderation. Having an extreme sub may also attract users who are only marginally interested in X but have a deep interest in the hate (for or against) which will cause further extremification.
This extremification can in turn poison the general subs. On Reddit if a link is posted in multiple subs there will be an "other discussions" link which will show you where else that link has been posted. If a news story is posted in both a general sub and a [pro/anti]-hate sub the users from the latter can easily find and post/vote on the general sub's discussion. (Not to mention posting Google-able quotes and outright direct links to other subs.) This was overtly a major problem with /r/fatpeoplehate. If a link (or quote or screenshot) was cross-posted to FPH you could count on FPH trolls to show up in short order and flood the general discussion with their hate. Even when it's not that overt the extreme users can subtly shift the tone of a general sub towards their point of view over time, such as with rampant racism on /r/worldnews.
The most straightforward solution to this that I can see is to 1) moderate general subs so that their tone remains, well, moderate, and 2) ban extremely offensive subs (using the standards of society at large as an indicator of what is too extreme). That's not to say this is an easy task or even clear-cut in many cases and it will prevent some people from expressing their legitimate opinions, but if the thin extremes at the end of the bell curve need to be cut for the benefit of the fat middle on a privately-controlled website I do not see a problem with that. (I do believe that governments should not restrict speech but social media sites are not governments and should not be held to the same standards.)
EDIT: Also, to clarify, the third paragraph of my original post was regarding people's perceptions of Reddit in aggregate, not how it actually is. Reddit (for a time) had a reputation as "progressive" but the reality does not and did not not match this reputation. I did not intend it as an attack on people who have non-progressive views (I obviously consider myself a progressive), I was merely providing examples of how the reality of Reddit's aggregate political views (to the extent that millions of people can be classified as having aggregate political views) are (or can be perceived as) "progressive" on some prominent issues but non-progressive/conservative on others.
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It does. When a really nice niche subreddit is thrust into the lime-light by becoming a default, it usually dies from an influx of low-quality default users. If it doesn't die from that, the moderation team has to really step up their job - a job they're not getting paid to do which means moderation teams get overworked and burned out, and the quit and the sub dies from lack of moderation. If the subreddit is survive…
This made me just imagine an aristocracy of commentators where once a community grows to a certain size/popularity it locks up and others must be vetted into the group through some process I can't imagine yet.
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> strict laissez-faire approach You mean they allowed speech that didn't tread on the rights of others? I think racism is shitty too, but I'm not going to ban it. And that makes me sound like a bad person, but people's definitions of racism vary extremely widely. It's not possible to say something without offending someone out there. If you think taking down posts that simply offend you is a good idea (rather than ig…
You are right that at some point what is and is not acceptable speech becomes a judgement call but at the same time some speech is so incredibly corrosive to the health of a community that you must draw that line. All social media sites should be taking that lesson from Reddit. "If you don't like the moderation just start your own sub" is a nice idea but breaks down in practice. The very reason you visit Reddit is to…
How does one assess the health of a community as large and compartmentalized as reddit's? Without that data, you'd have no idea which kind of speech is "so incredibly corrosive".
Making guesses as to what speech is "harmful" won't help anyone.
> If there is a general sub for topic X just starting a sub that is "X with stricter moderation" isn't very likely to attract a lot of users.
So you realize a minority of users are willing to make a fuss over how offensive some subreddits are, then.
> the FPH brigades
Yeah, that sucked. But brigading is extremely rare now on reddit.
/r/The_Donald and their "high-energy shitposting" might annoy you, but you can block out the noise. And if they begin to brigade other parts of reddit, they'll be banned just like FPH was.
> moderate general subs so that their tone remains, well, moderate
Tone policing? (even beyond the absurdity of moderating "tone") I don't think reddit users would like that at all. Default subs are run by community moderators. You can subscribe to them, ignore them, make your own, whatever you want. But those are their communities.
Messing with the link between the moderators and the communities they built can very seriously backfire.
It could collapse any subreddit entirely. And that's not good for anyone, especially not reddit's bottom line. They don't make money off of carefully regulating speech.
> ban extremely offensive subs
Well, but they do that already. FPH is gone already.
> it will prevent some people from expressing their legitimate opinions
Then you clearly don't care about free and open discourse. Removing certain ideas from the available pool means you will undoubtedly make your community more extreme. That's fine if you want a (commonly termed) "circlejerk" sub.
But if you actually want to hear a diversity of opinions, understand what both sides of an argument have to say, and actually for once create agreement between two sides rather than pulling them further apart... heavy moderation doesn't work.
If a community sucks, why not just leave it alone? What's it to you if someone, somewhere, is badmouthing minorities? They might be morons, but then why are you wasting your time worrying about someone who's not going to be taken seriously?
Hey so this is Rusty -- What happened was basically that Internap shut down the data center we were in and had to move the servers, and I conspicuously failed to Deal With Things around that. The content is probably not gone forever, but it may be a little while before it reappears. There's a very good chance that it will reappear in the form of an archive of static html pages though, not a live community. So if you'…
Consider donating it to the Internet Archive. This is precisely the kind of thing they really do a good job with, and it's worth saving.
That's kind of an interesting question. There's certainly some stuff there worth saving forever, but there's also stuff that's just plain bad or that's the intellectual equivalent of embarrassing childhood photos, which may not be worth saving at all.
I never was part of Usenet, but I understand a lot of people were angry at Dejanews and Google when what was once (perhaps naively) viewed as ephemeral communication was turned into a public searchable archive. At least most people on Kuro5hin used pseudonyms.
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Consider donating it to the Internet Archive. This is precisely the kind of thing they really do a good job with, and it's worth saving.
> and it's worth saving. That's kind of an interesting question. There's certainly some stuff there worth saving forever, but there's also stuff that's just plain bad or that's the intellectual equivalent of embarrassing childhood photos, which may not be worth saving at all. I never was part of Usenet, but I understand a lot of people were angry at Dejanews and Google when what was once (perhaps naively) viewed as e…
That isn't your call, and is nobody's call, really. Better to preserve it all and let people decide for themselves when they look at it.
First there was Slashdot, but CmdrTaco insisted on picking the stories for us. He called it an "omelet". Kuro5hin came along to fix this, but discouraged posts that were just links to pages elsewhere on the web. IIRC, this was called "link farming". How many users had the talent and time to create original content, and then survive the ridiculous Kuro5shin editing process? Not many. Digg then encouraged links, but sh…
Except that Reddit is gradually turning into 4chan. Every time I see /r/all, it's a little more mean-spirited, a little younger, a little more toxic. Outsourcing moderation and libertarian ideals all sound nice, but when the rubber hits the road it gradually chases normal people away. Reddit just did it it slower because the strengths of their platform and content overwhelmed it... but it's getting there eventually.
I never had any problems on Reddit until after they changed their policies, I don't go for hate speech and other things, but /r/Ferguson was about the Ferguson riots and Black Lives Matter and other stuff related to Ferguson, but the racists came in and took it over and then it became one of those subreddits that was in lock down and it warned you about it when you tried to access it. I got downvoted by racists and had to leave that subreddit.
I live near Ferguson and shop there, the people of Ferguson are good people no matter what race they are. The rioters and looters came from outside Ferguson. Maybe people don't always wave back or smile, but they got their own problems they are dealing with.