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Reddit is still in turmoil

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Re: Reddit is still in turmoil

#391

Post by dragonwriter »

FilterSweep wrote: post #351
didgeoridoo wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps I can assist: Shaun King calls Jason Whitlock a "coon". He keeps his verified check and account. If that isn't personal, racial abuse and harassment, I'm not sure what is. EDIT: Not being tremendously familiar with this spat, it took me a while to figure out what Milo got banned for. Best I can figure out, it was for calling a Ghostbusters actress "barely literate". Since that's a bit of a weak-tea insult, I…

Except Milo has been suspended before. Multiple times. Confusion towards his suspension has only considered this single incident in a vacuum.

Yeah, a criminal law analogy of Milo's circumstance would be being sent to prison for a probation violation.

Re: Reddit is still in turmoil

#392

Post by legodt »

toss1941 wrote: post #375
legodt wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would definitely say that there is a strong overlap between the two groups

And what do you base this claim on? What the people in the Anti-GG media have been telling everyone?

High incidents of hate speech, abusive behavior online, high overlap with swatting, death threats, and chasing women off the internet. The movement acts as a hate group and is made up of typical "red pilled" men's rights type people. And, much like most extreme right groups, all of these ills are dismissed as illusions by a nebulous liberal media that is against their hateful cause.

Re: Reddit is still in turmoil

#393

Post by amyjess »

MustardTiger wrote: post #277
empath75 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit's main problem is that they spent years building their user base as a site to find 'jailbait' porn (it was by far the largest search result that brought people to Reddit for a long time). That created a toxic culture, which allowed stormfront and similar groups to use it as a recruitment ground for racists. Reddit still refuses to do anything about it. The 'quarantined' a bunch of truly vile subreddits but all…

Every single thing you said is incorrect. Reddit ranked high when searching for jailbait, that does not mean jailbait was the largest search that brought people to reddit. The "toxic culture" predates the jailbait sub. And stormfront does not recruit on reddit, reddit recruits for stormfront. The insane, dishonest, censorious leftism that runs rampant on reddit is driving people to become racist, and sexist, and homo…

> Also many of the subs being punished are in no way vile. They are just too popular and not leftist.

You mean subreddits like /r/european and /r/truecels? Where death threats against women in interracial relationships were common? Where it was common to wish rape on women who don't hate Muslims? Where the former subreddit routinely called for ethnic cleansing and the latter subreddit talked about how western women are part of a corrupt plot to deny sex to men? Where AutoModerator was set up to respond to the word "entitled" by saying that constant access to sex is a fundamental need for men and should be considered a human right?

Everyone: I'd recommend popping onto /r/againsthatesubreddits and checking out the myriad posts on /r/european and /r/truecels AHS has linked to. You might have to dig through the archives, though, because both of those places were quarantined a while back.

They deserved to go.

Re: Reddit is still in turmoil

#394

Post by dragonwriter »

mindslight wrote: post #14
twblalock wrote: post #6

I think much of Reddit's problems with its userbase boil down to an early failure to manage expectations. It's pretty clear that the Reddit corporation doesn't want Reddit to be an anything-goes, absolute free speech zone with no moderation or anti-harassment policies -- but that's what the site actually was for many years. Now, when the company cracks down, users think their freedoms are being curtailed. The mistake…

> The mistake was ever allowing that kind of freedom in the first place, because people developed an expectation that it would persist. Sure, and then we wouldn't be talking about reddit but rather whatever site was actually free at the time. The only reason web forums exist is because people are lazy about adopting decentralized Free software. Yet the owners of these centralized services, as well as paternalistic sp…

> The only reason web forums exist is because people are lazy about adopting decentralized Free software.

Well, other than the fact that a whole lot of the software involved in using web forums, on both the server and client end, is "decentralized free software".

And the fact that other software (much, but not all, of it free) was adopted for discussions before web forums got popular. Web forums got popular because -- on both server and client end -- most people are going to have the tools anyway, so adopting a whole new software (free or otherwise) stack for discussions is unattractive.

Re: Reddit is still in turmoil

#395

Post by CaptSpify »

kartickv wrote: post #207
twblalock wrote: post #6

I think much of Reddit's problems with its userbase boil down to an early failure to manage expectations. It's pretty clear that the Reddit corporation doesn't want Reddit to be an anything-goes, absolute free speech zone with no moderation or anti-harassment policies -- but that's what the site actually was for many years. Now, when the company cracks down, users think their freedoms are being curtailed. The mistake…

I have a theory — to clean up a site, find and expel the most egregious offenders, like the people who engage in repeated name-calling ("You are a fucking asshole!") as opposed to constructive discussion. You can't police every user, but if you find and expel the worst offenders, I suspect it will have a significant effect on the quality of conversation.

I think that works only when you set those expectations up front. This is an apples-to-oranges comparison, but: reddit started as no filters. That was one of it's main draws. Then suddenly started applying filters, and banning "toxic" members. Now a lot of people are mad at them.

HN, afaik, has always had these rules in place. There's never been an expectation of free-speech here, and nobody minds, because they were presented up-front.

Re: Reddit is still in turmoil

#396

Post by Razengan »

vintermann wrote: post #188
Razengan wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Give a cut of advertising revenue to the mods of successful, high quality subs. No, oh no. Why mods? Cuts should go to users posting the content. Maybe make it so that OC is rewarded [more], karma "farming" is discouraged, echo chambers don't become the only places with activity, and make sure that hiveminds do not drown out all other discussion. Otherwise Reddit just becomes the online cousin of mainstream media,…

Do you want clickbait? Because that's how you get clickbait. There's a big difference between how you think when you ask "Do I want this?" versus when you ask "Will people want this?". You shouldn't confuse these. A lot of scams are based on confusing people about what they want vs. what they think others will want. First and foremost MLM-schemes. You convince yourself the product is good, because you hope to make mo…

> do you have a proposal for how to achieve this, beyond the old "putting the right people in charge"?

I was actually brainstorming over this – an alternative, or rather, something that builds upon the fundamentals of the Reddit/HN format – during a long drive today, and I think I did hit upon something that could be effective, and fun.

Now to polish up my idea and figure the best way to put it out there. :)

Re: Reddit is still in turmoil

#397

Post by res0nat0r »

alanwatts wrote: post #333
retox wrote: post #290

The human race is comprised of horrible people, any website that accepts user contributions will attract contributions from horrible people. As a service owner you have a decision; either you say that everyone's opinion is valid, horrible and all, or you say no; these are the rules around what you can post and anything outside those boundaries is subject to removal. What you absolutely should _not_ do is build a bran…

>Of course, no one thinks of themselves or their in-group as horrible. You could substitute horrible for flawed if it makes you feel better. If everyone is flawed, then whats the point of having an arbitrarily selected group of flawed people censor all the other flawed people? That logic seems flawed, unless it is purely from a monetary interest. Moreover, deeming people "horrible" is completely subjective. All of th…

> If everyone is flawed, then whats the point of having an arbitrarily selected group of flawed people censor all the other flawed people? That logic seems flawed, unless it is purely from a monetary interest.

It seems reasonable that the people who put the time and effort into creating and maintaining a discussion site are perfectly valid to pick and choose what type of content they see fit no matter how arbitrary their rules.

If their rules are too harsh or unliked people will just go elsewhere.

Re: Reddit is still in turmoil

#398

Post by toss1941 »

legodt wrote: post #392
toss1941 wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what do you base this claim on? What the people in the Anti-GG media have been telling everyone?

High incidents of hate speech, abusive behavior online, high overlap with swatting, death threats, and chasing women off the internet. The movement acts as a hate group and is made up of typical "red pilled" men's rights type people. And, much like most extreme right groups, all of these ills are dismissed as illusions by a nebulous liberal media that is against their hateful cause.

GamerGate exposed clear ethical violations in the gaming media. Do you dispute that too? That same media has yet to clean up it's mess and famously doubled down by ignoring the legitimate claims or blowing them off while conveniently pretending that every troll/kid with a keyboard are really the spokespeople of the movement.

Re: Reddit is still in turmoil

#399

Post by bbctol »

jib wrote: post #222
twblalock wrote: post #6

I think much of Reddit's problems with its userbase boil down to an early failure to manage expectations. It's pretty clear that the Reddit corporation doesn't want Reddit to be an anything-goes, absolute free speech zone with no moderation or anti-harassment policies -- but that's what the site actually was for many years. Now, when the company cracks down, users think their freedoms are being curtailed. The mistake…

I dunno, it seems weird to me to treat reddit as one community. I use reddit a lot, but really 99% of my interactions is on /r/cfb, which is a space far from the descriptions painted here. It is a community (and I do believe it is a community of its own) imo not far away from Hacker News in terms of creating and curating interesting content, and discussing it, for a focused group of interest, except rather than tech…

I think that also reflects Reddit's issues with mission confusion. Reddit does present itself as a single entity: "the frontpage of the Internet," and it was founded as a single community, a group of users on one forum. The introduction of subreddits has very slowly shifted it towards being a platform, a piece of forum-hosting software--and as it grows larger, it becomes much more enjoyable to use it to browse small forums than deal with the mob on the defaults. IMO they should fully commit to being a platform for many different communities, but the site's founding ethos was the opposite.

Re: Reddit is still in turmoil

#400

Post by hexane360 »

ManlyBread wrote: post #305
CM30 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. Some like Shit Reddit Says can get away with open brigading against other subreddits they don't like. There are cases where a post has a few hundred votes, gets linked there and ends up with a score in the minus hundreds range. And a few other subs seem like doxxing people they disagree with, usually with the depressing common assumption that there's 'no bad actions, only targets'.

The whole notion of "brigading" and "doxxing" that reddit has is just plan stupid. The whole site is build on linking stuff to other places on the internet, but suddenly, when you link to the site itself there's a problem? "Doxxing" is an issue, but reddit is overly sensitive where it's impossible to link publicly accessible data that the people in question put up for everyone to see. I've been banned for linking a f…

Well, as far as brigading goes, the violation is actually doing it, not linking to the wrong sub. However, the rules aren't enforced evenly. Some subs have been threatened with shutdowns for allowing any links, even np links. Some subs openly allow links and disallow np links, with no retaliation.

Doxxing is a similar issue. However, were you banned by a mod or shadowbanned by an admin? Because mods can mod their sub as they want. Consistency goes out the window, which is good and bad. If you were shadowbanned though, that's a whole different story.

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