Reddit is still in turmoil • Hacker News Board

Re: Reddit is still in turmoil

#441

Post by DanBC » Fri, Jul 22, 2016, 6:36 PM UTC

reitanqild wrote: post #356

gohrt wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we more civilized when there is no anonymous free speech, and people are abusive only in semi-private situations?

I find HN and arstechnica.com a lot more civilized than the comments section on the major local newspaper. I have hypothesised that the reason is that without anonymity only * (trolls with) fake accounts * politically correct people and people who think they are pc * and people who don't care about real life reputation anyway post in any kind of controversial debate. Normal knowledgeable people doesn't want to lose t…

Many local newspaper comment sections have people posting vile things under their real names, often linked to their facebook accounts.

Re: Reddit is still in turmoil

#442

Post by stcredzero » Fri, Jul 22, 2016, 6:37 PM UTC

didgeoridoo wrote: post #308

skj wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ask us to compare between two examples, you are required to provide two actual examples instead of having us just imagine a scenario that fits your claim.

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…

Should we hold peaceful BLM leaders responsible for tweets from their followers promoting cop-killing?

Actually, I do think we should hold "peaceful" BLM leaders morally (not legally) responsible for tweets from their followers. How can a movement of justice accept the silence or ineffectiveness of BLM leaders with regards to inculcating a non-vile culture and calling out hate speech? Isn't tolerating that sort of thing from a movement's followers for the sake of internal politics and membership basically the same thing as tolerating a number of bad cops for the sake of "thin blue line" solidarity and internal police politics? It's not viable without becoming hypocritical. The only difference is in direct connection and legal consequence, not in the overall morality.

I think we can tolerate vileness as a culture and society, but we should not welcome it -- especially if it starts to abrogate what participants would consent to. We can't tolerate hate speech that incites to violence, period. We should not laud internet vileness as some kind of magical problem-solving "pure" expression, which is what we seem to be doing now. There is an important difference between a freedom and a virtue. Movements of social justice need to be teaching virtue. Otherwise, history shows us that such things will tend to devolve into demagoguery and mob behavior.

Re: Reddit is still in turmoil

#443

Post by MichaelMoser123 » Fri, Jul 22, 2016, 6:47 PM UTC

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…

Is it possible to generalize for the whole of reddit? every reddit group is setting a different level of expectations - for instance reddit.com/r/askhistorians has quite strict guidelines - much stricter than most of reddit.

Re: Reddit is still in turmoil

#444

Post by FireBeyond » Fri, Jul 22, 2016, 6:51 PM UTC

pythia__ wrote: post #426

cglace wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are probably talking about Milo Yiannopoulos being permanently banned from twitter.

Every "permaban" like this is an opportunity to get a famous person on a distributed Twitter competitor like GNU Social (especially if the ban actually lasts). If you work on one you may want to contact him. People whose presence is objectionable to Twitter are the natural early adopters for distributed social networks.

Except GNU has a Code of Conduct talking about considerate and respectful.

Whatever you think of COCs, they might be hard to take seriously if it's "be considerate or respectful, unless you have both a large following and were kicked off Twitter for what largely amounts to abusive and hate-speech like behavior, then we'll actively court you to come to our network!"

Re: Reddit is still in turmoil

#445

Post by Houshalter » Fri, Jul 22, 2016, 6:51 PM UTC

toss1941 wrote: post #381

FilterSweep wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bans, yes, people get punished for breaking the rules. But having your posts quietly vanish without warning? This comment particularly stuck out to me. Very few other communication platforms of Reddit's ilk will go through the process of shadowbanning users - that is - the user still has full functionality of the site, however their comments are not visible to other users; only themselves. To an unknowing user, it…

If only game makers would build this kind of system into their Anti-cheats, make the cheater think for as long as possible they are ruining other people's day only to find out that the last hour has been against AI with canned outrage responses from the AI.

Some minecraft servers used to do this. The "griefer" would see blocks being destroyed and placed, but their actions would have no effect on the server. Eventually they would get bored and leave on their own. It was hilarious too.

I think current anti-cheat tool suck. Cheaters are usually obvious, sometimes blatantly flying around, or performing inhuman actions. Simple machine learning should be able to detect cheats with high accuracy.

Re: Reddit is still in turmoil

#446

Post by dimino » Fri, Jul 22, 2016, 6:52 PM UTC

FilterSweep wrote: post #350

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #337

Reddit is a crossroads: It's an intersection between the cultures of 4chan (which is in itself an intersection of japanese and american sensibilities), and the culture of usenet, and internet forums, and a dozen other cultures besides. None of these cultures handle censorship well. They all originated in an environment where, to some extent, you could say whatever the hell you like. Many of Reddit's early users came…

> Bans, yes, people get punished for breaking the rules. But having your posts quietly vanish without warning? This comment particularly stuck out to me. Very few other communication platforms of Reddit's ilk will go through the process of shadowbanning users - that is - the user still has full functionality of the site, however their comments are not visible to other users; only themselves. To an unknowing user, it…

The admins of Reddit have said over and over again that shadowbanning is for spammers, and if non-spammers are getting shadowbanned, it's due to a bug. It was never and is not currently used to silence humans, only robots.

Re: Reddit is still in turmoil

#447

Post by bshanks » Fri, Jul 22, 2016, 7:02 PM UTC

jules wrote: post #244

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 problem with reddit isn't the admins, but that people who have managed to become moderators of prominent subreddits censor posts and thousands of rather innocent comments. For example the Orlando terrorist attack was censored from /r/news, and when they later allowed the posts to go through they deleted most of the comments, including all comments talking about the censorship of the previous posts. They even dele…

A big problem with Reddit is the first-come, first-serve nature of claiming subreddit names. In theory anyone can start a new subreddit to provide different moderation, but in practice /r/news, /r/bitcoin, /r/programming, /r/haskell etc have a leg-up in being seen as the canonical subreddit for their topics (these are just the first examples of canonical subreddits that came to mind, i'm not taking a position on whether they are well-moderated).

Perhaps subreddits should be required to have numbers after their name, eg /r/news2 (numbers 0 and 1 would be forbidden, eg no /r/news0 or /r/news1).

Re: Reddit is still in turmoil

#448

Post by jdmichal » Fri, Jul 22, 2016, 7:05 PM UTC

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #443

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…

Is it possible to generalize for the whole of reddit? every reddit group is setting a different level of expectations - for instance reddit.com/r/askhistorians has quite strict guidelines - much stricter than most of reddit.

There's routine swathes of [deleted] posts in /r/askscience also. In my experience though, having heavy-handed moderators is certainly an exception on Reddit.

Re: Reddit is still in turmoil

#449

Post by jules » Fri, Jul 22, 2016, 7:08 PM UTC

deadowl wrote: post #338

jules wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with reddit isn't the admins, but that people who have managed to become moderators of prominent subreddits censor posts and thousands of rather innocent comments. For example the Orlando terrorist attack was censored from /r/news, and when they later allowed the posts to go through they deleted most of the comments, including all comments talking about the censorship of the previous posts. They even dele…

The problems would be portrayed differently depending on different subsets of the userbase. I don't like all of /r/news moderation, but unfortunately it hasn't alienated enough people for another relevant news subreddit to take its place. A lot of the people that are alienated enough end up being people that I don't want to associate with, e.g. the kind of people that post in the Donald Trump subreddit, where I was b…

I don't agree that the Donald Trump subreddit is the heart of the problem. It's a symptom of the problem. I don't care what goes on in that subreddit. Let them have their echo chamber. The problem is huge default subreddits that purport to be neutral but actually are far from it. This is what pushes users to the extremes, one of which is the Donald Trump subreddit, which got a lot of subscribers because of this fiasco.

Re: Reddit is still in turmoil

#450

Post by arprocter » Fri, Jul 22, 2016, 7:09 PM UTC

anjc wrote: post #26

It's bizarre that a company seems to be struggling to administer diversity of staff, without being certain of its own medium-term success. There's no point in having your quota of "people of colour", as the article puts it, if the business model is unsustainable and leads to people being fired anyway. Why not focus on creating a successful company first, and then worry about things that carry an administrative and ma…

The article seems to clumsily imply that the firing/resignation of a handful of employees is evidence of some conspiracy at reddit, yet people resign and get fired for all kinds of different reasons.

The tone of the piece makes me feel like it wouldn't even have been written if the employees who left had been 'tech bros'