171–180 of 348 posts
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Reddit definitely does not have the tech focus hn does. Maybe it did in the long past, but not anymore. Definitely not a substitute for Reddit content without the trolls.
Some subreddits are very technical, and also some content from Reddit ends up here. With the right subscriptions Reddit is quite more technical while HN is still more entrepreneurish.
Places like this tend to show the hypocrisy of the average leftist when it comes to free speech, though. When free speech benefits them by weakening social norms (especially religious ones), they champion it, but the moment free speech starts to subvert the new liberal norms they put in to replace it, suddenly we get arguments about how free speech is a limited concept and pleas to rediscover civility and tolerance.…
When it comes to the selective protection of free speech, accusing any particular side of hypocrisy only reveals the bias of your particular political perspective.
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Well, lets say you know someone who is a legit flat earther. You're not going to change their mind, because such a belief is unreasonable, but if you attempt to reason with them you elevate their social status and accidentally lend credence to them. This is the Fox News "fair and balanced" model -- if you give equal time to both viewpoints, even if one viewpoint is nuts, people will assume that there's a rational deb…
What would you do in real-life? Would you make a mockery of them? Or would you simply ignore them? I find a lot of people (on both sides) will do things online behind the shield of anonymity they wouldn't otherwise in real life. I find this behaviour cowardly. Would you confront these people in real life, and mock them to their faces? I suspect a lot of people who do it online wouldn't in real life (if for no other r…
I guess it depends on the context right? I remember in college there used to be these religious fanatics that would loudly berate strangers in the plaza; whenever someone would walk up and try to "debate" them, it would just make things worse, but sometimes someone would just say something really funny and the mood of the whole crowd would change and the extremely aggressive obnoxious fanatic would end up packing it in early or going for a new tactic. (Maybe not immediately, but it did seem to have an impact overall)
My point isn't like, go pick on people, that would suck, I'm just saying that humor is a really useful tool sometimes. Self-serious "be nice" policies can remove those tools and give some unreasonable people a nice cloud of cover to haunt places.
Maybe a different metaphor is better. A good community is like a garden. Nobody likes pesticide, but sometimes if you have a pest problem... It's all a judgement call right. "Be nice" policies only work if you can assume the other people you're interacting with are reasonable, and that's not really always true.
Why can't a forum cater to everybody? E.g., you could hide troll comments using a filter.
I'm wary of any type of moderation. I don't know how it can be done, but it's very apparent that reddit has lots of moderation (within subs) and it seems to heavily promote echo chambers. I fear we won't make any major advancements until AI can accurately measure our intent, snark, etc. Because we need to not be echo chambers, imo. Unpopular opinions are amazing and needed. But the assholes, for any cause, only serve…
I don't understand how commenters generalize about Reddit: the is no Reddit, only subreddits - each of which is moderated in a different way. I moderate /r/Africa we deal with speech mercilessly. /r/askScience or /r/askHistorians have even stricter policies. On the other hand, there are subreddits which are most definitely hateful... But I never go there. In the middle, I'm still subscribed to /r/Europe which is a ba…
I was banned for 2 days on the whole platform for following a link to Voat, another link back to Reddit and downvoting a guy who was copy/pasting the same comment all over the thread. (Reddit is surprisingly link-sharing adverse for a site based on link sharing)
Reddit exists through the abuses and policies of its administrators. It's not a generic forum platform and I don't think it ever was.
I signed up on their website, went through the onboarding flow and joined a couple of communities. Without them knowing anything about my political leanings they suggested a bunch of anti-Trump communities. I guess they're not trying to solve the "filter bubble" issue, but rather becoming the Reddit for liberals? I mean it's their business for them to run as they like, but I hope somebody can take us past the Breitba…
It sounds like a fair amount of statements directly made by Trump on the campaign trail (mocking a disabled person, telling people to check out the "sex tape" of a former Miss universe he didn't like, many other statements) would themselves not be allowed on this site, so it's not surprising it would be naturally anti-Trump. I highly doubt it would have any such attitudes towards people like Jeb Bush or Rand Paul who…
If you think Trump made fun of a disabled reporter, you may have been reading fake news
I am staggered by the amount of people here who object to Imzy's "Be Nice"-policy on the basis that it limits free speech. To me that seems to be a rather flawed argumentation: a) The First Amendment of the US Constitution, which guarantees free speech, explicitly does so in a political context ("Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech"). Imzy is not the US Congress, they don't have jurisdict…
Well, lets say you know someone who is a legit flat earther. You're not going to change their mind, because such a belief is unreasonable, but if you attempt to reason with them you elevate their social status and accidentally lend credence to them. This is the Fox News "fair and balanced" model -- if you give equal time to both viewpoints, even if one viewpoint is nuts, people will assume that there's a rational deb…
Okay, but malice and schadenfreude are not requirements for humor. Obnoxious memes and troll baiting are not some kind of Shakespearean fools. They are the lowest form of humor that incubate far more bad ideas than they're worth.
Hate speech, bullying, none of that shit needs to be protected speech. It's not as delicate or complicated as people who generally aren't on the receiving end of it try to make it out to be.