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Imzy wants to be a kinder, gentler version of Reddit

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Re: Imzy wants to be a kinder, gentler version of Reddit

#191

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

Imzy sounds interesting. The questions is how well the rules are written and enforced. If the rules are just "be nice," then the community may be pleasant, but it will be rife for censorship of any sort of dispute, establishment of "safe spaces," etc.

I've been through reddit, usenet, and the chans, and I'm part of the programming culture (one perhaps more acidic than most), so I do detest censorship. (ie, you can't say that sort of thing/express that sort of opinion here). But that doesn't seem to be where Imzy is coming from. The use of a chan/usenet style most recent system as opposed to reddit-style voting also shows that Imzy seems to have a good understanding of how corrosive "internet points" can be.

Community moderation can be a good thing. HN and 4chan are living proof. And if your criticism is "but my freedom of speech," xkcd.com/1357/ gives the explanation for why that's wrong.

Basically, I think that if Imzy is well-run, it could be a very good site (just like the good parts of reddit). However, if it's poorly run, it will end up as an endless cycle of agreement, with any dissent leading to an immidiate ban. Time will tell.

There are plenty of sites out there for those who wish to express themselves freely. Well-moderated sites are considerably rarer, and we could use another one.

But hey, maybe I'm crazy.

Re: Imzy wants to be a kinder, gentler version of Reddit

#192

Post by overgard »

Retra wrote: post #136
veddox wrote: post #74

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…

>On Reddit and like sites we see behaviour that we would never tolerate if we saw it in real life. Why do we not only tolerate it online [...] That's because the behavior you are seeing online is actually not at all like the behaviors "in real life" that you are comparing them to. In person, you get a lot more information and in a vastly more narrow context, and it's much easier to interpret people under those condit…

Funny that you're getting downvoted for a nuanced polite response to why online behavior necessarily differs from in person behavior. Apparently being nice doesn't apply to arrows.

Re: Imzy wants to be a kinder, gentler version of Reddit

#193

Post by zzzeek »

rjeli wrote: post #189
zzzeek wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Politifact: "Donald Trump says Hillary Clinton is 'wrong' to say he mocked a disabled reporter": False "Trump may deny that he intentionally mocked Kovaleski for his disability, but many Americans believe his remarks amounted to mocking, and we concur that that’s a reasonable -- indeed, perhaps the only -- interpretation of his actions. The notion that Trump’s comments about Cruz and a general undercut Clinton’s clai…

OK, do you have an actual response to what it shows? Seems cut-and-dry to me. edit: parent comment originally just said "that video is pathetic" https://i.sli.mg/g7PW3y.png

yes, the style in which he mocked the disabled reporter was completely different and is consistent with what I would observe while growing up in 1970s suburban Long Island (close to where Trump grew up in Queens). Maybe you're just not from New York. The Ted Cruz motions were not at all the same thing.

Not to mention, being a decent human being would mean that even if you do have the same "mockery" routine for everyone, you'd hold off doing it towards someone where your routine clearly is going to be interpreted that way. As we're talking about a site that bans people who don't treat each other decently.

Re: Imzy wants to be a kinder, gentler version of Reddit

#194

Post by gavanwoolery »

Hmm, perhaps the intent is noble (or not, depending on your perspective), but historically products like this have failed in the past (and I am not trying to be needlessly critical, but just provide some feedback and perhaps a warning). "I want to make product X, but with different ethical standards" is not enough of a selling point for most people. It is hard enough to entice people away from a popular platform even when you are adding new, desired features. Happy to be proven wrong here.

As I have said many times before, I have found EVERY form of feedback to be valuable, even the most seemingly poisonous feedback. A simple 3 line response to any of your harshest critics will often turn them in to fans, or at least neutral, if you approach them with humility and respect (i.e. admit that their criticism has some degree of truth, and try to explain to them how you are attempting to work around the problem).

The internet is not a good place to be emotionally fragile, especially when you are willingly putting yourself out there. I am not expecting human behavior to change any time soon so I'd rather help people understand that they are talking to real people on the internet, instead of just filtering them out. Of course, that is strictly a personal preference, I would not blame others for thinking differently. :)

As for all the trolls and nasty internet content, I have no problem with it to be honest. It will exist somewhere if not on Reddit, and I never encounter it on Reddit anyhow (within my subreddits at least). Moderators tend to do a pretty good job of keeping their respective communities clean. On the rare occasion where I do encounter it somewhere, I just ignore it. Why waste my mental energy?

Re: Imzy wants to be a kinder, gentler version of Reddit

#195

Post by vanderreeah »

kristofferR wrote: post #57
vanderreeah wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by safe spaces you mean places where people of colour aren't subjected to racism, gay people aren't subjected to homophobia and women aren't subjected to misogyny, then I fail to see how any of these types of attack would help anyone "move forward", even "creators".

That's what safe spaces are defined as in the dictionary, but it's not what they are in practise though. In practise it's often a system of oppressing dissenting opinions and voluntary segregation.

I can only say that when you say "in practise" you sound dogmatic, defensive and vague. I am going on the assumption that you have not (as I have not) performed any kind of scientific / sociological investigation into this and that in fact when you say "in practise" you mean "in the limited set of encounters with safe spaces that I have experienced". I admit you say "often", thereby admitting the possibility that sometimes a safe space could accord with its dictionary definition. But your comment is mostly just the impotent expression of hearsay. At the very least an example ought to be given. Without that bare minimum I really can't understand why your comment exists.

Re: Imzy wants to be a kinder, gentler version of Reddit

#197

Post by Keyframe »

Somehow I think an open community can't be nice if it's anonymous. Not that all communities have to be anonymous (far from that), but if you want self-restraint then you need to revoke anonymity. I don't see how else that would work. At least a semi-anonymous system. For example one where a seed pool of people are chosen to be a part of the community and have them invite and be responsible for a certain number of child/invites. If one of the invites and their invites screws up, whole branch suffers or something.

Re: Imzy wants to be a kinder, gentler version of Reddit

#198

Post by diyorgasms »

stefantalpalaru wrote: post #175
liotier wrote: post #49

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…

> the is no Reddit, only subreddits - each of which is moderated in a different way 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…

Voat is where the groups who were kicked off of reddit (pizzagate, jailbait, c--ntown and the rest of the "chimpire", fph) go to organize brigades off-site. It doesn't surprise me in the least that reddit bans people participating in off-site brigading activity, especially from Voat.

Re: Imzy wants to be a kinder, gentler version of Reddit

#199

Post by makomk »

jasode wrote: post #162
makomk wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I was more thinking about the layer of abstraction above individual communities like OrganicMothers.com and AnythingGoesMothering.com - the one made up of shared services like Reddit and Facebook that are used to establish communities, since they're harder to avoid. But even at that level, speech-restrictive websites can certainly be worrying. For example, anti-vaccination ideas are likely to be popular wit…

>be a lot friendlier if they banned criticism of mothers' choices not to vaccinate their kids. Can you perhaps see how this might not be socially desirable? Yes I do, but only because you cherry-picked an example that seems to be an obvious benefit. I want to emphasize again that true free speech includes everything you don't like and all stupid opinions so you can't isolate good examples and ignore bad ones.

You cannot isolate good and bad examples of censorship that easily either, because it denies users information on what information they're being denied. This hypothetical site is hardly going to tell users that it's hiding the fact they're killing their babies from them; it's more likely to frame it as protecting them from industry propaganda, exactly as you argued they should be allowed to. It's only from the outside perspective that this is obviously terrible.

(This is, in my experience, a general principle of site-based censorship. For example, if I had a dollar for every regular of every feminist community who was sure the site moderators were protecting them from the oppressor, when actually they were protecting the site owners from criticism and dissent by women more oppressed than them who they were rather spectacularly failing to represent...)

Re: Imzy wants to be a kinder, gentler version of Reddit

#200

Post by matt4077 »

gtaylor wrote: post #167
matt4077 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you actually /been/ to reddit in the last year? The idea that anything of value is created by this raging mob of hateful teenagers with too much free time is laughable. FFS, they've just spent a month riling each other up about a Clinton/Podesta pedophile ring operating out of an italian restaurant. That may be "challenging" for some of them (because letters etc.), but it's not the stuff the next breakthrough in…

Can you further define "they"? Reddit has hundreds of thousands of communities in it. It seems like you are generalizing the actions of a tiny subset to the whole user base.

I was speaking about the part of the community that would be affected by "censorship", as should be obvious from context, i. e. the post I was replying to. Nobody is talking about /r/askahistorian
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