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Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

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Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#241

Post by pjc50 »

keepper wrote: post #117
_m8fo wrote: post #46

So we've tried: - Real identities (Facebook comments) - Voting and self moderation (Reddit, HN, etc.) - Strong moderation (Reddit, HN) They all result in toxic comments, trolling, an echo chamber,or worse, a complete lack of participation. There's no real solution to this problem. However, if you create consequences or a cost to commenting you'd eliminate toxic comments and trolling at the cost of less participation…

We haven't really tried "real identities". We've come close. Real identities would require verification, which sites like FB only do after the fact. I fear that a huge repercussion of the election issues is that we will get there. A real ID may be required for you to post comments in all websites. And i'm not sure how I feel about that. Reality is that it would drastically reduce comment trolling, if your real identi…

A lot of this is not "trolling" but genuine hate speech. People will post hate speech under their own bylines on news sites, all day long.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#242

Post by jotux »

_m8fo wrote: post #46

So we've tried: - Real identities (Facebook comments) - Voting and self moderation (Reddit, HN, etc.) - Strong moderation (Reddit, HN) They all result in toxic comments, trolling, an echo chamber,or worse, a complete lack of participation. There's no real solution to this problem. However, if you create consequences or a cost to commenting you'd eliminate toxic comments and trolling at the cost of less participation…

I think one way to help prevent echo chambers is to have term limits on moderators. So many moderators become sour towards their own communities but feel an obligation to stay involved. Term limits might help with that and encourage new users to become moderators themselves.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#243

Post by sbarre »

prepend wrote: post #160
siegecraft wrote: post #148

This problem is easy to solve: give users the tools to do their own filtering. But services like to pretend that it's a hard problem because they don't want to actually cede that control to their users. The whole point of controlling the communication networks is to control what and how people say and hear.

It’s surprising how much social media bullshits on this issue. RSS had the standard and solution a decade ago. Being able to filter even by simple regex would be so much better than Facebook/Google’s “algorithm.” But it would allow us to filter out ads. It would also allow for community-driven white/black lists. But again, wouldn’t allow Coke and HBO to make you look at stuff.

Indeed.. Social media users don't get those tools because they are not the customers, they are the product.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#244

Post by daxorid »

mozumder wrote: post #16

Social media sites are learning the hard way that they're media properties like any other media property, and that they have to have strong editorial control over their media property to be a proper media business. Reddit is a hive of working-class populism, which is incompatible with any advertising-oriented business. Advertisers don't want their ads next to shitty toxic content. They want their ads next to elite, w…

> Reddit is a hive of working-class populism

Is this . . . I don't even know how to respond to this. Have you ever spent more than three seconds with a working-class person?

I can assure you that cat memes and intersectional feminism are not mainstays of the working class.

> which is incompatible with any advertising-oriented business

Tell this to the ad agencies selling Busch and Coors Light.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#245

Post by pjc50 »

saas_co_de wrote: post #206
_m8fo wrote: post #46

So we've tried: - Real identities (Facebook comments) - Voting and self moderation (Reddit, HN, etc.) - Strong moderation (Reddit, HN) They all result in toxic comments, trolling, an echo chamber,or worse, a complete lack of participation. There's no real solution to this problem. However, if you create consequences or a cost to commenting you'd eliminate toxic comments and trolling at the cost of less participation…

> Real identities Real real identities (i.e. government issued digital id) have never been done. I am sure they will come eventually. The political process is just very slow compared to the pace of technology.

South Korea tried this for a while, but I believe eventually gave up on it. China effectively manages it transparently.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#246

Post by mozumder »

majos wrote: post #161
mozumder wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a media business, they can be a lot more profitable with fewer high-quality users than hordes of low-quality toxic users. A fashion magazine only has 1 million subscribers, but can make $400 million/year in revenue, basically printing money.

What fashion magazine does this?

Magazines like Vogue, InStyle, Harper's Bazaar might sell 2,500-3,000 ad pages a year, each page costing $100k-$200k. $100-$150 CPM is typical.

It helps to know that it's a $3 trillion dollar industry.

Outside of fashion, you can look at the financial industry that can also charge $100+ CPM.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#247

Post by prepend »

ssully wrote: post #56
ScipioAfricanus wrote: post #8

It's not that the "trolls are winning", it's that people are allowing the trolls to bother them. Trolls have always existed; it's our heightened sensitivity and inability to just shrug them off or laugh in the face of their obscenity that's letting them "win".

Yeah this is bullshit. Trolls have always existed, but shrugging them off was never a solution. In message boards I used to frequent trolls were suspended without question and banned for repeat offenses. Now when trolls get banned there is an out cry from the troll and those in line with them about censorship and violation of their free speech. The problem is trolls are given too much room to play and speak.

For me the issue is the broad application of troll and liberal banning. I was all on board the detoxify train until I was banned from a subreddit where I had posted for 5 years.

I didn’t know what comment or behavior. Messaging mods said that it was obvious what comment and that I was a troll.

This was confusing to me. I never went back. Now I am skeptical of labeled trolls unless I can assess behavior directly.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#248

Post by jjrh »

cpncrunch wrote: post #130
_m8fo wrote: post #46

So we've tried: - Real identities (Facebook comments) - Voting and self moderation (Reddit, HN, etc.) - Strong moderation (Reddit, HN) They all result in toxic comments, trolling, an echo chamber,or worse, a complete lack of participation. There's no real solution to this problem. However, if you create consequences or a cost to commenting you'd eliminate toxic comments and trolling at the cost of less participation…

HN generally works very well. The echo chamber problem is due to allowing downvotes IMO. In my experience that simply leads to minority viewpoints being downvoted. Instead, downvotes should be removed, and people should be allowed to flag abusive comments.

The real issue is binary choice. I might disagree with a comment, but acknowledge it's a valid well thought out argument. On the flip side I might agree but acknowledge it's a poorly formed argument.

Something might be totally off topic or funny, but if I made me laugh do I down vote it?

Slashdot's model of tagging posts was a pretty good idea I think and allowed one to filter out the 'funny' or 'offtopic' comments.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#249

Post by UrukParthian »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #238
UrukParthian wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dangerously minimizing? What's dangerous is a culture addicted to simulating political action by managing online comments. Instead if putting resources to making your local garden great, to mangle Nietzsche of Ecco Homo, people get worked up by actions they have no control over instead of working locally to change conditions where they could have an impact. And you lack imagination and historical hindsight if you thi…

"Dangerously minimizing?" Yes. Pretending that the problem of toxicity is just people who can't handle differing opinions is to be willfully ignorant of the problem. As such, a reasonable conversation can not be had. "And you lack imagination and historical hindsight if you think the concept of "toxicity" can only be wielded by whatever you consider to be the forces of light. So to speak." Nowhere did I say that in t…

You're spoiled beyond belief if you view "toxic" comments online as a serious problem. If it is truly "a problem", then the larger problem is tying your emotions to what anonymous people say. You live vicariously through an image of how offended someone else might be. Instead of tending to the garden you can actually protect and uphold.

Do you think the poor bastards in Skid Row feel better because some (literal) white typed in defense against toxicity?

Do you think someone...Let's say Tim Wise! Do you think Mr.Wise has actually interacted with black communities while he lives in a 98% white neighborhood? Do you think Mr.Wise would help some homeless junkie who's trying to figure out how to work his phone so he can message an estranged daughter on Facebook? That's part of what I did in Skid Row. There are issues of knowledge, skills, and plain diet that would offer much better benefits than speaking out against some notion of "toxicity", created by people who have no skin in bleating their stupid moralism.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#250

Post by fatbird »

ralusek wrote: post #74
wnevets wrote: post #47

Reddit has zero problem leaving post that threaten the lives of an entire religious group on their frontpage. If they were serious certain subs would be nuked.

You realize that is a perfectly reasonable objective for a site to be a mostly impartial, user-moderated forum, right? I don't consider any view I encounter on reddit to be endorsed by the platform. If people want content moderated with a specific slant, just subscribe to the subreddits that suit your tolerance, there are plenty that are heavily moderated. Personally, I love seeing things that I disagree with on redd…

The problem with Reddit is that, while it's not endorsing the content, it is facilitating it. You can let the white supremacists in your neighbourhood use your garage for their weekly meetings and plausibly claim that you're just being neighborly while disagreeing with their purpose. But I'm still going to judge you for helping them out, for making their organizing easier and cheaper, and for smoothing the road for them.

When Reddit banned r/fatpeoplehate and r/coontown in 2015, among others, it actually succeeded in reducing the amount of hate speech on Reddit:

Working from over 100M Reddit posts and comments, we generate hate speech lexicons to examine variations in hate speech usage via causal inference methods. We find that the ban worked for Reddit. More accounts than expected discontinued using the site; those that stayed drastically decreased their hate speech usage—by at least 80%. Though many subreddits saw an influx of r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown “migrants,” those subreddits saw no significant changes in hate speech usage [0]

By making it easy for participants of r/coontown to participate, Reddit actually contributed to the output of r/coontown.

[0] http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf

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