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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

#331

Post by ep103 »

gowld wrote: post #273
prepend wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And Usenet and email had the solution a decade or two before RSS. The march of progress is in dumbing things down so the average person doesn't have to think, and the intelligent person isn't permitted to think.

Harrison Bergeron

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#332

Post by felixgassner »

_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 believe that heavy moderation is necessary to weed out toxic stuffs.

HN seems to be doing a great job in that regard (in my opinion) and it is a model with which other websites can learn from.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#333

Post by ionforce »

enraged_camel wrote: post #267
Tiktaalik wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is not actually strong moderation. Forum communities with actual strong moderation, eg. Something Awful, ResetEra have near zero issues with hate speech, Nazis and other things that reddit has let fester.

I'm a regular on Something Awful. One of the major factors that keeps it relatively clean is that user registration costs $10. That's a strong financial disincentive against trolling, bots, etc. I really believe that successful online communities of the future will have paid signups.

The other factor is not being shy about banning people. Heavy moderation.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#334

Post by anigbrowl »

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…

Reality is that it would drastically reduce comment trolling, if your real identify was viewable and searchable by all you know.

I don't think it would. Lots of people post horribly objectionable material under their own names on a regular basis, depending on their level of financial security, peer group, and social milieu.

What makes a "normal" person take an alter-ego/view/counter view, solely based on lack of face to face interaction...

Some people are horrible, and are just as unpleasant in real life as they are online.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#335

Post by anigbrowl »

egypturnash wrote: post #310
gowld wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MetaFilter is more of a non-forum than an echo chamber. There's almost 0 discussion; people go there for the links, not the conversation.

Have you ever... looked at the comments on MeFi? Some posts get lengthy, complex discussions, on subjects related to the link at hand; some do not. There is also Ask MeFi, where you can ask questions and get answers from other users (ads shown against this section to visitors without an account used to be a major portion of MeFi’s revenue until Google did some stuff that lowered MeFi’s search ranking). And there’s Me…

I was a member there for years. There's a community, which is highly normative, but they also resist implementing threading or commenting by reference precisely to keep the focus on submissions.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#336

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

bluGill wrote: post #302
shaki-dora wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The analogy of food nicely shows that some sort of race-to-the-bottom does not necessarily occur: there’s still organic or other high quality fresh food even though McDonald’s has been around for a while. Similarily, there are still excellent news sources. The Economist is often cited in these discussions, and the New York Times is also vigilant in their reporting and the correction of errors when they occur[0]. What…

Organic food is not higher quality. Organic just means they cannot use some arbitrary list of farming practices, (some good some bad). Sure McDonalds is not good, but there is also plenty of organic that equally bad (or worse).

> Organic food is not higher quality.

That depends. Sometimes European organic veg is preferable to Chinese industrially farmed veg when your local supermarket offers only those two choices. This is definitely true of garlic: Chinese garlic tends to be notoriously bitter and lack juice, but Spanish organic garlic is very sweet, pungent, and juicy. Now, the fact that the European organic choice was made according to the limitations of organic farming may well be irrelevant to its goodness, but there is a strong enough correlation with quality to guide consumers, and it was likely chosen by your supermarket as an alternative to the Chinese imported product precisely because they wanted to cover the organic segment.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#337

Post by pbhjpbhj »

dalbasal wrote: post #316
gdubs wrote: post #150

We tend to think we’re more in control of our behavior than we actually are. That is, our brains are operating from habit a large amount of the time, and the idea of the CEO brain consciously deciding our every action is largely an illusion. This is why emergency exit doors must open outwards. People have died in fires in theaters trying to push on doors that said “Pull”. The crash bar on an emergency exit door is wh…

This is an insightful analogy. To stretch it a bit, I'd say there's an important difference between a fire door and reddit. The fire door knows its job is to prevent people burning to death. Reddit... does it know it's job is to prevent outraged reaction? I think this is one of the things that made facebook so problematic on politics, it can't tell the the good likes, comments and shares from the bad ones. I'm not su…

>Reddit... does it know it's job is to prevent outraged reaction? //

Ha, ha, ha.

Cause that'll increase pageviews.

Outraged reaction is exactly what all news media is going for because people rant and rave and in passing see more adverts. It's just they want to sanitise the topics according to their advertisers wishes.

Reddit doesn't have non-censorship values, it's heavily censored; not all from the top admittedly, but the sanitisation that's gone on in the last few years is huge as Conde Nast have moved to make it a more tempting platform for advertisers.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#338

Post by mywittyname »

enraged_camel wrote: post #267
Tiktaalik wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is not actually strong moderation. Forum communities with actual strong moderation, eg. Something Awful, ResetEra have near zero issues with hate speech, Nazis and other things that reddit has let fester.

I'm a regular on Something Awful. One of the major factors that keeps it relatively clean is that user registration costs $10. That's a strong financial disincentive against trolling, bots, etc. I really believe that successful online communities of the future will have paid signups.

Also, SA's userbase consists largely of older, tech-savvy people. It's been around for nearly 20 years now and I bet their registration peak was ~2004 (:files:). So it's pretty likely that the median age of a poster there is ~35-40.

I'd totally pay $10 for a less shitty reddit clone.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#339

Post by floren »

I can't wait for the word "toxic" to drop out of favor. It implies that the person is not just giving a bad opinion, but is in fact fundamentally flawed and dangerous. Arsenic isn't toxic because it had a bad day at work, arsenic is by its nature a deadly poison and you can't change it, only avoid it. The vast majority of people labeled "toxic", though, are just humans with a variety of opinions and beliefs, some you may agree with and some you surely disagree with. They may change these beliefs, but not by being vilified and told they are intrinsically bad.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#340

Post by pbhjpbhj »

InvisibleCities wrote: post #159
gdubs wrote: post #150

We tend to think we’re more in control of our behavior than we actually are. That is, our brains are operating from habit a large amount of the time, and the idea of the CEO brain consciously deciding our every action is largely an illusion. This is why emergency exit doors must open outwards. People have died in fires in theaters trying to push on doors that said “Pull”. The crash bar on an emergency exit door is wh…

>This is why emergency exit doors must open outwards. People have died in fires in theaters trying to push on doors that said “Pull”. The crash bar on an emergency exit door is what’s known in design as an affordance. Is this true? I always assumed it was because it's pretty much impossible to pull open a door when you are being crushed by people pressing against one another trying to escape.

AFAIK you're correct, a vertical handle is an affordance to that indicates a door should be pulled, but the reason is mechanistic. A crush of people will open the door with a push-release but won't with a pull handle - whilst the handle affords pushing some numpty will try and pull it but the people behind them will soon ensure that they push the door, with their broken ribs if necessary.
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