Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet • Hacker News Board

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#561

Post by intended » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 6:48 AM UTC

ASalazarMX wrote: post #54

overcast wrote: post #2

The only way to detoxify the internet, is to get rid of the "social" aspect. Starting with gasp comments. My online experience has been that much better, since adding comment blockers to my browser.

Reddit has a large user base and a myriad of subreddits where different solutions have been tried. So far, the best I've seen is strong moderation: clear rules and swift enforcement. AskScience is a shining example of a high quality subreddit, although the comment section usually looks like a graveyard with 90% of the comments removed.

Its also a narrow topic subreddit with a specific goal.

That kind of moderation works under those environmental conditions - similar how some drugs work on certain types of body types and fail in others.

Other topics which are broad and have little general boundaries tend to get a lot harder to define.

Classic example would be where does porn stop and art begin?

In forum terms - politics, general opinion topics have more subjective moderation.

---

Overall though, I agree - manual moderation is pretty much the best way to go forward.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#562

Post by TeMPOraL » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 6:49 AM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #375

floren wrote: post #339

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…

There are in fact system dynamics in which specific behaviours are unhealthy. Toxic, if you will. Consider these, generally, hygiene factors. There are substances which are toxic in specific concentrations or circumstances , which are otherwise healthy: oxygen, CO2, water, vitamin D, salt, nutritional iron. Certain forms of discourse. My view increasingly isn't that there are things , but interactions or behaviours .…

> My view increasingly isn't that there are things, but interactions or behaviours. A thing isn't, but is what it does or how it behaves.

The "belief in things" is itself a cognitive simplification we make, probably for the sake of efficiency. To use a programming analogy, toxicity as a concept is a function of at least three arguments - toxic(what, to-what, context) - but we attach it as a label to the first argument and store it there.

Compare e.g. with beauty, itself a function of at least two arguments - beautiful(what, to-whom). But we usually assume to-whom = "human like me", and stick the whole thing as a label on a thing, because 99% of the time, that's the correct thing to do (incidentally, the quote "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" is literally a reminder that the concept of beauty is a function of multiple values).

Confusing the "arity" of concepts seems to be the cause of quite a lot of misunderstandings between people.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#563

Post by hnuser1234 » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 6:51 AM UTC

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?

Says who? Let's get a little more objective first. Its job is to make money, presumably, if not encourage participation by any means necessary. Its job isn't to moderate. Its job is to allow the creation of sub-communities that can be moderated in any conceivable way. Most moderators aren't interested in reducing reactionism, they're just interested in reducing whatever they or their community doesn't like.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#564

Post by timcederman » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 6:52 AM UTC

scubadude wrote: post #543

timcederman wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it's designed to open outwards because when there's a crush of people, there's no room for the door to open inwards. Also, affordances aren't to support habit or unconscious behavior. Affordances are to imply meaning or how to use something by their design (whether digital or physical).

> Affordances are to imply meaning That's actually called a signifier. https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/94270

I disagree. A signifier gets into semiotics, but more explicitly. e.g. the word "push" is a signifier, but a large bar that makes it seem like you can push it is a perceived affordance.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#565

Post by intended » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 6:53 AM UTC

ufo wrote: post #502

gowld wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is until it starts to leak. It doesn't really leak, not until the honeypot gets shut down and the denizens are forced to hangout elsewhere.

Someone made a quantitative study about the /r/fatpeoplehate ban recently and their conclusion was that the honeypot theory isn't valid and that banning hateful subs causes a reduction in overall hateful behavior instead of just shuffling it around.

This was the study - http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#566

Post by ekianjo » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 6:55 AM UTC

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…

> Free speech is also problematic, when taken as 'all speech is equal.'

Free speech is not problematic, as long as everyone has the right to speak and falsehoods can be debunked - there should be no "safe place" for the exchange of ideas, whether they are good or not. Starting by saying that 'free speech' has a problem is a very, very dangerous place to go to.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#567

Post by intended » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 6:57 AM UTC

thomastjeffery wrote: post #352

InclinedPlane wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that reddit is one site. You can live in other "neighborhoods" on reddit that are not /r/the_donald, but you are still forced to live in the same city. That means people from there will show up in all of the other sub-reddits, voting and commenting away and twisting every single part of the site to be what they want. It's exhausting to put up with, and if you don't notice it then count yourself lucky.…

> It's exhausting to put up with It would be more exhausting to put up with a system of censorship. There will always be people around you that say or do things that you do not appreciate. Getting offended at them is something you do to them , not the other way around. The more we act like people have power over us, the more power we give them.

This theory has long since met with reality and lost.

I mod - and it turns out that trolls target groups of people.

So for example seeing a bunch of posts targetting women, or minorities, is going to go ahead and affect people who have been abused for being parts of those groups.

Indiscriminate massed assaults are extremely hard for people to deal with - and even if I am not the target I would expect myself to step in, or some authority to step in.

So yes, in a very real way they have power over a large number of people, just the same way you have power over someone weaker or more vulnerable than you.

The old chan philosophy worked on a smaller net, if it even worked then.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#568

Post by TeMPOraL » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 6:58 AM UTC

hnuser1234 wrote: post #560

TeMPOraL wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Thus I think "value" exists only in the eye of beholder, and trying to objectify it would only mean dismissing the values of part of the audience and emphasizing values of some other part of the audience. And yet we need to do it. As you observed, "way more people value rants than measured, polite discussion", and I'd claim that this is a problem . The "value" may be subjective, but the consequences of both "kinds…

What if I don't believe in trying to control people at such a low level? What if I think people should be allowed to be as ranty as they want without having to worry about being "disincentivized"?

Then I'd like to talk with you, see if you have an alternative way of keeping the society from self-destructing.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#569

Post by smsm42 » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 7:00 AM UTC

tmuir wrote: post #555

smsm42 wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the opinions expressed in this subreddit make me believe that these people are preparing for a violent insurrection, full stop. What makes you think so? I've looked at it (admittedly, didn't spend too much time) and it looks pretty standard fare for a subreddit - or any other forum like it. It's slogan is "BE LOUD. BE HEARD.". People that are preparing violent insurrection don't want to be loud and heard. They want…

I mean preparing for violent insurrection that they believe is about to be started by someone else. I don't think they are planning to start it. So many of the posts are alluding to events that are imminent. My fear is not that the logical progression of this group is a pre planned and executed terror attack of some kind, but that they are being radicalized, and are not far off from a mob of Manchurian candidates. Pe…

That may or may not be true that they are expecting doomsday of sorts, but there are a lot of conspirologists which predict imminent doom literally for decades, and when it never comes they aren't bothered by it even a little. If that day will never come - and most likely that's exactly what would happen, if history teaches us something - there wouldn't be no other harm done than a bunch of folks wasting a lot of time on the internet talking about stuff. So far mob violence was a rather rare occurrence in political demonstrations, actually - and one that happened lately was mostly driven by antifa. That's pretty much the only movement right now that openly uses mob violence and achieves some political success by it - cancelling speeches, shutting down events, etc. Are there any other examples?

I see a lot of explanations - especially on the left - how expressing certain views is akin to violence. If we had tons of actual violence happening - or clearly imminent to happen - we wouldn't need any speeches about how words are similar to violence. It would be clear to us that there's actual violence and there would be a lot of pointing to it instead. So, I take it as a sign that there's actually not much violence to be pointed at, if we are pointing at words instead.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#570

Post by throwaway84742 » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 7:00 AM UTC

abvdasker wrote: post #480

throwaway84742 wrote: post #102

Aside from the degenerate cases like “kill all white men” or “liberalism is a mental disorder”, one man’s “toxic comment” is another man’s “common sense”. And as frustrating as it may be to SV digital overlords they don’t get to decide which is which, at least not without unpleasant repercussions down the line. So there’s really no way to solve this. There is a way to contain it somewhat: create homogeneous bubbles.…

Or, rather than giving up or "creating homogeneous bubbles" instead you could look at things on a case-by-case basis as Reddit is doing. At the end of the day the privately run company does get to decide whether content warrants removal or not since they are running a business and advertisers don't like advertising in a space associated with extreme or harmful content. They also have an incentive not to take the mode…

Trouble begins when you try to define “harmful” content outside the most egregious cases. Politics inevitably creep in. Worse, these days some people think that “words are violence”, that being offended gives them any rights (and thus creates the vicious cycle of being offended by more and more inane things), and that everyone who voted for Trump is a Nazi. How far are you willing to go, as a private company, to please your advertisers? And how far will your user base allow you to go before deserting en masse?