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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

#641

Post by ekianjo »

aninhumer wrote: post #631
ekianjo wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> there should be no "safe place" for the exchange of ideas What do you think a "safe space" is? If you are arguing that there should be platforms where people can speak without being shouted down when the audience strongly disagrees with what they're saying, that is a safe space . In order to construct that space, you have to deny some rights of the audience to speak in that context. And this is the whole problem wi…

> If you are arguing that there should be platforms where people can speak without being shouted down when the audience strongly disagrees with what they're saying, that is a safe space. In order to construct that space, you have to deny some rights of the audience to speak in that context.

No, I am not asking for that kind of platforms. I am saying to let people express what they want to say, and the only restriction to Free Speech should be "direct incitation to violence" (such as asking to lynch someone publicly) as mentioned in the US Constitution. Everything else should be able to be said and be heard, and debated between people as long as they want to debate. And of course you will be responsible for what you say, as an individual, and you will have to face the consequences of your words. But it goes both ways.

Restricting Free Speech puts power among the ones in control of Speech. Allowing Free Speech is the only thing you can do to allow even the marginal points of view, even unpopular ones, to be heard.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#642

Post by skrowl »

taurath wrote: post #90
skrowl wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit only used free speech as a draw until it got enough user to make money by pushing agendas. It's been agenda-pushing high censorship for years now, but some people just started noticing around the 2016 US election where they didn't even try to hide their obvious bias anymore. In an age where any opposing opinions are consider "toxic" by some, I don't think trying to "detoxify" should be a goal. If you don't lik…

Its been relatively rare that unpopular opinions offered in good faith are punished with anything other than downvotes on reddit. People don't post opinions with the intent to convince, they post with the intent to deceive or create a reaction, IE trolling. That has been the big wave that has taken over, its just taken the conservative political sphere over far quicker. The other wave is the circle-jerk - a relentles…

It's not at all rare, and it's endorsed by the admins. They LITERALLY changed their algorithm to keep the Donald Trump fan subreddit from appearing in the /all filter and their posts from ever reaching the front page.

When you change your searching and indexing algorithms to suppress fans of a specific politician but not fans of other politicians, that's not really good faith.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#643

Post by dnomad »

kerkeslager wrote: post #639
projektir wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a bad metaphor. If your community is ignoring trolls instead of banning them, it's effectively sending the message that the trolls are very welcome. I've never observed that a no-moderation community is free of trolls, and ignoring trolls often results in them just taking over because they just start talking to each other and everyone else leaves. These things are caused poison because even a small amount ca…

> It's not a bad metaphor. If your community is ignoring trolls instead of banning them, it's effectively sending the message that the trolls are very welcome. I've never observed that a no-moderation community is free of trolls, and ignoring trolls often results in them just taking over because they just start talking to each other and everyone else leaves. Which form of trolls from my post are you talking about? I…

I think you're very confused. The idea that rational people have to engage thoughtfully with irrational bigots is pure nonsense. It is not the duty or obligation of anybody to engage with those who hate them.

The reason we get bigots in office by the way is not because trolls are banned. It's because powerful interested want bigots in office. Bigotry sells. It's very easy to screw people over if you can distract them by having them hate on some out group. It is naive to think that taking with bigots will change this.

And here is the point: social change doesn't proceed through rational discussion. Never has, never will. Real change requires organization and solidarity and protesting and marching and uncompromising demands.

If you want to waste time engaging with trolls have at it. You will find that these people have nothing but contempt for discussion and no interest in being swayed by logic. For the rest of us we have far better things to do and banning trolls and bigots is the obvious choice.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#644

Post by ohtwenty »

zaarn wrote: post #603
austincheney wrote: post #489

Bah, I recently deleted my 5 year account with nearly 4000 comment karma on Reddit. Reddit is toxic. Saying something benign but mildly disagreeable caused some people to get emotional, and I do mean exceedingly emotional like you just crapped in their car and had sex with their girlfriend. I am not talking about politics, but subreddits like javascript and programming . Worse than being toxic, Reddit is an echo cham…

There are definitely reddit communities were this isn't true, though these are largely small community subreddits that focus on some particular topic.

This is often mentioned but the examples for it keep changing—any of the small nice communities that grows too large will become filled with noise and become unpleasant. It's the reason I've been moving to lower-volume/higher intimacy websites recently, hoping to filter out noise. Unfortunately it's not really easy

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#645

Post by [deleted] »

heed wrote: post #586
antishatter wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the somethingawful forums involve a cost to participate, something like a one time $10 fee that was designed to remove low content or negative content participators. Might be an interesting case study of your hypothesis.

Metafilter does this as well. A one-time payment to post along with heavy moderation will remove/keep away most of the toxicity.

[deleted]

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#646

Post by DanBC »

zaarn wrote: post #598
dang wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're not supposed to be used to express disagreement That's a common misconception. Downvoting for disagreement has always been ok on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314 I think people have the wrong idea about HN downvotes because they think Reddit rules apply to HN. It's a bit like how in Canada we think we have Miranda rights because we've seen it on American TV.

I would argue that while it's totally okay to do it, I'd find it better if people used it less for simply disagreeing. In my experience, the resulting discussion ends up being of poorer quality because of it (and less exposure due to being pushed down and hidden once it hits a certain threshold)

Sure, but people have been saying that on HN for many years.

I think you have more success if you ask everyone else to upvote unfairly downvoted comments.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#647

Post by InitialLastName »

jessaustin wrote: post #504
InitialLastName wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like it or not, you can't just beat "undesirable" views out of people, either with schools or social media moderation. You absolutely can. An example: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2012/sep/22...

That is indeed an inspirational example.

I don't mean it to be inspirational, only to indicate that persistent propaganda and organized information warfare can indeed drive ideas fully out of the population.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#648

Post by pixl97 »

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…

>at what cost?

I can see at the cost of making stolen identities worth even more.

As it is websites completely suck at keeping our 'anonymous' identity secure. Our email and passwords are hacked so commonly there are websites dedicated to tracking it. Now you're just adding 'real identities' to the brokered data. Any real trolls will be able to use this data from the dark net pretending to be you. Even worse, since real names are required, any employers will look for you on the internet, they will see your "I'm an anti-gay right wing pro-russian" profiles online and say "you are not a cultural fit for our company". You will have to take the time and effort to clean up what is said about you. Since it's a real identity, it's not going to change, and they already have all the information they need on you.

Good luck in that terrible future.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#649

Post by valeg »

The article reminded me about another proposal of how to fix reddit: http://chuqui.com/2015/07/fixing-or-replacing-reddit-some-qu... I see a problem with this but there are some valid points. Maybe mastodon.social is heading there:

So I wouldn’t host the stuff. But I could build an easy to install environment that would be a standardized system that could be installed on effectively any hosting site. Start with WordPress, WordPress’s P2 theme, a forum plug-in, the Disqus commenting system and a couple of weeks of hacking some custom work, and you’d have something that could be easily installed and run by a non-geek on any hosting service that supports WordPress.

There are big advantages to this: If someone really wants a topic to exist, they can get it going for well under $100 (including domain name) and keep it running for $10-20/mo. Most of these sites will be very low traffic and a lot of them will in fact be pop-up and collapse as people figure out running sites is work and audiences don’t appear by magic — but the good ones will thrive and grow, and for most of these, it’ll be cheap enough to operate that most people can run them out of pocket. By building it as an independent site, though, that person would have the option of doing advertising, or running a Patreon or GoFundMe, or find other ways to pay for hosting the content of the site.

It also shifts the liability for the existence of the content to the owner and host of the site and away from the central authority. If that person wants to find an offshore hosting service that doesn’t care what the content is, that’s up to them. So you’ve removed the need for a central authority to have to censor to protect its own interests.

You still need a way for people to find these topic-specific sites. Enter the central authority. It hosts a directory, much like the original Yahoo! directory was. Building something like this is dirt cheap and easy to host, so someone (like, ahem, Reddit) could do so at low cost so that it doesn’t have to host those subreddits any more but could still support them by hosting a directory of them where they could be found.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#650

Post by Mozai »

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…

I believe the metaphor of "poisonous chemical" has run away with you. Is it about the listener ingesting knowledge that is harmful ("grokking"), or is it about the speaker making a mistake and thus everything that speaker has done / will do is a mistake?
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