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‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

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Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#131

Post by glogla »

AimHere wrote: post #60
rightos wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Admins do nothing to prevent extreme moderation as occurs on there from deleting any comment with an alternative viewpoint. Yet it appears quite consistently on the front page with only agreement in its comments section.

It's not as if there aren't meme-heavy right-wing subreddits who do something similar. r/the_donald was all over the front page for a long while, and has a notoriously strict moderation policy. It's just that the right wing subs just don't happen to be as popular right now - or they get banned for lack of moderation and for having their members advocating extreme violence (like r/physicalremoval). latestagecapitalism…

[flagged]

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#132

Post by alehul »

psychometry wrote: post #76
jamiegreen wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Favourite subs you would recommend?

Ones about things you are interested in...

I'm interested in politics, however /r/politics has awful comment quality and isn't a great sub to visit.

I'd also like to hear about people's favorite subreddits in terms of comment quality, as I'd happily read a passionate and informative stance on something I'm usually not interested in compared to what I read on /r/politics.

Edit: I meant to use it as an example -- I'm actually interested in any type of subreddit, I meant to explain! So thank you for the suggestions and I'll definitely check them out :)

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#133

Post by rjtavares »

SeanLuke wrote: post #107
austincheney wrote: post #4

Reddit wouldn't be so toxic if the vote counts were hidden, but echo chamber validation is the ultimate badge of honor there. There is so much in this document that applies to all things Reddit (please note that I wrote it inspired by my time on Reddit) : https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Avoiding_Tr...

Fundamentally the problem, I think is anonymity. On the Internet no one knows you're a dog. I have both pseudonymous handles on reddit and also I go by my own name. On Hacker News I only go by my own name. And I have found that it made me a much, MUCH better person when posting. So now I post on reddit about 95% of the time under my own name as well. When you have no skin in the game -- such as your reputation to uph…

We've seen with facebook that have real names doesn't improve the level of discourse that much.

I think it's the protection (or at least the apparent protection): you can't be a jerk in person in a public place without exposing yourself to immediate negative repercussions. That's why online forums with harsher moderation are usually much better (one of the best examples being /r/askhistorians).

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#134

Post by brandmeyer »

abnry wrote: post #17

I think there is a very important distinction that needs to be made. The popular reddit experience is vastly worse than the customized reddit. It took me a while to realize that my reddit experience was vastly improved once I was very picky about which subreddits I follow.

This is both a blessing and a curse.

I think that fine-grained subreddits naturally tend towards echo chambers, because it has become easier and easier to find and interact with people that think just like we do.

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#135

Post by StevenPaul »

SeanLuke wrote: post #107
austincheney wrote: post #4

Reddit wouldn't be so toxic if the vote counts were hidden, but echo chamber validation is the ultimate badge of honor there. There is so much in this document that applies to all things Reddit (please note that I wrote it inspired by my time on Reddit) : https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Avoiding_Tr...

Fundamentally the problem, I think is anonymity. On the Internet no one knows you're a dog. I have both pseudonymous handles on reddit and also I go by my own name. On Hacker News I only go by my own name. And I have found that it made me a much, MUCH better person when posting. So now I post on reddit about 95% of the time under my own name as well. When you have no skin in the game -- such as your reputation to uph…

Yes, but that needs to be balanced by the distorted form of reputation people get even when they are polite and thoughtful due to the lack of any emotional channel in text-based web forums. Add to that the fact that in real life, people have many sides to their personalities, which are inhibited or eccentuated in different contexts; but the impression the web gives of people lacks those contexts.

Then, consider the good that anonymity has allowed for; think of all the things people have able to speak out about anonymously which would have gone unsaid.

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#136

Post by fnord123 »

brandmeyer wrote: post #69
ggregoire wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, how did it work before adding the subs? A single board like HN, but without any specific topics? It seems crazy. I can't imagine Reddit without subs.

Actually, it was very much like HN is today, or as /r/programming is today. As an ordinary user, I thought that the creation of subreddits was a clever solution to the Eternal September Problem. The initial pool of users were folks that were sniped away from Slashdot and Digg. There was quite a bit of frustration about the editorship of Slashdot, and having a system that was effectively user-edited was quite attracti…

>The solution was to split off new user groups into more specialized subgroups. The initial set of subreddits were effectively curated by Reddit itself, based on the categories of stuff that was showing up in practice. User-generated subreddits didn't come until later.

Everyone wanted tags for posts (myself included), and when they announced subreddits, there was a lot of belly aching. I thought the choice of using subreddits was a technical one to make the site more easily partitionable but they gussied up the reasoning behind the concept of communities. I think they made the right choice.

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#137

Post by alex_young »

cup-of-tea wrote: post #116
SeanLuke wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fundamentally the problem, I think is anonymity. On the Internet no one knows you're a dog. I have both pseudonymous handles on reddit and also I go by my own name. On Hacker News I only go by my own name. And I have found that it made me a much, MUCH better person when posting. So now I post on reddit about 95% of the time under my own name as well. When you have no skin in the game -- such as your reputation to uph…

I disagree. Anonymity allows you to express unpopular views that you wouldn't be able to in real life. But the existence of downvoting basically defeats that, except in unpopular echo chambers, of course.

What if your unpopular view you wouldn't express in real life is something abusive towards others? i.e. trolling.

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#138

Post by so33 »

UncleEntity wrote: post #126
wvenable wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like a right-wing contingent has taken over the moderation of a lot of smaller subreddits, specifically city/country subreddits, and both the content posted and the commentary reflects that. It's a dangerous trend for both society and reddit itself.

> It's a dangerous trend for both society and reddit itself. Wouldn't squashing the voices of the "right-wing contingent" just lead to an (already implied) echo chamber of leftist thought? Your one single comment sums up the problem I have with user-moderation systems like reddit (and HN).

>Wouldn't squashing the voices of the "right-wing contingent" just lead to an (already implied) echo chamber of leftist thought?

That implies it's only possible to be "right-wing" or "leftist".

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#139

Post by eeZah7Ux »

Synroc wrote: post #9
darepublic wrote: post #5

What I can never reconcile with is that when mainstream media means 'toxic' they are never referring to the /r/latestagecapitalism plastered all over the front page of reddit. They protest the fact that somewhere, hidden from popular view a minority of people hold a different view from the extreme leftist one.

What’s wrong with r/latestagecapitalism?

Asking that question on HN got you a lot of downvotes. Interesting.

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#140

Post by SeanLuke »

rjtavares wrote: post #133
SeanLuke wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fundamentally the problem, I think is anonymity. On the Internet no one knows you're a dog. I have both pseudonymous handles on reddit and also I go by my own name. On Hacker News I only go by my own name. And I have found that it made me a much, MUCH better person when posting. So now I post on reddit about 95% of the time under my own name as well. When you have no skin in the game -- such as your reputation to uph…

We've seen with facebook that have real names doesn't improve the level of discourse that much. I think it's the protection (or at least the apparent protection): you can't be a jerk in person in a public place without exposing yourself to immediate negative repercussions. That's why online forums with harsher moderation are usually much better (one of the best examples being /r/askhistorians).

> We've seen with facebook that have real names doesn't improve the level of discourse that much.

Yeah, okay. How about: real names + no private gardens.

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