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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’

#381

Post by sli »

minimaxir wrote: post #40
Reedx wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some subreddits where they are hidden for a period of time (not sure how long, but it's quite a while). I wonder if anyone has analyzed those?

A formal statistical experiment was done in /r/politics about the impact of hiding vote counts temporarily but it did not find statistical evidence that it made an impact on discourse: https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/mitmediala...

Was /r/politics given a vote-hiding feature that other subreddits didn't have? Votes and downvote buttons are typically hidden with custom CSS that users can disable, which would completely invalidate these results. Votes can be hidden for real for a short time, but cannot be disabled completely.

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

#382

Post by cookiecaper »

pascalxus wrote: post #345
lghh wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google search results have been getting steadily and measurably worse over the last several years I have an inclination to agree, but how is that measurable?

Someone needs to build a search engine that does'nt depend on page rank. Page rank is the thing that filters out 99.9% of the internet: it's the millions of pages you don't see that could potentially have better answers in it. Now, surely, there's a lot of junk in that 99%, but I'd be willing to bet there's a lot of gold nuggets in there too. Google's fundamental assumption and it's biggest weakness is that: Excellen…

I don't know how much Google realizes it, but "walled gardens" are a fundamental threat to the quality of their search. Since most "normal user" internet activity is now locked up behind login pages on Facebook, the value of PageRank grows more dubious by the day.

This leaves institutional and commercial websites as the corpus of "open content" available for Google to index/test, and while they are sometimes useful, the incentives are much less straightforward when you bring in money and organizational politics.

Depending on the organic voice of the users who were publishing personal web pages and just wanted to discuss their interests and share the best information available got Google where it was, but now that lifeblood is locked down and thoroughly controlled by Google's competitors. Nowadays, many hobbyists and small businesses even forgo the web site entirely and just operate out of a Facebook page or group.

Worse still, open forums typically either completely disallow links with accurate anchor text or explicitly tell search engines to ignore them with rel=nofollow. This makes PageRank even less valuable, because the shared URL is not associated with link text. Some forums will transparently place anything containing a URL in a moderation queue, leaving no information at all for a search crawler to extract (ostensibly to prevent spam, but I've found in practice it's more often used by niche forum operators to block out competitors and get higher prices for ads; you can even see this on reddit, as many subreddit mods configure AutoModerator to filter any URLs pointing to unapproved domains).

Google was designed for the web as it stood in 1999. It's not 1999 anymore. Sadly, hyper-aggressive legal restrictions like the CFAA and the RAM Copy Doctrine mean that a useful search for the 2018 web is unlikely to materialize (at least in the U.S. or countries that impose similar restrictions).

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

#383

Post by nemild »

IAmEveryone wrote: post #353
nemild wrote: post #151

I've been actively working on a media literacy guide for engineers, contributions welcome: https://github.com/nemild/hack-an-engineer (Think Reddit influences so much of engineering thought from things like r/learnprogramming to all the cryptocurrency subs)

This is just a collection of stereotypes of journalism that are already commonly believed among the tech crowd. Just one example: it’s insulting and hurtful to any quality journalist (ie at the NYT, WSJ, or Economist) to suggest that their reporting is motivated by personal financial incentives, or their employer’s.

I'll respectfully disagree. Financial incentives influence everyone, including the editors at top publications who are constantly looking at what is read, watched, and shared to decide what to invest in and feature.

You might really like "All the News That's Fit to Sell" which is written by a media economist that digs into how market incentives influence coverage (he's the director of the journalism program at Stanford). There's lots of discussion as well about media coverage decisions in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election at even the national networks.

This Cecil the Lion example at the Washington Post has always been illuminating to me: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/17/business/where-clicks-rei...

Even at the top publications, financial incentives influence choices. It's not as malevolent as someone paying off a journalist.

For example, at most top tier newspapers, there is an incentive for "if it bleeds, it leads". This is an economic outcome, as this elicits the most reader interest and also increases profitability. (See my data analysis on this in the NY Times: https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html )

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

#384

Post by uhtred »

TearsInTheRain wrote: post #368
baby wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright. I’ll reply to the troll. How are weapon manufacturers not responsible for the deaths caused by their toys? What baffles me is how intelligent people want to live in a society where everybody carries weapons.

They are not responsible in the same that car manufacturers are not responsible when one of their toys gets driven into a crowd of people.

Cars are not designed with the sole purpose of killing people though are they?

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

#385

Post by dictum »

TearsInTheRain wrote: post #367
ctlby wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that these "hate speech" venues have caused deaths is thrown around quite often, but I wonder if a connection has been found in even a single case. Gaping chasm between rhetoric and reality.

I wonder how many lives have been saved because hateful people on public forums had their views challenged and were able to change themselves.

My idealistic younger self would like to believe many people have done so on different issues, but what I've been noticing on the sidelines is that it seems to be working the opposite way: people are reinforcing beliefs and acquiring beliefs they didn't previously have by way of conforming to ideological purity ("you're part of the problem", "if you do X stay away from me") or cynical pragmatism (centrism/compromising as a thing for "cucks").

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

#386

Post by komali2 »

stale2002 wrote: post #320
komali2 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that same logic, reddit is allowed to outright ban all right-positive content, correct? It's not the right's safe space, after all.

But they aren't doing it. So if you don't like the fact that reddit supports free speech, you can feel free to leave. Reddit is fully within its right to support free speech. It is the reason why it is successful.

Weird, that sounds a lot like the billboards I used to see in South Carolina along the lines of "if you don't like [guns, god, trucks], you can GIIIIIIIT OUT!"

Are you telling me I shouldn't be exercising my free speech right to argue that reddit should remove alt-right subreddits? Are you placing barriers around acceptable free speech?

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

#387

Post by webkike »

TearsInTheRain wrote: post #368
baby wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright. I’ll reply to the troll. How are weapon manufacturers not responsible for the deaths caused by their toys? What baffles me is how intelligent people want to live in a society where everybody carries weapons.

They are not responsible in the same that car manufacturers are not responsible when one of their toys gets driven into a crowd of people.

The reason that guns were created was to fire high powered projectiles into people. Cars weren't created to run people over.

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

#388

Post by str33t_punk »

rst wrote: post #377
ctlby wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that these "hate speech" venues have caused deaths is thrown around quite often, but I wonder if a connection has been found in even a single case. Gaping chasm between rhetoric and reality.

Here are a few off the top of my head: the death of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville last summer, the nine people killed by Dylann Roof in Charleston, and the two killed by Jeremy Christian in Portland Oregon after they interrupted his anti-Muslim rants. Note that the perpetrators in all these cases are on record as citing racial, ethnic, or religious hatred as motives for their acts.

You are being incredibly disengenious.

For all these cases, there it is not shown that they going to online forums radicalized these characters and caused them to kill people.

Just as you would not say there is blood on Black activist forums hands because that one radical guy killed all those cops last year.

Unless there is a clear link that people in these forums are encouraging terrorism, the forums are not responsible

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

#389

Post by seunosewa »

TearsInTheRain wrote: post #368
baby wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright. I’ll reply to the troll. How are weapon manufacturers not responsible for the deaths caused by their toys? What baffles me is how intelligent people want to live in a society where everybody carries weapons.

They are not responsible in the same that car manufacturers are not responsible when one of their toys gets driven into a crowd of people.

I think the difference is that guns are designed to cause deaths. Cars are not designed to be in accidents.

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

#390

Post by projektir »

haberman wrote: post #376
projektir wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The comments here have this mentality of "there are people with different opinions from me, why don't these websites deal with these opinions". It's dangerous thinking that can be applied to your opinions. It has nothing to do with opinions. It has never been about opinions, and you know it. It has to do with antisocial behavior . Antisocial behavior is inherently hostile and doesn't deserve a platform, which has b…

> It has never been about opinions, and you know it. It has to do with antisocial behavior. It is my genuine belief that presuming bad faith (as you have done here) is one of the most common antisocial behaviors that people don't even admit is antisocial. It is toxic to the civil exchange of ideas. It's even mentioned in the Hacker News Guidelines ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ): "Assume good fai…

> It is my genuine belief that presuming bad faith (as you have done here) is one of the most common antisocial behaviors that people don't even admit is antisocial.

The bad faith is on the person responding. The post literally starts with "The comments here have this mentality", how is that not bad faith? Then they construct a strawman.

You want to give that power by acknowledging it with a response? It's the same problem as "it was about ethics in journalism".

Someone implying ignorance on a topic they should not have any ignorance on is acting in bad faith. There's no way people do not realize, at this point, in such large numbers, who is being kept out, or meant to be kept out. It was never unique, special opinions. It was always trolls, sexist and homophobic language, etc.

The issue is that some people think that language IS valid and SHOULD be included but can't straight up say that because nobody would support them in that case.

But this has never been about free speech, nobody prevents you from starting up your own website and promoting your agenda on there, if anything, that has gotten easier, as has already been obvious from the proliferation of problematic fringe communities (in case I need to define these think Stormfront or flat earthers).

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