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Study finds Reddit’s ban of its most toxic subreddits worked (2017)

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Re: Study finds Reddit’s ban of its most toxic subreddits worked (2017)

#91
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I don't support voat or gab. I was just describing what happened. The problem with reddit is that it's wildly inconsistent about banning subreddits. Subreddits like these can exist for years, but only will get banned once they start to become popular enough that they start to get noticed.

That sounds perfectly consistent to me. Stuff that doesn't matter gets ignored. Stuff that does gets the attention of staff, who then apply rules. It also sounds reasonable to me. At small scales, especially with novices, it's good to let people experiment, find their voices, build the right audience. But once something's of a certain size, it's unlikely to change its character much.

> it's good to let people experiment, find their voices, build the right audience.

That's not how subreddits work, though, since they require a a name and almost always have mods that shape the content. /r/waterniggas at 300 people is basically the same at 20,000 people. So if the rule is subreddits should not have "nigga" in the title, then all subreddits with that name should be quarantined (or not allow the names to contain that word).

Subreddits don't tend to change topics or "voices" but they can and do worsen in quality. Instead of posts with original concept C being upvoted, posts with content similar to C but not really get upvoted by the more general audience that comes with larger subscribers. I think /r/bonehurtingjuice is a pretty good example. At first it was excellent but now basically any anti-joke (which is different than bone hurting juice jokes) gets upvoted there.

Re: Study finds Reddit’s ban of its most toxic subreddits worked (2017)

#92
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a disingenuous excuse for people to use a racial slur anytime someone mentioned the word “water” to the point where it appeared almost any time someone used the word in any context for any reason. It’s ridiculous how many people can’t control themselves when they think they have a thin excuse to cover their terrible behavior.

I'm not American but I've been told the word nigga is not the n word. Do I have a wrong impression about it? I'm surprised a bit because the mainstream music is filled with the word nigga but also the n word. Isn't it workings against the idea of not using these words?

It's contextual. Many slurs have been reclaimed by the communities that they have been applied to.

E.g., as a mild example, terms like "nerd" and "geek" were pejoratives that were adopted and reworked. E.g., Geek Pride: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek_Pride_Day

As with most of these slurs, positive in-group use is ok, but negative out-group use is still generally seen as abusive. I might talk about my geeky ways or refer to my fellow geeks. But I'd still bristle at non-geeks using the term in its original pejorative sense.

The N word is of course much more extreme given America's ugly, unresolved history around race, but it's the same rough deal.

Re: Study finds Reddit’s ban of its most toxic subreddits worked (2017)

#93

It "worked" only if the definition is "it removed it from Reddit". As the article mentions, these people did not just disappear or change their mind. They just moved to more obscure places, where they can continue and be evem more motivated, because now they have been censored. And you might still consider this to be a satisfiable definition for "it worked". Out of sight, out of mind. Except that, these people are no…

I think having extremists in the open improves their recruitment rates and leads to greater number of extremists. Ideas, good and bad, need a medium to spread.

It's not the idea that is dangerous. I can hold multiple incongruent ideas in mind to compare them. It's the experience that get's me at an emotional level, that may change my opinion. Well, ideas may inform the intdrpretation of an experience, and holding an incongruent set of ideas, the reaction may be arbitrary. Arguably if one idea can take hold, then because the tendency was already there, latently.

An extremist is, by definition, someone going to extreme ends to reach a goal. I don't think that holding an extremist's opinion is directly extreme. Having extremist ideals just makes for a latent extremist. That's radical, not extremist. That's still tendentially bad, anyhow. But so is ignorance, and so someone knowing only one side of an argument is merely ignorant, not necessarily latently radical. Ignorance doesn't need a medium to spread. Quite the opposite, it needs barriers. YMMV though, as bias is such an important topic in learning. It might count as barrier as well, if figuratively speaking.

Re: Study finds Reddit’s ban of its most toxic subreddits worked (2017)

#94

It "worked" only if the definition is "it removed it from Reddit". As the article mentions, these people did not just disappear or change their mind. They just moved to more obscure places, where they can continue and be evem more motivated, because now they have been censored. And you might still consider this to be a satisfiable definition for "it worked". Out of sight, out of mind. Except that, these people are no…

> It "worked" only if the definition is "it removed it from Reddit". As the article mentions, these people did not just disappear or change their mind. They just moved to more obscure places, where they can continue and be evem more motivated, because now they have been censored. What about all of the new people who would have more easily stumbled into those cesspools, but now have to take quite a bit more effort, an…

I would like to see evidence that “deplatforming” actually reduces hate globally instead of simply moving it elsewhere, because I haven’t seen any, and until then this is simply an unfounded belief (i.e., “bullshit”)

Re: Study finds Reddit’s ban of its most toxic subreddits worked (2017)

#96
post #53

It "worked" only if the definition is "it removed it from Reddit". As the article mentions, these people did not just disappear or change their mind. They just moved to more obscure places, where they can continue and be evem more motivated, because now they have been censored. And you might still consider this to be a satisfiable definition for "it worked". Out of sight, out of mind. Except that, these people are no…

>It "worked" only if the definition is "it removed it from Reddit". There are plenty of people who thought that it wouldn't work to that extent, either. They claimed that allowing a subreddit for toxic topic X at least had the benefit of segregating proponents of X; and that if such subreddits were banned their inhabitants would infect the rest of Reddit. But that didn't happen. I remember when posts from r/FatPeople…

Well, FPH-style posts were banned across-the-board because they were held to be leaks of privacy-sensitive material, and harrassment. But somehow, /r/fatpeoplestories suddenly got a lot more popular. Also somehow, /r/peopleofwalmart is still up...

(inb4: "found the Walmart shopper"!)

Re: Study finds Reddit’s ban of its most toxic subreddits worked (2017)

#97
post #46

It "worked" only if the definition is "it removed it from Reddit". As the article mentions, these people did not just disappear or change their mind. They just moved to more obscure places, where they can continue and be evem more motivated, because now they have been censored. And you might still consider this to be a satisfiable definition for "it worked". Out of sight, out of mind. Except that, these people are no…

By pushing it to the underground you by definition make it harder to access, and as you've said it becomes more extreme and thus less appealing - even repellant - to a mainstream audience who stumbles across it. This is what we want.

So instead of creating a bias with counter arguments at the same level, you make an abstract argument biasing the bias at a lower (or higher?) level, for lack of a better word. That's kind of the irony I was looking for in my previous comments, though not quite as I had put it. Very well.

Re: Study finds Reddit’s ban of its most toxic subreddits worked (2017)

#99
post #65

Collective response to those who claim that it pushed those users to other platforms: Only marginally. If you read the paper ( http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf ), you can see that ~20% of the users of the banned subreddits became inactive vs 10-15% in control communities. The difference for users that deleted their account is of the same magnitude. The users that stayed had a dramatic drop i…

> The users that stayed had a dramatic drop in hate speech. Which might mean that they don't engage in hate speech as much, or that they do the hate speech thing on another platform and follow their normal hobbies on reddit.

Not really. Page 9 has a graph of the activity before/after the ban, and the drop in activity (in post/day) matches the number of accounts that became inactive.

If those users found other outlet for hating, they didn't do so by reducing their reddit activity.

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