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Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

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Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#221

Post by EamonnMR »

snazz wrote: post #80
nsilvestri wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a little over half a million karma, about 200k from posting links. I think it's incorrect to suggest that the "vast majority" of content is manipulated. You see the same names because they understand the game of karmawhoring. If you have one link which can fit in multiple subreddits and your goal is to get as many points as possible, you post it to all the relevant subreddits, repeat for every other link you h…

Is the value of Reddit karma purely psychological? I know that you can sell accounts with high point values for significant sums of money, but I'm confused what the actual value is aside from the little dopamine rush you get when something is upvoted.

Do not underestimate the value people will place on a little dopamine rush.

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#222

Post by Quekid5 »

txcwpalpha wrote: post #60
BitwiseFool wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a moderator you have the power to control what people see - subscribers and visitors alike. To me, it's easy to see how moderators with an agenda can curate content to match their views. It also wouldn't surprise me if some moderators are compensated - under the radar - by influencers and marketers.

>It also wouldn't surprise me if some moderators are compensated - under the radar - by influencers and marketers. In GallowBoob's case, he's admitted before that posting on reddit is his job. He used to work at Unilad, getting paid by his company to promote viral shit all over reddit. I think now he's moved on from Unilad but does the same stuff at other companies. It's pretty egregious that reddit admins allow him…

To add to that, he's been accused of deleting posts, then reposting the same links/content without attribution. If you're watching closely I imagine it's pretty easy to see if a post is starting to gain a little traction and just... do that.

He's also been accused of lots of other shitty and possibly illegal behavior. I will say that evidence of this may be disturbingly easy to forge since it's all digital and everyone can use Ctrl+Shift+I in their browser. However, one redditor did mirror a nude which GallowBoob had allegedly posted to minors. I can personally attest that the photo itself definitely exists, but the circumstances around who it was sent to, etc. is... cloudy at the very best.

(Incidentally, I went to look at his profile to check up, but it turns I've blocked him ages ago. Good riddance.)

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#223

Post by Zaak »

e2le wrote: post #154
soylentcola wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't think of a world where I would trust such a system (or trust anyone to create/run such a system). Is this just for websites? Or does it encompass all use of the Internet? At least as far as websites or individual platforms go, this is exactly what accounts, moderation, and "banning" already attempt to do. We've seen how difficult and expensive this is to scale when your site gets as big as Facebook or Reddit.…

Perhaps a potential solution is POW based registration, registration is slow and CPU heavy. I don't think it's likely there is going to be a perfect solution to this and might be that it's better to slow down bad users and make it expensive to ban evade.

That's a very interesting idea, though it wouldn't significantly affect people with vast resources such as botnet owners, corporations, and governments. It would certainly slow down the garden-variety troll, however the determined troll would just keep a core burning to create a steady stream of sock puppet accounts.

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#224

Post by jldugger »

bredren wrote: post #15

I am a freshman moderator of /r/portland. I had thought working as a moderator would be a great way to help grow the subreddit's base. Offer more useful real world interaction points and basically have a big impact on Portland. Instead what I've found is that 99% of the time the moderators are dealing with bad actors and that has to be the primary focus to keep the sub from falling apart. It isn't just dealing with t…

> performing anti-ban-evasion

Honestly, this is something Metafilter did pretty well: the five dollar account fee makes a ton of abuse tactics more costly to deploy, while simultaneously funding efforts to combat it.

It would go a long ways I think to at least allow mods to restrict subreddits to read-only for unpaid accounts.

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#225

Post by syshum »

Goronmon wrote: post #140
syshum wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I am sure that occurs, I have been personally banned from several subreddits not for rules violations, or violence comments, but because the moderator simply disagreed with my comment or I was harsh in my commentary against the product the subreddit was about, for example a certain web browser subreddit banned me because I talked badly about a policy of that web browser I have much more experience in dealing wi…

Just to provide the other side of this. Imagine seeing a post exactly like yours, literally word for word, with the same civil tone and all. Except the user in question had been banned for posting a tubgirl (its gross) image by a moderator that happened be female and had responded in private messages on a clear alt account (minutes after the ban with the same IP address) calling that moderator a slut who deserved to…

Not sure how that invalidates the equally if not more common occurrence of banning based on philosophical, political or other disagreements with the moderation staff

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#226

Post by Goronmon »

valuearb wrote: post #195
Goronmon wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to provide the other side of this. Imagine seeing a post exactly like yours, literally word for word, with the same civil tone and all. Except the user in question had been banned for posting a tubgirl (its gross) image by a moderator that happened be female and had responded in private messages on a clear alt account (minutes after the ban with the same IP address) calling that moderator a slut who deserved to…

Imagine treating a civil poster as if they were a jerk, just because a different civil poster once turned out to be a jerk.

Its' not about treating people like a jerk, just that you learn quickly to never trust a person at face value when they say "I didn't do anything wrong" because that's usually the first and most common phrase a person who does something wrong uses.

I was merely pointing out that the "public" persona a user portrays doesn't have to match the truth.

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#227

Post by MildlySerious »

While this whole situation is a mess and nowhere near black and white I'm sure, painting Allam in particular as a victim is leaving out a lot of detail.

He is not only known for being a reddit power user, he's also infamous for abusing his mod powers, and being provocative and elitist towards people calling him out, mocking, trolling or banning them. He took over and wiped out a sub that tracked his abuse of mod powers. On the big subs he's controlling people got banned frequently for calling him out, long before this more recent drama. These whole theatrics have been going on for years. I've been targeted by him in the past, sadly I can't dig it up because reddit's comment history only goes back so far.

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#228

Post by ChainOfFools »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #183
unclebucknasty wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this problem is bigger than Reddit and focuses on lack of enforcement for digital actions that would qualify as genuine crimes of harassment if translated into the physical realm. Part of the problem is that online communities rely on the fallacy that, because most people are good, such communities can thrive with some reasonable amount of guidance. But it only takes a relative few people acting in bad faith to cau…

You make a good point. All online posts are equal, and that's a terrible thing because on popular sites a shouty bad actor looks just as credible as a real expert - especially if the former relies on dogwhistle rhetoric, deliberate confusion, and superficial point-scoring, and the latter is trying to respond with facts and reason. Good moderation can keep out bad actors and promote an adult and civil tone, but it's i…

> but it's insanely time-consuming and expensive.

one of the few cases where online and offline worlds converge on a common modality to deal with common fundamental inputs. you don't know the valence of a new group member until they choose to reveal it to you, when it most favors their leverage.. This (among other things) tilts the odds of successful group influence in the favor of the new comers. Freedom isn't free and all that.

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#229

Post by charwalker »

MattGaiser wrote: post #120
1024core wrote: post #92

Reddit just hasn't scaled well, and it looks like the operators of Reddit have no interest in scaling it properly. Case in point: the moderation system. Now, if you're passionate about some niche topic, and create a sub for it and become the moderator, then fine; you rock. Things work well for you and your subscribers. But if you're a sub of a large interest area (say, the country of India). How do you moderate there…

> Reddit just hasn't scaled well, and it looks like the operators of Reddit have no interest in scaling it properly. Has anyone scaled online moderation well? Facebook, Twitter, Stack Overflow, etc. all struggle with moderating their communities.

This was my thought as well. There is no efficient AI like modding, even Google/YT can't get it to work well enough to leave alone, at least not yet. A responsible human tasking with modding can only scale so far before more humans must be found, and the more you need the lower quality the you are likely to drop to based on resources.

When your site or system generates lifetimes of content each day the scale becomes insane.

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