Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment • Hacker News Board

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#281

Post by NoodleIncident » Thu, May 21, 2020, 5:12 PM UTC

jerrysievert wrote: post #212

bredren wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're welcome. > Both of these things can be true at once! I've been on both sides of this. Last year, /r/portland began using the word 'criddler' to describe people in various states of meth-addiction and bicycle thievery. The word was beginning to be used very often to disparage many different types of people. The moderators made a decision to ban it, and the community backlash was supreme. I let the mods have it…

r/portland is one of the worst cesspool subreddits I've seen, and has had a history of really bad moderators over many years. I likely haven't read anything in r/portland since you became a mod, so I can't comment on how it is at the moment, but something about a liberal city draws out the worst in people on that subreddit. but, "criddler" is much older on the sub than "last year", it's been a mainstay for at least 1…

Subreddits for any location go completely against the grain of reddit. The point of a subreddit is to group people with a similar interest, but the people who live in a city don't have that shared interest, they're just in the same place. Even on the bigger side, you end up with this cross section of the entire site, shrunk down and fragmented so that it's too big to ignore the inevitable arguments between the different factions, but also too small for the moderation to be any good.

Since the concept of a city subreddit is so obviously pointless, the only people who stay are the ones who like the conflict, exacerbating the problem; or in worse cases like the Canada subreddit, there is a hostile takeover by one side. If you want to talk to people who happen to live nearby, I think you should do so on a different website; reddit doesn't work at all for that usecase.

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#282

Post by uncletaco » Thu, May 21, 2020, 5:13 PM UTC

I was a moderator on /r/blackpeopletwitter and the amount of racist and outright vitriol we received was fucking insane. There are people out there who really have it out for BPT and we banned dozens of users daily who were legit there to only drop the n word with a hard r and make jokes about monkeys or something.

I deleted my reddit account in a panic after someone sent me a DM saying they knew where I lived and I saw a guy wondering around my apartment complex with his phone out like he was recording. I never want to be highly visible on reddit again.

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#283

Post by tptacek » Thu, May 21, 2020, 5:13 PM UTC

sova wrote: post #126

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…

There is no way to get unbanned on Reddit, even if your first post is innocuously misplaced, there is simply no mechanism to get unbanned. So what do you suggest people do?

Not stalk and harass moderators.

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#284

Post by ranger207 » Thu, May 21, 2020, 5:13 PM UTC

I think the biggest problem with reddit is that the simplest subreddit name is going to attract the largest audience, and if you don't like the moderators or community there, then there's nothing you can do about it. There's only one /r/politics, and if you don't like it then you'll have to move to, say, /r/notpolitics, which is going to have less visibility and a smaller community simply because of its name. What would help would be, for lack of a better term, "namespaced" subreddits. There wouldn't be a /r/politics, there'd be a /r/namespace1/politics and a /r/namespace2/politics, and there'd effectively be no problem with visibility: if someone's looking for a subreddit to discuss politics, then there isn't a default, and you'll have to explicitly choose which community and moderation style you want. The best way to implement this would be a federated reddit, with each server being it's own namespace. If you don't like federated-reddit1.com/r/politics, then move to federated-reddit2.com/r/politics. There'd be a problem with bubbles, but that wouldn't be any worse than what already exists.

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#285

Post by Invictus0 » Thu, May 21, 2020, 5:13 PM UTC

MildlySerious wrote: post #227

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 powe…

I've been a member of centuryclub for a long time, which is for Reddit users with over 100k karma. Gallowboob has been posting photos of his ass on that sub for years and was open about the city he lived in and what he did for work. Its hard to feel bad for him here; he should have known what he was getting himself into.

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#286

Post by Zooper » Thu, May 21, 2020, 5:15 PM UTC

MagnumOpus wrote: post #16

thebouv wrote: post #5

So, I don't get it. Why does it matter if a few volunteer mods manage a ton of subs? Isn't it hard to do? So they have a hard job? And it's volunteer? And .. what? I don't understand the outrage directed at mods I guess. Note: I'm a light Reddit user. I follow a handful of subs. And I can't name a single mod of any of them. Maybe this is more meaningful for people who spend more time on the site and are more involved…

These positions are unpaid volunteer positions. Moderating more than a handful large subs is a full-time job. There is a good chance that a proportion of these people willing to do an unpaid full time job that can direct the attention of a billion pairs of eyeballs have ulterior motives, or are indeed paid by third parties (companies, political parties, governments) to promote or censor certain news/memes/opinions.

It's not a good chance at this point, it's the height of naivety and ignorance to assume that this isn't actively occurring. There's absolutely no incentive for it not to occur and there's significant incentive for it to occur.

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#287

Post by jborichevskiy » Thu, May 21, 2020, 5:15 PM UTC

staycoolboy wrote: post #110

ryandvm wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News suffers from the same problem. We have folks like dang (God bless him) manually dealing with assholes. Seems like we could solve these problems with technology, but here we are two decades into the 21st century and we still have humans cleaning the pools. I'd be interested to know if actual forum moderators think that we could solve the bad actor problem with algorithms...

Hello, bad actor here. I only use Hacker News and Reddit. And I always manage to get banned every few months, so I guess I'm a "bad actor". Usually I start off OK. I can rank up 1000 points on HN or 20k karma on Reddit quickly because some of the discussions are interesting and non-inflammatory and I have interesting things to say. But then some topics veer into domains that make me angry (hello politics), or I find…

> (FYI DanG is a paid mod, not a volunteer, which is probably why he's so calm about it, even though he get's riled too: read the New Yorker article about him)

If anyone else is interested, here it is:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...

Some interesting stuff in there, though I would love to read more about the behind-the-scenes tools they use to search and keep track of everything.

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#288

Post by Gene_Parmesan » Thu, May 21, 2020, 5:16 PM UTC

sasasassy wrote: post #95

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…

I have never used reddit, and just know that "karma" is a type of points system like here on HN. Could you explain why you personally are interested in accumulating karma by "karmawhoring"? I ignore the points system in HN too, but I think it's main function is to ban bad actors. So I don't understand on the other hand why someone would accumulate points unless they mean to later spend them on "bad actions".

I'm not saying that everyone who seeks high karma scores is like this, but astroturfing PR/advertising firms will pay real hard cash for accounts with an established history of trust from the community. I've read many stories from people who have gotten private messages from such places with an offer to buy their account. Or perhaps, like gallowboob, you want to parlay it into an actual social media gig (UNILAD for him).

I do believe for most people though it's just a sort of fame-seeking thing, for whatever reddit 'fame' is worth.

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#289

Post by thejynxed » Thu, May 21, 2020, 5:17 PM UTC

charwalker wrote: post #233

Quekid5 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 everyo…

Benefit of the doubt, I could see removing quality content by a PITA user and reposting to keep that content alive without feeding the user, but at that point the system seems broken enough to step back and re-access entirely.

He was caught red-handed doing it so he could get the karma. He was called out by the orignal poster who was not just the original poster, but the creator. He proceeded to ban that user and anyone who commented in support of that user.

I feel zero sympathy for gallowboob whatsoever.

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#290

Post by sova » Thu, May 21, 2020, 5:17 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #283

sova wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way to get unbanned on Reddit, even if your first post is innocuously misplaced, there is simply no mechanism to get unbanned. So what do you suggest people do?

Not stalk and harass moderators.

How will this result in an unban? Nobody ever gets unbanned. What you said is emblematic of the problem.