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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

#291
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>how meaninglessly violent people become when their posts are modded Maybe if mods were more transparent across all the subs. Most people get angry when someone removes their post and yet they see it reposted and approved hours or even minutes later (Gallowboob is infamous for that but regular users do it too)

>>how meaninglessly violent people become when their posts are modded > Maybe if mods were more transparent across all the subs. Does the latter really justify the former? If you disagree with a moderation decision, take it up with them politely. If you consistently disagree, maybe this community just isn't for you! Mods are just people donating their time. Even if they're inconsistent or "corrupt", there's no reason…

What if you take it up with them politely and this is their response? https://imgur.com/a/jhmGXzJ

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#292
GallowBoob tells a sad story, but the fact remains that they and a few others had far too much power. They were arguably also spread far too thin. So altogether, I'm not sad to see them go.

Also, their behavior deleting posts and banning users over discussion of this issue has been egregious.

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#293
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…

We are solving these problems at - https://district.so . Dealing with trolls can be draining and it's a plague for a good community. We working on solving that. @bredren Would you want to lead /Portland District?

You don't describe your product or service on the site.

As such, this is spam for a vague mailing list.

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#294

This is your signal to build the thing you were thinking about. So much money on the table for anyone that can reinvent, but allow easy migration from that once great site.

If someone's going after this, my killer feature would be user-driven moderation/filtering. That is, what I see should be determined by me, not some moderator or the hivemind. Almost certainly this would need an AI element to learn what I want to see. Potentially there could be a "people like you" assist to that.

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#295
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…

I think one of the major failures of social businesses on the Internet is that their business need for massive user growth forces them to upend basics of social interaction that we have taken for granted in the real world for eons.

If you create a new subreddit, anyone can show up and participate. Good actor or bad.

Can you imagine if you threw a physical party and let every single stranger in the world literally walk in your front door, wander around their house, and do what they want? You'd be a honeypot for thieves and vandals.

On the Internet, they don't take your physical stuff, but they harm the online equivalent: your information and attention. Every popular online forum is likewise a honeypot for scammers, shady advertisers, griefers, and other malcontents. Why wouldn't it be?

The typical suggested option is massive policing, but that's really hard in a world a bad actor can don a near-perfect disguise (create a new account) in an instant.

I would love to see sites like Reddit and Twitter adopt a model closer to real-world social interactions: something like a web of trust where you need to be invited to participate in a space and where there is some level of vouching for you. But those kinds of businesses don't scale well so we almost never see them.

Another option would be to force something like real identities. The reason a bar can get away with just a couple of bouncers is because a bad actor can't as easily escape the consequences of their actions by shedding their identity. But, of course, requiring real identity gets in the way of good actors who use anonymity for good reasons (generally avoiding other bad actors).

It's a hard problem, but it makes me sad that almost every business just ends up doing "let everyone in and accept that there's going to be shitbags all over the place fucking it up for everyone".

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

People blame FB for social media woes, but I feel that FB is different from the other social networks in that it’s the world you fully curate and manage. If FB is giving you grief, that’s people on your green list giving you grief. If you need FB to come in to manage that, then you’re basically saying you can’t even handle the agency involved in freedom of association.

I half agree with you. If the "grief" that Facebook is giving you is from you not liking the posts you're seeing, then yeah, unfriend some people and move on.

Censoring private chats (among plenty of other sketch practices) is something entirely different though. I never foresee myself wanting to send "joebiden.info" to a friend on Messenger, but the fact that Facebook has decided I'm not allowed to seems problematic.

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#297
post #62
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…

This is a really interesting insight, thanks. There are roughly two views on moderators. Moderators think that moderators are the thin green line protecting the ordinary users from a handful of bad actors, letting them live in blissful ignorance of the awful things that are happening. Ordinary users think the that moderators are power-mad bullies who ban and delete as they see fit, with no accountability. Both of the…

Having been a moderator of a large, 60k-ish person subreddit for a couple years, I can assure you that that's not the case: removing spam and other obvious rule breaking (sending users death threats, racial slurs, etc) took no more than a few minutes a day. Well over 90% of my fellow moderators' time was spent exceeding their authority: harassing people they just disliked, removing posts for personal biases, and so on.

It's a job that attracts that sort of person, people who just want things to function smoothly will get fed up with it quickly, the only people who stay at it will be the ones who want to mold the community to their vision (whether it wants to be molded or not).

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#298
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This problem is really easy to solve. Make your forum invite-only and have a ban on a user revoke the ability of the person that invited you to invite new users. Do not make the links between who invited whom public. It's for moderation only. You can still have throwaway accounts for commenting on things and the overall community will be increasingly more civil.

> Make your forum invite-only > You can still have throwaway accounts How can both of these things be simultaneously true?

Say you or a friend has an account in good standing. Get an invite link with a unique token. Sign up with the link.

Done. The inviter doesn't know the username of the invitee. It's only visible to the moderation team who invited whom.

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#299
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…

Yikes. I am the moderator of r/Metric among other medium sized reddit subs. It turns out there are people who really hate the Metric system and see it as part of a globalist conspiracy. All of the behaviour you describe is familiar, though thankfully hasn't risen to the level where police needed to be involved. Our worst offender has thankfully recently focused on Brexit and left us alone.

I totally agree that lack of response to ban-evasion has been a problem. Even Wikipedia does better than Reddit at managing user bans.

The amount of damage that bad actors can do on reddit is disappointing. It also doesn't seem to be getting any better. In the 9 years I have been modding the same problems are still present.

The poweruser situation is also frustrating. The reddit moderation system and the ranking of moderation power by seniority really encourages cabals. It has been tough to resist on some of the subs I moderate for them being taken over by power users. You invite one mod to help with spam or problem users and all of a sudden you have 5 more mods, all of who moderate dozens of subs. Slowly the power users move towards top mod position and they never bring in fresh mods, only other power users. They will also try to remove any existing top mods to entrench their control. The system is killing the democratic nature of reddit by concentrating moderation into a narrow group. Given reddits position that moderators effectively own the community it makes it very difficult to resist this kind of takeover. My advice: never invite anybody who is already modding more than 100K users in other subs to be a mod on your sub.

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#300

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…

Yup. A long time ago I was mouthing off in a sub about gallowboob. He threw a shit fit and had the admins ban me.

The whole site is rotten, and completely opaque. They say one thing, and do another. Fresh blood is something reddit sorely needs.

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