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

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#301

Post by mundo » Thu, May 21, 2020, 5:23 PM UTC

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #204

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…

This is almost off topic... but can you explain criddler? I think I’ve spent enough time around people on meth and bicycles to probably understand it - but I just don’t get it yet.

It's an insulting term for scruffy looking people who are presumed to be homeless or drug-using.

The reason it's contentious is that one person uses it, someone else objects to it, people take sides along left-vs-right lines, and the thread devolves in to a shouting match.

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#302

Post by three_seagrass » Thu, May 21, 2020, 5:23 PM UTC

infogulch wrote: post #153

friendlybus wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you are. Social organizers, advertisers, trend setters, ect frequently get free product, kickbacks or some money for their 'work'. That's the work you have done. It's not your intent to do work and it's probably not the pub owners desire to pay for meetup organizers, but regardless of your and the pub owner's intent, work has happened.

Ok, so in addition to the community getting value out of it, the pub benefitted too , that's just called win-win. Why does the pub have to lose in this situation for you to be ok with the result?

They didn't really claim the inverse, just that any form of community organizing inside a private for-profit business profits the business, making it free work for them.

It's one thing to organize a bake sale in a public park, but when you choose one pub over other competitors, and they profit from it, you're doing work for the pub for free.

This is why experienced community managers works with businesses to get prices for the event discounted, or set up an agreement for profits to go towards the event.

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#303

Post by FriendlyNormie » Thu, May 21, 2020, 5:23 PM UTC

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…

No post body was provided.

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#304

Post by joshuamorton » Thu, May 21, 2020, 5:24 PM UTC

NoodleIncident wrote: post #281

jerrysievert wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 differ…

Are you saying that people who live in a similar location don't have a shared interest in that location?

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#305

Post by president » Thu, May 21, 2020, 5:24 PM UTC

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.

Any community with unvetted and anonymous users end up being gamed and filled with various bad actors. I have always thought that a community where people were vetted through multiple forms of verification (e.g. government ID, drivers license, etc) and posted using their real names would instantly improve quality of discourse to some degree. In this way, people would self moderate through shame and real-life reputation. Unfortunately, with this type of system, you wouldn't get a critical mass of users since most people don't want to associate their controversial views/comments with their real identity. On the other hand, the discussions that do take place might be more valuable since they could be trusted and you could get some degree of guarantee that there wouldn't be astroturfing or bot activity.

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#306

Post by javert » Thu, May 21, 2020, 5:24 PM UTC

notadev wrote: post #261

twic wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do you free work for a for-profit social network They don't. They do the work for a community they're part of. The social network hosts that community, and tries to make a profit doing so. I organise a meetup that's held in a pub (well, not at the moment). People coming to the meetup spend money on the pub's beer and pizza. Am i doing free work for a for-profit public house?

AOL would use volunteers, called Community Leaders, to moderate chats/BBSes, etc. They even got perks, like free Internet. I volunteered as a Host Guide when I was 16. CLs eventually filed a complaint with the DoL claiming AOL violated the Fair Labor Standards Act by using non-employees to do unpaid work that could have been done by paid employees. In fact, it's still illegal even if the volunteer doesn't mind or doe…

In your favored outcome, the government intervenes in a way that

a) prevents people who want to be mods, from being mods

b) breaks the way the site works

What gives you the right to do that? Seriously, if you want to live in a nanny state, please, not in my back yard.

I do not want you to be my nanny.

Reddit's moderation problems are not so big that you are justified in putting a gun to other peoples' faces to force them to do it the way you want.

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#307

Post by jason0597 » Thu, May 21, 2020, 5:25 PM UTC

Goronmon wrote: post #52

haunter wrote: 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)

Maybe if mods were more transparent across all the subs. This is a common refrain I've heard going back well before Reddit ever existed. I helped moderate the Vault Network boards for a while back when they were a thing. Its hard to overstate how amazingly...disturbed and vitriolic some of the individuals of a community can be. And dishonest. And spiteful. No amount of transparency helps when all it takes to refute a…

I've been thinking of what I would do if I were a forum moderator and I came to the conclusion that I would have to implement a minutes keeping rule like they do in the actual government. In the UK for example you have the 30 year rule, which says that all the minutes in cabinet meetings get released after 30 years.

Maybe you could keep complete raw backups of the "minutes" (or mod logs in this case). So you would take a backup every 24 hours, encrypt it, and upload it to an independent write-only server (which proves you couldn't tamper with it). And after e.g. 1 year (let's reduce it from 30 years), you would release the encryption key to that mod log backup you made. This ensures transparency and trust.

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#308

Post by tptacek » Thu, May 21, 2020, 5:26 PM UTC

sova wrote: post #290

tptacek wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not stalk and harass moderators.

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

If you believe stalking and harassing moderators is a valid response to anything moderators do, you shouldn't be unbanned.

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#309

Post by munificent » Thu, May 21, 2020, 5:26 PM UTC

castillar76 wrote: post #175

jlg23 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But then some topics veer into domains that make me angry (hello politics), or I find a comment inappropriate or unfair, or mod behavior hypocritical. And I share that in a post that gets flagged or downvoted, and I get banned. Kurt Tucholsky gave great advice on how to write a letter to a government agency that is applicable to all potentially heated discussions: * write letter. * put letter in drawer. * wait thre…

This is absolutely true, and it's unfortunate that the current format of sites like Reddit and HN discourage this kind of behavior. The comments that get the most votes are the ones that have been present the longest, which incentivizes early and fast, "shoot from the hip" commenting so your comments get into the flow early where people can see and vote on them. In most large subreddits, it's basically not worth your…

> The comments that get the most votes are the ones that have been present the longest, which incentivizes early and fast, "shoot from the hip" commenting so your comments get into the flow early where people can see and vote on them.

Reddit's default "best" sorting algorithm is designed to mitigate that effect [1]. It does a good job of not biasing old comments in terms of sort order, but it doesn't help the related problem that older comments tend to accumulate the most replies so newer stuff can still get drowned out in terms of quantity of other content.

[1]: https://redditblog.com/2009/10/15/reddits-new-comment-sortin...

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#310

Post by rellui » Thu, May 21, 2020, 5:26 PM UTC

BitwiseFool wrote: post #6

I downloaded Reddit Enhancement Suite and it has a feature that marks the cumulative amount of upvotes you've given a user when you see a post of theirs. It is absolutely eye-opening just how much content is posted by the same few dozens of usernames. GallowBoob is the most infamous but to focus on him would be a mistake. It's pretty clear to me that the vast majority of content on Reddit is heavily manipulated and a…

Top subreddits are pretty much all like that. The smaller subs are really what makes reddit a great place. Often as the smaller subs grow bigger, I tend to find myself unsubbing from them.