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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

#441

Post by wave100 »

3pt14159 wrote: post #182
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...

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.

How would you account for people being invited, then immediately creating a bunch of alternate accounts to hand out to people/use for nefarious purposes later?

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#442

Post by bsanr2 »

twic wrote: post #62
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…

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…

This assumes good faith tested to the point of cynicism, on the part of the police, when it's been shown time and again that police are indoctrinated into a regime of institutional bias from the moment they enter the force.

I see the logic in your statement, but it's an imperfect model.

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#443

Post by jimbob45 »

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…

4chan seems to have a superior system wherein there are a small number of mods who take recommendations from a large, churning group of janitors. These janitors can only suggest bans and must follow a template for each of their ban recommendations. However, the janitors can delete posts/images at will (reversible by mods).

Thus, the system is both evenly-applied (most of the time) and highly scalable.

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#444

Post by kthejoker2 »

magicalhippo wrote: post #235
3pt14159 wrote: post #182

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.

That would work. However it could also make the community hard to grow. I surfed HN for years before I decided to make an account, and even now I don't really know anyone else using it in my circle. I guess I might have found someone if I asked around, but it would definitely raise the bar.

Making communities hard to grow is a feature not a bug.

Let us read our Shirky:

https://web.archive.org/web/20050615082335/http://shirky.com...

A well-tended community is constrained by things like Dunbar's Number and SNR ratios.

Soft forking is a common response - IMO reddit is the closest social platform to "getting it right", although it should do a better job of pushing low-value content (/r/politics, etc) down into the "minor leagues" of subreddits.

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#445

Post by cambalache »

loceng wrote: post #158
staycoolboy wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've long argued that the downvote is terrible for civil discourse, I've had to tread carefully and be warned many times when I comment on it - including writing in-depth constructive criticism and not simply whining. It's strange to me that especially on a technology forum discussing the negatives or pitfalls of certain mechanisms is being suppressed, censored - just like with politics, as politics is inherently int…

The downvote/upvote count thing should be informative, and the display preferences based on user's choice. I find the HN practice of dimming downvoted comments downright Orwellian.

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#446

Post by pas »

Goronmon wrote: post #169
friendlybus wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 'criddler' word seems humorous. Is there any particular need to ban it outright? These kinds of neologism happen all the time in real life and we ask people to 'tone it down' or give some other social signal that the joke has gone too far. The social feedback is immediate with breathing room, nobody is ejected from social areas, but you know they might be eventually. The joke naturally deflates as the last dregs…

The 'criddler' word seems humorous. Is there any particular need to ban it outright? From my experience in the past, moderating doesn't scale at all. So you basically have to pre-empt issues that tend to lead towards requiring mod actions. An example of this would be the auto-mod stuff on Reddit (though I don't have any experience with the specifics here, just assumptions). Another approach is to root out the "trigge…

Usually the problem is, that you don't want to ban the user, but the behavior. And - reddit being mostly a textual thing - it is represented by words. Banning the user is unfair, plus they can just create a new account anyway.

So you try to be alert for people who use certain phrases. Racism, xenophobia, conspiracy theories, paranoia, extreme pettiness, severely abrasive attitude, choosing beggars, and so on.

And flame wars, and people jumping on others. And of course if there is a group of people showing such unwanted behavior it takes no time for the powder keg to go off.

I think having sort of simple but a big ambiguous rules are okay if there are very broad but exact rules too. (Eg. Rule1: don't be a dick, Rule2: no harrassment, no xenophobia, no posting of personal information, etc.)

Moderators and the community should be proactive. (I find that the best tool is reports, because that signals what people find problematic. Sometimes they are just annoyed that some newcomer posted that again. That's okay, but most of the time users report spammers, crazy serious racists with too much time, and the occasional lost redditors' posts.)

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#447

Post by [deleted] »

jimbob45 wrote: post #443
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…

4chan seems to have a superior system wherein there are a small number of mods who take recommendations from a large, churning group of janitors. These janitors can only suggest bans and must follow a template for each of their ban recommendations. However, the janitors can delete posts/images at will (reversible by mods). Thus, the system is both evenly-applied (most of the time) and highly scalable.

[deleted]

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#448

Post by scollet »

eganist wrote: post #399
scollet wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You shouldn't be seeking relationship advice from random strangers or a reality show in the first place. Given that no one is a verified counselor the sub is largely redundant at best, knowingly harmful at worse. It is rife with low-effort karma farming, and toxicity, among the defaults.

Largely true with two caveats. 1. We're trying to keep the subreddit as accessible as possible to people with nowhere else to turn. This is 𝐇ard. 2. There's at least one verified crisis counselor who frequently comments - u/ebbie45. We've verified their credentials.

I stand corrected.

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#449

Post by maest »

tptacek wrote: post #385
sova wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all what I said, I asked how will passively sitting by result in an unban? You are simply confirming the fact that there is no way to get unbanned, even if the moderators made a mistake, or if the person wants to actively participate. Reddit basically says if you get banned you must make a new account if you want to participate in that board still. So it's natural people make lots of accounts. Is there a mecha…

Stalking and harassing moderators won't get you unbanned; instead, it confirms that there should be no place for you anywhere on Reddit.

Hi, quick question - do you think stalking and harassing moderators will get me unbanned?

Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

#450

Post by sova »

koheripbal wrote: post #391
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?

Create a new account?

It's against the TOS! What are you, a savage?!
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