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Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit

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Re: Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit

#281
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TD is gone for a long time now. r/protectandserve is a reddit for police officers as far as I know? Not sure what's controversial.

lately its been them sharing memes about "why are protestors so surprised when we gas them" and the like

I don't really see how removing the subreddit would make them any less likely to gas protestors though.

Honestly, I'd've thought anti-police-brutality people would prefer them to share such things publicly for screenshotting purposes and etc.

Re: Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ever been to r/science? 8/10 comments are deleted and those posts can't be read ever again Note that this is clearly spelled out in the subreddit rules, and is by design. 8/10 comments on reddit as a whole are jokes, anecdotes, off topic, or simply low quality. /r/science tries to promote high-quality discussion of actual science, does so by heavy moderation, and doesn't pretend they're not deleting most comments.…

> 8/10 comments on reddit as a whole are jokes, anecdotes, off topic, or simply low quality. I would guess that is a significant underestimate. I had one post become reasonably popular, and I was amazed at how awful, low quality, and incredibly redundant the replies were. 99% of all the top level replies were some version of the same low-effort comment.

This is what I miss from the old Slashdot. There you didn't just up- or down-vote comments. You specified if it was "funny" or "insightful" or "redundant" etc. [0]

I could then filter comments by what I was looking for. Between that and the meta-moderation, they did a great job.

I would love to see something similar on reddit. Instead of mindless updoots. Or maybe let me filter out comments that aren't at least n characters long?

(Or, maybe train a classifier to detect puns and hide them :)

[0] https://slashdot.org/faq/metamod.shtml

Re: Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit

#283
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relevant, but I think the timeline is a bit subtler than that. (Mostly, the CEO referenced in that story is Wong himself, not Pao.) - Reddit was acquired by Condé Nast in 2006. - Founders Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman left in 2009. - Yishan Wong became CEO in March 2012. - Reddit raised its Series B in September 2014, led by Sam Altman. Wong was one of the investors. - Wong resigns in November 2014. Ellen Pao beco…

It's interesting how sexual harassment has long-term implications for one's career. You're a VC partner who is sexually harassed by another partner, as a consequence you get pushed out, as a consequence you're forced to take a position at a failing company, as a consequence you're forced to take the role of the fall guy by the failing company's founders, and as a consequence your career in tech is over. It's remarkab…

It's all power and positioning. That chain of events does a good job of explaining how the soft consequences of speaking out (a little less trust from others, not being perceived as the person you actually want to lead) can lead to real outcomes.

It's hard to know for sure how much she knew about when hired, but without what she'd experienced prior, would she have felt the need to take on this role? Was she viewing her career or reputation in need of rebuilding or strengthening, so that's why she entertained this (and if so, was the outcome expected, or did they throw her under the bus)?

Re: Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit

#284
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just scape-goating and finding something recent to blame for a situation that has been going on for 150+ years. Besides, it was effectively shut down, and all that did was lead to the creation of thedonald.win, which by all appearances seems to be thriving and growing rapidly, probably much faster than Reddit itself grew when it was founded. To blame the situation on a forum is to misunderstand that the count…

> Besides, it was effectively shut down, and all that did was lead to the creation of thedonald.win You don't end up on thedonald.win by chance, you go there purposefully. For a long time /r/t_d wasn't quarantined at all meaning anyone browsing /r/all would see their posts all day long (since they were pretty good at mass upvoting their own posts for that purpose). I don't think anyone advocates for entirely banning…

It's not freedom of speech if reddit starts suppressing speech.

There are various other arguments to make, such as the rpevelance of posts encouraging violence that aren't covered under freedom of speech, or that reddit does not have to follow free speech rules in the first place.

Re: Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, TD alone was huge in 2016-2017 and was a huge contributor to the dynamic we have in the world today. Ellen is 100% right here and Alex did absolutely nothing to address it. Good on her for publicly calling it out.

I think if TD were banned in 2016, there's a decent chance the world would look even worse and more polarized today, due to the backlash and chain reactions that would have occurred. Picture "TOP SOCIAL MEDIA COMPANY BANS SUPPORT OF THE PRESIDENT" headlines running for months. Picture Trump bringing it up in hundreds of speeches and tweets, demanding regulation and saying how unfair it is that he and his supporters a…

And? De-platforming works very effectively. Look at 8chan, Gab and Voat. All drowning in server costs trying to host "safe spaces" for certain opinions.

Re: Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was by far the largest online conservative community, and it funneled people into even more extreme communities. I don't really get bringing up the freedom of speech angle here - r/the_donald has always aggressively deleted posts and banned users for expressing anything but complete loyalty to Donald Trump.

> It was by far the largest online conservative community, and it funneled people into even more extreme communities. a) This is such a stretch and you have no evidence to support your claim. b) I'm pretty conservative and know a large number of conservatives and exactly none of the people I know even like Reddit, or consider it a viable "conservative community" at all.

There is a surprisingly large literature of academic literature on Reddit an TD specifically, at least some of which mentions radicalisation, though I've yet to find specific bits.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=reddit%20the_donald&btn...

Work elsewhere certainly expresses and substantiates that narrative: Kate Starbird, Renee DiResta, Samuel Wooley, Kara Swisher, Zynep Tufekci, among others.

Re: Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit

#287
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fiscally conservative, and even trying to discuss those ideas on Reddit has met me with downvotes galore without being discussed. Even while trying to be respectful and open-minded. I gave up after a while. A lot of people can't fathom how conservative ideas would be shunned on there until they actually try to discuss them. Reddit is comprised of a lot of younger people who are indoctrinated to think in certain w…

I'm a libertarian socialist/communist (aka rabid leftist) and even I am often annoyed by how much of a "liberal" (whatever that means anymore) echo chamber reddit is. People who have great points against the hive mind are often downvoted into oblivion. It's less of a place for discourse and more a place for voicing agreement. The worst experiences I've had are in the socialist/communist subreddits themselves. I've be…

I've also been thoroughly confused by a weird form of "liberal" that has infested social media. It's not necessarily left-leaning as in "help the poor workers, unionize, strong manufacturing domestically, etc". It's "offshore everything, maximize profit" damn the workers. It's very much not a left position in the traditional sense.

Re: Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit

#288
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relevant, but I think the timeline is a bit subtler than that. (Mostly, the CEO referenced in that story is Wong himself, not Pao.) - Reddit was acquired by Condé Nast in 2006. - Founders Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman left in 2009. - Yishan Wong became CEO in March 2012. - Reddit raised its Series B in September 2014, led by Sam Altman. Wong was one of the investors. - Wong resigns in November 2014. Ellen Pao beco…

It's interesting how sexual harassment has long-term implications for one's career. You're a VC partner who is sexually harassed by another partner, as a consequence you get pushed out, as a consequence you're forced to take a position at a failing company, as a consequence you're forced to take the role of the fall guy by the failing company's founders, and as a consequence your career in tech is over. It's remarkab…

Keep in mind that it was found that all of her allegations of sexual harassment were completely unfounded and she was likely just trying to get a settlement to help her dire financial situation

Re: Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit

#289
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No the sub doesn't exist anymore. There was an admin takeover and they left it in this odd "technically existing" state for some reason. TD is gone - you can look for stories about it some months ago.

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/gshffi/trump_si... The sub clearly exists, comments are clearly recent, and CovfefeBucks (the most recent mod) is clearly submitting content (linked). Not sure why you insist on gaslighting, but that makes this our last interaction.

/r/The_Donald has effectively been archived and marked read-only. There's no or little activity - the link you posted was an exception - all users have moved over to a third party site.

While one could argue that Reddit should have removed the subreddit sooner, I'm not sure that would have done them any favors (see Streisand Effect.)

They opted to strangle the community slowly, hoping it would dissipate. But it just moves elsewhere, like it always does.

Re: Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's why she was ousted: https://www.wired.com/2015/07/reddit-ceo-ellen-pao-steps-dow... Turns out only allowing speech that you deem acceptable makes for a pretty boring internet forum.

Isn't that Hacker News? I'm assuming you aren't a regular user of Reddit as almost all of the subreddits I've used are heavily moderated?

HN allows a very wide swath of opinions without over-moderation. I've seen arguments commonly from every ideological & political segment, even though HN leans left (because its userbase foundation derives from the Bay Area, which is 95% left leaning). You see Capitalists here, you see Communists, you see conservatives, you see liberals, you see libertarians, you see every flavor of Socialist, you see everything inbetween.

You can argue for most points of view here, so long as you remain within their decency guidelines. Obviously HN won't tolerate certain extreme ideas that involve genocidal camps, killing people, violence or racism, that you might see bubble up out of eg the pro fascist or pro communist camps.

If there are 20 slices in a gradient of political ideology in the US (as an example), HN will allow you to very freely argue 18 of them, only dropping the extreme left and right (both of which commonly involve arguing for murder, racism, genocide, oppression, gulags, forced re-education camps, violence and countless other horrible things).

If you go into the largest political sections of Reddit arguing strongly (but decently) for Trump, you'll get moderated because the mods won't like you. That doesn't happen on HN, Dang will mostly leave your opinions alone (you will get downvoted though), so long as you are arguing in a way that isn't belligerent.

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