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Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies”

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Re: Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies”

#121

Post by anarazel »

cwhiz wrote: post #111

I don't think Reddit should be able to censor lawful content and also claim protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. If they want to police lawful content that is fine but then they are no longer an open platform and they should forfeit their Section 230 protections. I dislike the ability for online platforms to have their cake of protection against lawsuits and also eat their cake of policing…

The aim of 230 was explicitly to allow doing so. And how would you even imagine this working? Have a bunch of conlaw students judge posts against complex tests?

Re: Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies”

#122

Post by ryankemper »

cheschire wrote: post #33
zeveb wrote: post #6

So, if people don't vote the way the Reddit admins want, the Reddit admins will replace the voters. That is definitely a way to get only the things the Reddit admins want upvoted, upvoted. But it seems to me to be the opposite of free discourse. I can sympathise with the admins, because a) there are a lot of terrible, toxic people b) there are a lot of bot armies. The latter is probably easiest to combat, but it is s…

And people downvote you as a disagreement button on this site instead of qualifying their opinion in words. But you’re not wrong in your opinion and allowing downvotes without requiring a response encourages groupthink as well. But where’s the line? Do we as society mandate freedom of speech on all private platforms? Are downvotes on HN protected speech? You’re right that it’s a tough problem. We are at an inflection…

Even more concerning than using downvote as a disagree button is flagging as a disagree button. It's happened to me many times where my good-faith comments have been flagged due to advocating a minority position (specifically, that the COVID-19 lockdown is harmful, just to give context) and I have/had to e-mail Dang to get a human to look at the flagged comments and determine if they were actually violating a guideline.

Re: Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies”

#123

Post by WalterSear »

haunter wrote: post #109
numpad0 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably they profit from horrible communities and lose on some, and there are no clear distinction between the two, so they started to quarantine less profitable ones to stigmatize before banning them. They’re profiting off anger so “old” ones being angry has no downsides.

>Probably they profit from horrible communities There are no ads in quarantined subs and you can't buy any reddit awards to gift to others

Still drives traffic to the rest of the site.

Re: Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies”

#124

Post by dvtrn »

dageshi wrote: post #115
dvtrn wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine the mods have a fairly finely tuned sense of which threads will turn into a shitstorm and don't give a fuck about pre-emptively killing them. How do we feel about pre-emptive moderation? Is it warranted? Is it warranted every time? Only certain topics?

Ultimately the mods are volunteers, they get to do what they want? More precisely I would imagine they don't care about facilitating/refereeing culture wars inside their subs, cause lord only knows how much work that would be.

Well sure, they get to do whatever they want, you're right. It's their community they're moderating. We agree.

That wasn't what I was asking-however.

Re: Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies”

#125

Post by rplst8 »

cheschire wrote: post #33
zeveb wrote: post #6

So, if people don't vote the way the Reddit admins want, the Reddit admins will replace the voters. That is definitely a way to get only the things the Reddit admins want upvoted, upvoted. But it seems to me to be the opposite of free discourse. I can sympathise with the admins, because a) there are a lot of terrible, toxic people b) there are a lot of bot armies. The latter is probably easiest to combat, but it is s…

And people downvote you as a disagreement button on this site instead of qualifying their opinion in words. But you’re not wrong in your opinion and allowing downvotes without requiring a response encourages groupthink as well. But where’s the line? Do we as society mandate freedom of speech on all private platforms? Are downvotes on HN protected speech? You’re right that it’s a tough problem. We are at an inflection…

Freedom of speech is only about whether what you say can be used against you for government persecution (other than admitting to a crime to an officer of the law).

Therefore, I don't think we can say that posts and replies on the websites hosted by private companies can be considered protected speech.

That said, treating upvotes and downvotes in the same way as the text in a post or reply is a pretty bad idea IMHO.

Re: Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies”

#127

Post by buboard »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #61
buboard wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because competitors exist

Not really. And forcing all of your unwanted/toxic subreddits to Reddit clones only damns them from ever gaining traction. Take a look: https://voat.co/

These sites rely on network effect, which become prominent after a certain threshold of users join the site. If they reach critical mass, they will suck in the rest of the extreme-right, then the republicans then slowly everyone, because people like controversy and will seek to go where they can have it.

Reddit is clearly a leftwing site now in ways that it wasnt when it started (when libertarian was the dominant ethos). All their "common word" reddits, such as news, politics, technology science are purely leftist echo chambers by now. The few rightwing corners left are already isolated and ready to make the move. In fact they may even decide they should jump ship. What better time for /r/t_d to go somewhere else than now, when people's interest is intensely focused in elections and they can easily rally all their users to follow them. Wherever they go, more people of other persuasions will follow, because people love telling other people that they are wrong on the internet.

The question is if those other competitors can stand the traffic and whether they give the features to moderators that reddit does.

Re: Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies”

#128

Post by MattGaiser »

salawat wrote: post #101
MattGaiser wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is an anonymous website, in a unique way that Facebook, Twitter, and even Hacker News (simply because of the small community) are not. A lot of its success is built on content which is not as acceptable as one might desire. See what happened to Tumblr when they cracked down.

Reddit isn't even remotely anonymous. Pseudonymous at best. Anonymous forums are completely incompatible with user identity centric moderation mechanisms (Karma, Gold, rep etc...) Once you assign usernames and attach any type of value counter to an account, you've effectively dumped true anonymity out the window due to essentially creating a pseudonymic marketplace. People may think "How pseudonymous do you need to b…

Anonymous relative to Facebook and all the other social media sites. Sure, having user accounts is not completely anonymous, but it is good enough for 99% of people.

Re: Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies”

#129

Post by fwip »

mullingitover wrote: post #84

> Abusive content is not acceptable on Reddit nor is engaging with it. This is such a fail for Reddit. If the content isn't allowed on the site, it's on Reddit to remove it. The existence of the content on the site implies Reddit's approval of the content, so engaging with that content is a wholly innocent act.

Do you think that every post and comment on Reddit is pre-approved by an employee before it becomes visible?

Re: Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies”

#130

Post by ru552 »

I'm a daily redditor. On Saturday I logged into reddit and found "Your account has been permanently suspended from Reddit." across the top banner. The mod message says I was permanently suspended for repeated violations of the content policy.

The last time I posted ANYTHING on reddit was 21 days ago when I commented on a Schwarzenegger post and said I'd love for him to be president. I appealed it and haven't heard anything.

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