Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies” • Hacker News Board

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

#251

Post by kps » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 5:41 PM UTC

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…

VC News is basically a Reddit clone to show off pg's then-up-and-coming toy language.

• Discourages long-running discussions by burying (and ultimately locking) older content

• Discourages coversation in favour of fire-and-forget comments by making it impractical to continue where you left off

• Gamification of content

• Numerically larger groups can bury content they would prefer others not see

— but slightly worse —

• No notification of replies, making actual discussion impractical

• Extra privileges for conformity (downvoting, vouching)

It doesn't match what pg wrote in http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html but actions speak louder than words.

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

#252

Post by shostack » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 5:41 PM UTC

AlwaysRock wrote: post #172

Jonnax wrote: post #107

I used Reddit a lot back in 2013ish but went off of it. Looking at it now, it feels like that in general the site is really mean spirited. Also upvoting means that you're just seeing whatever the majority of voters want you to see. It works on a smaller community like HN because comments get 10s of upvotes at most. It's not a site for good discourse. However there's communities where there is interesting discussion s…

Reddit's issue is the issue of so many ad supported websites. Clicks sell ads and controversy draws more clicks than anything else. It's been clear over the last few years that the popular subreddits are the ones that have the most dramatic content. Smaller subreddit do tend to have better discourse though until eventually, they get large enough to become popular and start to become the same echo chambers.

First, big brands don't want controversy displayed next to their ads. This is likely behind some moves Reddit has made in the past to clean things up.

Second, I'm curious what % of revenue comes from user-purchased post and comment awards from gold. I've noticed those in use quite a bit in some more inflammatory subs like /r/politics. I wonder how they vet payments from users to avoid providing a way for hostile actors to buy visibility while flying under the radar. Ie. Avoiding conflicts of interest from accidentally monetizing trolls.

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

#253

Post by zozbot234 » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 5:41 PM UTC

bradlys wrote: post #249

jlawson wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Far-left content' and 'hateful content' are not mutually exclusive. Quite the opposite, really. It is amazing how people will redefine hating Trump supporters, men, white people, "the 1%", western civilization etc as somehow 'not hateful'. "My hate isn't hate , I just dislike things that are bad." Right.

> 'Far-left content' and 'hateful content' are not mutually exclusive. Quite the opposite, really. I wouldn't characterize far left content as hateful. Usually it expresses an intolerance for intolerance or hypocritical actions. > It is amazing how people will redefine hating Trump supporters, men, white people Is there even a point to you speaking here? You're like an incel on a women's forum. You've transitioned in…

> I wouldn't characterize far left content as hateful.

You're not familiar with, e.g. tankies, I take it?

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

#254

Post by Meekro » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 5:41 PM UTC

torben-friis wrote: post #22

I don't really get reddit's efforts to clean their site. They sometimes come up with measures like this, while routinely ignoring the development of horrible communities that they're aware of (since some users take any possible opportunity to mention them to the admins and are met with silence or half measures). They even came up with the concept of quarantined subreddits. I honestly can't think of a single honest re…

> Once you've deemed a community so harmful that you don't want people accidentally stumbling into it, why go out of your way to allow it to exist behind a curtain

Since we all know we're talking about The_Donald, I'll just mention them specifically. Alexa traffic data considers Reddit the #6 website in the US -- they are huge, and their major actions will be noticed. If they ban their top pro-Trump community, Fox News will be talking about it later that day. Reddit execs will be answering questions in front of the US Senate a week later. Phrases like "election interference" will be thrown around. Nobody wants that.

So instead they do it subtly: quarantine The_Donald, which means they don't show up in site-wide lists, can't be accessed through the mobile app, and can't be indexed by search engines. This stems their growth. Later, start replacing their moderators. Eventually you've taken it over and shut it down, and they leave. Now if Tucker Carlson wants to tell his audience about it, he has to explain to a bunch of 60-somethings what a "forum moderator" is. Not happening.

Honestly, I think what they did worked out best for everyone. Reddit is happy to be rid of them, and they're happy with their new website, TheDonald.win. Everybody wins.

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

#255

Post by greenhatglack » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 5:41 PM UTC

Fogest wrote: post #105

kache_ wrote: post #27

Reddit has been compromised with actors who do not have free speech in their best interest. The other day there was an illuminating ask reddit post about transexuals who decided to transition back and their experiences. That post got promptly removed by moderators; even though there was no hateful content within it at all. They effectively silenced the transexual population due to an ever so slight conflict of ideolo…

The post you are referring to was deleted by the user who made the post not the mods.... And that doesn't even relate to this topic as what you're referring to is on a subreddit basis and is determined by a set of volunteer mods not reddit admins.

You’re lying.

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

#256

Post by cgiles » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 5:42 PM UTC

cthalupa wrote: post #49

s3r3nity wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it’s also a cesspool or horrible people sharing horrible ideas. I tend to follow Voltaire's ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.' I agree with your assessment of the quality of ideas thrown around there, but I'd prefer a world where the internet allowed sites like that to exist, rather than one that's increasingly owned & distributed by giant corporate conglomerates wi…

There's nothing wrong with Reddit not wanting to facilitate and provide a platform for that sort of content, though. It's a massively popular site with mainstream appeal. They don't want to let that popularity and audience be taken advantage of to spread ideas that are hateful and likely to incite violence. Quarantined subreddits are dumb, but it's a sign that their afraid of the backlash of outright banning them - t…

Quarantined subreddits are analogous to downweighting a particular Facebook post in the FB algorithm: both are a form of "soft" moderation stopping short of outright censorship.

Banning users who vote for Reddit's arbitrarily-defined objectionable content is a bridge even further than mere censorship. Particularly because the users are voting for the content before they know Reddit has defined it as objectionable, by definition, because once Reddit has made that determination, the original post is removed.

> There's nothing wrong with Reddit not wanting to facilitate and provide a platform for that sort of content, though.

The counterarguments to this have been presented so many times on HN.

The most fundamental problem is that there is a motte-and-bailey going on with these defenses of censorship: in theory, Reddit and others are censoring far-right hateful domestic terrorists. In reality, they are also censoring qualified medical professionals from opining on COVID in a manner contrary to the WHO, or people who are not actual climate denialists, but who merely question the precision of particular climate models.

Exactly as any defender of free speech would have predicted, these mechanisms are enacted on the pretext of defending against a bogeyman, but are actually used in practice to impose ideological uniformity and suppress legitimate dissent.

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

#257

Post by isatty » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 5:43 PM UTC

No jedberg comments on this post?

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

#258

Post by luckylion » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 5:43 PM UTC

elicash wrote: post #217

luckylion wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the community would be a subreddit, not the site reddit.com, which is far too heterogeneous to be considered some kind of community.

You'd be surprised what percent of reddit visitors just browse popular or don't do specific subs outside the default. Most users aren't super users.

That's probably true, but people who just look at popular post and aren't engaged in anything aren't really part of any community either, unless we expand community to literally mean anybody that's visiting the site, at which point it becomes somewhat meaningless because it's too homogeneous again.

Terms that have no distinctive power have little value, so while I'd certainly consider them "users", I wouldn't consider them part of the community, much like a tourist staying in a village for a weekend isn't a part of the village's community.

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

#259

Post by haunter » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 5:44 PM UTC

Meekro wrote: post #254

torben-friis wrote: post #22

I don't really get reddit's efforts to clean their site. They sometimes come up with measures like this, while routinely ignoring the development of horrible communities that they're aware of (since some users take any possible opportunity to mention them to the admins and are met with silence or half measures). They even came up with the concept of quarantined subreddits. I honestly can't think of a single honest re…

> Once you've deemed a community so harmful that you don't want people accidentally stumbling into it, why go out of your way to allow it to exist behind a curtain Since we all know we're talking about The_Donald, I'll just mention them specifically. Alexa traffic data considers Reddit the #6 website in the US -- they are huge, and their major actions will be noticed. If they ban their top pro-Trump community, Fox Ne…

But the sub doesn't "exist" for months, no new posts

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/new/

There is a pinned mod message which leads you to the new site but that's entirely out of reddit

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

#260

Post by hn_check » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 5:44 PM UTC

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…

This is an absurd argument that the far right is plying as if they have some constitutional right to push their hateful noise on every site.

The internet is open. If you disagree with Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc, there are alternatives. Of course when the hateful all congregate, the farce of their positions becomes too clear. They need the legitimacy of Twitter or Facebook to ply their nonsense.

As an aside, it's interesting that those far right sites are some of the most fervently moderated, "snowflake" sites. Even The_Donald on reddit was hysterical in its suppression of even a simple question on the truthfulness of some fake claim. Instant comment deletion and account ban. Gab's extreme assertions of their moderation policy are uproarious when compared to its creation (you know - "Twitter silenced right wing voices!")