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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”

#261

Post by jlawson »

tw04 wrote: post #12
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…

How so? Calling for someone to be murdered is understandably against their policy. As is doxxing someone. The user accounts that upvote the call for murder or upvote the doxxing details KNOW that the post is against their policy and decided to participate anyway. I hate how these conversations always devolve to "well they're just trying to control what everyone says!" as if it's black and white and not shades of gray…

You're forming a motte and bailey argument here... inside another motte and bailey argument.

Motte #1: doxxing, calls to murder specific individuals

Bailey #1: 'hate speech'.

And your bailey itself is a motte and bailey!

Motte #2: speech that incites violence or hate against a given group

Bailey #2: "All lives matter", "It's ok to be white" banned, "#killallmen", "all white people are racist" Ok.

It's always like this. I'd love a pro-censorship advocate to actually advocate what they want instead of endlessly cloaking it in these sorts of smokescreens and sneer labels. If 'hate speech' ever defended all people equally it wouldn't get so much pushback as a concept, but it was always a special protection for groups favored by those in power. Address that.

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

#262

Post by greenhatglack »

conradfr wrote: post #138
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…

Not exactly the same thing but the other day I got banned from r/ADHD for a (moderate from my POV) comment about pronouns. The mod then gloated about banning dozens of people other this and that "LGBTQIA+ people run the subreddit", and that "the lack of discrimination (...) for being cis or being white or being straight or being a man overshadows any discrimination they would receive for their adhd" I don't think tha…

I think your ADHD prevents you from writing coherently. Jesus Christ that was hard to parse and I’m still not sure what you tried to convey.

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

#263

Post by JohnBooty »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #48
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…

The missing component of your thought process is who, exactly, deems subreddits not worthy of existence. Many people view pornography as an extremely damaging problem and addiction, would you want all 18+ subreddits removes because somebody “can’t think of a single honest reason for them existing”?

Ten years ago I would have said, "No censorship. Turn on the firehose of information, and let me choose what's 'acceptable' and what's not."

No more.

That presumes some sort of equal playing field and a meritocracy of ideas.

That's clearly not the case. The reality is that good-faith content takes more effort than bad-faith content.

The 2016 US Election in particular showed us what happens when a platform takes a "hands off" approach - platforms become absolutely saturated with false, hateful information... much of it produced by large and even state-level organizations.

It's not just evident when it comes to political content.

Craigslist. Amazon. Etc. None of these platforms work with a completely laissez-faire approach on behalf of the platform owners. To think otherwise is utterly naive.

Platforms need to curate. There's no other way. Yes, this means we will need to place trust in those platforms and monitor their curation. Platforms will, in turn, have an obligation to be transparent w.r.t. how they curate.

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

#264

Post by root_axis »

rewoi wrote: post #237
root_axis wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok. In my view that's unreasonable. Website operators should have the freedom to moderate their sites without fear of being shut down. Moderation is part of the product, they should have the freedom to create online communities that cater to specific audiences, including with respect to political partisanship if that is where their values lie. It seems unreasonable that all the users that enjoy the site as is should…

removed

> they should also disclose their bias

This isn't a practical idea. People aren't always aware of their own biases and critics are also inclined to see bias even when there is none. There is no practical way to determine bias levels.

> Reddit is very happy to claim they are unbiased, neutral, hate free.

Are they? Can you point to an example of such a claim?

> But some preferred subreddits will ban people for heaving wrong gender or wrong race

Subbredits are run by users.

> They also tolerate hate speech, incitement to violence or even advocacy for genocide , if it matches their ideology.

Reddit would say they don't tolerate those things, you say they do, how do we determine who is right?

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

#265

Post by ru552 »

NietTim wrote: post #158
ru552 wrote: post #130

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 an…

Do you share your internet? I read today that someone got banned because his roommate got banned

I don't. I'm not sure what the reason is. I generally only post nerd stuff in r/sysadmin or r/networking. Oh well.

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

#266

Post by pteraspidomorph »

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…

I have been a redditor for a decade and have a few remarks based on my experience.

I feel like reddit has always had recurring and overlapping cycles of mean spiritedness. For instance, during the summer holiday period it becomes notoriously harder to have a reasonable exchange of ideas there (don't ask me why; I'm not quite sure). This year, since the beginning of the COVID19 isolation period in March, we've been in a period of very high mean spiritedness. It could be a consequence of users' high stress levels.

Reddit does still have several excellent communities. I find that there's one thing in common between them: They have real, dedicated, human moderators enforcing strict, rational policies. Also: There are some weird cliques of power moderators on reddit who control dozens if not hundreds of subreddits. A good subreddit is usually not run by those cliques. Not to discount the hard work that some grunt moderators put into trying to run the large, clique-controlled communities, but the commonalities are hard to ignore.

On upvotes: Reddit should have clear policies enforced equitatively and transparently at the company level, by a human staff, and downvotes shouldn't be presented as the opposite of an upvote. I don't see a complete alternative system that can replace the upvote, though. They do provide different sorting options; what else could they do, there?

On alternatives: People attempt to leave on a regular basis. The problem is that there's a much higher incentive for the people who are ostracized not only by reddit as a platform but by the associated community to leave than for people who are, for the most part, comfortable, even if the administration acts a little weird on occasion. All alternatives are quickly colonized by people that the majority of the reddit community (if there is such a thing) would rather not be immersed in: White supremacists, conspiracy theorists, fanatic nationalists, etc. For the more moderate people to be willing to move, they want to feel surrounded by a majority of people like them, not a minority.

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

#267

Post by cygx »

cmdshiftf4 wrote: post #236
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…

>Reddit is dead and no one I know uses it anymore. It's not dead, and I say thankfully because it not being dead retains its state as a containment mechanism of what is easily the worst group of internet users in internet history. I fear for the day Reddit falls and its userbase spills out looking for another avenue to be comforted with groupthink, newspeak and feel goods for the Brands We Love.

of what is easily the worst group of internet users in internet history.

Oh, you sweet summer child.

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

#268

Post by Fogest »

elpocko wrote: post #160
Fogest wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The post you are referring to was deleted by the user who made the post not the mods.... Not true. The post body says [removed]. If the user deleted it, it would say [deleted].

https://i.imgur.com/pkzrm25.png -- It literally says it was deleted by the user.

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

#269

Post by michaelcampbell »

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…

> Reddit is dead

This is just absurd.

* https://foundationinc.co/lab/reddit-statistics/

* https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/reddit.com

> and no one I know uses it anymore.

You say this as if it is relevant to your point.

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

#270

Post by Fogest »

surround wrote: post #238
elpocko wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The post you are referring to was deleted by the user who made the post not the mods.... Not true. The post body says [removed]. If the user deleted it, it would say [deleted].

Indeed, it was removed by moderators. Here’s the OP’s response: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/h9ctho/serious_a... Edit: another user determined it was both removed and deleted.

https://i.imgur.com/pkzrm25.png
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