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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”

#371

Post by redxdev »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #359
redxdev wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anonymous is probably the wrong term, but I'm not sure there's a better one. I think the point is that there's a distinct disconnect between your profile on Reddit (and any other sites you share the username with) and your physical person, at least up until the point where you (ideally) make the connection public yourself if desired. It's anonymous insofar as the "person" on reddit is not easily attributable to the p…

> Anonymous is probably the wrong term, but I'm not sure there's a better one. There is one. It was used a couple comments up. Pseudonymous. It's an actual word, not just made up.

Ah yep, I glossed over that somehow.

My point stands, though - despite the misusage of the word anonymous there's a real difference between how facebook treats identity and how reddit does. And it massively affects how communities in both interact.

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

#372

Post by wnoise »

mikeyouse wrote: post #342
wnoise wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that there's no reason to believe that this policy will be limited strictly to obvious garbage. Unpopular, but not garbage views will inevitably be hit too. Maybe that's worth taking out the garbage, but collateral damage is still a negative.

It's amusing how much HN mocks the police for their stance that everything that enables privacy could enable child exploitation imagery while at the same time insisting that anything that resembles moderation will end in dystopian thought policing. Sometimes slopes just aren't that slippery.

Everything that enables privacy absolutely could enable child exploitation imagery. But privacy as a whole is too fucking valuable to give up to make prosecuting some crimes easier. In the US, that's the whole point of the fourth amendment -- warrants with probable cause and specificity requirements are the proper escape hatch, not bulk data sifting. Not all crime can or should be caught at any cost whatsoever.

Moderation need not end in dystopian thought policing. Reddit has had moderation for quite some time. Indeed voting was there from the beginning, and is a primitive crowdsourced form of moderation, with many obvious flaws, including groupthink.

Forum moderation's whole point is to constrain what can be said. It can be used for good or ill. Extending it to bans from agreeing with wrongthink is a step beyond the status quo. Maybe it'll balance out to be good on net, maybe bad, but don't pretend it's not novel or that it's obviously good on balance, and no one should be concerned.

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

#373

Post by guug »

NOGDP wrote: post #336
majormajor wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You keep bringing up trolling as a term in general, I tried to make it specific. The pitch being made in this subthread was "I don't think Reddit should be able to censor lawful content and also claim protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act." So you lose liability protection if you censor lawful content. So if you want to ban swearing, you become liable for your user's content. Which makes you…

Okay, to make it clear - I don't think sites should lose 230 protections for having a moderation policy. I do think that the excessive manipulation and censorship of dissenting opinions on sites such as reddit is a bad thing however.

I do. If you moderate your site, you endorse its content and should be held responsible for it (i.e be treated like other publishers).

If your laws permit speech you don't like, either fix your laws or fix yourself.

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

#374

Post by fatbird »

slg wrote: post #188
TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also keeps people from flooding into the rest of Reddit. When /r/fatpeoplehate was banned, their users flooded and spammed most other subreddits.

It is naive to think these bad users currently stay confined to their hateful communities. They use the rest of the site too. There is even an argument to be made that the rest of the site could be improved by banning these hateful communities, decreasing the value these users get from the site, and thereby decreasing the likelihood that these users will continue to use the rest of Reddit.

The sibling comment to yours links to the study of users from /r/fatpeoplehate and what happened to them. Short version: most of them stayed, and behaved better in better moderated subreddits. The implied conclusion is that a very significant part of noxious community behaviour is situational.

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

#375

Post by mullingitover »

MauranKilom wrote: post #281
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.

Please explain by what mechanism you would expect abusive content to be unengagable before being recognized (and treated) as such. Preferably one that does not involve Reddit having to travel back in time.

I don't have a way to programmatically detect abusive content, and for users the content's presence on the site implies it's legitimate. Just remove it when it's found, and shadowban the people who posted it. It isn't rocket surgery.

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

#376

Post by luckylion »

elicash wrote: post #361
luckylion wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 conside…

I don't go to my city council meetings, but am still a member of our local community. This is quick becoming a debate over definitions, but I think reddit thinks of itself as both having a community and also as having individual communities. For example, anybody who has had a post in their niche community get to the front page understands that there's a larger community they're a part of that is different from their…

Sure, much like you can get your 15 minutes of fame and get on national TV. I wouldn't call "the whole country" one community with smaller child communities though.

To me, community implies some amount of connections between the members. I've never put a number on it, but basically something like "if you randomly pick X people from the group, at least Y of them will know each other". That would limit both the size and also do a reasonable test for community membership: if nobody in the community knows you, you're not a part of the community.

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

#377

Post by pas »

sfkdjf9j3j wrote: post #369
TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also keeps people from flooding into the rest of Reddit. When /r/fatpeoplehate was banned, their users flooded and spammed most other subreddits.

For what its worth, researchers have actually studied this specific case (r/fatpeoplehate) and concluded the exact opposite: http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf

Interesting. That's a very fancy study, but the second set of graphs show nothing. While of course the text says that everything went just fine.

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

#378

Post by lenkite »

No one complained when folks voting on an unpopular forum were kicked out late last year. Everyone laughed and said "good riddance" then. Now the chickens have come home to roost.

The adage of the "fascists will next come for you" continues to remain true.

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

#380

Post by tekknik »

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.

Unfortunately this style of moderation has already has spilled out. Even on HN people are insulted for not agreeing with the groupthink, usually as an attempt to bully their point of view off of the internet. Now these people are becoming mods and have real power to suppress counter narratives. This is a systematic problem of people trying to oppress views outside of theirs.
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