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Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

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Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#521

Post by jerf »

Nasrudith wrote: post #496
jerf wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Would something decentralized help?" Not directly; I'm increasingly thinking centralization is not the problem. The problem is size. The intersection of "things that everyone agrees are acceptable" goes to zero as the size of the community increases, and while communities have strong selection effects that prevent them from being anything like "a uniformly random selection of people slammed together", regression to…

I would put it as "the problem is society" essentially as opposed to size per se. I personally doubt that what is essentially a forcibly sharded technical approach akin to what MMOs did to deal with larger loads and content saturation would be useful. Content depends upon O(n) users subdividing it would reduce the utility and make it lose out and worse breed a new tribalism. Combine that with side channels and I am s…

It doesn't have to be a "forcible shard". In fact I think that's not terribly effective and there's better ways to do it. Weblogs did it fairly well, way back when.

Also, don't forget that you don't belong to one community; it's not like you log in one day and get assigned to your immutable chunk of the internet. You wander around the read versions of various communities, pick a couple of communities you invest it, pick several more to half-follow, get tired of the abuse in one and switch to another, meet someone in real life who encourages you to join another community, and so on.

Basically, the sort of "tribalism" that you'd encounter is whatever "tribalism" you associate with HN, because the structure I describe already half-exists, scrounging around the remnants from reddit and Facebook in tens of thousands of forums and active blogs and other such things. I don't think it produces any more or less "tribalism" than you get from anything else.

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#522

Post by iateanapple »

freen wrote: post #438
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not. Not only is "The only good Tory is a dead Tory" not a popular refrain at all [1], but a quick search for "The only good Republican is a dead Republican" returns a lot of hits for the "[...] dead Democrat" quote and almost none for the search phrase. These attempts at false equivalence reliably appear in these situations, and there's reliably nothing to back them up. The difference is the right is trying…

The overwhelming majority of terrorism in the United States is committed by right wing extremists. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/homegrown-... The anti-gun, peace-loving left may not be the most polite online, but they emphatically are not as violent. Not by a long shot. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either uninformed or lying through their teeth to push an agenda.

[flagged]

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#523

Post by duxup »

mcguire wrote: post #351
bitexploder wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you had any doubt about the character of TD and what it has become at its new home, just cruise around it. It’s full of conspiracy theories, misogyny, racism, and outright calls to violence. It is a common sentiment there that the only good Democrat is a dead one. These “edgy” takes receive many upvotes.

You mean like https://thedonald.win/p/GIEYMyjj/steven-huffman-the-most-col...

Folks like to drawn in people with discussions about how some views aren't allowed on reddit and tales of political persecution ... but that there is a good example of a lot of TD's content.

It wasn't a place that was about conservative views, or a political party or politician ... it was mostly just fear, hate, and lies.

And for a place with lots of defenders crying out over censorship, any wiff of a differing opinion in their sub was met with a ban...

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#524

Post by monksy »

berkes wrote: post #429
jlkuester7 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO decentralization (via federated protocols) is the most viable option here. Taking Mastodon ( https://joinmastodon.org/ ) as an example, people are able to connect globally with each other, but you also have a moderation framework that allows for true decentralized control over content. You can join an instance with moderation policies that align with your ideals or even host your own instance.

In addition, mastodon, and even the protocol, has a lot in place to mitigate targeted harassment by a community. Individual Instance blocks, where a user can block an entire instance are in place. Instance blocks on your instance, where an admin blocks another instance for all the users of that instance. And, community driven, blacklists where an admin can copy paste from. Even more interesting, is that some instance…

> if you don't block Gab, there are a lot of instances that don't want to talk to you.

Modern day witch hunts. (I'm not defending gab, or promoting it) However, these guilt by association hunts are irritating.

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#525

Post by blisseyGo »

From Reddit:

https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/rules-reporting/acc...

> Marginalized or vulnerable groups include, but are not limited to, groups based on their actual and perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, immigration status, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy, or disability. These include victims of a major violent event and their families.

> While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate.

The majority based on what? An individual state? The US? The west? The world? Men are the minority in many countries but the majority world wide. White people are the majority in the west but a minority world wide.

Does that mean people can attack white people with impunity, even though they're a global minority? Can I crap on women to my hearts content because they are a majority in the UK? Can people in California shit all over Hispanics because they're the majority in that State?

Will they assess a users state/country/continent of origin before deciding whether or not they're being hateful towards a specific group?

We are watching Reddit die. Aaron Swartz, the cofounder of Reddit warned about this a decade ago.

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#526

Post by afiori »

striking wrote: post #145
pjc50 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was effectively a challenge: how bad can you be without explicitly violating the rules? (I call this "I'm not touching you Fascism", after the popular children's pastime. The goal is to enrage people without ever crossing anything that might be considered a clear line. Most systems evolve a meta-rule somewhere that "pushing the boundaries of the rules is itself against the rules". At the very least "ban evasion"…

As someone who's moderated a community, this is exactly what things feel like. Especially given that our community has an explicit focus on freedom of expression (and what a thorn in our side that's ended up being) We've adopted pretty vague rules as a result, with a lot of room for interpretation, and rather than changing the rules often we've just updated our interpretations and communicated them with the community…

From this point of view I would almost prefer sites to adopt just overall stricter rules, strictly moderating both tone and "off-topic" content tuned to each individual forum.

I think that a lot of communities had a passion for cultivating a freedom of expression, but actually had a lot of unspoken/unrealized rules in mind.

In my opinion a lot of communities would gain a lot by a flashing banner "We decide what content we want on our platform and we will take arbitrary action to protect our choices". In practice is what social media companies are doing now even if they cannot state it as such (in part for legal reasons and in part for marketing reasons)

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#527

Post by dlp211 »

iamstupidsimple wrote: post #478
dlp211 wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> r/AHS staged a massive public brigading campaign in 2018 to get many HATE subreddits banned. FTFY.

So much of what the right says is perceived as hate by the left. So much of what the left says is perceived as hate by the right. Remember this every now and again when you're correcting others, because you might be wrong.

I didn't make the argument/correction that you think I made.

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#528

Post by zackees »

duxup wrote: post #86
ve55 wrote: post #7

Worth taking note that in today's climate, you really cannot win when you are in a position to moderate important things that a lot of people use. There is constantly tremendous pressure on you to perform opposing actions, and even making no decision at all will cause you significant mental stress and harassment, regardles of what the issue is. You have to pick who you want to cave to, and to what extent, and no matt…

Would something decentralized help? I don't think people want that. The_Donald involved a lot of spreading their message / fake news sites / spamming across other subs and etc. Do people want to be on a platform where other folks on the same platform are targeting their community with dishonest and often bigoted content? I'm also not sure how much The_Donald was as a community. The sheer volume of users at its height…

NO.

Fake news is what the MSM does and it's supported by big tech. That's why I blew the whistle on Google and exposed their censorship regime to the whole world to see:

https://www.zachvorhies.com

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#529

Post by maceurt »

zimac wrote: post #313

New rule change is essentially no hate subs except if it’s hate against a majority aka white people. As a minority I’m tired of defending white people from other white people and being shouted at by white people for doing so. I’ve tried for 6 years to push for equality for all and had the most insane rebuttals against that.

Yeah I feel you. The problem is that the majority of white people agree with you, and do not believe its okay to use hate against them. However, there is a minority of white people who think they can speak for their whole race and will attack anybody who doesn't fall in line.

Maybe its because I don't live in a city like Portland or LA, but I have never talked to a white person in real life one on one who agreed with the typical narrative on places like reddit of, "you can't be racist against white people". The more time I spend on reddit, the more I realize is that the people who comment are getting less and less human. Back 5 years ago, reddit actually felt human. Now it feels like it is just filled with either bots or seriously mentally ill people. I think its about time for me to stop going on that site entirely.

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#530

Post by blisseyGo »

mcguire wrote: post #351
bitexploder wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you had any doubt about the character of TD and what it has become at its new home, just cruise around it. It’s full of conspiracy theories, misogyny, racism, and outright calls to violence. It is a common sentiment there that the only good Democrat is a dead one. These “edgy” takes receive many upvotes.

You mean like https://thedonald.win/p/GIEYMyjj/steven-huffman-the-most-col...

Have you ever been to any of Reddit subs?
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