Show HN: Reveddit.com: Improving online discourse with transparent moderation

I strongly disagree, it's inherently democratic. The scientific method is all about making mistakes and trying again. Discourse is all about sharing knowledge. Open societies do this effectively.

Jonathan Rauch, in Kindly Inquisitors (1993) wrote,

> Authoritarian systems have their intellectual giants. What they lack is the capacity to organize and exploit their masses of middling thinkers.

https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=uZUVAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA74...

> From my experience, I think without moderation r/science would become “aliens built the pyramids” in a week.

It might. What would happen then? I'd argue there'd be a lot of good discussion.

The reason people don't think it's possible to change people's minds over the last 7-8 years is because during this whole period you didn't know about shadow moderation.

Watch the linked talk, look at the examples. Deception is being crowdsourced and it is happening across every ideology, geography, and on every major platform.

The problem is the unauditable censorship. This is especially important on political forums but it also becomes relevant on science forums when scientific issues are starting to be politicized.

Of course, Reddit can be whatever it wants, but as it stands, you can only treat it as a propaganda outlet, as you have no way of knowing what gets removed.

The way we can make moderation trustworthy is the same way we make software trustworthy: By putting it out in the open so anyone can scrutinize it and raise a stink when they discover something suspicious, and can't be silenced.

There is almost zero legitimate reason to completely scrub any comment, hiding them by default would work just fine. The only reason to really delete a comment would be if it directly puts a person in danger, such as by containing personally identifying information.

Hard censorship must be a rare enough event that it becomes a scandal and everybody hears about it. The normalization of censorship allows moderators to do basically anything they want, because comments being removed is just expected and doesn't raise any eyebrows anymore. "Oh yeah, those 75% removed comments were just memes and hate speech."

The other side of the coin is that flooding forums with memes, hate speech, and inane nonsense is a quick and easy way to drown out meaningful discussion and actual information, so soft censorship is necessary.

They are two different attack vectors, and we need a defense against both of them. To prevent infiltration of the mod team, speech that we accept to be censored completely must require actual effort so mods can't plausibly claim it was "just memes" when comments get removed on a daily basis. To prevent exterior soft censorship by flooding, we ironically need moderation with power to implement soft censorship, but one that we can trust.

We also cannot accept "hate speech" (or any other combination of words) that requires zero effort to produce to be a reason to force moderators to implement hard censorship. That allows anyone to censor any platform they like or at a minimum to force its moderators to destroy the trust the platform's users can objectively have in them.

Of course, this isn't completely implementable due to unreasonable laws in pretty much every country in the world, but a trustworthy platform would at least try to approximate it as closely as possible under the laws they're bound by. Reddit certainly isn't one, at least it hasn't been since Aaron Swartz was bullied out a long time ago.

And the #1 problem is actually much worse since "you" aren't paid - in that there is a strong likelihood that "you": 1) are a paid shill to suppress specific content by either domestic or foreign bad actors (government or industrial complex trying to control/suppress narratives), and/or 2) "you" have an ideological bent - and are "passionate" (and biased) on certain issues and why you're volunteering your time.