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

There seems to be zero ethical guidelines / pressure / consequences for any of this stuff.

Of course the problem is hard but I've seen tons of high quality, on-topic comments with 500+ upvotes get removed because the mods obviously disagreed with it. The commenter won't even know it's gone and 99% of visitors will not realize how thoroughly editorialized the entire conversation threads are.

I seriously recommend picking any even slightly controversial r/science post and look at the comments being removed. It's not just memes and trolling.

> As you've stated in this thread, an involuntary contract between the government, the media company, and the user are not optimal

I said no such thing, and I have no idea what you're talking about. Good one, I'm sure you thoroughly confused a few people.

Inevitable result: Over time, the mod pool consists more and more of people who get something in return for the act of moderating itself. Either they get to push an agenda, they get to be petty tyrants, or both.

This could explain the pattern where for any given topic, you'll often see discussion of that topic splinter into several diametrically opposed subreddits which are constantly trying to dunk on each other. No one wants to moderate a sub which attempts to synthesize all the perspectives, but there is a supply of mods available for a sub that dunks on "the bad guys".

And for shadow removed comments too? Because that's the majority of it, and slicing and dicing what stays up versus what is secreted away makes it much harder for users to discover that shadow moderation is happening.

I don't think it will work. As mentioned elsewhere [1], the government (as an entity, not a particular political party) would love to be your savior here. If they get to pick and choose who wins they will end up controlling social media. They're not going to be able to handle all of the shadow removals or demotions that occur; heck, shadow moderation has been occurring since the dawn of social media and society is hardly aware of it now 16 years later. So, since they couldn't handle all those cases, they'd have to be selective, and that is just more cronyism.

No, we need citizen-built transparency systems starting ASAP. Nobody will help us better than ourselves [2].

> There are a few cases where I can almost see it as justified-- not spam as its trivial for spammers to automate detection of-- but certain kind of obsessive mentally ill-people that will forever shout their abusive and disruptive comments into the void if shadowbanned but get a new account if they are informed. But that fringe case just can't justify the abuse against more reasonable people, particular in a world where users are frequently actioned against in error.

Yes, exactly. It's a fringe case that we know will come up, and it will be annoying but it won't destroy society as we know it, whereas the systems as built today are doing exactly that. The good part is, it's an easy win. Tell people about it, get people to talk and write about it, and show people who work at social media companies that we don't like or want systems that are driven by shadow moderation.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33480576

[2] https://youtu.be/aCadmiIfbcI?t=1571

This is a very succinct and insightful way of putting it. It's fine to refuse to engage with people who are refusing to engage with you in good faith (i.e. they won't respond to the arguments you're making with anything but a repetition of their own arguments.) However, assuming bad faith of everyone who has a different opinion than you, even an obviously bad opinion, just hardens their belief in that opinion. It also makes you the one who is refusing to engage (in good faith or bad.)

People know from their daily lives that when people refuse to engage, it's either because they're afraid their answer will anger you, or because they're afraid that they won't be able to defend it. When you refuse to engage with a bleach-drinker, and you're clearly not worried about angering them, they reasonably assume that you can't confidently tell them why they shouldn't drink bleach.