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Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

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Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#591

Post by tedks »

spangry wrote: post #489
adaml_623 wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post seems quite accurate but I'd like to point out that one thing often mentioned about misogyny on the internet is that it's 'powerful' women that get the most hate. 'Powerful' women and authority figures get grief. And women in helper roles do not. So your statement is correct but perhaps people's attitudes to gender still influences their response to Pao. Food for thought

Wouldn't a simpler explanation be that powerful/authority figures, regardless of gender, always get the most grief? I think there's a misattribution error occurring here: the amount of grief one receives is not a function of gender, it is a function of 'power'. That seems more logical to me. If you're in a powerful position, you have to 'own' unpopular decisions. And the decisions of those higher up affect larger num…

There are a number of studies testing this, and the consensus that emerges from meta-analysis is that women tend to be liked, or respected, but rarely both. Cuddy (2005) is the citation I've memorized for this.

In contrast, men have no problem being liked and respected in positions of power. Women managers tend to be viewed as nurturing pushovers or bitches.

It would indeed be simpler if liking decreased as social distance increased, but the world is not always so simple, and a thousand years of gender stereotypes and oppression don't end in a century.

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#592

Post by cJ0th »

lmm wrote: post #552
cJ0th wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is where most of the conflict lies. Reddit the community and Reddit the business don't have the same goals in mind. And this is the part about Reddit that I just don't get. A few years ago their users were a rather homogeneous group of nerds that had a lot of trust in the reddit management. Why on earth didn't they capitalize on that? By doing all the latest actions that aim at getting rid of people that are n…

If they're exactly where they were some years ago but now with a demographic that's less likely to block ads, that's a win. How might they have "capitalized on" their "homogeneous group of nerds" that wouldn't have caused them to just leave?

> How might they have "capitalized on" their "homogeneous group of nerds" that wouldn't have caused them to just leave?

The possibilities should be endless. One thing I could have imagined would be cooperations with companies that have products which reddit user value and use heavily. Take Valve's Steam, for instance. Reddit could have offered those companies a service to buy a sub that is especially tailored for the company's needs so that they could turn their sub into a tailor-made r&d lab (with special features as required...). Those who love their products would be thrilled to develop ideas and share their user knowledge with their favorite company.

As long as they would've selected companies carefully and resist from interfering with other parts of reddit no one would run away. If anything, those "special sub" could be a gateway drug for new users.

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#593

Post by caskance »

geofft wrote: post #219
lingben wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a 2 way street. The community can be nasty but they do not treat every admin this way. Consider Victoria who was just fired. The whole shenanigan today isn't really about her but about the way the mods are being treated. But my point is that the community really appreciated her work and her approach. When you come in and right off the bat are condescending, haughty, and tone-deaf, as well as non-transparent, th…

That's 'cause Victoria had a different job . People loved Raymond Chen back when Steve Ballmer was CEO of Microsoft. In particular, Victoria had the job of making AMAs happen smoothly, and /r/IAmA is this very weird subreddit, operationally speaking (how many other subreddits have their own mobile app?), that clearly needs a paid staff member. Ellen has the job of being the final say on anything that happens, controv…

>People loved Raymond Chen back when Steve Ballmer was CEO of Microsoft.

Why the past tense? Did people suddenly stop loving Raymond Chen for some reason?

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#594

Post by tdkl »

darkmighty wrote: post #313
keithy wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The community would be in an uproar if such a sale happened. Reddit's only monetization schemes right now are 1) reddit gold 2) ads and 3) the gift shop. These are things that the community can completely boycott. Any sane person would know not to buy out something like reddit.

Reddit is really poorly managed. If Google bought it and gave it an overhaul I'm sure it would be welcome over the current administration. Plus, the "non-vocal users" simply don't care. I would start with rewarding administrators with payment (akin to youtube, somewhat proportionally to views -- this creates a strong incentive towards fidelity), revamp post priority algorithms, and add some basic functionality that y…

> Reddit is really poorly managed. If Google bought it and gave it an overhaul

If this happened, Internet would explode from all the rage.

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#595

Post by Crito »

rjaco31 wrote: post #467
ep4d4s wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The music detection stuff I feel was probably bigger than them. DMCA and whatnot. You forget YouTube follows suite in this regard. Not keeping videos forever honestly made sense to me. They were very scientific about it in their blog post and showed that honestly, nobody is really watching these archives. If at most they're there to watch a certain clip (which can be highlighted which ARE kept forever). Banning cleav…

> Banning cleavages again makes sense... Otherwise the site would turn into a softcore cam site with gamers. Wait what? I've never seen or heard of anything remotely close to "softcore cam" on Twitch, I find it extremely stupid and rather discriminatory to ban cleavage for female gamers. It's a very bad omen for further possible restrictions imho.

I've seen softcore pornographic material from twitch. Women flashing their breasts or ass at the webcam.

Granted, that sort of thing apparently is uncommon because the people who did it were apparently almost immediately banned... but that's rather the point, isn't it? You don't see it because they ban it.

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#596

Post by tdkl »

tallanvor wrote: post #520
geofft wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always struck me as weird that Reddit moderators are volunteers. While this may or may not have been justifiable, I'm not sure it was ever tenable that IAmA had a dedicated, paid staff member to make the subreddit run, answerable to Reddit the corporation and not to the subreddit moderators. (To what extent are the subreddit moderators answerable to Reddit the corporation, or vice versa? Remember that time that…

Volunteer moderators are an extremely common feature of forums all over the internet. The only forums I know of that have paid moderators are forums for specific companies and their products.

Sure, but those forums don't get millions in funding.

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#597

Post by Crito »

adaml_623 wrote: post #444
go1dfish wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been saying that the Scarlet Letter Administration of Pao are "paper tigers swimming in a barrel of incompetence" But today's tone deafness astounds even me. They have no allies left. They also immediately destroyed the narrative that reddit just hates Pao because she's a woman. Victoria was one of the most popular and well respected admins ever. Even the tinfoil hats at /r/conspiracy trusted her not to manipula…

Your post seems quite accurate but I'd like to point out that one thing often mentioned about misogyny on the internet is that it's 'powerful' women that get the most hate. 'Powerful' women and authority figures get grief. And women in helper roles do not. So your statement is correct but perhaps people's attitudes to gender still influences their response to Pao. Food for thought

On reddit, an admin has more power than the overwhelming majority of users. There are seriously only a handful of people on reddit that had more power than Victoria had.

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#598

Post by Crito »

saint_fiasco wrote: post #571
NhanH wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is already mainstream by any sense of the words. The reason it's full of hateful, annoying etc. people is because that's how anonymous human behave. Reddit is not a super secret group that only hateful bad apple knows about. You can try to clamp down the bad content, but alienate the user base will end up badly because there will be no one left to join.

>because that's how anonymous human behave You mean pseudonymous humans? Reddit has a karma system, people can see your comment history and so on.

Are websites that are known for being more anonymous than reddit known for being more or less abrasiveness than reddit?

In my personal opinion, they are less abrasive. But I think I am definitely in the minority there. I think that anonymous sites are popularly known as more abrasive.

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#599

Post by Programmatic »

DanBC wrote: post #397
jsmthrowaway wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it clearly was. That's the problem. It's not clear. There's a lot of unanswered questions there: how does off-site activity on Tumblr and other sites get linked back to specific people and the overall thrust of a subreddit? How do you even solve that problem in general? I have personally observed chan (not 4chan) threads involving skimming certain subreddits and finding targets to harass without even having Red…

Reddit does have a consistant position: 1) don't brigade. 2) don't dox 3) mods can mod what they like; the commonly agreed best subs use extensive vigorous modding 4) admins aren't going to get involved unless you break the tiny number of rules. Reddit should release the graphs that subs have of visitors. A FPH brigade causes 10,000 extra visitors, thousands of extra votes, and hundreds of comments. In smaller subs t…

Reddit would have had my support if they enforced the rules as you say. Unfortunately Reddit chose instead to enforce the brand new harassment rule, ban the sub, ban the mods, and then ban any sub that even looked like FPH.

It would have been a far, far more effective message if they said "We have banned FPH and the moderators due to their brigading and doxxing. Let this be a lesson to all subs: if you do these things, you will be disbanded." and then left alone all of the other subs that superficially looked like FPH but didn't engage in that specific behavior.

Instead they got a minor revolt, and the latest revolt seems like a manifestation of a lot of the hard feelings from that attempt.

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#600

Post by geofft »

will_the_bomb wrote: post #587
geofft wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say I love Reddit, but I'm certainly an active user. But I'm not subscribed to any of the subreddits that were affected, and I wouldn't have noticed if it weren't for this thread. There are lots of little communities that work well, with their own things they value. (There was a particular thread over on /r/OrthodoxChristianity, now removed, that would have been hilarious if it wasn't sad: a member of the…

> I'm not subscribed to any of the subreddits that were affected, and I wouldn't have noticed if it weren't for this thread While that might have been true when you posted this comment, I have trouble believing that it could be true for anybody right now. At least a half dozen defaults have gone private an the majority of posts on the signed-out home page are about this story.

Is it so hard to believe that active users wouldn't be subbed to any of the defaults?

Looking at all of my subscriptions, it looks like exactly one of them, /r/linux, is currently private. /r/bayarea previously was. Places like /r/debian or /r/AskNYC or /r/SandersForPresident or /r/osdev just don't care -- or at least, they care less than they care about keeping their community open. There's a post each on /r/Christianity and /r/Catholicism saying thanks to the mods. There's a post vaguely about the subject on /r/networking, but it veered into discussion about the community.

As I mentioned elsewhere in these comments, yesterday's issue was specifically about the tensions between large, default sub volunteer moderation and Reddit the company. Most of the subreddits I read are small communities without these problems. (And they don't see themselves at risk for being banned for harassment / political incorrectness / what-have-you, so they're not concerned about that, either.)

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