Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Former Reddit CEO says the site's about to be purged

engadget.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 141 posts

Re: Former Reddit CEO says the site's about to be purged

#71

Post by dragonwriter »

baddox wrote: post #56
dragonwriter wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or you might be linked, but you can already be linked anywhere from anywhere else on the web, so that's hardly a meaningful argument. Its a meaningful argument from the POV of Reddit management, and their effort to build a profitable business, given that what people can be linked to that is tied to Reddit -- unlike what people can be linked to that is not tied to Reddit -- impacts the perception of Reddit and both…

> Its a meaningful argument from the POV of Reddit management, and their effort to build a profitable business Oh absolutely. I'm not disputing that. Of course they are doing all of this in pursuit of profit (or at least in pursuit of pleasing their board). The trouble is that, in my view, there is a conflict between the goal of pleasing the reddit board and the goal of creating a vibrant community.

> The trouble is that, in my view, there is a conflict between the goal of pleasing the reddit board and the goal of creating a vibrant community.

If you can't run a business that brings in the money to keep the lights on, you can't maintain a vibrant community, either.

I think a lot of the issue is that lots of people are attached to conditions that are only made possible by the willingness of investors to tolerate Reddit's lack of profitability in the expectation that that will be turned around in the future, but that that willingness is not sustainable.

Re: Former Reddit CEO says the site's about to be purged

#72

Post by johrn »

clavalle wrote: post #53

I have a feeling that Reddit, with its focus on growth of the user base, is just going to play to the lowest common denominator. As soon as it is filled with what amounts to user curated network TV levels of content and the banal advertising mindset that goes with it, it will become Just Another News Aggregator and will not inspire the level of engagement it has enjoyed until now. Reddit doesn't have a sticky network…

> they will lose the tasty morsel they could currently be enjoying.

That tasty morsel of hardcore racism, rabid misogyny and all sorts of other fun hate groups, and the people that defend them because anyone should be allowed to say anything they want?

I don't understand why so many people think that getting rid of these groups is going to suddenly implode all the thousands of smaller, more focused communities that you mention.

Re: Former Reddit CEO says the site's about to be purged

#73

Post by baddox »

SwellJoe wrote: post #49
baddox wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The yelling analogy doesn't really work, because the vast majority of the controversial content is content you have to go looking for to find. Obviously there can be some leakages, but most people learn about this stuff because tech blogs or media companies deliberately go looking for it to "expose" how bad reddit is.

It is literally impossible to visit reddit regularly without seeing casual racism, sexism, able-ism, etc. "Some leakage" is actually a steady stream of hate into every subreddit at one time or another. Some subs are better than others, but mostly the good ones (science, AMA, for example) are already heavily moderated...they won't change because the racist trolls are already being silenced in those subs. If you don't…

> It is literally impossible to visit reddit regularly without seeing casual racism, sexism, able-ism, etc.

Sure. It's also literally impossible for reddit to perfectly prevent all such content from being posted, so I don't see this as a particularly strong argument.

> If you don't find reddit obnoxiously bigoted as it currently is, it is because you are predominantly visiting subs that already have stricter content policies than any reddit is likely to impose site-wide.

Not necessarily. I subscribe mostly to very small subreddits that only attract people who actively go looking for a subreddit dedicated to the topic. They're not a target for trolls until they get larger, and by then I've usually moved on.

> If anyone hates moderation and a strict set of content guidelines, you're in the wrong place, because HN is stricter and has more active/aggressive moderation than reddit will ever have site-wide.

I actually do dislike ("hate" is too strong) the strict moderation of HN, but it's not all or nothing. I still think HN is a great community with good content and discussion. HN is also different than reddit, because it's more like a single subreddit. Reddit is a host for subreddits, which can have their own moderators who are not affiliated with reddit the corporation.

Re: Former Reddit CEO says the site's about to be purged

#74

Post by Lawtonfogle »

maaku wrote: post #23
sharkweek wrote: post #8

Eh... it's their playground. While I don't like the idea of what's offensive being so subjective, there is A LOT of shit on Reddit that I would be happy to see gone. If Costco had a corner in every store where people were allowed to stand around yelling racist commentary all the time, and Costco laid out a policy to remove this from their stores, I think the majority of people would applaud this move, thus improving…

Reddit is an anarchist experiment. No centralized filtering except where external laws are clearly being broken, and even then only in the most extreme cases of violence or exploitation (e.g. child pornography). Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing is worth debating. But it absolutely must be said that the anarchy defines what Reddit is . With active moderation, it won't be Reddit, it'll be something else. May…

>Reddit is an anarchist experiment. No centralized filtering except where external laws are clearly being broken,

Most of the filtering put in place during the first (to my knowledge) purge was to filter unsavory but legal content due to a public image problem it was causing.

Re: Former Reddit CEO says the site's about to be purged

#75

Post by hiou »

dang wrote: post #37

The rule of thumb for ongoing stories on HN is to have a new thread each time there's significant new information, and (hopefully) have it point to the most substantive source. Neither this story nor the article comes close to passing that test, so I'm burying this post as a dupe.

I'm sure this has nothing at all to do with certain investors in reddit who run Ycombinator...

Re: Former Reddit CEO says the site's about to be purged

#76

Post by Lawtonfogle »

johrn wrote: post #38
wnevets wrote: post #25

If you find the content of a particular subreddit offensive, don't subscribe to that subreddit? Why must admins police legal content?

Maybe admins don't want their site to be somewhere that stormfront considers to be their biggest recruitment center. It's not like the users who subscribe to coontown etc keep their opinions to themselves when they are using other parts of the site.

As with the FPH debacle, when you take down the walls, you aren't destroying the community, you are destroying the containment.

Re: Former Reddit CEO says the site's about to be purged

#77

Post by dang »

publicfig wrote: post #62
dang wrote: post #37

The rule of thumb for ongoing stories on HN is to have a new thread each time there's significant new information, and (hopefully) have it point to the most substantive source. Neither this story nor the article comes close to passing that test, so I'm burying this post as a dupe.

What story mentions the same information this one does that has been on the front page? This, at least to me, seemed to be new information. Posts about reddit seem to be more harshly removed from the front page than other stories, is it because it's a Y Combinator-backed company?

As a rule we penalize stories less when they're YC related. That's actually the number one rule of HN moderation. "Less" doesn't mean "not at all", though. There's more than one concern to balance here. Doing nothing about the tidal wave of Reddit drama would definitely not be good for HN.

> This, at least to me, seemed to be new information.

Is it significant new information? I wouldn't say so. Here's one criterion that we have found surprisingly useful: an announcement of an announcement is not substantive. This story doesn't even rise to that level. Yes, the drama is riveting, but part of HN is not to confuse dramatic episodes with information.

Re: Former Reddit CEO says the site's about to be purged

#78

Post by baddox »

SwellJoe wrote: post #69
baddox wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only rational argument people can make against the "purging" (of blatantly racist etc. subreddits) is the "slippery slope" argument, which is usually known as a fallacious logical device. Not at all true. I don't like any removal of content by reddit employees (as opposed to subreddit moderators) beyond what is required by law. Whether it leads to more and more removal in the future is irrelevant. I would like…

So, why are you here at HN, which has much stricter guidelines and much more active moderators than reddit will ever have site-wide? Reddit is still vastly more "free" than HN, and yet...the caliber of conversation here is generally higher (not always, and the HN demographic has its blind spots), and I believe it is precisely because it has no tolerance for fools. In short, I don't care about racist's "right" to rant…

> So, why are you here at HN

HN is roughly the equivalent of a single subreddit on reddit. I don't have a problem with individual subreddits with strict moderation, because those policies don't affect the policies of other subreddits. HN doesn't (as far as I know) intend to be a host for a plethora of communities each dedicated to a specific topic or hobby.

> Reddit is still vastly more "free" than HN, and yet...the caliber of conversation here is generally higher (not always, and the HN demographic has its blind spots), and I believe it is precisely because it has no tolerance for fools.

HN generally has high quality discussion, but so do many (mostly small) subreddits.

Re: Former Reddit CEO says the site's about to be purged

#79

Post by johrn »

baddox wrote: post #58
austenallred wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not saying reddit doesn't have the right to censor. I'm just saying I would prefer that they didn't. I'm genuinely curious as to why. Do you feel your experience on reddit is harmed if /r/coontown is gone? Or is it just the principle of the matter?

> Do you feel your experience on reddit is harmed if /r/coontown is gone? Not directly, of course. My experience on reddit isn't directly harmed if any community I don't visit is removed. But it would be pretty obviously unrealistic for me to propose that reddit remove all subreddits except for the couple of dozen that I'm subscribed to.

But there's obviously some middle ground between 'free-for-all' and 'only your subreddits' that allows for moderation of the subreddits that are literally evil.

Re: Former Reddit CEO says the site's about to be purged

#80

Post by baddox »

johrn wrote: post #61
baddox wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only rational argument people can make against the "purging" (of blatantly racist etc. subreddits) is the "slippery slope" argument, which is usually known as a fallacious logical device. Not at all true. I don't like any removal of content by reddit employees (as opposed to subreddit moderators) beyond what is required by law. Whether it leads to more and more removal in the future is irrelevant. I would like…

> I would like reddit to be a place for completely free, uncensored expression. This is nice in theory, but it basically requires defending the rights of hate groups to silence those they hate. It's hard to freely express yourself when there are people calling for your extermination, or treating everything you say as if it came from the mouth of a five year old.

Why would the targets of hate speech be in subreddits dedicated to that hate speech?
Post reply on HN