Storming Reddit's Moat • Hacker News Board

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#111

Post by fjabre » Tue, Jan 19, 2021, 11:50 PM UTC

sellyme wrote: post #104

fjabre wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't agree with this more. As someone who has gotten to the top of Reddit front page twice with my free (no ads) web app I now cannot. It's all but impossible. Mods are so over protective they will ban you for practically nothing. If you attempt to evade the ban even innocently they will sniff you out. I think Reddit's mod tools are disgusting and foster censorship and make Reddit a more negative and critical p…

> If you attempt to evade the ban even innocently they will sniff you out. How exactly do you "innocently" attempt to evade a ban?

I created another account. Logged in. Forgot I was logged in on another account. Forgot I got banned in that sub ages ago.

But not Reddit. Reddit mods don't forget. Reddit gives them the tools they need to sniff you out.

Kinda creepy reddit has become.

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#112

Post by stretchcat » Tue, Jan 19, 2021, 11:53 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #39

stretchcat wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not certain, but doesn't a 'read only' reddit page still get changed when a user who was in it deletes their account and posts? Often when a search engine sends me to reddit, the comments that probably contained the relevant information are long gone.

You might be right, in which case Google should offer a link to the corresponding Internet Archive wayback page (where the deleted content should still exist). Failing that, there are browser extensions for both Chrome and Firefox that enable this functionality.

I used IA's browser plugin that does this for a while, but unfortunately had to stop because it had too many false positives (sending me to archive pages for sites that were still live.) An extension that does this properly definitely interests me.

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#113

Post by intended » Tue, Jan 19, 2021, 11:56 PM UTC

abcdjdjd wrote: post #29

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #15

Many popular subreddits are quietly operated by moderators with industry connections. Some of this occurs naturally. People who were deep enough into a niche to become moderators of a subreddit in the late 2000s and early 2010s are also likely to end up working in that industry or starting business in that industry. However, many companies have realized that being in the good graces of subreddit moderators can be ver…

>Moderators have a lot of power to influence conversations on Reddit in non-obvious ways. You had the above quote when I was commenting on your post, but may have edited it out. But I think this line right here is also why reddit is becoming unusable and going downhill fast. Basically, moderators are given way too much power and users have no recourse against mod abuse really. Users can't vote a moderator out for exa…

> almost like people forgot their was a an upvote and downvote button

They forgot this within a few weeks of seeing rule breaking behavior.

I recently went through some old logs and discussions from 7/8 years ago. People actually talked about how important it was to upvote content and follow rediquette.

That discussion died because you have to enforce rediquette and the "honor code" fails when people see that abusing the code goes unpunished. This means that upvote downvote become like/dislike.

This logically implies that if you want to make upvotes work, then you need to really prune your community for rule compliance. My favored example of this is badecon.

------------------------

The other issue really fascinating issue is how automation results in better filter bubbles.

Before automod, people couldn't ban alt accounts fast enough. Ban bigot_1, and 10 minutes later you would have bigot_2. Until automation, banning was a fools errand.

Later, bots could target words, so now your regexes would stop variations of N*er and other coded hate speech - which also meant that you could stop users from using the names of alternate subs.

Now this may be a great thing. You ban bigot_2 and he can't speak anymore so he goes to create his own sub, where they say they will be a free speech zone (and vehemently downvote opposing ideas).

Of course, these bastions also use the same tools, and they maintain their ideological purity.

Leading to the final conclusion - that moderation is innately a question of morals and ethical leadership. Not of technological design.

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#114

Post by intended » Tue, Jan 19, 2021, 11:58 PM UTC

ranger207 wrote: post #102

antihero wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, for small subreddits, mods should have all the power they want to curate and garden and develop their community in the way they see fit. The great thing about Reddit is that if a mod is abusive and most users agree, there's absolutely nothing preventing you starting a new subreddit. Perhaps larger less niche subreddits should have a greater amount of accountability, though, because something like /r/canad…

>...there's absolutely nothing preventing you starting a new subreddit. Except for discovery. If you want to talk about, say, Python, you'll probably go to /r/python. But what if /r/python's mods start sending the sub down the drain? Go to /r/python2? /r/python3? /r/python_lang? New users are still going to go to /r/python and be sucked into a bad community. If they're really invested in discussing Python, maybe they…

This didn't use to be a problem. Famously people moved out of r/marijuana to r/trees because they had issues with the mod.

This was subreddit splitting/budding. Which has stopped because of automation.

Thats the tradeoff. Automation allows you to moderate and stop the hate speech.

It also means you can stop people from using the name of the new sub, so discovery is stalled.

So even your solution won't stop it, because we can't survive without automod.

Enjoy!

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#115

Post by maest » Tue, Jan 19, 2021, 11:59 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #15

Many popular subreddits are quietly operated by moderators with industry connections. Some of this occurs naturally. People who were deep enough into a niche to become moderators of a subreddit in the late 2000s and early 2010s are also likely to end up working in that industry or starting business in that industry. However, many companies have realized that being in the good graces of subreddit moderators can be ver…

> Reddit conversations are generally assumed to be authentic.

r/hailcorporate would disagree, but, sadly, their corporate marketing detectors are too sensitive and they can come off as tin-foiled kooks.

Still, more content than you think is astro-turfed on reddit (and I've been claiming this for years).

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#116

Post by maest » Wed, Jan 20, 2021, 12:02 AM UTC

lovegoblin wrote: post #92

dageshi wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large subs like your r/canada example can and do split. r/unitedkingdom has basically been replaced by r/casualuk in size because a substantial part of its userbase was tired of its constant misery and moaning.

> because something like /r/canada can't easily be replaced. Yeah. As it became more and more clear that /r/canada was modded by reactionary bigots, a lot of people started moving to /r/canadapolitics and /r/onguardforthee.

You still have the issue that r/canada is the default place to go if you're new and want to talk about Canada. To make matters worse, r/canadapolitics isn't advertised on r/canada, so how are new users supposed to find out about it?

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#117

Post by detaro » Wed, Jan 20, 2021, 12:03 AM UTC

fjabre wrote: post #101

detaro wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> besides this one You do realize how far from "moderators only remove illegal posts" HN is, and how much that shapes what HN is?

Yes there maybe some common sense approaches to curating things but Reddit has gone too far IMHO. I think HN is a separate use case than is reddit. Which is why HN will never become Reddit nor does it want to. It's always been a niche site. Even though it's gained quite a bit of notoriety in the last decade. Most people outside of tech circles have no idea what HN is.

It's less of a separate case from a single subreddit in many ways. (although of course a subreddit can't influence a lot of the things that are differently designed on HN, so it's not like you could turn it into one and it'd just work)

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#118

Post by intended » Wed, Jan 20, 2021, 12:09 AM UTC

abcdjdjd wrote: post #68

detaro wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of high-quality subreddits are high-quality because they do moderate and don't succumb to the lowest common denominator of more mainstream subs. You'd be killing the IMHO most valuable parts of reddit with that rule.

Sorry, but this argument is the same reason that dictatorships fails endlessly throughout history. Sure, you can make an argument that maybe the leaders (in this case mods) will be benevolent and lead fairly and for the betterment of all efficiently. After all, dictatorships are more "efficient" at getting stuff done than democracy (note, not saying GOOD is done, just more efficient when you don't have to consider ot…

Well, communities haven't also existed at the scale and pace they do online. Plus in the real world people had to go eat, and could come back with cooler heads. Online you end up seeing that incendiary piece of text and lose your mind all over again.

As someone mentioned elsewhere - like the media and news industry, there is a Gentleman's agreement in moderation to do "good". There are few ways to punish people for breaking that rule.

Subs with strict moderation end up doing "good" for their communities. The measurement everyone lacks is whether the good of creating insular communities is offset by the harm done to the larger ability to share ideas.

And people really can go ahead and try to prove this - the whole corpus of reddit data is available, if you can come up with the toolkit to test this people could put empirical evidence to these questions.

It is also a question on how you can create balancing forces for moderator overreach. However that sounds laughably expensive. Reddit sure as heck would not want to become a court of judgement where bad mods are censured (even though they have to do it every day).

Fact is you need humans to handle humans, and humans are expensive. No one wants to pay, and debugging deception in human interactions is painful.

Far easier to talk about the marketplace of ideas and put a lid on the whole mess.

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#119

Post by intended » Wed, Jan 20, 2021, 12:17 AM UTC

fjabre wrote: post #41

abcdjdjd wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Moderators have a lot of power to influence conversations on Reddit in non-obvious ways. You had the above quote when I was commenting on your post, but may have edited it out. But I think this line right here is also why reddit is becoming unusable and going downhill fast. Basically, moderators are given way too much power and users have no recourse against mod abuse really. Users can't vote a moderator out for exa…

I couldn't agree with this more. As someone who has gotten to the top of Reddit front page twice with my free (no ads) web app I now cannot. It's all but impossible. Mods are so over protective they will ban you for practically nothing. If you attempt to evade the ban even innocently they will sniff you out. I think Reddit's mod tools are disgusting and foster censorship and make Reddit a more negative and critical p…

I love these conversations. As I've said in about 3 other places now - these are the side effects of automation. It didn't use to be like this because it was not possible - and reddit was in many ways MUCH worse. You couldn't ban known bigots or racists because they would be back with an alt.

The presence of harassment and hate speech has a chilling effect on normal users - they aren't here to engage or fight nazism.

Without effective moderation, you will end up with Godwin's law applied to all convos.

But with automation you can ban hate speech! Awesome! You can stop bigotry and harassment! Brilliant!

You can enforce ideological views over your sub and crush dissent - whoops?

No, you cannot escape this conundrum - tools will be misused. The issue then becomes one of ethics and the appropriateness of the force used.

Re: Storming Reddit's Moat

#120

Post by dwohnitmok » Wed, Jan 20, 2021, 12:21 AM UTC

fjabre wrote: post #111

sellyme wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you attempt to evade the ban even innocently they will sniff you out. How exactly do you "innocently" attempt to evade a ban?

I created another account. Logged in. Forgot I was logged in on another account. Forgot I got banned in that sub ages ago. But not Reddit. Reddit mods don't forget. Reddit gives them the tools they need to sniff you out. Kinda creepy reddit has become.

The whole concept of a ban is to follow a person not an account though... This has been true for every single forum I've ever frequented (including HN). The fact that this isn't always true is due to an (necessarily for both ethical and technological reasons) imperfect implementation.