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

Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies”

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 401 posts

Re: Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies”

#181

Post by Spivak »

brirec wrote: post #170
Scoundreller wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subreddits can be unwanted by Reddit, but otherwise non-toxic.

This is correct, but the toxic, racist, alt-right, pro-fascism posts covering the front pages of sites like voat and ruqqus make me and many others wholly uninterested in these sites. If someone wants to provide an alternative to reddit but they don’t want to moderate/censor content that makes people uncomfortable, Reddit becomes the lesser evil.

Doesn't that mean that Reddit is doing a half decent job? If all that stuff was on Reddit (haha if...) wouldn't it turn you off of the site?

Re: Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies”

#182

Post by [deleted] »

brirec wrote: post #170
Scoundreller wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subreddits can be unwanted by Reddit, but otherwise non-toxic.

This is correct, but the toxic, racist, alt-right, pro-fascism posts covering the front pages of sites like voat and ruqqus make me and many others wholly uninterested in these sites. If someone wants to provide an alternative to reddit but they don’t want to moderate/censor content that makes people uncomfortable, Reddit becomes the lesser evil.

[deleted]

Re: Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies”

#183

Post by mikeyouse »

chippy wrote: post #42
tw04 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? Calling for someone to be murdered is understandably against their policy. As is doxxing someone. The user accounts that upvote the call for murder or upvote the doxxing details KNOW that the post is against their policy and decided to participate anyway. I hate how these conversations always devolve to "well they're just trying to control what everyone says!" as if it's black and white and not shades of gray…

Yes, it's shades of gray. For example, lets compare a similar service. Twitter is currently censoring some of the President of the US's tweets. They were not doing that a few months ago. So it's not black and white where twitter and acceptability is, and, like with society, it changes over time. Thus, people are concerned that merely interacting with something is enough to be labelled anathema, because of the shades…

They're not censoring them at all - they're adding more context below them that some of the content is misleading. You can still read every insane word in its original context.

Re: Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies”

#184

Post by downerending »

torben-friis wrote: post #22

I don't really get reddit's efforts to clean their site. They sometimes come up with measures like this, while routinely ignoring the development of horrible communities that they're aware of (since some users take any possible opportunity to mention them to the admins and are met with silence or half measures). They even came up with the concept of quarantined subreddits. I honestly can't think of a single honest re…

My impression is the reason is that there really isn't widespread agreement on the harmfulness of such communities, so they're sort of trying to split the middle. And perhaps also to advocate for seeing them as awful, per corporate sentiment.

The principal example that comes to mind is TD, which seems more obnoxious and tasteless than some sort of evil.

Subs that truly are beyond the pale by wide consensus seem to get dropped immediately and without objection.

As to not wanting to win, well, yes, dropping everything controversial means losing a lot of page-hits, and as a business, they're likely wary.

Re: Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies”

#185

Post by cthalupa »

marricks wrote: post #89
cthalupa wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>CTH has some posts that violated a rule but most don't I'm not familiar with the CTH situation, or super familiar with CTH in general besides knowing them to be pretty far left on the political spectrum. But based solely on this line, if their admins are not making enough of an effort in Reddit's eyes to clean up and discourage people from making these rule breaking posts, then the quarantine makes sense. Even if on…

I don't follow them enough to personally have an opinion on if they warranted that treatment or not, but did follow enough to know it really couldn't have been most posts. So really can't argue with you on the validity of the banning. but... that if the fraction of bad posts lead to mass suspensions on CTH then I'd say it is a creepy/not-good direction for Reddit.

I pulled the fractions out of thin air, so I have no idea what they actually are.

But you have to do something about people refusing to enforce site policy, even if it's only on a small portion of the content.

For an extreme example (and to be clear I am not saying anything like this happened at CTH), if 99 posts out of 100 on subreddit fall within the rules, but that 1 post that doesn't is promoting killing everyone of a certain race, and the subreddit moderators refuse to do anything about that one post, then they 100% need to have something happen. And that doesn't change if it's 999 out of 1000, etc., either.

Now, it's unlikely that anything on CTH was at that level of toxic and hateful, but the same overall concept applies - they have to take care of posts that are against policy, even if they're a small minority. If not, it seems like getting quarantined or even removed completely is a reasonable course of action.

Re: Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies”

#186

Post by dogma1138 »

Nice I wonder how many comments that go against Reddit’s policies I’ve upvoted over the years unintentionally on the mobile app.

I up/downvote posts/comments at least couple of times a day when trying to scroll on my phone or just hitting the screen to wake it up after being distracted.

This is ridiculous policy.

Re: Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies”

#188

Post by slg »

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #72
MisterTea wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once you've deemed a community so harmful that you don't want people accidentally stumbling into it, why go out of your way to allow it to exist behind a curtain, instead of just outright banning it (unless you want to support it discreetly). Perhaps this is a way to sidestep claims of censorship. Deleting subs can embolden some community themes and messages by allowing them to play victim of censorship and bolster…

It also keeps people from flooding into the rest of Reddit. When /r/fatpeoplehate was banned, their users flooded and spammed most other subreddits.

It is naive to think these bad users currently stay confined to their hateful communities. They use the rest of the site too. There is even an argument to be made that the rest of the site could be improved by banning these hateful communities, decreasing the value these users get from the site, and thereby decreasing the likelihood that these users will continue to use the rest of Reddit.

Re: Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies”

#189

Post by s9w »

fwip wrote: post #119
s9w wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not mandatory to be against the things that you listed. Many people enjoy reading and talking about things they're legally allowed to.

"Many people enjoy being racist" is a weird hill to die on.

That's a difficult discussion. These sites offer so much more than what they're always reduced to. I would even argue that they're sometimes nicer places than Reddit or hn. And even with those icky subjects they're not always as black or white as they're portrayed. Even if you don't believe that they're right about them, they're evidently more open to their debate.

Re: Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies”

#190

Post by luckylion »

yusyusyus wrote: post #162
cwhiz wrote: post #111

I don't think Reddit should be able to censor lawful content and also claim protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. If they want to police lawful content that is fine but then they are no longer an open platform and they should forfeit their Section 230 protections. I dislike the ability for online platforms to have their cake of protection against lawsuits and also eat their cake of policing…

What model makes sense and why should it be treated differently than other forums with moderation? I'm a big fan of the idea that internet providers, DNS registrars, etc. need to be neutral to content in the way common carriers are, but I'm not convinced yet that platforms should have similar obligations. It seems that the appropriate response to schismatic disagreement with the "SysOps of the BBS" is to build anothe…

At some point, that gets moved up a few levels though, if the BBS allows for groups that get moderated by other people, is the BBS still "the moderator" or is it those people that set up the group? And if you don't agree with their decisions, should you be able to launch a rival group on the BBS (it being a platform and all)?
Post reply on HN