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Artist banned, told to “find a different style”- AI-made art

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Re: Artist banned, told to “find a different style”- AI-made art

#261

Post by kspacewalk2 »

bitwize wrote: post #180
jknoepfler wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an extremely reductive claim. Can you really not think of more mundane reasons someone might find themselves moderating reddit? It's hard to imagine "ideology" being relevant to the vast majority of reddit... Do you really think the moderators of ELI5 or PeopleFuckingDying or some obscure porn reddit or whatever are primarily concerned with "ideology"? I used to help moderate a poker forum. I was a professiona…

It's common knowledge now that abstaining from politics is taking the side of the oppressor. This has the effect of giving many subreddits and other topical communities a political orientation even if politics is nominally offtopic. To give an example, it is increasingly hard to find an online knitting community that tolerates conservative viewpoints; most have followed the lead of Ravelry.

This absurd beyond belief. Knitting has precisely nothing to do with politics, so I struggle to imagine what "conservative knitting viewpoints" even are. Or liberal ones, for that matter. Cross-stitching is a tool of systemic racism? Purl stitching is inviting the illegals to tukk-urr-jurrbs?

To me phrases like "abstaining from politics is taking the side of the oppressor" are just so damn American. You guys, more than any other nationality I've met, tend to dive head first into whatever ideology or sect or even hobby you happen to get into. There are, of course, people who are "extra" in every viewpoint or occupation. But more so for Americans.

Re: Artist banned, told to “find a different style”- AI-made art

#262

Post by kypro »

jasonkolb wrote: post #142
benjaminbachman wrote: post #2

The only real news here is that Reddit mods are power mad tyrants, which is nothing new at all. AI generated art has just given them newer, funnier ways to be in the wrong.

Reddit is a worse echo chamber than Twitter ever was. I gave up on it when I got banned from certain subreddits for posting quotes from congressional testimony. If you post anything that deviates in the slightest from the moderator's viewpoint, you get banned. The end result is an echo chamber that's getting tighter and smaller, excluding any diversity of opinion. It's no way to run a business.

It's not just the mods, the users on Reddit are equally awful and contribute more to the echo chamber imo.

The UK politics subreddit used to be one of my favourite subreddits back in the early 2010s. Back then it was quite a small community and while we had differences of opinions I think it's fair to say we enjoyed each other's company. But around the time of the Brexit vote, then Trump shortly after that, the subreddit started getting flooded with reactionary, low-effort comments and anyone who tried to provide a nuanced opinion or alternative view point was typically downvoted and insulted.

I along with a few other long-time commenters were mostly in favour of Brexit at the time so we would constantly be downvoted and insulted whenever we wrote anything in favour of Brexit. And the worst was when a post made it to /r/all because then you'd an even larger flood of low-effort commenters just downvoting and insulting everyone with a different opinion.

And this wasn't even just minor insults, this was people telling me to kill myself and that I'm a horrible person literally everyday. I'm not sure how much this was a political subreddit thing vs Reddit generally, but it was honestly ridiculous the stuff people would say to me there.

Needless to say, I obviously left the community shortly after 2016, but I've seen similar things play across the site since. There seems to be no room for a difference of opinion there anymore. The mods if anything are just an amalgamation of the average Redditor.

Re: Artist banned, told to “find a different style”- AI-made art

#263

Post by kibwen »

thatguy0900 wrote: post #229
jknoepfler wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it is. That does not entail that forums moderators (myself included) are exclusively motivated by a desire to push an ideology, which was the topic at hand. Nor does "subjective" entail "ideological" unless you're going to torture the term ideology being having a useful meaning.

We're not talking about forum moderators, really, but power moderators. Someone who mods a random topic they like is probably decent at it and not trying to push something. Someone whos gotten themselves in a position to mod 10+ of the largest subreddits on reddit is probably not doing very much actual modding and is very much trying to push something.

The person above stated "Why do Reddit moderators do their work? They are paid in power." They appear to be talking about moderators in general, not just power mods. The root comment here also appears to be talking about mods in general (with little idea what they're talking about, AFAICT).

Re: Artist banned, told to “find a different style”- AI-made art

#264

Post by kibwen »

13of40 wrote: post #166
ilyt wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is, in part, why it's so common for popular submissions to be locked or deleted because "y'all can't behave". But they have no problem digging into downvoted comments and deleting them, even if the system already did the job for them (put the downvoted stuff at bottom and hidden).

Maybe this is already well-known, but I saw another behavior recently on some subrreddits where a lot of new posts are seemingly getting a single downvote to a score of zero. I suspected there was some troll doing it, so I went down the line and gave about 20 or 30 of them a single up vote back to one, refreshed the page, and most of them had immediately gone back to zero. I think the mods must have a button for squa…

> I think the mods must have a button for squashing a post without actually deleting it

No, Reddit does not provide such a feature. And setting up an outside bot farm to hide posts makes no sense for mods who can already just delete a post outright.

Re: Artist banned, told to “find a different style”- AI-made art

#265

Post by BitwiseFool »

thechao wrote: post #178
jasonkolb wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is a worse echo chamber than Twitter ever was. I gave up on it when I got banned from certain subreddits for posting quotes from congressional testimony. If you post anything that deviates in the slightest from the moderator's viewpoint, you get banned. The end result is an echo chamber that's getting tighter and smaller, excluding any diversity of opinion. It's no way to run a business.

Reddit's business is to house all of the echo-chambers, though, isn't it? That seems like a great business to be in, during this Heyday of Echo Chamber Construction™.

>"all of the echo-chambers"

All of the like-minded echo-chambers. They seem to have no appetite for certain heresies and have walked back Aaron Swartz' original emphasis on free speech as a virtue.

Re: Artist banned, told to “find a different style”- AI-made art

#266

Post by rightbyte »

ok123456 wrote: post #162
spacemadness wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit mods are ineffective or harmful a lot of the time, but so is Reddit itself in how it incentivizes thankless moderation and oversized and noisy communities for the purpose of ads and their upcoming IPO. Most non-niche subreddits could be replaced by ChatGPT at this point.

> Most non-niche subreddits could be replaced by ChatGPT at this point. According to the "dead internet theory" they already are. I'm inclined to believe that a lot of the political discourse on there is bot driven.

It feels like it. It is so single minded compared to any real group of people I know.

Re: Artist banned, told to “find a different style”- AI-made art

#267

Post by richbell »

Seattle3503 wrote: post #248
richbell wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've added custom CSS to hide it, it isn't actually removed. You can easily bypass this by disabling custom CSS or using a mobile app.

13of40 was talking about a single button that mass downvotes multiple comments. None of the default (nor popular) clients support this functionality, but you could script your own version using the reddit API.

Oh, I guess I misinterpreted that because it's a bizarre speculation.

Shwartzworld is correct, the votes are fuzzed and deliberately fluctuate so that it's difficult for bots to tell whether they've been detected.

Re: Artist banned, told to “find a different style”- AI-made art

#268

Post by kibwen »

generalizations wrote: post #44
benjaminbachman wrote: post #2

The only real news here is that Reddit mods are power mad tyrants, which is nothing new at all. AI generated art has just given them newer, funnier ways to be in the wrong.

I wonder if the simple solution is to prevent mod accounts from interacting on the subreddits they moderate.

That's the opposite of what you want. Good mods are those that are invested in the community and are well-known and respected participants.

Re: Artist banned, told to “find a different style”- AI-made art

#269

Post by brador »

layer8 wrote: post #230
c3534l wrote: post #100

It does look like AI generated art, tbh.

Only at first glance. It doesn’t have any dodgy area or incongruence like you pretty much always find in AI pictures.

The new hotness is letting the AI do the first pass then the artist cleans it up before posting.

Re: Artist banned, told to “find a different style”- AI-made art

#270

Post by BitwiseFool »

purpleblue wrote: post #157
flumpcakes wrote: post #141

Speaking on the topic of Reddit and mods and it's power structure: In the UK Reddit has pushed a new subreddit called "HeyUK". It has turned up in the subscription feeds for some (all?) UK users automatically without the user asking for it or adding it. If you remove it from your list of subreddits the posts will still show up in your feed as "sponsored". As far as I can see this new subreddit is seeded with just cro…

The beauty of reddit is that you can create your own subreddit with your own mods and have the discourse that you want. You're not held to just sticking with the subreddits that are given to you.

>"The beauty of reddit is that you can create your own subreddit with your own mods and have the discourse that you want."

The "just start your own" strategy rarely works, and at the end of the day you're still on a platform that can ban your little upstart for any reason it wants. That's assuming the people in the main subreddit even learn that your alternative exists, as the mods don't want people leaving their little fiefdom and can ban you for mentioning it. This mindset is also counterproductive because it advocates for completely and totally giving up any effort to address the problem in the main subreddit. It lets the troublesome moderators run unchallenged and can make things even worse.

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