Live data from Hacker News

Reddit CEO Cracks Down on Abusive Content to Protect Users, Attract Advertisers

wsj.com

271–280 of 407 posts

Re: Reddit CEO Cracks Down on Abusive Content to Protect Users, Attract Advertisers

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is stupid to expect ad-driven media properties to be neutral. Just dumb. Reddit is an ad-supported system. The moment you take advertising, you are now required to maintain editorial control. And that's fine. Advertisers have strict content guidelines, things like: no blood, no violence, no gore, no porn, etc.. Do you think a company like Calvin Klein is going to want to put their fashion ad next to an image of a dea…

You probably don't know but there are NLP and computer vision methods to detect "blood, violence, gore and porn" automatically and stop ads on those pages (subreddits).

This doesn't just apply to obvious and simple visual problems, but also more subtle content problems.

How does Honda avoid placing ads next to a pro-Roy Moore articles that might associate their brand with pedophilia?

Re: Reddit CEO Cracks Down on Abusive Content to Protect Users, Attract Advertisers

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is stupid to expect ad-driven media properties to be neutral. Just dumb. Reddit is an ad-supported system. The moment you take advertising, you are now required to maintain editorial control. And that's fine. Advertisers have strict content guidelines, things like: no blood, no violence, no gore, no porn, etc.. Do you think a company like Calvin Klein is going to want to put their fashion ad next to an image of a dea…

Put it a different way: Its like Usenet. Lots of unrelated and related NG's. Some are very palatable and high content. /r/electronics, /r/arduino , /r/news ; those sorts of things. I think there'd be room for lists of "advertising acceptability" while still maintaining the previous freedom of speech ideals they claimed. Something like: "Acceptable for all ages" "Acceptable for most viewers" "NSFW content, porn relate…

The advertising market is dominated by mega corporations in big industries.

You can always find a few dollars from crap local family brands and porn companies, but if you want the big bucks, you need the major brands.

Economics sets the rules. How much of your income goes towards porn? How much of it goes towards food or transportation or housing?

The sizes of each of those is directly proportional to the size of their corresponding advertising industries.

Re: Reddit CEO Cracks Down on Abusive Content to Protect Users, Attract Advertisers

#273
post #21
post #4

Yah, except they're hosting /r/The_Donald which has been confirmed to violate Reddit rules. Just like Twitter they cherry pick for $$$.

This is untrue, and repeating it loud and often doesn't make it true. The moderators of The_Donald work with reddit to try to keep the subreddit in line. They do not allow anything that violates the site wide rules, but that doesn't mean low ranked comments on low ranked threads don't go unreported. I'm not saying there aren't a lot of assholes in The_Donald. There are. Some of them have valid political points to mak…

Here's the most recent thread (16 days ago) on this issue. /u/spez (the CEO of Reddit) responded [1] to a long list of unreported calls for violence on /r/the_donald, saying:

> Many of these links are probably in violation of our policy, but most are unreported, which is what alerts the mods and our team, especially when there are few votes. We'll consider them reported now.

> Generally the mods of the_donald have been cooperative when we approach them with systematic abuses. Typically we ban entire communities only when the mods are uncooperative or the entire premise of the community is in violation of our policies. In the past we have removed mods of the_donald that refuse to work with us.

> Finally, the_donald is a small part of a large problem we face in this country—that a large part of the population feels unheard, and the last thing we're going to do is take their voice away.

The reporter's response [2] said:

>> most are unreported, which is what alerts the mods and our team

> I don't accept that excuse. These were gathered by searching for phrases that should be included in their AutoModerator config. These calls for violence are mod enabled.

There's definitely some validity to ignoring cherry-picked violations of low ranked comments and threads. But many of these should be caught automatically, just by watching for words and phrases like "kill", "hang", and "shoot". You'd have a lot of false positives, but a moderation and administration policy that was less tolerant of these calls for violence would not have this track record.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/7a4bjo/time_...

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/7a4bjo/time_...

Re: Reddit CEO Cracks Down on Abusive Content to Protect Users, Attract Advertisers

#275
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, that's the crux: racism and misogyny are terrible enough that if you hate it, you must be correct. For me personally, the echo chamber on both sides is enough to keep me far away from both /r/politics and /r/The_Donald. For example, you cannot say anything positive about Trump on /r/politics. Nothing. There was a screenshot showing that there were 231 negative articles posted and zero positive articles. It's lite…

>Ah, that's the crux: racism and misogyny are terrible enough that if you hate it, you must be correct. As is required to maintain what I would call a "democracy" with "individual rights". We have to be vehemently intolerant of intolerance and marginalization (in general), and this is more important than free speech. Free speech is an artefact of-, not a requirement for democracy. Tolerance is required, however. Some…

Being intolerant of ideas makes you intolerant even if you classify those ideas as good or bad.

Being intolerant isn't always a bad thing either.

Everything is not black or white. Move the pieces around and the minority become the majority in different contexts.

Re: Reddit CEO Cracks Down on Abusive Content to Protect Users, Attract Advertisers

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it means that Reddit has a left leaning bias.

Maybe to give a concrete example: When /r/anarchism (left leaning sub about anarchism, antifa, communism, ...) mods refused to enforce reddit's rules relating to the incitement to violence, reddit only removed the mods in question instead of closing the sub. When /r/physical_removal (right leaning sub about pinochet 'memes') mods refused to enforce reddit's rules relating to the incitement to violence, the sub was re…

/r/nazi was removed because it promoted Nazism.

Re: Reddit CEO Cracks Down on Abusive Content to Protect Users, Attract Advertisers

#277
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, one is sub meant for general political discussion and the other is clearly meant to be an echo chamber for one side's ideas. /r/the_donald is awful but at least it doesn't pretend to be impartial.

But it is impartial in that you won't be removed for discussion in good faith, though you may be disagreed right to the bottom. Spiteful trolling usually gets down-voted to hell as well (thankfully). A little too often I see hyperbolic vitriol and shitposting persist, and though I don't mind the odd gag, it's not warranted. It clogs the thread as much as anything else. That subreddit is impartial in itself. It's cons…

It reflects the mods.

Re: Reddit CEO Cracks Down on Abusive Content to Protect Users, Attract Advertisers

#278

Any other non-Americans just fed up with this peurile black-and-white, Left-vs-Right tribalism that all discussions of US politics have seemingly devolved into over the last few years? It’s like watching a bizarre caricature of some dystopian satire.

I follow UK politics a bit and am American and have difficulty seeing any substantive difference between the right/left divide in the UK and the USA, but I am only reading the BBC headlines. In the USA, many people can trace the right left not working together to 1990's or so with Newt Gringrich, so it's not a recent phenomena either.

Re: Reddit CEO Cracks Down on Abusive Content to Protect Users, Attract Advertisers

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which ones do you have in mind? What left-wing sub is there advocating racism or misogyny?

try posting "It's OKAY to be white" in a popular subreddit

Because that statement has a pretty big white nationalist connotation.

Re: Reddit CEO Cracks Down on Abusive Content to Protect Users, Attract Advertisers

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't know how else to tell you that these things are all very bad. They, to me, should appear bad at face value. We clearly differ in the perception of the world at a fundamental level.

Even if they are bad are they as bad as Bush starting a war? It's claimed that somehow Trump is the worst of them all. From what you have stated here do you personally think they are worse things than Bush starting a war?

While I have an opinion for your question, you seem oddly driven to change topics. So I'll kindly decline to answer.
Post reply on HN