> Huffman can no longer edit the site indiscriminately There's precisely zero proof of this.
Tampering can be detected with internet archives and data dumps of Reddit submissions/comments.
Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet
31–40 of 757 posts
Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet
#32The only way to detoxify the internet, is to get rid of the "social" aspect. Starting with gasp comments. My online experience has been that much better, since adding comment blockers to my browser.
I assume the irony of writing that in a comment is not lost on you.
It might if he blocked it.
Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet
#33It's not that the "trolls are winning", it's that people are allowing the trolls to bother them. Trolls have always existed; it's our heightened sensitivity and inability to just shrug them off or laugh in the face of their obscenity that's letting them "win".
Ah, the old "We just need to change human behaviour" solution. Yeah, that would definitely work if it worked.
Stopping trolling is the same. People will always troll. If there’s a text input on a site, it will get trolled.
Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet
#34Given that reddit is a Y Combinator alumnus, did anyone at YC contemplate the current mess of the internet back when they applied? I'm curious about the questions asked back then and how they would be answered now
Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet
#35It's not that the "trolls are winning", it's that people are allowing the trolls to bother them. Trolls have always existed; it's our heightened sensitivity and inability to just shrug them off or laugh in the face of their obscenity that's letting them "win".
No, trolls have not existed in the form they exist since the emergence of the internet. Self-censorship is a wonderful thing. And the way it works is: you say dumb things (especially as a kid), you get slapped by your parents/friends/people around you. By age 18 or 21, you know instinctively that what you can and cannot say around other folks. At least the vast majority of folks do.
On the internet however, there's no real sense of human interaction and the repercussions are usually minimal.
Real life trolling is probably 1/10k of internet trolling.
Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a comment though.
HN doesn't allow such negativity though. Reddit flourishes on it.
It really depends on the subreddit, doesn't it? I only visit subreddits like r/boardgames and while there is the occasional rude person, overall thos subreddits are welcoming uplifting places. Some parts of Reddit are horrid and some parts are beautiful, just like real life. I just don't go to the horrid parts - just like I would avoid the horrid parts of a city.
Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet
#37> Struggle to Detoxify the Internet
The internet isn't toxic.
It's the people who are toxic.
These people are just as noxious in real life even if some of them hide it when their identities are known.
Can anything be done to detoxify the people, or do we just treat them like spam and filter them out?
And what happens next when millions of rabid voices are suppressed?
The toxic people don't cease to exist, we just won't be able to see them as well.
Perhaps we'll find the social and political environment of 2022 to be much darker and more dangerous than 2018.
Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet
#38The only way to detoxify the internet, is to get rid of the "social" aspect. Starting with gasp comments. My online experience has been that much better, since adding comment blockers to my browser.
I've been kicking a design around in my head for the past few weeks which retains most of the outward form of something like Reddit, on the grounds that it has proved to be a model that can attract users, but redefines the upvote and downvote process such that an upvote now means "I want to see more of this poster's comments, and transitively (and weaker as the links go out) what that user sees" and a downvote now means "I'd like to see less of this poster's comments and transitively what they upvoted". The difference here being that upvote no longer means "I think everyone should see more of this comment", but now "I think I should see more of this commenter".
I think it ought to be unidirectional to prevent obvious attacks. I'm not too worried about the "filter bubble" because I think you are inevitably in a filter bubble, and it's on you to manage it, not expect random sites on the internet to somehow pop you out of it (they basically can't, by definition).
I think I'd still want categorizations for subject, just to give things some sort of focus. The result is that instead of /r/politics or /r/$ANYTHING being captured by some sort of single monolithic gestalt, multiple simultaneous gestalts could be running side-by-side. You'd want some deliberate mixing, both to keep things interesting and because I think you'd want to ensure some "heat" in the simulated annealing sense to ensure that things don't get too isolated and things keep moving. (Communities themselves keep moving, after all.)
The net effect of this is that while trolls would still exist, anyone not interested in trolling should naturally filter them out of their view relatively quickly, while the trolls get each other to troll at. Since they can not be eliminated, all you can really do is fence them off. One of the other interesting side effects is that you ought to get some other interesting communities in there, too; the community of people who thoughtfully comment, the community of "doers", etc. One interesting possibility is that this may even allow "celebrities" to have a "social network" that nominally anyone can join, but requires sufficient social proof that it isn't just "anybody with a Twitter account and an itchy trigger finger can get the first reply below $CELEBRITY's tweet.", wrecking the utility of social media for the celebrity. I haven't quite solved the question of how to initialize the communities once the system gets going, but it's probably feasible.
What stops me from coding this up is that whenever I start really fleshing this out into an implementable system, I realize it violates one of my life rules: "Never engage in an endeavor in which the worst case scenario is complete success." I don't want to run a community site like that. So for me personally, the outcome matrix boils down to "Failure -> waste of time, Success -> oh shit". Because even if this did miraculously fix all social issues, which I am hardly naive enough to suppose, there's still legal compliance, DMCA compliance, etc., all sorts of things I personally have no desire or drive to do.
However, by all means, feel free to "steal" my idea. While I am by no means an expert in this field (the aforementioned paragraphs are pretty much the sum total of my thinking at this time), I'll even spot you some free "consulting" in the form of playing intelligent-rubber-duck to bounce ideas off of if you'd like. And let me know if you get to deployment.
Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet
#39Reddit used to be a place where you could post links to anything on the internet (kind of like this place) and comment on it (without signing up with your email). Now it's place more like Facebook with algorithms based on your personal taste, geolocation, forced email, shadow banning, banning of politically incorrect subreddits, endless political posts and "Futurology" and "Uplifting" news articles. Free speech on re…
I’ve also noticed recently that Reddit has gotten extremely aggressive towards people using it without an account or using it on mobile without installing the app. I’m addicted to it enough, thank you, without having a dedicated app for it.
Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet
#40> Huffman can no longer edit the site indiscriminately There's precisely zero proof of this.
Tampering can be detected with internet archives and data dumps of Reddit submissions/comments.
and how many people are running bots/scrapers to do this? also, how do you know whether the OP edited it, or it was an admin?