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Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

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Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#471

Post by wtf_is_up »

_m8fo wrote: post #46

So we've tried: - Real identities (Facebook comments) - Voting and self moderation (Reddit, HN, etc.) - Strong moderation (Reddit, HN) They all result in toxic comments, trolling, an echo chamber,or worse, a complete lack of participation. There's no real solution to this problem. However, if you create consequences or a cost to commenting you'd eliminate toxic comments and trolling at the cost of less participation…

This is why 4chan always had it right. Anonymous + minimal moderation. Instead of echo chambers you get extreme contrarianism. The upside of this is that non-conformal viewpoints aren't buried and low effort trolling just gets ignored.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#472

Post by derefr »

anigbrowl wrote: post #318
KirinDave wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the argument but actually any lipped shape can give this guarantee. Even historically manhole and utility covers had to be somewhat flush to the ground and so they've always had to be lipped for this. You can see lots of utility covers that are hinged, square, or other options, but all are lipped for safety. While a circular profile makes the lipping easier, it doesn't seem to influence many utility covers.

You can easily put a square or a rectangular utility cover into the hole, because the length of the side is less than the diagonal. This isn't possible with a circular cover because the diameter is uniform.

The parent’s point is that a lip prevents this for every shape, by making the hole smaller than the side-length.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#473

Post by cookiecaper »

tbabb wrote: post #408
cookiecaper wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. In today's age of near-universal literacy, "uneducated" is just a euphemism for views disliked by the the side in control of the education apparatus. While thought-policing media, schools, churches, and any other possible venue of "indoctrination" may "work" to a superficial extent, it mostly just completely destroys the credibility of your authority and leads to stunning implosion and destabilization. See: the…

Education is not indoctrination. Education teaches critical thinking, science, history, numerical literacy, and the general skill and toolset to differentiate fact from falsehood, rhetoric, and manipulation-- regardless of where it is coming from. Education is an immune system for the mind. Generally it is the manipulators who don't like an educated populace, because it decreases their power. They tend to be the ones…

>Education is not indoctrination.

Right, in principle, it's agreed that "education" is "good knowledge" and "indoctrination" is "bad knowledge" and/or "fake news".

As long as you think that the inoculations being administered in the school system are valid, you'll call it education. Once you stop thinking that, you'll call it indoctrination.

So you're not really arguing anything. Every side calls training that biases you toward their preferred narrative "education" and training that biases in the opposite way "indoctrination". Is your point that "sometimes people disagree"?

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#474

Post by mancerayder »

adamrezich wrote: post #415
mancerayder wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Hackernews' "echo-chamber-ness" is extremely exaggerated. It only feels like that if you're in the minority viewpoint in a thread (which happens to me, too). However, it's not echo-chambery if dissident viewpoints live side-by-side dominant viewpoints, even if the latter are 80% of the thread replies and upvotes. An echo chamber is arguably more when we actively suppress dissident viewpoints. Reddit is in…

I've seen a lot of very interesting, usually quite short comments on politics-related threads in the past few weeks, that were posted less than ten minutes prior and already grayed out and marked "[dead]". In each instance, the user was not using inflammatory language at all, yet HN was implicitly saying "yeah we're not going to allow discussion on this topic." I'm sure there's Very Good Reasons(TM) for this but it a…

Ah. HN is special: they punish political discussions. It's unfortunate, even tragic in my opinion. They allow it sometimes if there's specifically a tech or science-related topic very very closely attached.

I avoid poking the moderator lions (I used to post political articles maybe a year or more ago), but I do wish HN would have another view of that particular topic. It's rather unavoidable that adults (and we are adults), highly-educated ones at that, would sometimes slip into politics when science or tech news (or legal news about tech or science) is discussed.

But yes, you're generally right about that.

I think emotive political discussion is useless, but rational policy discussions aren't useless.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#475

Post by derefr »

guelo wrote: post #470
floren wrote: post #339

I can't wait for the word "toxic" to drop out of favor. It implies that the person is not just giving a bad opinion, but is in fact fundamentally flawed and dangerous. Arsenic isn't toxic because it had a bad day at work, arsenic is by its nature a deadly poison and you can't change it, only avoid it. The vast majority of people labeled "toxic", though, are just humans with a variety of opinions and beliefs, some you…

Poisoning a conversation is a thing. And if you've participated in online discussions I don't see how you can honestly say it doesn't exist. You're implying that in every thread where a troll shows up to derail the conversation we all have to stop what we're doing and give thoughtful responses to the troll to show them the error of their ways. But then the only possible conversation is debates with trolls. But that g…

No, the parent was simply saying that “trolling” (or, having a bad opinion) doesn’t imply a character flaw, and that we shouldn’t use language that makes that implication, lest we start to think of people who have bad opinions as irredeemable. People can do wrong without being fundamentally bad, broken people.

If we treated, say, driving a car the way people treat Internet discourse, you would be dragged out of your car and stoned to death the first time you cut someone off.

Yes, sure, ignore posts that seem like trolling. Filter or block them, even. But perhaps you could give the people behind those posts a second chance, before writing them off for life for one post.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#476

Post by nradov »

dalbasal wrote: post #345
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Reddit... does it know it's job is to prevent outraged reaction? // Ha, ha, ha. Cause that'll increase pageviews. Outraged reaction is exactly what all news media is going for because people rant and rave and in passing see more adverts. It's just they want to sanitise the topics according to their advertisers wishes. Reddit doesn't have non-censorship values, it's heavily censored; not all from the top admittedly,…

Well, yes that's the obvious (and cynical) assumption. It's definitely true as a real pseudo-economic force on the internet and media generally, but let's not just assume reddit are following that "interest" blindly. If you think reddit doesn't have those values, I guess we disagree. I don't see any way of coming to that conclusion apart from fundamentalism, it's either absolute or it's bullshit.

I'm not a Reddit user but there are plenty of stories out there about how the corporate managers have permanently closed some offensive forums. To be clear, I'm not claiming that Reddit management did anything wrong; they're under no obligation to spend money spreading toxic content. But obviously they don't value non-censorship as a corporate value.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#477

Post by tbabb »

cookiecaper wrote: post #473
tbabb wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Education is not indoctrination. Education teaches critical thinking, science, history, numerical literacy, and the general skill and toolset to differentiate fact from falsehood, rhetoric, and manipulation-- regardless of where it is coming from. Education is an immune system for the mind. Generally it is the manipulators who don't like an educated populace, because it decreases their power. They tend to be the ones…

>Education is not indoctrination. Right, in principle, it's agreed that "education" is "good knowledge" and "indoctrination" is "bad knowledge" and/or "fake news". As long as you think that the inoculations being administered in the school system are valid, you'll call it education. Once you stop thinking that, you'll call it indoctrination. So you're not really arguing anything. Every side calls training that biases…

Do you understand the difference between knowledge and critical thinking?

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#478

Post by KirinDave »

Reedx wrote: post #445
KirinDave wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same sort of myth as "why are manhole covers round?" and there are lots of attributions for why that ignore history for a just-so story.

What's the myth? There are good reasons for round manhole covers. Also fun fact: That used to be a Microsoft interview question.

That is not where the myth originated, but it is where I heard it first.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#479

Post by KirinDave »

anigbrowl wrote: post #318
KirinDave wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the argument but actually any lipped shape can give this guarantee. Even historically manhole and utility covers had to be somewhat flush to the ground and so they've always had to be lipped for this. You can see lots of utility covers that are hinged, square, or other options, but all are lipped for safety. While a circular profile makes the lipping easier, it doesn't seem to influence many utility covers.

You can easily put a square or a rectangular utility cover into the hole, because the length of the side is less than the diagonal. This isn't possible with a circular cover because the diameter is uniform.

Yes. Yes. I am aware you read this on a blog post about interview prepping. I wish you had shown the same retention for this thread.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#480

Post by abvdasker »

throwaway84742 wrote: post #102

Aside from the degenerate cases like “kill all white men” or “liberalism is a mental disorder”, one man’s “toxic comment” is another man’s “common sense”. And as frustrating as it may be to SV digital overlords they don’t get to decide which is which, at least not without unpleasant repercussions down the line. So there’s really no way to solve this. There is a way to contain it somewhat: create homogeneous bubbles.…

Or, rather than giving up or "creating homogeneous bubbles" instead you could look at things on a case-by-case basis as Reddit is doing. At the end of the day the privately run company does get to decide whether content warrants removal or not since they are running a business and advertisers don't like advertising in a space associated with extreme or harmful content. They also have an incentive not to take the moderation too far since to do so would put the company's most valuable asset — its user base — at risk.
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