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

Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 757 posts

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#61

Post by DanBC »

digitalantfarm wrote: post #25

Reddit 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…

There's no forced email for Reddit accounts. New accounts are midly painful with some delays in posting built in.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#62

Post by favorited »

wnevets wrote: post #47

Reddit has zero problem leaving post that threaten the lives of an entire religious group on their frontpage. If they were serious certain subs would be nuked.

Yeah – until it affects their PR or advertising, they don't care. There are some vile, disgusting subs out there.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#63

Post by DanBC »

ScipioAfricanus wrote: post #42
oblio wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

Ok so some random person is saying something you find offensive or hurtful. You can block them so you don't have to see what they post. It's a decentralized solution to a decentralized problem.

You don't seem to have any clue about how prolific trolls can be, and how persistant their threats are.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#64

Post by zitterbewegung »

I don’t know if you can do this. The problem with social news sites is not that the trolls are winning but it is that the moderators aren’t properly compensated because no website has the capability of moderating large websites. Also to get advertisers on your platform you need a moderated forum that aligns with your advertisers. The internet always had free speech and with that comes trolls by definition . The difference now is that there are competiting ideologies associated with websites that want to control vast parts of the internet . We have websites that want your pictures , attention and comments for free in exchange to promote other people’s products. On the site operators side they need to do deals with advertisers who don’t want that controversial topics. So the advertisers force discussions on the platform to only align with them. Or the site operators do this. Solving the troll problem is not going to be solved just by reddit.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#65

Post by _m8fo »

frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #60
_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…

I think your suggestion would lead to an echo chamber. Take a look at metafilter and how samey they've gotten. One thing to remember is that even small barriers implicity give mods much more power.

I complete agree. My premise is that you can only remove two out of the four -- echo chamber, trolling, toxicity, community. If you accept this premise the only logical conclusion is to remove trolling and toxicity. Without community the point is moot, after all. So really you're removing two out of echo chamber, trolling, toxicity.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#66

Post by jstanley »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #54
overcast wrote: post #2

The 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.

Reddit has a large user base and a myriad of subreddits where different solutions have been tried. So far, the best I've seen is strong moderation: clear rules and swift enforcement. AskScience is a shining example of a high quality subreddit, although the comment section usually looks like a graveyard with 90% of the comments removed.

I'd like to see moderation decoupled from the forum namespace.

So you'd subscribe to a forum namespace in order to see posts about a topic (say, AskScience), but you would then also subscribe to whichever moderators you want. The moderation wouldn't be inextricably tied to the namespace.

Anybody can post anything in any namespace (and anybody can declare themselves a moderator of any namespace), but people will only see posts if their chosen moderators allow it. You could have all of the same moderation powers that exist at the moment, except any given moderator's actions are optional to any given user's view of the forum.

We wouldn't need a situation like with r/bitcoin and r/btc where disagreements about moderation resulted in a splinter group creating a separate namespace: those who disagreed with moderator X would simply unsubscribe from X's moderation.

I don't know if this would result in a better forum, but I'd be interested to see how it's different, and I don't know of anywhere it's been tried.

(And in case someone out there is granting wishes... can I also have it decentralised e.g. using IPFS's pub sub?)

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#68

Post by _m8fo »

DanBC wrote: post #58
_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…

Reddit does not have strong moderation. Some subreddits do have strong moderation; some subreddits think they have strong moderation but they have fucking idiot mods who call down trolls; and there are some subreddits that have permissive moderation and those subreddits leak. > However if you create consequences or a cost to commenting you'd eliminate toxic comments and trolling. You genuinely don't. There are forums…

I apologize -- I mean the platform itself offers strong moderation. Unlike Facebook, for example. I agree with your point, though.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#69

Post by Nadya »

adpirz wrote: post #24
JorgeGT wrote: post #3

> Huffman can no longer edit the site indiscriminately There's precisely zero proof of this.

It's described in the article... EDIT: I misunderstood OP, I thought the comment was saying there was zero proof of Huffman's ability to tamper in the first place. Agreed there's no way to prove he can't do this anymore.

Mind quoting the passage that describes the measures in place? I just read the entire article and absolutely zero proof is provided that Huffman can no longer edit things.

It mentions Spezgiving, followed by Huffman's apology, and then moves onto banning subreddits, to the meeting about banning subreddits, and ends at /r/Place and the worry it'd be nothing but swastikas. Absolutely nowhere is anything described about the measures in place to prevent Huffman - or anyone else at Reddit for that matter - from editing posts.

Post reply on HN