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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

#731

Post by Karunamon »

tmuir wrote: post #696
tmuir wrote: post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The flaw in your argument is that the obedience must be demanded at gunpoint. In actuality, the obedience can be gained through a combination of continuously putting people under stress, and framing yourself as the only viable solution to the stress. Its how you train dogs, and how you train Marines. Narcissists and con artists don't need to threaten violence to achieve their means. The threat of violence is simply o…

@Karunamon: I'm not sure why, but I have no reply link under your latest post, so I'm posting as close to it as I can. I don't think its controversial at all to say that both Facebook and Reddit are brainwashing people. Not to say that the companies themselves are doing the brainwashing, just that they are effective platforms for anyone to do it on. Do you really not know anyone who literally lives on one of the two…

Re commenting: That happens after two or three replies - you have to click on the timestamp to get the permalink to the comment to be able to reply to it.

Re everything else: This is a reply that doesn't do justice to the effort you put into it, but I think with your definition of "brainwashing", we've made that term functionally useless, and I think bringing partisan politics into it apropos of nothing has made any further honest conversation on this matter impossible.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#732

Post by cirgue »

etblg wrote: post #184
antishatter wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the somethingawful forums involve a cost to participate, something like a one time $10 fee that was designed to remove low content or negative content participators. Might be an interesting case study of your hypothesis.

Worked, but not 100%. Many people were still willing to pay 10$ over and over and over again, for whatever reason, to reregister and keep posting (badly) just to get banned again.

The number of people committed enough to being trolls that they will keep paying you is small enough that they don't dominate the discussion.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#733

Post by projektir »

kerkeslager wrote: post #717
projektir wrote: post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which form of trolls from my post are you talking about? I insist that we not pretend these are the same group of people. I haven't found it particularly wortwhile to distinguish people who are saying terrible things to troll, or because they believe them. They're very often the same group, because reasonable, emphatic people are going to neither say nor believe those terrible things. If you cannot carry a conversa…

> I haven't found it particularly wortwhile to distinguish people who are saying terrible things to troll, or because they believe them. They're very often the same group, because reasonable, emphatic people are going to neither say nor believe those terrible things. > If you cannot carry a conversation with consideration for the other people in it, I do not want you in my community. Okay, you can want whatever you w…

> But if people continue to insist on putting their head in the sand and take actions that feel good...

I'm not sure how you go from "I don't want trolls in my community" to "it just feels good, you're putting head in the sand". I'm not putting anything anywhere, I know exactly what I am doing. I don't want trolls in my community.

> these problems are only going to get worse

Not in my community they won't.

> I have had fairly in-depth conversations and said plenty of unpopular stuff on Reddit all the time, so I'm not sure what you're basing this.

This is a subjective thing obviously but it's not like it's some new sentiment I made up, plenty of people find Reddit terrible to have interesting conversations on. Particularly a thing you'll see mentioned often is that shorter, less complex posts are often more liked than longer, more complex posts requiring a lot of effort to write.

> You said, "If your community is ignoring trolls instead of banning them, it's effectively sending the message that the trolls are very welcome."

Which is not a proposal. It's a statement on consequences. A proposal looks like this: "To have a well functioning community, you need to have this, this, and this, and not that". I've said nothing of the sort. Communities are complicated and require design, and there's a lot of variety within communities besides just "free for all" and "echo chamber".

You have a conversational style which seems to like to presume that the person you're speaking to is doing something they never claimed they're doing (keeping their head in the sand, or suggesting an echo chamber), which might be why you find Reddit tolerable, because this is very much the kind of interaction I find really annoying and could do without. It's always easy to feel right about everything if you just put words in the other person's mouth.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#734

Post by wfo »

slayed0 wrote: post #697
wfo wrote: post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoken like someone who hasn't spent much time on reddit recently. Since the massive surge in white nationalist, alt-right, and other right-hate ideologies online (and particularly the creation of the_donald, a subreddit which has shockingly avoided the ban hammer for an inexplicably long time given its obvious explicit purpose: to be an echo chamber to spread hate, scream slurs, threaten people with death and genoci…

You're mixing beliefs with tactics/behavior. The behavior you described is "toxic" no matter what your beliefs are. I agree that the lack of repercussions and social feedback online lead to an increase in people acting like this and it is a problem for pretty much all public forums. However, it is neither constructive, nor is it truthful, in my opinion, to attach this behavior to a single group, side, or set of belie…

>Edit: The exception, of course, is if the behavior that is at issue is actually encouraged by a foundational belief of the group.

I'm glad you added this, I agree with you in general. I'm not interested in "other-ing" right-wing people, Republicans, moderates, conservatives, but I'm very interested in "other-ing", e.g. neo-nazis or Klan members. I am not worried about neo-nazis becoming more extreme (? is this possible?) and I also am not willing to let their sensibilities or concern for their feelings dictate any part of my or society's behavior.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#735

Post by nkurz »

tmuir wrote: post #528
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…

I submit to you, a subreddit I've found in the past week that is absolutely horrifying, and I think stands quite counter to the "variety of opinions" model you put forth. This isn't anything visually graphic, but the opinions expressed in this subreddit make me believe that these people are preparing for a violent insurrection, full stop. https://www.reddit.com/r/CBTS_Stream/ CBTS stands for the Calm Before The Storm…

The subreddit you refer to has since been banned:

"This subreddit was banned due to a violation of our content policy, specifically, the prohibition of content that encourages or incites violence and the posting of personal and confidential information."

https://www.reddit.com/r/cbts_stream

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#736

Post by dredmorbius »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #725
dredmorbius wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your meaning of arity here? "Things" with some bounded shape or form (or other properties) may be related to perceptual apparatus. We see, or hear or smell or taste or feel, etc., the boundaries, emissions, or other perceptible manifestations of objects or phenomena. If you will, those are their interfaces. As in other domains, an interface may reveal, or conceal, some more complex back-end, inner working, or…

Arity, as in number of arguments to function. As in, beauty(who to-whom &optional context) confused as beauty(who).

Got it.

I've been thinking on Aristotelian categories over the past couple of years. Thought occurs that all of them are relations, though with varying degrees of dependence on the observer.

Related, a ~1835 essay on value by W.F. Lloyd notes that all value is relative. That's not a universally held view, but is, I believe, correct.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#737

Post by joshmillard »

anigbrowl wrote: post #335
egypturnash wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever... looked at the comments on MeFi? Some posts get lengthy, complex discussions, on subjects related to the link at hand; some do not. There is also Ask MeFi, where you can ask questions and get answers from other users (ads shown against this section to visitors without an account used to be a major portion of MeFi’s revenue until Google did some stuff that lowered MeFi’s search ranking). And there’s Me…

I was a member there for years. There's a community, which is highly normative, but they also resist implementing threading or commenting by reference precisely to keep the focus on submissions.

I'm still a member! For the record, we resist implementing threading or commenting by reference because it's makes for an unreadable discursive shitshow when trying to follow busy, active discussions.

Staying relatively on topic is an unrelated aspiration and one that we mostly let flex a lot depending on the specific thread and context.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#738

Post by joshmillard »

gowld wrote: post #279
frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

MetaFilter is more of a non-forum than an echo chamber. There's almost 0 discussion; people go there for the links, not the conversation.

This is remarkable for the terse confidence with which it is misapprehends the actual structure and content of the site.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#739

Post by dang »

shawnee_ wrote: post #729
dang wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "You cannot come to HN to discuss the potentially-negative ecological or economical impact of a YC company." People say negative things on HN about YC companies all the time. We moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC-funded startup is at issue. That doesn't mean we don't moderate it at all—that would leave too much of a loophole—but we do moderate it less. This is literally the first principle that we tell eve…

Thanks for the reply. What I meant, is that one cannot start a discussion of such things without being willing to lose lots of points and karma. Observations that AirBnB might be doing more harm than good to cities having "housing crisis" issues, and the fact that Uber and Lyft are actually harming public transportation rider numbers and putting more automobiles on the roads (creating congestion). Two issues I've see…

It's hard to say why specific comments have been downvoted. Often it's because they break the site guidelines in ways the author didn't notice. Sometimes it's simply not fair, and other users need to (and often do) fix that by giving a corrective upvote.

Plenty of comments arguing that Airbnb/Uber might be doing more harm than good routinely get heavily upvoted, so I'd question your overall generalization.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#740

Post by dang »

forapurpose wrote: post #702
dang wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HN is the ideal place to solve that problem That's an illusion, for reasons I attempted to describe here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16443431

Thanks for responding. > That's an illusion, for reasons I attempted to describe here That implies that it's an unsolvable problem, if I understand correctly. There's no reason to think this problem is any more difficult than all the other 'unsolvable' ones and this one is particularly, I would even say 'extremely' valuable to work on. I don't believe we simply could introduce political topics and it would work due t…

I don't know that it's impossible. But if I'm certain about anything re HN, it's that it would be unwise to try to make it be that, for the same reason we don't do radical medical research on living humans.

Our first responsibility is to take care of what we have. The way to take care of a complex system is to be sensitive to feedback and adapt. We can apply that principle here. Look at what happens when the political taps get opened beyond a notch or two. Discussion becomes nasty, brutish, long, and predictable. That's what we want less of, so opening the taps all the way is not an option. For similar reasons, closing them all the way isn't an option either.

I don't disagree completely. I think there's a chance HN can slowly develop greater capacity in this area. But it would need to be very slow and not something we try directly to control. Anything as complex and fragile as HN needs a light touch.

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