This is your signal to build the thing you were thinking about.
So much money on the table for anyone that can reinvent, but allow easy migration from that once great site.
Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment
91–100 of 482 posts
Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment
#92Reddit just hasn't scaled well, and it looks like the operators of Reddit have no interest in scaling it properly.
Case in point: the moderation system. Now, if you're passionate about some niche topic, and create a sub for it and become the moderator, then fine; you rock. Things work well for you and your subscribers.
But if you're a sub of a large interest area (say, the country of India). How do you moderate there? How do you accept the diversity of thoughts and opinions, many of which run contrary to your own, but are perfectly valid in a diverse society?
Currently, /r/india has a bunch of moderators with a severe political stance (I won't go into specifics here, but I've been banned from it several times). They will warn you and ultimately ban you if you don't toe their "moderation" line. So on the one hand you have the "in" group of people threatening violence and harassing people; and on the other, you have the complement set of people getting banned for using words like "naive" (happened to me). There current moderation system (whoever started the reddit, and whoever they blessed, get to be moderators; sortof like a monarchy and a feudal system) is horribly out of date in today's world.
Here's how I would fix it: every year, have an election of moderators. People get votes proportional to their karma (or upvotes or some function thereof, which could heavily penalize bad posting behavior) earned since the last election. And the top N vote getters get to be moderators for a year.
Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment
#93I am a freshman moderator of /r/portland. I had thought working as a moderator would be a great way to help grow the subreddit's base. Offer more useful real world interaction points and basically have a big impact on Portland. Instead what I've found is that 99% of the time the moderators are dealing with bad actors and that has to be the primary focus to keep the sub from falling apart. It isn't just dealing with t…
Hacker News suffers from the same problem. We have folks like dang (God bless him) manually dealing with assholes. Seems like we could solve these problems with technology, but here we are two decades into the 21st century and we still have humans cleaning the pools. I'd be interested to know if actual forum moderators think that we could solve the bad actor problem with algorithms...
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Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment
#94I downloaded Reddit Enhancement Suite and it has a feature that marks the cumulative amount of upvotes you've given a user when you see a post of theirs. It is absolutely eye-opening just how much content is posted by the same few dozens of usernames. GallowBoob is the most infamous but to focus on him would be a mistake. It's pretty clear to me that the vast majority of content on Reddit is heavily manipulated and a…
Or... maybe they just post good content? You yourself said the extension marks the cumulative amount of upvotes you've given a user. So, unless you yourself are engaged in this conspiracy to inflate GallowBoob's upvotes, then all this is evidence of is that GallowBoob seems uniquely skilled at finding and posting viral content.
He also is paid to post on reddit.
He also submits posts dozens of times, deleting them if they don't gain traction quickly.
People don't dislike gallowboob and others because the content is necessarily bad... it's just inorganic and lame. I want to see content from other regular users, not power posters working for firms.
Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment
#95I downloaded Reddit Enhancement Suite and it has a feature that marks the cumulative amount of upvotes you've given a user when you see a post of theirs. It is absolutely eye-opening just how much content is posted by the same few dozens of usernames. GallowBoob is the most infamous but to focus on him would be a mistake. It's pretty clear to me that the vast majority of content on Reddit is heavily manipulated and a…
I have a little over half a million karma, about 200k from posting links. I think it's incorrect to suggest that the "vast majority" of content is manipulated. You see the same names because they understand the game of karmawhoring. If you have one link which can fit in multiple subreddits and your goal is to get as many points as possible, you post it to all the relevant subreddits, repeat for every other link you h…
I have never used reddit, and just know that "karma" is a type of points system like here on HN. Could you explain why you personally are interested in accumulating karma by "karmawhoring"?
I ignore the points system in HN too, but I think it's main function is to ban bad actors. So I don't understand on the other hand why someone would accumulate points unless they mean to later spend them on "bad actions".
Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment
#96Relationship Advice lead-ish mod here. We were one of the subs "called out" as being controlled by Gallowboob with the original post and subsequent reposts. We (buu700 and I) added Gallowboob some years back largely to have insight into how other teams modded their subs at a time when we were growing quickly and needed to know what to do to keep up. While useful in meeting that goal, we quickly realized it was pretty…
Why do you free work for a for-profit social network, especially if you say yourself that the work negatively impacts your mental health and that the community you are moderating is toxic? What are you getting out of this?
> Why do you free work for a for-profit social network
They don't. They do the work for a community they're part of. The social network hosts that community, and tries to make a profit doing so.
I organise a meetup that's held in a pub (well, not at the moment). People coming to the meetup spend money on the pub's beer and pizza. Am i doing free work for a for-profit public house?
Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea being that you'd punish those users who generate most of the content for your platform? How does that make sense?
Same way term limits make sense. Hit the ceiling, then you're done. Make room for someone else. Avoid stagnation.
You get paid in power, money, fame, access ect for being president. Providing content for free to make someone else money doesn't have the same appeal that could tolerate term limits.
Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
>how meaninglessly violent people become when their posts are modded Maybe if mods were more transparent across all the subs. Most people get angry when someone removes their post and yet they see it reposted and approved hours or even minutes later (Gallowboob is infamous for that but regular users do it too)
Maybe if mods were more transparent across all the subs. This is a common refrain I've heard going back well before Reddit ever existed. I helped moderate the Vault Network boards for a while back when they were a thing. Its hard to overstate how amazingly...disturbed and vitriolic some of the individuals of a community can be. And dishonest. And spiteful. No amount of transparency helps when all it takes to refute a…
While I am sure that occurs, I have been personally banned from several subreddits not for rules violations, or violence comments, but because the moderator simply disagreed with my comment or I was harsh in my commentary against the product the subreddit was about, for example a certain web browser subreddit banned me because I talked badly about a policy of that web browser
I have much more experience in dealing with corrupt and biased mods than I see anything else
Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment
#99Relationship Advice lead-ish mod here. We were one of the subs "called out" as being controlled by Gallowboob with the original post and subsequent reposts. We (buu700 and I) added Gallowboob some years back largely to have insight into how other teams modded their subs at a time when we were growing quickly and needed to know what to do to keep up. While useful in meeting that goal, we quickly realized it was pretty…
As someone who was mentally and physically abused as a child, I'm so sick of people on the internet saying they have PTSD from mean comments that they can ignore and escape from. You cannot escape abuse from someone that is supposed to be protecting you in childhood. You cannot escape from the trauma of war when you sign up or are conscripted to be a soldier. You cannot escape the horror of death being an EMT. Seeing…
> A stranger saying, "you're a piece of shit," is not fucking traumatic to anyone but an immature child or a weakling.
Think more everything from graphic descriptions of rape to child porn. Reddit generally lets comments of the "piece of shit" nature stand.
Re: Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment
#100The way I see it is someone who has enjoyed a "privileged" position without transparency or accountability for a long time is surprised that people find issues with concentration of moderation powers (especially across subreddits). Makes me wonder what is it that people find so appealing in having moderation of subreddits as an almost full time job.
Concentration of influence in the media is a real issue, yes. However, doxing him isn't a reasonable or helpful response to those concerns.
I think you're underselling the other side of the problem. The guy had real, significant power, overseeing many of the largest discussion forums on one of the most popular websites in the country. It's unreasonable to expect anonymity when you wield that much power to control the national discourse.