“No, I'm the ex-CEO of Reddit because eventually there was too much bullshit.”
reddit.com
reddit.com
> "The reddit admins (of the time; it's mostly a different group now) really did not like SRS. In attempting to force the admins to take their side, they would dox them, send bad shit to their family members, etc. It was really bad. Despite this, the admins never cracked but they really hated them."
And somehow weren't banned for this? Futher down they say that they just want to make the site better, but 90% of that is just about building tools to stop (in order of importance) harrasment of users by other subreddits, fighting within a subreddit and (c) poor topic discipline.
Eventually they learn from this:
"11/ ... bans ALL the problematic subreddits. F* your free speech, this is why we can't have nice things.
12/ They've had peace so far, so I guess that was probably the right policy"
I'm old enough to remember when people ran unmoderated newsgroups and open mail relays for free speech reasons. They either drowned in spam or were gradually blocked by so much of the rest of the internet that their position became untenable.
If you build a system that doesn't deal with spam, it gets drowned in spam. If you build a system that doesn't deal with abuse, abuse becomes commonplace. If you don't secure your IoT devices you get journalists DDoSed by lightbulbs. It's the same kind of social responsibility.
What makes this problem worse in the mid-20-teens is that there are hate groups organising off-board to cause these problems.
See the discussion of VR harrasment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12777340
If you really want freedom, 4chan, glorious 4chan! Enjoy your cesspit.
Ever been on /pol/ these days? It's so much an echo chamber of sponsored trolls and shills I'm surprised any genuine conversation can happen there at all.
Or /b/.
Or most of 4chan in general.
/tg/ is fun sometimes, though.
Gonna need some hard evidence of that. 4chan can barely sell ads on the site, not sure why anyone would bother marketing to them.
Frankly, 4chan is kind of irrelavant. A couple million weebs, racists and neo-Nazis spread across the world is pretty irrelevant to state actors. No offense to 4chan users, but no one cares what you think.
It's a pretty interesting site, in general, and fairly neat in some ways.
Unfortunately, the best part of 4chan was axed. What was the best part of 4chan? the text boards (aka world4ch): They were less crowded with awfulness, and threads were immortal. It also played host to /prog/, the programmer's chan, which is probably most famous for inventing the now-famous sleepsort (the ancient HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2657277). Sadly, because threads were immortal, archives were rare, and sleepsort, along with many other threads, has been lost to the mists of time.
I can't really imagine using the site regularly, but a remarkable amount of material elsewhere is ultimately 4chan-derived. Imgur pretty consistently has 'greentext' on its front page, which means views derived purely from rehosting 4chan content.
To continue my metaphor, 4chan pans for gold (copper), Reddit sorts the results for purity, and Buzzfeed packages it all into something pretty looking at an enormous markup.
More directly, sites like 1d4chan just take the purest of the gold and saves it.
So why did they tolerate the accounts? I don't think it was Free speech so much as a business demand: the number of active accounts needs to stay on the hockey stick curve. Reddit favored quantity over quality.
I think it's deeper than that, it's Inverse Conway's Law_. Reddit was fine before they introduced sub-reddits. It used to be a nice "not quite so tech" HN. Sub-reddits allowed very different cultures to form and easily war with each other.
Conway's Law states that systems end up with structure that mirrors the structure of the teams that design them. The inverse is true too. Social systems tend to mirror geographical (or in this case, technical) structure.
SRS was ostensibly fighting the evils of Reddit misogyny, racism, harassment of women etc - and more importantly, could convince enough of the media of this that it would likely have ended very badly for Reddit if they banned them. There would almost certainly have been headlines about Reddit supporting harassment and all kinds of nasty shit the next day. If dealing with harassment is seen a form of social responsibility, that just becomes another tool for the cleverer harassers to use.
Also, when reading point 3 you need to bear in mind that of course people who'd do this to Reddit admins wouldn't just restrict their behaviour to the admins, and that the admins kept publicly insisting the group had done nothing wrong. I think this may be the first admission by an insider that wasn't true.
Harassing people, in the real world, is not acceptable especially sending things to unrelated people (family/employers).
I giggled at the thought oh being DDOS'ed solely by RGB light blubs all turning red when they get "Tango Down" (I have a thing for lights, i'm 33 going on 14) and then deeply sighed because I don't think we are that far off from a large DDOS solely done by light blubs. :-(
I genuinely felt bad for her, I wouldn't of been able to handle it at all. It was truly revolting and hateful.
There was plenty to dislike about Pao's actions as CEO (as well as the KP lawsuit), but I think the real lesson is that the Internet Hate Machine is very difficult to slow down or stop once it flies out of control. Every nuance or worthy consideration is drowned out by waves of rage at even the smallest worthy object of complaint.
It wasn't just a violation of the "free speech" promised by the original founder, but it was a selective "free speech" which indicated to affected individuals that they were offending the management/Admins while arguably even more offensive groups which targeted minorities that were not composed of management/Admin groups received a pass. Indeed, there was some schadenfreude with their wanting the same ill on these other offensive subs out of being selfish, but they did highlight a major inconsistency with Admins.
If there's real substance to the allegations, there will be another copy somewhere more respectable.
What? No. When a source is that biased, then the "list of topics covered" (and the keywords associated with them) do not somehow magically escape that bias; it is not a "great resource" for anything except the viewpoints of r/MensRights
But I'm also pretty sure that painting these broad brush strokes of men who want to see their kids or women who don't want to be harassed at work unnecessarily tarnishes a bunch of people trying to make things better.
I mean this sincerely: if you feel like there is a war on men, or that as a man in tech you're persecuted, you should find a professional to talk to. I'm not qualified to diagnose you and if I was I wouldn't do it over the Internet, but my suspicion is that a lot of MensRights activists are really experiencing pathological anxiety --- an extremely common ailment --- and that it's just expressing itself as a feeling of persecution.
Not nearly enough people take advantage of mental health care. It's possible that most(!) people should, in some fashion, just like we all see doctors. We live in crazymaking times.
You mention that the world isn't linear, but you seem to want to replace it with a simpler black and white model.
Thomas, the correct response to:
- a) strawmanning me
- b) being this rude
is to apologize.
I'm very comfortable with the two of us simply disengaging.
> I mean this sincerely: if you feel like all men should be killed you should find a professional to talk to. I'm not qualified to diagnose you and if I was I wouldn't do it over the Internet,
Obviously:
- You didn't write that
- It couldn't be interpreted from what you /did/ write
- It looks like an attempt to change the tone of the conversation by creating a straw man and attacking that rather than actually contributing anything to the conversation
- It's a thinly veiled and childish insult
> The idea that MRA's and feminists are two ends of a single spectrum is one of those cognitive line-fitting traps we nerds fall into.
While I'm all about detecting and uncovering cognitive biases (hardcore LessWrong expat, reporting for duty!), I don't believe GP's analysis was wrong.
Just a guess, but I expect the people you're using to mentally represent MRAs are the equivalent of tumblr feminists (who also should consider treatment options in my opinion). Here's my line based model that attempts to not straw-man either group:
Fringe-MRA: war on men
Reasonable-MRA: there are some men's issues worth talking about (circumcision, work related injury and fatality rates, prison over-representation, gendered divorce laws, etc).
Middle: Meh, what's on TV?
Reasonable-Feminist: there are some women's issues worth talking about (FGM, right to drive/vote/work, right to serve in the military, pay equality/glass ceiling, etc).
Fringe-Feminist: patriarcy!
I don't see why this way of arranging the data should qualify as falling in to a line fitting trap. It seems like there are genuine issues on both sides, and a significant paranoid delusional component to be found at both ends of the spectrum. What am I missing?
Because its a nice, convenient, abstractly appealing linear arrangement that doesn't have any utility in describing the reality of the distribution of views on gender issues?
"There is general, society-wide, active oppression of men" is a view that opposes and is mutually exclusive with the comparable view with "women" replacing "men", but "there exists issues specific to men that are worth addressing in society" is not exclusive with the comparable view toward women, and in fact they are frequently found together, but almost never among people who identify as MRA (though often, IME, among people who identify as feminist.)
Completely agreed. Not sure how people self label is particularly relevant: someone who understands both sets off issues and is male wouldn't generally want to be labelled as an 'MRA' or 'male feminist' either as both have awful reputations.
However, perhaps #1 is the case, so I'll try to clear the air. Here's my take on what the two of you are saying:
> I'm responding to your claim that both MRAs and feminists have "awful" reputations, which is false
I have personally heard more complaining about feminists, though I take that to be more an indication about the relative numbers of Feminists and MRAs in the world.
In my experience people with a strong ideological viewpoint have bad reputations outside of social circles dominated by that ideological viewpoint (Conservative Christians, Scientologists, Anarchists, Hard-Line Libertarians, MRAs, Feminists, etc) <-- hopefully you're not all of those, and so at least one was a good example.
Which is to say I think you're saying that in the circles you personally hang out in, feminists are generally highly regarded... which is to say you mostly hang out with feminists... and that GP is saying that in the circles he hangs out in feminists are not highly regarded... which is to say there are fewer feminists per capita than in your social circle.
I think both GP and you should have been more careful about misrepresenting your personal experiences as somehow universal. If you had, you would probably have avoided this back and forth.
> Feminism, on the other hand, is one of the more important social movements of the last 150 years
Feminism and feminists aren't the same thing. For example, Capitalism was an incredibly important idea globally, and is widely regarded as a good thing. Capitalists on the other hand are generally viewed as greedy. Incidentally, capitalists will often try to frame themselves as part of capitalism to subvert this negative impression... roughly the same thing you're doing here with respect to feminism.
That is a false equivalence. Anyone who supports feminism, that is equal rights for women, are feminists, the noun. Capitalists, the noun, are not just people who support capitalism, they are in fact wealthy people who take advantage of capitalism.
Finally, the idea that MRA & feminism have equal historical provenance is laughable. MRA is largely attributable to the last 5 years & is plainly a recent reactionary movement.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-word... ... which is to say I feel like most people understand the word feminist to mean something other than "99.9% of people living in a western democracy"
> the idea that MRA & feminism have equal historical provenance is laughable
Completely agree here, and am confused where I might have implied otherwise.
This whole thread on the other hand is about how feminism & MRA do not exist as opposites on a spectrum. Feminism, as you say, is an exceedingly common position. MRA on the other hand is a new, reactionary & uncommon position. But its proponents routinely try to play this rhetorical trick.
My point was mainly about your incorrect statement that feminist was to feminism what capitalist is to capitalism. They are not the same thing and thus any extrapolation about negative connotations is unlikely to be correct.
As Thomas says, even anti-feminists usually categorize their antagonism with terms line "third wave".
Ahh, apparently the post was less clear than anticipated. Here's a quote from it that evokes what I was trying to say with the link:
"I feel like every single term in social justice terminology has a totally unobjectionable and obviously important meaning – and then is actually used a completely different way."
Which is to say that I disagree with your definition of feminism in this context.
According to http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/16/feminism-poll_n_309... 80% of people should identify as feminists by your definition, yet only 20% do. This means that at least 60% of the respondents to that survey disagree with your definition of feminism. I think that I (and the gentleman who's position in this conversation I took pity on) am using roughly the same definition of feminism as the 60% of the population from that HuffPo survey.
That definition is harder to put into words, but is something along the lines of "someone who primarily sees the world through the lens of gendered power struggles." Kind of like a Marxist, only for gender rather than class.
Using this definition, likening the reputation of Feminists to that of Capitalists is not a false equivalency (Capitalists here are people who primarily see the world through the lens of economic life).
> MRA on the other hand is a new, reactionary & uncommon position. But its proponents routinely try to play this rhetorical trick.
Agreed, I was not trying to imply it was particularly common. My main point was that, in my experience, the more hardcore ends of both groups share a lot of psychological problems and cognitive errors.
I think you're mistaking your experienced distribution for the true distribution. Like, I'm very willing to believe that of the MRAs you're aware of, they are all hardcore -- it's a demonized subculture, you'd have to be a zealot or have fuck-you money to come out supporting it.
If instead of defining MRAs as "people posting crazy things to (insert website here)" you simply call an MRA someone who's primary political activity is toward fixing issues MRAs discuss, you'll be able to find a large number non-hardcore MRAs with a couple of google searches. Heck, I think most people working professionally with prostate cancer would qualify. The guy in this thread who mentioned lurking on MRA forums for interesting ideas absolutely qualifies (or rather, he didn't sound hardcore to me on first read).
Similarly if you go looking for the equivalent of (insert MRA website here) for feminists, you will also succeed in that endeavor. Your comment re: hardcore Roman Catholics & Branch Davidians makes me think perhaps you haven't gone looking for these sorts of sites.
Which is to say, yet again, that I do not believe the equivalence is false. I'd even go so far as to say that I expect the rates of hardcore ideologues in each group to roughly correlate with the rates of paranoid delusion in men and women respectively.
But having concerns about family law does not make you an MRA. People with family court problems want to fix the family court system. MRAs are people who feel like women are locked in a zero-sum contest with men, and that women have obtained more than their fair share of concessions in that contest. That's a problematic view, not widely believed to be based in fact, and held only by a fringe.
It is not at all comparable to feminism, which is based on the clear historical truth that women have been disfavored both by custom and by law in truly outrageous ways: not being given the right to vote, having the state make coercive medical decisions for them, having no protection from spousal rape, being overtly and deliberately paid less for the same work, &c. We can argue about the state of play on these things today. We cannot argue about the historical context of feminism.
> you should see how unfair and, in fact, terrifying the domestic violence legal situation is for women
Seems bad, though I'm not familiar enough with the situation to say anything specific. I've only recently started looking at politics/ideologies after having managed more or less 10 years of living by an overly literal interpretation of http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/ 's title :p
> But having concerns about family law does not make you an MRA.
As you say there are reasonable people doing things related to men's rights. If you choose not to include these people in what I'll now call the "MRA spectrum" (since you've just narrowly defined "MRA" here), that's fair -- I agree the parallel with feminism breaks. If we try to compare a narrowly scoped group of awful people against a much broader and diverse loose coalition of less awful people, it's an apples and oranges situation.
However, we can also create a narrowly scoped subgroup of feminists. I think MRAs might be using the term "3rd wave feminist" for this, but to be on the safe side I'll coin a new term for our use here: FRA (TERF may also work, but I'm playing it safe).
We now have two narrowly defined groups of awful people, sitting inside and more or less agreeing with a broader, more diverse coalitions of politically active less awful people. The broader groups dislike the smaller groups, though are less harsh on their own. Both smaller groups suffer from seeming psychological problems, have a strong ideological streak, and are rather awful to interact with online. This is to say that the relation between FRAs and feminists has a similar feeling to that of MRAs and "MRA spectrum individuals".
If the parallel now makes sense to you, I believe you may have been mistaking a recurring semantic disagreement (namely: people on forums not realizing you have an extremely specific definition of MRA), for a widespread cognitive error (namely: people thinking MRAs-by-your-definition and feminists are similar).
> We cannot argue about the historical context of feminism.
I think we're in broad agreement on the history of feminism. My discussion was about feminists as a group of individuals, rather than an intellectual lineage. (Similar to meaning "people who live in the us" when discussing Americans, rather than "the philosophical descendants of the US founding fathers").
> your claim that both MRAs and feminists
I didn't claim that. Read my post again. I've included it above to help you. 'Male feminists' have a very different reputation than feminists per se.
Similarly, I didn't claim there was a 'war against men'.
You make up awful things I don't write and then respond to them. It's lazy and rude.
Now please disengage.
The model was an attempt at describing what the mental states were, rather than the distribution of individuals over those states.
> in fact [interest in gendered issues] are frequently found together
This was quite useful, thank you!
> are frequently found together, but almost never among people who identify as MRA (though often, IME, among people who identify as feminist.)
I disagree with this -- most feminist views on men's rights issues are of a different character than MRA views on men's rights issues in my experience. So while I believe the views are strongly anti-correlated, I disagree that anti-correlation should be the basis for the specific line I drew above, as there's nothing in principal that prohibits a belief in both at once.
I don't think that's a basis for calling it a cognitive trap though. Like, the similarity at the fringes is absolutely there.
This was probably one of the few times in my life where I defended the rights on principle of someone who had no evidence against him/her, and actually turned out to be right (sad reality, usually the accusations tend to be true).
While I can feel smug about it, that whole episode in Reddit's history pretty much killed my respect for the Reddit community. Reddit used to be a place for diverse opinions, and non-hivemindedness. Ellen Pao's skewering showed me that those days are long in the past.
Ellen Pao not only lost her discrimination suit against KPCB but was deemed liable by the court for KPCB's legal costs.
Reddit is laced with gender issues, someone filing a wrongful discrimination suit isn't the correct leader for that site. The Reddit users weren't willing to sweep that under the rug.
That lawsuit had zero to do with Reddit though.
However, things only blew up when the moderator was fired, and it had nothing to do with gender issues.
The fact is: Ellen did not fire the moderator, and all of Reddit went into uproar insisting with no evidence whatsoever that she was responsible.
I'm not saying Ellen was an angel, or even a good fit for the job. She had her issues. However, all of that had nothing to do with the criticism leveled against her for firing the moderator.
The attack on her was a mob attack - no less.
Which made her a terrible choice for CEO of Reddit.
Things were blowing up before the firing of the mod. That was just the straw that broke the camel's back.
There are a lot of communities on Reddit that focus on media coordination. There was a huge push from most tech media to be pro-Pao despite a total lack of evidence to support her story. I see that as the main intersection between her and the Reddit community. She was a Reddit story that became the Reddit CEO then went on to make questionable decisions (mod firing, banning salary negotiation...).
And here you repeat the false accusation against her.
As for salary negotiation, this was already in the works by her predecessor. It wasn't her baby.
The buck stops at the CEO for all decisions.
Pao is generally not a very tactful or likeable person, but with that gender discrimination lawsuit dripping off of her she was dead on arrival as far as Reddit is concerned.
AKA a post-hoc justification of the improper acts against her.
I'm not claiming she was a competent CEO. I'm saying the general Reddit community acted inappropriately against her. It was a case of "get rid of her by any means necessary", which included baseless accusations.
She may have been a poor CEO, but the judgment against the Reddit community is far worse.
That said, the incendiary anti-Thiel op-ed she wrote last week was also out of place and ridiculous.
That's what a lot of Redditors found shocking/disgusting. If there were indeed six KPCB PR firms in play, they did a terrible job.
Man, tell me about it. I was a moderator for the Vault Network message boards back in the days when it was still around. It's hard to overstate how hard some people will work to make people they disagree with look bad.
People would post super racists, hateful, gross comments and images to the board, get a ban, and then try to go on an alt account and complain about the moderator who banned them. The moderator would remove that post (discussing mod actions was against the rules) and then that person (and others) would use that as a reason that the mods were evil, biased people just trying to silence disagreement. They would go so far as sending personal messages to individual mods (both on and off the boards) who they assumed were responsible. The worst attacks somehow usually made it to a mod that wasn't involved, usually a woman.
It really gave me an appreciation for how hateful and deplorable some people can get when they can remain anonymous.
Moderation is a thankless job.
Back in 2004, Penny Arcade wrote a comic that articulated this better than anything else I've seen (https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19)
Normal person + anonymity + audience = total fuckwad
The caveat being that some people only need an audience to completely lose social inhibitions and act inappropriately.
To be fair, I think that's a bad rule. Any type of government – even when it's something small like the moderator team of an internet forum – should have some accountability towards the people it governs.
It's a bad rule, but necessary. If you allow people to argue about mod actions then it basically means any thread requiring mod actions now needs to be locked because then the topic would become arguments about moderation practices.
Additionally, at least half the threads on every board become arguments about "Why was so-and-so banned?", "Why was this topic deleted?", "Why are the moderators so terrible?". If you edit/warn/ban 3 people in a thread, you would have 3+ (someone unrelated always has to butt in, or maybe someone uses both their main and alt accounts to complain) new threads arguing about why you are a terrible mod.
I mean, we had no problems sharing information anyone requested it via personal message, within reason.
(adding entropy for my identity here) but the minecraft, sailing, and networking subs are good examples of midsize communities that are fun to be in.
politics and the_donald and worldnews are examples of garbage. /r/politics really is in the pocket of Hillary Clinton. I say that as a non-Trump voter... the overt bias and suppression of anti-Clinton discussion is staggering.
But yeah, you'll never see a single pro-conservative story on /r/politics
Mission accomplished, by the looks of it today.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/21/hillary-pac...
In most of the anti-Trump things I am seeing on /r/politics, the top comment(s) are generally anti-Clinton, or at least more rational about a dislike for Trump based on things he has actually done or said.
The users there made the same mistake Trump makes after a well-attended rally. If you're surrounded by supporters, then it's hard to reason about how broad your support really is.
A quick search proves this out: there are tons of highly upvoted posts calling out Obama, Holder, both Clintons, Spitzer, Geithner etc. This is actually what fueled a lot of the fervor for Sanders - he brought together the disenchanted Paulite libertarians, lefter-than-Obama liberals, and anti-establishment independents.
Of course these things are all relative, as some people (again, probably younger) would consider pro-Clinton and pro-conservative to be the same thing from their perspective.
It's impossible to know what will trigger one of them to come invading, but when one does they all do. If KiA decides they don't like something, Ghazi will inevitably follow to counter them, then SRD will link it up and send their users charging in, SRS will start cherry-picking the worst of the invaders screaming at each other and then...
Oh, and there's no good (as in, works consistently) tool I'm aware of to mass-nuke entire threads of comments as a moderator, so I've had plenty of exercises in deleting a couple hundred posts one by one.
But yeah, they're all awful. r/KiA just keeps getting worse and worse. They're at the point where some of them are actually attacking John Bain, who is one of the symbols for ethical journalism in games, just because he has clearly stated that while he's pro-ethics, he's not going to involve himself with, or put up with, the r/KiA BS.
All of them have gotten far beyond the point where they stand for something, if they ever did: their only purpose now is to perpetuate their own existence.
I have only found a subreddit about the car brand (KIA)?
I'd advise not to go there ;)
And the titles does not seem too bad, but I haven't read the comments.
Edit: Well, it's not too bad
> WELCOME!
> KotakuInAction is the main hub for GamerGate discussion on Reddit.
And I have read the few top thread and it's not too bad (YMMV).
AKA the inevitable destination of all extremist political movements.
If there were an easy way to identify that kind of content and wield a banhammer against it, it would really clean up the internet in general (and stinkier corners of reddit in particular).
You and I know that /DIY/ (what it sounds like) and /OUT/ (as in outdoors, camping and stuff) have nothing to do with /POL/ the venn diagram is a near perfect non-overlap.
Also /hc/ and /s/ (both NSFW) are supposedly politics free.
/DIY/ and /OUT/ are possibly the last refuge on the entire internet from marketing shills and paid reviews and all that kind of corruption near omnipresent on the internet.
Outside of the dedicated marketing shill startup threads, that is.
Take for example router tables. Imagine a normal web discussion group. I've never used anything but a Kreg table so my brain is wired Kreg so if all you got is a hammer the whole world looks like a nail. Or someone who wants to tie their name to money can brag about his Incra which he may or may not have (they're like $2K) and it better be the best thing ever if it costs more per pound than solid silver. Then the guy who always gets all signally rants off that most of the results are in the operator skills with the implication that we're the noob and he's the educator when everyone knows that, and the whole point is to min-max the non-operator skill issues. Yeah yeah I know you gotta know which part of the router is the spinny part but I'm more interested in who sells a table where simple adjusting the router height doesn't require contortionist work or where the dust collector actually works as opposed to looks cool. And then people who are just trying to help who point out walmart has some Chinese thing that isn't even flat on sale, as if something thats not even fit for sale is worth considering if its cheap enough. And then the marketing droids descend into the mix at the same time, and oh its just awful.
But if you go to /DIY/ and find the router table thread, you'll get the real story and no BS. Well ... and some screwing around and amazing language it is 4chan after all, and there's probably 50 threads with about 10 threads worth of real content spread across the 50, but its only fair that if you're paying nothing and there's no middleman to shill that you're going to have to invest some time to think about it. 4chan is honest there is no free lunch if you really want to learn you have to put in the analysis time.
I read a book called Reality is Broken recently, and it talked about what people want from games, and it struck me that a lot of this behaviour fitted the description perfectly. They make social connections with other users, they feel like they're making a difference in the world, and every post has points attached to keep score.
Even something like "hey, did i waterproof this shower correctly" on reddit turns into a massive crapfest.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/58tl1w/did_i_mess_up_m...
Though, staring at it days later, the top level comments ended up roughly okay. But until everyone mostly moved on, ...
(IE if you stared at this thread 2 days ago, it would make you not have any desire to participate in an online forum ever)
That's really why HN is the only place I comment.
Well, of course. In the subs I subscribe to every once in a while an HN discussion gets linked because of the quality of the comments.
The defaults on Reddit have a ton of SRS/SJWs vs. MensRights/Red Pillers. Also memes and general herd behavior.
But there are also subs for pretty much every TV show and game out there. Frameworks and programming languages have subs devoted to them. In general many, many interests have their own subreddits. That's where you can often have intelligent discussions with mostly sensible people.
And of course, let's not forget heavily moderated places like the shining star /r/AskHistorians
What I mean to say is, you can't compare Reddit to HN, comparing HN to a specific subreddit would be more appropriate.
That is something traditional forums often do a lot better, since a hot topic stays active for a long time instead of falling off and being replaced with a new one that discusses all the same points over again. Especially for common questions or product discussions, traditional boards tend to point people to search and existing topics instead of repeating them.
And they don't realize they're doing it.
> when actually, the admins would just like y'all to shut up so they can write some features to make the site better
Why did they have admins coding or coders admin'ing? Those should be different people.
For instance, you can go to any of the right-leaning or conspiracy related subreddits and find posts where they show collusion between SRS and CTR. Evidence that is completely undeniable, like mods of SRS and r/politics also modding pro-Hillary or anti-Trump subreddits.
When one side says CTR has totally taken over the site, and the other says they're not involved at all, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
I have spent very little time on reddit, so I'm unfamiliar with what form censorship takes there. That said, viewing Twitter and HN, I wonder if this doesn't have more to do with people pulling tangential topics into discussions. It takes effort to pare down an idea, separating it from others that may be logically related or associated with some bundled collection of ideas.
Also, while two people may share a belief, they may not rank the belief equally among all of the others they hold. Alice and Bob may both think free speech is important, but it's really important to Alice. It's more likely that Alice will want to talk about it than Bob. So perhaps people who end up discussing free speech/anti-censorship issues also tend to share similar rankings of other shared values. That could explain why people discussing free speech tend tend to share other beliefs as well. They hold similar beliefs and similar belief rankings.
I have nothing to back that up :) But it sounds reasonable. Anyone need a research topic?
What do you think? Is there something more going on in reddit's case?
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/58zaho/the_...
As others have said, new features have nothing to do with moderating. Note how the company did nothing wrong. It is not their fault they can't shield developers from user shitstorms.
"Alexis was supposed to announce it [..] but somehow that did not happen". This is just casually glossed over. Somehow that did not happen? again, it is the communities' fault for assuming the CEO fired someone, when they could've easily been informed about who actually did it.
"FUCK your free speech, this is why we can't have nice things." yeah, or this is why we can't have advertisers. If you want to have advertisers, you have to ban the subreddits that make the site look bad. https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/4ll9tc/it_looks_li...
Isn't it convenient how they could (in a series of moves)
1. Fire Victoria (for whatever reason)
2. Make the impopular CEO take the blame to get rid of her and
3. Hire a former founder as the new CEO (embraced by the community)
4. Who drops a "Reddit, we need to talk" and gets rid of the shittier subreddits
edit: LMAO at the immediate downvoting that proved my point about not being able to have reasonable discussions in media anymore.
Although in a mind-bogglingly incompetent way. Their self-serve ad product is so far behind even Twitter's offering (which is inferior to Facebook and Google) that it's not even funny.
Wouldn't the solution here be to dedicate engineers to ship the features that are intended to decrease your support load?
That's basic management 101: be an umbrella.
Maybe you would have engineers providing support to community managers for tools and ad-hoc fixes "intended to decrease the support load" as you say, but as second-line assistance, not doing the main body of work. You would think that if anyone has the specialisation that comes at scale and could do this, reddit does.
When you work at a small company, features like that can get sidelined for months to do something like "build algorithm for tying different users together as one entity to ensure bans aren't trivially worked around." With things like that happening, you can lose a lot of developer time on this kind of stuff without them even directly handling bans / policy decisions.
This is probably the right thing to do if you have investors to report to and you want a site that caters to the middle 50% of the population. I guess users will complain about their free speech rights being trampled. I have noticed that reddit seems to have less drama since Steve came back. I don't know if it's just being masked by the new algos though.
Anyways, reddit doesn't have to protect your free speech, and they never did. I'm just glad that they'll stop pretending that they will, which is what bothered me: state the rules on your door, and make sure that they're enforced.
People have these views and they are free to express them, but creating a community dedicated to it normalises that behaviour and helps breed further hatred.
Under 18 age group seems to be large on Reddit as well [1]. Allowing subreddits such as FPH is really unhealthy amongst the more impressionable.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/1agz1o/ever_wonder_ab...
Do you deny them any sort of public space where they can communicate with each other?
Reddit has no power to stop the KKK from saying whatever they want. But they are under no legal or moral obligation to provide a forum for it.
The KKK can spin up a website and say whatever they want.
Are they not allowed to host certain speech either without being deemed "socially irresponsible"? Or is there some level of removal beyond which it's okay? If you've decided they're not allowed to use the internet now, is it okay to rent them spaces? sell them land? There's no good, definite ending point to this. Which is why companies like Black Lotus, CloudFlare and OVH just get it done. I don't fault them for it at all, in fact I trust them more to keep me online if some controversy is ever stirred in my direction.
I don't think it's ethical for a private company to censor everyone they don't like, but they should have that right. In terms of ethics, you're right that there's no definite ending point. Private companies should do what they feel is right, and not try to force themselves to allow full freedom of speech.
4chan and Something Awful provided that. I think it's healthy for the world to have a few places cordoned off to be primordial slimepools/cesspits. But, I wouldn't given anyone a hard time for trying very hard to not be one of those places.
For example, I think a big part of the continuing high signal/noise ratio at HN is it's tradition of downvoting sarcasm, memes, jokes, fluff, "nice post!" and other low-signal comments. As HN has grown, this has been slipping. But, it us already lasted much longer than I expected.
Sorry, I don't buy this. Reddit doesn't have a "social responsibility" to be the morality police.
Children are more impressionable, and when they form a large population on Reddit allowing hateful communities I think really does help normalise it.
I don't know if Reddit considers that considering that /r/deadbabies still exists[1].
1. Probably. I'm sorry but I'm not going to check if that subreddit still exists.
Less drama in recent years, but also lower quality content and less of a sense of community.
I'm interested in that as well, though I tend to think the tech needs to serve the social aspect. What kind of community you want determines what kind of features (technical aspect) you want. The features in turn influence the behavior of the users.
Is that what you're getting at? Glancing at /r/theoryofreddit I think it is. Or is there something else?
Could one take the model of Reddit and make it real time? Basically a large chat room. There are of course huge problems that would have to be overcome, such as how to prevent spamming (so maybe a cool down period after each comment?), how to 'rank' up voted comments, and others I haven't thought about.
The next step would be live voice, but I don't see a benefit with video.
Now this next part is completely niaive and idealistic and I'm ignoring all the problems that will need to be solved but what if there were such an online anonymous community able to discuss and debate things in real time? In such a system perhaps the best 'ranked' idea (based on democratic vote, which may not be the best way...) is displayed in brighter it larger text, or lasts longer before disappearing.
So, you see I would love to hear from people who may have tried this or could tell me "no, X doesn't work because then you get people taking advantage of Y".
Offhand I don't know of any forums or mailing lists that focus on these types topics. One place to look for references might be at the development of chat room or forum software, looking at features that have been released/tweaked/removed over the course of their development; discussions on HN about features (how meta is that?); papers/research on social behavior and community building, peace studies, other social interaction. There's bound to be some graduate-level work on online communities, moderation, echo chambers, that might be useful as well.
I had a possibly related conversation yesterday where nickpsecurity provided some ideas as well
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12776446
Might not be exactly what you're looking for, but hopefully you'll find something useful.
Meatball Wiki[0] might be close to what you are looking for? From the about:
> Meatball is a LearningCommunity of the leaders of online communities--their proprietors, developers, mentors, and samaritans. We explore what it means to build an online community or, perhaps better, a community online. As it is a community, it is defined solely by the personal relationships that form it. Our breadth of interest is fairly wide as we take a holistic stance to community development. What differentiates us from many online meta-communities is that while we do talk about technology, we spend more time talking about sociology; and when we do talk about technology, we do so in a social context.
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1083-61...
First Monday http://firstmonday.org/index
This was particularly interesting. Massive communities like Reddit are a great testing ground for policies around free speech.
It makes me wonder how big reddit could be internationally without major changes. Reddit has over 40% of their traffic from the USA, probably 99% of what is written is in English. The concept and the laws of free speech in America is different from other countries. I do not know if there is a long-term plan, with clearer and universal rules that could be easiest to moderated.
If the affected users actually are children (seems many of them are) then you’re not teaching anything by taking everything away with no explanation. As sad as this may be, in the modern age Reddit might be as much of an influence on a child as a teacher, day care or other major non-parent authority figure, and therefore what Reddit does “matters”. If Reddit’s primary response is to kill things, kids will feel unheard and disrespected and react strongly. If Reddit has a wide array of punishments and a very clear way to explain what a user did wrong, I think it would be a greater investment in the future of the forums.
Reddit is a for profit media property, but banning subs where this stuff goes on is indeed the correct action. Nobody is ever under any obligation to support or sanction this kind of behavior with their money or time.
And I also read RationalWiki claiming that they hate SRS, which is enough information for this post.
Source: seven-year RationalWiki editor, RMF board member.
What other sites exist that could do the same????
This is applicable to nearly every online argument. You can find the media bias when sites chose to focus entirely on one side and ignore documented evidence of their own side engaging in the same behavior.