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Comment by volak | Hacker News Reader

I don't really want to comment - but I'd just say to anyone (including the writer of this article) to imagine someone artificially limiting the impact of your favorite platform of free expression. Hell just turn the mental corner and consider your arguments FOR net neutrality. Or try to recall your disappointment every time you read about some site being banned in China or Iran.

To China and Iran - facebook is a "disruptive community." To use reddit's language.

Its a sad moment in history that the people calling themselves liberals don't actually know what it means.

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The subreddit in question manipulates the algorithm in bad faith and bans any sort of dissent or disagreement.

They're not attacking free expression but trying to reign in abuse of their platform.

Nobody really knows what "liberal" means because it's been used in several very opposite ways in different times and places.

I don't buy the argument that they are exploiting anything - but I do recognize that their community is very overly active but I wouldn't call that exploiting

The vote totals aren't anything like any other subreddit has been. They were also using the pinning in a way no other subreddit did.

Just google – the_donald upvote script – to get an idea. Several tools were released for users to upvote or downvote everything targeting a subreddit or user. It's a sort of grassroots vote manipulation scheme.

Well I could write a r/hillaryclinton upvote script and post on gists in a few minutes - doesn't really prove anything. The only people who could have real evidence of rule breaking would be the admins and from the little we know we know the admins hate TD - if they are being botted they'd be gone already

You could; I'm not talking about the existence of such things but the prevalence. There probably wasn't much blatant botting, but a lot of mild botting which is much more difficult to detect and lives in a grey area.

One of the issues the admins were upset about was pizzagate. Basically they found some emails where Podesta mentioned pizza and cheese. So after a lot of time investigating they decided that Podesta and Clinton were deeply involved in a child sex trafficking ring centered a local D.C. pizzeria. There was an NYtimes story about how the owners been receiving death threats. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/technology/fact-check-this....

This whole witch hunt/conspiracy started and kept going with trolls from the_donald. People getting death threats from getting doxxed on reddit threads should not happen. Also, during this trolls kept accusing spez of being a pedophile. While changing user comments is extremely inappropriate, I think that the_donald has some extremely toxic trolls. So I'm definitely ok with reddit admins shutting some of that activity down. I would have found it completely understandable if reddit had shut the_donald down with that with the whole pizzagate thing. But that sub has a ton of activity with a lot of politically active posters, and so I don't think reddit really wants to shut it down.

My buddy got doxxed and harassed by those the_donald pizzagate folks. reddit shut down the pizzagate subreddit (constantly posting personal information for the_donald fans to call/email/text to harass) but allowed the_donald to persist.

> To China and Iran - facebook is a "disruptive community." To use reddit's language.

There is a vast difference between the government banning you and reddit banning you (which they are not actually doing here, but for the sake of argument).

You have the right to free expression. You do not have the right to free expression on someone else's platform. reddit is not the Internet - if reddit does not like what you say, you can set up your own space on the Internet. If the government does not like what you say, then there is literally no legal alternative. That's the difference.

Oh, and stop confusing net neutrality with this issue. It's not the same.

Fiber lines are someone else's platform. If Comcast was limiting access to huffingtonpost.com it would be their right as its their platform. I don't think I'm confusing anything.

The fiber example is one of the big reason regulating broadband as a utility was important. It prevents this exact scenario

> There is a vast difference between the government banning you and reddit banning you (which they are not actually doing here, but for the sake of argument).

It isn't all about public vs private. There is another frame to view this subject in which is shared culture.

In China the majority of those running the firms agree with the government's positions on Internet use.

In the USA, Washington and large parts of the media have identical political perspectives.

The problem with this is insidious. Where you're surrounded by like minded people you grow kinds of assumptions that in another context are absolutely crazy.

Recently for example I heard a university professor claim biological sex does not exist. Further he claimed all scientists believe that biological sex does not exist.

This tends to happen in groups where dissenting opinion has been culled. Isolation does not generate balanced perspective.

> You do not have the right to free expression on someone else's platform. reddit is not the Internet

The problem with this reasoning is that the entire Net is private. The feeling of the public sphere is a kind of collective illusion similar to how we perceive the Net to be a 'space'.

I would hope that doesn't mean the use of a server doesn't have to be contingent on what political views I held yesterday or today.

It's more along the lines of fixing a bug in the system. It's not about flushing out an ideology like TD wants you to think. They're exploiting Reddits code to have more weight than similarly sized communities. Reddit is balancing that.

It has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with these guys actively exploiting the voting system.

if (subreddit == "the_donald") fixTheBug() else notABug()

The counterargument is that loopholes in the mechanics allowed the community in question to artificially limit the impact of everyone else's favorite platform of free expression. The charitable view is to call what's being done a bandaid to fix a broken mechanic.

It's also not an understatement to say that the level of rule-breaking (doxxing, vote brigading, abuse, etc) from the community, sanctioned (or at least not nearly adequately curtailed) by its moderators, is probably justifiably grounds for banning the whole community (since it's failing to self-moderate) but that can't really happen because it would cause a much larger and more problematic fallout.

The last sentence of your comment is ignorant and needlessly incendiary. I'm sure you'll find that the people you're talking about probably do know what it means. You can disagree with "people who identify as liberals but argue for different actions based on their best judgment than you do" (and there's plenty of fruitful discussions and arguments to be had around those judgments), without snidely saying that they're ignorant schmucks who've lost track of their purpose.

As a liberal - its been my view to respect and fight for anyone's right to say whatever they want, regardless of my own views.

If there are bugs with the reddit platform that are being exploited, there would be no reason to "prevent stickied posts from showing on r/all"

It's pretty clearly explained in Spez's post that it's a loophole, not a bug. The loophole is that there's an override for how sticky posts show in /all, used to elevate topical events -- which was being abused, against the spirit of the override, by pretty much only that one subreddit, for different purposes. There is probably a technical solution to this but it's probably complicated and this bandaid gets the job done for now.

But I think you knew that.

The bandaid was to allow people to filter subs themselves (which is great). Writing code to target a specific community crosses the line

I disagree. I don't think it crosses the line. But that's a value judgment, I guess, so there's not a lot of point arguing it out.

I especially think it was acceptable because it solves the urgent problem with a quick solution, whereas a technical solution would take a lot longer, and I do strongly believe that the problem was very urgent.

Trouble is that too is your opinion. As a frequent of r/all after the first TD purge I see 2-3 TD links there a day. Nothing so outrageous.

It kind of bothers me that people let companies like facebook, twitter, google, reddit, etc push their agendas and bury conservative news. Recent data suggests facebook "fake news" alone could have swung the election. Social media being the primary source of news these days.

I'm all for these platforms having the right the police their own site - but they have to be open and honest about it. Otherwise you end up with conspiracy theories going viral making one side super pissed and willing to elect Donald Trump over the beneficiary of what they perceive massive conspiracy to silence people.

I think it's a bit of a stretch to say this is burying conservative news, it's more like burying conservative meme-spamming. Especially because, well, now TD is going to be able to get on the page the same way every other subreddit normally does, which seems.. almost.. fair?

Certainly if you turn your head one way it's fair.

It's not inherently discriminatory for one-of-two political camps to have behavior that breaks the intended functionality of a platform and necessitates a response. You can argue that in this case it was, and that's fine, but I disagree.

Would it appease you if r/politics or a hillary subreddit had the same treatment? It wouldn't change anything but at least it would 'feel better'?

And I'd like to point out that one reason I'm defending spez and the reddit admins on this is that I think they've been extremely open and honest about it (barring the one idiotic mistake of Spez's). I like the guy because his admin posts have none of the veneer of bullshit that literally-every-CEO's has (ie Zuckerberg's "our mission is to bring the world together" drivel). It's super candid; he answers every question, even the sensitive ones; he's very open about mistakes and changes and motivations. It's rare for a company to display it and I value it highly.

I totally agree that doing special-case stuff to a community already obsessed with conspiracy theories about censorship is maybe a bad move, but I also think it's justifiable and probably justified. And also, there are tons of worse moves, in the game of not-pissing-everyone-off, in a generally shitty situation (such as banning the whole subreddit).

No what would appease practically everyone would be if r/all - the "frontpage of the internet" - had clearly defined rules as to what that means. Is it a collection of top up-voted content from a collection of subreddits? Apparently not due to this and other "algorithm changes."

Take twitter shadow banning people as its an easier example.

The rules of twitter are simple - someone tweets and it gets put at the top of a follower's feed. This is accepted as "the truth of twitter." When this truth is altered and all of a sudden some individual's tweets are NOT showing up in follower's feed people should be rightly pissed. No matter who the target is - because the accepted rules of the platform have been twisted to push an agenda. It is no different than propaganda and an insult to free expression.

> If you turn your head one way it's fair

Anyone can certainly justify anything if they are willing to turn their head with the breeze. I would point out the blatant mod and brigading bias in r/politics as an example of something you as a presumed liberal should be equally mad about. The content there is laughable and part of the reason why people even subscribe to the TD to get what little news is there.

Reddit has a problem - and its been written about before. Mods are dictators of their own communities and have complete control to push their own agendas within places that should be neutral. I don't see much of a future for the platform if this is not solved.

Re the first paragraph: your "apparently not" is incorrect. This change helps restore it to being a collection of top up-voted content from a collection of subreddits, where previously it was not following that as much, due to the special-treatment of sticky posts.

I don't like the bias in r/politics, but I don't think it's nearly as bad. Certainly not equal.

I meant "turn your head" in the sense that there are two palatable perspectives and they can be sort-of chosen between. It's not taking on any perspective without discrimination.

I agree with your last paragraph, except that I don't think it impacts the 'future' that much; I think reddit will go on existing even if it's not solved and still be about as popular as it is. It's a small but vocal minority who care deeply enough about it to actually quit.

[this dictator-mod problem is huge in my city's subreddit, r/seattle; a competitor (r/seattleWa) recently emerged and everyone jumped ship because the mods of the first were so awful and refused to relinquish power. So I certainly agree this is an issue.]

Like facebook maybe this is just them pivoting to countries like China and Iran?

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