‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’ | Hacker News Reader

‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

nymag.com

433 pointssmacktoward592 comments

Many of the comments here are picking apart pieces of subreddit drama or are discussing specific Reddit positions, but I think that's missing the forest for the trees. The VC grow-at-all-costs model seems to be resulting in monopolistic business practices and more negative externalities than positive ones.

Msatodon/GNU Social/Qvitter right now is a thriving social network run by instance owners that federate their instances. Or you can run your own instance if you want total control of everything. Secure Scuttlebutt is a growing social network run in a fully distributed (as opposed to federated) model.

The cat is out of the bag, and if you're complaining about social media today I see no reason not to embrace modern social networks.

> The VC grow-at-all-costs model seems to be resulting in monopolistic business practices and more negative externalities than positive ones.

Bingo. The essence of it was captured by: "I think a start-up needs to think about the monetization and how it can work with the users instead of against the users."

The VC-mindset monoculture doesn't help ("majority [...] are all the same archetype").

Some programmers see a problem and say "I know, I'll add federation". Now you have 7 problems.

More seriously, I'm not seeing how federation solves any social network problem better than subreddits did? In either case, the quality of the discussion will depend on the moderators, who can be good, bad, or evil.

Federated social networks give you the ability to change allegiance or fork. Don't like a particular moderator on an instance? Leave to another instance, or start your own. Things can get problematic if other instances refuse to federate your own, but if you maintain even a bit of social capital, most instances will not block an instance with a single user. There's a growing culture (and a set of actions in the ecosystem) of letting people know when you've changed instances, because instances are becoming easier and easier to run and more and more people are trying to run their own. But if you don't want to deal with it, join one of the large already existing instances.

But the problem with Reddit doesn't seem to be that subreddits don't have enough independence and ability to make their own choices?

But that's not good enough per the article. The guy advocates for active moderation, for surveilling users and making sure they are "good" enough. I guess the interviewee would argue that federation is bad because you can't ban people and control the "toxicity" that way.

Switter was back online with a new CDN within a day because it's run from and (previous CDN aside) hosted in places where sex work isn't seen as a crime. They grew to tens of thousands quickly because they could tap into the existing federation, so they didn't need a marketing budget or sales team like Twitter.

People can make their own thing under their own geography-bound laws while still connecting with a global network. That's really neat.

> Mastodon/GNU Social/Quitter right now is a thriving social network

I'm going to have to disagree with this. Compared to Twitter, Facebook, even G+, they are miniscule. Are my friends there? How do I know which of these federated instances to check for my friends in the first place. And what about my company's CEO? Or IBM's blockchain engineering team? Or British Airways customer services? Or the actors in the TV series I like? NONE of them are there! So lets not pretend that these are going to replace social media - they will be the playthings of a handful of starry eyed geeks and FSF libertarians, nothing more.

I still can't get over the fact that their official mobile app stops rendering comments past a certain level of nesting. There's no indication that anything is missing, no "continue this thread" link, nothing... the comments just aren't there. I don't understand how one of the world's largest social media platforms could have a mobile app that silently hides content from the user. Just blows my mind.

It feels like increasingly they are shifting away from focusing on the comments and discussion, to trying to get readers to click, consume, leave and keep scrolling (to generate more impressions).

I'm saddened by this, and in digital battlegrounds (and I'm not using that term lightly) like /r/politics or /r/worldnews where it has been very obvious for a long time that hostile foreign nations are conducting operations there, it can result in a lot of the important meta-chatter being pushed down, or troll comments being gamed to the top without the accurate counter-response being visible anymore. This results in further distortion of the truth (or at the very least exposure to multiple sides of an argument).

Next thing you know they'll have a UI "refresh" a la Digg.

Their mobile website is equally bad. A gigantic pop-up takes up half of the screen to tell you to use their app.

Third party apps make Reddit so much more usable.

I always use https://i.reddit.com. It's their years-old mobile site and it's super fast and reliable.

Wow, thanks for that link. I was having the same problem as the parent comment, I definitely don't want their app but I also don't want a giant pop-up in my face every time I load the mobile site.

It’s really amazing how many major websites don’t give a shit about perf. Their old school mobile interfaces end up giving the best user experience.

Perf is user experience. It’s a feature!

How long is that gonna stay available for mobile users?

> I still can't get over the fact that their official mobile app stops rendering comments past a certain level of nesting. There's no indication that anything is missing, no "continue this thread" link, nothing... the comments just aren't there.

More than that, half the time I go into a reddit profile on my desktop and try to click a link to a comment, it just doesn't work. Literally does nothing. They changed the rendering a short time ago from straight links to some type of JS, and now profiles are broken half the time.

I don't understand what you mean... The official reddit app on iOS show comments as deep as you want, as far as I can tell. They default to collapsed the further you go deep/down in subcomments, but have buttons that say things like "6 more replies".

Beyond a certain level they stop indenting, so the actual hierarchy is no longer clear, but that's necessary because there wouldn't be enough horizontal space otherwise. But the content is still all there, as far as I can tell.

Do you have screenshots?

If you have the mobile app, you can see for yourself. Here's an example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskOuija/comments/89rukm/hey_vsauce...

If you're not by a desktop, you can verify the missing comments by viewing the link in mobile Safari (in an ironic twist, Reddit's mobile web view is actually more functional than their native app).

I wonder how many people are out there, like you, who have no idea this is going on. The terrible thing about silently hiding comments is that there's no indication that anything is missing, so most people don't even realize it's happening. The only reason I know about this is because my subreddit, /r/AskOuija, often has deeply nested comment threads (due to the nature of the subreddit). Reddit's broken mobile app is actively interfering with the functionality of my subreddit, resulting in a lot of redundant comment replies from people using the mobile app (since it appears to them that these nested comments have yet to be replied to).

> mobile web view is actually more functional than their native app

Thank goodness for that! Reddit isn't so complicated that I need a special app for it. It's a website and it works well as a website. It could be better but there's nothing happening on the site that a browser can't natively handle just fine.

In the thread you linked, someone replied:

> Mobile people stop replying it’s there just u can’t see

Holy.. didn't knew about that. WTF

I don't know what to tell you, but I see the full thread on my iOS reddit app:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/tqoooN7gJ7zNKZLB3

Maybe it's an Android thing?

If you're on iOS, I recommend Apollo for reddit, I actually was using Alien Blue for the longest time because I also hated the official app, but I switched to Apollo a few months ago and it has been great.

The non-mobile version of the sites works really well on mobile browser. What does the apps add to the browser experience?

>Were there moments in which Reddit chose to double down on something and made it that much harder to work toward a solution?

>> I don’t know. I’m trying to think about your question.

>Is there something recent that you’re thinking of?

>> I can’t remember the specific instances right now, but there was a bunch of press about things that were going on on Reddit and Discord, and they both reacted and banned the subreddit.

>> I’ve got a lot of advice for start-ups, and it’s not very fucking complicated. It’s just: Think about the impact that you want to have on your users and on the people consuming your content and do the right thing. They know what the right thing is.

Sounds like this guy has a lot of vague complaints but not much in the way of concrete solutions, other than "do the right thing" which in his mind is extremely obvious and yet undefined.

>>Sounds like this guy has a lot of vague complaints but not much in the way of concrete solutions, other than "do the right thing" which in his mind is extremely obvious and yet undefined.

Maybe he's operating on the same principle espoused by Justice Potter Stewart's "I know it when I see it" threshold test[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it

That's an uncharitable interpretation of what are, I think, pretty clear words on his part.

He says he doesn't know how to fix existing broken entrenched sites like Reddit and Twitter but does have suggestions for sites that are just getting started.

How well did those things work out for him?

Sounds like it's "don't be so stuck on 'free speech' that you let nazis and trolls dictate the dialogue"; strong moderation is what's been missing. Banhammers from on high, and damn the whiners.

I agree, but will go further to claim that the entire interview was horrible. So little information was conveyed in soo many words. He either had nothing to say, couldn't articulate what he had to say, or both.

Reddit wouldn't be so toxic if the vote counts were hidden, but echo chamber validation is the ultimate badge of honor there. There is so much in this document that applies to all things Reddit (please note that I wrote it inspired by my time on Reddit): https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Avoiding_Tr...

I'm not sure hiding vote counts is sufficient, since comments are still displayed based on them. The 'Theory of Reddit' sub did some pretty compelling analyses showing that the first 3-5 votes almost completely predict eventual vote direction, and that the top comments in a thread will consistently be the first handful of upvoted comments.

Which also explains complaints of the shape "Reddit hates X one day, but loves X the next!" Whoever shows up first with an idea people don't hate ends up becoming the dominant voice of that specific conversation.

A subreddit solely dedicated to auditing the quality of moderation on various subs would go a long way to give reddit the tools to remove problematic moderators. Ultimately the quality of the mod makes the quality of sub.

The problem is that the reddit culture is that upvotes/downvotes solve all and that moderators should be invisible.

This exists, but in a really basic and incomplete-looking form.

http://reddit.com/r/dsmr/wiki

http://reddit.com/r/blueribbon/wiki

I read about one strategy on my favorite subreddit. A user admitted to posting memes and cheap content there, then going into /new and downvoting every other post and upvoting his own with a couple alternate accounts.

This was done on a large scale by Quickmeme a few years ago. Now the site is banned site-wide. https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/1ux68h/why_ar...

I don't actually comment in reddit threads with more than 15 comments for this reason: there's no point, no one will read it. And if they do, they won't care.

The vote thing is true. If I'm the first to comment I'm usually at the top, or near the top, of the thread.

They should remove comment votes. Why we care so much about what people are thinking? When we had usenet we weren’t so mad about others opinions...

Fundamentally the problem, I think is anonymity. On the Internet no one knows you're a dog.

I have both pseudonymous handles on reddit and also I go by my own name. On Hacker News I only go by my own name. And I have found that it made me a much, MUCH better person when posting. So now I post on reddit about 95% of the time under my own name as well.

When you have no skin in the game -- such as your reputation to uphold, no superego to hold yourself in check -- a person's id reveals itself. And it's not pretty.

Maybe you "become a better person" when you post under your real name, but Facebook, which has a real name requirement, is a cesspool, and this community, where most people use pseudonyms, is relatively civil.

You can have an identity and "skin in the game" without using your real name. You can also use your real name and not care/be aware of the consequences of things you say online.

Agreed, but note that for a lot of people on Facebook, their primary audience are friends, family & acquaintances; people who will mostly tolerate your (contrarian) views, whether you display tact or otherwise. People are the center of conversations on FB.

This contrasts with a place like HN which has no concept of friends and family -- the center of everything here is the comment box. That's a great trade-off as it allows us to focus attention on debating contrarian ideas, and less on the one who is airing it.

We've seen with facebook that have real names doesn't improve the level of discourse that much.

I think it's the protection (or at least the apparent protection): you can't be a jerk in person in a public place without exposing yourself to immediate negative repercussions. That's why online forums with harsher moderation are usually much better (one of the best examples being /r/askhistorians).

Indeed I 5hink it's the missing direct personal contact.

It takes a lot of, say, training, to learn to use communication media, too. You just can't have a chat as if face to face, in writing. And most people aren't well educated at authoring, either. At the worst, some wouldn't even know how to lead a conversation anyhow. Online forums just expose that. And I think we as a society at large, are still figuring this out, since 50 to 100 years, so it's a mess.

> We've seen with facebook that have real names doesn't improve the level of discourse that much.

Yeah, okay. How about: real names + no private gardens.

> Fundamentally the problem, I think is anonymity. On the Internet no one knows you're a dog.

No, anonymity is not new to the internet and is actually one of the beneficial aspects, since it makes people more likely to say what they think, and less likely to be a target for others. Lots of anonymous BBS are moderated just fine. Meanwhile, Facebook can be very vitriolic.

The fundamental problem is the assumption that moderation is not needed and free speech is everything. It seems to have gotten popularized by Reddit in particular.

Nobody who has spent lots of time on BBS, IRC, and other typically moderated spaces would think anonymity is even relevant.

Would you have used your real name if you were gay in 1950?

The internet is not where politics are decided, but at the very least that’s where a good part of the debate happens. Use real names and you’ll be able to blackmail people into approving things they disapprove. What about publishing everyone’s votes, while you’re at it? No, people need a safe space to experiment debating about good and bad ideas without risk.

Real name policies are only about the ability to blackmail and coerce.

As a thought experiment - would slavery in the US have ended sooner or later if we had anonymous internet from the 18th century on? I'm not implying there is any clear answer, but I think it is a simple way of immediately seeing much of the nuance of this issue that you might miss at a cursory consideration.

Self censorship due to social pressure certainly keeps some people (as has been mentioned Facebook shows clearly enough that lots of people simply don't care) from discussing things that they would not feel comfortable discussing under their real name. And those things that they might not feel comfortable discussing can be negative, but they can also be positive. In either case, I think it's probably a net positive for society when people can discuss things they actually feel instead of things that they think others think they should feel, even though those others might not even feel that way! Shouldn't society operate in a way that we think it should operate instead of the way that we collectively think everybody else thinks we think it should operate?

I disagree. Anonymity allows you to express unpopular views that you wouldn't be able to in real life. But the existence of downvoting basically defeats that, except in unpopular echo chambers, of course.

What if your unpopular view you wouldn't express in real life is something abusive towards others? i.e. trolling.

I'm not saying anonymity doesn't have its place. But that I think it's a major factor in the particular problem being discussed here.

Yes, but that needs to be balanced by the distorted form of reputation people get even when they are polite and thoughtful due to the lack of any emotional channel in text-based web forums. Add to that the fact that in real life, people have many sides to their personalities, which are inhibited or eccentuated in different contexts; but the impression the web gives of people lacks those contexts.

Then, consider the good that anonymity has allowed for; think of all the things people have able to speak out about anonymously which would have gone unsaid.

> Then, consider the good that anonymity has allowed for; think of all the things people have able to speak out about anonymously which would have gone unsaid.

Of course.

HN has a different audience and moderation so i m not sure its just your name. When people are posting with real name, it changes the dynamic, the post becomes part of the social signaling, which can lead them to refrain from saying some truths, or to support things they don’t really believe but align well with their real life identity.

Pseudonyms are just a symptom, I guess. A name is another channel for communication. For real names, origin was usually intimitly tied to identity. John Doe or Lisa Muller is as much a pseudonym as JDog123 would be, without further references. Real Name policy much relates to overlap between internet and local interactionnand discoverability. If I don't need to be discovered by non locals (as defined by my off-line reach; which today is a false schism, but anyway), I can use my name for artful expression.

There are cases where I don't want to be discovered, too. The latter, Obscurity (hiding), shouldn't be confused with the former, Security (literally without worry or need).

That's a great point. In the end it's an identity problem. This is one place where I think that blockchain technology might actually help. (Jesus, now I'm one of them.)

There has to be pseudonymous/anonymous channels for information, but the bile has been so intense lately that it makes me think that the majority of communications need to be positively identified.

There are some subreddits where they are hidden for a period of time (not sure how long, but it's quite a while). I wonder if anyone has analyzed those?

A formal statistical experiment was done in /r/politics about the impact of hiding vote counts temporarily but it did not find statistical evidence that it made an impact on discourse: https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/mitmediala...

Low-effort comment, but: I really appreciate your content, both here and on Reddit. It's refreshing to see anyone doing any of this sort of analysis, and it takes a lot of effort to do it, and you do it really well and at a rate that's mind-boggling.

Was /r/politics given a vote-hiding feature that other subreddits didn't have? Votes and downvote buttons are typically hidden with custom CSS that users can disable, which would completely invalidate these results. Votes can be hidden for real for a short time, but cannot be disabled completely.

/r/politics is aggressively left-wing, so much so that I'd doubt anyone interested in real discourse is trying anymore. I'd think an experiment like that would need to be done on a clean subreddit that isn't bringing in any baggage, or a pre-existing ideology-based ban list, to test its validity.

r/politics said it didn’t make much difference, but they left it that way anyhow. The feedback based ranking implicitly supports echo chambering, but there’s not much of a way around that.

> The feedback based ranking implicitly supports echo chambering, but there’s not much of a way around that.

Traditional topic-based forums are better, because you can't suppress unpopular-but-correct opinions by downvoting. Even if you don't care about Fake Internet Points (and the reason they exist is because we do, gamification works), if you state something that goes against the prevailing hivemind your opinion will literally be hidden unless users go out of their way to find them.

(and yes, I browse HN with showdead=yes for the same reason)

> but they left it that way anyhow

If it makes little difference either way, perhaps they left it on to quiet those who would keep suggesting they try it even though they already have.

> There are some subreddits where they are hidden for a period of time (not sure how long, but it's quite a while)

I think there's a subreddit-level setting for that, but the max is only something like a couple of days.

0-1440 mins

Just checked - Reddit mod /r/askelectronics

Vote counts on HN are hidden - doesn't stop a lot of toxic behavior on here.

The problem is down votes are not a good comment tool. Especially combined with hiding and such. Upvote only systems are much more resilient to the kind of gaming mechanics you see here and on reddit.

What is meant by "gaming mechanics you see here"? Could you be more specific? Of course, voting does affect what gets posted, but that's the point. If your authentic voice doesn't appeal to HN voters, then develop another voice that does appeal to us!

Isn’t that how you get a popularity-driven echo chamber? If only certain points of view will get upvoted or avoid downvotes, only those points of view will be posted or get discussed.

That’s completely compatible with an upvote only system. So I don’t see your objection?

That blob is (ironically) extremely ideological/generalising. Doesn't mean I don't disagree with it though, maybe just the approach/tone.

I believe you may be grouping strong (and maybe not always right) opinions with flat out chaotic evil trolls (whom there are actually extremely few).

It's been intruiging to grow up witnessing the appearance of the term "troll", initially designated to IRC and other net spammers, to it's present and increasingly meaningless, nebulous definition of "mean people on the internet". It's a big difference, which your linked blob quite interestingly evidences :D

Reddit would also be better if karma wasn't known.

Just goes to show that whenever there is money involved there has to be some 'incentive' or motivation for users / creators.

Both reddit and hacker news would be much better off with no voting at all.

Strong moderators are the only thing I've ever seen keep online forums at a high quality level. Voting is the weakest kind of moderation.

I strongly disagree. Whether the points are displayed or not, voting is what revolutionized forums. I find voting forums almost universally better than non-voting ones, because voting sorts by relevance by default.

I still dread the (lack of) content quality that I've come to associate with phpbb forums (and their ilk).

The problem with the upvote/downvote system is that it's too simplistic. If you have an opinion that goes against the status quo, a lot of people will downvote your comment simply because they disagree with what you said on some emotional level.

Of course, past a certain number of downvotes, you post will be buried, so you have basically an echo chamber.

"High Quality Level" is a relative measure though. It's really easy for a heavily moderated discussion forum to become an echo chamber for the moderator's views.

> I had conversations with Jason [Citron] a year ago about the problem of white supremacy on his site, and he said, “I don’t want to invade their privacy by going into their channels and reading what they’re doing.” And I said, “They’re gonna cause deaths because you’re not doing that.” And he said, “You really think so?” And I said, “Yeah.” And sure enough they didn’t do anything, and sure enough deaths were caused because of the shit going on in their channels.

I'm not sure I can agree with this kind of moralizing. It's the same argument that blames gun manufacturers for school shootings. Clearly the latter argument is absurd, and yet very intelligent people subscribe to the former argument. So either some step is missing here that differentiates these two arguments, or we should be focusing on the real problem.

More than agreeing or not with this line of thinking, I find the bigger problem is how selectively it is applied. People will point out that if we ban guns, we wouldn't have to worry about school shootings. Even if we ignored the logistics of such a challenge and agreed on the conclusion, why is the same logic not applied to things like alcohol and all the harms that results (drunk driving, alcoholics ruining their lives, etc). And some people do that (I think MADD would be one case, especially for the subset of their members wanting to ban all alcohol); yet even in that case those people selectively apply the same reasoning about something else.

Look at those who ignore the harm of buying drugs from unverified sources, where you may be paying money to a supply chain ran by the cartel. People are tortured and killed to get the drugs delivered, and if one doesn't verify (or if one insufficiently verifies) then they are funding such activities, but many are willing to ignore that. But change from drugs to escorting and you'll find some of the same people now saying that it should be banned because without sufficient verification it is possible to paying people who are coerced or forced into doing it. The overall argument has valid points and problem points, but the discrepancy of when it is applies makes discussing the validity harder when it seems people aren't being transparent about their motivations to begin with.

> Even if we ignored the logistics of such a challenge and agreed on the conclusion, why is the same logic not applied to things like alcohol and all the harms that results (drunk driving, alcoholics ruining their lives, etc).

Indeed, and we already tried that, and it led to the rise of organized crime. But I think it's important not to get sucked into "slippery slope" style reasoning. There can be good reasons why banning alcohol would be problematic, but banning guns would not. It depends on the surrounding culture. For instance, if enjoying a drink a few times a week was universal, but almost no one owned a gun.

> The overall argument has valid points and problem points, but the discrepancy of when it is applies makes discussing the validity harder when it seems people aren't being transparent about their motivations to begin with.

I think it's largely because people see symptoms, and look backwards in the causal chain to something they think they understand and can blame as "the" problem. People are pretty weak with nuance on tough and emotionally charged issues.

>For instance, if enjoying a drink a few times a week was universal, but almost no one owned a gun.

1 in 3 own a gun in the US. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/one-three-americans-own...

1 in 2 had a drink in the last month: https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohol-health/overview-alcohol-co...

From that same source, 88,000 people die annually from alcohol-related diseases, making it the 3rd leading cause of death in the US.

Culturally, guns and drinking are the same order of magnitude in the US. From a death count though, alcohol dominates.

The thing is, you don’t really need to theorise about how to stop school shootings. It’s been done. It just required people to prioritise children’s lives over a minority hobby.

(I’m from a country where owning a gun is legal, but controlled, and has no school shootings. We used to have less control, and school shootings happened.)

A gun if fundamentally designed to kill. That's the only reason it exists. Yes you can use it to eat cereal, I guess, or you can dip the nozzle in paint and create wonderful art, or maybe you can load an AR-15 with 30 rounds and shoot at a giant wall of cheese to make hipster Swiss cheese, but most people realize why guns exist - to end life. Human life, or animal life, but some form of life.

I hear various arguments how somehow a bunch of rednecks armed to the teeth are the reason why the Government hasn't yet come and locked me away in a FEMA Death Camp, but I don't buy it.

Alcohol does not exist to end life. It can be used to end life, yes, either through abuse, or by someone driving intoxicated - but that's not why it exists. It can, and is, used safely, by millions of adults world-wide.

I can go into a room and see someone "brandishing" a shot of whiskey and not be concerned for my safety. If I walk into a room and see a bunch of nutters brandishing guns, I'm getting the fuck out. At best, they're a bunch of insecure-in-their-masculinity macho-wanna-be's - at best. No normal person looks at someone obsessed with firearms and thinks "that's just a normal person with a normal hobby like my aunt Tilly who collects stamps" - nobody.

This is why this whole argument how guns are awesome and we shouldn't be afraid of them but should encourage them and, hell, let's arm teachers and doctors and soccer moms and even the kids' lacrosse teams, why not, it's just like giving them a glass of wine - is starting to sound more and more hollow.

It was, after all, a lunatic with a gun who killed a bunch of people at that Vegas concert, not a guy with a beer keg and some Jaeger bombs. Unless I'm not quite remembering the facts.....nah, pretty sure it wasn't Jaeger bombs.

> A gun if fundamentally designed to kill. That's the only reason it exists.

That's the reason it was invented, that's not the only reason it still exists. According to stats cited above, 1 in 3 Americans have a gun. Why aren't two thirds of you dead if guns only exist to kill?

The truth is, people have fun shooting guns. Just like they have fun in archery contests, despite the fact that bows and arrows were also invented only to kill.

> A gun if fundamentally designed to kill. That's the only reason it exists.

Yes, and people need to kill other people sometimes to defend their lives and the lives of their loved ones. You may not like this reason, but that's the truth.

Guns are a bad analogy because manufacturers have no control over their use post purchase. If gun manufacturers could take back their guns (ban users) when somebody threatened illegal violence the analogy would be closer, and it would be quite reasonable to expect them to do so.

Who you're selling to can make a big difference. An extreme Example is Heckler and Koch that supposedly exported G36 illegally to the conflict zones of Mexico. But there are also legal examples, for instance weapon manufacturers lobby for laxer laws, including how weapons need to be handled after they are bought.

> If gun manufacturers could take back their guns (ban users) when somebody threatened illegal violence the analogy would be closer, and it would be quite reasonable to expect them to do so.

Except creating a new profile on reddit is trivial, so "banning" is a weak threat at best.

In doing so you lose your social connections and any moderator privileges you have; so it's not without threat.

It’s a more effective deterrent than doing nothing at all.

The idea that these "hate speech" venues have caused deaths is thrown around quite often, but I wonder if a connection has been found in even a single case. Gaping chasm between rhetoric and reality.

>I wonder if a connection has been found in even a single case.

I'd argue that the psychopaths who're attracted to such forums have their hateful beliefs reinforced and amplified by them. Whether or not they would've ended up killing people even if they'd never started hanging out on those forums is hard to say, but it seems pretty naïve to me to assume that those "hate speech" venues didn't have an effect on them.

See the many murderers who've been active on Stormfront for example.

White Homicide Worldwide, SPLC (2014) [pdf]: https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/d6_legacy_file...

Here are a few off the top of my head: the death of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville last summer, the nine people killed by Dylann Roof in Charleston, and the two killed by Jeremy Christian in Portland Oregon after they interrupted his anti-Muslim rants. Note that the perpetrators in all these cases are on record as citing racial, ethnic, or religious hatred as motives for their acts.

That question is being hotly debated in the Canadian press at the moment, due to the actions of a terrorist.[0]

0: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-city-mosque-al...

I wonder how many lives have been saved because hateful people on public forums had their views challenged and were able to change themselves.

If words do not lead to actions or changes in behavior then why are people bothering to post here?

And if words never contribute to actions then there are allot of correlations to explain from the American revolutionary pamphleteers to the Zimmerman telegram to Jihadist Imams to Coca Cola commercials.

Now maybe this is a price we're wiling to pay for unlimited free speech, I dunno. But we mustn't convince ourselves there is absolutely zero causation between words and deeds.

Feeble minds desire leadership. In the absence of leadership they will devolve into chaos and the least feeble among them will discover that they can lead the mob. In the absence of leadership.

Lead your community or it will destroy you. Put another way, make the future you want. This applies first and foremost to humanity. The clever devices of metal and silicon are secondary. Always.

The argument is not the same. You're comparing the banning of a tool, a gun, to the moderation of a group who's existence is based on the belief that one race of people should 'dominate' all others. "very intelligent people subscribe to the former argument" because the arguments are different.

>...blames gun manufacturers for school shootings...

If a new item today entered the market and was misused to the tune of 30,000 deaths per year. Misused far more often than legitimately like stopping an intruder. And the manufacturer knew in advance this would be the outcome, I think we would be right to blame them.

There are many extremely dangerous substances with legitimate uses that would instantly be widely abused that we wisely restrict. I can see no metric that puts most personal weapons outside that category.

> Misused far more often than legitimately like stopping an intruder. And the manufacturer knew in advance this would be the outcome,

Yeah, I'm not convinced. If enough people enjoyed using the item in question recreationally, there'd be enough pushback to an outright ban.

> I think we would be right to blame them.

This doesn't follow from the premises. I'd wager that every item has an ethical use.

> There are many extremely dangerous substances with legitimate uses that would instantly be widely abused that we wisely restrict.

"Restrict" does not entail "forbid". There are already "gun restrictions", just as there are "chemical restrictions" and so on with all the other items you're no doubt thinking of.

The comments here have this mentality of "there are people with different opinions from me, why don't these websites deal with these opinions". It's dangerous thinking that can be applied to your opinions.

The internet always worked this way. There are the cesspools, maybe things you don't like, but if you don't feel like engaging with these communities you simply keep going. Problem with these social media forum sites is that as much as you don't want to engage/debate with these communities they still use the same website as you so its unavoidable.

This is why centralizing these forums onto one website was a bad idea, blame that. Because now, there's too much money involved and excluding people of certain political ideas or whatever means you lose a substantial chunk of userbase, which means users would depart to another website.

Reddit once was a good place to engage in things like politics, but now it is a cesspool of left leaning people. /r/politics turning into a largely left platform has helped to give rise to the more extreme groups that feel ostracized. It is my opinion that effectively banning views that can at times be extreme (though non-violent and not inherently bigoted) only draws more people to them.

I don't blame Reddit for being too hands off, if anything I often blame them for being too hands on. That may not be a popular opinion; but I have in my any years in active online forums/newsgroups/message boards from the early 2000s, to now, seen this happen so many times.

A overactive admin/mod group always has a blowback, which generally ends in another community forming with more extreme views than what was originally the cause of the bans.

Yeah, exactly this. Many of the communities on platforms like Reddit simply cannot co-exist, and having independent forums for them meant they could operate peacefully without those who dislike the fundamental premise of the community worrying or complaining about their existence.

You could probably even compare social media sites to schools or prisons really. Tons of people with different, wildly incompatible viewpoints or philosophies stuck in a place they don't really care for.

To be fair, some of the "speech" on Reddit is actually dangerous. Like, get people hurt dangerous.

I've never seen an active threat on Reddit, what do you define as dangerous? Can you give an example? I've been on Reddit almost since the beginning and I've never come across a post that I felt posed any danger. Maybe I'm in the wrong subreddits.

You are in the wrong subreddits. EDIT: AND your anecdotal experience isn't conclusive.

> The comments here have this mentality of "there are people with different opinions from me, why don't these websites deal with these opinions". It's dangerous thinking that can be applied to your opinions.

It has nothing to do with opinions. It has never been about opinions, and you know it.

It has to do with antisocial behavior. Antisocial behavior is inherently hostile and doesn't deserve a platform, which has been known to anyone who has ever ran any kind of social space for a long time. If you don't moderate antisocial behavior, you create a community where only that behavior thrives.

This is not news, and the real dangerous trend that I'm seeing is that antisocial behavior doesn't matter and should be protected. No, it shouldn't.

> There are the cesspools, maybe things you don't like, but if you don't feel like engaging with these communities you simply keep going.

Yes, except thanks to aggregators all the communities got, well, aggregated, and now there's really nowhere else to go. A cesspool used to compete with other non-cesspools, now we're all in just one big cesspool, because the quality of trash is that it affects everything it's in.

Thank god for programming IRC communities.

> It has never been about opinions, and you know it. It has to do with antisocial behavior.

It is my genuine belief that presuming bad faith (as you have done here) is one of the most common antisocial behaviors that people don't even admit is antisocial. It is toxic to the civil exchange of ideas. It's even mentioned in the Hacker News Guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html): "Assume good faith."

The other antisocial behaviors mentioned in this article (animal cruelty, r/jailbait, etc) are certainly worse. But they are also committed by people who know that what they are doing is socially unacceptable. They know this but don't care.

When people presume bad faith, they often do so completely convinced that they are the good guys. I am sure I have fallen prey to this myself plenty of times.

But this is why the attitude is so dangerous: "Antisocial behavior is bad, and I know it when I see it. I can be trusted to identify what is acceptable, and who deserves a platform." Well, probably you notice it when you see it in other people. But we as humans are really good at rationalizing our own actions.

For the record, I completely agree that moderation is necessary to keep communities healthy. But I think it's harder than people think to apply moderation in a way that isn't just reinforcing the beliefs and taboos of whoever is in charge. For example, I see too many greyed-out comments on HN whose tone is the same as other highly-moderated comments. The only difference is the opinion being expressed.

> It is my genuine belief that presuming bad faith (as you have done here) is one of the most common antisocial behaviors that people don't even admit is antisocial.

The bad faith is on the person responding. The post literally starts with "The comments here have this mentality", how is that not bad faith? Then they construct a strawman.

You want to give that power by acknowledging it with a response? It's the same problem as "it was about ethics in journalism".

Someone implying ignorance on a topic they should not have any ignorance on is acting in bad faith. There's no way people do not realize, at this point, in such large numbers, who is being kept out, or meant to be kept out. It was never unique, special opinions. It was always trolls, sexist and homophobic language, etc.

The issue is that some people think that language IS valid and SHOULD be included but can't straight up say that because nobody would support them in that case.

But this has never been about free speech, nobody prevents you from starting up your own website and promoting your agenda on there, if anything, that has gotten easier, as has already been obvious from the proliferation of problematic fringe communities (in case I need to define these think Stormfront or flat earthers).

>Antisocial behavior is inherently hostile and doesn't deserve a platform

How many posts would we need to go back and forth for you to tell me who gets to decide what “Antisocial behavior” is?

How do you deal with anti-social behavior that uses "stamping out anti-social behavior" as its justification?

You can't reason with any party that has already decided to be corrupt. So, in short: you don't.

You deal with this whole problem by not creating all-powerful giant aggregators like reddit that eat all other communities.

You deal with it how we did in the past: by creating zillions of competing communities and people choosing which ones they found palatable, or creating their own with their own set of rules. This usually results in a number of fairly diverse communities somewhat competing with each other.

> It has to do with antisocial behavior. Antisocial behavior is inherently hostile and doesn't deserve a platform

Can you define "antisocial behaviour"?

Behavior that follows from opinions I don't share.

There's a wealth of literature on the topic that you could examine at your leisure.

>This is not news, and the real dangerous trend that I'm seeing is that antisocial behavior doesn't matter and should be protected. No, it shouldn't.

There was a time when approving of gay marriage or suggesting that women are equal to men in most regards would have been considered "antisocial" by a good chunk of the population.

There was also a time when it was not antisocial at all to suggest that certain races of people are superior to others.

Times change. Today's acceptable could very well be tomorrows antisocial and vise-versa.

I am not sure what is the point you're trying to make.

If we define a behavioral set, such as "antisocial", meaning, behavior not welcome in a society, why does the fact that we later expand this set indicate a problem with using the set?

Reddit has been a completely positive force in my life. I subscribe to hundreds of subreddits and they all seem quite well-moderated. If I want to ask a question of doctors, engineers, lawyers, or manufacturers, I can. If I want to spend some time look at cute baby elephant pictures, I can. If I want to learn about a new GarageBand feature, it's easy. I literally didn't know about the things like jailbait until they became national controversies.

I’ve seen absolute junk science on gun control posted in reddit science. Comments that questioned the “study” were flat out removed. Millions of subscribers on that sub, at the time it was a default.

No one is implying that gonewild or programmerhumor are bad forces... but news censors, worldnews is manipulated, politics is beyond a joke. Those three particularly are almost certainly bought and paid for.

Reddit is pretty bad, particular subreddits can be great. You need to understand the content vs the company.

I used to be a mod of r/science. There is an incredible amount of garbage in the comment section. This makes precise moderation very very hard. In general, I think the sub is far too lenient about leaving up comments. Far too often the top comments are pointing out some "flaw" in the study that is either irrelevant to the paper or addressed in the paper body.

Reddit has been mixed for me, but overwhelmingly positive. I'm a part of industry subs that have incredibly high signal-to-noise ratios and counts founders and executives as some of its members. I've gotten amazingly deep answers quickly, and for free, for some of the most challenging and technical problems in my space. And for hobbies, it is now my goto place for really deep dive info.

I've received consulting opportunities, and also just connected with people IRL (including someone who ended up working literally around the corner from my office).

If I had to summarize my negative experiences, it would come down primarily to being made increasingly aware of how broken the world is with places like /r/politics and /r/worldnews, and the sheer amount of my free time Reddit ends up consuming that is, let's face it, mindless scrolling and brain candy.

To help with the negativity I've found adding more positive subs to my list helps balance it (like /r/uplifitingnews). It really is a balancing act though and I'm constantly aware of the self-imposed filter bubble I'm cultivating, so it is important to step outside of that.

As many on Hacker News know, I've been an avid fan of Reddit and believe that their data and community, and there's still a lot more that can be done that can be derived from that data that can't be found anywhere else.

That said, from an administrative perspective, the intense hands-free policies are baffling. You'd expect a company based off the nature of community would engage with their community and their needs. Admittingly, that's not very profitable.

But they did get engaged! They banned all subreddits related to the trading/purchasing of firearms and alcohol. /r/beertrade, a subreddit for trading beer, had a strict policy that users were not allowed to sell beer for money (something that's actually illegal) and only allowed people to post about trading beer. Even someone like me, who doesn't ship beer and only trades in-person, is no longer allowed to talk about trading.

They did after realizing they would be facing lots of regulatory problems.

Organizationally, it should be very obvious to anyone who thinks that things like facilitating anonymous gun and alcohol sales, etc is probably not a good idea.

Except they banned trading as well as sales. Trading beer is legal.

It's unfortunate that beer drinkers aren't likely to DDOS the site or brigade other subreddits -- you might have been left alone then.

They actually went back and corrected some of those subs which were link aggregators essentially. r/gundeals was reinstated and they have a stickied post describing what needed to be done to be brought back to life. The main takeaway is that there is no p2p transactions allowed, only links from stores/manufacturers.

Except that's bs. Hardwareswap for example is still there. Thinkpads for sale, GoPro Market...

And that's the fundamental problem with "getting engaged". As soon as you do, everybody's going to criticize not just where you did poke your nose, but also where you _didn't_.

> That said, from an administrative perspective, the intense hands-free policies are baffling. You'd expect a company based off the nature of community would engage with their community and their needs.

That's always the thing I liked about Reddit, and something I never found baffling at all. 'Here's our platform; please don't break the law' is a nice, easily understandable, easily followable policy. 'Here's our platform; please don't violate the social mores of this hour' is much trickier.

I hate many of the foul subreddits (like /r/ShitRedditSays), but I can easily ignore them. It's easy to ignore what one doesn't want, but much more difficult to use something one's not allowed to have. And then there are issues of fairness, e.g. will Reddit ban subreddits on one side of issues but not another? Does it selectively enforce its rules?

I think "platforms shouldn't censor" is arguably one of the core values of the early internet. For the first half of its life to date, reddit seemed to share that value.

Unfortunately, it's hard to take a strong stand on that position in the face of public pressure when the thing people want censored is something as close to child pornography as people can find without stepping over the legal line, or Nazis calling for innocents to be harmed. I think I'm in the majority when I say that those things are bad.

On the other hand, I firmly believe that the existence of uncensored platforms is good. A history of caving to demands to censor bad things says that censorship in on the table and demands to censor anything someone doesn't like might be successful. Already, reddit has ventured beyond banning things that are horrible to banning things that have some mild potential for regulatory issues (trading beer and selling firearms is not affected by FOSTA, so far as I am aware).

Yeah, reddit is contradictory here. They have strong open-source ideals that they're trying to tie to a for-profit hosted platform model. They should accept their role as one or the other.

I've significantly reduced my time on Reddit. Used to pull up the website out of curiosity every day but the atmosphere is incredibly toxic. My front page was riddled with Russiagate stuff too for some reason and every time you'd bring up an argument that isn't the norm you get a mob after you.

Unsubscribe from /r/politics. Unsubscribe from /r/worldnews. Find the handful of subreddits that are bothering you and unsubcribe from them. The discussions I read on Reddit are overall nicer than those on HN, not because the userbase as a whole is better, but because it has sewers where the crap is concentrated -- and you can easily avoid them. That's one of their most important features.

I would go a step further and say the first thing a new Reddit account should do is unsubscribe from everything, then selectively subscribe to your interests. Every default subreddit is horrible.

I would extend that further to _unsubscribe from all default subreddits_.

Start from a blank slate and search for subreddits that actually interest you and seem reasonable. Yeah, you're also creating an "echo chamber" if you participate in polarizing topics, but hopefully you're aware that you're doing that to yourself.

The default/popular subreddits are toxic. The smaller, niche subreddits are rarely toxic and usually good communities.

As for the Russiagate stuff, the front page is riddled with it because it's a very important subject in the US, Reddit's user base is primarily people from the US, and there are bombshells dropping every day.

Still a nothing burger, it's paid political propaganda on those default reddits, paid teams pushing bs and noise.

Share blue for example was given a budget of 40+ million a year to do just that. (Over 100k a day)

The other paid campaign is 'deplatforming' (their term). They do your best to silence opinions which don't match the paid script.

>As for the Russiagate stuff, the front page is riddled with it because it's a very important subject in the US,

Not really. Describe how each news articles has impacted your day-to-day life. It's only important in that it keeps readers coming back who are excited about a big conspiracy taking down the president they don't like.

City specific subreddits are really hit or miss. Often it's people complaining about newcomers and how the drivers "here" are the worst drivers anywhere ever. Sometimes a good news story comes through. Some are better than others but that kind of discussion/complaining bores me.

I personally go to Reddit to relax and not fret about the state of the world. So, I unsubscribed to all of the serious or semi-serious subreddits (all news, politics, etc.).

Turns out if you unsubscribe from all of those types of subs, Reddit becomes a really funny and interesting time killer where the community actively tries to come up with ways to make you laugh.

> the atmosphere is incredibly toxic

People say that a lot, but, although there are a lot of people I don't agree with on there, I don't know about the applicability of the analogy "toxic". Most times, when people say reddit is "toxic", they're referring to a specific subreddit that I won't name here, but it's mostly just full of innocuous posts like "we have the greatest president, don't we?" - clearly designed to ruffle some feathers, which I suppose is in itself counterproductive, but "toxic" as in, leaches out into the surrounding area and makes it unusable? Seems a bit of an overstatement to me.

It's hard to bring up without being attacked, even off of Reddit, but for long-time heavy users it's been obvious for a while that Reddit has purposefully undergone several changes to control the narrative at the behest of advertisers and the powers that be.

I think it's more that Reddit grew so much that the original community gets drowned out by everyone else. You can't have a community that big without it becoming filled with, for lack of a better word, normies.

What narrative supports The_Donald and the numerous left leaning subreddits both being there? Honestly I hear this a lot and am curious. I believe it is because they are focused on retention numbers which thrive off focused insular communities to be clear.

This is a valid complaint for non-technical users, but I don't understand why HN users don't customize reddit to suit their tastes instead of complaining. Signing up doesn't even require an email. Is there a better alternative? It's arguably the best feature that reddit brings. Don't like a sub-reddit? Remove it and add something else. You can even create your own and moderate to your taste. You can even grab someone else's reddit customization under multi-reddits. Here are some examples:

https://www.reddit.com/user/A_UPRIGHT_BASS/m/uplifting/

https://www.reddit.com/user/DrPropulsion/m/science/

https://www.reddit.com/user/bodaciousbecca/m/motivation/

I did the same and no longer login or use the front page.

I found that just going to a few subreddits on topics of personal interest that I can browse through for new ideas, user stories, etc. results in a much more positive experience.

Smaller communities for specific hobbies/videogames/etc (in most cases) seem to be less polarized on the platform.

I hate the default experience since it is purely low effort posts. The cute gifs are entertaining but I feel I am wasting my time compared to discussions on interesting topics.

By logging in you can select your subreddits which lets you filter out subreddits you don't care about and add ones you do care about.

Browsing subreddits is the best way to check out a particular topic but I do find their algorithm is okay at pulling up an okay overview of your subreddits if you login. (assuming you remove all the noisy defaults)

Why is it toxic to share stories about an investigation of the US President?

It's the commentary that's toxic. Nobody is allowed to criticize anything about the investigations or tenuous connections to Russia without being labeled a russian propagandist and downvoted out of visibility.

Look at this commentary from just today: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/8da2uu/trump_wel...

Do you think this is constructive? https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/8da2uu/trump_wel...

What about this? https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/8dga0r/trump_tol...

There is no intelligent discourse occurring in those comments. It's just a big echo chamber.

Every time you see a post on the front page you don't like, filter that sub from your front page. So easy. Unfortunate that Reddit limits you to filtering 100 subs from your front page.

So you're subscribed to them but filter them out of your front page? Why not unsubscribe entirely?

When I tried this I hit the 100 sub filter limit in a few days.

I had a pretty well-curated list of subscribed subreddits but reddit decided some of my interests are problematic and I deleted my account. Posting links to licensed firearm dealers legally selling firearms is too taboo for a site that has subreddits organized around linking videos of people dying.

>Russiagate stuff too for some reason

Because its one of, if not, the biggest story in the world right now? I mean, of course its going to occasionally top /r/politics and /r/worldnews.

The president and the highest levels of the GOP are directly targeted in an investigation that has brought 20+ indictments with several guilty pleas with apparently more to come.

This is a bit like saying the news in 1974 was too focused on Watergate.

> I mean, of course its going to occasionally top /r/politics

Have you actually ventured over there? Saying Russiagate/Trump stories are "occasionally" at the top of /r/politics is a bit of an understatement. They're obsessed over there.

I think there is a very important distinction that needs to be made. The popular reddit experience is vastly worse than the customized reddit. It took me a while to realize that my reddit experience was vastly improved once I was very picky about which subreddits I follow.

The same could be said about the internet in general. Take a stroll away from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc and you can find some really interesting places with extremely insightful and meaningful content.

The problem is that a majority of people are just absolutely manipulated by their emotions and dive head first into the feedback loop designed by social media to provide an addictive stream of never-ending engagement.

Are you assuming they would have sought out longer form or higher tier content otherwise?

My dad was extremely happy using Stumbleupon for years. It was about as high-pace low-quality you could get on the internet. I showed him sites like Reddit and elsewhere but he was very content with just Stumbling.

People like to blame FB/Twitter for low quality content without considering the huge market for that stuff. People aren't the ignorant sponges who can be pushed/pulled in whatever direction other people think is better for them, which is how everyone seems to treat the average internet user or voter. Much like trying to blame the whole "obesity crisis" on some evil capitalist food producers, without considering the natural evolution of the workplace, evolving urban environments, technology, chemistry, or just standard irrational human behaviour to be lazy and knowingly make bad choices.

I'm sure quite a few ivory tower intellectuals had their way they'd ban tabloids like National Enquirer and trashy reality TV like Big Brother. But I doubt that would suddenly make these demographics any better informed or better citizens.

We can try to push back against straight up lying, at least when it goes beyond entertainment, but demand will always find supply in the marketplace...

Wow, harsh. My sense is that the problem is that these other sites are simply not very findable, and Google search results have been getting steadily and measurably worse over the last several years.

Really? I find "really interesting places with extremely insightful and meaningful content" all the time.

If not for Facebook or Twitter I likely would've never found The Athletic, a newer news media website for sports. I doubt they'd have just advertised on ESPN or some other sports broadcast channel website. Some of the content there has been incredibly insightful and meaningful. I even find articles from there on Twitter that I wouldn't normally have seen since I have the content from there filtered to what I like in my day to day consumption.

Last month I was kicked from twitter, since I was trying to be more productive I didn't trigger the reset process.

I did spend less time refreshing some timeline. But

1) I did miss some of my "audience" (feels like an audience more than friends, but I'm twisted)

2) I'm now way less aware of lots of news. Two days ago was the first time in years that I thought to myself "what ? I didn't know that" about an event. Not sure if this is bad or good, but it's an important difference.

I don't have a Reddit account but I lurk there regularly, in my experience that only works as long as the subreddits are very niche and not well known. As soon as they get popular since there's effectively no barrier of entry for the general Reddit population you effectively get the same community everywhere.

Normally when people find a forum that interests them (like, say, HN) they need to bother creating an account, often validating an email etc... It only takes two minutes but that's enough friction to weed out the vast majority of the people who just stumble randomly on one of your posts. On Reddit once you have an account you just have to click a button to subscribe to any community you like. It's "eternal september" on steroids. 4chan had "lurk more", Reddit is "repost more".

So your post sounds a bit to me like "Twitter is great if you know the hashtags to follow" and it's probably true but at this point is it really representative of the website? If you need to filter 99% of the content to make it usable, maybe there's a bit of a problem still? I just went to /r/all and had a look at the subreddits available there, I find 16 million accounts subscribed /r/gifs, 3 millions to /r/politics, 17 millions to /r/gaming, 18 millions to /r/pics etc...

So yeah, I'd believe you if you told me that /r/common_lisp, /r/mongolia/ and /r/treepics/ are amazing communities but I don't think it's enough to redeem Reddit as a whole.

> As soon as they get popular since there's effectively no barrier of entry for the general Reddit population you effectively get the same community everywhere.

Strict moderation can still be effective once obscurity is lost. /r/SpaceX is an example of an excellent subreddit that has survived an explosion in popularity.

> So your post sounds a bit to me like "Twitter is great if you know the hashtags to follow" and it's probably true but at this point is it really representative of the website? If you need to filter 99% of the content to make it usable, maybe there's a bit of a problem still?

You're just making the observation that the majority of internet users aren't sophisticated intellectuals. Demanding that the website you visit are sophisticated everywhere is just a demand that they are hidden or ignored by most people. I don't see how this is different than having hidden/ignored hashtags, subreddits, or filters.

/r/Polandball being a shining example to the contrary. There's a whole other discussion to be had about the importance of strict moderation and rules to improving a subreddit's quality.

True, but The_Donald is always leaking. I've seen plenty of sexist/racist content on subreddits for cities, sports teams, memes, etc. Reddit has allowed itself to be a platform used in part for really despicable content, and the despicable people who generate that content regularly venture outside their cesspools.

I feel that leftist movements are leaking much more than T_D.

Comments which — without being racist or sexist — go against the popular & politically correct leftist stance are downvoted to oblivion. Meanwhile, extremely statist stances are tolerated and celebrated by users.

Isn't this a symptom of a site growing to reflect the broader population? When communities are small, they typically cater to a niche audience, who invites their friends who are directly or tangentially related to that niche.

Once the site grows beyond those 1st, 2nd and 3rd degree connections, you get exposed to those 4th, 5th and 6th degree connections that might have some values and opinions that are shocking to you because they don't run in your orbit.

I feel bad that the author contributes his time to making a world a worse place. I see Reddit as giving more visibility to the world. It's true there's some crazy stuff from some loud people, but my guess is if it was quantified it would still be a small percentage of actual content on Reddit. But just like in life, a rare shocking event dominates our consciousness much more than persistent normal events.

You're talking about a world where Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, The Jersey Shore, and gameshows where you pick your spouse from a group of strangers are hit television shows. I think you may have tastes which are outside of the mainstream.

There was plenty of sexist and racist garbage on reddit prior to the creation of T_D. It's probably more virulent now, but it's definitely not new. Good mods are the key to keeping bad content off good subreddits.

This is the problem that so many people miss when they extol the virtues of a customized Reddit. If you make a site that is attractive to racists, bigots, sexists, and homophobes, those people are going to be using the whole site and not just their tiny vile corners.

This phenomenon might be easier to understand with a specific example like the recent Ghostbusters remake. It was by most accounts a bad movie. If you browse any movie related subreddit you will see plenty of valid criticism of that movie. Mixed in with that are comments about how that movie never should have been made with an all female cast and that is what caused the movie to be unsuccessful because women aren't funny. It is easy for some naive kid to see that and think "yeah, I saw that movie and it wasn't funny, maybe that comment has a point". Meanwhile it might never occur to them the user who originally left that comment came to Reddit to be a member of an incel community that is notoriously sexist and anti-women. This allows these communities to grow their size by spreading hate and feeding off the rest of the site.

As a moderate on reddit I see leaking from both sides, but leaking from r/the_donald is much more contained.

It is particularly annoying when a hobby subreddit gets swarmed by the fanatical social justice crowd and kills all conversatamd community that existed previously.

The leaked content from r/the_donald are downvoted to oblivion. The leaked contentent from r/shitredditsays has much more power.

However, if you are simply seeing conservatives from r/news posting, and assuming they are crazies from r/the_donald, then you are assuming bad intent and may need to re evaluate how many conservatives live on the internet. Regardless of your political affiliation, you will see opinions you disagree with and that’s a good thing for the most part.

the_donald or the like has never leaked into the many subreddits I frequent.

What does that mean though? People who post in one sub aren't allowed to be in any other sub?

People in TD can write in others subs too, as can people from late stage capitalism. Wanting to forcibly segregate and silence people with different opinions is I think at the heart of the problem with silicon valley right now.

'remove those who disagree with me' has killed hundreds of millions over the years, and is a common and dangerous kind of groupthink.

The internet is not your save space. Neither is reddit. If everbody were thinking your way, those posts would be downvoted into obliviation. I am sorry that you have to face the fact thst many people don't share your personal value judgement of what is considered to be racist/sexist.

There's a certain sub I like that is full of sexist and racist stuff and nobody there likes Trump at all. What I mean to say with this is, when you see stuff you don't like on Reddit, that does not mean it's coming from T_D, or that getting rid of T_D would get rid of stuff you don't like.

It seems like a right-wing contingent has taken over the moderation of a lot of smaller subreddits, specifically city/country subreddits, and both the content posted and the commentary reflects that.

It's a dangerous trend for both society and reddit itself.

I think this is an important distinction. I could never quite understand what all the hub-bub was until I realized that.

I've used my account to comment since before they added subreddits. And I never stumble across one of the "toxic" ones except for the rare occasions when one of the other subreddits links to those ones.

Wait, how did it work before adding the subs? A single board like HN, but without any specific topics?

It seems crazy. I can't imagine Reddit without subs.

This only sort of works. Reddit being a combined system, subs tend to leak into each other. If you are into something very obscure, benign, and uncontroversial, like, fountain pens, you're probably fine.

If you're into anything gaming related, good luck. I've been on some subreddits of popular games and it's basically just like the rest of Reddit. In particular, Reddit's system just doesn't work well when there's a lot of users. And the drawback is that these subreddits tend to dominate the space so people do not make private, limited gaming BBS boards as much anymore.

This is definitely the way to handle reddit. I mostly stick to local sports subreddits and a few general interest subreddits (i.e. not /r/funny, /r/pics, etc) and I think reddit is a great tool.

I think it's the same thing with most social apps though. Small discord servers allow you to build up groups of online friends, but if you just go into the specific game ones you're going to end up with a mix of good and bad.

Overall it's just an issue of popularity bringing out the worst in people.

I actually disagree with this. I find that customized Reddit leads to the same feedback loop/conveyer belt feeling that made me quit Facebook out of annoyance with always seeing the same ideas propagated out again and again. Browsing Reddit without an account lets you avoid the urge to comment on things and also turns you on to loads of new things that you otherwise might not've found on customized Reddit. Granted, I still have an account I use sometimes, I just get more enjoyment out of the front page when I don't have any control over what I'm seeing.

Isn't there still a way to see that particular front page when you're not logged in? Either /r/popular or /r/all?

I completely agree. There are some fantastic engaging subreddits with great people. I personally don't use it as much but I highly recommend finding those cult following subs.

Funny you should mention that... my first exposure to reddit was exclusively through /r/programming. (To give a sense of the scale of the site at the time, I distinctly remember a post celebrating 65,536 subscribers.)

At some point shortly after, they added the ability to create subreddits, the site blew up in overall scale, and I was completely oblivious to it all for years, being that I only read /r/programming.

Point is, the site gives you a lot of useful ability to curate what you read.

It’s not really relevant to what the author is trying to say at all. Actually, it’s the opposite.

Because of the excess of disinterested capital that only values growth, a thing that could be a positive and productive thing is instead a cancer — it grows and grows without purpose. That’s why Reddit (and Tumblr) have massive porn sections that aren’t spoken about and Reddit is a watering hole for white supremacy and political propaganda.

The porn thing is really interesting in other ways. Hosting images and video is mostly hands off, so it begs the question of what shady things are the third party media hosting people doing to make money and what is Reddit’s business relationship with them.

Comparing porn to white supremacy is just that kind of political view that feels completely alien to me. It was not many years ago that Monty Python poked fun at a whole nations conservative view about nudity and porn, and it seems like globally we have taken a few new step backwards toward the 19th century views about those topics.

The biggest porn section in reddit is currently ranked 61 of all subreddits. Cat picture section is ranked 6 and is 18 million subscriptions vs 1.4 for the porn. Do reddit have some 18 times more sinister business relationship with cat shops, veterinarians, and cat food, or should we just conclude that reddit reader are human with human interests and as that goes most people prefer looking at a cat picture while a smaller minority goes to reddit for a dose of nudity.

Go to http://redditlist.com/all and look at what the people want to consume. Celebrate that science is where it is.

> That’s why Reddit (and Tumblr) have massive porn sections that aren’t spoken about and Reddit is a watering hole for white supremacy and political propaganda.

That's the core of reddit, which was founded as a normie 4chan at the beginning of a time when many sites were trying to monetize the energy coming from that corner of the internet. The parts that you like are an outgrowth of that, and originally essentially subsidized by it. The fact that when you remove that element completely, you don't have a business (there have been many attempts at a "civil" reddit), shows that it still is.

There was already a metafilter. If part of you, at least part of the time, wasn't attracted to the id of reddit, you probably would have been on metafilter.

Tumblr is a different case - just a blogging site with social extensions - and there have always been porn blogs (and nazi blogs, but the social element of tumblr happened to pull it into a different direction.)

This is my filter list for Reddit using RES (not including keyword filters like Net Neutrality or meme filters):

https://i.imgur.com/Ybmk6fZ.gifv

All the subreddits I want to see I subscribe to directly. For everything else I browse All with these filters.

reddit cannot be customized.

You can subscribe to X subforums. and only ever see those same X subforums.

But you can NOT see "All" excluding only things racist subforums for example. So it is either your little bubble, or the full blown promoted/paid xenophobic posts.

> But you can NOT see "All" excluding only things racist subforums for example. So it is either your little bubble, or the full blown promoted/paid xenophobic posts.

For /r/all, there is the ability (on the right sidebar) to filter subreddits. You can add whatever subreddits you wish to exclude when browsing "All".

This !

I am becoming more and more picky about which subreddits I follow.

I have even unsubscribed from some that are partially interesting to me like androiddev (I work as an Android engineer) because they were 10% interesting information, 90% circlejerk/toxic.

That's sort of the inherent flaw of aggregators. There's a lot of shit that gets vacuumed up into the general site, but the onus is really on the user to dig through and find what's meaningful to them.

I'm fine with the "Google Reddit Experience" - when I search for something and I end up reading an answer to my question on Reddit. I didn't actually know there was any other Reddit experience.

This is both a blessing and a curse.

I think that fine-grained subreddits naturally tend towards echo chambers, because it has become easier and easier to find and interact with people that think just like we do.

Is it the case that for the problems he's talking about, the popular experience is the only one that matters?

Favourite subs you would recommend?

/r/askhistorians is regarded as pretty much the "perfectly moderated" subreddit others strive for

/r/science and /r/programming aren't bad

After that you should just check out niche communities and see if they've been taken over by trolls. So far /r/motorcycles, /r/ultralight, /r/camping etc have been fine, as opposed to the many iterations of /r/onebag which generally suffer from power-grabbing moderation.

Ones about things you are interested in...

r/iamverysmart - funny screenshots of the Dunning-Kruger effect and people generally thinking they're God's gift to intellectual life.

r/holdmyredbull - extreme sports cousin of "hold my beer". Other fun ones in this circle include "hold my juice box" and "hold my fries". I tend to think of watching someone go skydiving without their own parachute as universally interesting, ymmv.

r/AskReddit - Good survey of the current human experience, usually leave here with a feeling that your questions about the world and lives of other people aren't as unique as you though. Sometimes it's banal/off topic, though.

r/ELI5 - "Explain like I'm 5" usually contains layman's questions about science, maths, history, and other sometimes unapproachable with great responses from people who know their stuff. Almost always leave here with something new to think/talk about.

r/ProgrammerHumor - I'm a programmer, but even some of my non-programmer friends can enjoy the jokes over here.

What are your interests? If you're into fitness, take a look at r/fitness.

If you're into woodworking, take a look at r/woodworking

r/hiking if you like hiking

r/campinggear for gear

r/baking if you like baking

etc. Just do a search for your hobbies and see what subreddits show up.

reddit has been in an identity crisis since they sold out to Conde Nast. They've made themselves too much of a factor. They should move to a behind-the-scenes operation and let communities bear responsibility for themselves.

That's important from a product point of view. I see redditors unhappy about a specific community, I'm always confused why they're visiting that community.

It's a good distinction, but it doesn't solve the issue that problematic subreddits will continue to exist, even if I've customised Reddit to avoid them. I understood that was more Dan McComas's issue with Reddit, and with Twitter.

This is going to be an increasingly common realization, especially in Silicon Valley. Which got way too caught up in the idea that everything was making The World a Better Place.

But Zynga and Facebook are like fast food companies.

This realization started really kicking in with Free to Play mobile games a few years ago (also mostly here in the Bay Area). I worked in F2P early on, left and moved to a non-F2P company. One of the most common things we heard from interviewees is that they were looking to get out of the F2P side of the games industry.

Reddit is the only popular website where rational discourse can actually happen, thanks to the infinitely threaded conversations and complete markdown.

While there is objective rude comments on there, this is why some people call it, "toxic," because their ideas are challenged, and they'd rather preserve their ideological bubble than seek to understand reality.

It's toxic because a relatively small number of mentally ill people can effectively overrun any conversation. These people are not interested in rational discourse. You can't spin that as "the challenging of ideas".

Reddit has been fully gamed at this point and engaging in the most popular areas is just frustrating.

Also because those same mentally ill people are the exact same people with the time and desire to become internet moderators (no offense to dang or anyone else here, the moderation here is good!). Reddit needs to take control of subreddits back from moderators; too many subreddits are curated echo chambers, moderators are always trying to make money through bullshit like referral links, there's no transparency, etc.

Keep in mind that reddit skews younger than here, and probably considerably less educated as well. It's just too big to have the kinds of discussion you can have here

>It's toxic because a relatively small number of mentally ill people can effectively overrun any conversation. These people are not interested in rational discourse. You can't spin that as "the challenging of ideas".

you know what is truly toxic? internet armchair psychologists.

>Reddit is the only popular website where rational discourse can actually happen, thanks to the infinitely threaded conversations and complete markdown.

Except comments people don't like can be downvoted to oblivion, causing no one to see them (unless they purposely sort by controversial).

Downvoted is ok (and usually, when it happens, completely warranted). My problem is when they're deleted entirely by unaccountable moderators with their own agendas.

Exactly. It's rather revealing that Facebook is his example of a well functioning forum for the exchange of ideas.

Not sure how markdown improves rational discourse but I'd like to be enlightened here.

> where rational discourse can actually happen

There are many, many topics that are completely untouchable there - I wouldn't say that rational discourse can happen there, but I would say that reddit comes closer than anything/anywhere else.

Only just getting started reading this, but I had to jump into comments to give a shout-out on how amazing 924 Gilman was for me as a kid growing up in the East Bay. I wasn't there for the glory days of the 80s/90s, and I have no idea to what extent Dan played a role in its founding, but as a space for playing and watching music, I've never found a venue in my life that comes even close to what they were able to achieve. We actually had a great scene in the East Bay, with a decent number of spots for young, local punk/hardcore/metal bands to play. But as a teenager, it was frustrating when an overzealous security guard would go off on a 15 year old kid for moshing, or when a skating rink would flip the lights on and kill the power an hour and a half before the bands had agreed earlier.

924 Gilman had none of that. I remember the first time I saw this sign[1] and then realizing that there were no security guards to enforce those rules. And yet, the punk ethos was strong enough that folks were just generally good to each other.

Or the graffiti all over the walls with a graffiti code of conduct posted every so often: don't tag over color with black and white, don't put doodles over real art, that sort of thing. Sure, it wasn't 100% followed, but people really respected it for the most part.

Or the 25 cent bottles of water and cans of soda. No profit, just kids handing out there zines and making sure no one goes thirsty.

Anyway, I'm going to go finish the article now, but if this guy got 924 Gilman, and wants to take that ethos into the internet, I couldn't be more supportive. Godspeed.

[1]: https://www.flickr.com/photos/61992100@N03/23226226149/in/al...

Gilman was a huge part of my life and I played various roles in participating and helping to manage it over the year, though I don't want to take ANY credit for this, it's not my place and no person should. But, the experience I had there showed me what is possible when things are started with good intentions and managed that way going forward. There were and are rocky times at Gilman, but overall it's a model that should be studied.

Also, we made and shared a lot of great music with the world, which is the real upside of gilman. I miss that time in my life.

Oh yeah, it certainly wasn't perfect, but the good far outweighed the bad IMO. Also, I'm now realizing there are probably a lot of parallels in building those sorts of communities with the Eternal September problem: getting too big and people betraying the ethics. It'd be a fun historical analogy to explore...

> I miss that time in my life.

Me too. I'm still in my 20s, but given that I now have a lot more means working in the tech world than I had when I was a teenager, I've been thinking a lot about how I might be able to help foster communities like that for younger generations (opening a venue, starting a small label, patronizing high school bands that want to record, etc.) Curious if you've thought about the same?

EDIT: Holy crap, just realized you're the subject of the article. Definitely didn't mean to imply you didn't play a role, FYI, but I imagine you played a large part given your humility on the matter. ;) Keep up the good fight, man. We're rooting for you.

The entire Hollywood mythology was built around being "discovered," and elevated to fame and stardom, and arguably it's main product wasn't movies, it was hope.

If I were Conde Nast, I would use reddit as a farm team for finding, creating, and monetizing internet celebrities through its "legit," properties the way that movie studios created vehicles to profit from actors.

Costs them hardly anything to talent scout redditors and try them out in other publications, then promote the story back of how success story X was "discovered," on reddit.

Keeps their monetization platforms hands clean, while bringing a steady stream of talent to market. The difference between hollywood and Conde Nast is that now, Conde Nast literally owns that talent source instead of relying on a bunch of agents.

Condé Nast doesn't own reddit, the parent company to Condé Nast, Advance Publications, is the majority owner of reddit, but not the only shareholder.

Block me on Twitter!

Good color. Single party has control of Conde Nast and Reddit, so while there is a legal distinction, this isn't a correction to the basic business dynamic.

The fundamental problem I have with reddit is that it seems extremely easy to game and astroturf. Things like /r/politics felt like a Democratic party propaganda platform around the 2016 election for example.

One thing that really annoys me from Reddit is the mob mentality.

For instance, a person will make a seemingly "logical" argument and everyone will just keep adding their own "opinion" agreeing with this argument to be part of this mob. Later, even if this argument is proven wrong, you will get insulted, downvoted and threatened if you make any sort of counter-argument. I hate generalizing but my experience was that most people were unwilling to take back what they said.

Not unique to reddit. Once a forum comment has been accepted as right, it will always be the top post. Child comments only ever see fewer views. The correction will never be as popular.

/r/mma is an absolute gem. /r/BlackPeopleTwitter is great as well.

I'm also getting tired of these apology tours from SV people. The biggest flaw they have (aside from collecting scary amounts of data) is seemingly taking a too-rosy view of people. It'd be more refreshing for somebody to stand up and quote a somewhat notorious fighter by saying, "I'd like to take this chance to apologize... to absolutely nobody."

Reddit has been overrun by extremists and special interest groups and has become a dangerous tool for indoctrination and misinformation.

This interview feels disingenuous and a thinly veiled humble brag/promo for Imzy.

Jailbait Really? How can you mention jailbait but not coontown, KKK, fatpeoplehate, incels, boston marathon, there are so many worse communities/incidents that have spilled into general reddit than jailbait.

the cycle is media backlash > ban a few subs > replacements/under the radar alternatives readily available in the ban announcement comments.

no one seems to fully appreciate the massive influence that reddit has on the news cycle/national discourse and how the company policies can actually shape world politics. It's insane we're not studying this and talking about it more.

He's basically saying that freedom of speech is too risky on the internet for any platform.

That is scary to me.

A lot of the banned subs were downright abusive if not criminal. Shaming, harassing, threatening. Reddit is not obligated to provide them a platform and that's not a free speech issue.

It is scary. This is what convinced me that maybe "hey, freedom of speech, even for stuff I dislike" could actually leave us too vulnerable:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/08/25/546127444/epis...

But I have no real solutions. Maybe even if we censor things, we work as hard as possible to keep the censorship records transparent and to make the censored stuff accessible and have some complex accountability system?? I dunno. maybe it's all hopeless.

Freedom of speech has nothing to do with Reddit.

No, the first amendment of the constitution of the United States (which describes the US government's responsibilities in regards to freedom of speech) has nothing to do with Reddit. Freedom of speech as a concept can be applied to anything: reddit, the government, hacker news, you or I.

This is the latest flavor of humble bragging in the Valley.

Speaking from one of his nine yachts over a satellite phone, Spammy Tachsdodger McScrapyface said "What we did at Zynga was terrible and should be regulated. My new company is available to consult on how that should be done."

I've been actively working on a media literacy guide for engineers, contributions welcome:

https://github.com/nemild/hack-an-engineer

(Think Reddit influences so much of engineering thought from things like r/learnprogramming to all the cryptocurrency subs)

This is just a collection of stereotypes of journalism that are already commonly believed among the tech crowd.

Just one example: it’s insulting and hurtful to any quality journalist (ie at the NYT, WSJ, or Economist) to suggest that their reporting is motivated by personal financial incentives, or their employer’s.

I'll respectfully disagree. Financial incentives influence everyone, including the editors at top publications who are constantly looking at what is read, watched, and shared to decide what to invest in and feature.

You might really like "All the News That's Fit to Sell" which is written by a media economist that digs into how market incentives influence coverage (he's the director of the journalism program at Stanford). There's lots of discussion as well about media coverage decisions in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election at even the national networks.

This Cecil the Lion example at the Washington Post has always been illuminating to me: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/17/business/where-clicks-rei...

Even at the top publications, financial incentives influence choices. It's not as malevolent as someone paying off a journalist.

For example, at most top tier newspapers, there is an incentive for "if it bleeds, it leads". This is an economic outcome, as this elicits the most reader interest and also increases profitability. (See my data analysis on this in the NY Times: https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html )

However stereotypes about journalists from the tech crowd doesn’t have much visibility.

The journalist crowd thinks a bunch of stereotypes about tech. And they have the platform to broadcast their prejudice to the world. Some of their stereotypes are quite insulting to any quality Engineer.

Why is it bad when we stereotype them, when they have been doing it aggressively for years?

Rather, I believe it is our duty to start reporting on the media and our opinions about the media, as no one does. The media holds all the power in broadcasting opinions on the populace, and there are very little entities that check their power.

Fundamentally, the problem with the site is that Reddit was happy getting growth on the back of people searching for jailbait[1] and creepshot porn and white supremacists for years and they have a user base that reflects that. A lot of the power mods that run the largest subreddits are just awful human beings. I don't see how they fix that short of nuking the whole site from orbit and starting over.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20110429125747/http://www.alexa.c... (check the top search terms)

These people exist and no amount of censorship will eliminate that. Protective bubbles exist in the form of moderated subreddit and other forums outside of Reddit.

And sure enough they didn’t do anything, and sure enough deaths were caused because of the shit going on in their channels.

Which incident is this referring to?

Likely this, but perhaps something else...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunil_Tripathi#Misidentificati...

No, Discord wasn't around at the time of the Boston Bombing. I believe (though don't know) that he's referring to some of the white nationalist stuff, like Charlottesville perhaps.

I was quite disappointed not to see more from McComas on what went wrong with his so-called kinder, gentler Reddit alternative, Imzy.

He briefly mentions the investors, but not his role in the site, its own group behaviours, staff, etc. I'd explored it and was impressed by several of its technical features, but found the net of its founding cohort and technical design, as well as staff and volunteer management & moderation, hands down the most toxic online experience I've seen in 30+ years. (Yes, pre-dating the Web.)

The session-based anonymous identity dynamic in particular gave rise to dynamics such that every conversation was a single-iteration Prisoners Dilemma encounter with a strong dose of Zimbardo.

I've been hoping to see a post mortem with some degree of introspection. That's not happened.

More on my experiences: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/500ysb/the_imz...

reddit - anarchic garbage = metafilter

metafilter has 12,000 users, not mansions, yachts and tennis star wives. No one is asking metafilter mods about reddit, they're asking people who got rich off reddit, because they respect people who get rich, not people who have well-run, wisely-moderated forums. This is because well-run forums are common, and reddit.coms are not.

>if Reddit, specifically, focused all their efforts on the health of their platform, on the people that are really the contributors and not the consumers, they would see growth beyond what they’re getting.

I think Digg tried this, shortly before being crushed by Reddit.

"They believe that if they have a billion unique visitors a month, that they have a property that is going to be worth a ton of money in some way eventually."

This is stupid; users are fickle and visitors mean nothing if you can't monetize them. And usually attempting to monetize visitors causes them to leave to the next platform trying to reach a billion unique visitors.

I can't believe intelligent people think this is a valid way to run an Internet business. It might work for small startups looking to be bought out by a larger company (who will then try and monetize it, driving away all the users) but for a company like reddit it's a bit ridiculous.

(Edit fixed typo)

I think the idea of reddit collapsing entirely is much harder than a single news site for instance. It's not one product, it is hundreds of strong communities that have gathered from different places on the web. There are discussions and communities that I would not know how to find elsewhere on the web.

Reddit is not profitable. Your strong communities are supported by investors hoping to get a return on their investment. If the growth stops, the investment stops, and the servers go away.

The fact that the communities are strong matters not.

I used to have an reddit account from the first year reddit came out and I finally decided to delete it this year. I kept going into smaller and smaller subreddits because the ones I used to like, askscience or askhistorians etc. grew too much and became non enjoyable for me. At the end even the smaller subreddits were a waste of my time. I feel good about this and I don't think I'm going back to reddit.

Can the sentences for this article get any longer?

What I can never reconcile with is that when mainstream media means 'toxic' they are never referring to the /r/latestagecapitalism plastered all over the front page of reddit. They protest the fact that somewhere, hidden from popular view a minority of people hold a different view from the extreme leftist one.

Reminds me of that quote about Puritanism being the fear that someone, somewhere is having fun.

What’s wrong with r/latestagecapitalism?

I agree with a lot of the jokes/memes posted there that make it to the front page but the actual rules for discussion within the subreddit are kind of far out there. I guess one might call it the (publicly acknowledged) equivalent of the unspoken rules for the r/the_donald subreddit where many things written in opposition to trump are deleted by the moderators.

Admins do nothing to prevent extreme moderation as occurs on there from deleting any comment with an alternative viewpoint. Yet it appears quite consistently on the front page with only agreement in its comments section.

latestagecapitalism is pretty noticeable. It is an echo-chamber by design, and it is fairly popular.

Its absolute cringe, and it is humbling to me that I dont get why anyone joins such a place.

Although I disagree with the subreddit, nothing really wrong with it being on front page of reddit. It just shows how pro-left reddit is, but despite this the mainstream media only reports on minority of people practicing their free speech. This willing blindness to the truth of the situation is to me a form of misinformation. I think NYT would gladly welcome a violent Maoist style revolution if it increased its subscription numbers. Hence articles like this: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/style/black-bloc-fashion..... Extreme content like this free to parade around but god forbid some people are making pepe memes somewhere and garnering 12 views. The state (increasingly communist) must fight to protect those poor minority leftists from the evil empire.

It should really be named r/socialism, as the mods do not accept the validity of any other alternatives to late-stage capitalism.

Asking that question on HN got you a lot of downvotes. Interesting.

Um, the fact that it's named after a concept from a failed ideology that caused several at least Holocaust-sized genocides in the span of 20th century?

Reddit focused on openness and push growth as hard as possible.

Imzy focused on heavily policing their userbase.

Where is each of them at today?

With the complaint that VCs are incentivised to favor short-term metrics and over emphasise growth, how would you go about fixing that? Also, as a founder, how would you seek investors that wouldn't pressure you to scale too fast?

That's the problem with VCs in general, and it doesn't fit their business model from a math perspective if you are low-growth. There are some investors who are trying a new model (see Indie.vc).

The alternative is either to go without funding (at the expense of an ad or subsciption model), or have your users help fund you through something like an ICO or equity crowd fund or patreon etc.

Or you find a way to remove infrastructure costs through some technical decentralization or open-source and treat development/support as a hobby, but that doesn't scale to this size.

That confirms the actions of what Spez usually does. He remains silent on the rampant abusive subreddits UNTIL someone publishes a news article about it, then he steps in with the whole "We're dedicating ourselves to stepping up regulating these harmful subreddits, and other blanket PR statements". Like most, I enjoy the hobby specific subs(tech related for me) like sysadmin, networking, netsec, etc. Those communities are often very closely monitored by moderators who don't want off topic things floating in. I do browse the news sections everyday but it's normally not terrible. Most people have caught on now to the bot comment structure so those accounts get their comments downvoted to invisibility.

I think the biggest problem is that Reddit has created a poison with two perfect ingredients. 1) Having little to no moderation on abusive/illegal topics due to fear of PR backlash. 2) Creating a platform that allows people all over the world the communicate.

Mix those together and suddenly you have extremists, criminals, and just outright mentally sick people joining together to create massive communities where that behavior and mentality is allowed to prosper. When insane people have insane views, they typically have them amongst themselves or in a very small groups. Their not going to go around telling the town about their views and intentions, so it can be hard to find others to connect with that are in the same boat. That isolation I think tends to lead to towards those ideologies to fizzle out, or continue in private but without the backing to do any harm. When you suddenly have hundreds/thousands of these small groups of insane people banding together in a place where they can share their views publicly with anonymity, things get out of hand.

Take Incels for example, which is a now banned sub that was made up of generally unappealing men would very likely never experience intimacy with a female due to their own shortcomings. It's one thing for a guy to think in a brief moment "I really want to do X with a female, maybe I should just do it forcefully". That's just a personal thought and likely to fizzle out because it has no backing. Now when you have an entire echo chamber of like minded individuals saying things like that, now it's leading to encouragement and active planning of those illegal actions. All because Reddit refuses to step in.

Reddit truly doesn't offer much in terms of positives. Sure the easy going, user friendly, rolling forum type setup makes it easy for people to discuss hobbies and interests. However, forums have been doing just that since the internet began. Sure you can get news, cooking recipes, tech help, etc in a fast, easy going manner but you can get all of those from plenty of other sources too.

Think of it like this: In many areas down south in the US, militant groups are living in the forests. Generally they are white extremist, pro gun nuts who have small communities being self sufficient in the deep woods. These groups hate government interference and usually have a shoot on site policy. By themselves, these groups are nothing. Even the ones who threaten the public, pretty much never do anything. Now what if these groups had a way to find and communicate with each other in as efficient a manner as Reddit provides? Now you go from harmless threats to a potential, real world problem that could lead to violence and destruction since many groups would now have banded together.

>Think of it like this: In many areas down south in the US, militant groups are living in the forests. Generally they are white extremist, pro gun nuts who have small communities being self sufficient in the deep woods. These groups hate government interference and usually have a shoot on site policy. By themselves, these groups are nothing. Even the ones who threaten the public, pretty much never do anything. Now what if these groups had a way to find and communicate with each other in as efficient a manner as Reddit provides? Now you go from harmless threats to a potential, real world problem that could lead to violence and destruction since many groups would now have banded together.

That kind of logic is what leads to events like the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII

Dan wasn't there when Spez came back. Spez's first order of action after coming back was to create tools and systems for cleaning up the site. Dan never saw any of that. So take what Dan says about Spez and the site in the context of 2015.

Bring back Ellen Pao.

reddit is probably one of the best social sites on the internet. You need to pick and choose the best ones though. Like everything, there are shitty ones and great one. The great ones have great mods with a very precise focus.

Bold claim; most people in the world have never heard of Reddit.

I'm sure that's what most people could say about their time at, or on, Reddit.

Reddit is just a reflection of the world. There is both good and bad there. It is very easy to avoid the bad. Only visit the subreddits that you know are good. For instance, I'm a boardgamer and r/boardgames is a very friendly place. Other subreddits I frequent like r/woodworking, r/bodyweightfitness, r/campingandhiking are likewise places that positively contribute to the world.

The problem is that the site leaks in a way which doesn’t have a real world analog. Your favorite coffee shop doesn’t have random skinheads show up as soon as someone starts talking about e.g. sexism or racism. If it did they’d be limited to who lives nearby and the manager could kick them out when they started bothering people.

None of that happens on reddit and while intense moderation works (I love /r/AskHistorians for example) it’s expensive.

Yeah I read a number of hobby subs including r/woodworking and it is pretty amazing how helpful and positive these subs can be. I do not ever go except for specific subs. r/vacuumcleaners helped me find a vacuum etc. Without reddit I would find a lot of bad info on google thats often just paid advertising.

Reddit is a reflection of the internet world. Don't forget how many people don't use the internet at all, or people who interact with the internet in only a minor way during their day to day (a debit card transaction, a text message, a social media notification...)

I have been on reddit for years, and I am noticing far more karma 'gatherers' and seeming bot accounts than I used to. Political shills, karma farms, spam... you name it. A lot of it is on the front page.

And reddit admins must know about it.

The medium is the message.

I can't say that I agree with that. There are plenty of subreddits that are not the official ones that have great communities and do great things for its members... (/r/learnprogramming or /r/askamechanic and such)

There are marginal nice subreddits, but the platform as a whole has a problem.

As a foreigner, i am massively puzzled by how people seem to want to place all this on some left-right axis when both "sides" seems to have a massive problem of authoritarianism and groupthink.

> The incentive structure is simply growth at all costs. There was never, in any board meeting that I have ever attended, a conversation about the users, about things that were going on that were bad, about potential dangers, about decisions that might affect potential dangers. There was never a conversation about that stuff.

This externality-disregarding culture was idolized in SV for the last decade or so. It's nice to see some self-reflection, but unfortunately the VC community, without heavy regulation, is structurally unable to value anything other than growth.

Regulation doesn't solve all the problems. In and of itself, regulation can create just as perverted incentives as the existing VC culture. With the perceived impact that Facebook had on the election, I'm starting to believe our culture is evolving into one that won't allow such disregard with or without laws enforcing it.

You would really prefer to see Ajit Pai’s FCC in charge standards for internet discourse?

Its as if the members of the VC community were a bunch of capitalists or something ;-)

The introduction indicates that this is part of a series that NY Mag has been running called "The Internet Apologizes", where it appears they specifically seek out influential people willing to say bad things about online communities and properties.

This series can probably be reasonably interpreted as part of the traditional media smear campaign against democratized speech platforms -- they quite prefer speech controlled by their fancy executives and programming directors.

While it doesn't necessarily diminish anything the interviewee states, it's important to understand the context and framing of the discussion.

They're suffering the same problem as Facebook & YouTube. They're leaderless, being driven by and reacting to the mob of users, instead of the producing a planned product that understands people.

The problem with social media is that they don't have people telling the public that their ideas are crap, so everyone thinks they're awesome.

Editors get to make sure people understand that, no, they are not awesome.

Social media, like any advertising-driven media, needs editors to tune their site. They're trying to have it all - the profit of big advertising with the automation of tech, but advertisers only want something specific, and automation isn't going to get what advertisers want. No major advertiser wants their beautiful fashion brand ad nexts to a post of child mutilation on Reddit. And editors get to tell people that their content is garbage or great.

And editing means people are going to be unhappy. You are officially taking a certain viewpoint, and are literally filtering out incompatible expression. The people that get edited out, they'll get mad, but they'll have to deal with it, like the millions of other people that get edited out by various editors around the world and deal with it appropriately.

To fix it, Reddit & other social media needs Editors-in-Chief. Just tell the users: "This is the boss. Keep that person happy. Want to be pissy about it? Go somewhere else."

YouTube is now trying that with their kids channels.

In the long-run, things work out better with editors.

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