BTW, I gave you +1 Your honest opinion does not deserve to get downvoted.
In practice, it looks as though online conversations aren't constructive unless the participants share a certain amount of common ground (eg: "first principles" like whether the strong should dominate the weak, or whether all "MSM" are part of a conspiracy and untrustworthy). I think in the future social media startups will have a "point of view" and not try to cater to everyone.
The entire premise of Reddit is that filter bubbles are the solution. You get to create bubbles for your own views called 'subreddits' where you can moderate out any wrong-think until the remaining subscribers reinforce the correct-think with their upvote/downvote mechanisms.
A system that operated under the assumption that "filter bubbles are bad" would not allow its members to upvote/downvote each others' content so simply.
you agree with me? great. wonderful debate thanks guys
The past few years make me think that without sufficient common ground, rational debate is impossible:
•Alice: "Rosemary's Baby is the best film ever." •Bob: "Devil woman! Satan is speaking through you. But you can't fool me!"
•Alice: "My father just died. Everyone, give your dad a hug. You'll miss him when he's gone." •Bob: "Cry me a river, loser! Cow farts. Cow farts. Hitler was right!"
•Alice: "I didn't vote for Trump, but I am glad he's talking to North Korea" •Bob: "Of course you are, Russian bot! I hope your handler is happy"
•Alice: "I used to be a cop, and this video is way over the line." •Bob: "Antifa scum! How much does Soros pay you to write this BLM propaganda?"
•Alice: "Just a reminder that you can get a free vaccination today, if you live in Charleston." •Bob: "Great, free autism everybody! Bet you'll trot out your MSM 'facts' now. Science is the new religion."
The web is so full it's bursting with "debates" like these. They are not worth having. They do not change anyone's mind. They cause people to dig in. They just further divide society.
If you try to do everything through the global site moderators you immediately get pulled into arguments like this: User 1: You need to ban User 2 because he is a racist. User 2: I only said that User 1's views are not supported by evidence. User 1: My views are well supported by my life experiences, and there is no good evidence because the government outlawed funding for research into them.
It's a no win situation, and neither side is going to change their mind and there's no clear winner. They're going to bicker and raise your noise floor constantly though. It's much better for site health if they can be isolated from one another, and better for your moderator's health if they do it automatically by themselves.
This is the messy messy world of real life.
YouTube and Wikipedia working together are good strides. LinkedIn offers suggestions on how to respond to people, then the new Gmail came out with that same feature, I hope Airbnb does too.
Maybe, when using curse words/slang AI could suggest something more intelligible?
If we connected our brains to an emotional evaluator, we could include all the necessary emoji automatically, so we don't accidentally forget that winky face when point out an irony or satire (satire; often mistaken for sarcasm due to different emotional attachments).
Trying to find common ground just eliminates useful debates because your solution ends up being "put the people who agree with each other together". Also, people having common ground doesn't mean they will behave rationally when they run into differences.
I would rather debate socialism with someone rational who believes in it rather than a strawman portrayed by someone else in the capitalist bucket I get thrown into.
Obviously this isn't absolute. The site has a common structure for debate, the default subreddits have common traits (and common troll/bad-faith factions), and the media perception is of a unified site.
But the functioning of /changemyview, /askhistorians, and other highly structured subs is vastly different from "the reddit experience", and lots of other subs with less structure still have mod-enforced debate boundaries. As an example - the sub for "late capitalism" memes bans defenses of capitalism or debates on the merits of socialism to create shared values for discussion, while linking to /debatecommunism to provide space for a different debate.
Honestly, this is my biggest frustration with talk about reddit as "an alt-right site" or predictions that it will die out from ideological conflict. It's not Facebook, where things pass arbitrary distances along a graph. It's not Tumblr, where the basic communication structure is "here, talk to people who hate you". It's a siloed system where a huge fraction of users never experience any of what's popularly described as 'Reddit'.
Tangential: I honestly don't understand why someone would willfully participate in such obvious propaganda (even if you 100% believed eliminating capitalism is the solution). It's willfully burying your head in the sand to pretend that your ideology that would replace the modern western world isn't open to criticism.
That's an impulse I can understand, but the exposure-to-propaganda part I can't get my head around as easily. Even political cartoons/memes that align with my positions mostly just feel slimy these days - like they're not about humor or solidarity, but pushing people to take the angriest, most simplistic takes possible on an issue. Most of /latestagecapitalism or /libertarianmeme or anything else is completely misleading no matter what politics you subscribe to.
The reason sites attract a lunatic fringe is in large part the same reason they attract anyone else; they're active and enjoyable to use. Even 4chan offsets /b/ and /r9k/ with a host of less famous boards where people have basically normal conversations you could see anywhere online.
I think you're dead on - userbases don't schism into more and less intense factions, they form around frameworks that match their interests. 9gag and Imgur are "here's some rapidly entertaining content", Tumblr is blogs with mutual audiences, Reddit offers a mix of hyper-curated content, 4chan is a place where things are just happening on a topic and you can jump right in if you can stand the pressure.
A bunch of subs related to QAnon were just banned, the most significant one being r/thegreatawakening.
A couple of past sweeping bans include:
- r/jailbait and some other subs with questionable sexualized content
- r/fatpeoplehate, which I think also came with a bunch of bans on other hate subreddits
I know somebody that is in the explicit business (as in this is their profession) of getting tech companies to aggressively add stronger moderation to their platforms. It's an objective with some admirable aims, but what I will never understand is how the reddit solution isn't already considered to be the perfect one. I literally read 0 The_Donald content, ever, and yet I see its existence referenced pretty frequently as "proof" of why reddit is actually run by Trump sympathizers. I am not exposed to it at all, I don't see what the issue is. Working exactly as intended.
The moderation culture varies so incredibly between subreddits, you really can find things that are perfectly suited for your tolerances. If you can't, then you can make a subreddit for the same type of content, where the distinguishing factor is that the culture of moderation is different from the one that didn't suit your taste.
I don't like Trump or his subreddit either, but I also literally never see it, and don't need a quasi-common community carrier like reddit to evict everything controversial. The idea that reddit is harboring fascists or that the admins or executives are fascist-sympathizers or even Trump supporters is pretty ridiculous.
Reddit is full of stuff like that ( see: https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/ ). If it were my company, I would have some system to vet subreddits before they went live. It would kill me to host a website full of toxic garbage.
I think Reddit is going to get more moderate over time, though. They are owned by a big mass media company after all (Advance Publications) and are advertiser driven in nature. I don't think many companies would want to advertise anywhere near a hate community -- most likely even r/ImGoingToHellForThis is too much. I'm sure Reddit also wants to avoid negative publicity, and hate communities and other toxic subreddits can generate oversized amounts of it (as happened during the 2015 "user revolt" where it seems like all you heard about Reddit in the news were communities like r/fatpeoplehate).
Currently Reddit tends to quarantine, delist, and de-advertise toxic communities that don't violate their rules. That might be enough -- the volume of news articles on toxic sub-reddits is nowhere near what they were during the 2015 "user revolt". But if it's not, I'm sure pressure will come to crack down further, as is happening on other big advertiser-driven social media platforms.
> toxic stuff is a relatively small percentage though
"[Reddit] is a pudding stuffed with apposite observations, many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain life for some. But it is not a tasty pie"
I would disagree with many of the characterizations of hate speech according to /r/AgainstHateSubreddits, as they seem to consider /r/The_Donald and similar conservative subreddits as hate speech which needs to be banned (when in reality the issue usually tends to be a few racist or sexist posts out of millions, which usually end up getting very few upvotes and/or get removed by the mods of the subreddit; right-wingers could easily play the same game pointing out a few non-representative extremist comments in left-wing subreddits which, and they often do, but it's just as absurd)
Not to mention that subreddits that do get posted there seem to get removed by reddit admins pretty quickly. Reddit is even removing conspiracy theory subreddits like the QAnon ones, for supposedly inciting violence, though that seems a bit dubious and has not been demonstrated by reddit staff at all (yet).
The pro-censorship side is definitely winning on reddit and has been winning for the past few years; I really don't understand some of the criticisms of reddit as some kind of alt-right safe haven. I'm pretty liberal and reddit is easily the most liberal site I use, perhaps next to HN (though I think reddit is probably more liberal than HN). Huffman and Ohanian, and the previous two CEOs (Wong and Pao) are all pretty outspoken liberals who don't like Trump. Huffman, the current CEO and reddit founder, even abused his admin power to troll Trump supporters on a number of occasions (not that I can blame his frustration, but I think that was extremely unprofessional of him). reddit is derided as essentially a hyperleftist safe space by most people who would consider themselves even a little to the right (not even remotely to the extent of "far-right" or "alt-right" beliefs), and I don't think that's an unreasonable criticism.
Some years back when /r/jailbait and /r/FatPeopleHate were explicitly allowed by staff for free speech reasons, your side definitely had a point, but the pendulum has swung quite a bit within the past few years, so I'm not sure where all the criticism is coming from. I don't think reddit could be anymore pro-censorship when it comes to subreddits than they are right now.
Vetting subreddits before they're created sounds very unsustainable and kind of defeats the point of reddit, in my opinion. I think the default position for a common carrier-type platform like reddit or Facebook or Twitter should be to allow everything, and only censor when there is no other option. Again, I think people sometimes forget reddit is not like some big bulletin board. The point of the site is to allow as much user autonomy as possible when creating, managing, and posting in their own communities.
Do you have any documented evidence of reddit admins acknowledging its existence and then doing nothing? Has it been posted in one of those /r/AgainstHateSubreddits things? I'm sure if they were made aware of it, they'd remove it.
But the thing about liberty is that its more focus arouns the government, not citizen to citizen so you'd be in your right to purge toxicity if you hosted.
All of the alt-right and other controversial users moved there. And with the recent banning of dozens of subreddits like greatawakening the trend will only continue.
Reddit still has the rampant porn and misoginism courtesy of incel, kia, mensrights type subs which will continue to dissuade women from being interested in the site but it's definitely becoming more mainstream with every coming day.
I fully understand some people need anonymity and pseudonimity. But the general case, very quickly goes to a descent to the bottom.
But I take your point. It is no guarantee of success, just to require people to be identified.
I haven't seen this at all. It oppresses ideas from surfacing that are currently seen as unpopular by whatever vitriolic group, which leads to a large misrepresentation in the public discourse because the only ones supporting it usually have "nothing to lose".
Identified use is great if you don't want any controversial discourse and just need a quick way to verify identity (reduce spam, coordinate local events, etc). Otherwise it's just a recipe for reflecting popular opinion given the online community's proclivity for reaching for pitchforks.
I think we often underestimate the need to have these spaces active and available just to leave room for such people.
If /b/ is where people post bizarre anonymous trash, and Facebook is where people have serious conversations about serious issues, what do the people who need anonymity do? Go on Facebook and tell their families "hey, you should go have some of this discussion in those weird anonymous forums you've heard are full of evil people, no reason, nothing to do with me having a trait you'd hate me for"?
I don't mean to be snarky, this is a genuinely hard problem. But "people who need anonymity" are by definition a group you can't wait to accommodate when they speak up and ask for it.
Facebook's real name policies regularly cause problems for everyone from American trans people to Bangladeshi atheists, and go far beyond that in silencing discussion on topics where a totally conventional opinion might offend an employer or family member. (Or perhaps Customs and Border Patrol, which can't prove how many Reddit accounts someone has but apparently challenges claims of not having a Facebook profile.)
I don't think anonymity has to be a descent to the bottom. Comparing different subreddits, or HN to 4chan, or any other pair of anonymous sites, demonstrates that. I do think anonymity and the need for moderation tend to trade against one another; anonymous fora without oversight quickly become toxic, or are simply eaten by spammers.
But I'm very concerned that real name policies look good because anonymity causes highly visible bad behavior, while identity silently pushes vulnerable people out of the discussion.