Study finds Reddit’s ban of its most toxic subreddits worked (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Study finds Reddit’s ban of its most toxic subreddits worked (2017)

techcrunch.com

224 pointsrbanffy389 comments

It "worked" only if the definition is "it removed it from Reddit".

As the article mentions, these people did not just disappear or change their mind. They just moved to more obscure places, where they can continue and be evem more motivated, because now they have been censored.

And you might still consider this to be a satisfiable definition for "it worked". Out of sight, out of mind.

Except that, these people are now relegated to an echo chamber far from public discourse where they will only reinforce their views without challenge. An echo chamber that is now suddenly more appealing, because it's forbidden.

Recently, in an episode of the Joe Rogan Podcast with Tim Pool, Jack Dorsey and Vijaya Gadde, Jack admitted that a woman that was part of the Westboro Baptist Church changed her mind only becasue she was allowed to be on Twitter and be exposed to other points of view.

So, from the point of society, I don't think it ever works to pushi extremists to the underground. Sure, Reddit does not have any obligation to give them a place to gather. But still, maybe it should anyway?

EDIT: Reading other comments here, I also got reminded of the fact that, before Hitler got to power, Germany had hate speech laws that explecitly forbid nazi propaganda. Many were sent to jail for that, which only contributed to their determination and their spreading.

So, if you are concerned that being allowed in the public allows them to spread their views, do not be so sure that pushing them away is going to stop them. You might just do them a favor.

> It "worked" only if the definition is "it removed it from Reddit". As the article mentions, these people did not just disappear or change their mind. They just moved to more obscure places, where they can continue and be evem more motivated, because now they have been censored.

What about all of the new people who would have more easily stumbled into those cesspools, but now have to take quite a bit more effort, and go out of their way, to go to other sites?

Sunlight isn't always the best disinfectant. Sometimes the disease requires treating things at a lower level, stopping the roots of the trauma, and not only treating the symptoms. De-platforming is an important and necessary component of fighting hate online.

I would like to see evidence that “deplatforming” actually reduces hate globally instead of simply moving it elsewhere, because I haven’t seen any, and until then this is simply an unfounded belief (i.e., “bullshit”)

The thing is, Reddit isn't responsible for, and couldn't possibly begin be responsible for, hate in the whole world. They banned it on their site, and it cleaned up their corner of the world, and they're happy that the place they have control over has less hate. That's not bullshit.

Bullshit is saying "well, we can't possibly get rid of it, so may as well let it stay where ever it shows up."

Except that you can get rid of it. I’ve rationally argued against racism with some success. (And often while getting comments autoblocked for hate speech. Can’t clean up manure without getting your hands a little dirty, unfortunately.)

“Bullshit” is taking the easy way out by mass-automatic-deplatforming instead of addressing the bad thought head-on.

That's a much better argument than I thought you were making, so my apologies for misunderstanding.

I still disagree though - I think Reddit probably agreed with you for most of its existence, but evidence indicated that rationality and clear arguments weren't winning, and the virality of these ideas was too potent to be overcome by a few people who were willing to wade into the cesspool. So they drained the cesspool.

I agree with you that, if we could be sure that there would always be enough people to argue against racists, and do so calmly and rationally, then we would be better off not censoring racism, and instead letting the debate play out. But I don't think we live in that world.

You've laid the groundwork for one part of what would be a valuable media psychology study.

You've identified an example where being part of the open conversation led to a woman leaving a hate-driven community.

Other comments point to a scenario where it could be harder for people to find these communities online, as they would have to have significant motivation to find them. I've seen "playbooks" for white nationalist groups where they describe a slow ramping up of ideology that gradually indoctrinates people outside the overton window.

The question is, is the outcome more or less hate crimes if this type of hate speech is deplatformed?

You point to examples in Germany where the effect of deplatforming was negative.

Current forms of media, attention and culture are significantly different.

I'm not sure how to go about this research when each platform simply aims to maintain their own private, profit driven goals?

You're assuming that the basis for their hate is rationality. If they were rational people, they wouldn't be racists/fascists/hate groups/etc. Assuming you're correct that having "some success" removed people from such a path, it's still just drops in a bucket. Recycling the contents of a dumpster won't stop climate change.

>with some success

How do you measure it?

The best way to get rid of bad ideas is to not give a megaphone to the people who want to spread them.

The fundamental fallacy you're making is that you're conflating the act of judgement with the act of sentencing. What a fine world it would be if your justice system were forbidden to sentence people under the expectation that the purpose of a trial were simply to convince the accused to never do it again.

It is irrational to declare that some behavior is 'bad', yet forbid anyone from suffering meaningful consequence for engaging in it.

Bullshit is saying "We stand for free speech" and then later saying "the best way to deal with toxic and hateful viewpoints is to censor and hide them."

Belief in free speech as a principle assumes that good and right arguments will win out every day in an open public forum.

It probably isn't obvious from my posts, so I'll put it here explicitly: I'm not pro-censorship. I think ideas should be out there. My ideal world is one where there are the "big" sites with millions of DAU generally keep racist content (or at least the really nasty stuff) off their platform, but there are plenty of little sites that "keep the dream alive" so to speak.

A lot of people aren't going to be willing or able to actually engage with the real logic of an anti-racist argument. Instead, people use heuristics for this sort of work. In my ideal world, the question of "was this on a big site? or some little blog and/or known racist publication?" would serve as a useful heuristic re: what arguments to bother with. This is how newspapers generally settled out. Is it in the paper? If yes, then there are at least some standards. If no, e.g. if it's some vanity publication, then squint a little harder.

These sorts of things have happened every time we've had a big shift in information distribution technology. There's an explosion of ideas with no real markers to differentiate them, and mass chaos for a while as people sort it out. Then eventually people identify the signs of trustworthy info distributors, and it settles back down. If a platform allows racists to flourish, they're not going to remain a place that people can trust. I would like to see Reddit remain a place that has some amount of trust, so I'm happy they banned the really nasty racists.

That assumption is false. Things like racism aren't motivated by rational arguments, so they cannot be cured through a rational tool, like free speech.

Racism stems from fear, hate, and deeply embedded cultural tools. You can't "cure" racism through argumentation. Maybe, maybe, you can make people less racist in person -- but on an anonymous forum like Reddit, not a chance.

>Belief in free speech as a principle assumes that good and right arguments will win out every day in an open public forum.

This is demonstrably not the case. Just look at the chans.

> Belief in free speech as a principle assumes that good and right arguments will win out every day in an open public forum

That may have been correct 50 years ago, but technological changes since then call it into question.

It used to take a fair bit of effort on the part of information purveyors to get their information out to a wide audience. Generally you couldn't just come up with a bad or wrong argument and get it rapidly spread far and wide.

On the receiving end, it took a fair bit of time or effort to access information. We might regularly watch a scheduled TV news broadcast, read a daily newspaper, maybe also read a weekly news magazine to get a broader or deeper perspective, and also maybe read more specialized magazines for news and information on more specialized topics we were interested in. If we needed to go beyond that on a particular topic, we'd have to go to libraries or bookstores.

This combination of bottlenecks on both the production and consumption end meant that generally by the time bad and wrong arguments could start to get traction past a fringe audience there would have been time to develop good and right arguments to counter them, and that people would see those good and right arguments.

Nowadays, the barriers to widespread dissemination of the bad and wrong arguments are way lower. On the receiving end, instead of getting our information by setting aside time each day to read/watch a small number of high quality, consistent sources, many people get their news as a side effect of social activity. It is much less likely now that when they get a link to that bad and wrong stuff that they will also get a link to the good and right refutation. And remember, because the dissemination barriers are much lower now, they are getting the bad and wrong stuff on multiple topics, so even if someone does send them a refutation on one they might be too busy looking at the sensational bad and wrong stuff from another topic to go back and read the refutation of yesterday's stuff.

I think that most people recognize that it is important to be well informed. 50 years ago it took some work to be well informed, so we had to put some thought and effort into becoming so. Now, it is easy to think that you are getting well informed as a side effect of your other activities.

We weren't smarter back then, or less gullible, but there simply was much less of a grey area between uninformed and informed. Now there is a big grey area and it is easy to end up in it. The "let the good and right win out in open public forums" only works if the people in that forum who think they are informed actually are. If they are in that grey area, all bets are off.

The situation 50 years ago did have some problems, mainly that sometimes a thing that is actually good and right appears initially to be bad and wrong, and those barriers that helped keep bad and wrong things from spreading would also slow down those "really good and right but looks bad and wrong" things, too, so it took longer sometimes to adopt new good things.

We've removed that friction...but we've removed too much of it. You need some friction to slow down a bit so that people have time to evaluate and react.

So belief in free speech would appear, by that definition, to have been proven wrong.

Have yet to find a single defense for free speech that wasn't a 'slippery slope' fallacy at it's core.

Like removing homeless people from your neighborhood by moving them to another?

I would like to see evidence that “deplatforming” doesn't actually reduce hate globally instead of simply moving it elsewhere, because I haven’t seen any, and until then this is simply an unfounded belief (i.e., “bullshit”)

While it's easy to be a critic and call someone else's view bullshit because you haven't seen evidence, it's not really adding anything to the discussion, it's just being needlessly inflammatory. You could accomplish the same thing by saying something as simple as "The evidence shows it worked for Reddit in isolation, but whether it works globally is unclear. Has anyone seen evidence that it does or doesn't? My gut says it doesn't."

Now when someone goes to analyze and respond they're not starting to argue with someone who dismissed something they may not be familiar with as bullshit right out the gate. It's better to keep an open mind to either possibility under a lack of evidence.

And to your point, it's a question where the data, such as it may be, is going to be complicated, and hard to harness. And you can phrase a question about that lack of data in such a manner that it puts the burden of proof on whoever you want it to be on.

This isn't a quantitative opinion, but here's how I think about it. Generally hate springs from some kind of problem or ideological bent in a person's life, but those problems and bents are initially undirected and latent. Eventually, someone comes up with a story that speaks to these impulses and describes why a particular group is the cause of their ills, despite ahistoricism or any kind of grounded logical argument (some groups can be actual problems such as slave masters or a literal invading army).

The inchoate pain these latent hate group members feel could be resolved in another way by accurately portraying the source of their problem, and giving them a realistic way of solving it. However, often in our society, we don't provide these things. Therefore, they remain susceptible.

When a hater that tells a powerful narrative gets together with others, this becomes dangerous. The group now validates their beliefs and it becomes self-reinforcing and actionable.

Deplatforming prevents hate groups from getting new recruits by making these stories and groups harder to access. It also is a message to the more marginal members that what they are doing is shunned and they should think hard about what they are doing. Essentially, the idea is prevent these small scale problems from turning into a social movement that would be highly destructive.

Is it a bandaid? Yes. We have to work much harder on our social and economic problems to make sure everyone is included in society and can live a decent life. That would remove much of the impetus for joining hate groups.

You’re making a strawman argument. There’s no question that it’s made Reddit a better place - marginalizing hate communities is something most people would agree is a good thing. There’s a reason there’s no ISIS subreddit, as an example. Giving equal billing to hate communities is normalizing them.

There is no ISIS subreddit because ISIS has now moved its threatening planning underground into encrypted channels where the good people at the NSA can no longer quietly observe and monitor from afar.

Arguments about whether deplatforming has merit should be automatically deplatformed via machine-learning in order to teach everyone a valuable lesson in civics. At least, if I were to create a Hacker News or a Reddit or a Facebook or a Twitter, that would be one of the first things I would build.

The majority of online hate speech (of any variety) is driven by groupthink. If you make it harder to find the hate groups, you de facto reduce the groupthink.

So you would prefer edgy platforms to move from open cleartext forums where they can be argued against and monitored, to private encrypted forums only populated by the choir, as it were?

This will not end well.

The burden of proof is to show that it IS as bad or worse after deplatforming, given the observation that it reduces the problem locally and makes it harder for new people to discover and convert into those communities.

Racist online communities aren't difficult to find. The problems brew on the fringes first. Regardless of how they might see it, I think the close proximity to the rest of the public erodes it's power.

I don't necessary disagree with you, and generally lean towards the 'marketplace of ideas' / free speech side of things. But a few thoughts that make me hesitate:

1. not deplatforming is based on a belief ("sunlight is the best desinfectant, etc.) that, as far as I can tell, isn't supported by much evidence either, at least as far as it's larger-scale effects.

2. it's possible, for example, that having these ideas out in the open and easily accessible actually increases the effect of them radicalising/convincing people who previously didn't have much of an opinion on or care about these issues. This might outweigh the effect of those already radical being exposed to alternative ideas.

3. building on this, I find that generally the 'better' and less hateful ideas are more nuanced and complex, and thus much harder to convey. Especially in online environments like reddit/twitter/etc.

4. there's the 'bullshit asymmetry principle'. it's much easier to produce bullshit arguments for bad ideas than it is to counter them. it also strikes me as much easier to get ensnared by hateful and/or bad ideas than it is to 'escape' them. A bit like how cults work.

5. access to these ideas via Reddit and the like removes one rather important element: collective shaming and having to accept the consequences of particular ideas. While in theory this is a good thing, in practice it can easily lead people down dark paths in isolation.

Having grown up deeply religious, and having spent a lot of time in all sort of fringe communities, I suspect that the net effect of not deplatforming is negative. Ideas are perhaps kind of like viruses. With the internet and places like Reddit, they can propagate freely without the mediating effects of interpersonal contact and various degrees of ostracism or other consequences. They also have a reach that they never had before.

Despite all that, I'm not arguing that we should do something about it. I don't know, and still lean towards accepting this new reality with all its consequences, or at least making sure we have a better understanding before we 'curb' things. But I'm much less optimistic about this new, internet-enabled state of things than I used to be.

Apologies for all this being a bit of a ramble.

The argument before the deplatforming was that those users would just recreate accounts & post on other, less well known, subreddits.

Could you think of a reasonably achivable study that would be able to falsify your belief that deplatforming doesn't reduce global hate?

Content moderation is pretty standard practice and reducing the amount of exposure highly toxic trolls and extremists are able to get isn't super controversial as to it's effectiveness.

Do you think having a president that has lent support to racism and white supremacy has changed the amount of racism or just revealed it?

Citation?

Echo chambers like these incubate hatefulness, provide positive feedback to individuals who embrace the hate at the core of these subreddits, and set up strawman representations of "enemy groups" to immunize members against rational discussion. I used to identify as an "anarcho capitalist" and it was largely because I discovered r/Anarcho_Capitalism. People praised me for arguing against left anarchism, socialism, communism, or anything besides poverty-is-a-moral-failing style capitalism. Eventually, the community embraced overt racism and I tried to find another community to replace r/Anarcho_Capitalism, but I could not find one. About 3 years after leaving that echo chamber, I went back and read through my comments in that sub and I was mortified by the twisted logic I used to justify starving the impoverished of government benefits and services.

My story is anecdotal, but I can't believe that it's a rare occurrence, because that's basically the mechanism that underpins all fringe organizations based on a shared false worldview. You need people to constantly validate and reinforce that false worldview, or reality will smash that worldview. Barring a subreddit may push a fraction of the active subredditors to another platform if one exists, but the marginally attached subredditors will just fail to follow and the hold that echo chamber had will fade as the echos grow fade to silence, and they won't catch anywhere near as many new people.

I'd imagine America's forced reeducation camps in Germany after WW2 would count as deplatforming nazis

For a steady state analysis such first order black and white approach may hold. The metaphor is brilliant at that.

But punishment is a multifaceted thing. It serves for protection, but also virtue signaling and creating incentive. There's eye for an eye, too, the taliation principle, and that's what the grand parent comment lamments, I guess.

There are different theories of punishment. Satisfaction from reciprocating pain shouldn't be the goal, at any rate. Getting nevertheless to letting somebody have a taste of their own medicine as a way of irony, is much more difficult, but much more effective than selectively accepting the legitimacy of the method and forcing the taste.

I feel like you're disregarding the concept of the "marketplace of ideas". Pretty much the entire corpus of post-enlightenment thought rests on the (IMO well-founded) belief that good ideas will naturally win over bad ideas when presented on equal footing.

Someone from 1500 would be very much concerned about censoring "heresies", because they'd believe that people are easily swayed and manipulated by evil. I think we know that dumb ideas, are just that, dumb. There's a reason why these types of extreme ideologies, are just that, fringe beliefs. Because the vast majority of people recognize that them for the idiocy that they are.

If we can tradeoff exposing normal people to extreme ideas, and extremists to mainstream thought, that's a great tradeoff. Many, many more of the latter will be convinced than the former.

I can produce hundreds of posts from a chosen narrative and filtered or manufactured truths before you can construct a well sourced and thought out counter argument. Good ideas don't naturally win, for the simple reason that the energy cost is asymmetrical, and people's rationality is dependant on access to facts, which further adds energy cost to the good idea side. Bad ideas only need to spread, not worry about facts or reasoning.

I'm not convinced that "good ideas will naturally win over bad ideas" applies to twelve year old children. My assumption is that a sizable contingent of tweens explains the tone of many of the internet's worst places.

> I feel like you're disregarding the concept of the "marketplace of ideas".

I’m not disregarding it at all. I’m directly confronting it, and calling it both naïve and insufficient as a strategy for improving society.

Bad actors have weaponized our elevation of “the marketplace of ideas” to an ends rather than a means, and so it’s both necessary and appropriate to recontextualize it, and where it makes sense to call forth.

Googling "8chan" is not a high bar to entry. Don't even get started on the information that is shared through private discords and other smaller private communities. It isn't hard to find the community for you in the age of the internet.

> the disease requires treating them things at a lower level

I feel that the anti-vaccine movement had such a large resurgence because they had very public platforms. So, yeah, I agree with you.

Or they had very large plattforms, because it had a great resurgence? Both is true, if there's a feedback loop. GP notes that there are root causes that one should care about in favour of those already aching.

So you are suggesting any discussion about the merits of vaccination should be forcefully stifled. That's a pretty low bar and opens up the shaping of public discourse on countless topics because they are "dangerous".

If the anti vaxx bullshit were LITERALLY NOT ALLOWED, i for one would be SO MUCH MORE INTERESTED IN IT and about 200000x more likely to become a crazy anti vaxxer.

Banning “fat people hate” makes hating fat people seem totally radical, fringe, and thus badass.

"Sunlight is the best disinfectant"

Unless, of, course, the disease is cancer.

The issue isn't where radicalised people go. It's how people get radicalised in the first place.

Both Reddit and YouTube are general purpose sites. Very, very few people go on there to discuss the e.g. racist beliefs they already have. But the algorithms on these sites ends up exposing people to extreme views - there are many, many examples out there of people watching an innocuous video on YouTube only to immediately suggested a 9/11 conspiracy video or a barely concealed white supremacist tirade.

If that content were removed from YouTube and Reddit people wouldn't be going underground for it, because they wouldn't be looking for it.

(and as a more general thought, invoking Nazis here isn't all that useful. Just because X had Y effect once in history doesn't mean it will every time. Germany has outlawed Nazis since the end of WW2 and guess what... they haven't taken over again.)

> Germany has outlawed Nazis since the end of WW2 and guess what... they haven't taken over again

Counter to that, Italy has a provision in its Constitution that forbids the reconstitution of the fascist party and now we have at least two that declare themselves as such (and have a few seats in the parliament), and one that, despite not being explicitly fascist, has more or less similar ideals and methods, has the relative majority of consensus in the country and is governing right now.

EDIT: did I write something false, inflammatory or off topic?

so, when you claim to deplatform something, then let let them on anyways, you're not doing well?

is that a counter point, or just an example of Italy's government being impotent? if it were china, the members of those parties would all be dead already

Right. My point was that the OP implied a correlation between censorship and the rise of politics bring censored, my answer was that there isn't really any correlation, there are plenty of examples that go both ways.

I looked at youtube recently on a clean browser and almost all of the content suggested was far right - I don't mean conservatives I mean ultra's

>Germany has outlawed Nazis since the end of WW2 and guess what... they haven't taken over again.

Nor have they taken over in any other country, regardless of being banned. Because their ideology has already been exposed for the bullshit it is. The ban did nothing.

>It "worked" only if the definition is "it removed it from Reddit".

There are plenty of people who thought that it wouldn't work to that extent, either. They claimed that allowing a subreddit for toxic topic X at least had the benefit of segregating proponents of X; and that if such subreddits were banned their inhabitants would infect the rest of Reddit. But that didn't happen.

I remember when posts from r/FatPeopleHate would regularly make the front page. Then FPH was banned, and you know what, we didn't see it metastasize elsewhere, we just saw many fewer FPH-style posts, which I'd say is a good thing.

>Then FPH was banned, and you know what, we didn't see it metastasize elsewhere, we just saw many fewer FPH-style posts, which I'd say is a good thing.

But what we DID see, for a while at least, was a lot of people sympathetic to that subreddit arguing in any way they could think of that the ban was either inconsistent, not needed, unfair or wouldn't work. But what do you know, by and large that content kind of just went away.

I'd argue that FPH was by and large a reaction to that whole "Fat Acceptance" fad that also happened to fade away for the most part. Everytime a member of that "movement" got a lot of attention you would see a lot more FPH related posts, likely from people venting their disapproval.

So it wasn't necessarily the ban that got rid of FPH but rather the "Fat Acceptance Movement" losing steam.

FPH is gone because it was banned, and it was banned at a time when it was very active, provoked a massive backlash in the immediate term, and the ban appears in the long run to have had the effect of stopping the activity.

I guess your argument for the decline in activity not coming from the ban, but scaling up and down in relation with the prominence of fat acceptance, would have to be that the ban coincided with fat acceptance losing steam around the same time, which I don't think to be the case. (It's also a way of talking that seems to equivocate on whether the behavior was acceptable, since it can be explained as a response to something else, and I think its unacceptability is important enough that it needs to remain clear in any conversation about it.)

I don't have an obvious way of measuring the relationship one way or other. But the face value version of events, which is just that the ban worked, full stop, requires fewer coincidences.

Well, FPH-style posts were banned across-the-board because they were held to be leaks of privacy-sensitive material, and harrassment. But somehow, /r/fatpeoplestories suddenly got a lot more popular. Also somehow, /r/peopleofwalmart is still up...

(inb4: "found the Walmart shopper"!)

While it didn't happen for the topic of FPH, my subjective experience is that it _did_ happen for racism. I've mostly been subscribed to smaller subreddits for about 5 years, and while the likes of r/European and r/coontown were at their peak, there wasn't the constant stream of insinuations about immigrants or outright racism at the low (and sometimes not so low) end in subreddits like r/Ireland or r/Europe there is now.

> And you might still consider this to be a satisfiable definition for "it worked". Out of sight, out of mind.

I think expecting the behavior to disappear is an unrealistic goal. Marginalizing it certainly makes it less appealing because it's clear it's not widely socially acceptable.

> Except that, these people are now relegated to an echo chamber far from public discourse where they will only reinforce their views without challenge. An echo chamber that is now suddenly more appealing, because it's forbidden.

Again, this has always existed in society and always will. The less chance of people being exposed to it via a big public outlet, the less chance new people will be intrigued.

The aim isn't to end extremism, it's to make it clear it's not acceptable via the platform.

> Marginalizing it certainly makes it less appealing because it's clear it's not widely socially acceptable.

So, how did the 18th Amendment in the United States, i.e. Prohibition, work out? Surely, the broad public support and commitment to marginalizing alcohol, enough to get a constitutional amendment passed (no small feat), has been successful in making the US a booze-free country today? No?

Marginalization only works if it's something people aren't deeply committed to and tribalism, the root of many of these toxic behaviors, is far too deeply ingrained in human nature for marginalization to work.

Alcohol is a physically addictive product that was already engrained in acceptable culture. This isn't really a fair comparison.

Even so, cigarette smoking was similarly marginalized (though not outlawed, making it a better analog) to great effect.

The influence works in both directions. If "bad people" are able to publish content that is easy to find on a platform used by millions, it's likely to be seen by people who would never have been exposed to or influenced by it otherwise. Personally, I'd be happy if easily-influenced people weren't exposed daily to Islamist propaganda and pedophillic imagery. If the price of that is those communities going underground, then good. It's for the police and security services to deal with them, not casual web users.

The danger here is this distinction between the wise protectors of "easily influenced people" and the dumb asses that need protection. Who decides who is who? I do not think this is always clear cut. People who seek the role of censor are almost always the wrong people to be entrusted with that power. And historically we have many examples of ideas that were thought to be ridiculous, dangerous, etc, that turned to be valuable, even accepted. Maybe its best to leave the nastiness in the sun, just mark it as such.

Nothing is ever clear cut, but a lack of perfect knowledge and the possibility of unintended consequences are poor reasons to refrain from acting when the consequences of not acting are dire.

On the contrary, those are perfectly good reasons to refrain from acting.

> Nothing is ever clear cut, but a lack of perfect knowledge and the possibility of unintended consequences are poor reasons to refrain from acting when the consequences of not acting are dire.

Sounds like a thinly veiled version of the Politician's Syllogism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism

Subreddits are not easy to find. WTF?

>Except that, these people are now relegated to an echo chamber far from public discourse where they will only reinforce their views without challenge.

Reddit already provided these groups with an echo chamber that was public facing, and a platform that exposed them to other points of view. That didn't do anything though, people largely don't have their views changed just because they are around others with different view points.

>An echo chamber that is now suddenly more appealing, because it's forbidden.

If it's out of the public eye, people are less likely to know it exists right? Yes maybe people who do hear about such "secret places of discussion" are likely to be drawn to them, but the number of newcomers who are even exposed to such groups are significantly cut down by simply not being accessible.

I think having extremists in the open improves their recruitment rates and leads to greater number of extremists. Ideas, good and bad, need a medium to spread.

It's not the idea that is dangerous. I can hold multiple incongruent ideas in mind to compare them. It's the experience that get's me at an emotional level, that may change my opinion. Well, ideas may inform the intdrpretation of an experience, and holding an incongruent set of ideas, the reaction may be arbitrary. Arguably if one idea can take hold, then because the tendency was already there, latently.

An extremist is, by definition, someone going to extreme ends to reach a goal. I don't think that holding an extremist's opinion is directly extreme. Having extremist ideals just makes for a latent extremist. That's radical, not extremist. That's still tendentially bad, anyhow. But so is ignorance, and so someone knowing only one side of an argument is merely ignorant, not necessarily latently radical. Ignorance doesn't need a medium to spread. Quite the opposite, it needs barriers. YMMV though, as bias is such an important topic in learning. It might count as barrier as well, if figuratively speaking.

Unless you think people should be punished for thought crimes, that seems like exactly the right kind of "it worked" to me. You don't want to give these toxic communities a broad recruitment platform and you don't want them to destroy your forum culture. That's your right as the provider of a privately owned social network. Of course, they can go elsewhere. They can make their own website and host it in another country, if they really want to.

These kind of bans are not about doing favors or not, they are about maintaining a site that you can live with as a company or private forum owner. It has been like that online on every public forum since the dialup BBS system days.

If on the other they plan to commit crimes, then that's a matter for police and the public prosecutor's office, not for private companies, no matter where those groups go or meet.

How is that any different than the stricter commenting culture here on HN? Haven’t we pushed a lot of discussion to Reddit?

Yes, that’s a good thing IMHO.

By pushing it to the underground you by definition make it harder to access, and as you've said it becomes more extreme and thus less appealing - even repellant - to a mainstream audience who stumbles across it.

This is what we want.

So instead of creating a bias with counter arguments at the same level, you make an abstract argument biasing the bias at a lower (or higher?) level, for lack of a better word. That's kind of the irony I was looking for in my previous comments, though not quite as I had put it. Very well.

I feel like these types of "free speech solves hate" arguments should be automatically rejected until the author gives evidence that rational argumentation works. I see this type of comment all the time, but there's never any evidence except for historical examples that aren't directly relevant. It's quite tiresome and inflammatory.

There's proof that Reddit is now a happier place. The commenter must prove, using evidence not fear mongering, that the negative effects of deplatforming outweigh the positives.

I think deplatforming is especially good on Reddit. Take subreddits like The_Donald. People who go there are constantly barged with blatantly false information. If The_Donald was banned they would be forced to integrate with the rest of Reddit (exposing them to more true information) OR a smaller portion of them would go to voat, but that smaller portion couldn't be saved anyway.

What I don't get is why r/politics is not banned yet. To call it "toxic" would be severe understatement.

This "cult like" division of people and ideas is rife throughout reddit. Subreddits where reasonable objections get downvoted out of sight and preaching to the choir gets upvoted to the top reinforcing those beliefs.

It ruins the whole point of reddit. The mods are very biased on some subreddits that aren't even based on extreme ideas and they have so many unnecessary rules they can lock any thread they want for any reason just because they don't like it.

Reddit has become a cesspool for discourse. There are a couple of good subreddits but that's because they are based on discussion (e.g /r/casualconversation)not the subject of discussion.

Many subreddit don't want reasonable discourse. They want a safe space full of "yes men" that fall in line with and reinforce their beliefs.

You seem to be overlooking at least two key findings.

When the users moved to other Reddit groups, they did NOT exhibit the same level of hateful behavior. some of this was due to better moderation. This contradicts your view that they simply go away to deeper holes away from moderating influences, and supports your point that moderating influences do provide positive influence.

The other key finding is that "bigotry is easy and those who cherish it are lazy". So, merely removing the cesspool removes a place for them to swim, and they often simply don't bother to go find or create another cesspool. So, overall activity is reduced.

> When the users moved to other Reddit groups, they did NOT exhibit the same level of hateful behavior.

As the article suggests: it's likely they found an off-reddit outlet for the stuff they no longer were able to do on reddit and continued to use reddit for their other interests (well, they left reddit at higher rates, too). That is, if you want to make sure that Twitter's hate speech rules work and make "the world a better place", you also need to look at gab.ai & co at the same time to see whether and how much of the hate speech "moved" and how much simply stopped.

This study confirms that pushing criminals out of one neighborhood "works" - for that one neighborhood. Reddit is such a neighborhood, Twitter is another.

Actually, it specifically neither confirmed nor contradicted that assertion, as it was out of scope to track to other venues, or address the larger problem of the entire society.

But it DID show that providing cesspools does increase the behavior of swimming in cesspools, AND show that moderation has an effect.

Providing mainstream venues for anti-social behavior increases that behavior and harms society.

Sure, it may still exist at the fringes, but the further it is pushed off into the fringes, the greater the effort needs to be made to engage in the behavior. The dedicated haters will still make the effort, but the vast majority of lazy bigots will just drift along elsewhere, without enhancing & aggravating their bigotry.

Similar to smoking in the US, it hasn't been banned, just strongly discouraged in public, and it is now a fringe behavior.

> Actually, it specifically neither confirmed nor contradicted that assertion, as it was out of scope to track to other venues, or address the larger problem of the entire society.

Yes, that's about the study. The article does suggest it:

Of course, it’s not so simple as all that. Naturally, many of the users who previously spewed racial slurs at CT just moved over to Gab or Voat, where their behavior is proudly fostered.

> The dedicated haters will still make the effort, but the vast majority of lazy bigots will just drift along elsewhere, without enhancing & aggravating their bigotry.

Again, that's what needs to be proven. All we know is that they didn't see it on reddit at the same rate, not that it happened less or that fewer new people engaged in hate speech, or that those engaging in it stopped.

Smoking is a great example because NOW ITS A SEXUAL FETISH TOO

When you make something fringe you invite people to fetishize it. All you do is up the ante. Sure, some normies will stop being racists because there’s no longer a place to be racist. But other guys will fetishize racism and shoot up synagogues.

Is the benefit of subtracting normies from racist movements worth the cost of creating people who fetishize racism??????? HARD FUCKING QUESTION IMO!

I think we’d be better off with a million people who are “kinda anti Semitic but not anti Semitic enough to write books about it” than one Henry Ford.

I think pervasive racism does more damage than mass shooters, in total. Push it to the fringes.

and sure, it is so rare that it's virtually unheard of; e.g., I'd never heard about smoking being fetishized in the context of it being discouraged (& while I'm not exactly Mr. Club Scene, I do work to keep aware of trends).

It isn't only subtracting the normies from the racist movement, it is also preventing the medium-core bigots from 'practicing', honing, and exaggerating their racism.

If we are to attribute a cause to the rash of current racist murders lately, they are clearly NOT from Reddit recently banning two subs, but far more likely from the entire environment being pushed towards more open racism & bigotry from the chair of the POTUS, to a major Faux News source, to rampant online environments like 4Chan, Voat, etc. Far more likely that these enhanced cesspools and the more approving political environment are the cause than merely one source going offline (particularly since they started occurring before they went offline).

Some probably did. But I wager many didn’t bother and only partook in the bigotry as long as it was easy. In other words, they were ”casual” bigots. Enablers, not instigators. The social dynamics of bullying and related antisocial behavior are fairly well understood.

The study followed users internally as well and monitored their continued behaviour on Reddit. A significant number didn't simply leave, they remained in other subreddits and exercised much less of the objectionable behaviour, even if the new subreddit was comparable in viewpoint but stricter in moderation. Part of "it worked" includes the people actually improving their behaviour, rather than just finding a smaller echo chamber.

Indeed. Simply removing the medium does not fix the cause. Many of the problems in human society stem from people not being able to talk about those problems.

Most of the popular subreddits have become sterile echo chambers with homogenization of opinion. HN is just as vulnerable to that.

There are two issues that make "out of sight, out of mind" in this case not the absolute worst.

First, it makes it much harder for them to radicalize and recruit new people. There is a lot of circumstantial proof that mere exposure to fringe ideas can convert a lot of people, even folks we wouldn't necessarily consider "borderline". Look at YouTube's autoplay algorithm and various conspiracy theories like Flat Eartherism, or stories we've heard of Facebook moderators needing to get rotated out to avoid radicalization.

Second, in moving to less popular platforms, less dedicated, existing members are lost as they stay on the old platform for other content. Voat is a good example of how these alternative platforms aren't always self-sustainable. If more of the popular platforms took a hardline stance, it scatters the miscreants to the wind, where their numbers dwindle and they hopefully, eventually evaporate.

It's not a complete solution and requires too much cooperation between adversarial corporations, but it's a start.

Reddit's aim was not to change peoples' minds. They simply don't want to host those kinds of content on their platform and and they did that. Toxic content reduced and so it worked. Period.

On the other hand, having those communities on popular platforms makes them more easily accessible. As the market grows, it makes new audience susceptible to have similar view.

Having a separate subreddit whdre other views are not welcome, at the whim of the subreddit moderators is not exactly the open discourse that would be needed. The people weren't bannrd and if careful can still debate their opinion. Reddit just removed the explicit protection. And the pooling. The protection of the pool.

you’re posting in a heavily moderated forum. HN too works, because a heavy hand forces good behavior.

> I also got reminded of the fact that, before Hitler got to power, Germany had hate speech laws that explecitly forbid nazi propaganda.

That's actually the law today in Germany. The Weimar Republic itself focused its censorship on limiting the distribution on what today we'd consider middlebrow pop-fiction and pornography, but generally excluded matters of politics and religion. It did have laws against anti-semitic speech, but anti-semitism itself as already extremely widespread so it was like a fan blowing against a hurricane.

Is the parent actually being highly incorrect?

Anti-semitism was highly popular at those times (e.g. Poland, Russian Empire, US).

Nazi party were also popular in Britain (at that time) and other countries.

Why would Weimar Republic specifically outlaw their nazi propaganda?

Am I missing something, or is that specific paragraph related to only a short period of time?

>They just moved to more obscure places, where they can continue and be evem more motivated

Citation needed.

> where they can continue and be evem more motivated, because now they have been censored.

or demotivated, because they are fewer in number (most stayed on reddit) and have been censured

and the ones who stayed -- now their radicalizing pals are out-of-sight, out-of-mind

"It worked" likely refers to them being more profitable without having the undesirable communities on their platform

They aren't really echo chambers. I routinely harass these people for their racist views and they don't ban me. Their Hitler worshipping is really ludicrous. It's a lot of fun to flame someone on the Internet without worrying about getting banned for hurting people's feelings. I think the false belief that the mainstream has gotten everyone into is "racism=nationalism". The stupid people on the right bought into that and took the other side even though that's the narrative of their ideological enemies. I am trying to deprogram from the idea that nationalism and racism are synonymous.

Where the hell is this "hitler worshipping" going on in reddit?

I agree and I find it dismaying that so many of the users here are holding cowardice in confidence as a means to erode racism.

"As the article mentions, these people did not just disappear or change their mind. They just moved to more obscure places, where they can continue and be evem more motivated, because now they have been censored."

The irony of HN having this article on their front page while they engage in the same bullshit behavior is just delicious.

Maybe HN should learn from the site that's over 1,000x bigger than themselves.

Oh, wait, dang and stcb aren't that smart.

Collective response to those who claim that it pushed those users to other platforms:

Only marginally.

If you read the paper (http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf), you can see that ~20% of the users of the banned subreddits became inactive vs 10-15% in control communities. The difference for users that deleted their account is of the same magnitude.

The users that stayed had a dramatic drop in hate speech.

Also, people end up believing disinformation that is often repeated. Silencing those opinions probably has a net positive effect on society.

You seem to be making some assumptions: (1) Users that went inactive on Reddit went somewhere else, and (2) Users that didn't go inactive didn't go anywhere else. I don't think either of these assumptions are true.

The fact is, we don't have a way to track users between platforms.

You can't track them, but you can make educated guesses.

There's a finite amount of time in a day.

So for 1) they must have been doing something during that time they were off reddit. They could have picked up cooking or moved to a non-hating online platform. If so, that's a win anyway.

For 2), that's possible, they would have to do it by reducing another activity. Given that reddit is designed to eat all your free time, I find it unlikely.

> The users that stayed had a dramatic drop in hate speech.

Which might mean that they don't engage in hate speech as much, or that they do the hate speech thing on another platform and follow their normal hobbies on reddit.

Not really. Page 9 has a graph of the activity before/after the ban, and the drop in activity (in post/day) matches the number of accounts that became inactive.

If those users found other outlet for hating, they didn't do so by reducing their reddit activity.

Did those include the inactive account, or is it the rate of activity of those that showed signs of life?

RTFP?

I asked because I looked for that information and didn't find it by searching. As you had apparently looked into it more, I had hoped that you knew where that was stated. Sorry for asking for clarification.

Provided they didn't mention excluding users from the count I inferred that it was the average of the non-deleted accounts (scientific writing leans towards parsimony).

>The users that stayed had a dramatic drop in hate speech.

They could have a drop based on the belief that it is being punished. Is there a study on what impact this would have on their beliefs? Does it weaken them, or does it make them believe that others are scared of the truth and thus encourage their beliefs more?

Brain connections are like cowpaths the more they are traveled the deeper they become entrenched.

Having them practicing other thoughts will let their brain gradually collect the garbage (unused synapses go weaker and are ultimately pruned over time).

Some people may end up ruminating those thoughts anyway, but I'd expect them to be a minority (the propensity for long-term rumination is linked to mental issues that are somewhat prevalent, but not that much).

Removing the social validation will help most people withdraw from the problematic thoughts.

For a long time, I underestimated the power of the mods. Then, I saw how a few of them could turn the sentiment of a technical forum about a seemingly technical question upside down, simply by banning the right users and removing the right posts. Censorship works, regardless of whether it is used for good or for bad.

I agree, for me the big surprise was the impact of removing the "vice" subs, e.g. darknet market/some piracy-related ones. You'd think with the internet being the internet, those communities would just move elsewhere, and no doubt some members did, but for the most part the communities just died and the world moved on.

People frequently enter a forum/sub/thread/etc with a not-yet-completely formed opinion on an issue.

Sometimes to learn more, sometimes to further convince themselves, very rarely to change their mind.

When the right group of people are waiting to reply to everything with zealotry, it's easy to go from •leaning• toward a viewpoint to full on embracing it and becoming a zealot.

And let's face it, hate is the most effective weapon for this.

Censorship and Moderation are different things.

An emergent ethical concern keeps bugging me in these situations. Of course, private companies reserve the right to refuse business and services to whomever they want. In a healthy society this is no problem.

But if we slide towards a dystopian future where Big Tech is basically an oligarchy governing important chunks of society without due process and the democratic checks and balances we would expect from a governing body, things look pretty grim.

I have no solution to offer, unfortunately.

EDIT: Despite all the cynicism, I do think we are still on the healthy side of things :)

I'm not so worried about the free speech aspects of that...there's always somewhere to spew whatever opinion you have.

I do agree, though, that Google and others wield a lot of power by being able to permaban a whole account/person for an alleged incident on just one of their platforms. Where "banned on YouTube" means, for example, that your Android phone no longer works.

Yes, but "there's always somewhere" may stop being true if we enter that dystopia.

Competition for fringe discussion exists today so our society is healthy (thank goodness). If a true monopoly is allowed to form in these platforms, we will have a big problem. Thankfully we have anti-compete laws. Unfortunately it feels like we are flirting with monopolies when vertically integrated companies like Apple and Google have a very large market share (from Android to YouTube, as you mention).

My favourite Sci Fi that deals with that dystopian future is a little-known show called Continuum. The oligarchy begins when governments go bankrupt and get bailed out by corporations in exchange for political power in the form of a "corporate congress". Fantastic show. Still sticks with me.

> Yes, but "there's always somewhere" may stop being true if we enter that dystopia.

That's true. That "somewhere" might become TOR because everything else is well regulated. In the end, you can technically also always meet like minded people in your basement to do whatever the government doesn't want you to do in public, so there's always "somewhere" ;)

>Yes, but "there's always somewhere" may stop being true if we enter that dystopia.

We're already there and we didn't need to enter a dystopia. All big platforms (Google's YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, you name it) follow the same exact lines on politics and speech.

(btw, funny that the English UK dictionary from Chrome doesn't include the word dystopia ;P)

>I'm not so worried about the free speech aspects of that...there's always somewhere to spew whatever opinion you have.

You know, this is a really interesting observation. Oftentimes in these debates about moderation, people argue that you can't do it because these platforms are already de-facto public platforms. Meanwhile, in this thread's conversation, the main argument seems to be that pushing people off mainstream platforms won't work because they'll enjoy the exact same opportunities at another platform.

That doesn't imply a contradiction from any particular person, as long as they only embrace one argument or the other. But both have been used in defense of Not Moderating Trolls, and both can't be right.

My reasoning is that it's not really different from the past. Heavy corporate control of communications media isn't new, it predates the internet. Yet people still find ways to get their rants seen and heard, then..and now.

I concede that companies can make it harder. Hard to really stamp it out though.

And that's fine. I think I lean toward your reasoning, more or less. Though what I WANT to do is take concerns about consolidated media seriously while also undercutting the free-speech argument that seems backward-engineered specifically just to defend trolling.

If we can all agree (not that we should, but if we DID agree) that there are platforms that are de-facto public spaces, and we want to take away their ability to moderate the way they currently do, then let's work to make them actual public utilties/spaces/whatevers, so that the standards they are subjected to are formalized and not pushed and pulled by weird momentary energies of this or that internet controversy.

Or work to decentralize them, again, so that the issue of how moderation happens isn't just attached to this weirdly specific cultural moment where it's hard to figure out the sincerity of the motivations.

Or just reject the whole argument outright.

It's still the Internet. Anybody can run and host software. Anybody can post a link to that.

I agree tech's concentration of power in a few large companies is a big problem. I just don't think it's a significant concern for freedom of speech. Hopefully we'll return to enforcing pro-competition laws vigorously.

This is always my response when people say "the Internet is dying, woe to us, big tech is destroying the Internet". It doesn't matter if 90% of Internet users exclusively use Facebook, Facebook does not and can not stop you from creating your own website and distributing links the old fashioned way. There is absolutely nothing "dead" about the Internet of the 90s. It still exists and it's still possible to be a part of. The fact that Facebook and Google and etc built on top of that does not matter one bit.

If you create your own website are you going to get Facebook-level traffic? No, of course not. But you wouldn't in 1998 either because there just weren't that many people interested in visiting your website. Facebook didn't make them less interested, because they never had that interest to begin with.

If I run a health food store, I don't cry because an ice cream shop opened up across the street. I don't cry when I see how many people walk right past my door to get to the unhealthy treats. I know I'm in a niche market, and I know that ice cream will always be more popular than kale and wheatgrass. The people who go for ice cream aren't going to go for kale and wheatgrass anyway, so I'm not losing customers to the ice cream shop. The ice cream customers are not my customers.

What the ice cream shop did was put more people on the sidewalk. They didn't steal my customers, but if I have a really good value proposition I may be able to steal some of theirs. That unhealthy ice cream shop is a good thing for my business, even if it's a bad thing for overall community health.

I'd agree with this. As large companies get more powerful and their property becomes the equivalent of the public square, we seem to be ending up in a situation where rights de facto don't exist and everything's left at the whim of the public/stakeholders/owners.

Then again, I also worry that no one seems to want to make a neutral platform or service/piece of infrastructure any more, and everything seems to be designed as a pseudo platform/publisher instead.

Would we even create the telephone/email/postatal service infrastructure we use today if it didn't already exist? I suspect the answer is no. I suspect we'd end up with something like Slack or Discord or Facebook Messenger where the corporation can step in and ban people for wrongthink. No one wants to sell a dumb pipe or what not any more.

You see this right now, where Trump’s support in the ballot box is stronger than his support in polling which is stronger than his support in the media, because when a point of view becomes socially unacceptable, people only express it in private.

> Of course, private companies reserve the right to refuse business and services to whomever they want. In a healthy society this is no problem.

Did you notice that you just said that civil rights laws prohibiting racial and sexual discrimination are wrong and that the US is an unhealthy society because of them? Perhaps you do believe that, which is fine, but if you don't, then be careful making bold statements with a scope wider than what you're really thinking of. It sounds grand and important to make a general declaration of what's right and wrong, but the reason it sounds grand and important is because it carries so much meaning. If you don't really mean all of it, then it's more honest to stick to the specific concept you do want to say.

Reddit back in the day: bans /r/fatpeoplehate, /r/coontown, /r/jailbait, and other awful subreddits.

Reddit today: effectively bans (quarantines) /r/waterniggas simply because of the subreddit's title. It was quite literally a joke subreddit about being hydrated. Doesn't ban subreddits like /r/hapas.

Edit: The problem with reddit is that it's wildly inconsistent about banning subreddits. Insane subreddits can exist for years, but only will get banned once they start to become popular enough that they start to get noticed.

A fair amount amount of people went from reddit to voat because at the time voat was new, had signups open, and advertised itself on free speech. Note that I DO NOT support the likes of voat- I am describing the event that happened.

edit; changed substantial to fair amount

It was a disingenuous excuse for people to use a racial slur anytime someone mentioned the word “water” to the point where it appeared almost any time someone used the word in any context for any reason. It’s ridiculous how many people can’t control themselves when they think they have a thin excuse to cover their terrible behavior.

I'm not American but I've been told the word nigga is not the n word. Do I have a wrong impression about it?

I'm surprised a bit because the mainstream music is filled with the word nigga but also the n word. Isn't it workings against the idea of not using these words?

It's contextual. Many slurs have been reclaimed by the communities that they have been applied to.

E.g., as a mild example, terms like "nerd" and "geek" were pejoratives that were adopted and reworked. E.g., Geek Pride: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek_Pride_Day

As with most of these slurs, positive in-group use is ok, but negative out-group use is still generally seen as abusive. I might talk about my geeky ways or refer to my fellow geeks. But I'd still bristle at non-geeks using the term in its original pejorative sense.

The N word is of course much more extreme given America's ugly, unresolved history around race, but it's the same rough deal.

> The N word is of course much more extreme given America's ugly, unresolved history around race, but it's the same rough deal.

I think this is quite dubious. "Nerd" and "geek" or even "freak" were never pejoratives in the way that the other word was. You could sympathetically say of someone, even as an outsider "He's a bit of a nerd/geek". But it would make no sense for one who was sympathetic to say something like "he's a bit of a "-- well, you get the idea. (This is also why I don't even claim or pretend that I'll ever understand this whole "reclamation" deal. I do accept that free speech is a thing and that a social ingroup can do whatever they want amongst themselves, but I still find it somewhat in poor taste, and counterproductive to its goal.)

Nerd, geek, and freak are nowhere near as utterly vile as the n word. They are in completely different leagues.

The first step to understanding the reclamation is understanding just how offensive the n word was and is today. And the culture that surrounded it.

For non-Americans this topic is a difficult issue to get into because it involves unpacking and understanding so much history and culture.

> Nerd, geek, and freak are nowhere near as utterly vile as the n word. They are in completely different leagues.

Yes, which supports what I said, contra what GP said. You can't just take such a vile word with such vile connotations attached and "rework" it harmlessly like you could with "geek"-- that's just not how human psychology works, and an IAT or such would easily bear this out. You'd have to wait for the whole semantic field of the original word to become basically forgotten, then you could freely reclaim it.

(There is such a thing as dysphemism shift, but it tends to happen randomly or to be driven by language-internal forces. "Yankee" used to be a (mildly) derogatory term, but it became popular and neutral because there was no sympathetic term for "a U.S. person" in the lexicon - so "Yankee" moved into that space. But even this is a rare phenomenon; you can't just "make this happen".)

> "Nerd" and "geek" or even "freak" were never pejoratives in the way that the other word was.

No, it was the same way, not just the same degree. E.g., a geek was originally the sideshow circus freak who bit heads of chickens and ate live insects. That comparison was not favorable, especially in the 50s and 60s, when conformity was strongly enforced.

I'm guessing you are young enough that you have only experienced the rise of tech. For some flavor of the early days, try Levy's "Hackers": https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003PDMKIY

With an "a" the word can be a source of pride and community for black Americans, which is why it's used so commonly in black music. Non-black Americans are not commonly accepted into this community, so when non-black Americans say the word it's considered very rude.

With an "er" on the end, it's almost always a racist term.

Either way you spell it, it's pretty much only acceptable for black Americans to say it.

> Non-black Americans are not commonly accepted into this community, so when non-black Americans say the word it's considered very rude.

Isn't it somewhat racist?

I'm not entirely sure what "it" you're referring to.

If you're saying that it's racist because only one race is allowed to say the word:

No, I don't think so. It's not really a racial thing, it's a race and a culture. Not all black Americans say it, not all black Americans agree with it, and not all black Americans can get away with saying it. It's a kinship thing. My wife's female friends can say "you're such a bitch" but no one else would be able to say that to her. My coworkers and friends call me a nerd, but if someone I didn't know called me a nerd I would take it as an insult. They haven't earned that right. It's an offensive word unless there is a kinship developed where I know you're not saying it in a hurtful way.

If you're saying it's deemed racist for non-black Americans to say the word, then yes. Saying it with an "a" would be deemed less racist and more of a very rude faux pax by many. Others may see it as very racist. Also depends on the context it's being said in.

Specifically this part : "Non-black Americans are not commonly accepted into this community"

Also the fact people keep writing "the n word", "the word but with an a" feels like communicating with children. Just write nigger or nigga and be done. The sky won't fall. You can't analyze or criticize something you can't name. Especially when forbidden words change every 10 to 15 years because people will just start using other common ones as insults. A simple example would be how "despite", "kings" and "queens" were used to mock black people (not just north-american one) on r/cringeanarchy (which ban must be why this was reposted).

Both ____a and ____er are the N-word and should not be said by non-black people

> ...should not be said by non-black people

I disagree...people of all ethnicities can say any word they like whenever they want...there might be social consequences, but there isn't anything inherently wrong with saying a word

How do you distinguish between actions that have negative social consequences and actions that are inherently wrong?

Did anything happen with Voat, though? I hear frequently (just yesterday, in fact!) about terrorists radicalized on 8chan. I see screenshots of Gab quite often. I only hear about Voat in the context of "A few years ago, some people left Reddit."

If the net effect is that certain people left Reddit for a platform inviting the worst of Reddit, and then didn't stay there either, that seems like a win.

Voat just became a cesspool because it was all about the "free speech". So you had an influx of the worst of reddit + the sort of people who are attracted to free speech areas online.

It just died off since then, since 1. nobody really quits reddit, and 2. the aforementioned events made voat culture, well, not great.

You call it cesspool because you either don't like it or disagree with it. Its a matter of perspective.

Do you think the group of people you called cesspool will just accept that ? In their perspective by banning them, they are the one being oppressed. Of course they are going to fight back and try to create/move to alternative platform.

https://voat.co/v/Voat/3178819

> Gas the kikes Race War Now is not an illegal threat. The supreme court has ruled that a threat needs a place and a time to be considered actionable or illegal. example: We're gassing the kikes at the Freemont Synagogue on 5th avenue, Tuesday.

This is the most upvoted comment. We can say things like "it's a matter of perspective", but sometimes things are simply objectively shit.

edit, to those of you who think I'm exaggerating, here is one comment in that thread out of many:

"Fucking faggots...meanwhile Antifa gets run of every liberal city in the country while the nigs murder us daily...and we aren't even allowed to talk about clownworld."

Pretty much any place on the internet that promotes itself solely on being a "free speech zone/place" is trash. Theoretically they should be fine but in practice they just always attract assholes and people who want to say very edgy things. Someone should coin it, "the law of internet free speech zones" or something.

It has nothing to do with agreeing or disagreeing. Proper places of discussion don't have comments like "gas the kikes isn't technically hate speech so we should be allowed to say it here". You can always go ahead and host such a place if you want, but I'll stick to HN, Tildes, and Reddit instead so I can have reasonable discussion.

You do realise that most of this language is from people that are deeply frustrated at the situation they live in and vent on the Internet. Yes they said mean words on the internet? Who cares? I don't.

> Pretty much any place on the internet that promotes itself solely on being a "free speech zone/place" is trash.

Twitter is equally trash and has plenty of Anti-White, Anti-Jew (mostly in Arabic but nobody talks about it) and Anti-Men rhetoric, Violent threats towards Children and people get a free pass because they have a blue checkmark by their name and the "right" politics.

Also the term Hate speech is an ill defined term, which is used when convenient if someone has the wrong politics (e.g. centre-right, libertarian, conservative or religious). The terms is soo badly defined in law that people in the UK are going to prison for posting offensive rap lyrics on facebook.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921

> Proper places of discussion don't have comments like "gas the kikes isn't technically hate speech so we should be allowed to say it here".

Absolute garbage. This is snobbery and nothing more. I would argue that by just siloing people on the internet it is actually making discussion in general more problematic. In the past, we used IRC, AOL chat room and other things with no moderation. If someone was just being rude all the time, people just ended up ignoring them and they left ... I miss the old internet.

Voat is already on its way to being shut down.

The owners posted last week a message telling some of their users to stop inciting violence as the Feds were in contact. Given that Voat is ultra-toxic now it's not going to be possible to moderate every piece of content ever posted.

https://voat.co/v/Voat/3178819

Wow, I remember joining Voat way back when it first started and it just seemed like an angsty Reddit. I even started a group for my home town.

Just read that thread and it's crazy how much it has festered since then. Everyone there just seems so angry all the time, there are zero positive posts on the front page. How do people live their lives so angry all the time?

The top comment on that post is just amazing. Voat really is the place where you can "have your say™"

Voat seems to have four distinct kinds of groups, populated by two distinct kinds of people.

The groups are:

1. Groups that were kicked off Reddit for hate or questionable sex, went to voat, and got shut down there, too, or are still there but get very little activity.

An example of one that got shut down would be /v/jailbait.

An example of one that just gets very little activity would be /v/coontown. It goes months between posts.

2. Questionable sex groups that are somewhat active. /v/loli is an example.

3. Groups on neutral topics that get regular posts, like /v/technology or /v/funny or /v/science.

4. Hate groups with regular posts. (I assume these exist. I've never actually seen one, because I only go to voat when some disucssion elsewhere points to it, and that has never taken me to an active hate group).

The two kinds of people are:

1. People who came there for the hate groups.

2. People who came there for the sex groups.

The people who came there for the hate groups also post in the neutral groups, so the comments in /v/technology or /v/funny are full of hate stuff. The hate people seem to stay out of the sex groups.

I can't tell if the sex people also post in the neutral groups. My guess is that they probably do not.

The Voat groups for things like science and technology have nothing that sets them apart from the corresponding Reddit groups except the hate comments.

Sex is much easier to compartmentalize than hate. If you like something that most would find unacceptable sexually, there is no reason for that to come up when you participate in, say, a technology or science discussion. You can go to Voat for those sex groups that aren't allowed on Reddit, but stay on Reddit for everything else.

Hate group people, on the other hand, are more likely to let it leak out, and so get banned from neutral topic Reddit groups, and so have to go somewhere like Voat for those topics.

> Did anything happen with Voat, though?

Voat is very small luckily, that may be the reason why you're hearing so few of it. If you visit the frontpage, it's full of jewish conspiracies and "gas the jews", as expected.

And it turns out that yes, voat and gab.ai are both filled with the utter dregs of society. Is this "free speech" positive hangout a wonderful paradise full of intellectuals and idealists? No, just a bunch of racist conspiracy nut trash.

> And it turns out that yes, voat and gab.ai are both filled with the utter dregs of society

What does this say about the validity of the questionable study linked here that applauds "deplatforming" and only examines a few short-time consequences? Great success, sending more people from reddit to their own hate platform that will grow and exploit synergies among groups of particularly toxic people.

If you look at the number of upvotes and comments on any given post on voat.co, it's clear that very few people are actually using it. If deplatforming drove >50% of affected users there it would be troubling; my guess is that it's <5% though.

That we can identify potential school shooters, identity terrorists and other bad actors from their network traffic.

If Joe Bloke suddenly starts tunneling a lot of crap to 8chan... might be time for the constable to drop by for tea and persuasion.

You're going to end up with a shit signal to noise ratio for the people who visit the site for the automotive, origami and cooking boards.

Thats really worrying that guilt by association and thoughtceome is still a thing.

Isnt that just a more powerful soft censorship tool?

Thoughtful and intellectual conversations require good moderation, this is hardly a new concept.

> Great success, sending more people from reddit to their own hate platform that will grow and exploit synergies among groups of particularly toxic people.

Fox News seems like a rather good analogue of this. Despite promulgating information and opinions considered false and unacceptable by many, they are quite successful both financially and at exerting political influence. Shaming and shunning them and their viewers only hardens their viewership's belief in the truth of what they say.

By shunting the "basket of deplorables" off to Voat/Gab, we might be inadvertently creating the next Fox News.

The difference being that fox was never marginalized, it's always been mainstream.

Exactly. I don't support voat or gab. I was just describing what happened.

The problem with reddit is that it's wildly inconsistent about banning subreddits. Subreddits like these can exist for years, but only will get banned once they start to become popular enough that they start to get noticed.

That sounds perfectly consistent to me. Stuff that doesn't matter gets ignored. Stuff that does gets the attention of staff, who then apply rules.

It also sounds reasonable to me. At small scales, especially with novices, it's good to let people experiment, find their voices, build the right audience. But once something's of a certain size, it's unlikely to change its character much.

> it's good to let people experiment, find their voices, build the right audience.

That's not how subreddits work, though, since they require a a name and almost always have mods that shape the content. /r/waterniggas at 300 people is basically the same at 20,000 people. So if the rule is subreddits should not have "nigga" in the title, then all subreddits with that name should be quarantined (or not allow the names to contain that word).

Subreddits don't tend to change topics or "voices" but they can and do worsen in quality. Instead of posts with original concept C being upvoted, posts with content similar to C but not really get upvoted by the more general audience that comes with larger subscribers. I think /r/bonehurtingjuice is a pretty good example. At first it was excellent but now basically any anti-joke (which is different than bone hurting juice jokes) gets upvoted there.

For this specific example, sure. For most things that would make a community bad, I think it's worth giving something a chance to develop. And given finite staff attention, I think the economics of Reddit's business means that they're not going to bother with the small fry.

/r/hapas seems to be filled with more self-pity than hate. Reading the comments, these are actually mixed-raced kids talking about the racism they face from not only their peers, but also their own family.

The sub demonizes asian women and white men. It's exactly like /r/incels (which got banned) except they blame on it on their race.

> A substantial amount of people went from reddit to voat because at the time voat was new, had signups open, and advertised itself on free speech.

Luckily, we're collectively beginning to grow past the naïve belief that free speech is a virtue in itself, an ends, and understand it properly as a means, a tool, which we're all obliged to use ethically and responsibly to make our society better.

I agree. Voat basically instantly became a cesspool after the major banwave. In theory it would work but in practice places that are all about "free speech" tend to just attract complete and utter assholes.

This feels to me like hubris, a kind of 'end of history' prediction that we have finally progressed to at least the beginnings of a final moral order. Personally I don't believe this to be the case, and the ways it can go wrong will leave us wishing that freedom of speech protection had not been eroded.

I don't think it's an end-of-history thing. I think it's cyclical.

In the US, most people have always had an understanding that speech should be used responsibly. The early Internet was overstocked with utopian idealists, me included, who thought this new age of instant communication meant that good ideas would quickly triumph over bad. That led to a lot of naive policies.

In practice, that didn't work. We hoped for a great age of dialog and understanding. Instead, we got an era of "don't read the comments", because it turns out the small number awful people are perfectly willing to spew awful talk all day long driving out the reasonable people who have better things to do. Now anybody running a significant platform knows they need to deal with abusers and monsters or they'll end up a cesspool.

The same utopian thinking has often gone with new technologies. Standage's "The Victorian Internet" makes clear that the telegraph was seen with the same rose-colored glasses. It was going to end war! To knit humanity together into a great brotherhood! Spoiler alert: it didn't.

Free speech has only ever been a means. Some elements of enlightened society got caught in the local optima for awhile (Locke, Hume, etc.) but that only worked out as long as the bad-faith actors could be marginalized or overpowered in a given context. Now that we have the ubiquity of the internet, coupled with the N-chans and Voat and whatever, the trolls have successfully weaponized the unthinking elevation of a means to an end. Ethical society is both justified and obliged to develop more sophisticated responses to more sophisticated attacks against it.

Free speech is a tool, like democracy and discussion and rhetoric and liberty and communalism and a thousand other things besides, which we should judiciously and precisely in order to make our society better.

Whoever is in power determines what is "ethical society" or what makes society "better". Censorship is a form of physically violent oppression and is never justifiable.

Society is nothing more than the aggregate form of its constituent parts, i.e. all of us. It’s not separate from us, it is us, and we all have an obligation to act to improve it. Censorship is a tool, just like free speech or liberty or law or justice or rhetoric or tradition, that we have to wield to those ethical ends.

Inasmuch as different parts of society disagree on how to "improve" it, one part does not have the right to censor the other.

So who gets "physically violent" against who when Reddit bans some subs?

Or do you mean to say that isn't censorship?

Burning a book is physical violence. Banning a sub is physical violence. In censorship you are forcibly destroying a communication between two nonviolent third parties.

No one is eroding anything, please don't be melodramatic. Free speech is a protection from the government, not products offered by corporations; end of story.

You are free to not use reddit, or create your own reddit.

No, that's the first amendment. It does not equal freedom of speech, and the US constitution is not the be all and end all on how rights like that work.

There's plenty of material in the philosophical world about freedom of speech in regards to censorship by private parties and other people.

I like free speech, for the most part, but if it means I can't boot somebody from my house when they are being an asshole, then I am 100% against it.

I think most people's idea of free speech doesn't align with what you are saying.

Well the concept of free speech I mentioned wasn't 'anyone can say anything anywhere with no consequences', since that's something practically no one wants for obvious reasons.

Obviously you should be allowed to boot people from your house for being an asshole. And many businesses should probably also have the same right.

But there's also the ambiguities that mean it should be as simple as 'private property overrides everything else'. Some companies are utilities, and can't dictate whether someone can use their service based on personal views (electricity companies, water companies, telephone networks, etc). Sometimes someone's role means they can't be that selective about what they hear, like how a judge found it was unconstitutional for Trump to block people on Twitter. And there are issues about either public vs private property (like for company towns) or instances where a company is so large and has such a huge share of the market (like a monopoly) that you could argue whether they should be able to pick and choose what they like.

Well, you can get as philosophical as you want. In the real world, for American companies and services, it comes down to basically doing what they want.

There is no real argument that a company like Reddit must adhere to free speech. No one forces you to use facebook, reddit, or any other website.

Freedom of speech is specified as preventing the government from enacting censorship (the act of stopping something before publication) in every constitution I have seen.

It does not mean "I can say what I want and you have to leave me do it".

Substantial?

Substantial enough that voat turned to shit right after. I was looking into it at the time, but it got way worse after the banwaves.

Yep mods work.

I see that first hand from Jeff Hoogland, he twitch for a living and his niche is magic the gathering. His channel is very civil and he moderate the heck out of it. His motto is that he's responsible for the discourse so he have to moderate it. He disabled youtube comment for awhile because he doesn't have the time to moderate it. Then later on he enable comment and all the youtube comments were very civil, I believe his twitch rules just transfer over because all his fans know how to behave.

> Migration was common, both to similar subreddits (i.e. overtly racist ones) and tangentially related ones (r/The_Donald).

Tangentially-related? I'm pretty sure this crosses the line of being tangentially-related to racism. https://i.redd.it/ua1ukmoi8ls21.jpg

As someone that’s heard the president talk it really is hard to say tangentially related.

Islam is a race now?

"Race" is a pre-scientific term. It means whatever people want it to mean. Language is funny that way.

You realize anyone can post anything on reddit? I could go to /r/SandersForPresident and LARP as a violent communist revolutionary, right this moment if I wanted to.

Yes, you could. You'd probably receive a ban instantly, not have people engaging with you and upvoting you. You'd certainly not be able to do that for weeks (since some of these I've opened at random still post in t_d).

I don't know who you're trying to fool by claiming this shit isn't common on t_d, but you're not fooling anyone.

You could, but you wouldn't get 40 upvotes.

Congratulations, you found a few idiots amongst 700.000+ people.

This screenshot is about half a month old. I've just opened two of these at random and they both still post in t_d.

If it were a few idiots, they'd be easy to ban. I've moderated a controversial sub for years and I guarantee you that a few idiots are easy to ban way before they reach the stage in which they're comfortable with posting shit like this. They know that they won't face any consequences.

If you think this kind of thing is hard to find on /r/The_Donald, you've either never visited it or are (possibly willfully) in denial.

To be fair I've seen worse on /r/politics, a subreddit that has way more exposure than the D

Can you provide some screenshots?

The underlined posts have 2 upvotes. It can't really be used to represent anything

There's a predictable cycle each time you ban toxic users. There is a core of incredibly toxic users, surrounded by a halo of sympathizers. When the toxic users get banned, the sympathizers will argue in bad faith, moving heaven and Earth to insist that the ban was either unfair, inconsistent, ineffectual, or extreme, or a violation of their interpretation of free speech.

To whatever extent there was an actual debate with neutral parties, I think it was likely inflamed by these kinds of actors, and the fact that there's no there there at the end of the day isn't entirely surprising, even in light of significant debate on the question.

So a free speech advocate is in bad faith in your mind?

Not necessarily, but it can be for sure. I think in the context of reddit threads debating the need for moderation, a large proportion, if not most of the free speech folks were working backward from wanting to defend trolls toward an interpretation of free speech principles that effectively worked to shelter the trolling behavior.

This is slightly off-topic and will probably get buried, but has anyone else seemingly noticed a huge spike in incel-type commentary as of late all over reddit? I feel like I can't go into any serious posts' comment section without getting that vibe anymore. I was wondering if this is related to some of those more infamous subreddits getting banned and "releasing" those types of people to the rest of reddit's site?

Interesting. I have wondered if the “iron law of prohibition” [1] applied to censorship as well as substances (my original context was the UK’s “extreme porn” prohibition, but the same question arises for non-sexual censorship). It looks like drugs and censorship are different, given the diminished behaviour by the same accounts on other subreddits.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_prohibition

One should ask why the "bad and wrong" arguments are so dangerous that they need suppressing.

If it's so bad and wrong, it shouldn't have a leg to stand on, surely?

There are kernels of truth unaddressed by the champions of so-called-good because they undermine the groupthink. That's the real catalyst for conversion in the rabbit hole funnel. Having a subreddit is just a convenience.

It's no skin off my back whatever reddit allows or doesn't. I despise discussing politics, specially online (I'm making an exception in this one comment, which I'm sure I'll regret), so I only follow technical and funny subreddits.

That said, I wanted to point out something that the people saying that this is a win are ignoring with their "fewer recruits" idea: The more you censor someone, the more they're likely to actively proselytize, I think.

I also saw someone saying that censorship could be a tool for the betterment of society and I'm kind of horrified now at this thread so I didn't read any further.

Ok, lets suppose that banning discussion of "toxic viewpoints" worked as this title implies (overall spread of the viewpoints declined). Now for the tricky question: who defines what "toxic" means?

Is something a "toxic" viewpoint when it's holders take action that is harmful? Certainly that's why racism is bad, but what about more controversial opinions? People who spread the belief that abortion is OK are encouraging more people to get abortions, which the pro-life movement equates to murder (and therefore harm). What about meat consumption? Vegans and PETA-types would label this harmful as it involves the death of animals. What about weed? LGBT normalization?

This labeling of speech as being "harmful" is necessarily subjective. What happens when operators of major discussion platforms decide that things besides racism are too "harmful" to permit discussion of? Seeing that limiting the discussion of ideas shapes how a population propagates them (taking this study's claim at face value), do we really want to normalize this sort of censorship? Is it even moral for site operators to manipulate people's perception of reality like this by censoring what they see to shape a population to be politically homogeneous to the operator's views?

Ideologies that if they should come to fruition would limit the very free speech they are currently abusing, in much the same way that tolerant societies should not tolerate intolerance.

So, it "worked" in the sense that the users likely moved to more toxic echo chambers where they can be further radicalized in their toxic viewpoints? Yay?

That's an interesting perspective.

I mean, it's kind of like kicking the KKK out of your local YMCA. Sure they go have Klan rallies elsewhere but at least my kids aren't bumping shoulders with them anymore when they're using the water fountain between basketball games.

I'm going to make up and then present you with the "Best Comment for this article" award.

Short, sweet, memorable and cuts through all the BS and leaves only understanding.

Yeah, because kids are not attracted to things that are forbidden.

I reckon there is actually more excitement to being part of an infamous fringe of a large mainstream community like Reddit, than to be part of an isolated fringe community that the mainstream is unlikely to ever see. Part of the appeal is surely in offending the mainstream users who share the platform.

> ...than to be part of an isolated fringe community that the mainstream is unlikely to ever see...

Like being a computer hacker was (and still to some extent is)? Sorry, no. People like to gather into in-groups and exclusivity makes it more attractive.

Sweeping dirt under the rug doesn't destroy the dirt; you just wind up with a bigger and bigger lump of dirt under the rug.

It doesn’t matter if they can’t find them or access them.

The majority by far follow most rules imposed on them.

The population of these cesspools isn't a constant, it's a function of (among other things) how easy they are to access. Making them harder to get to is a net-win. Platforms have an ethical responsibility to de-platform this garbage.

Why do people who are banned always think this is about them, as if they were the centre of the universe? Banning people is not for their benefit, to somehow make them better people, keep them from forming radical views or nonsense like that. It's solely for the benefit of the remaining users and the forums themselves. That means you have to strike a balance between banning/removing too much or banning/removing too few. It's not about making the world a better place, it's about making the forums a better place.

Besides, why should I, if I am a forum administrator or company running forums, force myself to run forums for users with world views that are completely opposed to what I can stand behind with my conscience? By providing them with a forum I support those people and groups. Why should I support people whose views I find disgusting and appalling, and, in addition to that, not helpful for the discussions of the majority of regular users? I cannot find any reason why.

So you're on the side of the baker in the gay wedding cake case? The difference here is that that was one small shop among many so the customers aren't completely screwed. Social media is dominated by a small number of huge companies so that if they ban you, then you lose access to far more than just one private business. You can't just cross the street and use the other almost-as-good Reddit or almost-as-good Twitter. You're socially isolated online. For that reason, I think when companies have massive control of a big and important market, they should be subject to some greater obligations towards their users/customers.

> So you're on the side of the baker in the gay wedding cake case?

In general, no. The analogy is deeply flawed. You ban people on forums because of their actions, and you delete posts because of their content. That's just social interaction. In contrast to this, the baker made it 100% clear that he singled these customers out because they were gay and not because of their actual behaviour at the baker shop. They behaved well like any other customer. If they had spit on other customers, shouted annoying gay parade songs with megaphones, or incited for violence against straight people, then the baker would have had all rights to kick them out of his shop. Only, they didn't do anything like that.

I hate having to explain this to you, but the golden rule of netiquette is that you should only say online what you would also be willing to say aloud, so that everyone else can hear you, to a bunch of strangers in a bar. It may get heated at times and barkeepers are more or less resilient to abusive customers, but at some point they will kick you out of their place if you don't stop annoying their customers. Moreover, no barkeeper is obliged to host a bunch of Nazis, Stalinists, or pedophiles, and most places will use their house right to expel those toxic groups.

Social networks have the same right and use it in the same way. That is part of their responsibility, which is indeed higher the more users they have, as you put so eloquently. Just like the barkeeper, they have a responsibility to protect their main user base against morons and notorious troublemakers.

That Colorado baker didn't want to effectively participate in their wedding ceremony which he was opposed to and couldn't stand behind with his conscience. He was happy to sell them other things. So it wasn't because they were gay, but because they wanted to use his service to do something he didn't like. I'm sure if they got their straight friend to go back and order on their behalf he would still have refused if he knew what it was for. I think it's very much the same as your description of a forum owner not wanting to enable some activity he finds disgusting and appalling.

On social networks, the other users can block the people they don't like or not enter the offensive group. But being personally offended isn't really why people want banning. If that were the case, they'd be quite happy with optional personal filters. It would be even better because they could tune their own filter to suit their personal tastes. But nobody is calling for that because what they really want is to prevent 3rd parties from being influenced by ideas that they don't agree with. In a bar, you can't just mute somebody who's shouting so that's where the analogy fails.

they get a fraction of the exposure and Reddit’s network effects

It's not Reddit's mission to reform these individuals. Sometimes you have to remove the worst elements of your community before their toxicity radicalizes everyone.

Yay for Reddit prepping for an IPO, probably.

That still makes it a win for Reddit.

It was never a question if top down rules on speech work, it's if it was a desired. Reddit is the beige wall of community. My experience is choosing between echo chambers, marketing, or ghost towns.

"Thousands of communities, endless conversation, authentic human connection." Would that mission statement be more true for Reddit, Tumblr, Image boards, IRC channels, random internet forums? and the conversation is boring, its feels just like tech Twitter where everyone has to make sure they thoroughly vet their posts for the sake of their future and avoid getting slam dunked on. At least it's usually up and down arrows and ban hammers instead of verbal assault.

Please convince your communities to abandon ship to self hosted, more intimate communication platforms.

> It was never a question if top down rules on speech work, it's if it was a desired.

I don't agree, a lot of people seemed to think the Streisand effect proved that you can't control speech / content on the internet once upon a time.

I've come across some old time r/fatpeoplehate people and they pine for the olden days when they could freely say what they wanted about fat people. They aren't signing up for any reddit alternatives any more than anyone else is.

The hardcore haters, trolls and extremists will find other platforms, but the majority of toxic users are passive readers, or occasional commenters who randomly stumble upon subreddits, and aren't going to dedicate themselves to another platform.

I would be careful with getting the pitchforks. In reality, very few people live through such anger and hate on a daily basis.

Still, I do agree with banning most of those subreddits in defense of people who might get distressed and deeply offended.

One of my side hobbies is tracking and studying online reactionaries--in an effort to understand how their swamps bubble over and they impact society at large I've got eyes and ears on something like 60K accounts and probably 20K real identities behind them across Twitter, Discords, Riot groups, etcetera. (I should say "fascists", though; in my estimation, there aren't many reactionaries around, these days, who wouldn't fit the term.)

I can assure you plenty of people "live through such anger and hate on a daily basis". The Diet Coke version of this is Fox News, where on their hard-news shows they literally hard-cut to commercial when, after a shooting at a synagogue guests so much as mention that Trump et al. encourage racism and anti-semitism. It is systemic and systematic and the way this stuff poisons the brains of the people who are soaked in it is very, very real. We underestimate it at our peril--because the full-on, undiluted thing is a hell of a lot more powerful a drug.

A good opportunity to point out that "toxic" means exactly "people I disagree with" and absolutely nothing more.

That is not true, we disagree here on HN on many topics like software freedom, is Apple a monopoly, is Tesla autopilot good or bad etc but persons that disagree with my view points can disagree without becoming toxic. For me toxic comments are comments that are int the first place illogical, use false facts or speculation as truth, use personal attacks or aggressive language, generalize one or a few data points to the whole and mainly they are not people that can have a coherent, reasonale logical discussion.

My point toxic != someone that I disagree, your are generalizing.

Fair enough, the implication doesn't go both ways. My point was that all things considered "toxic" are just things that are not being agreed with. Of course, things can also not be agreed with without being considered "toxic".

You're right that people are more likely to use words like 'toxic' when they disagree. But your generalization goes too far, and the cases where it fails are important. I moderate posts on HN all the time whose views I personally agree with. That's probably the most important capacity a moderator needs. Some of those posts I would definitely call toxic.

To pick an example that won't upset any people (ok, not many people), if someone shows up in Common Lisp threads on HN with the sort of chauvinism that destroyed comp.lang.lisp, that's toxic and I'm going to moderate even if I share their views about Lisp. This is a real example btw. I found https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9813527, but there have been a bunch of cases.

>Fair enough, the implication doesn't go both ways. My point was that all things considered "toxic" are just things that are not being agreed with

Can you give an example because you make no sense or you are stating something obvious, yeah communities do not agree with toxic things because they are bad.

The toxic meaning is clear in the context of each community, if you don't agree then don't join, if you want to join follow the rules, if you just want to join and not follow the rules and you want to create harm then you are toxic.

Reddit is notably not a community. I can accept a community deciding that it doesn't want certain opinions to be expressed because they don't fit the communal culture, but this doesn't apply to Reddit, which is explicitly a platform for people to start their own communities.

I think there's some room for common sense as to what communities should be given a platform and which shouldn't, for example I don't tihnk /r/coontown should be given a platform in western society which is overwhelmingly anti-racist. But the moment you start banning communities based on criteria that go beyond basic common sense of your society, especially of you do so based on vague and ill-defined rules, you're no longer being a neutral platform. If Reddit wants to be a community as such that's fine, but from my perspective that's explicitly not their branding, and it doesn't seem to be the opinon of Reddit users as agood whole either.

I was referring to sub-reddits and the moderation that happens there where "toxic", trolling , offtopic ares clear terms.

Not the full reddit platform, it is a private thing and a business, if keeping toxic sub-reddits on would make them money and good PR then they would keep them , it was a business decision and if it is legal then it is nothing you can do then move your community elsewhere.

I also don't like when business ban perfectly legal things like adult content but what can you do? Make a law forcing business and private people host things that they don't want, if you had a forum and someone would spam it with disgusting images don't you want the freedom to remove that? Reddit is not a monopoly, we have forums and they even work better for some content type

The word "toxic" has no meaning anymore, because it's all relative to the person using it.

For example, in the game Overwatch, "toxic" got mostly used as "this person does not play with the characters currently recognized as the most optimal". Just playing the game differently than the pros/current metagame was literally considered toxic by a non-negligible amount of people.

When someone says "ban this person for being toxic", one has no idea what they actually mean. To some people, even respectful trash talk is "toxic". By catering to people calling things "toxic", one encourages witch hunts by people.

Your own post is an example of toxic <posts,comments,behavior> not having a standard accepted definition: "For me toxic comments are comments that ...".

You are still using some extreme example and generalizing.

Say the word online, troll it has a well known definition, I don't care if you or that dude there is using it wrong, the definition is clear and the majority of humans are using it right.

Second if a community decides that behavior X is not allowed then that community will ban X and fck your freedom of speech or whatever , on the community forum,sub-reddits, IRC the community rules apply, you don't like it don't join the forum,sub-reddit

It is not trolling. If it was trolling, I would have said "trolling". The reason I used that example is because in someone's arbitrary definition of "toxic" they extended it to mean "not playing exactly how I think someone should play".

A normal word with an accepted definition doesn't get randomly abused like this.

No, within games and on twitter "toxic" is used in a variety of ways by a variety of people. I used one somewhat common example but not everybody agreed on that, because they had different arbitrary definitions of what being toxic is.

It has no standard meaning anymore. What's toxic to me isn't toxic to a random person on reddit or on twitter, and that's what the problem is. I'm not discussing "trolling".

I find this extremely hard to believe.

I disagree with white supremacists, anti-vaxxers, and people who defend sex offenders.

I also disagree with think that JSON is more readable than YAML, that C++ is a good language to teach beginners, and that Apache is more user-friendly than nginx.

Only one of these groups is "toxic" to me. But just "people I disagree with" is not an accurate representation as to why I find them toxic.

i.e. They cause actual harm to the general public.

I don't think "causing harm to the general public" is at all a good metric to decide "toxic". I've had to deal with more trouble caused by people who insist on using Apache than I've had caused by white supremacists, and I don't think I've ever met someone who "defends sex offenders" (as a general position).

To begin with, "causing harm" is still essentialyl subjective. An anti-vaxxer wouldn't think they're "causing harm" at all. You're still basing yourself on whether or not you agree with someone or not.

> To begin with, "causing harm" is still essentialyl subjective. An anti-vaxxer wouldn't think they're "causing harm" at all. You're still basing yourself on whether or not you agree with someone or not.

It's not about whether you think you're causing harm... It's about whether you objectively are.

Anti-vaxxers have led to the resurgence of diseases once thought to be extinct.

White supremacists carry out acts of terrorism/violence against people of color, and lobby against laws that would improve the quality of life for minority groups (sometimes, they are actually the elected officials voting on these laws). And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

People who defend sex offenders let alleged rapists get elected to the highest legal office in the land just because of party affiliation.

That is in no way comparable to using Apache over nginx.

> It's not about whether you think you're causing harm... It's about whether you objectively are.

Not my personal view but I will point out that from the point of view of a vegan or PETA, raising animals and slaughtering them for meat and other animal products is causing harm. And you cannot objectively deny that the deaths and incidental suffering of those animals is not harm. Are they justified in considering you (assuming you consume animal products) toxic and immoral?

Your heuristic is not meaningful.

"Causing harm" is subjective until you can demonstrably show that whatever activity is causally linked to increased harm towards some group of people.

Yeah an anti-vaxxer won't think they're "causing harm", but they are. They're the reason we've had a major resurgence in measles cases for the first time in 20 years.

"Toxic" means "I may have common ground with this person but I can't tell because this private square keeps giving megaphones to trolls who are drowning both of us out."

The article, GaTech, and HN seem to be skirting around that issue.

Agree, and most of the comments in this thread itself is hate speech. Hate towards those deemed "toxic".

It didn't work. It's more toxic than ever, just in a different way.

Yes.

Also, Chinese efforts to fight freedom of speech and punish religious people worked very effectively to reduce criticism of the government and prevent people from attending churches/mosques.

Until machines can distinguish arguing against hate speech from hate speech itself (which requires understanding context), automated deplatforming is anti-democratic

So when do they get rid of r/politics?

This is why we need decentralized, hard to take down platform, but still relatively easy to be discover platform.

It's also why most people won't use one - it'll turn into a cesspit of prejudice and hate.

About a year ago, we had a discussion about reddit at work and tried this experiment. Three of us went to a city subreddit, /r/mycity, and looked for controversial posts about things like local politics, things involving police, and so on. One of us would make posts agreeing with others in the thread. Another would ask questions, feigning lack of knowledge but generally disagreeing, while a third intentionally took an opposing view. In all cases, we were careful not to attack anyone or use curse words or other disparaging remarks.

Interestingly, the first city we tried didn't upvote or downvote very often but the posts that disagreed with the view of the thread quickly, within a day or two, found their posts banned or shadow banned--that is, their posts appeared to us as going through but, in reality, did not appear to anyone else.

Some of the city subs, where the person slightly disagreed with the thread but mostly said they didn't understand the points, always found their posts either listed at the bottom, were downvoted, or got themselves banned but it took longer--perhaps a week or two.

No person agreeing with the thread was downvoted or ever banned which is to be expected. However, the whole point of our doing this was to prove our expectation that reddit is a biased culture that only lets those in who will agree with the crowd and won't let opposing views in. At least in the /r/city threads we chose but we noticed the same behavior in many technical subs, too.

I wish we kept the data but none of us visit or use reddit in any way, for these reasons and a few others, and we only scribbled the notes on paper somewhere.

OK, something is wrong with your anecdote.

Bans from a specific subreddit are instituted by the mods of the subreddit. I can easily picture the mods wanting a sub to be run in a certain way, and if you run afoul of them, you are out.

Account suspensions from reddit and shadowbans can only be done by reddit admins. Why would they even care about whatever politics are happening in some tiny sub?

> I can easily picture the mods wanting a sub to be run in a certain way, and if you run afoul of them, you are out.

Thus my point. Except the comment is not how they are run but that opinions expressed that don't tow the line are cut from the tree.

Yes. Who knows if the reason all the comments above you are pro-suppressing minority views is because that's how HN feels or because people are suppressing minority views?

I doubt censorship and speech codes ever changed anyone's mind. It just produces a facade.

Wow TWO posts on front page of HN calling for censorship. What's going on?!?!

I commented on this the last time it made the rounds, and the study's methodology is flawed in a pretty central way.

From the paper:

> Hate speech and harassment are contentious topics, lacking clear definitions. As discussed above, the European Court of Human Rights notes that “no universally accepted definition of the term ‘hate speech’ exists” [48]. They adopt a definition including “comments which are necessarily directed against a person or particular group of people”, focusing on race, religion, “aggressive nationalism and ethnocentrism”, and homophobic speech [48].

> This definition provides a useful starting point, but it is difficult to operationalize at scale. We therefore take a usage-based approach: given that Reddit has banned the r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown forums, we focus on textual content that is distinctively characteristic of these forums. Using an automated keyword identification technique, we build lexicons of keywords for r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown, which makes it possible to track whether the words in these lexicons become more common in other forums after the ban. Next, we manually inspect the automatically generated lexicons, and identify a subset of terms that are especially oriented towards hate speech. These manually refined lexicons are sparser, but offer higher precision.

The Tldr here is that they defined hate speech as "the subset of terms heavily used in these subreddits, manually filtered by the authors' subjective (and opaque) assessment of hatefulness". My beef actually isn't with the subjectivity of the latter part: I think the reliance on the ill-defined concept of hate speech does a lot more harm than good, but I acknowledge that plenty of people think it's valuable, and that's a non-central hill to die on here.

The real issue with the study is that starting your definition of hate speech with "the lexicon of banned subs" is a fatal confounder:

Many subreddits, particularly free-flowing ideological echo chambers, end up with distinctive lexicons: specific phrases, terms, and in-jokes that people bring up to solidify feelings of community. This isn't a novel insight, since it's how most communities (and indeed relationships) work. the phenomenon is exacerbated for ideological echo chambers, and not just the ones in the right which are more likely to align with people's definition of hate speech: you can find the exact same phenomenon on exho chambers like LateStageCapitalism or ChoosingBeggars, and a milder version on most subs that are less general-interest than eg r/movies.

The study's conclusions essentially boils down to: "if you ban a sub, the distinctive lexicon of that sub becomes less common".....duh? It provides very little signal about the way the amount of hate speech evolves, as someone from fatpeoplehate could easily be spewing the same vile content elsewhere, and just use the term "hambeast" less in favor of a more broadly-used slur like "pig". This isn't a possibility that the paper even attempts to address, and it's conclusions in light of this fatal flaw are downright dishonest.

It's depressing how often people cite this study uncritically. As always, _read the papers behind articles before you cite or share believe them_, particularly when they're reliant on undefined, impossible to measure definitions like "hate speech". If authors at "papers of record" like the NYT are regularly too dumb or dishonest to accurately describes papers' conclusions (or at least describe their limitations), a rag like TechCrunch is DEFINITELY not something you should take at face value.

Only if you search for results with blinkers on.

they shoved these toxic groups elsewhere. they didn't go away.

They are only moving to other platforms that are harder to track, like Discord or Telegram. Just because they don't appear in the data doesn't mean that they don't exist. Then yes, you sanitize some platforms but the problem as a whole is just less evident but still growing.

I would argue that's still a win. Discord and Telegram are more difficult to track because they are less public and visible.

The move has therefore managed to reduce the exposure that non-active participants have to toxic behaviour, and the normalization of said behaviour as something acceptable/tolerated.

The size and conviction of 'toxic' groups is growing, not diminishing. Marginalising them and pushing them to less-visible communication channels is only harmful from every angle except staving off short-term moral outrage of social justice types.

When various less-desirable groups existed on reddit, it was easy to monitor and gauge their size and their beliefs. It was possible to engage with them on some levels. Now they are scattered across various difficult to observe channels and are fully enclosed in an echo chamber that amplifies their beliefs that much more.

The early days of large social platforms like Reddit was the only time in the last several hundred years when it was possible to get a reasonable estimate of what segment of the population held what beliefs, including the less popular ones. Being able to get an objective view of that distribution was the first step in qualifying and addressing the underlying issues.

Instead we are sweeping those demographics under the rug again, and destroying the ability to study and interact with them.

What evidence has shown that engaging with them is more effective? It seems to be like it’s nearly impossible to convince someone that their worldview is wrong; however people do feel the need and desire to be part of communities and knowing they might be excluded for having hateful views might be more of a motivator for them to rethink those views on their own terms, which is possibly a more effective method of changing someone’s views.

> What evidence has shown that engaging with them is more effective?

We have a lot of evidence that marginalising sufficiently large groups leads to tremendous backlash when they reach critical mass, e.g. almost every revolution in history. I think we can agree that doing exactly that which failed every time before is not a productive avenue.

> having hateful views

Let's not conflate hateful views with 'toxic' views. The term toxic refers to any unpopular view. In addition to hate speech, this includes various sexual preferences, political views, anti-science movements, mens rights groups, etc.

> Let's not conflate hateful views with 'toxic' views.

Is this a terminological distinction you just made up? In the usage I'm familiar neither "hateful" nor "toxic" is a term of art.

> They are only moving to other platforms that are harder to track, like Discord or Telegram.

Harder to track also means harder to find. Sounds great to me. Let's make sure anyone who worms their way into those dark places knows without doubt that they're detestable, that civil society stands united against them. Maybe with some time, the boredom of the next generation can be directed to less evil ends.

Nobody is actually saying we are going to eradicate these ideas completely.

Seems like a lot of comments here don’t want to do anything because it won’t completely eliminate the idea.

I don’t expect these ideas will ever be eradicated but my issue has always been that these platforms, especially Twitter and Reddit and especially YouTube, present these “underground” ideas alongside “mainstream” ideas and amplify it and suggest it to people that otherwise would have never stumbled upon it. And they present to the user as content of equal quality to ideas that are actually based in science and real research, not manipulation and cherry picked data.

The internet has plenty of space for everyone, but we don’t need to raise bad ideas to the same table as good ones. Just as we shouldn’t be covering “intelligent design” alongside evolution to our kids as an equal alternative.

>Seems like a lot of comments here don’t want to do anything because it won’t completely eliminate the idea.

The nirvana fallacy seems like a very popular defense for gatekeeping changes to something.

>we don’t need to raise bad ideas to the same table as good ones. Just as we shouldn’t be covering “intelligent design” alongside evolution to our kids as an equal alternative.

If you don't find it surprising that people can be influenced by their social environment (spoiler: you shouldn't), this seems like an unavoidable conclusion.

The "marketplace of ideas" is an idea that puts a little too much faith in rationality. It seems as dysfunctional as other markets in that a lot of people make irrational decisions, which have consequences, without caring about (or noticing) the externalities.

They are always going to exist, this isn't some charity case to help them heal, honestly people are just happy the scum has fucked off more than it had before.

Well, but the point here is that the reddit staff doesn't have to worry about those users anymore, no? It's not like someone is going to stop being a right-winger just because you ban him from reddit. That's not what they expected to happen. But they want to keep their ad dollars.

Reddit got the racists and sexists to leave by dialing the bigotry up to 11.

Reddit has never been as hateful as it is today. Take a look at /r/politics sometime. Do you see love?

People jump down your throat if you dare disagree with the hive mind. Those expressing the most popular opinions get to bully the minority. Fighting back will get you banned for incivility.

The censorship has also had a chilling effect on creativity. People create garbage content afraid to publish anything controversial. It’s becoming as boring to read as Facebook.

This is so frustrating to me. First of all who is to say what constitutes toxic? For instance, a drug related subreddit I know of was banned. There, people discussed harm reduction and chemistry of novel compounds. It was amazing and very useful for people. But that got banned.

Second- no of course this isnt effective. Its effective at removing people from the platform. But it is not decreasing "hate speech" (which is nonsense newspeak anyway) its just pushing it out of the mainstream. And for those of you making the argument that it is reducing peoples exposure to hate speech which stops its proliferation... Nonsense. In a free society everyone gets to dicide what they do and don't believe. You cannot control peoples thoughts by reducing their exposure to the bad thoughts.

Good people will not be convinced by bad arguments. Bad people will be bad either way.

I hate this so much and reddit is not NEARLY theplace it used to be. Now it is a liberal echo chamber which is all too happy to collectively shout down any divergent thinking. It was alwaysthat way to an extent, but it's so bad now that I finally had to delete my 6 year old account.

Yes, I agree. Within 1-2 years Reddit will be a collectivist utopia where controversial topics are banned outright and everyone who does not conform to the majority opinion is being made invisible through downvoting.

This is already the case in the big subreddits but there are still islands of freedom here and there.

> You cannot control peoples thoughts by reducing their exposure to the bad thoughts.

Actually, yes, you can, quite literally. Falsehoods repeated ad nauseam are convincing in the long run (do you remember the second Irak war and the WMD hoax propagated by the government? Half the US still believes that one).

In a meeting, a single person making the same argument three times is almost as convincing as three people making it once.

Etc...

We're not as free as you imagine.

let me rephrase. Yes, you can. But you absolutely shouldn't, because once you start controlling peoples exposure to ideas, things go off the rails.

Reddit has always been an echo chamber. Remember RON PAUL 2008? You’re just mad that it’s a different kind of echo chamber now.

I actually don't remember that. What was the deal with that?

One of my favorite things about Reddit was the ability to find people actually expressing opinions that are anathema in the mainstream media, like "women can also be bad sometimes". I feel heavily oppressed by the people in this thread saying I'm not allowed to read or talk about those things except in the equivalent of a "free speech zone".

I think the comparison to a law forcing the homeless out of your neighborhood is apt. It works, but you must recognize that you are using power to harm people you don't like, not just improving the world for everyone. Like police power, it sometimes does improve the world for everyone and sometimes it grows to do more harm than good. In this case the result is good, but the fact that everyone just thinks "I like the result so censorship powers are good" is a step down a slippery slope.

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