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Comment by lonelappde | Hacker News Reader

This is such an own-goal. Before worrying about censoring unwanted content, companies should spend their time on stopping promoting it (and building client side filtering controls) which is just as huge a problem and not anti-American to fix.

The problem is that companies want the flamebait and toxic content to drive enragement engagement ad impressions, but don't want to be accountable for the stuff that's just too edgy for advertisers.

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"Companies want the flamebait...." The moderation system on reddit seems to heavily promote group think. Actually promoting controversial comments as a default would be interesting.

* Actually promoting controversial comments as a default would be interesting.*

Controversial is subjective. Would you like FB/reddit to promote holocaust denial?

Reddit has an option to sort on controversial on a group and also on comments. I suspect the algorithm is probably looking for things with a combination of upvotes and downvotes. Take a look at any reddit group or the comments and sort on controversial if you want to see what it looks like. If you defined controversial as any thing that has a 15% to 55% down vote ratio that would be fairly specific. Maybe over 60% downvote it may be off topic or spam? It would be an interesting experiment, for a few days, to change the default from "hot" to "controversial".

I use reddit precisely because it has topical communities. Moderating away people and posts that distract from the topic is a good thing. It promotes group think exactly because you can belong to any number of groups.

It's perfect for hobby or niche interest subreddits. It's a flawed system for discussing politics or anything remotely controversial. Safespace bubbles, censorship by downvotes, mods that curate their subreddit, mass removed comments... That's all fine if you're discussing your favourite videogame or cooking recipes, but not when there's politics involved.

Imageboard style websites where every shit comment has as much visibility as the other is vastly superior for having an interesting discussion. The downside is that you have to wade through the bad comments.

> The problem is that companies want the flamebait and toxic content to drive enragement engagement ad impressions

No, we really don't. In fact, we have mechanisms in place to keep ads away from certain categories of content. Do you have any evidence to support your statement?

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