Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit
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> I am obligated to call you out: You should have shut down the_donald instead of amplifying it and its hate, racism, and violence. So much of what is happening now lies at your feet. You don't get to say BLM when reddit nurtures and monetizes white supremacy and hate all day long
Good on her for publicly calling it out.
https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/13/details-emerge-abo...
Hard to tell for sure, of course, but the recent blanketing of facebook with political advertising doesn't seem to have achieved that much except for buying Brad Parscale a ferrari.
Social media does presumably have some effect but I'm not sure how you'd tell how much/how little compared to other approaches for reaching people.
What form it takes isn't as important as the fact that it supplies enough content / entertainment / methods of consumption that one can subscribe to it and have 100% of their bandwidth filled, to the exclusion of competing narratives.
Talk radio was an imperfect expression of this, because radio isn't portable in the same way that app-based social media + mobile devices / Fox News are.
But it's entirely possible to prevent someone from ever being exposed to a contrary narrative, simply by filling all their available time.
That's the central premise of Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1980) https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/printing-press-as-an-ag...
I've compiled a related bibliography that gets at other aspects, including social and online media.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_a...
Brad Parscale, the Trump campaign digital director, and Dan Scavino, Trump's social media manager, regularly visited the site.
Your comment is not sarcastic, it is misleading, misiniformed and ultimately destructive.
I guess that’s one way of looking at it...
Indeed, the difference between making a direct call to violence and an inferred one are very different things.
The problems with TD stemmed far beyond inciting or glorifying violence. As mentioned, the biggest problem with /r/politics is it's an absolute echo chamber. Not even in the same realm.
That "dropping pretense" you describe carries a LOT more weight than you are giving it, in who it attracts, and the behaviors it promotes.
I'm no fan of r/politics, but to actually believe that they're basically the same as TD is just wild.
I would in particular be interesting to know if there is a significant difference in offensive words used in either sub.
Right spirit, completely wrong details. Story of my debugging life :D
Clear and present danger is the standard.
According to the Supreme Court saying that all members of a certain minority group in must be killed, is covered under free speech, but saying that a specific member of that minority group must be killed at 9 p.m. tomorrow night, it's not free speech but clear and present danger.
https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha...
Note that I don’t think that Reddit policing its content is censorship, I am only responding to the “fire in a crowded theater” Internet trope.
Can you elaborate as to why? I'm not really sure how a subreddit is responsible for hate + violence + racism. How does freedom of speech/thought only work one way?
I don't really get bringing up the freedom of speech angle here - r/the_donald has always aggressively deleted posts and banned users for expressing anything but complete loyalty to Donald Trump.
it's much narrower than that: whatever doesn't fit centrist Dem narratives is removed
Are you saying "smear campaigns against survivors of a school shooting" is explicitly pro-Trump?
The survivors of the school shooting politicized the issue which makes it everyone's problem. They want a political action, they are constantly on the television promoting a certain viewpoint which I believe is asking to give up on my civil rights. They're saying that I need to give up my civil rights because of what happened to them.
Virginia Beach Shooting resulted in sweeping anti-gun legislation passed and the flipping of Virginia legislature, almost none of it was targeted at the survivors of the shooting. There was world's biggest Mass demonstration of armed protesters, and almost nobody brought the survivors of Virginia Beach shooting up.
a) This is such a stretch and you have no evidence to support your claim.
b) I'm pretty conservative and know a large number of conservatives and exactly none of the people I know even like Reddit, or consider it a viable "conservative community" at all.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=reddit%20the_donald&btn...
Work elsewhere certainly expresses and substantiates that narrative: Kate Starbird, Renee DiResta, Samuel Wooley, Kara Swisher, Zynep Tufekci, among others.
And freedom of speech need not tolerate death threats.
That's not to say that they haven't ever existed, but certainly not anything remotely close to how it's perceived. And definitely not any worse than you would see right now on r/politics.
Plenty of really gross Pepe memes. I mean, I don't know what to tell you.
538 did an interesting analysis into the kind of people on the sub at the time https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/dissecting-trumps-most-...
They always did a good job of some token news story as a "see we're good guys!" type post but if you scratched the surface and read the comments its was obvious.
The 538 article has some examples https://np.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5ldfmg/red_pills...
I mean, reddit scrambled to implement a subreddit filtering feature just to provide a means for users to filter TD out due to the near constant complaints about the content of that sub.
Meanwhile, they banned other subreddits for much, much less. They actively fought to provide them their safe space and wrote actual features to support that subreddit.
Picture "TOP SOCIAL MEDIA COMPANY BANS SUPPORT OF THE PRESIDENT" headlines running for months.
Picture Trump bringing it up in hundreds of speeches and tweets, demanding regulation and saying how unfair it is that he and his supporters are being censored and silenced and attacked by Silicon Valley and the left. (He's already doing that, but this would give him way more ammo.)
Picture he and his supporters pointing to it as evidence that The Elites and the liberals and the tech industry are out to get him and out to get half of the country, and that only he can defend their liberties and bring our country and corrupt establishment back from the brink.
Also, all of those users would just flock to alternative off-site communities that make TD look like a bastion of reason and civility by comparison.
Huffman's not in an easy position, here.
Yes, it has been and it is and it will, but everything is relative. No matter how bad a bad situation is, it can always get worse. You may not like the US now, but for all we know you could be begging to return to June 2020 when June 2021 comes around.
Every little thing like this increases his odds of re-election and the odds that people will think he's right or at least has a point. If reddit bans the subreddit for him and his supporters and doesn't ban any others, that could actually turn some non-Trump voters into Trump voters, and definitely increases the odds that his people will get out and vote.
>spend every moment outraged about censorship and supposed sleights against them — real or not
Sure, but then here they would have a real sleight, a real example of censorship, and a concrete and empirical thing to be outraged about, as well as a coherent and persuasive argument about the larger implications of the censorship and potential future risks they may face. It's the perfect way to empower them and bolster their intensity and their numbers.
He is very good at taking inflammatory stories, running with them, and getting other people fired up about them, too. He is extremely persuasive not only to his base, but also can be to some people who are closer to the middle. Reddit banning the subreddit and not allowing another one be created for him would be an escalation and a turning point. It's a major line in the sand, and would be a major talking point for him.
It may sound alarmist, but I'm saying this because I am genuinely alarmed at what could have happened and what might happen in the future. His supporters exist in the tens of millions, and they're going to talk with each other one way or another. If they're unable to talk with each other or about him without being banned on popular websites, they're left with no choice but to instead do it on insane cult-like conspiracy theory websites (trust me, if you think TD is bad, just try looking at some of those sites), where they'll be increasingly polarized and will increasingly believe even more dangerous and extravagantly false things.
The more large organizations try to restrict a particular group, the angrier they get and the more they feel like powerful forces are out to get them and that there's an organized conspiracy behind it. It's like trying to push an air bubble out of some material - you just end up displacing it, and if you apply too much pressure, the thing's going to pop.
Also, as other commenters have pointed out, there are lots of very polarized and even extremist people on the opposite side, and if reddit removes one side and does nothing to the other, then all of the above gets amplified even more.
I honestly agree with how Zuckerberg and Huffman are handling this. They both clearly personally dislike Trump, but they understand the big picture. It's kind of like geopolitics.
That ship has already sailed most likely. I voted Libertarian in 2016 as I have for every presidential election that I have voted in.
2020 there is a high probability that I will vote Republican for president for the first time in my life, not for sure yet but it is EXACTLY because of the extreme support for censorship, de-platforming and cancel culture that is coming from the Authoritarian left that has my vote is wavering
I'm a left-leaning person and always will be, but sometimes I get really frustrated at how people I otherwise agree with just never fail to consistently shoot themselves and each other in the foot. They'll read your and my posts and just think it's a bunch of nonsense and once again be flabbergasted when Trump wins again. (I'm not 100% certain he'll win, but I definitely am over 60% confident.)
This would make the SV and "the left" look worse and more political, including in the eyes of fairly moderate people.
and make no mistake "de-platforming" is censorship
Is it really censorship if r/t_d had violated numerous Reddit ToS rules? Rules which all users agreed on when signing up.
Make no mistake, it's a no brainer to ban a community that is both outwardly hateful, and regularly abuses the rules of the site they're hosted on.
yes and no. It is lesser because it empowers the user to self select if they want to see NSFW items. That is the key.
I put the quarantine on the same level as this, so I have less of an issue with that than if they just banned it outright.
>Is it really censorship if r/t_d had violated numerous Reddit ToS rules?
yes, let me be clear Reddit is perfectly in its legal rights to censor anything they want. They can censor directly all Republicans if they want.
They however can not magically make it not censorship simply because they add a line in their ToS.. that is not how free expression works.
a Website that only allows car related topics censors all speech not related to cars
The problem for Reddit is for years they advertised themselves as a Open Access forum for all topics and discussions, the point 6 font terms of service not with standing.
If reddit has a BIG BOLD header on the HomePage that reads "Conservatives not welcome here" then it would be a different discussion for me
>> outwardly hateful,
Ahh the old "hate speech" non-sense. I reject this premise as "hate speech" is such a subjected term that if you ask 10 people what qualifies as "hate speech" you will get 30 different answers based on context and other things
Further Reddit ignores their own policy on hate speech and promotion of violence provided the speaker is the "correct" political affiliation and that target is the "wrong" political affiliation
I implore you to go to ceddit.com/r/the_donald and look at the mod log. See how many slurs and calls to violence you see being manually approved by their mods.
Reddits content policy, by their own admission today, is subjective and poorly defined.
Further it is beyond denial that admin moderation and crack downs on subreddits is often politically biased. for example it has been shown many times Admins will crack down on "calls to violence" in conservative or "right" subreddits but are hands off in progressive or "left" subreddits.
You ask me to go to ceddit or mod logs to see violence and racism, but what about the left subreddits that have it on display with out having to visit an external site or mod logs?
Platforms shouldn't have the power to completely squash voices but monopoly power and such is a different issue.
If they come out with a clearly defined OBJECTIVE set of rules that is UNIVERSALLY enforced then my objections would disappear
Instead they have a vague subjective list of rules that they selectively enforce largely based on a political bias they continue to publicly deny exists
They claim their site is open to all political leanings and views, if they want to have a liberal version of thedonald.win then more power to them, put up a banner that says "Democrat Supporters Only, This is Reddit. Our community is a high-energy Democrat rally. There are no exceptions." then my objections, and the objections of many would disappear, of course reddit would lose most of its value and traffic, which is why they want to speak out of both sides of their mouth. Reddit is only of high value if it has a large cross section of the public participating.
It does, and it is wonderful if those platforms are following along with the same narrative as you at a given point in time.
Google, Reddit et al. have shown themselves to pretty flexible when it comes to their morals though, particularly when it comes to the needs and wants of the Chinese government and their investors, so while you may be clapping your hands to your ideological opponents being "de-platformed" today, it could very well be you tomorrow.
I recommend this post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-central...
Key excerpt: "There’s an unfortunate corollary to this, which is that if you try to create a libertarian paradise, you will attract three deeply virtuous people with a strong commitment to the principle of universal freedom, plus millions of scoundrels. Declare that you’re going to stop holding witch hunts, and your coalition is certain to include more than its share of witches."
If you have relatively moderate people looking to discuss non-mainstream things without being censored, and they can't do that, then you're forcing them into the witches' dens, where they'll probably become increasingly less moderate and increasingly more paranoid and polarized. They feel like the other side hates them and is out to get them... and in this case, their point is being proven. This is exactly why Trump won in 2016 and why he'll probably win again.
Sure, it certainly isn't profitable or fun to run 8chan, Gab, or Voat if you're the owners, but this is just about the users who don't particularly care what site they're using. They'll just use whatever site won't get rid of them. (Also, it isn't even profitable or fun to run reddit, either.)
And this isn't even getting into the possible ethics of de-platforming and censorship and what should and shouldn't be permitted; just the practical effects. Practically speaking, I don't think it's an effective tactic, if the effect you want is to disempower your opponents. It empowers them and energizes them.
The POTUS has a strong support base, including multiple major media outlets that share information about him. It’s a totally different story. I think he could easily stand up a huge social media network if he needed to, perhaps in collaboration with Fox News.
I remain skeptical. Evidence still seems mixed.
Yes, it seems social medias are effective incubators and accelerators for social pathogens, dominating the attention economy.
But there's also evidence that attention doesn't change minds. If I read this correctly, StarSlateCodex is making the case that media attention about Creationism didn't move the needle about beliefs.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/28/creationism-unchalleng...
I really want someone to explain what's going on.
There's a lot of daylight between censorship and simply not amplifying outrageous behavior.
We could break feedback loops, add friction, disallow retweets (forcing copypasta), not show likes, etc.
Surely you mean "the dynamic we have in the world of reddit today", right? Otherwise, that sounds Bill-Gates-Is-Transmitting-Corona-Over-5G-Towers level insane.
It's not the smoldering powder keg in the middle east, the long looming conflict between the US as the sole imperial super power and the up and coming China contesting their role in SE Asia etc, no. It's really TD, a subreddit where Trump fanatics post memes.
The hypothesis is posed by Yishan Wong, an ex-CEO, with responses from Altman and Ohanian.
edit: I made a mistake understanding this story. Please see the correct timeline in geofft's comment.
- Reddit was acquired by Condé Nast in 2006.
- Founders Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman left in 2009.
- Yishan Wong became CEO in March 2012.
- Reddit raised its Series B in September 2014, led by Sam Altman. Wong was one of the investors.
- Wong resigns in November 2014. Ellen Pao becomes interim CEO and Ohanian becomes executive chairman.
- Reddit introduces an anti-harassment policy and bans fatpeoplehate and other subreddits in early summer 2015.
- Later in the summer, Victoria Taylor is fired. Users hold Pao responsible, she apologizes for how it was handled, and she resigns on July 10 under pressure from the board. Huffman becomes CEO.
- One day later, Wong writes the above post.
- One more day later, Wong reveals on Quora that Ohanian, not Pao, fired Taylor.
Celebrity AMAs just haven't been the same since. She was, in my opinion, one of the best parts of any of the default subs back then. It was very unexpected when she was suddenly gone with no reasonable explanation, and all the AMAs right around then were absolutely garbage. She did a lot for /r/IAmA.
It's hard to know for sure how much she knew about when hired, but without what she'd experienced prior, would she have felt the need to take on this role? Was she viewing her career or reputation in need of rebuilding or strengthening, so that's why she entertained this (and if so, was the outcome expected, or did they throw her under the bus)?
Do you have a source for this?
The courts ruled in Pao v. Kleiner Perkins that Kleiner Perkins did not discriminate against her. I don't think they ruled on whether or not Ajit Nazre sexually harassed her (or others), and evidence for it was presented in the case. I'm pretty sure they did not rule that the allegations were "completely unfounded."
> she was likely just trying to get a settlement to help her dire financial situation
Given the publicity around how her case was the first like it, you'd have to be very, very foolhardy to go into it for financial reasons, especially if you didn't think you had a strong case. And if you were going for a settlement, you wouldn't want it to actually go to court if the other side didn't offer one, you'd just withdraw the lawsuit.
https://www.vanityfair.com/style/scandal/2013/03/buddy-fletc...
The best commentary I read on her case with Kleiner Perkins was it was an imperfect case with imperfect parties. The press presented it as representative of gender discrimination in the valley, but it was really bad actors on both sides. While I didn't have any personal issues with Ellen, I know people who did, and I can absolutely see her taking advantage of the situation, so it was pretty appalling to see people who don't know her making her a champion of women in tech.
When I re-read it today, I finally saw all the obstacles and discrimination that Ellen Pao and Buddy Fletcher had to overcome just to be in a position to be embroiled in scandals like this.
This is potentially veering off-topic, but I think it's entirely reasonable for imperfect people to be champions of women in tech or whatever other causes. I know very few perfect people. (In fact one of the common reactions I heard to Susan Fowler's "very strange year" post is how lucky she was that her own behavior was blameless through that year - certainly all the forces that conspired against her had been at Uber and other companies for years before that, but nobody was able to tell a story where they were so clearly faultless, because, well, everyone's human, and sometimes you misjudge things, get into fights where you're in the wrong, etc.)
And in particular I think it's entirely possible - and entirely consistent with the details in the Vanity Fair story - for an imperfect person to have been quite factually sexually harassed and to have suffered for it.
I found the response from Altman (https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the...) but where is the response from Ohanian?
https://www.wired.com/2015/07/reddit-ceo-ellen-pao-steps-dow...
Turns out only allowing speech that you deem acceptable makes for a pretty boring internet forum.
I'm guilty of engaging in discussing politics here (and tried to do so in a factual and respectful manner) but it's pointless. It just becomes people talking past each other and generates arguments rather than dialog.
You can argue for most points of view here, so long as you remain within their decency guidelines. Obviously HN won't tolerate certain extreme ideas that involve genocidal camps, killing people, violence or racism, that you might see bubble up out of eg the pro fascist or pro communist camps.
If there are 20 slices in a gradient of political ideology in the US (as an example), HN will allow you to very freely argue 18 of them, only dropping the extreme left and right (both of which commonly involve arguing for murder, racism, genocide, oppression, gulags, forced re-education camps, violence and countless other horrible things).
If you go into the largest political sections of Reddit arguing strongly (but decently) for Trump, you'll get moderated because the mods won't like you. That doesn't happen on HN, Dang will mostly leave your opinions alone (you will get downvoted though), so long as you are arguing in a way that isn't belligerent.
I think that's a stark contrast with reddit, where being a dick is often excused if one has the right ideology. Not to mention that many subreddits (especially, but not exclusively, the political ones) have become carefully maintained echo chambers thanks rules against disagreeing with even a single facet of the "correct" beliefs. r/The_Donald even had an explicit "no dissent" rule.
I believe this policy is actually responsible for political subreddits there being so consistently toxic. The site’s moderation encourages extreme ideological echo chambers to form in which members can be almost arbitrarily uncivil as long as they exist within that community’s ideology.
It's what you don't see, friend.
I too miss the old forums you had dedicated to one thing and set up by volunteers who liked that one thing and weren't interested in growth above all.
Besides, it was effectively shut down, and all that did was lead to the creation of thedonald.win, which by all appearances seems to be thriving and growing rapidly, probably much faster than Reddit itself grew when it was founded. To blame the situation on a forum is to misunderstand that the country is filled with people with these viewpoints regardless (and it has been for far longer than anyone today has been alive).
Feel free to disabuse me of my misconception if I misunderstand. But it sounds an awful lot like what some people say when you try to call out racist cops: “We’re just scapegoating someone for saying aloud what all the police are thinking. It’s a waste of time.”
You don't end up on thedonald.win by chance, you go there purposefully. For a long time /r/t_d wasn't quarantined at all meaning anyone browsing /r/all would see their posts all day long (since they were pretty good at mass upvoting their own posts for that purpose).
I don't think anyone advocates for entirely banning this community from the internet, freedom of speech is still important, but just not have it in a place where it might get surfaced and advertised to people that weren't looking for it. So to me, thedonald.win and /r/t_d are very different.
I feel like that's only right and correct; in a sufficiently-large community (i.e. a society), anyone intentionally exposing themselves to "everything" should be prepared to view the worst of the worst (of the worst) of "everything." That's what "everything" means!
Honestly, I don't get why /r/all even exists, if it's not there for the people who want to voluntarily immerse themselves in a soul-destroying experience. It's a Total Perspective Vortex. (It thus perplexes me why Reddit—a corporation with PR concerns—would keep it around. It's not something a corporation would want to provide, even if it's something some strange people would like to consume.)
Imagine for a moment what the /r/all equivalent for Usenet would be like. Or the /r/all equivalent for "phpBB forums." Or /r/all for Wordpress blogs. Kind of ridiculous to even want that, no? It'd have no purpose other than instilling existential terror.
I'd venture to guess /r/all exists for the same reason the Facebook News Feed exists: to increase engagement with the site. It's a curation mechanism that amplifies the already popular items within the sub communities, and exposes them to the community at large in a virtuous (vicious?) cycle.
That would be ok if you saw that in propotion. The issue is when you have a group of people intentionally gaming the upvote system, making /r/all inundated with alt-right content (tbf, /r/t_d weren't the only one doing that), completly skewing what you see.
It's basically the same issue with all social platform, yes everyone should have the right to express their views, but mass amplification via the platform's algorithm shouldn't be a right.
Right. No amplification is the solution. /r/all and the homepage need to be removed. Left wing subs and right wing subs should exist in peaceful isolation and subs like AHS which try to police what other subs are doing should be shut down.
I'm sure that would negatively impact Reddit's income, however.
That’s not a problem with the way the algorithm counts votes. That’s just a mathematical voting-theory problem with comparing votes between disparate populations that are each motivated-to-vote for different reasons, and thus using “one vote” to mean something different within each community.
Or, to put that more simply: “karma” is non-fungible. It works fine to rank posts within a subreddit, but it’s entirely meaningless for ranking posts between different subreddits.
———
But that still ignores the greater issue. Things wouldn’t be “fine” even if some ideal inter-subreddit karma exchange-rate was reached. Keep in mind that some subreddits are “quarantined”, which essentially means that their weighting for appearing in /r/all is forced to 0.
In other words, /r/all isn’t just sorting badly; it also requires a bunch of manual overrides to its computed weights, in order to function.
IMHO, that’s not really a satisfactory algorithm. Maybe it’s practical for serving some purpose (e.g. making money), but that kludge-factor means that it isn’t actually doing what it claims to do: telling you about the activity happening across “all of Reddit.”
A “real” /r/all wouldn’t take quarantines into account. It’d just be the view that any third party would compute by scraping every subreddit, throwing all the posts into a table, and ordering by score descending. And that view is the one I mean when I say “soul-destroying.”
Let me restate my premise: a proper /r/all—one that truly delivers on the use-case it claims to deliver on—is just... not something anyone wants.
There are various other arguments to make, such as the rpevelance of posts encouraging violence that aren't covered under freedom of speech, or that reddit does not have to follow free speech rules in the first place.
> just not have it in a place where it might get surfaced and advertised to people that weren't looking for it.
You're going to have to pick one of these two statements. If freedom of speech is important then let the audience determine what makes it to the front page. If freedom of speech isn't important than hide content you don't like and continue building your own bubble.
Absolutly not. Repeating myself from a bit further down:
It's basically the same issue with all social platform, yes everyone should have the right to express their views, but mass amplification via the platform's algorithm shouldn't be a right.
Also,
> let the audience determine what makes it to the front page
/r/t_d was gaming the upvote system to have way more posts on /r/all that they would have had 'naturally', making this whole point moot. It wasn't determined by what the audience wanted to see, it was determined by a small brigade of motivated people.
Mass amplification via a platform's algorithm is not a big step above the old ways, and the platform owner does not seem to have much better divine wisdom than past kings.
Gaming Reddit's upvote system is however directly prohibited by the ToS:
> [...] the following behaviors are prohibited on Reddit:
* Asking for votes or engaging in vote manipulation [...]
This is dangerous for many reasons but particularly, what happens if something is deemed wrong think when it is objectively more true than the "right think"?
censorship does not help you win the debate.
why won't reddit police left-wing content and calls for violence? all I want is transparency.
Is a very reductive position to take and blatently antiscientific about what we know how racist ideologies spread.
Does she mean that it should have been done sooner?
When Pao said:
"Ultimately, the board asked me to demonstrate higher user growth in the next six months than I believe I can deliver while maintaining Reddit’s core principles."
Some, and I agree with them, interpreted this as Pao being the one that actually tried to keep reddit more of a discussion/free-speech site (the "core principles" she referred to), and the mob was wrong all along. Therefore, on the surface, either we were completely wrong, or Pao is changing the narrative today.
Either way, and it goes without saying, there's far more going on here than anyone outside of the board room knows.
I just don't know how much of a responsibility reddit has in strong-arming sub-reddits that are communities, whether we like them or not. So I struggle with Ellen's indictment.
It makes it seem like Reddit is a root level cause for where we are at today -- It's not, and is only a symptom. I believe it is unfair to say reddit, and their (somewhat) hands off approach to moderation inside a "community" is somehow the cornerstone to these ills, or that it did something to 'amplify' them
I was stating what I still believe is a factual observation. I didn't claim or imply that other generations could not or were not radicalized throughout history. I wasn't suggesting that only young males can be radicalized, that reddit is the only place it can happen, that only right-wing entities have ever radicalized people, or that their opinions are somehow novel.
Would you would like to argue that the groups associated with "gamergate" weren't on reddit, weren't radicalized, weren't radicalized by right-wing entities, weren't young, and/or weren't generally male?
Lots of people that cared about gamergate weren't "radicalized", they were pissed off. But mostly I'd argue that they are no different than their fathers or grandfathers. Those generations wouldn't have identified as gamers because that wasn't a thing back then, much like they wouldn't shout obscenities in Twitch chat, because that too didn't exist. They'd shout pretty much the same obscenities elsewhere though.
I had just started eighth grade when I moved to a very small town in Mississippi. On my first day a group of white kids invited me to sit with them. They decided the best way to break the ice would be to tell me heinous racist jokes. For example, somebody would tell a “joke” about how they’d like to hang Obama from their Christmas tree and everybody would burst into laughter.
All that is to say that I don’t think their opinions are different than those who raised them. They were children and had to have learned it from somebody.
But they would never express their racism outside of small white groups because they knew at some level it was wrong.
At some point in my teenage years I noticed a shift among these “friends”. They had joined online groups that echoed their sentiments and argued that it wasn’t wrong to be racist but rather it just makes you “woke” to go against the crowd. They think they’re just seeing the world differently.
One guy in particular would say heinous racist things and immediately follow it up with something like “I’d rather die than live under communism”. He had become radicalized. He was no longer a closeted racist boy. Now he’s a fully grown racist man filled with vitriol.
I am definitely seeing opinions that aren't mainstream, and I have seen some subs self-radicalize. Self-radicalization seems mostly a consequence of more egregious things being upvoted more (e.g I don't even dare think what r/badcopnodonut looks like now) and a refusal to discuss things people see as issues. There is no reason on earth that gamegate went right wing, but the mainstream media sent hate their way and so they shifted away from those.
To play devil's advocate, here are some potential negative consequences of censorship:
1) Censored communities may still find other uncensored platforms to move their speech to, and it may be a platform even worse for fostering "bad" speech that is hidden from the public and festers in the dark. For example, Islamic terrorists do pretty well without connecting their members on Reddit or Twitter, and as such, we don't really have an insight into the state of their thoughts.
2) Best case scenario is that banned speech and thought becomes repressed in society due to the difficulty in these people connecting/sharing ideas. This creates a latent risk as at some point all these repressed people may realize they are not alone in thought. It also delays the cure to the problem by treating the symptom.
This brings me to my point that racism, bigotry, and prejudice largely stem from a lack of understanding, experience, and fear. Silencing hate speech or thought is just treating the symptom of the problem. Hiding symptoms and ignoring the underlying causes will result in the disease breeding—in the worst case in the dark—until it becomes explosive. If you address them and fight them by educating, and showing, and assuaging their fears, this will do much more than a temporary censorship will fix for the long term.
Racists are people too, and often just misguided. Censorship, eradication, and vilification are only really viable strategies if you truly believe these people are intrinsically evil and irredeemable. Such tactics will just push them deeper into their entrenched thoughts and solidify their understanding that others don't care about why they think a certain way, but that it's just an Us vs Them fight (which of course they are already inclined towards). See China's handling of Falun Gong. There's no doubt that Chinese elimination strategies towards Falun Gong just entrenched its supporters and gave the Scientology-esque movement more strength than it could have otherwise derived.
So yeah, while a lot of people, including me, hate the changes, it is obviously better for the business, as it attracts a wider range of users. But still, I'm starting to use Reddit less and less, and relying on RSS and HN to get my daily dose of tech news and discussions.
What's frightening is that groups like politicians, unions, and extreme right-wing groups could very easily use this technique to quickly and pretty effectively promote or quell discussion.
I just recently saw an example of where this might have happened. Very suddenly a comment in a discussion I was following - what initially was a popular up-voted opinion (i.e discussing police brutality) - got down-voted into oblivion (from +5 to -25) in less than 5 minutes. The comment was deleted soon after - probably to protect their score.
This kind of quick/easy manipulation by bots can't be easy to detect/deal with yet I fear it may become mainstream.
Unfortunately for reddit, the site owes its existence to the users who built communities there, and when heavy-handed changes are introduced in classic reddit fashion (invariably user-hostile changes with little to no advance warning nor recourse), the users rightfully feel their senses of ownership being offended.
LinkedIn (2002): You know who has money? People with jobs. Or people looking to give people jobs.
MySpace (2003): Webpages for people who don't webpage or understand contrast. Also my favorite song auto-playing ON THE INTERNET.
The Facebook (2004): Realization that most people suck at graphic design. You'll be shocked to learn what your friends and family believe! Ooh, there's a lot of money in gaming -> targeted advertising -> web tracking.
Reddit (2005): Remember why people used BBSs? Reddit does! Condé Nast doesn't. YCombinator does! Wait, volunteer admins have their own thoughts?
Twitter (2006): Here's a single speech / thought bubble above my head + how I feel about others' bubbles.
Tumblr (2007): I hate apps, but love pictures. Yahoo: We're still cool!
WhatsApp (2009): Remember when you could do everything from the Yahoo! homepage? WhatsApp does! Facebook: Hungry... CHOMP.
Instagram (2010): Pictures are more important than words. Photos for people who don't Lightroom. I'm going to be a photographer / model someday. Facebook: ... don't mention us here. No wait, do. No wait, don't.
Snapchat (2011): The worst thing about social media is people being able to read my old posts. Ooh, there's money in gamifying Facebook to boost engagement metrics.
Google+ (2011): SOMEONE SAID I CAN HAVE MY OWN SOCIAL MEDIA ON THE INTERNET. Internet: Okay, boomer.
Telegram (2013): Security for people who don't attend PGP signing parties.
Mastodon / Fediverse (2016): Give me freedom or give me de... hold on, let me update my settings, something br--. Internet: Okay, rms.
TikTok (2016): Memes for people who don't Photoshop.
China: {Cambrian explosion}. As long as the name is two, repeated consonants. And the logo is a racoon.
Why not just stay with Reddit?
Also it's not federated, but I like hubski.com
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
Littr seems to be federated too:
That's about it for federated Reddit alternatives, at least that I can find. And I don't think the federated aspect has caught on yet for either.
First, you need access to a news server. These folks offer a free public one: https://www.aioe.org/ There are also other paid news servers but I don't want to advertise for them.
You also need an NNTP (Usenet) client. I use "slrn" which is a command line app. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Usenet_newsreaders for some others.
Once you find one, you'll need to point it to the news server of your choice (nntp.aioe.org in this example.)
Good luck discovering Usenet! Most groups are not too active.
Surely the popularity of content could be purely determined by the actual amount of clicks a given article/topic is given in a certain amount of time?
Also, it has a major problem: if users know that popularity is based on clicks, then they can't click on anything they might disagree with (to simply learn more about it) without amplifying the signal as well. The incentives of user behavior are changed in to a self-censorship of what the user allows themselves to read, likely enforcing bubbles even more.
Reddit does not want to establish a thoughtful community. Much like Facebook, Buzzfeed, etc. it relies on virtue/outrage to sell ads.
The other day I unsubscribed from a popular Javascript mailing list, after the writer switched from writing about Javascript to writing about how white people and black people should interact.
Or rather I didn't unsubscribe right away: I emailed the writer politely and mentioned how I prefer posts to be about the thing that unites us: Javascript.
Their response: "my platform, my voice", "all tech is political", "this mailing list isn't for you", and later on Twitter: people who unsubscribed are racist and should "eat shit".
I don't believe I'm racist. It's just that I signed up for Javascript tips and the writer switched to politics (in this case, the politics of a country and culture I don't live in).
I'm no more interested in their political views than they are in mine. On the internet, nobody needs to know I'm a dog.
These people have become paralyzed and unable to function normally. They allow world events to bleed into every conversation, and feel obligated to support their side and ostracizing anyone that disagrees - further isolating them in their bubble.
I think that social media has increased society's emotional surface area to world events. We no longer isolate 30-60 minutes per day to watch balanced reports on the 6 o'clock news - now it's all the time, hyperbolic, and often deceptive.
Our emotions are being weaponized - and November is going to be a real wake-up call where we will see the magnitude of disruptive power that these polarized social media messages can wield.
Whereas the third option, "I'm just here for Javascript tips", wasn't even under consideration.
So unless you engage with and echo their politics, you fall into the enemy camp by default.
This aspect of HN is specifically WHY I feel welcome here and WHY the content + conversation is consistently of higher quality relative to other forums...It's actually one of the few places left online where this feature remains.
Edit: Snark aside, his actions and financial commitments to various organizations (as well as some of his future earnings) are commendable. If more founders and executives took these actions the world would be a better place. There's always more that can be done, but that shouldn't stop us from committing smaller actions as well.
I think this November is going to illustrate just how much of an echo chamber it is, and it will go the way of so many other failed sites before it.
- I applaud anybody who takes a moral stand, especially if it might cost them something they hold dear.
- Whenever people complain about social media, the usual response is "But these are private properties. People can do what they like with them." I agree that this is the role of private property
- It's a fact that these social media networks operate because of the network principle, that is, it's much easier to get into than to get out of. It's also a fact that just a few media sites control the vast majority of online conversation and commerce
- Might it not have been useful for this moral stance to have been taken much earlier? First, you made your money and built your company. Walking off now isn't exactly standing in the soup line next week. Second, lots of folks are stuck with your product that might now be changing its operating parameters. Third, there's no way to predict what future event might cause even more changes.
Once again, kudos for reaching inside and doing a gut check. Life is full of a bunch of people, all with different opinions and points where they would change their mind. That's a good thing, but is this just something that keeps getting more and more restrictive over time? If so, might want to put that on your sign-up page, perhaps periodically remind folks. (This is a rhetorical question aimed at every service that does what reddit does online)
I also applaud anyone who takes a moral stand about what they are willing to do, especially if it might cost them something they hold dear.
If that moral stand involves enforcing a standard of conduct on others, then it's anywhere from slightly to extremely more complicated. Enforcing behavior on others for the perceived benefit of all has been responsible for some major problems in the past (for example, not allowing people to express their sexuality), so let's be careful how much we throw in with those pushing to instill a level of behavior on those who want a place of their own to speak freely (to take as an example another part of the comments here, where Ellen Pao calls out Ohanian re: the_donald).
Many of us may support it in this case because it aligns with our values of inclusion and tolerance towards others (even if it's sort of a catch-22), but it's not like leaders of moral charges haven't been known to go too far before, nor like movements haven't been co-opted by other interests before.
Edit: Clarified where the example I was referring to came from, since that might have been confusing in isolation.
You can have a series of these things over a few decades and then suddenly end up in a much different spot than when you started out. Humans have done this before. More than once. In fact, it's probably the natural outcome of situations like this and requires some sort of strong provisions to keep it from naturally happening over and over again. It's not like any of this is new.
A lot of people seem hell-bent that this is not the case, however. I'm curious to see if they're able to look at their own actions from just a small remove. If so, why? If not, why? These are technical, UX questions. They might involve sensitive matters, but that's only the more important reason for working them out.
All UI/UX issues shouldn't be about some version of wringing another .4% of sign-ups out of the funnel. There are things that are more important by orders of magnitude.
I'm not getting into whether it's right or not to have a code of conduct, just whether these statements or actions are really deserving of much if anything.
What I find most interesting about all of this "woke" behavior from Ellen Pao and Alexis Ohanian is this:
A few years ago, when racism was brought up on social media during the 2016 US election and a Canadian federal election, Alexis publicly pushed back.
Similarly, activists complained that Pao hired people who had worked at Reddit and previously discounted policies against homophobic, bigoted, racist, etc subreddits and comments/harassment.
People like these were in charge of a world famous, social media site where they were more aware than many others in tech about the very things they are now aghast over.
To me, it's a bit like if I'm telling a software manager about bugs in some banking application that can sometimes deduct money from random accounts and they're like "Ship it, ship it anyway!" lol.
Ever been to r/science? 8/10 comments are deleted and those posts can't be read ever again (I'm understating that number, if anything). Honestly, half the reason I come here is because you can still view dead comments - censorship is a surefire way to get me to leave your community.
Silencing/hiding content has the opposite intended effect on those being silenced, to those wondering why it's a bad thing.
The subreddits with laissez-faire moderation policies invariably get taken over by nasty interactions.
Bad example - people frequently go to r/science posts when they hit the front page and toss in non-scientific anecdotal evidence, or they will argue with the post using bad science, or they will offer their non-scientific 2 cents on the politics of a study.
The reason why content-heavy subs r/science and r/AskHistorians haven't devolved into the cesspool that is the rest of Reddit is specifically because they keep everyone on topic. You know, actually moderating the discussion.
The main rule that gets comments deleted: "Comments that only rely on a user's non-professional anecdotal evidence to confirm or refute a study will be removed".
It's just not useful to have those types of comments on a science based thread.
Of course, it's hard to audit the moderators. We don't know if they're deleting comments outside of their rules as well.
Note that this is clearly spelled out in the subreddit rules, and is by design. 8/10 comments on reddit as a whole are jokes, anecdotes, off topic, or simply low quality. /r/science tries to promote high-quality discussion of actual science, does so by heavy moderation, and doesn't pretend they're not deleting most comments.
Personally, I am very happy all the cruft is deleted there.
I'm not saying there's no abuse of power, but /r/science is bad example to put forward when the rules are clearly spelled out and enforced.
I would guess that is a significant underestimate. I had one post become reasonably popular, and I was amazed at how awful, low quality, and incredibly redundant the replies were. 99% of all the top level replies were some version of the same low-effort comment.
I could then filter comments by what I was looking for. Between that and the meta-moderation, they did a great job.
I would love to see something similar on reddit. Instead of mindless updoots. Or maybe let me filter out comments that aren't at least n characters long?
(Or, maybe train a classifier to detect puns and hide them :)
The biggest problem would be bad actors. Internet discussions in the late 90's probably had more good faith participants. People chosen for moderation would be more likely to take it seriously. In ways both good and bad, the culture was very different then.
I (possibly naively) still think the majority of people online are acting in good faith according to whatever they believe. But, with the massive online population increase comes an increase in the absolute numbers of people acting in bad faith. Even if they're still a small percentage of the whole. A Slashdot moderation system would give those trolls, bots, and astroturfers some considerable power to shape the direction of a discussion. Probably would increase the number of bot or sockpuppet accounts in order to snag a greater percentage of the randomly assigned moderation slots.
But, that's just my assumption. Would be interesting to see it tried as an experiment. Maybe for the next Reddit April Fool's project.
Not probably. I think definitely. There were tons of trolls back then, but they were trolling in good faith as well! (I mean that. They just posted shocking and vile things, for the lulz. They didn't promote their corporate brand or try to influence other nations' elections. They were good faith assholes :)
I think you're right. It's a really hard problem to solve; anonymity and reputation are difficult to combine. And meta-moderation itself could be seen as giving even more influence to the power users of these platforms (i.e. /u/gallowboob).
I kick around some ideas now and then about alternative rating and voting systems. Usually in the context of fake Amazon reviews, but the same general problem exists here.
What if users were limited to just 1 vote (up or down) each day? Or x ups and y downs? Whatever. Would that limit the votes on silly one-liner puns and encourage people to spend their precious vote on something more interesting? If you combine that with minimum account ages and maybe some minimum karma, I think it could work. Hell, you could vote more than once if you're willing to spend it out of your own karma. I'm sure I'm missing some aspect that tanks my idea. (Is there something for this like there is for spam-fighting ideas? [0])
If I don't stop tying now, I'm liable to bring up some sort of blockchain solution. And nobody wants that.
I don't think all forums need to operate the same, and it's beneficial that they don't. There should be places for people to say whatever the heck they want, and places that are moderately moderated (heh) and places that are tightly moderated.
Any "top-level" subreddit that is a single-word topic becomes overrun with too many people and also subject to Reddit cultural enforcement, like r/news, r/science, r/pics, etc. If your experience in Reddit is formed mostly by r/all, the popular subreddits, or browsing defaults, you'll suffer.
There's a lot of bot and other obvious spam that we catch with programmatic moderation
The vast majority of comments we manually remove fall into one of four categories:
* Stuff that is just random off topic, nothing to do with the sub
* Stuff we redirect to another sub (politics, relationships, etc)
* Stuff that is scammy, or straight up soliciting
* Stuff that is outright insulting ad hominems. The bad end of this category makes you lose faith in humanity, so you kinda have to turn off your soul when moderating.
So if I had to guess, a good chunk of those deleted r/science comments aren't just "scientific opion with no basis" or "flat earth!", but also things closer the form " \\\\ you \\\\ing \\\\, your \\\\ing mother too, I hope you all \\\\ing burn in hell you \\\\ \\\\\* \\\\\*".
But when you are on the board of directors, you are the boss. In that case resignation is an abdication of leadership and a tacit admission that you have done a poor job.
Not if your board is comprised of 8 other people that own 80% of the company.
I wish Alexis had been more clear about the issues in his statement.
Senior level people in meaningful positions (as opposed to figureheads) are harder to replace, and protest-quitting will have more impact, but in most cases, those impacts tend to be short-term, especially with larger organizations.
But the mods (at least on the popular subreddits) on reddit love to ban anything that isn't far left.
I don't mind echo chambers but the lack of self awareness always rubs me the wrong way.
And yes, even on non-political subreddits politics has taken root. Any time there is a political photo it turns into a full blown political subreddit.
Conservatives are a minority in America, so it makes sense their opinions would be unpopular by virtue of that.
There's nothing that's not political, every aspect of life is political, how we distribute resources, interact with our neighbors, basically everything is political and sidelining political discussion is itself a political act which benefits whoever is currently wielding power.
[1] https://splinternews.com/here-is-the-final-popular-vote-coun...
The Senate holds a conservative majority because it's structured to represent land rather than people, and conservatives are occasionally able to take the House because they use districting to deprive the majority of voters of the majority of representation.
I think it's one thing to say reddit is mostly people'd be leftists, which I agree with, and another to say that conservative opinions are explicitly banned. I think conservative opinions are unpopular and the imbalance makes reddit a poor place to understand the politics of the median person in the US, but non-leftists are allowed.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/fdpixv/city_of_mi...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/f8cdys/bernie_san...
nowadays, it seems like anything unmoderated starts going right. it used to be the opposite.
mildly OT - the only thing they have in common is that they are infiltrated by bots which just serve to amplify the extreme discourse. there are some interesting bot-bait threads on 4chan where people communicate text via obfuscated text images, but bait bots with text replies (i.e. "hillary bad pizzagate"). the bot replies then become obvious because they reply to the bait text which is off-subject, but the real people reply to the text images with obfuscated text images. the bots were right wing extremist and comprised maybe 60% of the replies.
i saw someone had an interesting idea to make a "deep fried" image board or plugin, where text replies are posted as obfuscated images which are unreadable by bots, so people can more easily distinguish bot replies from human. i imagine discourse would improve considerably.
And reddit isn't connected to real life and "mainstream" in any way. In fact they can give Twitter a run for their money based on how disconnected from reality they are.
Try posting anything that is mildly critical of Biden from a slightly further left position on r/politics and see how well you fare.
The fact that all those predictions turned out to be wrong indicates that at least a sizeable percentage of the population is further to the right politically than the majority of Reddit or Twitter seemingly is.
You may not always get banned for having the opposite opinion on topics like those (though it definitely happens in quite a few subreddits), but the point is, the prevailing consensus on those sites is certainly a lot further left than the mainstream as shown by election resultls.
Wow. I think this deserves highlighting. It's powerful and beautiful.
For another example:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-21804506
> Influential US Republican Senator Rob Portman has renounced his opposition to gay marriage. The Ohio senator said he began to change his mind in 2011 after his son, Will, revealed he was gay.
It's great that people change. It's not great that it frequently takes a direct familial relationship to cause it.
It only looks like a bug now because we are insisting on building complex, globalized societal configurations which don't play well with that limitation.
I believe it is called the Empathy Gap:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy_gap
Remember how the conservative establish was anti-marijuana, and before that anti-gay (well, still some are), and before that anti-mixed-race-marriage, and before that anti-long hair?
see, i'm not conservative (i'm absurdly socially liberal and a bit fiscally conservative -- i prefer less taxes and less government spending in general) but it's baffling that people call reddit a "right-wing-cesspool".
if you look at unfiltered /r/all right now, most posts are related to the current protests.
Reddit is comprised of a lot of younger people who are indoctrinated to think in certain ways and haven't ventured far outside of their ideological bubble. So I just chalk it up to that and don't even go there anymore because nothing there adds much to my life other than pointless distraction.
People who have great points against the hive mind are often downvoted into oblivion. It's less of a place for discourse and more a place for voicing agreement. The worst experiences I've had are in the socialist/communist subreddits themselves. I've been banned from those places for saying things like "artists and homemakers are proletariat." I guess if you don't have a hammer in your hand you're just a neo-liberal reactionary??
And sure, T_D is a violent cesspool that should have been gone long ago, but in general I'm sick of social media platforms deciding for us what views are acceptable and what aren't. Their algorithms constantly guide people into weird places that drive engagement but at the expense of critical thought and real public discourse.
I'd much prefer free speech and neutral platforms over corporations deciding what we are to believe. But I suppose reddit's problems are now cultural and that's a more difficult problem to fix than adjusting an algorithm.
i couldn't agree more. i never commented/subbed to the_donald. i added to my /r/all filter and i don't have to see it anymore.
btw, i do that to 99% of all political subs -- i just filter them, and now i don't have to interact. now, do i want them banned? nah, no way -- everyone deserves a place to discuss whatever they want, be it extreme left or extreme right politics. hell, i even disagree with chapo trap house being quarantined! no community should be "quarantined".
The whole left vs right, liberal vs conservative thing is so stupid, but our FPTP voting system and media are happy to keep the fight raging.
that's how i feel -- i want a small government and i want people to do whatever they want with their own bodies while being able to own guns.
people say i'm libertarian, but i don't agree with a lot of libertarian points of view (i still think government has a place in society and i think we do need some social safety net, like public health care and even negative income taxes.).
there's not a box that i feel inside other than "classical liberal" (in the milton friedman sense of the term) but whenever i say that, i' met with either laughter or hate.
honestly, it's quite hard to discuss political issues nowadays on the internet, where everyone is super extreme and if you don't fit any boxes, you get silenced (including here, btw).
I wonder if that's the path reddit is headed towards.
I will say that true conservatism is few and far between, and it doesn't help that the viral strategy the GOP has settled on in recent years is heaps and heaps of outright false or racist memes, so there just isn't much good right leaning content being written or created to begin with that isn't far right.
I would say that Reddit began as libertarian, and is now far-left.
In the same way that Biden, who pushed Reagan from the right on 'tough on crime' laws, is portrayed as the far-left.
I don't remember it that way. I remember it being very libertarian (Ron Paul was the Bernie Sanders of 2000's reddit) for a very long time. I believed that the shift to a left-wing orientation was organic and representative of the general population UNTIL the whole T_D thing came along... T_D was doing the same thing, pulling the site to the right, until Reddit's owners worked overtime to make sure that didn't happen. That makes me suspect that the liberalism was also artificial.
In terms of the user base, I definitely remember early Reddit having a strong libertarian bent, or at least significant conflict between libertarians and more mainstream leftists. Things seemed to shift left roughly when the Digg influx happened.
1) Group Isolation. You can be banned from groups and not the platform. This allows for the notion of being toxic in a specific context, but not in the broader context, which I don't believe is possible. Either you are a toxic user, or not. If not, disagreeing with the zeitgeist of a specific group should be a welcome part of the groups discourse, otherwise the group only serves to radicalize.
2) Free for all discourse. If everyone gets an unlimited platform, the loudest and most absurd will speak the most, and subsequently be heard the most. You need level, artificial, limits to how much a single person can contribute to any given discussion in order for it to be balanced.
When switching from a physical medium to discuss things, to a digital medium, we lost key limiting factors which helped free speech be an effective way for society to operate. You can only yell so loud and at so many people on a street corner, and you can only avoid hearing others' opinions so much when leaving your house. The internet has done away with both of those, and an ideal platform for discussion needs some mechanism of providing both.
Yup. It starts from the top and trickles down. Thats why the U.S is so far gone.
The funny thing is we will all be talking about a new case in the future. Then another high profile person will be throwing money at the situation. Maybe something different is needed?
Also how on earth are certain subreddits still up and running is just beyond me.
I'm not american but does racial quotas have any support? Say every company should have X% of N races on the board? South Africa for example have something like this in their (still majority white) sports teams.
There's huge support for both it and gender quotas, but they're wrapped up in "Diversity & Inclusion" initiatives that focus outcome equity over opportunity equity.
Somewhat ironically you'll also find that the ranks of D&I in corporate and academic America are overwhelmingly filled with white women.
> "Poll results vary widely, for example, according to specific question wordings. In general, historical polling data show that Americans have an overall positive view toward "affirmative action" and programs that increase opportunities for minorities, so long as these do not confer an unfair advantage for minorities in the form of "preferential treatment" or "lower standards."
More concretely, compare the following proposition:
> "Setting quotas for the number of racial minorities hired or accepted, but requiring them to meet the same standards as others (66% favor, 32% oppose)"
To this one:
> "Setting quotas for the number of racial minorities hired or accepted even if it means lowering the standards in order to make up for past discrimination (18% favor, 79% oppose)"
Source: https://news.gallup.com/poll/7660/gallup-brain-bakke-affirma...
A) Keep the core platform as open as possible, almost like a protocol (I.e. http doesn't care who says what.)
B) Build/invest in community-driven monitoring tools that users can select to filter the content.
I was in San Diego for some college stuff last Summer, and became friends with a fairly eccentric/successful dude through an even more eccentric hobby we shared... And out of nowhere, he starts dating Alexis's like... First cousin.
Anyways, Alexis seems like a great guy, family seems pretty great and well rounded (I say this because of how she described their yearly reunions)... yeah. Life's weird :O
It's happening too slowly and at high cost to everyone.
Information- and systems-dynamics suggest to me strongly otherwise. Mencken and Barnum seem validated.
That's how society has evolved when a Norm is violated specifically in the public square you get thrown in the Drunk Tank for a night to sober up.
The way he said BLACK candidate also feels really weird. We get it - you want to virtue signal. Make it a little less obvious.
So now it's the truest propaganda machine, you're saying. Approved users only for consumption by a dedicated subscriber base.
Edit: Also the sidebar says there are 600 active users. I assume that includes me following your link. For comparison /r/news has ~68,000 users as of this writing.
Also, quarantined != banned. It's still on reddit, and those users spread out onto other non-quarantined subreddits and spew the same kind of garbage.
Ban the cesspools and most of those people will actually leave the site for good, as what drew them to it in the first place is now gone. You also no longer have any cesspools serving as negative guideposts for making bad contributions. So if you moderate your site well, and just get rid of this kind of stuff, it ends up much better in the long run.
Honestly, I'd've thought anti-police-brutality people would prefer them to share such things publicly for screenshotting purposes and etc.
E.g from yesterday https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/gwgv6i/awfully_...
Conspiracy theories used to more neutral like 5 years ago. Now they're exclusively far right and anti-liberal.
plus: There are regular calls to murder all cops these days on reddit. In plain sight. Just imagine what would happen for any of those "bad" subs if they wouldn't remove those within seconds.
>TLOU2 Just some choice picks from a recent thread [2]
"Everyone that is part on lgbtq should go live on an island. I wanna see how long you last. Since you hate straight people. And dont know how to reproduce because you think ass holes feel better than pussy."
"They'd need migration to reach replacement level for their plummetting birth rates "
"Because their fuckery and meddling has brought us to this, be gay in silence instead of shoving ity down everyone's throat. You are the fucking minority. LGBTQ is an evolutuionary dead-end for a reason"
"SJWs need to be castrated. Yikes."
"Gays are parasites. They don’t reproduce but steal instead, corrupting the youth through pedophilia. See: Milo. See: Steve Huffman. Many such cases!"
>unpopular_opinion It used to be pretty questionable a few months ago, but maybe it got better. I haven't really bothered staying up to date on it.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/eho1nb/remi... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/TheLastOfUs2/comments/g9825v/what_t...
nope.
The horrors we ban for are usually considered (by their submitters) to be perfectly normal, and we often have people starting debates with us about our own rules because other subreddits permit passive bigotry across race, gender, orientation, etc.
There's a lot. You've just closed your eyes to it. We've had mods quit because of the volume of crap.
We don't tolerate intolerance, and mindful consent is a pre-requisite for all things. That's it.
Amazing how much that weeds out. :)
Two things:
1. Post: "After 10 years of marriage, today my husband didn't say good morning back to me. Is that normal?"
These should be reported - they fall afoul of the moral judgment rule. The subreddit is focused specifically on requests for advice, not retrospective analysis. Because of the volume of moral judgment posts we receive, we tend to ban submitters for a day simply because it's written both into the rules and as a pinned post on the sub.
2. "OMG the monster is probably planning to kill you, you must leave him at once and ruin his life."
We're not empowered to do anything about these - the only solution we have is to suggest that people try to disregard guidance that screams "dump" without going into why.
>People are being radicalized on your site. Ideological violence—murder—is committed by people who were heavily involved in hate communities on reddit that are still not banned as of today. All you jellyfish can muster up is some finger wagging and a yellow triangle to let them know that they've been so naughty that they get an ad-free experience and the inability to give reddit money through awards. Here I am wishing every subreddit could be so privileged.
But even if it wasn't a personal issue to him, I'm more disturbed by the number of people who 100% fail to engage with an issue and dismiss it as virtue signalling, as if a person couldn't authentically care about the issue.
Yes, Ohanian is a rich guy, but by stepping away from his role at reddit, it is foregoing likely future income. He is going to spend time working on these issues. Why is that so easy to dismiss?
I don't know if their desire to please advertisers is responsible for the fact that it's now a ragebait click farm, but it sure seems like they are connected.
Also, please don't post flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments generally. You've been doing that a lot lately, and we eventually penalize or ban such accounts.
That is not "signal". Voices like mine and the few others are though. And they are certainly not predictable as they're literally against the overwhelming majority of homogeneous posts in the other direction. The following downward spiral is evidently caused by the majority who doubles and triples down on their virtue signalling - not the people causing the signal/"trouble".
Now I know what you really mean of course. You don't want dissenting opinions. But you shouldn't frame this as a SNR issue.
This has nothing to do with not wanting dissenting opinions. That's a cheap thing to say, because everyone always feels like the mods are against their side and secretly supporting the other. The issue is that your comment was obviously in the flamewar style.
Please stop using HN for ideological battle. We've had to warn you about this more than once before.
https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/gxas21/upcom...
The "for my country" part is just dramatic posturing.
Reddit thrived because it was a platform for all misfits - not just left wing misfits.
Aaron Swartz is rolling in his grave. He felt it was better that extremists be exposed in the light of day rather than be hidden on private chat boards. He also would have been against dark patterns to make people install a phone app so Reddit can spy on your telemetry for advertisers.