Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies”
old.reddit.com
old.reddit.com
They sometimes come up with measures like this, while routinely ignoring the development of horrible communities that they're aware of (since some users take any possible opportunity to mention them to the admins and are met with silence or half measures).
They even came up with the concept of quarantined subreddits. I honestly can't think of a single honest reason for them existing. Once you've deemed a community so harmful that you don't want people accidentally stumbling into it, why go out of your way to allow it to exist behind a curtain, instead of just outright banning it (unless you want to support it discreetly).
To be clear, I'm not accusing reddit admins of shadily supporting horrible communities. I'm just saying that, from the perspective of a user that sees them fight the battle, they're doing it so badly that it almost seems they don't want to win, and I wonder what's happening behind the scenes for that to happen.
I suspect this is the reason. I observed the opposite, a certain type of content disappearing after a separate comunity was created for it.
Take a look: https://voat.co/
Reddit is clearly a leftwing site now in ways that it wasnt when it started (when libertarian was the dominant ethos). All their "common word" reddits, such as news, politics, technology science are purely leftist echo chambers by now. The few rightwing corners left are already isolated and ready to make the move. In fact they may even decide they should jump ship. What better time for /r/t_d to go somewhere else than now, when people's interest is intensely focused in elections and they can easily rally all their users to follow them. Wherever they go, more people of other persuasions will follow, because people love telling other people that they are wrong on the internet.
The question is if those other competitors can stand the traffic and whether they give the features to moderators that reddit does.
If someone wants to provide an alternative to reddit but they don’t want to moderate/censor content that makes people uncomfortable, Reddit becomes the lesser evil.
That would be the company which owns reddit, through the admins. Is it fair? No, it isn't, but reddit has no requirement to be fair (although it would be nice if it was).
The same people that deems them worth quarantining, presumably.
We could have a debate of the benefits and drawbacks of moderation, but by the time you have quarantines in place, the ship of not considering yourself a moderator has long sailed, which is why it doesn't make sense for me as a measure.
No more.
That presumes some sort of equal playing field and a meritocracy of ideas.
That's clearly not the case. The reality is that good-faith content takes more effort than bad-faith content.
The 2016 US Election in particular showed us what happens when a platform takes a "hands off" approach - platforms become absolutely saturated with false, hateful information... much of it produced by large and even state-level organizations.
It's not just evident when it comes to political content.
Craigslist. Amazon. Etc. None of these platforms work with a completely laissez-faire approach on behalf of the platform owners. To think otherwise is utterly naive.
Platforms need to curate. There's no other way. Yes, this means we will need to place trust in those platforms and monitor their curation. Platforms will, in turn, have an obligation to be transparent w.r.t. how they curate.
And yet, presumably you were able to employ critical thinking, see past all this, and vote the "right" way despite an alleged deluge of hateful misinformation, as were 48%, a majority, of your fellow voters.
Where is the evidence that the level of misinformation is any higher now than in the past, or that censorship (whether by public or private entities) is suddenly a desirable thing?
History has shown that we didn't need to censor and oppress Communist thought in the US during the Cold War because of its alleged threat, and even because Communist thought was being supported by foreign actors. In the upshot, communism discredited itself just fine, and in the meantime, our censorship made us intellectually and morally poorer. Why should things be any different with the new far right?
Where is the evidence that the level of misinformation is any higher now than in the past,
History has shown that we didn't need to censor and oppress Communist
thought in the US during the Cold War because of its alleged threat,
and even because Communist thought was being supported by foreign actors
1. "Communists" had no way to create and disseminate information on such a massive scale, in a manner that is nearly indistinguishable from good-faith actors. There's no analog for that in the Cold War's "Red Scare".
2. During the Red Scare, the possibility of Russia infiltrating and influencing the US to any real degree was laughable. It's not laughable now. It demonstrably happened and is happening.
3. "Censorship" is when a person is not allowed to express their views. That is not what is being proposed here. This is about refusing to hand a megaphone to bad actors.
Reality does not conform to your ideals of an egalitarian marketplace of ideas. Content farms with modest funding and modest staffs can outproduce and out-influence millions of regular voices. Relying upon the populace to suddenly become savvy is not realistic. Either we need to turn this into a full-scale information war of competing content farms and state-scale misinformation campaigns, or platform providers need to combat things at that level.
And yet, presumably you were able to employ critical thinking, see past
all this, and vote the "right" way despite an alleged deluge of hateful
misinformation, as were 48%, a majority, of your fellow voters.
I also have an IQ in the 90-99th percentile range, a degree in computer science and have been immersed in online culture since before web browsers existed.
The vast majority of the human race does not have those sorts of advantages. Realize that the HN demographic is not representative of the entire human race.
> 3. "Censorship" is when a person is not allowed to express their views. That is not what is being proposed here. This is about refusing to hand a megaphone to bad actors.
Censorship, historically, was preventing objectionable books from being published. In many forms of censorship, there was nothing theoretically preventing an author of objectionable books from handwriting them and distributing them privately, so long as they didn't draw too much attention to themselves. The historical censors could have made an identical argument to yours: they were merely depriving the objectionable view of a "megaphone" (the publisher), not eliminating the view entirely.
But given what you have asserted above about the importance of breadth of reach for views, it would seem to me that preventing a view from being widely disseminated in any practical way to people who would otherwise freely choose to read or hear the view is the very essence of censorship.
But more broadly, my real problem with your viewpoint is perfectly exemplified here:
> I also have an IQ in the 90-99th percentile range...
> Relying upon the populace to suddenly become savvy is not realistic.
Firstly, with deep respect, this is incredibly arrogant. But nevertheless, you may be right about this, that only the enlightened and educated few can discern truth from falsity and make informed choices.
But if you are right, don't you see that this undermines the bedrock assumptions and principles of democracy? The masses must be led, and shown the "right" information and protected from the "wrong" information? By whom? And what is to prevent those elite and enlightened few from acting in their own interests rather than those of the ignorant mob?
I see within your argument, which may not be factually wrong, a powerful argument in favor of authoritarianism and oligarchy. Any argument that leads to such conclusions is worth a fair amount of scrutiny, no?
Even if it is a fiction that all voters are equally intelligent and informed, sometimes we have found that certain fictions are very important prerequisites for creating a desirable society. For example, the fiction that "all men are created equal". They aren't. But we use that fiction in very important ways to create a more just and equal society. Another is the fiction of free will. Free will does not exist. But still, we treat people as if they had free will, because the alternative is disempowering and decouples people from any responsibility for their actions.
So, I think "the demos makes more-or-less informed choices that are more-or-less in its own self-interest" is another of those necessary fictions, necessary to prevent us from regressing to feudalism or worse.
Firstly, with deep respect, this is incredibly arrogant.
But nevertheless, you may be right about this, that only
the enlightened and educated few can discern truth from
falsity and make informed choices.
But it's important to examine our own privileges.
Intelligence (while admittedly not well-represented by a single number like IQ) is more or less a lottery we win or lose at birth. Bragging about intelligence is like bragging about being tall. It's not something earned; it wouldn't make sense for anybody to ever brag about it.
Critical thinking is a skill that is a serious luxury. It relies on some combination of intelligence, time to hone the skill, access to education, access to information, and/or a serious autodidactic streak. A lot of people live lives where one or all of those is missing, often through no fault of their own.
Other things help me to separate online misinformation from information as well. I was in high school / college as the web came of age, at a time when I had the time and inclination to dive into it from the beginning.
I was born into a stable middle class household in which we could afford a computer and internet access. More privileges many do not enjoy.
All those factors were crucial. Take one away and I may well have struggled to comprehend the difference between real and fake news.
My sister is a prime example. Many of the same advantages of me, but born earlier. Missed the internet revolution. Never been comfortable with technology. Constantly falls for fake news. Is that her fault? Well, yes, ultimately. We must all be responsible for ourselves.
But it's also essentially "a well-financed misinformation industry" versus "a middle-aged woman who is technologically illiterate" and wow, that is NOT a fair fight by any measure. If we are basing the future of our society on that fight having a favorable outcome, we are really fooling ourselves.
But nevertheless, you may be right about this, that only the
enlightened and educated few can discern truth from falsity
and make informed choices.
The "enemy" is well-funded organizations who have serious time and money -- and sometimes state level backing -- and are devoted to pushing a mix of legitimate and fake news that takes serious effort and knowledge to separate from the real thing(s).
I see within your argument, which may not be factually wrong,
a powerful argument in favor of authoritarianism and oligarchy
There are no easy answers.
A purely laissez-faire free for all absolutely does not work. We see it time and time again. Bad-faith information always utterly drowns out good-faith information, like spam emails or search results drowning out the legitimate stuff.
Solid, best-effort reporting takes time and sometimes the results are boring. Willful misinformation is orders of magnitude easier to produce.
Education and critical thinking are utterly essential. We should invest heavily in these areas. Democracy relies on them, utterly. But it is also fantasy to think everybody will become enlightened information-processors, and even those of us who are competent at it need help wading through oceans of garbage. At some point, we do need trusted providers of curation. While not ideal, it is realistic, unlike hoping that most members of society evolve into galaxy-brained autodidacts.
This is how any developed society functions. We can't all evaluate drugs and therapies, so we need the FDA. You could replace it with one or more private-sector ventures, perhaps, but at some point you would need to rely on something. We can't all make clothes or food so we trust others. We trust others to design our roads and keep them safe. If I had unlimited time and brain cells it might be nice to do these things myself, but it is not even a little bit realistic.
– John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (https://www.utilitarianism.com/ol/two.html)
Mill seems to agree with you.
Perhaps this is a way to sidestep claims of censorship. Deleting subs can embolden some community themes and messages by allowing them to play victim of censorship and bolster claims of conspiracy via attacks from left/right/government/lizard people. So let them carry on while alerting people of what lies ahead.
Keeping this group of people happy, while at the same time trying to maintain a somewhat “clean” site, is a delicate balancing act. I am certain that quarantined subreddits is a result of this.
A lot of its success is built on content which is not as acceptable as one might desire. See what happened to Tumblr when they cracked down.
Once you assign usernames and attach any type of value counter to an account, you've effectively dumped true anonymity out the window due to essentially creating a pseudonymic marketplace.
People may think "How pseudonymous do you need to be?" In today's world? Very. Especially given the propensity for deplatforming and reputation based social warfare.
https://www.reddit.com/user/Throwaway8675309
Also no surprise, the account was active for only ~5 days.
I think the point is that there's a distinct disconnect between your profile on Reddit (and any other sites you share the username with) and your physical person, at least up until the point where you (ideally) make the connection public yourself if desired.
It's anonymous insofar as the "person" on reddit is not easily attributable to the physical person themselves.
There is one. It was used a couple comments up.
Pseudonymous. It's an actual word, not just made up.
My point stands, though - despite the misusage of the word anonymous there's a real difference between how facebook treats identity and how reddit does. And it massively affects how communities in both interact.
Reddit just says “This content has been restricted in your country in response to a legal request.
Geoblocked in Canada due to General legal request”
Is there any way to push Reddit to disclose who sent the request?
I’d love to followup with that agency, but we have a lot of police services in Canada, if it was one.
Though the subreddit (was forced) to enact a “no sourcing” rule already in the past.
Reddit stopped copying Lumen (Chilling Effects) around 5 years ago.
(NSFW I guess, but not porn)
For some people free speech is like riding the train: when you reach your stop, you get off.
They’re profiting off anger so “old” ones being angry has no downsides.
There are no ads in quarantined subs and you can't buy any reddit awards to gift to others
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-ana
Several such subreddits are (IMO rightfully) banned or quarantined.
The principal example that comes to mind is TD, which seems more obnoxious and tasteless than some sort of evil.
Subs that truly are beyond the pale by wide consensus seem to get dropped immediately and without objection.
As to not wanting to win, well, yes, dropping everything controversial means losing a lot of page-hits, and as a business, they're likely wary.
You don't get why a online forum might have an interest in ensuring every other post isn't a dick pic?
If you can understand that, maybe you don't, then you DO understand their interest in moderating their own website whether or not you agree with their moderation standards in practice. A dick pic may be obvious to you...but so long as the picture depicts someone >18yo then it is legal and free speech.
>They sometimes come up with measures like this, while routinely ignoring the development of horrible communities that they're aware of...
Again isn't it their right to determine what forums/threads dick pics may in fact be appropriate and which threads forums they aren't and should be moderated/removed?
The confusing part is not that they're attempting to clean the site - it's their ineffective, half-assed ways of doing it.
Since we all know we're talking about The_Donald, I'll just mention them specifically. Alexa traffic data considers Reddit the #6 website in the US -- they are huge, and their major actions will be noticed. If they ban their top pro-Trump community, Fox News will be talking about it later that day. Reddit execs will be answering questions in front of the US Senate a week later. Phrases like "election interference" will be thrown around. Nobody wants that.
So instead they do it subtly: quarantine The_Donald, which means they don't show up in site-wide lists, can't be accessed through the mobile app, and can't be indexed by search engines. This stems their growth. Later, start replacing their moderators. Eventually you've taken it over and shut it down, and they leave. Now if Tucker Carlson wants to tell his audience about it, he has to explain to a bunch of 60-somethings what a "forum moderator" is. Not happening.
Honestly, I think what they did worked out best for everyone. Reddit is happy to be rid of them, and they're happy with their new website, TheDonald.win. Everybody wins.
https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/new/
There is a pinned mod message which leads you to the new site but that's entirely out of reddit
I think their main challenge is they have a cultural/temperamental resistance to making decisions on a case-by-case basis. Any time there is a problem it seems like they try to overgeneralize and come up with a sort of rule or heuristic that can apply in every case and situation. But since the "toxicity" of a community is usually more subtle than that they end up always being way too reactive.
That's easy - advertising.
The same reason YouTube cleaned up it's act. And Gifycat. And a dozen other sites who found themselves at the wrong end of their advertiser's ire.
So, using a combination of email blasts, instant messaging, and more, these groups focus down a site or individual. This can involve simple brigade type tactics against posted comments and stories, complete with abusing the site reporting process, to flag users and content they disagree with. Sometimes it requires pressuring those higher up with public shaming for permitting something they may not be aware of by use of the common innuendo of if they don't take action they agree with all the hateful, if any, aspects of the target.
When any social site becomes large enough to receive mentions on other sites and media it immediately becomes a target of groups seeking to control the message and attack those who do not wholly support that message. Even minor disagreements can be sufficient to attract ire.
the moral majority is an authoritarian regime and it will have a further damning effect than any feared religious right that people constantly brought up as an internet or social bogeyman.
the very fact they now state ideas they don't agree with as making them physically uncomfortable to the point they declare if violence should scare anyone. this is code for saying no limits are required to remove the threat.
1984 isn't government oppressing people, it is people oppressing people
* btw - only reddit you can be banned from reddits you never visited for activity on another sub (including just voting apparently)
Users who consistently upvote policy-breaking content within quarantined communities will receive automated warnings, followed by further consequences like a temporary or permanent suspension. We hope this will encourage healthier behavior across these communities.
https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/f8y9nx/sprin...
Quarantines offer greater flexibility in monitoring and management, with fair warning to members.
In what world, refusing to ban something from your online platform is equivalent to "supporting it" (discreetly)? Reddit is a business, the business of getting ad money for providing an open discussion forum. They are free to decide what they host and what they not but simply hosting something (which in their case means, doing business with people that post that content) doesn't mean they support it. Supporting something is not the opposite of not supporting it.
It's like saying that Amazon _supports_ pornography because AWS allows to host pornographic content.
> Your account has been suspended from for breaking the rules. Your account has been suspended for 3 day(s).
>> You recently upvoted a post or comment that was determined to be against our policies. Abusive content is not acceptable on Reddit nor is engaging with it. Please be thoughful about the content that you interact with.
Interestingly nothing in the Reddit policies seems to mention voting or engaging with content: https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy
> Users who consistently upvote policy-breaking content within quarantined communities will receive automated warnings, followed by further consequences like a temporary or permanent suspension. We hope this will encourage healthier behavior across these communities.
Until now that has mostly been warnings for posting in "bad" subs. Now after most of those are gone I guess it's time for the next phase.
> I’d like to share an update about our thinking around quarantined communities.
> When we expanded our quarantine policy, we created an appeals process for sanctioned communities. One of the goals was to “force subscribers to reconsider their behavior and incentivize moderators to make changes.” While the policy attempted to hold moderators more accountable for enforcing healthier rules and norms, it didn’t address the role that each member plays in the health of their community.
> Today, we’re making an update to address this gap: Users who consistently upvote policy-breaking content within quarantined communities will receive automated warnings, followed by further consequences like a temporary or permanent suspension. We hope this will encourage healthier behavior across these communities.
This seems strange to me. If this content is violating reddit's policies then why don't they ban them? It seems awkward to have this middle ground of "semi-banned" content where users get suspensions if they interact with it too much. Why create these invisible land-mines for users? I imagine it's because banning this content outright would make Reddit admins appear even more biased, or because the content doesn't actually violate any policies but puts off advertisers.
I think there should indeed be penalties for upvoting e.g. death threats.
If Reddit's goal is to encourage broader self-censorship of wrong-think, the message makes perfect sense. If Reddit informed a user that they broke Rule A, a rational user would learn a specific lesson. They would learn that they can avoid punishment by not interacting with content that breaks (or might break) Rule A.
By punishing without an explicit explanation, a rational user must conclude that, to avoid punishment, they cannot risk interacting with content that breaks (or might break) any of the rules on the website.
There isn't a short answer to what's probably an eternal conflict, but I do know a lot of people in tech who might benefit from reflecting on the question of, "are we the baddies?"
This isn't a practical idea. People aren't always aware of their own biases and critics are also inclined to see bias even when there is none. There is no practical way to determine bias levels.
> Reddit is very happy to claim they are unbiased, neutral, hate free.
Are they? Can you point to an example of such a claim?
> But some preferred subreddits will ban people for heaving wrong gender or wrong race
Subbredits are run by users.
> They also tolerate hate speech, incitement to violence or even advocacy for genocide , if it matches their ideology.
Reddit would say they don't tolerate those things, you say they do, how do we determine who is right?
No, they are run day to day by users, but ultimately are at the discretion of the site owners. Case in point, this article we are discussing.
> Reddit would say they don't tolerate those things, you say they do, how do we determine who is right?
The behavior of the site owners? Reddit site owners treat different subreddits differently and different viewpoints differently, although there is single characteristic differences (gender, race, etc) because of the people and topics that are generated from the groups. Pre-censoring, is not uncommon, which has led up to this wrongthink penalty.
If you're challenging the history of reddit, you aren't informed enough to be discussing this and it's not worth rehashing.
The site owners don't ban users based on race and gender which is the claim I responded to.
> Reddit site owners treat different subreddits differently and different viewpoints differently
Well yes, that is how standards work, "different views" are treated differently based on how they stack up with respect to the standard. I understand that you're arguing that reddit applies the rules selectively, but reddit would argue that they apply them fairly, so how do you suggest this kind of conflict be resolved at scale? Who should decide if reddit is being fair or not?
> If you're challenging the history of reddit, you aren't informed enough to be discussing this and it's not worth rehashing.
If you want to make an argument then make it, but condescending declarations of a monopoly on the informed position does not do your case any favors.
I'm not making a case. I'm describing the state of the reddit culture. Whether you believe it or not, is incidental.
> The site owners don't ban users based on race and gender which is the claim I responded to.
Your statements were broader than that. Revisionism aside, you can get banned for voting on a post, and there are lots of rules (written and unwritten by each community) that can get you banned from the subreddit or reddit as a whole. Making statements about YOUR gender (or a number of other attributes) can also get you banned. Here, I'll do a google search for you (since you can't be bothered) for subreddit bans, to start you off: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=subredd...
You aren't informed enough to be discussing this and it's not worth rehashing.
That much is clear.
> I'm describing the state of the reddit culture. Whether you believe it or not, is incidental.
Very convincing. Oh, I know, you don't care about that in the least.
> Your statements were broader than that. Revisionism aside...
No, they weren't. You stated that the subreddits are ultimately controlled by the site owners, and I explained that the site owners don't ban people based on race and gender. Simple. Revisionism indeed.
> Making statements about YOUR gender (or a number of other attributes) can also get you banned. Here, I'll do a google search for you
The results of the google search does not support the claim you're making, like, not even a single result. Beyond that, mods can ban users for whatever reason they want, but the site owners do not ban people based on their race and gender, that claim is totally false.
> You aren't informed enough to be discussing this and it's not worth rehashing.
lol, a laughable assertion coming from someone who can't even cherry-pick google search results to support their argument. Stop wasting my time.
Not cherry picking to make an observation that documents the history. Its an ongoing, and well covered, topic for which you can demonstrably research without difficulty. Denial doesnt help either of us and causes me to question your sincerity. Good luck with whatever.
The answer is going to be a moving target. You're gonna have some government bureaucrats having to make rulings on these regulations.
And many of the proponents of this seem to fail to imagine a world where Donald Trump is ever not president. Imagine the power this would give the government against someone who plays fast and loose with 'facts'. "We've decided that the statements in this post were intentionally misleading, therefore they are a political statement, and the owners of the site promoted them in a way that they didn't do to this other post, therefore the owners are making a political statement and this is not a neutral site, which makes it liable for these other comments from other users that we're interpreting as violent threats."
This is unsustainable though, there is just too much content to filter. There is also the fact that lacking such protections the site will be targeted by bad-faith actors who intend to harm the site by posting lots of legally problematic content.
The legal realism prevails with this stupid law, it will always prevail. You can both moderate / review / editorialize content, including political content, while simultaneously enjoying Section 230 protections.
I don't think people espousing this view understand the scope of what sites need to tolerate to comply. Would reddit be a better place if they let people say, "ni\\\\s belong in shackles" and, "death to Jews"? Because that's legal speech.
As far as Reddit and Facebook go, understand that freedom of speech also means freedom from compelled speech. It's not just about being able to say what you want, it's about being able to not say the things you don't want to say. Making Section 230 contingent on hosting all legal content compels people so say a lot of things they don't want to say.
I'm a big fan of the idea that internet providers, DNS registrars, etc. need to be neutral to content in the way common carriers are, but I'm not convinced yet that platforms should have similar obligations. It seems that the appropriate response to schismatic disagreement with the "SysOps of the BBS" is to build another BBS as the "telephone network" is open to all.
Someone else mentioned as well, but some very specific monopoly/necessity cases could change this delineation, however I could only see this being necessary with a much different environment than we have today (that is, situations without feasible common carrier alternatives, _maybe_ google search would be an example today).
I won't speak to your particular motives because I don't know you from anyone else, but I sometimes wonder if a core driver behind wanting to mess with section 230 is because people feel entitled to an audience at low/no cost to them, at the expense of platform owners, to blather on about whatever they please. To this end, I say "nope, you're not entitled... we have an open internet, drive your own damn traffic".
You mentioned Google Search, I'd add Youtube for video content, Twitch for streaming, FB for social network etc. Sure, you can broadcast video content without Youtube, there's vimeo or you could host it yourself, but it's really not a feasible approach. Much like you don't really have to rely on the local utility company to provide you with electricity and water, you could totally run a generator in your back yard and have trucks bring in fresh and move out waste water ... but it's not a realistic approach.
> To this end, I say "nope, you're not entitled... we have an open internet, drive your own damn traffic".
I'd respond that we don't have an open internet, but more importantly: you don't have to be a platform, nobody is stopping Reddit from being a publisher.
The reason why they don't want to legally be a publisher is simply that their low-cost approach doesn't work if they have more responsibility for what they publish. They very much want to be able to pick and choose what is published, but they don't want to be considered a publisher.
So HN is gone, too, then.
Any site can have any rules they want. But they shouldn't expect to be able manipulate and control discussion and face no backlash from users.
> Without becoming a target for filling up with illegal shit to overwhelm the moderators and cause legal trouble for the owners?
'Trolling', 'flaming' and 'swearing' are not illegal, and honestly, most complaints about 'trolling' I see are just people who disagree with what they're reading.
You're saying they should face backlash from government regulators not from users.
If there's a big user backlash, those users are already free to move to whatever site they want, or make their own.
---
Re: your comment about trolling, etc, not being illegal: yes, exactly. So if a site wanted to enforce some sort of "family friendly" policy, you could simply bomb them with truly illegal shit instead and get them in trouble with the regulators for not being able to keep up as they would be liable for that, since they aren't a "anything legal goes" platform.
I never said that. But it's probably a good idea to have some sort of oversight for a massive platform that censors and manipulates discussion of millions of people. You may think their policies are totally justified and correct (they aren't), but the specific opinions they choose to promote may change to something you are against.
> If there's a big user backlash, those users are already free to move to whatever site they want, or make their own.
Yes, they are also free to shit on the website and point out it's flaws.
> So if a site wanted to enforce some sort of "family friendly" policy, you could simply bomb them with truly illegal shit instead and get them in trouble with the regulators for not being able to keep up as they would be liable for that, since they aren't a "anything legal goes" platform.
Trolling is not illegal, it's not even a specific thing. It's a very ambiguous term used to describe 'comment's that make me feel bad'. Trolling and posting illegal shit is completely different, sure ban illegal stuff - you kind of have to, but don't use 'trolling' as an excuse to ban stuff you disagree with.
Think through the mechanics of how this oversight would work.
Someone will have to decide "is this site sufficiently neutral in how they moderate UGC." So let's spin up a government department more that, maybe call it part of the FCC, maybe make it a new one, who knows.
Now let years, maybe even decades go by. Now let's say some site you like gets essentially taken out - since massive sites aren't going to be able to do manual moderation of everything - by a regulator who leans to the opposite side of the political spectrum you do.
Now you don't have much resource, since you aren't free to go off and try again - the regulator would just get that site too.
I have a hard time seeing how this is better.
And this is a weird stance for conservatives to be preaching, since the previous similar thing, the fairness doctrine, was no favorite thing of theirs.
This is one of those things where you can't say "only the government can solve this problem" unless the only speech you want to see protected is fairly-mainstream government-endorsed speech.
There are many ways this can work, and it's not necessarily simple. I don't have a specific proposal.
> Now let years, maybe even decades go by. Now let's say some site you like gets essentially taken out - since massive sites aren't going to be able to do manual moderation of everything - by a regulator who leans to the opposite side of the political spectrum you do.
1) Manual moderation of massive sites is already going away for the most part.
2) Sites like reddit have swarms of moderators, the ability to report, and send legal notices to take down specific content and also be made.
3) We have laws about 'illegal content' these websites are already complying on a massive scale.
4) My suggestion was an oversight of excessive moderation and manipulation of opinion, not what your example suggests, which is the opposite. You literally don't have to moderate anything to not be charged with 'excessive censorship' or whatever.
> Now you don't have much resource, since you aren't free to go off and try again - the regulator would just get that site too.
We have a justice system for a reason.
> I have a hard time seeing how this is better.
We can all come with with 100 different imaginary scenarios where some very generic suggestion may fail. I don't see the point. Do you think there should be no laws about content? No libel laws? No copyright enforcement? Where do you draw the line?
> And this is a weird stance for conservatives to be preaching, since the previous similar thing, the fairness doctrine, was no favourite thing of theirs.
I'm not a conservative, but what I find more jarring is the people who want sites like facebook forced to be censored and moderated politically, while reddit can do whatever it pleases as long is it aligns with their political ideology.
> This is one of those things where you can't say "only the government can solve this problem" unless the only speech you want to see protected is fairly-mainstream government-endorsed speech.
Again, I did not suggest that there should be laws about what content is allowed. I actually think we already have too many such laws - I would personally do away with DMCA and other such bullshit. What we should have is a check on mass-scale censorship and manipulation of opinion by corporations.
I was talking about the proposal from `cwhiz, in which the government would revoke protections under existing current law. I think there are holes in that suggestion that are miles wide, that will extend to pretty much any other proposal that depends on the government deciding if a site is over- or under-moderated.
Without a specific proposal to talk about, or specific opinions on "should a site have to relinquish editorial control or rule-setting ability to enjoy liability protections from stuff done by users" (I say "no"), I don't see much more interesting stuff to debate. Those are real, active questions and proposals being made; other hypotheticals could go on forever but are less relevant to now.
But if you aren't interested in those specific points, I don't know why you're participating in a thread that was specifically about the questions around that current law.
Do you honestly believe that a discussion forum site that wanted a family friendly policy shouldn't be able to have any liability protections? That if someone started flooding them with child porn, say, at a rate they couldn't keep up with, they should have to shut down because they'd otherwise be liable for all that content due to their having a content moderation policy that forbid certain types of legal speech (say, swearing)?
And what does child pornography have to do with swearing?
> Do you honestly believe that a discussion forum site that wanted a family friendly policy shouldn't be able to have any liability protections?
Again, I never said that.
The pitch being made in this subthread was "I don't think Reddit should be able to censor lawful content and also claim protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act."
So you lose liability protection if you censor lawful content.
So if you want to ban swearing, you become liable for your user's content. Which makes you a WIDE OPEN target for bad actors who could post whatever illegal content they want faster than you could moderate it.
I'm trying to illustrate why I think `cwhiz took an absurd position, and am not using the term "trolling" in general now. I've given a specific example of "legal content some communities might want to prohibit" as well as "illegal content that bad actors could use to get the owner of that site in trouble in this proposed world."
If your laws permit speech you don't like, either fix your laws or fix yourself.
If you would like to learn more, and see exactly what happened when Section 230 was not in effect, check out this case:
Stratton Oakmont, Inc. and Daniel Porush, v. Prodigy Services Company, "John Doe", and "Mary Doe".
Stratton Oakmont (yep, the one that was made by Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wall Street), won that case against Prodigy and, yes, John Doe and Mary Doe. You, the user, are John Doe or Mary Doe. Section 230 protects you.
I'd be in favor of a law that required uncensored free speech on all forums but that also allowed users to opt-in to moderation. Even if 99% of users opted in to moderation it would still leave an escape valve for totally uncensored free thought.
Honestly I don't see what's the best alternative. Probably the segregation of comment platforms and sites. If Section 230 were to be substituted with something effective in regards of speech protection, or conversely the right of platforms to curate comments, then still this would only apply to the US and it would be a significant factor to move the comments elsewhere.
Section 230 did not create a distinction between a platform and a publisher that required censorship rules to be applied fairly or evenly.
But Reddit is effectively just a big message board. Such interpretation would force every small internet forum to either become a [0-9]chan or a closed space for invited members only. There is lots of middle ground where the owners/the community polices some speech and you can reasonably, realistically just go somewhere else.
The internet is open. If you disagree with Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc, there are alternatives. Of course when the hateful all congregate, the farce of their positions becomes too clear. They need the legitimacy of Twitter or Facebook to ply their nonsense.
As an aside, it's interesting that those far right sites are some of the most fervently moderated, "snowflake" sites. Even The_Donald on reddit was hysterical in its suppression of even a simple question on the truthfulness of some fake claim. Instant comment deletion and account ban. Gab's extreme assertions of their moderation policy are uproarious when compared to its creation (you know - "Twitter silenced right wing voices!")
The whole point of Section 230 was so sites could do that. Before 230, there has been court rulings that said if you moderate the content you are liable for the content. 230 was enacted specifically to reverse that.
The entire point of 230 was to allow companies like Reddit to censor lawful content while still claiming protections. It was never designed at any point to create neutral platforms.
Lack of moderation was already a defense before 230 was created:
> CompuServe stated they would not attempt to regulate what users posted on their services, while Prodigy had employed a team of moderators to validate content. Both faced legal challenges related to content posted by their users. In Cubby, Inc. v. CompuServe Inc., CompuServe was found not be at fault as, by its stance as allowing all content to go unmoderated, it was a distributor and thus not liable for libelous content posted by users. However, Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co. found that as Prodigy had taken an editorial role with regard to customer content, it was a publisher and legally responsible for libel committed by customers. [0]
Section 230 was not designed to foster neutral platforms, it was designed to allow platforms/communities to moderate as they saw fit without opening themselves up to legal liability. To re-phrase that in modern terms, section 230 is one of the strongest protections we have today for community's Right to Filter[1].
When people say that they like Section 230 but it's gone off the rails, what they really mean is that they think Section 230 was always a bad idea. Or perhaps more charitably that they haven't really researched how Section 230 works or what its history was.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
Looking at it now, it feels like that in general the site is really mean spirited.
Also upvoting means that you're just seeing whatever the majority of voters want you to see. It works on a smaller community like HN because comments get 10s of upvotes at most. It's not a site for good discourse.
However there's communities where there is interesting discussion still and often if you want an opinion of a product or an issue you might find a thread on it from a real user.
But generally they've done nothing to stop the nurturing of racist/sexist/bullying content over the years.
Now you can argue about free speech being important for an internet platform.
But Reddit trying to change the community attitudes of their site now seems a little late.
Also there is a real sense that some users believe that Reddit is the Sheppard of society and they're fighting on the forefront of society. Which I think stems from the millions of apparent subscribers to subreddits.
But it's just a fancy internet forum.
Like this linked post is on a subreddit called Watch Reddit Die. Apparently something about free speech being stifled in Reddit.
People need to realise they shouldn't waste their life on a website they don't like.
The internet hasn't been fully consolidated by Facebook and Google just yet, they can find or make a different community.
I think you underestimate the size of this place. It’s basically a busy Subreddit.
It's been clear over the last few years that the popular subreddits are the ones that have the most dramatic content.
Smaller subreddit do tend to have better discourse though until eventually, they get large enough to become popular and start to become the same echo chambers.
Second, I'm curious what % of revenue comes from user-purchased post and comment awards from gold. I've noticed those in use quite a bit in some more inflammatory subs like /r/politics. I wonder how they vet payments from users to avoid providing a way for hostile actors to buy visibility while flying under the radar. Ie. Avoiding conflicts of interest from accidentally monetizing trolls.
I've done some searching and it seems that reddit gold is a pretty small piece of the reddit revenue. Campaigns start at $50,000 with Reddit Ad's.
Reddit made close to 1 million in revenue from Reddit gold in 2016.
I'm deeply interesting in learning what % of revenue that is for them and how quickly it is growing.
As for advertising on Reddit, I view it as a fool's errand on the part of advertisers given the extensive popularity of PiHoles and adblocking software among the userbase.
That said, my concern is that it creates an environment for misaligned incentives. If say, hostile foreign governments have their troll farms buying awards to increase visibility of divisive and inflammatory posts in key threads, that furthers their agenda and creates a revenue stream for Reddit that is fueled by creating an environment where that flourishes.
I'm NOT saying Reddit is actively trying to do this as I think they'd be horrified to find this happening, but they have a fine line to walk here from a product and business standpoint.
Re: your other point, I do digital advertising for a living. I can assure you that the vast majority of users on Reddit are not using PiHoles. While many may be using ad blockers, those largely don't work for native ads in the mobile app.
I feel like reddit has always had recurring and overlapping cycles of mean spiritedness. For instance, during the summer holiday period it becomes notoriously harder to have a reasonable exchange of ideas there (don't ask me why; I'm not quite sure). This year, since the beginning of the COVID19 isolation period in March, we've been in a period of very high mean spiritedness. It could be a consequence of users' high stress levels.
Reddit does still have several excellent communities. I find that there's one thing in common between them: They have real, dedicated, human moderators enforcing strict, rational policies. Also: There are some weird cliques of power moderators on reddit who control dozens if not hundreds of subreddits. A good subreddit is usually not run by those cliques. Not to discount the hard work that some grunt moderators put into trying to run the large, clique-controlled communities, but the commonalities are hard to ignore.
On upvotes: Reddit should have clear policies enforced equitatively and transparently at the company level, by a human staff, and downvotes shouldn't be presented as the opposite of an upvote. I don't see a complete alternative system that can replace the upvote, though. They do provide different sorting options; what else could they do, there?
On alternatives: People attempt to leave on a regular basis. The problem is that there's a much higher incentive for the people who are ostracized not only by reddit as a platform but by the associated community to leave than for people who are, for the most part, comfortable, even if the administration acts a little weird on occasion. All alternatives are quickly colonized by people that the majority of the reddit community (if there is such a thing) would rather not be immersed in: White supremacists, conspiracy theorists, fanatic nationalists, etc. For the more moderate people to be willing to move, they want to feel surrounded by a majority of people like them, not a minority.
To think that the reddit administrators would go so far as to ban people for even interacting with content that THEY deem problematic.
Reddit is dead and no one I know uses it anymore.
EDIT: - In case anyone is interested; here is the censored post that I was referring to https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/h9ctho/serious_a...
And honestly I WISH nobody used reddit anymore, maybe it could roll back 10 years when it was frankly more fun, but it sure seems like more people than ever are using it.
How do we feel about pre-emptive moderation? Is it warranted? Is it warranted every time? Only certain topics?
More precisely I would imagine they don't care about facilitating/refereeing culture wars inside their subs, cause lord only knows how much work that would be.
That wasn't what I was asking-however.
See the following comment https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/h9ctho/serious_a...
This almost inevitably happens when a site gets popular enough. There are only so many intelligent people actively posting on the internet, and it's impossible to have a site with 100,000 users (let alone the >400,000,000 of Reddit) with a high fraction of them providing good content.
Certainly the heavy-handed censorship of the Reddit administration is a disincentive for people who are interested in topics at the edges of the overton window (i.e. most of the interesting people online).
This isn't a bad thing. It's not like Reddit has monopoly powers. Some people want to belong to communities that have agreed-upon values.
Terms that have no distinctive power have little value, so while I'd certainly consider them "users", I wouldn't consider them part of the community, much like a tourist staying in a village for a weekend isn't a part of the village's community.
This is quick becoming a debate over definitions, but I think reddit thinks of itself as both having a community and also as having individual communities. For example, anybody who has had a post in their niche community get to the front page understands that there's a larger community they're a part of that is different from their smaller one.
To me, community implies some amount of connections between the members. I've never put a number on it, but basically something like "if you randomly pick X people from the group, at least Y of them will know each other". That would limit both the size and also do a reasonable test for community membership: if nobody in the community knows you, you're not a part of the community.
https://archive.vn/KojNR#selection-7875.0-7947.5
Brief recap on its current state of affairs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqx4wdn4Odc (18 minutes and change)
And that doesn't even relate to this topic as what you're referring to is on a subreddit basis and is determined by a set of volunteer mods not reddit admins.
How do we know that? The body just says [removed] and the user is marked as [deleted].
If the admins can alter the content of your posts, then surely they can delete / remove content and have it show whatever they choose.
Not true. The post body says [removed]. If the user deleted it, it would say [deleted].
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/h9ctho/serious_a...
Edit: another user determined it was both removed and deleted.
Also, the user posted a comment complaining about the removal.
The mod then gloated about banning dozens of people other this and that "LGBTQIA+ people run the subreddit", and that "the lack of discrimination (...) for being cis or being white or being straight or being a man overshadows any discrimination they would receive for their adhd"
I don't think that's great moderation given the subject of the subreddit but what can you even do about it that would not be time consuming and pointless?
My model for moderation would be opt-in. I want to be able to see everything by default but be able to see what moderators have flagged as inappropriate. I could then grow to trust some or all of those moderators and just hide everything they flag by default. But I'd always be able to go and quickly evaluate whether I still trust those moderators to be doing the right thing and not just hiding things they disagree with.
These are just folks who either showed up early, or demonstrated they thought about the issue the same way as the person who started the reddit thought.
>> It was a combination of things, so I can't say for sure what could have prevented this. More understanding parents definitely would have helped. Other perspectives online, as well. Detransitioners frequently get shut down on the internet, as their experiences are often labeled "transphobia." Which is utter bullshit, in my opinion. Perhaps if I had read a similar story as my own those years back, I would have had second thoughts.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/h9ctho/serious_a...
Ironically, the AskReddit mods contributed to this problem by removing the post.
It's not dead, and I say thankfully because it not being dead retains its state as a containment mechanism of what is easily the worst group of internet users in internet history.
I fear for the day Reddit falls and its userbase spills out looking for another avenue to be comforted with groupthink, newspeak and feel goods for the Brands We Love.
People are in different stages of life and seek solace in other people having similar experiences. Thus, the sexually frustrated congregate, the depressed congregate, drug enthusiasts (and abusers) congregate, disgruntled ex-<insert organization> congregate, you name it, and angry/sad/anxious people with a shared condition will congregate in search of validation/confidence.
But the opposite is also true - people with a shared hobby/passion/vision congregate as well and create some really fun and uplifting communities.
As the subs where you can speak with some degree of openness are ever smaller, it's not worth the time anymore.
This is just absurd.
* https://foundationinc.co/lab/reddit-statistics/
* https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/reddit.com
> and no one I know uses it anymore.
You say this as if it is relevant to your point.
Whilst there isn't inherently incorrect or morally wrong about detransitioning in itself, often when brought up it can lead a person to an idea which is incorrect - essentially applying the anecdotal evidence of a Reddit thread to all situations.
Thus, moderators of subreddits (and administrators, although I think that whilst it is bad when they do so, it isn't as common as many would believe) feel conflicted on the matter. Should they allow the discussion to continue, almost guaranteeing that somebody is going to form misconceptions from the thread? Or should they shut it down, stifling free speech but at the same time reducing the level of overall animosity towards minorities in the community, and preventing people from forming misconceptions?
Ultimately, I think that it should always really come down on the side of free speech, as long as they aren't being blatantly hostile. However, in my opinion, if we really want to have a positive "marketplace of ideas", as some describe it, we really need to educate people from a young age on logical reasoning, cognitive biases and argumentative fallacies the same way we would teach history, geography or the arts. Whilst I think that's unlikely to happen in our current political climate, given that keeping people uneducated is a very effective way to make them vote for those who make the most compelling surface-level arguments, it seems to be the only good solution for the conflict laid out above.
Here's an exercise - check out /r/unpopularopinion today. Full of perfectly boring normal opinions like "MTV should go back to showing music videos". All of the content just seems completely fake. There's not an unpopular opinion in sight.
Now go the Wayback Machine and take a look at that same sub from say, three to five years ago (which feels like a short time to me these days). Plenty of deeply unpopular, controversial, thought-provoking opinions. You don't have to like them, but they were real.
I sometimes browse by /r/all/gilded, which gives you a weird, weird, WEIRD cross section of the Internet. One time I found a heavily gilded post memorializing a recently deceased contributor to /r/cripplingalcoholism -- which appears to be an important but saddening community for people with a serious medical problem -- then followed a few links on the profile of the deceased and their associated until, a few minutes later, I ended up at /r/opiaterollcall.
Wow oh wow, what a subreddit that was: https://web.archive.org/web/20130904195509/www.reddit.com/r/...
That forum died pretty soon after I found it (and got national press coverage at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/20/us/opioid-reddit.html ) but wow, oh wow, there was a lot going on there which is now essentially lost to readers of history, because existing archives don't go deep into posts and comments.
Yesterday, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman (or “Spez,” as Redditors affectionately know him) published the platform’s annual transparency report, highlighting how the platform took down more than 200,000 pieces of offending content over 2019, along with nearly 56,000 accounts and nearly 22,000 subreddits—the site’s communities, most of which are moderated by volunteer users. He also flagged a “company update” regarding the way Reddit thinks about “quarantined” communities...
https://gizmodo.com/reddit-will-start-to-punish-users-for-up...
That policy, in a Reddit post by Huffman:
When we expanded our quarantine policy, we created an appeals process for sanctioned communities. One of the goals was to “force subscribers to reconsider their behavior and incentivize moderators to make changes.” While the policy attempted to hold moderators more accountable for enforcing healthier rules and norms, it didn’t address the role that each member plays in the health of their community.
Today, we’re making an update to address this gap: Users who consistently upvote policy-breaking content within quarantined communities will receive automated warnings, followed by further consequences like a temporary or permanent suspension. We hope this will encourage healthier behavior across these communities.
https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/f8y9nx/sprin...
According to that statement, bans (apparently temporary) are for voting only in already quarantined subreddits.
WatchRedditDie's discussion is not especially nuanced, considered, or balanced.
There's enough fuzz in the vote counts that no one would notice, and you wouldn't have any controversy on your hands.
It is amazing how people will redefine hating Trump supporters, men, white people, "the 1%", western civilization etc as somehow 'not hateful'. "My hate isn't hate, I just dislike things that are bad." Right.
Those user's votes don't matter, scaring the userbase into narrowing their overton windows of acceptable reddit voting is what matters.
More broadly Reddit wants to be seen as taking action. The incentive structure facing that company rewards loudly making a slight improvement to the site over quietly making a huge improvement.
The last I heard they still weren’t profitable.
That'd fix most of Reddit's issues and then some.
and I don't especially want the admins of any one site to be able to erase my entire existence off the net on a whim.
single/token login from known net authority agents is common. I'd rather embrace that kind of thing than the idea that any one site should be our de facto forum and communications standard.
I was reminded of this recently when a personal favorite BB forum disappeared , taking years and years of niche automotive data with it. Data that was rare from the get-go, and un-replaceable now.
I'd rather decentralize my 'data-stores'. Reddit will disappear one day, and it's up to them to be a good actor towards the archival group, providing data bandwidth during a time when investors have become disinterested, and paying the light bill is near impossible.
I wouldn't count on that.
Keep archives, repeat information elsewhere , and most importantly : don't embrace adding and relying on centralized structure where doing so inherently adds weakness and fallibility.
Reddit’s content is already dumped and cloned in near-real-time. https://pushshift.io/
A normal forum will have different sections to discuss everything even mildly related to the overarching topic, and a number of areas to talk about things not related to the topic. But Reddit doesn't have those features, so subs have to resort to these half measures or allow multiple daily posts about the same 5 topics.
The problem with reddit isn't technical, it's human. A large group of people will ruin literally anything.
It is far better than it was over a decade ago.
As an aggregator, it is nearly perfectly aligned with my interests (except for the year they spent heavily promoting Jimmy Fallon).
I read CNN multiple times a day.
As a news site, it is nearly perfectly aligned with my interests.
Where did I lose you?
Sure, there are communities that are horrid, but then there are those that are on the line. And inch by inch that line moves from moral goodness, to corporate interest.
Reddit is no different than Twitter/YouTube/Facebook, only they haven’t covered the same amount of ground.
Given another few years, if that, we’ll see the same censorship practices on Reddit, with the same magnitude, as youtube, facebook, and twitter.
This is essentially account entrapment. Show content they know is in bad faith, then punish them. Or, once a post is deemed in bad faith, retroactively punish them for not having the correct opinion.
1984
1984 and its consequences has been a disaster for the human race. Read another book
People moved away from Digg because they implemented an algorithm to suggest news, and de-emphasised user submitted stories. Now, essentially the same thing is happening with reddit via these farmers. It's not as obvious and might not be sanctioned, but at the end of the day, a few select bots are also pushing content to the front.
The last time I posted ANYTHING on reddit was 21 days ago when I commented on a Schwarzenegger post and said I'd love for him to be president. I appealed it and haven't heard anything.
First, it tries to be a "community hub", like Forumer in the old days, where anyone can set up an "autonomous" messageboard (subreddit) to support discussion among a particular subculture. Consider e.g. /r/smashbros.
Second, it tries to be a "community-in-itself", complete with its own demonym "redditor", and a shared set of values, etiquette, and jokes/memes.
These goals are fundamentally at odds. A community of competing factions -- some of which openly hate each other -- is hardly a community. A board for Super Smash Brothers players which must hew to the diktat of reddit at large is not really a community of Smashers. When a norm on Reddit at large is violated by a subreddit, the general population is incensed. When a rule is handed down from the admins to the moderators of a subcommunity, the members of that community feel they are being manipulated by outsiders -- even if they might have decided to enforce that rule on their own, if they had been left to their own devices.
Reddit splits the baby and nobody's happy.
Obviously this practice is/would be awful. But it's really surprising and the image seems a little fishy.
"Reddit Will Start to Punish Users for Upvotes as It Eyes Ad Cash"
https://gizmodo.com/reddit-will-start-to-punish-users-for-up...
"Spring forward… into Reddit’s 2019 transparency report"
Users who consistently upvote policy-breaking content within quarantined communities will receive automated warnings, followed by further consequences like a temporary or permanent suspension. We hope this will encourage healthier behavior across these communities.
https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/f8y9nx/sprin...
Amidst all this accounts that randomly spam the site with collections of articles and etc run free. They don't participate in discussion (maybe a handful of actual comments... with more links), they just push a particular point of view and inundate every sub they can find with article after article....
A simple query "hey is this user just spamming submissions" could deal with some of them.
If you search new you're presented with repost after repost of these spammers, sometimes reposing their own content, just from another news source.
If you're part of a location based sub that is in the news, it's just an AVALANCHE of distantly cause related submitters spamming it up.
- Advertiser uses our trademark on Google Ads? Google makes money and has editorial control. But we can't sue them.
- Somebody posts something libelous about us on Twitter? Twitter makes serious money and has editorial control. But we can't sue them.
- Fakes on eBay? Can't stop them. eBay not liable.
If Twitter is going to have a "fact checking" department, then they also need a "retractions" department. And if retraction aren't forthcoming when reasonable, then we need a cause of action against them.
This is such a fail for Reddit. If the content isn't allowed on the site, it's on Reddit to remove it. The existence of the content on the site implies Reddit's approval of the content, so engaging with that content is a wholly innocent act.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8044337/Redd...
https://gizmodo.com/reddit-will-start-to-punish-users-for-up...
CTH has some posts that violated a rule but most don't, the admins claim their quarantining was never well communicated and intentionally vague, posting screenshots of lack of communication from mods.
If people get suspended for just participating there without any clear violations of calling for violence/brigading/etc then that's not really a great sign for transparency.
I'm not familiar with the CTH situation, or super familiar with CTH in general besides knowing them to be pretty far left on the political spectrum.
But based solely on this line, if their admins are not making enough of an effort in Reddit's eyes to clean up and discourage people from making these rule breaking posts, then the quarantine makes sense. Even if only 1% of .1% of the posts are violating the rules, if the subreddit isn't policing that small minority of posts, what is Reddit supposed to do? Ignore it because most posts aren't breaking rules?
but... that if the fraction of bad posts lead to mass suspensions on CTH then I'd say it is a creepy/not-good direction for Reddit.
But you have to do something about people refusing to enforce site policy, even if it's only on a small portion of the content.
For an extreme example (and to be clear I am not saying anything like this happened at CTH), if 99 posts out of 100 on subreddit fall within the rules, but that 1 post that doesn't is promoting killing everyone of a certain race, and the subreddit moderators refuse to do anything about that one post, then they 100% need to have something happen. And that doesn't change if it's 999 out of 1000, etc., either.
Now, it's unlikely that anything on CTH was at that level of toxic and hateful, but the same overall concept applies - they have to take care of posts that are against policy, even if they're a small minority. If not, it seems like getting quarantined or even removed completely is a reasonable course of action.
You can go to /r/politics and say that we should go to war with Iran, or say that it would be great if Putin died and be fine.
/r/chapotraphouse has probably the same amount of calls for (or glorification of) violence as /r/politics (and less then /r/justiceserved), but for some reason reddit has it out for them. Also, how is /r/cth supposed to fix their rulebreaking if the admins aren't very clear on what content is breaking the rules?
I think there's two separate issues here:
1) There's probably not enough manpower to be able to do this evenly and consistently across all of Reddit. They're not ever going to be able to do everything all at once. If efforts are ongoing, I don't think it's fair to penalize Reddit for not having taken care of everything that needed to be taken care of all at the same time. If we get to the point where Reddit says "ok we're done we've taken care of all the bad communities and are scaling back down the moderation team" and we see that it still is uneven, then I think we're at the point where it's a problem.
2) The mega subs are tough to deal with in general. Politics is absolutely massive, and from a practical standpoint as one of the core subreddits, is going to be handled differently than a non-core one. Reddit is ultimately a business, and even if from a moral absolutist standpoint it should be treated exactly the same as any other subreddit, realistically it's not going to be.
I do feel like CTH might have been targeted a bit specifically because so much of this has been focused on far-right subreddits, and there was some desire to "balance" it out.
Not sure what makes sense.
I tend to follow Voltaire's ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.' I agree with your assessment of the quality of ideas thrown around there, but I'd prefer a world where the internet allowed sites like that to exist, rather than one that's increasingly owned & distributed by giant corporate conglomerates with significant oversight into the discussion of its members, lest you get assigned to "re-education camps" or some BS like that.
And let's not pretend that Reddit doesn't want to be one of those giant conglomerates...
It's a massively popular site with mainstream appeal. They don't want to let that popularity and audience be taken advantage of to spread ideas that are hateful and likely to incite violence.
Quarantined subreddits are dumb, but it's a sign that their afraid of the backlash of outright banning them - they are already getting accused of heavy handed censorship.
If people want to talk about that stuff, then yeah, go to gab and voat and ruqqus or 8chan or other sites that allow for it. There's no shortage of places on the internet to talk about anything you want. Reddit doesn't have to be one of them.
These policy changes have driven me off of Reddit. Not because I was part of any quarantined "communities" but just because I see where things are going.
Reddit used to actually believe in the ideal of free speech, full stop. That stopped being true quite some time ago.
> I hope most people on HN don't agree with the train of thought that websites have no duty to their fellow man to not normalize hate speech.
I suspect that most agree with your statement, but to speak for myself, I am very skeptical of labelling something as hate speech. It starts out with banning "legitimate" hate speech ("ethnic group X is secretly controlling everything and must be purged") and quickly morphs into something like "you said all lives matter which is associated with opposition to black lives matter which over the long-run is part of a system of oppression and therefore we're going to ban you". If it's not clear, these are arbitrary examples that I just made up but I think the way Reddit is going it's quite clear that we're moving towards that.
I used to be completely against de-platforming people. And I still think sometimes it goes too far - people should be exposed to diverse ideas, and disagreeing with someone doesn't instantly make you a nazi. I won't mention names here, but there are a lot of people that I've vehemently disagreed with on major issues, but still followed along with 'sunlight is the best disinfectant.' I thought that they were ultimately exposing themselves as bigots and hatemongers when going on TV shows, writing op eds, showing up at college campuses. That they would end up taking care of themselves.
But then I realized that I was seeing more and more people quote them, quote their rhetoric. And I'm not even talking about stuff along the lines of 'Black Lives Matter' vs 'Blue/All Lives Matter' type stuff - people being blatantly anti-semetic, people glorifying pedophilia because "it happened to them and they turned out OK", all sorts of very cut and dry "bad things."
When we give these large public platforms to people peddling this, we're directly increasing the spread of the rhetoric. Reddit doesn't want to be involved in spreading this sort of rhetoric, even in it's milder forms, because people get radicalized slowly - you start with the softer sound bites, the ones where they have a lot more wiggle room to claim you don't mean this other thing. And as people start to agree with that idea, you move in with one that pushes the boundaries a bit farther. Keep repeating this process, and someone ends up embedded in the extreme forms of hate.
Reddit wants to cut that off at the start and not play a part in spreading these ideologies and helping radicalize people into them. They've realized that sunlight isn't enough to disinfect things that are fundamentally rotten, especially when these subreddits are largely monocultures without outside influence coming in. If they don't want to be a party to the radicalization of people into buying in on extremist hateful ideologies, they have to do this, and they can't stand by doing nothing in the name of "free speech"
On most of the internet, you don't win arguments by being right. You don't convince people by providing a well research, well sourced, informative argument. You win by beating people into submission. You win by having the better sound bites, the pithier quotes, the most upvotes and most people agreeing with you. And since these subreddits are so self selecting, when you wander in as an outsider, you only see the "winners" - the dissenting voices got downvoted, the bad arguments that appeal to the population of the reddit get upvoted.
Is this a lot of responsibility to put in the hands of people? Yes. Can it lead to the same sort of problem I'm describing here? Yes. Is there any other choice? Not that I can see. You can stand by and let something that you know is harmful and dangerous to human lives happen on your watch because you're afraid you might someday end up doing the same thing, and know that there will be bad results. Or you can risk it, try to take steps to prevent yourself from falling into the same trap, and move forward with something that is necessary with knowledge that if you are not careful you can become part of the problem.
Why does this happen in one direction but not the other? A radical sees something slightly less hardcore. Is influenced. Sees more non-hateful content. Slowly moves away from radicalism and towards the center. Why doesn't that happen equally as the other way around? Should be a balance there, right?
Really, your whole point is essentially stating that these ideas that you hate are more convincing than the ideas you believe in. You don't think you can consistently win the war of ideas via argumentation so, since you obviously are right and your ideas are best, that justifies using power to simply suppress other people's thoughts and words.
All of this rests on your 100% certainty of being correct. Once you admit any level of uncertainty, which you must, your whole approach collapses.
Why do you get to do it to them, but they don't get to do it to you? It's because you think you're 100% right. Of course they think the same about themselves, though, so you're claiming you have some special moral position in the universe that they don't. you stand above them; you have the right to judgment on them but they don't have the right to judgment on you.
Nothing justifies that. The only real differential is that you have the power to silence them and they don't have the power to silence you, and so you're going to use that power and screw equal rights.
>something that you know is harmful and dangerous to human lives
You keep saying these things as though they're absolute facts. They're not facts. That's your opinion. Others' opinion is the opposite - to them all of your beliefs are harmful and dangerous to human lives. And you're walled yourself in so you don't understand the reasoning, and end up thinking it's just inchoate meaningless 'hate' that you're opposed to. You're ignorant of ideas outside your filter bubble, and use the strawman images of opposition you've invented to justify enforcing that filter bubble on others using power.
Banning users who vote for Reddit's arbitrarily-defined objectionable content is a bridge even further than mere censorship. Particularly because the users are voting for the content before they know Reddit has defined it as objectionable, by definition, because once Reddit has made that determination, the original post is removed.
> There's nothing wrong with Reddit not wanting to facilitate and provide a platform for that sort of content, though.
The counterarguments to this have been presented so many times on HN.
The most fundamental problem is that there is a motte-and-bailey going on with these defenses of censorship: in theory, Reddit and others are censoring far-right hateful domestic terrorists. In reality, they are also censoring qualified medical professionals from opining on COVID in a manner contrary to the WHO, or people who are not actual climate denialists, but who merely question the precision of particular climate models.
Exactly as any defender of free speech would have predicted, these mechanisms are enacted on the pretext of defending against a bogeyman, but are actually used in practice to impose ideological uniformity and suppress legitimate dissent.
So these alt sites spring up all the time (8chan, 4chan, ruqqus, voat). No one has taken those sites off the night. And the public is free to vote with their time, clicks, and money on whether they support these sites.
Just different terrible people from the terrible people who dominate reddit is all.
"Orange man bad" 320k upvotes, front page
This is not coincidental. The same thing happened with Voat, the same thing is happening with Ruqqus.
I'm sure some not-awful stuff will end up as collateral damage here, but Reddit is attempting to target the communities of people that are promoting and engaging in some pretty heinous activities and lines of thought. When those are the people leaving to make a new platform where they won't be censored, that's the content that takes up the mindshare on those websites.
Can confirm. Checked out Ruqqus out of curiosity. Racist content right there on the homepage.
Reddit is currently full of these, and it's apparently Ok when it comes from correct side of political spectrum
I think it would quickly devolve into 4Chan. Almost all of the current community would decamp, and the trolls that infest other sites would take over.
HN is entirely filled with right-wing to far-right sheltered techbros. Half the accounts here that are constantly complaining about "free speech" and "consequences to their actions" are really one bad day away from calling everyone they disagree with various slurs, and the other half are so insulated from any sort of actual injustice in the world that they sit atop of their smug towers of indifference, cawing at the peasants below who have things such as "opinions" (that disagree with theirs, of course) or "motivations".
What makes something valuable is the 10% of the thing that is not CRUD, and whatever measures put into place to make sure that the 90% CRUD doesn't poison the 10% that's worthwhile.
To me, that's having clear guidelines that are consistently applied through moderation.
HN has one homepage; one sub-community. Reddit has an infinite number of subreddits. Similar for facebook.
Even with no moderation, in no case would anyone be exposed to content that wasn't posted and allowed in a community that they deliberately subscribed to.
Reddit polices what kinds of communities are allowed. HN is one kind of community.
Likewise, Reddit and Facebook both have to deal with being judged by all the forums they "host." You may not think it makes sense to criticize Reddit as a whole for hosting white supremacist forums and violent misogyny forums, but the rest of society seems to think that one bad apple forum spoils the entire Reddit and Facebook barrel.
If you're looking for a comparison, I don't have to read any thread I don't want to on HN, just as I don't have to join any subreddit I don't want to on Reddit.
But I know they're there, and that affects my perception of what HN or Reddit or Facebook is.
If it was just about hiding content, we could argue that HN shouldn't censor anything, but if we let people tag threads and comments with labels like "white supremacy" or "SJW raving," then everyone can filter what they don't want to see, so what's the problem?
Brigading has been rightly against the rules of Reddit forever, that's a hostile action, rare, quickly punished and not significant.
Also, critically, it applies the same way to completely separate websites as well. Redditors could brigade HN or vice versa.
On Reddit, nobody gets exposed to content they didn't subscribe to.
>I don't have to read any thread I don't want to on HN
True, though you still have to see it, so in the interests of time at the least it's good to have a filter.
>we could argue that HN shouldn't censor anything, but if we let people tag threads and comments with labels like "white supremacy" or "SJW raving," then everyone can filter what they don't want to see, so what's the problem?
That's a great idea! We could do a curator system where anyone can sign up to be a curator to tag things with their own personal tags. Then you can just find a curator who matches your wishes and we're golden.
Not in this or any other timeline. Even if we cover up the shops, knowing that your money in a normal store helps the mall stay in business to rent space to a racist store makes this mall anathema to a huge segment of society.
—-
YOU may be comfortable shopping there, and YOU might construct all sorts of rationalizations for being complicit in racism, but YOU are being unrealistic if you think that everybody else is going to be all, “racism is terrible, but hey, it’s a mall, what’s the big deal?”
Not everybody is going to go along with rationalizing away being complicit in violent racist ideologies. And thus it is that companies like Facebook and Reddit end up being judged by the worst things they support.
If you think that’s terrible and want to trot out “logic” that “proves” they aren’t complicit in racism, you’re going to have to accept that plenty of people can’t be persuaded to do nothing while their country slips into Nazis II.
I up/downvote posts/comments at least couple of times a day when trying to scroll on my phone or just hitting the screen to wake it up after being distracted.
This is ridiculous policy.
At least the porn is still there.
The problem with ‘social’ sites is that they allow cross-contamination between the seedy bits, and r/woodworking and the like.
The open web — with separately hosted forums — is a lot better, but less convenient. I hope to see a solution sometime, but the odds are not good.
It's not anymore about simply censoring unwanted content, punishing the users for engaging with will be way more effective in the long run.
Opaque vote display and ranking algorithms, keyword based shadowbanning, ideological mods and admin - combined with an organic facade you have a platform to manufacture consensus and push propaganda onto millions of unsuspecting users, young and old alike.
Frankly it's scummy and I hope they fail.
And why have they let themselves be tricked into spewing the Section-230 nonsense that conservative hate-mongers are using to threaten online service providers?
Section 230 protection is irrelevant to service providers policing their site. It is very relevant to service providers who are being told by conservative hate-mongering politicians “hey we’ll strip your protections unless you allow our hateful content even though the protections are unrelated to our content and comments”.
You’re carrying water for malicious actors who don’t care about you.
By your own logic, not mine (I think it’s bullshit) YOURS if you downvote this comment to the point that it is hidden or automodded then you are infringing on my “FREEZE PEECH RAIGHTS” because you are “removing” constitutionally-protected freeze peach from the public sphere.
The adage of the "fascists will next come for you" continues to remain true.
Overall, a worrying trend.
Even on HN there have been many anti-science nonsense stories on the front-page where the site would benefit from letting people indicate that they want anyone who enabled it to have no weighting in the curation of their own personal view. This may be a sort of filter bubble, but it's an anti-idiot filter bubble. I don't need to have my world clouded by the noise of conspiracy fanatics and idiots.
I can sympathise with the admins, because a) there are a lot of terrible, toxic people b) there are a lot of bot armies. The latter is probably easiest to combat, but it is still a tough nut to crack. The former is even worse: I imagine that the most engaged users are quite often the users one wishes were least engaged.
It's a tough problem, but Orwellian punishment of wrongthink seems the wrong direction.
First, Reddit isn't a 1st Amendment platform; they make the site, they make the rules. Like it or not, that's how it is today.
Second, you have to stop toxicity somewhere; there are a few universal goods we can generally agree upon, things like abuse of animals, underage content, etc. and as long as the slope isn't too slippery beyond that, I think this is an acceptable form of moderation.
I hate how these conversations always devolve to "well they're just trying to control what everyone says!" as if it's black and white and not shades of gray. No, they're trying to prevent assholes from spilling over into people's real lives, because the alternative is becoming 4chan. Where all that "upvoted" content results in ACTUAL PEOPLE BEING KILLED.
I hope most people on HN don't agree with the train of thought that websites have no duty to their fellow man to not normalize hate speech. "Where does it stop" - it stops at not doxxing people and not calling for people to be murdered, per their TOS.
For example, lets compare a similar service. Twitter is currently censoring some of the President of the US's tweets. They were not doing that a few months ago. So it's not black and white where twitter and acceptability is, and, like with society, it changes over time. Thus, people are concerned that merely interacting with something is enough to be labelled anathema, because of the shades of gray.
Calling for murder and doxxing isn't the only thing against the content policy. Lots of those policies will have a very subjective line in the sand.
You don't even know what the account upvoted, and upvoting isn't hate speech (or calling for someone to be murdered). Do you have a bunch of unknown information on this or are you just defending reddit's continued slide to dystopian horror for no reason?
Sometimes slopes just aren't that slippery.
Moderation need not end in dystopian thought policing. Reddit has had moderation for quite some time. Indeed voting was there from the beginning, and is a primitive crowdsourced form of moderation, with many obvious flaws, including groupthink.
Forum moderation's whole point is to constrain what can be said. It can be used for good or ill. Extending it to bans from agreeing with wrongthink is a step beyond the status quo. Maybe it'll balance out to be good on net, maybe bad, but don't pretend it's not novel or that it's obviously good on balance, and no one should be concerned.
Motte #1: doxxing, calls to murder specific individuals
Bailey #1: 'hate speech'.
And your bailey itself is a motte and bailey!
Motte #2: speech that incites violence or hate against a given group
Bailey #2: "All lives matter", "It's ok to be white" banned, "#killallmen", "all white people are racist" Ok.
It's always like this. I'd love a pro-censorship advocate to actually advocate what they want instead of endlessly cloaking it in these sorts of smokescreens and sneer labels. If 'hate speech' ever defended all people equally it wouldn't get so much pushback as a concept, but it was always a special protection for groups favored by those in power. Address that.
"That is definitely a way to get only the things the Reddit admins want upvoted,"
Feels like a bigoted conspiracy theory. Reddit admins are not a cohesive group of people and this blanket statement hurts.
Your are suspended to comment here.
Please think of the children.
/s
What does that mean? They are all paid employees of the same company, they have leadership, common goals, and accountability up the chain.
Is that part of the /s or commentary within the post?
But you’re not wrong in your opinion and allowing downvotes without requiring a response encourages groupthink as well.
But where’s the line? Do we as society mandate freedom of speech on all private platforms? Are downvotes on HN protected speech?
You’re right that it’s a tough problem. We are at an inflection point right now. The boundaries of speech freedoms for the next century are being defined right now.
Therefore, I don't think we can say that posts and replies on the websites hosted by private companies can be considered protected speech.
That said, treating upvotes and downvotes in the same way as the text in a post or reply is a pretty bad idea IMHO.
• Discourages long-running discussions by burying (and ultimately locking) older content
• Discourages coversation in favour of fire-and-forget comments by making it impractical to continue where you left off
• Gamification of content
• Numerically larger groups can bury content they would prefer others not see
— but slightly worse —
• No notification of replies, making actual discussion impractical
• Extra privileges for conformity (downvoting, vouching)
It doesn't match what pg wrote in http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html but actions speak louder than words.
Why exactly should an upvote, which is publicly visible approval, be different than a comment? I mean... they're both content posted to the site. It's not unreasonable that they be subject to the same rules.
Is the outrage here that votes are supposed to be "anonymous" and this feels like an unmasking of something people felt more comfortable doing "in private"? Is that something we want to protect per se?
This seems like more outrage than meat, honestly. I'd really like to know what the comment was before deciding.