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Comment by zeveb | Hacker News Reader

So, if people don't vote the way the Reddit admins want, the Reddit admins will replace the voters. That is definitely a way to get only the things the Reddit admins want upvoted, upvoted. But it seems to me to be the opposite of free discourse.

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.

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How so? Calling for someone to be murdered is understandably against their policy. As is doxxing someone. The user accounts that upvote the call for murder or upvote the doxxing details KNOW that the post is against their policy and decided to participate anyway.

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.

Theres no upvoting on 4chan and bumping a thread (or on reddit upvoting) does not kill and cannot kill anyone. The people making the threads end up killing people (very rarely) not the randoms that reply (or upvote).

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?

"Slide to dystopian horror"? For banning a bunch of garbage subs and the people that upvote the garbage? Hyperbolic much?

The problem is that there's no reason to believe that this policy will be limited strictly to obvious garbage. Unpopular, but not garbage views will inevitably be hit too. Maybe that's worth taking out the garbage, but collateral damage is still a negative.

It's amusing how much HN mocks the police for their stance that everything that enables privacy could enable child exploitation imagery while at the same time insisting that anything that resembles moderation will end in dystopian thought policing.

Sometimes slopes just aren't that slippery.

Everything that enables privacy absolutely could enable child exploitation imagery. But privacy as a whole is too fucking valuable to give up to make prosecuting some crimes easier. In the US, that's the whole point of the fourth amendment -- warrants with probable cause and specificity requirements are the proper escape hatch, not bulk data sifting. Not all crime can or should be caught at any cost whatsoever.

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.

Why should your (and their) definition of garbage be the only acceptable one?

Because they own the website and can do what they please with it? And "their" definition of garbage is banning things like "pics of dead girls" and "fat people hate". You're welcome to your own definition on whatever billion-user website you happen to administer.

https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy

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.

Yes, it's shades of gray.

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.

They're not censoring them at all - they're adding more context below them that some of the content is misleading. You can still read every insane word in its original context.

You're forming a motte and bailey argument here... inside another motte and bailey argument.

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.

And people downvote you as a disagreement button on this site instead of qualifying their opinion in words.

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.

Even more concerning than using downvote as a disagree button is flagging as a disagree button. It's happened to me many times where my good-faith comments have been flagged due to advocating a minority position (specifically, that the COVID-19 lockdown is harmful, just to give context) and I have/had to e-mail Dang to get a human to look at the flagged comments and determine if they were actually violating a guideline.

VC News is basically a Reddit clone to show off pg's then-up-and-coming toy language.

• 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.

Freedom of speech is only about whether what you say can be used against you for government persecution (other than admitting to a crime to an officer of the law).

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.

Eh but there's a couple reasons in my mind why this might be reasonable.

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.

Your discourse seems a bit like "hate speech" and you implying 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.

"Reddit admins are not a cohesive group of people."

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?

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