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Comment by marricks | Hacker News Reader

An obvious concern of this would be just silencing content which isn't violent or morally wrong but just not wanted in a large commercially viable website. This is obviously polarizing but something I'll be watching is what happens to /r/chapotraphouse.

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.

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>CTH has some posts that violated a rule but most don't

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?

I don't follow them enough to personally have an opinion on if they warranted that treatment or not, but did follow enough to know it really couldn't have been most posts. So really can't argue with you on the validity of the banning.

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.

I pulled the fractions out of thin air, so I have no idea what they actually are.

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.

The thing with reddit's rules is they aren't applied in a consistent way. You can go to /r/justiceserved (which is basically a violence porn sub) and talk about violence all you want. Look at https://www.reddit.com/r/JusticeServed/comments/hdvsy2/dayli... as an example, look at the people there that are saying they think it's a good thing that a guy was shot (and killed) for attempted robbery. This was the top post on /r/rising for that sub when I made this comment.

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?

Yeah, Justice Served definitely looks like it needs to be looked at.

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.

What seems to be happening with CTH looks like a positive sign. They're not really less toxic than the others getting the boot, and the admins kicking abusive buddies while they're cleaning up everyone else says they have a (somewhat) functional internal process. Less room for toxicity in the world!

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