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Comment by dmoy | Hacker News Reader

> The_Donald involved a lot of spreading their message / fake news sites / spamming across other subs and etc.

Yea, I gotta say, having to previously deal with r/The_Donald brigades on another large subreddit was incredibly annoying and depressing.

Can't speak to spreading fake news, but massive influxes of r/The_Donald users spamming truly vile stuff in an ostensibly non-political sub really sucked (as a moderator, to clean up).

The only thing that works imo is fairly strict moderation, or extremely niche/small communities. Everything else just gets swamped by toxicity. Decentralized vs centralized isn't really the right dimension to look at I think.

And as soon as your small community grows... the trolls come a-knocking.

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Gotta respect the iron fist of /r/askhistorians. Probably the best sub on reddit.

The iron fist is a double edged sword in some senses.

Although reddit acted as a free speech haven for a long time, it was only overall, and not ever in major specific communities. True free speech is valued because it fosters debate, and allows bad speech to be rebutted by more speech. A marketplace of ideas, and maybe more importantly, the counterspeech doctrine, are incredibly important principals in justifying the existence of free speech. Fiefdoms more often than not were echo chambers, where to see a response to bad speech, a person would have to know where else to venture. By creating filter bubbles, tribes, echo chambers, reddit was not an exemplar of a free speech haven, but instead a collection of lopsided megaphones pointed in opposite directions, strewn across a hard to navigate map.

Strong moderation is what allows communities with strict quality guidelines to function, but also amplifies division.

And on the topic of history, a part of me finds it unfortunate that this banning will make historical, sociological, and psychological analysis of trends, thoughts of the times, past bad behavior etc much harder. It's no what.cd or house of wisdom or library of alexandria loss, but it is still a historical record loss of a huge event that happened. I may not have personally liked The_Donald but it was quite the experience, as a fish out of water, to go look at how other people think, communicate, and reason. The culture that developed there will continue to exist, but the ease with which one could passively observe it, and learn lessons from it is greatly diminished. Another double edged sword.

> True free speech is valued because it fosters debate, and allows bad speech to be rebutted by more speech

Sure, but in practice this is what true free speech on reddit for a large sub looks like before moderation

* 3 knee jerk replies

* 10 pieces of spam asking you to buy their bit/altcoin or click on their affiliate links

* 5 people who are hurling vile insults at you for whatever reason

* 8 more people who are hurling vile insults at each other, and just happen to be in your comment chain for some reason

* 1 reasonable, well thought out response

* 2 people who are lost and looking for a different sub

* 1 person replying half a year later after everyone's gone

Something in that ratio

With no moderation at all, you're lost in a sea of spam, scams, and insults. And because of the extremely poor SNR, your reasonable replies dry up and just leave.

I agree not everyone has to go the r/askhistorians route of completely iron fist, but you can't actually run a communication forum with millions or tens of millions of subscribers without a lot of automated and manual moderation. True free speech ends up being no speech because everyone got scammed or insulted and just decides to leave to go somewhere smaller. (edit: trying to untangle my confusing sentence)

It might work for smaller communities. It does not scale.

As moderator of a top-100 subreddit: this is SO incredibly accurate. You must be another moderator of one of the big subreddits. 90% of my work is nuking flamewars, spammers, trolls, and low-effort meme replies.

Without automation and human moderators to clean up, it's basically impossible to have a free exchange of ideas or any good discussion. Free speech disappears into the noise.

The idea of free speech is great and was a big step forward in an era where government oppression was a primary fear. But in the Internet Age, I think Civil Discourse is a better goal to aim for.

One of the original ideas was with the up and down arrows, the good content rises to the top. The problem with heavy handed moderators is that they are often biased and many get on a power trip.

For a sufficiently large sub there is no time for power tripping. Only an endless queue of spam and vitirol

This, more or less. Even if someone wanted to powertrip like crazy they literally wouldn't be able to do much. Delete 100 comments? Wait 15 minutes and another 100 will replace them.

People assume "mod powertripping" too quickly. The reality is that most of the moderation is accomplished via automation, primarily Automoderator rules on Reddit. The volume is far to high to manage by hand -- it varies by community and month but it's around 75%+ automated for us.

Automation makes mistakes. A LOT. Sometimes a person catches them and overrides the bot, often they don't.

There are some communities that abuse the automation to enforce bias, of course. For example, /r/news appears to be auto-censoring things about coronavirus or that might be perceived as negative for Trump (ex: the Russian bounties scandal). But this is much rarer than people think -- with the exception of bans, most of the "mod abuse" is simply bots screwing up.

It would be interesting to see an implementation that lets you view but not interact with removed content. click the spam tag to see all the spam, grayed out. in some cases it might be helpful to know what not to say, or that something has already been said and removed. /r/askhistorians would probably be a place where marking something as removed but visible would not be as at risk of propagating urban legend or bad history. hopefully that community would know what they are getting when they peak beneath the curtain.

On reddit you can do that natively for a whole thread by locking, but for individual comment chains you can only do it with mod bots.

You can individually lock comments now (new as of a year ago?), but in practice it is incredibly painful/time consuming to do so for a whole subthread of comments. Eventual consistency also sucks there. Easier to nuke the whole thread and remove it from view.

At no point did I intend to or hint at advocating for a lack of moderation. Moderation can be other things besides how it currently exists.

Any commenting system is going to need some way to value signal from noise, and popularity by itself isnt enough.

What I did say, was that moderation, as it stands now, has blowback, which includes but is not limited to creating and reinforcing refined groupthinks.

Sure that's fair, though I don't know what else you mean by "true free speech"

There are middle grounds between completely opaque censorship and unfettered yelling.

The junk mail folder in your email mailbox is an example. It offers transparency.

Yup; give everyone an equally sized soapbox and people will take advantage of it. Imagine a town square full of people all trying to make themselves heard, with a nontrivial percentage just there to make noises, groups that start chanting / singing and lighting smoke bombs, etc.

> True free speech is valued because it fosters debate, and allows bad speech to be rebutted by more speech.

Is that really a thing on the internet though?

It seems like the unmoderated free speech havens on the internet are bubbles themselves and I'm not sure there's much real debate going on there....

>Some observers argue that the counterspeech principle makes a better ideal than a reality, primarily because some people or groups in society possess far more power than do others. For example, proponents of critical race theory contend that minorities often are denied access to the marketplace of ideas to counter harmful speech.

>Others argue that some types of speech — for example, pornography and hate speech — are so harmful that counterspeech alone is not an adequate response.

https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/940/counterspee...

I agree with your point, without some way to structure, weigh, and amplify the signal; noise and polarization are more likely to win out.

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/02/the-illusion-of-a...

The final result still leaves me conflicted, in a baby with the bathwater sense. Plenty of the speech in the sub was merely speech I disagreed with, and censoring it all is nowhere close to a least restrictive means way to erase hate. Moments like spez editing a users comment are now erased from the record, for the moment at least archived elsewhere.

If a politician ever wanted to go back, look at the pain of others, and use what they learned to bridge divides, to be able to speak to the others, they are now denied this resource for research. That probably bothers me more than the structure of reddit being quasi-free-speech-incompatible. ChapoTrapHouse isnt somewhere I ever went, but from a communication sense, I now feel a missed opportunity to learn how to read their language, and understand or recognize it if I heard it.

Between Reddit, Youtube, Twitch, and India; today itself might eventually be regarded as a historical day, where both public servants and private enterprise stood up and said enough, albeit for different reasons.

> True free speech is valued because it fosters debate, and allows bad speech to be rebutted by more speech. A marketplace of ideas, and maybe more importantly, the counterspeech doctrine, are incredibly important principals in justifying the existence of free speech.

No, you're missing the phenomenon of gish galloping[1]. Toxicity will overwhelm the community because it takes no effort to spew disgusting nonsense and spam while it takes significant effort to rebut it. The mythical "marketplace of ideas" only exists in presence of moderation, whether somewhat decentralized like HN or like the iron fist of places like r/AskHistorians. A literal free marketplace of ideas is a cesspool.

"A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes"

[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

I'm not arguing against moderation.

Half way down I said "Strong moderation is what allows communities with strict quality guidelines to function.". Quality could mean very different things to The_Donald and AskHistorians

The loss of what.cd still saddens me every time I see it mentioned.

In case you didn't know, redacted.ch replaced it and probably has all of the same torrents.

I know about red. Unfortunately their tracker economy is way too hard for me to compete with my asymmetric adsl home connection( 0.5mbps uplink) and I'm not going to spend money for pirating. I do however have other private sources of music( including various ftp servers utilized by the known unknowns), p2p networks, soulseek etc.

>allows bad speech to be rebutted by more speech That might work where people are physically speaking, and only have one voice, can only shout so loud, and the time taken to speak is equivalent to the time taken to listen. But in a digital medium, on voice can be amplified infinitely in volume and ..volume, at little cost of time to the speaker

Yea wow, I don't moderate r/askhistorians but rather a different sub, and we sometimes pride ourselves on keeping this relatively clean. But then I stumble across r/askhistorians again and remember that no, no we don't have things under control by comparison.

We can barely keep a lid on the vitriol and toxicity, and some of the more blatantly false/scammy advice. r/askhistorians is a whole 'nother level.

Sometimes I honestly wish hackernews was run more like r/askhistorians. Too many people here on hn talk a lot of shit on stuff they don't really know much about beyond a cursory understanding (I'm probably guilty myself).

> Sometimes I honestly wish hackernews was run more like r/askhistorians.

I don't. The moderation and voting/karma system on HN is much better than anything seen on Reddit. People have stupid opinions everywhere in life, but this is one of a few rare havens where it's incredibly easy to find deep and interesting conversation. Reddit ain't it.

You should spend some time on r/askhistorians then, because it's very much unlike the rest of reddit. It's not perfect of course, but...

I see more blatantly false armchair comments here at the top of threads loudly proclaiming something that is not correct than I do in r/askhistorians.

I can only tell when it's a topic that I'm actually expert in, so I don't know for sure. But, Gell Mann amnesia...

What do they do well that can be transferred without basically asking the mods to do more work? Isn't it just a manpower thing? Or do they have a way of verifying expertise etc so you know you're getting answers from experts without having to moderate each comment?

> What do they do well that can be transferred without basically asking the mods to do more work?

Nothing

> Isn't it just a manpower thing?

Yes

> Or do they have a way of verifying expertise etc so you know you're getting answers from experts without having to moderate each comment?

Well ok yeah I think they can vet expertise beforehand and then have a smaller list of approved posters, but most of the stuff I suspect just gets sent into the moderation queue requiring more humanpower to deal with.

That's why I say "I wish" heh, it's non practical here

> Too many people here on hn talk a lot of shit on stuff they don't really know much about beyond a cursory understanding

Amen, amen!

Yeah, you're right. HN should allow participation only from people with at least 2 years of education in a Computer Science program.

The sound of folks bemoaning getting moderated there is music to my hears.

No people, we want someone who KNOWS, not just saw something on the Discovery Channel this one time ... it's such a refreshing change from the magical internet experts that come and go.

I respect the iron fist of /r/askhistorians but it has the feel of being impossible to contribute.

This is by design but horribly off putting even if you read all the rules.

It feels way worse than wikipedia or Stack Overflow inner circle.

For example a few years ago there was a question about Hitler underestimating Soviet tank production. I submitted a link to HistoryChannel Youtube audio of the famous Hitler-Mannerheim talk of June 4th of 1942. I included even the exact second where Hitler talks about Soviet tank production.

Well, my comment which was 3rd or 4th level down got [deleted]. Why did I even bother?

I had a lengthy discussion with the askhistorians moderator on what the problem was.

* It was not Hitler since the question was about him. * It was not the fact that this was about as close to primary source as possible. * The problem apparently was that I did not provide enough context. We are talking about providing a primary source in a comment 3 levels down.

This leads to a horrible ratio of questions/accepted answers.

You would think that with only few historians being able to navigate the requirements the answers would be of the highest quality.

When it comes to recent history it certainly does not feel like it.

Another example: There was a question on Soviet black markets in 1980s The sole accepted answer referenced one pitiful official Soviet source and that was it. It was a lazy answer.

Since all I had was a wealth of anecdata I could not contribute which was fine but the feeling of incomplete answer really nagged me.

So you end up feeling like https://xkcd.com/386/ but unable to do anything.

The problem is this, if the official r/askhistorians answer is so obviously(to a biased participant in a recent event) incomplete for recent history how can we trust askhistorians for history where you have no knowledge?

It leads to a form of Gell-Mann effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

Isn’t /r/politics completely one sided fake news to prop up the democrats???

No. I think there are two separate camps within the Democrats, with very little overlap. Progressives on the far left, and centrists. Think Sanders vs. Biden, for example. And /r/politics is completely dedicated to propping up the progressives.

To be fair, I don't think it's filled with fake news. It's filled completely with progressive-biased, one sided interpretation of actual news events.

I'm not sure why this is downvoted. As an European I always found r/politics to be on the other side of funny US politics (dem and libtard and whatnot) and I also found it a bit disrespectful that it was just for US news. I get the whole "we were here first" thing but reddit is a bigger platform than that

I think calling it fake news is going too far. They are incredibly partisan though, but many refuse to admit it. They also bring a lot of their ideas elsewhere.

>Isn’t /r/politics completely one sided fake news to prop up the democrats???

/r/politics is how I imagine the "Two Minutes Hate" from 1984. A complete circle-jerk that has infested many of the main subreddits. /r/pics, /r/nextfuckinglevel, /r/publicfreakout are rather outposts of /r/politics these days. No wonder, when a small clique of politically aligned mods controls the major subreddits.

Even /r/askhistorians joined the blackout in support of 'Black Lives Matter'. What's neutral about that?

Damn, I can't believe they took a non-neutral stance on extrajudicial murder of black people. Crazy stuff.

There are an endless number of causes one could "black out" for. But they just so happened to black out for the one with a pressure campaign and mob backing, that has intertwined itself with American national political ambitions?

The emotional blackmail of this movement will probably be its undoing.

Imagine feeling "emotionally blackmailed" into not supporting extrajudicial murder...

It is easy to support that stance. Or even perhaps just stopping extrajudicial murder by police as a whole.

Go look at the official BLM list of goals - they are advocating to abolish the police, end capitalism, abolish the western nuclear family & several other far left, badly thought out, unsupportable concepts.

Worse still, the same campaign has spread to the UK, unfiltered and unchanged, despite the fact that we have almost zero people killed by police outside of terrorist attacks, our police don't carry guns, and due to our government's austerity policies, they're woefully underfunded.

As a moderator in a smaller technical subreddit myself, I mostly agree with that assessment.

The best subs I've seen usually have small communities and/or strict enforcement of the community rules (doesn't always need to be through moderator action!).

Unmoderated or otherwise weakly managed communities just don't scale. They never retain any quality if you try anyway. The noise will always dominate.

With no way to set expectations that the vast majority of the audience understands (see least common denominator), expectations which they agree with and which you can meet, you'll get endless conflicts.

Strict moderation like in /r/netsec and /r/askhistory works when done well and consistently by competent mods. It preserves good discussions and gives people and incentive to maintain high quality in their submissions since that's a requirement to even be seen in the first place.

Smaller forums with tight healthy communities often don't need much moderation (usually niche communities with no significant controversies), and can often self regulate by typical social means (just telling people to behave).

All the best contributors are usually driven by some kind of intrinsic motivation, often an interest in the topic at hand and a wish to share their knowledge. If the forum is by far too flooded with low quality content for that to be seen, they will lose motivation to contribute, and as a consequence the signal to noise ratio falls. You're more likely to incentivize new competent contributors to join if the contributions from your existing competent contributors are among the most prominent submissions in your forum.

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As for centralized vs decentralized, I see decentralization of forums as a form of an escape hatch when the quality of a forum degrades. The ability to cleanly fork a forum and walk away to a new location with new rules, like in software projects, provides a motivation to work hard to maintain unity in the forum, or else the mods will have nothing left to be modded, and likewise for other prominent members whose bad behavior contributes to division.

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