Comment by dmoy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmoy | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

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