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Comment by intended | Hacker News Reader

I love these conversations. As I've said in about 3 other places now - these are the side effects of automation. It didn't use to be like this because it was not possible - and reddit was in many ways MUCH worse. You couldn't ban known bigots or racists because they would be back with an alt.

The presence of harassment and hate speech has a chilling effect on normal users - they aren't here to engage or fight nazism.

Without effective moderation, you will end up with Godwin's law applied to all convos.

But with automation you can ban hate speech! Awesome! You can stop bigotry and harassment! Brilliant!

You can enforce ideological views over your sub and crush dissent - whoops?

No, you cannot escape this conundrum - tools will be misused. The issue then becomes one of ethics and the appropriateness of the force used.

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I'm obviously not arguing for zero moderation. You would trade one Nazi for another. I believe you are incorrect. That's what the downvote button is for.

What good is karma is it's not adhered to? If you can just remove things because you disagree with them?

Perhaps you should read Aesop's fable: The Wind and the Sun. I believe you would have something to learn from this fable about motivating people in the right direction.

I addressed what happened to the downvote button elsewhere:

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I recently went through some old logs and discussions from 7/8 years ago. People actually talked about how important it was to upvote content and follow rediquette.

That discussion died because you have to enforce rediquette and the "honor code" fails when people see that abusing the code goes unpunished. This means that upvote downvote become like/dislike.

To me this implies that if you want to make upvotes work, then you need to select your community for rule compliance.

I appreciate that you've framed a logical argument. There is definitely some sound logic in what you are saying.

I think of it a bit differently.

Reddit could have its 10 commandments and adhere to that. That would be clear and transparent and it should apply both to mods and users alike. There should be no cider house rules. A community is given power by its userbase. Mods should respect their userbase more than they do.

Mods can simply not be trusted to be good faith actors. They constantly abuse their power and Reddit enables it. They are encouraged by the (cult)ture there.

Every mod is free to act as they wish and Reddit will support it. They act like bullies is more like it. Do as I say not as I do.

I then take a step back and wonder. Are crowds truly wise? Or are we simply watching groupthink play out at massive scale?

The crowd is not a crowd anymore. It is a herd.

I wish this were possible too.

I want to engage with my users and explain things. But look at this conversation, it is going to take me hours to walk through the whole thing with you, and I am luckily a policy/forum history wonk.

I thrive on figuring this stuff out.

Doing this for ALL users who are angry or disagree with our moderation? Goddamn man, this is a volunteer role, and we are already tired from dealing with even worse users.

While you may respect your users as community members, on moderation your knowledge and peoples assumptions diverge far too much. Which means you stop taking them seriously.

It sucks, it creates a wall between users and mods, and a sense of working with lords and ladies. Most mods don’t want it, but its fated to happen.

I honestly urge everyone who is unhappy with moderation to try it out themselves. I think there is no faster way for people to start working on this problem than having their own experience to drive new solutions.

Perhaps the underlying system is flawed in some fundamental 'unfixable' way. Maybe there's a better way.

I agree. This is volunteer work. And despite the bad apples there's quite a few good mods out there! I just wonder about the ways in which Reddit motivates its moderators. It certainly isn't positive.

As I said I don't believe in the wisdom of crowds. I think we become a herd easily and forget the crowd.

I think the entire system of upvoting/liking is flawed. It encourages our worst behavior. At least the way PG and friends have designed it.

It only works for tight use cases like HN. It doesn't work for Reddit IMHO. It's too big. It's become a herd.

We are not witnessing the wisdom of Crowds. We are witnessing the chaos of herds.

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