Reddit nuking accounts of anyone who mentions a new employee or their history | Hacker News Reader

Reddit nuking accounts of anyone who mentions a new employee or their history

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184 pointsTenoke75 comments

I'll be honest, I feel whoever decided to reject this made a pretty poor decision. This is a discussion that absolutely needs to be had, and frankly it looks like collusion between Reddit and HN (while I doubt that's why).

Regardless, this community and reddit share a ton of users, if Reddit is going to ban discussion of what is at best a questionable hire, this should be a place to freely discuss it. It's both relevant and topical to the community here. As best I can tell it doesn't violate any rules, and if it does an exception should be made IMO.

> This is a discussion that absolutely needs to be had, and frankly it looks like collusion between Reddit and HN (while I doubt that's why).

Where is HN colluding on this?

It's been (as of my post) knocked off the front page. It's more likely people flagging "non-technology/startup" drama.

http://hnrankings.info/26554697/

If it were flagged shouldn't the post itself read as (dead flagged)? That's been my experience with articles that were flagged off the front page.

I'm not seeing that here.

No, there's a middle ground where a post is simply de-ranked. Which, absolutely, makes it hard to tell what happened as an outsider. IIRC, basically a "flag" also counts as a bunch of downvotes, in addition to adding up to a threshold where it actually marks a post as "flagged".

Given the clear conflict of interest at play here (Reddit is a YC company and are seemingly preparing to IPO in the near future) this post would be a great candidate for additional transparency from dang

Now it's fully flagged, and I think the information you just stated means it will stay that way.

I just don't get why a user would flag this.

Another post appears to have been suppressed in the same way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26556187

Probably because it smells like reddit drama and is not really a good basis for a curious debate.

Users flagged it. Moderators didn't see it (until now) and haven't touched it.

Anything else?

No, thanks, I appreciate your response.

Seems like this post has likely been quietly downweighed and pushed off the front-page. I do wish there'd be a bit more transparency over those decisions though I understand they are common and do usually have reasons behind them.

This thread has been captured in https://rejected.substack.com/, the newsletter of posts that reached the HN frontpage but were silently pushed off, and will be visible in the next release of the newsletter.

Oh, I never saw this but like it! I occasionally note submissions that have been weighed up/down based on the karma/time of the posts surrounding them for fun.

Do you have a theory for why they're being pushed off? Are these due to having keywords that are downweighted or sinister VC conflicts of interest?

Seems like you're pretty interested in this

I've gotten a reply or read a reply in some cases though it's usually done silently.

Some cases are due to a topic being overly-popular and having too many front-page submissions and the most obvious ones. Some are from flagging. A lot of the other ones seem to be purely based on what dang (and other mods?) like and don't like. Possibly there's also pressure from YC or VCs, maybe not - I have no idea there.

There's also much more up/down weighing than is captured here, some of it more minor. Overall, it's something of a myth that the front-page is mainly based on what the community is interested in - that's at most a secondary factor given the heavy curation and its effect over time.

I find it concerning that Greenwald's most recent article was flagged.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-do-big-media-outlets-so...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26486997

Flagged with 8 comments. Either a duplicate or dang has some explaining to do.

Flagging is done by users, not moderators: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12173836

Frankly, I would flag basically anything by Glenn Greenwald. Even putting aside my personal feelings about him, it's basically guaranteed to result in a carbon copy of the same political flame wars we've all seen 1000 times. Sometimes the issue is just that people are bored of the same discussion over and over again.

Why wouldn't you just hide it or ignore it?

Because I think having the same (mostly tribal) political discussion ad nauseum harms the community.

More optimistically, it allows the community to blow off steam in threads you don't read

Steam is not a good analogy. A better analogy is fire. Steam blows off, fire spreads.

If people had cancelled Greenwald this way years ago perhaps nobody would have learned of Snowden's disclosures.

Who knows what we will never learn because people want to avoid certain type of discussions

You don't think other people should be able to have a discussion that doesn't personally interest you?

That's not the issue. Not everyone is interested in Plan 9 but that doesn't mean they're flagging https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26554539.

The issue is that different community members have differing views about what's on topic here and/or what breaks the site guidelines. That's inevitable and natural.

HN has really started turning against Greenwald recently. It's possible many people flagged it as soon as they saw it was his article.

Many reasons: users flagging, moderators manually removing from front page are the most common. I guess it's pretty normal given how HN works (anyone with a certain number of points can flag + active moderation), but I just find those "rejected" threads quite interesting, especially their comments section.

Reddit is such an authoritarian shithole

The entire frontpage looks like it is curated by some propaganda department & megacorps acting like their posts with 1000k upvotes aren't advertisements

Mine doesn't look anything like that. Everyone has their own frontpage based on their subreddit subscriptions so I have no idea what you're talking about. Maybe post a screenshot?

There is the personal "front page"(stuff you subscribe to). Then there is the public "front page" which is just the most popular posts on reddit sans some controversial or NSFW subreddits.

r/popular also defaults to a different page by region, so again, I won't see the same posts as the GP.

Anyway, here's the frontpage of r/popular for me, is the "entire frontpage" full of advertisements by megacorps? Looks like I might be missing something, can someone tell me why each of the, say first five posts, are actually ads?

https://i.imgur.com/4x3CugK.png

Exactly what effective propaganda would have you think!

Not saying this is the case in your example, but take the Mariah Carey post: it wouldn't be hard for someone to buy up legit-looking accounts and make a bunch of posts about Mariah Carey (or whatever person/thing) to refresh everyone's memory about the topic in advance of some new concert or movie in a few months.

Again, it's not necessarily the case in your screenshot, but at the same time, how do we tell for sure?

Yeah. Reddit are gearing up for an IPO about to launch soon. They need to convince investors of their ability to push ads. Reddit ads most of the time just look like posts. Sometimes (top) posts themselves are cleverly disguised ads. In short, they are just about to go full corporate.

I agree with the other requests for examples. I just went to reddit.com from a browser that has never been there before. Here's what it is showing me. This doesn't seem very propaganda or megacorpish to me.

/r/GME post about a billboard telling people to keep holding GME.

/r/wallstreetbets GME Megathread.

/r/worldnews post about a Saudi official issuing a death threat to a UN investigator apparently over the investigator's investigation into the Khashoggi killing.

/r/Cricket match thread about "1st ODO - India vs England".

An ad.

/r/AskReddit asking what is something you loved as a kid but hate as an adult.

/r/technology thread on Microsoft's possible buying of Discord.

/r/awefuleverything thread making fun of Americans.

/r/worldnews post on a US intelligence agency saying the US should join South America in fight against illegal Chinese fishing.

/r/aww post about a puppy.

/r/Wellthatsucks post about a home baked pizza failure.

/r/IdiotsInCars post about an idiot in a car.

/r/politics post about Biden's infrastructure package.

...and it goes on like this...

There's a good automated reddit that tracks this actually. https://old.reddit.com/r/undelete/

It has a lot of unnecessary conflict, trolling, SJW, crazy people, censorship, idiocy, and no defense allowed insta-ban fascism.

What's missing is a nicer general purpose platform that doesn't have so much thin-skinned, circular firing squads or anonymity for SFW topics. Let everyone participate so long as they're not advocating the basic limits of free speech: conspiracy theories, violence, obvious hate, or criminality. Politics is probably best contained to a separate section, as well as NSFW.

Thats all due to their "karma" bullshit. It is a truly orwellian concept. People have fear of being silenced so nobody wants to argue with yes-men. Redditors always take one side of any hot issue and usually the top comment sets the tone. So it quickly receives 100000 likes and nobody would dare to disagree and instantly lose all of their precious karma points. So those who disagree will simply stay out of the discussion or would "agree" for the sake of driving their karma up. And every contrarian post will be reported and deleted. It is stupid and disgusting.

I'm still surprised that Reddit avoided a major scandal over the Ghislaine Maxwell situation. It's clear that they have serious ethical/integrity issues yet have avoided the kind of criticism that FB and Twitter get, despite arguably wielding more power. I wonder if this is partly because a lot of the community call themselves "redditors" and therefore interpret criticism of the platform as a criticism of the community. No one would call themselves a twitterer or a facebooker

I admit, I didn't believe /u/maxwellhill was Ghislaine but they still haven't posted since her arrest and it's been barely mentioned given how high-profile of a case it is.

So they haven't posted since they started getting massive amounts of online harassment? Go figure.

Maxwellhill was super profilic and definitely got harrassed occasionally in all those years. Stopping exactly when she was arrested and making 0 comments and posts for 8 months since is extremely unusual especially as people forgot about it quick and given that if they were posting there'd be way less reason to suspect them or harass them.

I don't get why it'd be a major scandal for Reddit even if u/maxwellhill was Ghislaine. They were not a Reddit employee, just a community moderator. Would HN be responsible if famous person X was secretly posting on HN?

Do people expect Reddit to dox everyone posting or moderating on their platform and then publicize the results?

I'm not sure I want to list the reasons it is bad here because the subject has been painted as a conspiracy theory and YC is obviously interested in Reddit. But the gist is that they knew who she was,she used her substantial mod power to bury news related to herself and JE, and then when her identity was exposed Reddit used Reddit to bury that story to prevent a scandal.

Alternatively, reddit knows who they are, knows that he isn't Gislaine and any burying of the story is being done to prevent online harassment.

Some more information by the same author with a few more links: https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1374348774378762248

… whoah. That’s not someone I’d trust to help run a website that promotes free-ish speech.

Somewhat related, does anyone know of a good tool to archive one's entire reddit history? I'd like to be able to dump all my comments, saved posts, etc to a folder. Even better if I can download whole treads, linked media, etc. Not worried about getting nuked for OP's linked example but I've gotten very interested in building personal archives of any of my online history.

As a personal anecdote, earlier this year I went through and (tediously) saved my bungie.net account which contained all my Halo 2, 3, etc online activity history. Funny enough, just a couple of months later Bungie announced that they were shutting down the site, and longtime fans scrambled to save what records they could. Unfortunately the forums were gone by that point, so I lost a lot of my memories there, but today I don't remember how much time I actually spent archiving that data, I remember the memories that come flooding back whenever I look through that data again.

>Somewhat related, does anyone know of a good tool to archive one's entire reddit history?

I've tried this for nlp training and all the old tools I tried no longer work, and you can't do it via the API either. Your best bet is to scrape it the old fashion way e.g. with Selenium but I am also interested if there's a working tool.

Bummer; so there is a reddit API, but you really can't use it to just get your saves/comments/etc? I had assumed you could. I guess this'll take more effort than I thought. thanks!

Python has a module called PRAW. https://praw.readthedocs.io/en/latest/getting_started/quick_...

I wrote a quick script a while back to dump my comments by subreddit to a text file to grep through. There's probably better praw scripts running around. https://gist.github.com/Zren/82befb7bf63e3d9156de1bbd48b0ffe...

> Somewhat related, does anyone know of a good tool to archive one's entire reddit history? I'd like to be able to dump all my comments, saved posts, etc to a folder. Even better if I can download whole treads, linked media, etc. Not worried about getting nuked for OP's linked example but I've gotten very interested in building personal archives of any of my online history.

I believe https://pushshift.io/ is purported to be archiving all of it, but after poking around I can't find anything past April 2020 in https://files.pushshift.io/.

> As a personal anecdote, earlier this year I went through and (tediously) saved my bungie.net account which contained all my Halo 2, 3, etc online activity history. Funny enough, just a couple of months later Bungie announced that they were shutting down the site, and longtime fans scrambled to save what records they could. Unfortunately the forums were gone by that point, so I lost a lot of my memories there, but today I don't remember how much time I actually spent archiving that data, I remember the memories that come flooding back whenever I look through that data again.

IMHO the problem with user account activity archives is that social media is social. I've got archives of my old Facebook activity, and it feels even more incomplete than only hearing one side of a telephone call. What I'd really want is an archive of every thread I've posted in, or even every forum for the dates I was active.