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Comment by silicon2401 | Hacker News Reader

The politicization and trend towards political correctness on reddit has been a huge part of its decline. It's rare now to find places where one can simply discuss topics with objectivity and curiosity instead of threads revolving around virtue signaling or demonization of the 'other side'

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Sure, nobody likes political correctness but without any controls on content on a public forum as a part of a ToS, nazis and other people who are desperate to express their hate, and even break the law and recruit others will eventually find it and spam the hell out of it. 4chan is a perfect example of what happens to an actually occasionally funny place that allows any kind of discussion "just for lulz". It's been a cesspool and barely anyone remembers how it was before the nazis came in. It's just how it works when the forum is public and there's no moderation. If you want good discussion without limits, I suggest joining smaller communities that are harder to flood in this way, or talk to people you know in real life.

Lmao

I completely agree with you, we need content moderation and some political beliefs are just toxic.

But Reddit just takes it to the absurd:

- Automods which remove posts which simply contain certain words (e.g. "coronavirus", apparently because too many covid deniers). I get trying to restrict covid misinformation, but I'm not even exaggerating, they remove anything discussing covid even if it's supporting.

- Mods removing some posts seemingly at random (seem using sites like reveddit.com). These posts really don't involve anything controversial at all and I can't understand why they were removed.

- Automods which ban you simply for posting in certain subreddits. And not radical ones, ones like r/PoliticalCompassMemes or r/watchredditdie. Btw, check out r/watchredditdie yourself to see more issues

Another issue is that Redditors in top subreddits tend to add politics to pretty much anything. Like, there is a highly upvoted post in r/nextfuckinglevel (a subreddit designed for e.g. people running ultra-marathons or doing crazy gymnastics or magic tricks) that is literally just a guy in his 40s ranting about how the U.S. government is fucked. And yeah, I agree the US government is pretty bad, but I don't need to hear about it in every single subreddit or r/AskReddit thread.

Social bookmarking site moderation is in need of an overhaul. Moderators have turned into gatekeepers who can’t be unseated.

I’m dreaming of an “old Reddit”/HN-esque discussion board where moderation policies are opt-in. E.g. submit a thread to /r/bayarea, users compete to moderate e.g. ban/censor content. Users “follow” moderators to opt-in to their moderation policies. Basically upvoting/downvoting but for moderation itself.

Even better if a user’s moderation policies could be forked and lightly edited. I even think there’s room for a learning curve here, given how thoroughly social bookmarking sites have trounced traditional media.

I think the big problem with this is that very few people actually want to be moderators, and the people who do want the position are often least suited for it.

Smaller communities can rely on simple upvote/downvote, possibly with some intelligent logic to notice who you tend to agree with - I think Slashdot was primarily this?

But past a certain scale, just dealing with spam is a huge deal. Plus you need 24/7 coverage, and you want mods to be reasonably responsive. Assuming each person can put in 42 hours/week of moderation that still means you need four moderators.

And of course you need a default for people who have just arrived at the site, so that they're not buried in spam or attacked by trolls on their first post.

Not to belittle the problem of spam, but spam isn’t really what people are increasingly taking issue with. “Political” moderation or just plain obstinance are the biggest shortcomings of present day moderation policies. It leads to de facto namesquatting of popular topics the moderators of which have unfettered power to control the narrative surrounding it.

I bet fame and karma points could counteract the disincentives to moderate. What if opting in to a particular moderator translated into 1 karma point per week for that moderator? Moderators of popular topics (e.g. topics with 100k+ subscriber counts) would quickly become some of the most highly upvoted users on the site.

And if commenters could “layer” opt-in moderation policies one on top of the other, moderators could specialize then. Much of the specialization could be done by bots. Anti-“flagrant spam” policies would be easy to bot and easy to combine. The moderation policies left to be done by hand would largely amount to narrative control.

> And of course you need a default for people who have just arrived at the site, so that they're not buried in spam or attacked by trolls on their first post.

That choice could be left up to GUI frontend maintainers, assuming the site itself were open source.

Really I just think social bookmarking has the clearest signal for human communications in general, by far — by leaps and bounds in fact. It’s a public service for such a thing to exist in modern pop culture.

Anecdotally, I've heard that spam is actually a pretty serious issue and keeping Reddit clean of it is fairly difficult (since you want to take it down ASAP to minimize it's audience). Obviously, the system works pretty well and we rarely see it, but I'm given to understand that's because of a LOT of behind-the-scenes effort.

The problem is, anyone who can eliminate spam can also eliminate posts that disagree with their politics, so you also need a supervisory layer above the spam-cleaners.

This is all pretty easy to balance in a smaller community, but spam is exponential to size: larger communities attract significantly more spam than smaller ones.

Ironnically i find r/PoliticalCompassMemes to be most rational sub among those discussing politics. There are some edgy teenagers but you will know who is that.

I think the fact that you're forced to understand that politics isn't just two sides forces everyone to talk about it in ways that aren't so polarizing because you can't just presume the entire basket of stereotypical behaviors that people who believe in the false dichotomy delude themselves with so they can strawman and ad hominem all over the place in lieu of thinking.

It's a meme sub on the surface, but the discussion there is higher quality than any other political sub.

It's amazing what even a tiny dose of nuance can do for the discussion.

Sounds to me like internet fora inevitably fail, either suffering under over- or under-regulation. People usually act as though one of the two solutions could fix the problem, but having seen both, I cannot prefer either. The medium is broken.

Reddit has become a long-form of Twitter. An endless circle of pandering to the same claqueurs. It is so tedious.

My time spent on Reddit has dropped massively over the last months. And I moved back to 4chan. It is so refreshing to see raw and uncensored communication. Even if 4chan often borders on insanity, it feels so much more honest and real than the cleansed cliques of sameness.

The problem with your desire to squelch nazis at all costs is that the tools for squelching nazis quickly get abused by labeling everything those possessing the tools don't like to be nazi content. Even if that weren't the case, you're infantilizing everyone else in the world, assuming that they're morons who will instantly start to genocide Jewish people because they saw some nazi babbling on about whatever it is that nazis babble on about. You're giving tremendous power to nazis and being incredibly insulting to pretty much everybody else.

You could replace nazis with any group of people with a specific message that they want to spam all day, every day and it would still be a horrible decision to let them roam free in every public forum. Whichever the group is, not ALL forums on the internet should be about the grievances of that one group. Though, it just happens that nazis are the ones who seem to be the quickest and most common group to take over forums. This is because they need an audience for their crap, and on every forum either the nazis get kicked out or their audience leaves. I never mentioned any real world consequences (although they definitely exist too), but even if you purely talk about discussion quality and ability for people of different kinds to participate, you usually have to be kicking some nazis out eventually, because they tend to become as overbearing of a voice as the moderation lets them.

>barely anyone remembers how it was before the nazis came in.

I remember it. A non-negligible part of the traffic was pedophiles posting LazyTown content, and users of /v/ would keep folders full of transsexual porn on their desktop just to derail threads they didn't like.

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