Almost all of the top subreddits are moderated by the same people
reddit.com
reddit.com
Recently I noticed comments I had posted in those subs over the last few months had completely been ignored.
It turns out I have been shadowbanned, and not just on the primary /r/thenetherlands sub, but on every single one of the communities they manage.
There is no apparent reason for them to have done this to me. My messages to the modteam are being ignored and Reddit support won't help because "moderators are free to run their communities as they see fit".
I have been locked out of engaging with the communities I was most interested and active in, for no apparent reason and likely forever.
And this is just one of many reasons for why having so few moderators control so many communities, is such a bad thing. Allowing them to operate without oversight or accountability is not helping the situation either.
I think there is some kind of IP or cookie based identification going on.
One of my accounts was permabanned on the German /r/de subreddit for publically questioning a mod decision. At the next login I found that ALL of my accounts that I used for serious and professional subreddits (netsec, python, learnmachinelearning) and never once used on /r/de had also been permabanned.
I wrote to the helpdesk but they only told me to contact the mods of /r/de which is impossible if you're permabanned.
The mods can go .. themselves.
I once posted a genuine question there: "Do you think /r/thenetherlands is an echo chamber?"
"[Your post was removed for being off topic]"
Oh well. Now I just don't use reddit anymore. My life is better because of it.
You're question does seem too meta and pointless. It's just a sub about Dutch news and stuff.
Speaking as someone who used to be the main moderator for a country sub (albeit a smaller one), at a certain point you just go numb and stop justifying your actions (you still communicate it with other mods and they see your ban reason, not visible to the user). That being said, I did enforce one or two temporary bans before handing out permanent ones.
HN has some very clear biases that you simply must subscribe to if you don't want your comment to be downvoted. It's clear that people here have certain stocks and don't like certain companies to be put in a negative light, for example. I don't think my account suffers the problems from this too often, but I've seen plenty of comments here at the bottom of the comment section simply because they disagreed with the status quo or because they asked an uncomfortable question.
Every now and then, I also see shadowbanned people here, who continue to make nearly invisible posts for a while and then just leave, seemingly caught by some kind of automatic filter or punished severely for a dumb comment weeks ago.
Besides I think you cannot compare shadow banning, banning and down voting at all. Shadow banning should only be reserved for spam. Banning for obvious trolls. If you get down voted that's fine. It only shows your views don't align well with the group majority.
Reveddit [1] or its accompanying extension [2] can alert you when this happens. I'm the author. You can see the behavior yourself on r/CantSayAnything [3] or read more in the FAQ [4].
[1] https://www.reveddit.com/about/
[2] https://www.reveddit.com/add-ons/direct/
So it's not a true shadowban, but any posts you make on subreddits who have shitlisted you will get deleted instantly.
And of course when a post of yours is deleted on reddit by a mod, reddit does not tell you this or indicate it to you in any way.
I've long since stopped caring about the ban itself, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't curious to learn the reason for it!
I stopped using Reddit because of the increased amount of censorship and bans for thinking the incorrect stuff and as someone else said my life is better for it.
Reddit was once a beacon of freedom of speech and today it is a tool to supress freedom of speech and thoughts that go against the mainstream.
r/sverige on the other hand is run by a really angry uncle who probably doesn't like most people.
r/okpolarncp is basically incels and nazis. It is too promoted to front page...
Since I'm quoting people, J.S. Mill wrote down what the problem is for all of us when this happens:
> If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. Were an opinion a personal possession of no value except to the owner; if to be obstructed in the enjoyment of it were simply a private injury, it would make some difference whether the injury was inflicted only on a few persons or on many. But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
I don't agree with much of the discussion on r/sweden. But it has an open discussion without any bullying or hate speech.
There are other subs that promote hate and ban everyone not agreeing with their narrative. What do you feel about them?
I wouldn't call any discussion where wrongthink gets you excluded to be open.
With Reddit's voting mechanism there's really no great need to censor anything unpopular since the system fudges consensus and anything that even the slightest subset of users finds disagreeable winds up downvoted into oblivion unless there's an equally large subset voting for it.
Regarding the rest, do you realise that HN is worse in this regard since the flag mechanism can be abused by much fewer participants?
The Taliban want discussion within boundaries, so does the law. It's a valid statement yet provides no insight into whether those boundaries are the same or even of the same category.
Would you support Reddit, as an American company, setting its boundaries for speech to the same limits as American law?
I doubt it.
It is your opinion that they promote hate, and you also assume that it being hateful is wrong. Mixing up opinion with fact and not checking your assumptions is a sure route to a belief in infallability, which Mill also warns against.
I am against (in general) bans for simple disagreement, but there is more than one way to silence those you disagree with, especially if you have power over media of communication as these mods and admins do.
> You are reading this completely wrong!
That may be so but you are working hard to give me the impression that you have a tendency to mix up your opinions with facts. If not for the need to avoid irony, at least avoid this so you don't appear so rude.
They have, at least when I used to be a regular, deleted tons and tons of threads because they had an political incorrect opinion stated. They banned a lot of users for no real reason and revamped the rules many times in order to silence peoples opinions that were widespread on the sub.
Now afaik there is only people like themselves (and presumably yourself) left, I wonder why? Reddit itself took a stance a while ago for specific political opinions and removed a lot of subs that I was subscribed to. Many others were famously quarantines like /r/theredpill and others. If you simply upvote the incorrect thing you can be banned. This is basically punishing thoughts.
You can't claim freedom of speech if you silence a very large group of people from speaking.
Not ok:
https://lagen.nu/1962:700#K16P8S2
> because they had an political incorrect opinion
After complaining some years ago, the mod team was rearranged and now contains people from a wide political spectrum.
> specific political opinions and removed a lot of subs that I was subscribed to
Maybe Reddit is not your private echo chamber and resits your extreme ideas?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communi...
> After complaining some years ago, the mod team was rearranged and now contains people from a wide political spectrum.
Yeah.. that is just a load of bs.
> Maybe Reddit is not your private echo chamber and resits your extreme ideas?
This is just the thing. As soon as you have deviating opinions, now you're instantly extreme. Do you know that I consider the Reddit rules and ideas extreme?
What people like you doesn't seem to understand is the wind is only blowing in your direction for now, it will not stay like that forever. It's sad that people have forgotten the importance of free speech and that censorship has been popularized.
Sometimes it really feels like people read 1984 and brave new world as instruction manuals.
It's like going to a restaurant and finding out the FOH are there because they're big fans of the food. Oh and they can also dictate how the cooks do their job.
There needs to be people on Reddit's payroll watching over the moderators of big/default subs.
If many of your posts show as deleted, the subs mods have likely added you to their automoderator blacklist.
Just make a new account. Screw their "ban circumvention" rule. What are they gonna do, ban you again?
For things like HN or imgur, I assume there is a way to pay them to get the com you want in a way that appears to be organic. That's the best way to make money for those kind of sites after all. Want to make a billionaire a hero? Suddenly, comments everywhere say how much the guy is great, links to articles of his achievements raise to the top and critics are down voted, or/ and counter answered elaborately by what has all the signs of a long time user account. Want to sell a new movie or a political program? How about some "fan-made" memes or technical article that everybody seems to love?
Even better for those firms, why pay if you can avoid it? In reddit, work patiently to have a lot of accounts that are mods in topics you care about, and you basically own the system for free. Even better, now others will pay you to do com targeting those communities.
In that sense, I think facebook and twitter are at least more honest about how they influence society because they are explicit about their paid communication offers.
I tried to appeal the shadowban and heard nothing from the admins.
Anyway I stayed away from Reddit for a while but eventually created a new account to talk about board games. A few years later I decided to check my other account again, and discovered it wasn't shadowbanned anymore (you can tell by going to your user page in incognito mode, it won't show up like other accounts do if it's shadowbanned). And so now I'm using that old account again.
Although I'll never talk about anything I've ever made on that site ever again, which seems kind of stupid to me, but whatever. Reddit's rules are crap (and new UI, I only use old.reddit), but I do enjoy checking and commenting in a few of the subreddits still.
People need to start cutting ties with companies that treat them badly. How many times have you seen this conversation: "A: Company Xyz took my money and screwed something up and can't be contacted. B: That's fraud--Just do a credit card chargeback. A: But, then they'll ban me!" Why the hell do people want to continue using, let alone continue giving money to, a site or business that treats you this way?
On a related note, I seem to be back in that HN purgatory where you can only post a few times a day. As usual, with no indication of what triggered it. <sigh> Getting really close to throwing in the towel here, too.
If you want a leftist Reddit, then I would advise you to consider Reddit.
I did stick with just that subreddit for quite some time. It was the Covid-19 pandemic that led to me branching out to other subreddits (I wanted to check r/coronavirus specifically) more and discovering my old account was back.
One thing I never did go back to, though, was r/indiegames and r/gaming, the two I most likely got banned from.
Also I don't really bother with r/boardgames anymore and check other subreddits more now. There are Facebook groups that work better for that, as I can see notifications from friends that are in the industry and make sure I keep up with their posts and comments.
Reddit is huge, me not participating isn't going to cause any changes in how the site works at all. I find value in the site still, so I still use it.
When the ban waves were happening and subs shut down, people tried going to voat. reddits favorite phrase was 'if you dont like it, leave' so we did.
But the mods followed us, especially the infamous mod 'She'. All the mods we tried to get away from bought their way into the voat subs and turned it into the cesspool you see today.
See, no one cares about the bans or shadowbans until it affects them, but by then it's too late.
It was all fun and games until May last year and all my posts were automatically shadowbanned. Fired of a message to the mods and got no reply, hung out on their Discord but by al measures it didn't seem a fitting place. Since I received no notification about the shadowbans nor any warnings about ban evations I ended up creating a new account and continued to interact with these communities again.
The fact is that reddit is really an undercover "upvoted for profit" front-site now. After they were done building the community from democracy, it changed to something else, a place where corporate and paying interests now are what push mediocre and triggering content to front pages... They banned me permanently based on my IP. and stripped all 3 of my accounts from access to my subreddit that I spend a lot of time building, and while I could easily get around that, I realized that it's simply easier and better to just work on my own web sites and not have to keep posting to gain traction for sharing my original work.
The same is happening on many social sites that have massive user bases but high overhead... It's not sustainable in the long run, because they will never be able to make everyone succeed no matter how much they pay.
We're reaching a new plateau/failure cliff for large-scale social media, and so many creators and talented people have been chewed up and spit out by the false promises those platforms once made. Now the focus is to go back to real organic growth by starting locally, and cutting losses with social sites...
Myspace is gone now, a neat and tidy profit for good ole Tom, remembered fondly by most... I'm not sure that modern social sites will have the same fate, nor be able to offer the same value to a large community as Myspace once did.
Younger me might of been excited to do it from the perceived status perhaps.
I do wonder how many off-site deals are done with moderators and third parties. There’s a lot of traffic these people are able to steward and influence I imagine.
But are you sure they aren't paid, ie employed by Reddit? Would totally make sense to either hide an army of moderating "grunts" behind a single user, or moderating bots. Reddit is large, lots to moderate.
I moderated that sub through election season and then stepped down in January. At the end of the day the death threats and constant insults aren't what drove me away, but the organizational chaos. No one could figure out how to lead that team, and leaning on practiced organizational structures was apparently too hard for a group of redditors.
Yes I would expect undercovers to be undercover to other mods. Like imgaine some random guy starts some subreddit adds a few friends as moderators right. Then it blows up, so some influence group decides they need to get in on it. They would certainly not be open about their strategy of gradual take over.
*E.g. Inherent Vice.
A more believable idea as it's based on fact is that Reddit is the playground of paid PR and marketing firms. Makes sense for a PR firm to have moderation powers too. (I suppose this might also be later Pychonesque or more like William Gibson?)
Are you, as a senior consultant, going to sell your team's time to a client at £750 an hour per person to astroturf on reddit? How do you plan on quantifying the benefits, vs the same budget going to the same team to influence traditional media and lobbying?
Heck I'd love to know any half-decent agencies that offer these services.
I’ve been on that forum for many years, and I’ve seen it all evolve.
Here’s one example of the dumbest things that go around - a troll account called crimsondot, came up with a copy-pasta Where he claims all sorts of things, including that one of hte mods was of Bangladeshi descent.
For years this claim went around, and it morphed into the general claim that one of the mods was Bangladeshi.
Then in the past few years, since Bangladeshi was insufficient, it became changed to Pakistani.
All of this, set up by a troll account, and now a claim repeated on HN.
Frankly people have forgotten the fanatical support you found on r/india for then CM Modi.
I take it as healthy that the sub has been able to constantly find itself at odds with the ruling party. IT suggests that opinion is driven by grumbling users, not by any cabal.
seriously both sides in Indian politics are so infantile.
[1] https://reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360060476592-Intern...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/n8g2om/redd...
I think a major problem for this was the limitations of german community. It's seems most are very young with very specific interessts and culture, so naturally they end up with content that caters to just those people, while the rest just hangs out in the better international subs.
But I agree with you and personally spend most of my time on reddit on international subs. But it doesn't make sense for a German to spend much time on r/personalfinance for example because it's too US-centric. That's where r/finanzen (and r/mauerstrassenwetten (like r/wallstreetbets)) is the better place.
The kind answer is that some people like to host parties, not just attend them.
A real answer for many subs is they enjoy the power of getting to decide who gets to say what.
It's a little like picking up litter while out for a walk. Not exactly fun, but can be fulfilling in a way.
There are frequent calls for a change of mods, and a long list of grievances about the current moderators. However, nobody ever volunteers their own efforts to fix anything.
I still see such drama spring up here and there. I'm just glad I'm not the target of it anymore.
"Moderation wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the fucking users"
You might be surprised how easy it is for mods of even somewhat popular subreddits to monetize their position. Of course not all do, but there are absolutely subtle ways to profit.
Sometimes you watch a group descend into being a cesspool of awfulness. The light stuff is death by boring memes, insults galore, "just an opinion" that are high-emotion crazy rants.
But the heavy stuff is worse. Watching individuals be egregiously insulted and threatened. Watching people delete their informative and well-meaning posts and never come back, because the first comment was some evil asshole having another content-free belittling attack because that's just what they do, no reason. Watching people be told they are incompetent, useless, should die, are the wrong gender, that sort of thing.
It is perhaps worse on locality-specific forums. Because then you are in view of people you know in your area, or are likely to interact with in future. Assholes don't care, and seem to enjoy the "status" that comes from putting down other people in the local area.
It does not help that such interactions seem to act like magnets in local forums, where putting people down through petty and unjustified insults attracts more of the same, and substantive interactions are lost. I guess that's because easy putdowns are low effort entertainment for some people.
But people finding themselves on the "unwinnable debate" receiving end of that sort of thing, end up leaving forums to get away from it, or are highly stressed whenever they have something to say, and may spend hours trying to carefully word everything just to avoid petty flamage from assholes and get substantive replies instead.
So some people are motivated to try to keep community areas a little gentler and cleaner. To protect and welcome others who appear to be joining in good faith, from the occasional blast of shitty replies. Like another commenter said, it's like clearing up litter when you go for a walk. Would be nice if it wasn't necessary, but because some people litter, others want to clear it up.
That's enough of a motivation for some. I've seen people spend hours moderating out of nothing more than a sense of civic duty and a desire to protect other people and encourage them to stay and feel welcomed and defended, to grow the community in a more friendly directionm, and to try to make the forum a less stressful place for new participants who have doing nothing wrong.
Like any volunteer working for something they feel is a good cause.
This was my first shadowban and teached me:
a) It's not worth to invest time in these communities.
b) To be shadow-banned is extremely insulting, especially if you didn't engaged in inflammatory or abusive behavior.
c) I will not engage in a community that shadow-ban people even if they have inflammatory or abusive behavior, everyone should, at the very least, understand why they we're banned and learn from it.
Thankfully, nothing of value was lost and now I simply don't care enough about Firefox or Reddit anymore.
I just wanted to point out that hacker news shadow bans...
Thanks.
https://www.reddit.com/user/maxwellhill
(moderator of r/worldnews, r/environment, r/Bad_Cop_No_Donut, r/cyberlaws, r/enviroaction and r/greed)
So that seems a good practice to me - use a name that could be arguably yours so that you are not hiding anything if caught out but enough not yours so there is plausible deniability. Then make a bunch of deeper cover names that you run that are harder to pin on you, if anyone is looking they are looking at the one that is close to your name.
but then maybe I've just read too many books.
Bit strange to do it under a name that is close to your name
"Ghislaine Maxwell...known for her association with financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein."
Curious about surname I checked and yes she is Robert Maxwell’s daughter, who killed himself in the 80s or 90s was all over the news
> It has been speculated that Maxwell was urinating into the ocean nude at the time, as he often did. He was presumed to have fallen overboard from the vessel, which was cruising off the Canary Islands, southwest Spain.
Let's not turn a perfectly reasonable night time piss into suicide. A person like that doesn't kill themselves over a few bad debts.
It would be extremely enlightening to follow radicalisation and communication of, say, an incel terrorist.
There's a really good youtuber called "Contrapoints" that attempts to deconstruct with low judgement the kind of environment an Incel lives in and what the worldview is.
Empathy is always at the root of deradicalisation, so I always plug her videos when I can.
She's a good performer, but most of the time she just beats around the bush and doesn't offer any solid conclusions about anything, which can leave you feeling unsatisfied.
She had some interesting insights into Incels because of her gender dysphoria, but those insights never led to any real sympathy for them, and she still essentially blamed them for all of their problems, and shrugged her shoulders about it by the end of the video.
Also, she's made some pretty fallacious claims, like when she said that denying being a fascist was evidence that you were a fascist. Or when you tried citing Christopher Hitchens argument in favor of protecting controversial speech to argue in favor of censorship. (I can reply with specific timestamps if you want to see).
I'm not convinced that she has deradicalized anyone, outside of a handful of teenagers that only ever posted edgy memes on 4chan that the never understood them the first place. None of the people who claim she deraticalized them can actually give concrete examples of what new information Contrapoints provided them that persuaded them to change their opinions about anything. I am certainly willing to listen when someone can. Instead, it is just vague platitudes about feelings and emotions, with zero substance or validation of facts.
She also did better when she included herself in her critiques. But over the last year or so, especially on Twitter, she has degenerated into a less ironic and more self-righteous direction, which is pretty cringe.
https://pushshift.io/api-parameters/
A weakness for the specific application you are interested in is that I don't think it works with banned or quarantined subreddits - the archived dumps probably have that, but not the main API feed
No matter who it is, I'd like to know what reason someone might have to abandon 15 million karma.
I quit using reddit regularly about two years ago, but I still checked up on it maybe once a month until a couple of months ago.
What's really telling is opening the site without being logged in to my old account. I never have to scroll more than 5-10 posts down to find an obvious astroturfing political post, or a screenshot of a 15-word tweet being hailed as some masterstroke of political discourse.
Reddit's primary societal function these days seems to be serving interest groups and providing a testing ground for psyops.
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/hnfx0r/not_conf...
https://www.reddit.com/r/redditoroftheday/comments/bdl3o/max...
Maybe, maybe not. What is the proof of the connection? Just the time of disappearance and the username? That is pretty circumstantial, but maybe. Not conclusive though.
EDIT: This article seems to have more evidence and is at least interesting: https://www.inputmag.com/culture/is-ghislaine-maxwell-secret... I think there is definitely a chance it is her. Strange.
Maybe. The account stopped posting 2 days before she was arrested. And hasn't posted since.
[1] have you noticed that many of top subs are about either watching others humiliation or judging people? idiotsincar, iamatotalpieceofshit, maliciouscompliance, etc. Do I actually become a better person by following these?
I fully agree that any sub that's core content involves shitting on people has terrible inhabitants and all the quality of commentary that follows from that. Some of the more lighthearted ones are a little better (e.g. holdmybeer vs idiotsincars) when the content is conducive to such but only in the sense that someone with a crippling mental illness might have a good-ish day here and there.
any sub that’s practical is inherently less active. There’s only so much good base knowledge.
Reacting to base knowledge is endless low value content.
This is something I've noticed too! I occasionally browse /r/all and it's awash with judgemental holier-than-thou material. Echoing many posters here, there is a lot of great content on reddit if you dig a bit, but it doesn't often seem be the stuff that gets pushed to the top for me.
Even on subs that do have good content, low effort posts seem to get the most upvotes (perhaps low effort = less effort to read = quicker to upvote?). A concrete example for me is on the /r/unresolvedmysteries subreddit - 2 line updates about a case (e.g. "Police announced no new evidence") are top of the front page daily, while longer insightful breakdowns of cases are often buried.
Perhaps a system for weighting upvote value to content length or complexity could be worth exploring?
It's still a really early version but I know the guy is still working on it
It’s not just that there’s people who make these comments - of course there’s always going to be - but that fact that they’re typically so highly upvoted anywhere there’s a voting/likes system. Anything that attempts to reflect nuance or lower the temperature has no boosters, while anything that reflects the worst, most reductive or least honest take is what bubbles to the top.
Not that it's impossible to radicalize a 30 year old, just that the less experience you've had in life the more mentally malleable you are.
I'll subscribe to programming, python, csharp, lego, starcraft. Basically anything I'm specifically interested in. To find out what's the general feel of those topics.
But I'll pop in leopardsatemyface, iamverysmart, and a few others just for fun.
https://i.4pcdn.org/pol/1582202873483.jpg
It was discovered and some of the mods removed themselves. Honestly I just think they go by another name.
Then, of course, there is the very real possibility that China literally did cause the virus.
Imho the reason this time it was different with terms like "China flu" is not that it's generally unacceptable to nickname an illness by it's region of first discovery, but that Trump was actively using this terminology to push an agenda
Ebola
Lyme
MERS
West Nile Virus
Marburg Virus
Guinea Worm
German Measles
Ross River Fever
Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever
Norovirus
Or for a complete list of thousands, simply look up toponymic diseases
> The World Health Organization (WHO) mostly works to reduce the physical toll of disease. But last week it turned to another kind of harm: the insult and stigma inflicted by diseases named for people, places, and animals. Among the existing monikers that its new guidelines “for the Naming of New Human Infectious Diseases” would discourage: Ebola, swine flu, Rift Valley Fever, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and monkey pox.
> The name r/China_Flu was created at a time when SARS-CoV-2 had not been named and was only affecting China. Subreddit names cannot be changed after they are created. This subreddit is a place to discuss the 2019 Wuhan-originated novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 and the disease it causes, called COVID-19.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Wuhan_Flu/comments/ev6yhy/the_new_s...
> The users of that subreddit believe in a conspiracy that the Wuhan Coronavirus is more serious than the governments of China and the United States are telling them. They believe the government is mismanaging the outbreak. They were quarantined because an admin believed the subreddit was spreading misinformation.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7jqbx/reddit-cant-quarantin...
From what I remember at the time /r/coronavirus and /r/china_flu removed any discussion about "leaks" (or were they?) from China. On the other hand, not all the "leaks" discussed in /r/Wuhan_Flu turned out to be what they seemed (videos of people "dropping dead" on the streets etc.).
Sure thing.
> From what I remember at the time /r/coronavirus and /r/china_flu removed any discussion about "leaks" (or were they?) from China.
I'm no expert on the content. I only know that the amount of posts removed as shown on reveddit is going to look the same at first glance regardless of what subreddit you are looking at. As for which topics were removed, someone could do a research project on that.
> On the other hand, not all the "leaks" discussed in /r/Wuhan_Flu turned out to be what they seemed (videos of people "dropping dead" on the streets etc.).
I agree and think the top comment on that OOTL post you referenced gives a more balanced view of what was going on [1],
> For background, everyone agrees the outbreak in Wuhan in late 2019 is an easily spread, relatively lethal [edit: relatively lethal compared to influenza], brand new virus. Unfortunately, outside that, details are very sparse and major organizations WHO, CDC are non-committal about predictions.
> Since “official” details are very sparse, true details are emerging outside official channels along with a whole lot of conspiracy theorizing. The two are extremely mixed at this point. A quick review showed the sub in question contains all levels. For example, excellent NEJM articles showing that the virus can spread prior to symptoms interspersed with video footage of a bunch of black birds flying into China because they can apparently smell all the dead bodies.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/f6jpm7/what_i...
Those videos were only a small part of the discussion going on there. Quarantining the sub acted for many only as confirmation that certain information was really being suppressed from higher up.
As I said here before. Because of this sub I bought N95 masks early on (some of which I later gave to doctors/nurses in my family), stocked up on food and warned others to stock up before the panic set in. Every once in a while I posted the latest numbers and estimations of the CFR/IFR. The last one I did which was on /r/coronavirus turned out to be accurate a year later. Sadly /r/Wuhan_Flu is now only a shell of its former self.
Later many things turned out to be true as well. All subs were guilty of spreading information which later turned out to not be the case. I really do not like censorship and want to hear from all sides. Luckily there is the website you created, reveddit.
Thanks for saying so. It builds on top of similar work. I think there will always be a way to review what gets removed. And as we use more social media with opaque moderation it may become standard practice to check whether your posts are "live" or not.
https://archive.is/4RJwu/6ec51706a8b44347b50d6ee38cc56191a7d...
And yet it's only a matter of time until another 20 something will announce that they can solve the problems of the world and human nature by creating yet another digital environment free from the rules (and responsibilities) of the real world. And we'll all act shocked when it somehow backfires into unintended consequences and recreates a worse version of the thing it was trying to replace.
I also filter, using RES, all posters and commenters with over 100k karma, and it's like taking a trip back in time when the internet wasn't tuned to inane content and advertisers
https://ebm.bmj.com/content/early/2021/05/26/bmjebm-2021-111...
A bit trigger happy with the ad hominem there considering you probably think of yourself as the rational side.
> ivermectin
From the first link:
> The use of ivermectin, among others repurposed drugs for prophylaxis or treatment for COVID-19, should be done based on trustable evidence, without conflicts of interest, with proven safety and efficacy in patient-consented, ethically approved, randomised clinical trials.
But there are over 30 RCTs with positive results.
Second link is about one particular study. Again there are over 30 RCTs.
(Just to give an example: I have heard about a plausible argument about that «manufacturers say it[']s ineffective», and I do not think the matter should not be discussed in this context, but arguments exist. Good or bad: that is for the analysis table, not the "I just had two minutes available". If matters were clear-cut, the whole problem would not exist.)
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¹Edit: for clarity: with «go[ing] into details» I meant that I invite the poster against introducing statements like «people who believe [whatever is controversial]», and especially because this thread is not here have us stuck in those controversies, and because they would not be solved with two sentences, surely, since there are apparent non-lunatics defending those positions.
People who will read that evidence without full contextual intellectual preparation will not be able to be certain of their evaluation; they are not competent to review it ("review" as in the expression "peer review").
On the other hand, yesterday I started exploring the material of a medical doctor who publishes interesting conferences - found as I was looking for other material, and to my surprise, from what he practices on himself I am sure he would disagree with your previous post. Who to trust?
On the other hand, if I see censorship, few exceptions aside it will be very clear that the censorship will help approaching truth. And for this, one name I will give: Lex Fridman, who denounced the matter a few weeks ago, while interviewing for this podcast one of the notable censored voices.
«it will be very clear that the censorship will [/not/] help approaching truth».
https://www.thedesertreview.com/opinion/columnists/indias-iv...
edit: come to think of it. Can RES hide points?
Aaron Schwartz is rolling in his grave.
It's a mindless escape.
I did enjoy the Wallstreetbets drama with the short.
And there's the boobies. (I still have testosterone?)
What worked for me was slowly unsubing until it was so boring, it just kind of lost the dopamine hitting effect.
Eventually, I never returned.
In places that entice emotional participation it is sheerly consequential that gut behaviour is effectively promoted. But this excludes «proper and mature discussion» as a consistent plan. It is very different from "[scope: ] «anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity»".
For many reasons, I am sure that it will be much, much easier to find there guts-dictated comments - no content, no reasoning, no arguments, but lots of partial statements claiming status of truth, and declarations of sympathy. I have not see it happen here.
Incidentally, I noticed there are guidelines there, being circulated in the past hours, very recently, that are inviting to censorship. Which creates another effect: sequences of "Yea, Well done, This is the way, Down with the scum, Frown on the snakes", with no single "Yes but" and obviously no "Boo". In the section about "horror movies featuring fancy cars", the participants and/or moderators are now scientists with truth in the pocket. Honestly, this makes it unnatural to go to those places to note a fancy car in an horror movie.
I don't see why Reddit tolerates this behavior on what should be a neutral forum.
Also, I like subreddits outside of the bubble/echo chamber of the main subs. Even if I don't really align with some of the opinions or positions of some of the other subs, it at least feels more like interacting with actual human beings with differing interests.
I also just don't use reddit that much. It's good for trying to solve a question, and maybe having a laugh for 15 mins, but after that it usually overstays its welcome and you can go somewhere else.
(very evident in the /r/battletech subreddit that just got overrun by a recent games workshop exodus. Subscriber counts increased, but /r/battletech turned into a meme channel ...)
Other than HN, 9gag is the only place on the internet that I still regularly visit. Most people posting and commenting have stuck around for a decade and it has been really nice to age together with an online community.
Most recent example was California drivers safety course. Googled: “Reddit drivers safety course California” and found a class that was entirely self-paced, $10, and got me through it with a letter off to court in under an hour.
Maybe I would’ve found it anyway, but dammit, I was over the moon.
If it helps, its worth considering reddit as a template for what can be improved.
I have no idea why the redesign was introduced, especially since there are now apps as well.
However, there is an increasing amount of study on how reddit operates, and how users move through the site. Its the maze which we can learn from - and its moderation is at least hopefully overturned by humans as opposed to the gnomic monoliths of FB and other imperial social networks.
I can’t even listen to music anymore while browsing Reddit because some goddamn ad or post I scroll past will hijack audio thanks to this stupid auto polar, which I’m pretty sure I disabled in the settings.
Prior to a recent update, I couldn’t even find a pause button to press while viewing comments.
reddit: flag to turn off seo spam, limiting results to earnest musings in the style of usenet posts that feckless old programmers are always pining for
"best vacuum cleaner reddit"
"honda civic 2021 reddit"
The moment a discussion CAN have dissent, the "game" of the site incentivizes you to only say things people agree with, otherwise you are hidden from conversation, and in many cases limited to respond.
funny angle is: even if the usernames were different, we wouldn't know whether those are same persons or indeed different persons.
reddit is certainly a very biased / skewed place with respect to "moderation"
It's not impossible but it's rare enough you shouldn't bet anything of value on it.
The non-stop ads disguised as content, and the consorship of posts critical of xi and ccp were the final nails in the coffin. I recall a story breaking about China and human rights, and it was chilling to watch shit disappear every second as I refreshed the comment thread.
I do not miss it, in the rare case of quality content/discussion that's relevant to my interests is often posted to here or some other aggregate.
10+ years I spent in that place, watched it get worse and worse. I quit reddit 2 years ago, and I do not miss it, at least not what it is now.
Reddit didn't foresee that its business would last for > 5 years . They need to set expiration dates for mod positions. In democracies we do that every 4-5 years.
Mod accounts for popular subject and location subs are highly valued and sought after by people looking to move the overton window of discourse on those topics.
Most mods work as volunteers to keep a sub clean of spam and porn. When the only ‘thanks’ you receive is, ‘we know where you live, watch your back’ I’m done.
The cherry on tip is when you notify the admins that there is nefarious activity and they literally don’t return a response for 3 weeks.
Reddit’s voting system enforces group-think, the users think it’s a ‘democracy’ in that they get to make the rules and mods should just follow orders, then mods need help due to an uprising, admins are no where to be found.
The meme subs aren’t funny any more, pics of cats and dogs are tired. The anti-mask, anti-vax, the_donald, and so much more all incubated in Reddit under the watch of the mods, the admins, and Condi Nast themselves for nothing more than advertising dollars.
I understand Reddit serves a purpose for some but it, in part, is assisting in the downfall of society. By allowing people to downvote without thinking critically, without thinking about the affects of polarizing endlessly until right and wrong don’t matter as long as everyone is in agreement. And if someone isn’t in agreement, downvote them in to oblivion.
Those subs are by far in the minority and are always on the line of getting quarantined or outright shutdown.
r/politics is the poster child of what 90% of Reddit is. Reddit is by FAR an echo chamber for leftist ideas than it is for "alt-right" anything.
I didn't realize mods were subject to so much abuse.
I wonder if the death threats would vanish if the users were not anonymous, either.
Awful people doing awful business, no surprises here
This list is at best deeply misleading; those subreddits often have dozens of moderators.
No one cared, nor did they care about the China astroturfing/censorship, but every so often someone raises the points, makes a stink, a few people leave reddit and it continues with business as usual.
A real problem is that I don't think that the process of becoming a mod is particularly exclusionary, and anyone with ambition can eventually work their way into any cartel they want through flattery and constant online presence. This sounds democratic, so the opposite of a problem, right? But it's not actually democratic, there's no votes, it's appointments all the way down. The only way you can vote on reddit is to leave a sub as a group of users, and move to another sub together, hopefully with enough posting force and shady knowledge of mod tricks to attract more incoming readers/posters than the sub you've left (by "incoming" I mean people encountering that group of related subs for the first time, either through search or through chance.)
Again, why is that bad?
Because it's so easy to game. The people who mod subs are not exceptional at modding subs in terms of fairness and cultivation of interesting dialogues, they're exceptional in their degree of motivation to be mods. An easy way to create exceptional motivation is through paying people. Another way to be exceptionally motivated is to be irrationally motivated, e.g. mental illness.
The motivation that we hope people have is the intrinsic motivation to facilitate/provide pleasure/information to others, but to also do that for free while Reddit gets rich. Not only do I think that borders on irrational, but I also think that in the fight between the intrinsic motivation to help and collaborate with others, and the simple economic utility headwinds, you 1) can't expect many people to be of the type we want, and we 2) certainly shouldn't expect them to remain for very long if they are.
And even worse, the interaction between the paid and the irrationally motivated will always benefit the paid. The paid have a mission, and if they see no means of accomplishing that mission, they leave. For the irrationally motivated, modding is the end, not the means, so if being an enabler of the paid gets them appointed or promoted, they're going to be the best enablers you could ask for.
Reddit, and most forums, need tools that facilitate real democracy (or some sort of open political process), and in certain cases the requirement to use them. This dictatorship of the appointed and the "people willing to do the work (for free)" is just M-L style vanguardism and results in rule by apparatchik.
This 100%. Once you've interacted with one of these people, you realize how completely insane they have to be to spend as much time as they do doing what they do. All they want is internet power. In real life, they would be that crazy guy in the neighborhood who never shuts up that people just learn to ignore because they know the man doesn't speak with any rationality. Online, they become gods.
If free speech is to be free, then godly reputation internet people should not be allowed to accumulate power, because the personality required to seek it by itself speaks volumes of how opinionated, undemocratic, authoritarian, and morally challenged they are.
HN quickly shadow bans anybody who goes against the dominant ideology.
Is it possible that the ban trigger was in the way of expression of said ideas?
That's why comments like this never come with links - because readers could then see for themselves and make up their own minds - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
the comments are slowly reflecting the result of this^ sjw-ish, anti-capitalism, anti personal growth etc.
that marked the demise of reddit (in terms of quality, not in terms of revenue)