Comment by sirspacey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sirspacey | Hacker News Reader

I cannot buy into a wholesale generalization that mods are power tripping people who deserve our contempt because they are lonely.

There’s all kinds of motivations for being a mod. I rarely find a sub where mods aren’t dealing with far more BS than they are putting out.

If I don’t agree with how mods handle a channel, I leave.

I think it’s important that we question the usefulness of blaming society for the lack of quality in “default” content. Yes, you’re funneled into these channels. Yes, Reddit is seeking to get people to consume them. Yes, the interest of advertisers override all others. Yes, Reddit constantly inserts unwanted subs into my feed.

Yet Reddit is still a place I can curate to the subs that align with my interests & values. it’s not dead yet.

I don’t expect any social media platform to give me the defaults I want. I’ve accepted that I can take responsibility for the content I consume.

What I’d like is to build tools that enable people to more easily filter for that content. I believe we need stronger filtering tools, not weaker.

This is where I do wholeheartedly agree with author - the loss of Aaron and RSS feeds was the end of the cyberpunk movement in the browser based web.

I don’t know if web3 genuinely offers a second chance, but I do know that I will continue to want the ability to learn from thoughtful people of all walks of life. That requires the ability to filter out everything else. At this point, I’d rather select keywords to filter than to surface & happily pay for the privilege.

I’m so tired of being spoon fed the empty calories of outrage.

You are automatically banned from some subs if you comment/post in other blacklisted, "rival" communities. Let this sink in.

Very few communities do that, and you generally aren't missing out getting banned from them anyway.

You immediately get a dozen ban notifications if you post in KotakuInaction.

Or TumblrInAction or PoliticalCompassMemes.

Regardless of the content of your responses/posts, you get banned.

TulblrInAction has just been banned.

Default subs are doing this. It's one thing if a small sub does strange things, but if a massive sub that explicitly recommend by Reddit acts like this (for years now!), it sends a pretty clear message.

Small nitpick: default subreddits no longer exist. The admins killed the notion after one of the blackouts.

Thanks for the correction. I'm not subscribed to any of those (everyone knows the best content is in the smaller subs right?) so completely missed that!

And yet that can also be valid - the /r/teen sub, which is meant as a safe place for teenagers to talk, bans people who've posted in creepy subs - do you disagree with that?

That’s the wrong question to ask. The right question is, for every creepy person caught by that, how many are there who are smart enough to make a new account?

The premise of creating via raw moderator power, a safe space for teenagers on an anonymous internet forum that encourages throwaway accounts is ridiculous.

No it's exactly the right question to ask, and you're not offering a rebuttal: you're simply making an asinine point about effectiveness.

I imagine the calculus involved would say it’s far better to create a safe space for teenagers and rid would be creeps than allow entry for non-teenagers in a space not even meant for them.

It would be like getting mad that a school prom doesn’t allow any adults inside. I’m sure there are good adults , but I doubt the intention of random adults and would rather have a whitelist of what adults are allowed.

The only real answer is that teenagers have no place on the public Internet, let alone a forum dedicated to them

I’d encourage you to consider than one of the public goods Reddit provides is to homeless teams & vulnerable people escaping abusive family.

Given the incredible breadth of services available to those individuals & yet the very real evidence that it continues to be a significant societal challenges, it’s worth considering the role a supportive community of random strangers play.

I was banned in a very popular sub (crazyfuckingvideos) with a million subscribers because I also subscribed to banpitbulls.

You can’t post any pro Israel news on /r/politics.

Their definitely needs to be stronger guidelines in place for mods, especially as they become sizable.

> You can’t post any pro Israel news on /r/politics.

Seems sensible to me when anti-Israel news is pretty much banned everywhere else.

How is that sensible? What makes israel different from any other nation such that they ought to be immune from all criticism?

I'm not sure if you misread. I think it's absurd how Israel seems to be immune to criticism in the media.

Post in /r/lockdownskepticism or pretty much any of the subs questioning the covid19 narrative and the same thing happens. Like 50 subs.

Getting banned from the covid-19 subs is also frighteningly easy as well. Any question about vaccine effectiveness or questioning “face coverings” and you’ll either get buried, comment removed, or banned outright.

Sounds like you haven't met any reddit mods. And no, web3 offers nothing except the ability to try and control your digital currency and make money off you.

I agree. The Reddit mods I've dealt with were nasty people.

I think the tiny amount of power goes to people's heads. Power-tripping moderators of small subreddits are a dime a dozen.

The larger problem is that most subreddits are moderated by a handful of people, whose interest is expressly _moderating_. They don't care about the community. How could they, they have so many? And the power absolutely goes to their head.

It's really because most mods and tech leaders are the types of people that want to play everything like a video game and have everyone else just watch them play as a spectator...

We praise exec wisdom and foresight a lot, but in reality, the people who come in an sit for years in exec positions when no new innovation happens are just reacting to profit indicators and protecting the company for as long as they serve, while leaving a bunch of headaches for the next guy who comes in.

This is the age of "don't rock the userbase" boat in tech. It's only companies that disrupt the entire social media landscape as we know it that wins next, but given time, they too will screw it all up...

All of it repeatedly just reaffirming the true genius of MySpace Tom.

> This is where I do wholeheartedly agree with author - the loss of Aaron and RSS feeds was the end of the cyberpunk movement in the browser based web.

Aside from not calling it a "cyberpunk movement", the people who work on such tech are still around. See: Mastodon, Pleroma.

fair - I don’t mean to define his work or vision, just my own sense of admiration for seeking to establish a source of knowledge not fully co-opted by institutions.

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