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Comment by ufmace | Hacker News Reader

Seems to me they're alive and well. The increasingly powerful censorship forces on places like Reddit has moved at least dozens of communities to create independent platforms for themselves with a variety of codebases. Yes, some of the oldest and worst-maintained ones have died, but many others are still as active as they ever were.

There's also a thing where communities tend to only really migrate to other forum-types that work similarly. Between Reddit/HN style nested threads with voting, classic PHPBB style strictly chronological threads, and Slack/Discord live chat with many channels, good luck getting a significant number of people on one platform type to move to a community on a different platform type. A different software package that provides a matching platform type is a much easier sell.

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It still blows my mind that I got a multi-day suspension for calling out a pretty obvious Russian shill and calling him a moron. He’s still posting, btw.

I mean, it's not like smaller forums didn't have an issue with power hungry moderators who would ban you completely for stupidest things. The same people are now subreddit moderators. This isn't really a problem with reddit.

I think OP was referring to a site-wide ban that only admins can issue.

It was much more fun to kick people out of a channel in IRC

I forget the name of it now, but back when I was still in irc regularly, I used a client that would hilariously play an explosion sound effect whenever someone got kicked.

Made for amusing chuckles to hear it in the background whilst working and wondering “wonder who just got the hammer”

back then, a lot of those kind of apps allowed you to assign your own sounds. the infamous Monty Python arrow sound "message for you sir!", the whistle sound before the explosion, etc were all popular sfx when the apps granted that kind of customization.

now, we get ring tones and other "choose from our curated list". zzzzzz!

I have the Sailor Moon sparkle noise as a Matrix notification sound and I regret nothing

Nor should you, unless your volume is at an eleven.

Im with you on snoozing and being incredibly bored with the quality and range of “curated” stuff coming with my apps and services.

if you were a real chump you'd kickban them then teardr0p them

That's not what I'm talking about though. Forum bans and subreddit bans are small change. What really makes people move platforms is when the Reddit admins nuke entire subreddits for dubious reasons, including breaking poorly defined rules. And admins deleting posts that follow the rules of their subreddit and completely banning accounts for various reasons.

Yes, this isn't new either.

The advice given to IRC admins was always "don't post in your own channels".

There are plenty of irc channels and forums administrated even worse than reddit.

What sorts of subreddits have been nuked for dubious reasons? I know admins have been abusive of privilege in the past but it seems pretty small- to normal-sized-potatoes as forum admin ego tripping goes.

A lot of people think /r/The_Donald was banned for dubious reasons.

Those people never visited The_Donald and didn't see the racism and bigotry there. It was a cesspool had no other purpose than to circlejerk over Trump and malign, and attack his political opponents.

It added no value to reddit.

Hard agree. I deleted my reddit account over the fact that they kept letting T_D exist despite its obvious flouting of the rules around brigading (they arranged brigades on discord and took over other subreddits, repeatedly, after being warned) and how it was an increasingly obvious alt-right funnel full of some of the absolute worst people on the internet.

They ultimately closed the subreddit about a year later, but I had already deleted my account at that point. I was better off in the end though, as the entire site is now just a giant meme dump with no redeeming qualities (it felt like all subreddits eventually saturate with memes on their main page as a function of their popularity, and it gets tiresome and same-ey after a while.)

> they kept letting T_D exist despite its obvious flouting of the rules around brigading

Some like to claim that it's because high engagement means more advertising dollars, but I think it's more like they knew that banning T_D would cause a massive backlash as people claimed they were banned simply for having different political opinions.

> It added no value to reddit.

Well, many subs don't add a value to reddit. At least from my perspective and personal opinion. I don't understand why you cannot just unsub and don't read it.

> I don't understand why you cannot just unsub and don't read it.

Because they radicalised each other and then went out into other subs no longer caring to hide their bigotry and racism.

If you you live in an apartment on a street with a nightclub on it, you're going to have drunk jerks on your street at night.

The chance of being on the internet for an extended period and not running into a troll is 0%.

I can tell you as a former forum admin, that there is no way to avoid these people showing up. The rules don't matter, banning them doesn't matter, being a calm and relaxing place won't matter either.

What did matter is that the rules made sense and were followed indiscriminately by the mods and admins. It also helped to have a forum dedicated to spam and allowed for breaking of many rules (racism/harrassment and CP being excluded from the exception)

My banlist over a million users was 20 people long. I don't consider this sum to be hard to handle and at 1.2m registered users (without a need to register to read), I think maybe the problem is actually in the rules/application.

People hate feeling like they are being treated unfairly.

We would also enforce the rules when racism was targeting white people.

A lot of people are terrible people, and there is significant overlap in them.

Other than the subreddits dedicated to hate speech, can you give examples of this policy being poorly implemented?

> This isn't really a problem with reddit.

YES it is. Reddit empowers fascist types to run their fiefdoms, UNTIL the liliputian leaders start running *too many* users away.

It's all about users per day engagement. If you harm that, the reddit admins show up and clean house. But in the interim, they'll let you think you own that subreddit.

And if you were a mod of a smaller forum that relied on ads to stay afloat, what exactly would happen if you started banning loads of people? It's the same thing, different name.

That scenario basically doesn't exist. A smaller forum can thrive on $5 hosting. (We're comparing to reddit so I assume volunteer moderation.)

Yea, that is the part of the equation people forget. They see a ban and big platform and thing those things are only happening on big platforms owned by big corporate people in shiny offices. Nope, censorship can happen in small communities ran by Billy Bob down the street to. It comes down more to people. If someone wants an echo chamber, they will create an echo chamber regardless if it is a subreddit or a MyBB instance on a shared hosting plan.

Because you are not supposed to attack other redditors.

    Reddit Content Policy - Rule 1

    Remember the human. Reddit is a place for creating community and belonging, not for attacking marginalized or vulnerable groups of people. Everyone has a right to use Reddit free of harassment, bullying, and threats of violence. Communities and users that incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned.

Being insulted is an "attack"?

Insult a synonym for verbal attack

So it is unacceptable now to merely insult other users?

You can act coy about the meaning of this, but the usage of such language is obvious. It is trying to compare a voluntary public exchange between anonymous internet users to acts of physical violence.

The usage of that word there is essentially an underhanded attempt at justifying future censorship through its ambiguous meaning. When moderators agree with the "attacked" the message becomes a bannable offense, but when moderators agree with the "attacker" the message becomes "fair criticism".

Yes. It is unacceptable now to merely insult other users, on their platform. As well as this one.

Whose platform is it? It's the users that make the forum valuable. Anyone can administrate a web forum. The individuals and communities should decide what speech is acceptable for them, not some unaccountable bureaucrats.

I think there is a time and place for insults and flamewars. Maybe not everywhere all the time, but what you are seeing on the web today is selective enforcement of "politeness" and "civility" rules to benefit whatever side of the "flamewar" that the moderators approve of.

HN is a good forum insofar as the users think that admins enforce reasonable rules and users agree to abide by those rules and not evade bans. On HN, moderation is rather sophisticated and neutral. When that changes I'll leave.

> Whose platform is it? It's the users that make the forum valuable.

It's the user's community and content, but Reddit Inc's platform.

> Whose platform is it? It's the users that make the forum valuable.

Not if they're using the platform to make other users miserable. That's got negative value.

The platform belongs to the people who pay the web hosting cost.

The people who are there for free are not the customer. They are the product.

Insults are perfectly acceptable here so long as they're directed at people espousing locally unpopular opinions and dressed up with enough filler wordage to have a modicum of plausible deniability.

I love how they changed the original first rule of Reddit:

>Remember the human. When you communicate online, all you see is a computer screen. When talking to someone you might want to ask yourself "Would I say it to the person's face?" or "Would I get jumped if I said this to a buddy?"

The new rule is there to allow two minutes hate against anyone who is against the current thing.

Ironically it separates "marginalized or vulnerable groups" from the rest in the first place.

Unless that Redditor's name is Seth Rich, then you can get away with murder.

This reads like you're allowed to attack people if they aren't part of a marginalized or vulnerable group of people.

The accepted definition of marginalized groups is actually rather large: https://www.mnpsych.org/index.php?option=com_dailyplanetblog...

The wording in this rule is probably not great. There is a difference in promoting, "Be nice to everyone, but pay special attention where you may have a gap with marginalized folks experience" and how this rule reads. I'm not sure that there's a difference in outcomes though.

> The accepted definition of marginalized groups is actually rather large

So, everyone but cisgendered heterosexual white men without health/emotional problems? I guess it’s okay to attack me then.

You had a good run

RIP SWM

> This reads like you're allowed to attack people if they aren't part of a marginalized or vulnerable group of people.

ummm....

> Everyone has a right to use Reddit free of harassment, bullying, and threats of violence.

Do you mean that they stopped at _threats of violence_ without including "violence" itself?

You can’t experience violence by using reddit you’re just staring at a computer screen

That's exactly and explicitly right.

Which subreddit? Each sub has different mods

On the other side of the medal, my native language is French and I got banned due to me being a "Russian operative"

While the US was in the "everyone is a Russian agent"-craze I talked to 1 person on the internet that was actually a Russian. There are many Russians that speak English but the language barrier is still quite high, most of them have higher education and are pretty critical of politics and information of course. Much to the contrary to the average redditor.

It sounds like you called somebody a moron for having a different POV from you.

What was obvious about it? In my experience, a lot of people seem to think that anyone with a different opinion than their own must be a russian operative.

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