Hacker News Reader

Comment by Beltalowda | Hacker News Reader

Furthermore, you can publish "The effects of the Jewish population on the 1930s German economy" which can be either a genuine bona-fide analysis, or something which essentially boils down to "Jews destroyed German economy before the war".

I think the "reddit model" where you have smaller communities with community mods works much better than the Facebook or Twitter model where there's one "global community". Not that reddit's moderation is perfect or that you can 100% rely on community mods, but overall, it seems to work much better.

View on HN

Reddit has a very bad antisemitism problem. It's a cesspool.

By no means is reddit 'the model'. In practically any sub except the explicitly Jewish ones, I will find an avalanche of antisemitism on any post that touches on Judaism/Israel/Jews.

It's bad now, and only getting worse. The moderators of top subreddits (like PublicFreakout) are openly in favor of marginalizing Jews, they'll just use the word Zionist instead. You can report a comment like "Jews don't deserve to live" and Reddit will automatically respond within a few hours saying the comment didn't violate their content policy. You can visit the subreddit AntisemitismInReddit for hundreds more examples.

And Facebook is fine with "Russians don't deserve to live" comments.

Reddit has a bad anti-everything problem.

That place is a cancer.

The Reddit model allows paid foreign agents to become volunteer community (subreddit) moderators and then use that platform to sow division or push a biased narrative. How much do you think the Chinese government would pay to subtly emphasize or de-emphasize certain stories on a huge community like r/news or r/politics?

Ten cents.

> Furthermore, you can publish "The effects of the Jewish population on the 1930s German economy" which can be either a genuine bona-fide analysis, or something which essentially boils down to "Jews destroyed German economy before the war".

When I was in college, I was looking around an FTP server and found a holocaust denier book. So I read it. Well, more moderately skimmed (not lightly).

It was exactly like this - it purported to be a sober view of history, well cited and no name calling. Literally none of the references were to anything real; it was all fabricated bullshit trying to push the reader to a particular conclusion (Jews are bad).

Not being able to tell the difference is entirely the point. These bastards are sneaky.

> "...it purported to be a sober view of history, well cited and no name calling. Literally none of the references were to anything real; it was all fabricated bullshit trying to push the reader to a particular conclusion (Jews are bad)."

But the problem is that censorship assumes that you are too stupid to come to that conclusion yourself and must be protected from the "misinformation".

It also robs the marketplace of the ability to hear the legitimate criticisms and the opportunities to expose said bullshit.

Companies have the right to handle this issue however they wish. Generations of politicians have ensured it, at least in the US. That's just how it is.

With regards to:

> But the problem is that censorship assumes that you are too stupid to come to that conclusion yourself and must be protected from the "misinformation".

> It also robs the marketplace of the ability to hear the legitimate criticisms and the opportunities to expose said bullshit.

Do you think the public on the first count, and the marketplace on the second count are doing a particularly admirable job here? Because, I don't. And that failure comes in no small part because of other vested interests who prop up said bullshit, because they see an opportunity to profit and gain more influence from it. How do you propose we address that?

> "Companies have the right to handle this issue however they wish."

But that's precisely the problem these days. We have seen recently that the government has been colluding with the tech companies to censor content that they deem "misinformation" and individuals whom they deem "problematic". It's no longer just about a private company deciding what they will or will not allow on their platform.

https://nypost.com/2022/09/01/white-house-big-tech-colluded-...

> "Do you think the public on the first count, and the marketplace on the second count are doing a particularly admirable job here?"

It's not about whether the "group" is coming to the decision or conclusion that you or I would like them to reach. It's about whether we, as individuals, have the right to view the totality of the evidence and arguments and then make up our own minds.

Some people see through the bullshit and some don't. That's the nature of humanity. And, to be fair, what you and I might think is bullshit might turn out to actually be completely the opposite. We're not infallible. But the fact that any of us might make mistakes in judgement or analysis is not a valid reason to prevent unpopular or unverified (or however you want to label it) information from being disseminated or accessed.

Nobody has a right to see all information in the world. Free speech is an ideal, not a right.

The first amendment just ensures the government cannot punish you for what you say.

If you are arguing for implementing that ideal, well and good. I disagree that in our current media ecosystem that that is a good idea. But I cannot fault you for advocating for an ideal.

If you are suggesting the public has a right to see all content on a platform without any moderation, you are wrong. No such right is enshrined in US law.

Reddit literally had /r/Holocaust controlled Nazis who would post Holocaust denial on it for years until reddit for too emberassed

Seconding reddit being very extremely, explicitly antisemitic. It's really just /pol/ with slightly bigger words much of the time.

You miss his point completely. Whatever problems "reddit" has, they're limited to small communities. As much as I think reddit has a huge left bias, there are huge, huge numbers of right leaning communities as well.

I don't read /pol, /publicfreakout or any of these other communities and that means I am completely unaffected by whatever nonsense they have going on.

Sure, minority issues are often limited to minority communities. I don't read r/publicfreakout either, but as a moderator of r/Jewish I can see the impact it and many other subs have on our community. You have your standard malicious crossposting and trolls, which we have good enough ways to deal with. Antisemitism from other subs leaks and grows and we often get brigades of intactivists, conspiracy theorists, BHI-sympathizers, you name it. Reddit's new Crowd Control system helps but it's not perfect. Good luck if anything happens in Israel (which it frequently does), you may as well just shut the sub down for a day.

Reddit shuts down other kinds of hate, the double standard is glaring. The fact that it doesn't impact you personally is so not the point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com