That's interesting because I consider Reddit to be one of the great victories of the Internet.
The 'proof' is a screenshot of a post that was called '92 of the top 100 subbreddits controlled by the same 5 people' that got removed. Why did it get removed? Who knows?
Do better. If you want to be better than reddit don't do the same dumb shit that it does and check your sources.
https://gist.github.com/bspammer/6b5eff6670e4b839ffea89ceaed...
The highest non-bot user moderates 12 subreddits in the top 100. There's quite a few users who moderate more than 5. I believe the situation was much worse a few years ago, and reddit the company put pressure on them to give up some of their subs.
But there is something to be said about having the censor cabal out in the open for everyone to see. Compare that with Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, where there is no record of who is determining what is and isn't ok to say.
Reddit is were actual discussion goes to die. Comes with the downvote ability I suppose.
And another particularly niche forum dedicated to a specific range of car chassis with a specific set of engine swaps that would permaban anyone who asked a question that could be answered via forum search. Which was at least mentioned in the forum rules you had to read before joining.
Forum mods were notorious power trippers on any forum I've been on. Sometimes it was worth it just to keep order. Other times it led to flame wars and forum splinters where a few people would start their own in competition to try and pick up the unhappy crowd.
So really nothing has changed because this is exactly how most discord/telegram servers, forums, subreddits, etc still function.
Back about 10-15 years ago I agreed to be a mod on a pretty large and popular forum, naively thinking I could help keep the place decent and useful for the users. What I discovered instantly were hidden mod forums where they made fun of all the users, laughed about arbitrarily banning people, and discussed about how they banned posts about illegal stuff mostly because it gave away their secrets. I gave that up quickly and decided I was all set with modding.
Mods on the “old forums” routinely deleted posts and banned users because they don’t like their opinion or hell even just as a “fuck why not it’s funny”.
Source: was a mod and active participant of such forums and saw it all the time. Did my fair share too.
Half of my hardworking, law-abiding immigrant community of doctors, engineers, and scientists were on the_donald. These are people who’ve actually faced hate in this country and who likely have way more exposure to people of different races & backgrounds than the average American.
If that does nothing to make you reevaluate your opinion, then you are sadly and ironically a victim of divisive indoctrination.
Edit: For context, the parent advocated banning users from an entire subreddit as a sound moderation strategy.
It is. 100% it is. If a subreddit shows that it's users continuously abuse the rules of the site, then yes, 100%, it's a sound moderation strategy. Banning regular users of the subreddit and just flushing it all out is sound.
> If that does nothing to make you reevaluate your opinion, then you are sadly and ironically a victim of divisive indoctrination.
The problem is you are misrepresenting what happened. Reddit didn't just "ban users from an entire subreddit." They didn't just randomly pick a large subreddit and ban all the users. Suggesting that they did that is disingenuous at best. So you can play the victim card all you want, but if you can't be honest about what happened that does nothing to make you reevaluate your opinion, then you are sadly and ironically a victim of divisive indoctrination.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/06/30/behind-biden...
Doctors had amazing voter turn out in 2020.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
I couldn't find an analysis of how they actually voted in 2020 but only 26% voted for Trump in 2016 before he bungled the pandemic
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/873266
Then there is the fact that a number of doctors think pre-covid trump already was in need of mental health help
https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/13/health/trump-mental-health-ex...
Only 15% supported a repeal of Obamacare heavily promoted by Trump before the worst public health crisis in my lifetime.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-obamacare-doctor-s...
Far from it being half of America it looks like a small fraction of educated folks and minorities and a large helping of mostly uneducated white folks. If anything the fact that he has any support at all from educated people in America proves that being an expert in one field doesn't necessarily make you wise.
Let me ask:
Do you think all 30% of college-educated Hispanics who voted for Trump were wholly misguided? Do you believe none of them had legitimate reasons for supporting him?
How about the 8% of black college grads, or the 26% of doctors?
None of these people were competent enough to make an informed decision?
None of them were competent enough to make an informed decision insofar as the leadership of the nation because they relied on faulty analysis, willful ignorance of Donald's many flaws, and self interest in lower taxes.
I'm not sure why this is controversial. The average college educated individual is presumably skilled in their profession but their profession but that is hardly sure to inform their understanding of matters out of scope of that profession.
Do you find it surprising that 30% of any group makes poor decisions?
The most tragic part is you don’t even recognize it. You peddle loaded language with the broadest of strokes without seeing that you yourself are the very thing you believe you’re fighting against.
Genuinely believing every single one of those hispanic grads or doctors were misguided or uninformed, tells me you haven’t had many good faith conversations with people across the aisle. Nowhere do you even acknowledge the legitimacy of or a desire to understand the grievances and concerns that led to their voting behavior. But you’re certainly quick to insults and labeling.
Don’t be an Intellectual Yet Idiot.
“The IYI pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realizing it is his understanding that may be limited.”
https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e...
You would be disingenuous to not acknowledge the political forces at play. Mods were on high alert because they knew admins were waiting for the most microscopic of reasons to ban the sub. And we know these forces exist. Twitter is proof positive of political bias in content moderation.
People of all backgrounds were on the_donald, which should make you question why they were tolerant of much of the content you likely perceived as hateful. If your answer is simply that they’re bigots, then I suggest you have more conversations.
A more through approach might to be to analyze the sentiment or at least the score of comments or even go further and analyze the mix of comments and sentiments to decide if someone is an undesirable.
There's value in any information-sharing they do in that they share trends across subreddits that reddit themselves are opaque about, but the subs still operate autonomously.
BBS like systems and forums had been successfully in use since the early 70s. Usenet is more than 40 years old by now IIRC? Very similar function and open by design.
Even without falling into “Endless September” rose tinted glasses I would argue that we really, really could do a whole lot better in 2023 and going forward.
I guess someone must work on Ted Nelson’s ideas at least (Xanadu, etc)?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProBoards
But Reddit is really bad at long on-going conversations unless it has enough to support its own subreddit.
Car maintenance forums are something I feel doesn’t work well on the Reddit system.
Or anything you’d want chronological or heavy in-like image/video embedding
Everywhere you go its just large swaths of photobucket/cardomain embed failures for the forums that didn't do image hosting.
Video game producers are starting up fan discords that also have the troubleshooting/bug reports channels for the game on them. Video game mod communities are moving to discord.
Its going to really suck when a few years go by and a company closes or moves onto a new game and shuts down their discord. A lot of community sourced info is going to be flushed down the drain if people don't archive it.
Dedicated forums for particular topics were generally tiny. A forum with 10k+ people was a sizable forum, and not many where that large. Small communities got very little attention from spammers, and while they had their own trolls giving problems they were much less rarely subjected general trolls unless something like 4chan or whatever came before it picked up on them.
The internet is also huge and has zero degrees of separation in most places. I could post a link to a tiny forum here and 1000 people may see it. I could post it to reddit subthread and a hundred thousand people could see it. Or I could get a front page post on Reddit and a million+ people could see it. And with it tons of trolls, spam, and general idiots will follow and quality goes to trash.
This barely has anything to do with Reddit/Facebook itself. It's the power of network effects congregating people. Facebook was always going to happen, maybe in a slightly different flavor, or slightly different form, but once we got the computing capability to have millions of people at one place at once time, someone was always going to build it.
Piss off the admin and you might be insta-banned with no recourse. You'd even lose connections to the other users on the forum and would have no way to reach them. You didn't have the option of opening a competing forum where all of the old users already had access like you do with opening a new sub. You'd also lose access to the posts themselves and any content you found useful for the private forums.
You were reliant on the admin to keep the site running. Most had extensive downtime. Things would often break. The admins would have to run charity fund raisers to keep things up and many would threaten to take everything with them if people didn't pay up.
Forum administration was terrible, but there was a far healthier ecosystem full of alternatives that no longer exists. Remember, SomethingAwful's overmoderation was what popularized imageboards for westerners, and Digg's failings were what popularized Reddit. There is no equivalent today.
It snuffed out small independant competitors, dominates an industry, and wields its tremendous power in a negligent, self-serving, and irresponsible manner.
I think the main reason people search Reddit from Google is more that Google's search results are bad, not that Reddit is great. When I search Reddit instead of Google, it feels like a hack to work around the fact that Google is overrun with spam.
And, to the extent that Reddit is an essential information source, it's largely because Reddit (and other social sites) destroyed the small websites and blogosphere where this information used to live. Reddit is now kind of the only game in town, which to me is a success for that business, but overall a failure for the web. Compare it to Walmart and Amazon in the retail space: is the fact that we now only shop with those massive companies a victory for the wider retail landscape, or just for those corporations?
Anyway, good point, thank you for the response.I would still like to hear what the original commenter has to say.
I disagree here, Reddit didn't destroy the small websites, the users leaving the small websites destroyed the small websites. Reddit did not put any duress on the users and force them to leave. Instead having everything they wanted in one place without 20 different logins motivated the users to stay on Reddit instead. Convenience motivates individual action.
Also, coming back to your first point on Google, but tying into Reddit. Spammers are destroying the internet. The reason Google is failing is spammers are expending far more energy to spam than Google is willing to spend to detect spam. Reddit is still very willing to expend energy to prevent spam on their site, hence becomes a higher quality source of information than the average search.
The size of Google and Reddit both make them targets for spammers, and I believe eventually their success will be mostly eaten by the costs of preventing spam from ruining their services.
What you find on Reddit represents the views of a small number of moderators and PR organizations.
Reddit has some serious flaws to be sure, and some really shitty subs, but the "genuine, peer-to-peer information" is found there in the weird little niche subs. PR organizations don't care about modified IBM Model M keyboards from 1985, but there's probably a subreddit out there dedicated to just that one thing, with a bunch of genuine information from genuine people who like to modify that keyboard. I could probably find another subreddit dedicated to restoring electronics from the 1940s, something else I'm sure no "PR organization" cares about. There's countless other examples just like this. In fact, if Reddit were confined to extremely narrow special-interest hobby groups like this, it wouldn't have the bad reputation it has now.
I still think it has devolved into one of the biggest tire fires on the Internet, but it was a cute idea. Maybe the next attempt will suck less.
Before that, I remember slashdot, which was pretty good at culling comments, but article selection was not democratic.
But money screws up everything.
Specifically, I really like the way Slashdot provides more categories for rating comments. '+5 Funny' vs '+5 Insightful' is a very useful distinction. '-1 Off Topic' vs '-1 Flamebait/Troll' is a useful distinction. I don't want to read off topic spam, but I often do want to read unpopular dissenting opinions. Slashdot let me read the "trolls" (dissenters) without having to wade through the literal spam. Great system, HN and reddit would be better if they had something similar.
And once in awhile you'd get picked to meta moderate where you'd be asked if the moderation choice of another user was reasonable.
"Our rule1 protects groups that are attacked based on a vulnerability, which doesn't pertain to white people or men as a group." Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/NgOxEg0.png
What is 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." (https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy)
So in practice, according to one of their employees it's actually:
"Remember the non-white male human. Reddit is a place for creating community and belonging, not for attacking non-white people or women. Everyone except white people and men have a right to use Reddit free of harassment, bullying, and threats of violence. Communities and users that incite violence or that promote hate against non-white people or women will be banned."
And this is absolutely born out in their repeated banning of male-centric subs, while the most toxic community I've ever seen remains, because it's wildly sexist against the correct gender. And there are multiple "fragile white redditor" type subs also, but all other "fragile <race> redditor" subs were instantly banned.
And the bait & switch:
"We want to democratize the traditional model by giving editorial control to the people who use the site, not those who run it."
— Reddit FAQ 2005
"We've always benefited from a policy of not censoring content"
— u/kn0thing 2008
"A bastion of free speech on the World Wide Web? I bet they would like it," he replies. [reddit]'s the digital form of political pamplets."
— u/kn0thing 2012
"We will tirelessly defend the right to freely share information on reddit in any way we can, even if it is offensive or discusses something that may be illegal."
— u/reddit 2012
"We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it. Not because that's the law in the United States - because as many people have pointed out, privately-owned forums are under no obligation to uphold it - but because we believe in that ideal independently, and that's what we want to promote on our platform. We are clarifying that now because in the past it wasn't clear, and (to be honest) in the past we were not completely independent and there were other pressures acting on reddit. Now it's just reddit, and we serve the community, we serve the ideals of free speech, and we hope to ultimately be a universal platform for human discourse (cat pictures are a form of discourse)."
— u/yishan 2012
"Neither Alexis [u/kn0thing] nor I created Reddit to be a bastion of free speech"
>— u/spez 2015
They banned a load of female-centred subreddits too, a couple of years back. The moderators of these subs then set up their own Reddit-like forum at https://ovarit.com, with a mission to uplift women's voices, especially on topics where they had been censored on Reddit.
Reddit also discriminates specifically against homosexual women, in similar ways: /r/lesbians is a pornography forum dedicated to the male gaze, while /r/actuallesbians is filled with men pretending to be women. Any lesbian subreddit that is created exclusively for actual female women to use gets swiftly banned, and similarly for comments that support being exclusively same-sex attracted. This sort of 'progressive' misogyny and homophobia is increasingly common in other forums too, not just on Reddit.
The common theme of all this banning and censorship is users not toeing the line towards a particular set of US-centric political viewpoints that are currently popular amongst those who call themselves 'progressive'. Though in reality their views and actions are regressive and authoritarian.
The connecting thread in all these bans is that if you're not in the niche of American 'polite society' that they market to, you can expect to be tolerated only to give an illusion of plurality to the site.
Accurate: https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps/actualles...