They then proceeded to call anyone who disagreed with this sentiment a “Russian bot”. I remember getting banned from certain subreddits just because I was guilty of the crime of posting in r/TheDonald (not even voicing support!)
5 minutes later: You have been banned from posting in $RANDOMSUB because of your association with hate-speech subreddits.
I usually christen a new account by speed running a ban there first, little tradition...
Engage in good faith in online spaces or get banned. hn is useful because it is tightly moderated.
the auto-ban of users that post in no-no subreddits was a reaction to the continued lack of action on reddit's part.
I understand why they did it, but reddit was not the same afterwards. The content got stale and boring, astroturfed to hell, and that's without mentioning the clique of moderators pushing a specific narrative on all subs and the horrible, horrible, horrible redesigns that kept getting pushed in increasingly hostile ways.
I am honestly surprised, and saddened, that reddit still hasn't gone out the way digg did, but that's probably because there is no good alternative yet...
The only way to "enjoy" reddit is with old.reddit.com and sorting by "rising" instead of "hot"... or "controversial", if you have the guts.
Reddit is now what Forumer used to be and a less reactionary NextDoor if you're in at least a medium-sized city. Today there was a loud boom in my city and the first place I heard about it was the local subreddit. Digg never had that. Nor did it have the special-interest boards (including pornography). Reddit also functions as the best independent product reviews site — my back owes plenty to /r/Mattress.
But as a news and politics site, it's basically dead. If you use any reasonably independent subreddits, people will be talking about how awful the "defaults" are. People prefer Discord for video games and they join filter-bubble communities for politics. The all-time top posts on /r/news are mostly more than two years old. The same is true of /r/worldnews and /r/politics — in the former case, some minor Hungarian drama from years ago outshines every single thread about the Russo-Ukrainian War.
This was definitely a turning point of Meme War I.
Not meant as a joke.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetic_warfare
>Memetic warfare on the part of 4chan and r/The_Donald sub-reddit is widely credited with assisting Donald Trump in winning the election in an event they call 'The Great Meme War'. According to Ben Schreckinger, "a group of anonymous keyboard commandos conquered the internet for Donald Trump—and plans to deliver Europe to the far right."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/The_Donald
It basically took over reddit before it was banned from the site.
It's an internet forum, not a debate club, and I'm not here to refute the central point while you name fallacies at me. No one is.
You just like this system because it allows you to suppress dissent while feeling OK about yourself.
To be clear, I'm anti-secretive censorship, not anti-moderation per se. But yes, secretive censorship is everywhere!
The long and short of it is that we are all equally guilty and equally capable of pulling ourselves out of this. It's not "just" the government as your article from The Intercept implies. The famous statements about "tyranny of the majority" came from Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill, but you can hear for example Jordan Peterson making roughly the same point [4]:
> "People think that when you're in a totalitarian state, the reason that the state is totalitarian is because everyone is the victim of top-down pressure from tyrants. And that's not how it works at all. A state becomes totalitarian when every single person is lying about absolutely everything all the time."
And shadow removals occur in many online spaces, not just Reddit. They don't get rid of spam, they promote it. Bots easily code around it and real users are left stuck in the mud. "Trolls" don't learn because they aren't facing consequences.
The thing to keep in mind is the future. If we all do this to each other in perpetuity, we're doomed. Fortunately, we humans are smart and can perceive a better outcome. The more people who understand that this does happen, the more who will decide not to do it because they don't want it done to them, and it looks bad when it's revealed.
[1] https://removed.substack.com/p/the-beginnings-of-shadowbans-...
[2] https://shadowmoderation.com/2022-10-transparent-moderation/
It's not really possible to have a productive conversation like that, regardless of the topic. Everything degrades into an endless game of oneupmanship that escalates until the opinions being represented are distorted well beyond anything espoused by most people in real-life discussions.
Reddit has two types of users, more or less: browsers and posters. The browsers will probably never post anything, or will post so rarely that it does not warrant mentioning. The regular posters will dominate the discussion in a given subreddit, and probably eventually moderate it, so there is a very strong in-group effect. The only way as an outsider to penetrate that in-group is to make well-liked, popular quips which pander to the moderators and browsers.
On the contrary, a forum or discussion board typically has two classes of users, in my experience: active posters who contribute to discussions they want to, and lurkers, who are usually new, and are absorbing from current posters. There is an implicit assumption that users have probably been watching the forum for a while to get a lay of the land before posting and have read through a good amount of the site’s content, and when they post, they are accepted since they are aware of the conversation and can build on it.
The culture of lurking and the desire of viewers to discuss topics with others is what keeps forums strong, IMO. In their place, Reddit has casual browsers who happen to see content and upvote it (effectively deciding democratically what others will see). When a large portion of users who have no intention to engage with others can dictate what their fellow members are most likely to see, it quickly degenerates to a “who can make the coolest comment” club.
Comment-tree discussions, especially gamified ones with "points" etc certainly are compelling, they're literally designed to be an endless quicksand for argumentation and gratification, which is why they've taken over. They're fun. But they are awful for reaching a consensus.
Also yes, suppressing dissident voices so that nobody can even read objections and counterarguments is the worst part about Reddit. That model barely even works here (politics discussions inevitably end up in a dogpile of flags and downvotes) with norms around not abusing your buttons, but it absolutely does not work in a mass-market social media site with hundreds of millions of users.
If I go to r/cars and ask if I can safely use diesel in my gasoline vehicle there is not and should not be two sides. Destructive commenters who try to advocate for otherwise will obviously be immediately deleted or banned, and entertaining their arguments and complaints about "censorship" and why they think they should be let back in is futile. Trying to argue with them is like trying to argue a complex math problem with ChatGPT - they will always hallucinate a new excuse and nonsensical response no matter how many times you try. A brief look at r/ModSupport will lay evident that Reddit's issue is a lack of moderation tools, not excess.
Why is it so hard for some people to accept that media outlets are filtering propaganda on other divisive topics too?
It's best to avoid Reddit front page and large subs.
PS. Reddit's transparent upvote system highly encourages popular and feel good opinions at the expense of accuracy. You can write a quality post backed by peer reviewed science but still get downvoted if it doesn't fit within a sub's consensus opinion.
When they're not at war would be a good time to bring that up
Men are/were being conscripted to defend that country. Knowing your leadership is selling you out is actionable information to those deciding whether to answer the call.
But this could also be psyops/lies/propaganda. Russia put a lot of effort into influencing opinion over the last two decades.
The USA profits from a protracted war in Ukraine. All of that money we send just goes right back into the military industrial complex.
Since Ukraine is fighting for their home, I guess they’ll have the willpower advantage. So, we should root for peace, achieved as soon as possibly, by the invaders leaving.
(I mean obviously it is Ukraine’s right to decide if they want to, like, sacrifice some territory in exchange for a peace treaty, but they seem to have pretty good morale and Russia didn’t respect their previous agreement not to invade, so it seems like it would be hard to start negotiating).
Fuck Reddit though. It’s all propaganda and censorship at this point. Both US political parties too - r/conservative has rules just as abusive as r/politics.
I don't believe that. These communities can exist outside reddit. Plenty of communities that were banned by reddit live on with their own website and thrive.
What is the open source Reddit alternative?
They were just lax about moderation until things got out of control and the company was at risk of being kicked off the app stores and being held complicit in some of the illegal conduct that was happening on the site.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/02/reddit-c...
(1) https://slate.com/technology/2014/04/reddit-and-the-boston-m...
(2) https://www.vox.com/2015/6/11/8767035/fatpeoplehate-reddit-b...
> I would personally prefer to see reddit kick all of their moderators to the curb and stop catering to the snowflakes of the world.
I'm sorry about your experiences with whatever moderators you have a beef with. My guess is you are talking about large subreddit(s). Large subreddits have their issues with transparency I agree but what are you trying to suggest? Reddit-appointed moderators? If so, you are in for a rude awakening.
I would instead spend effort in stopping them from charging third party apps for API access that are objectively better than the official apps and ensuring that they dont kill old.reddit.com (3) like they killed i.reddit.com
(3) https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/12qwagm/an_update_r...
No, it's up to the subreddit moderators. They are the hidden hand that shapes the conversation.
Many of the popular subreddits have been taken over by groups of full-time moderators who are pushing various agendas. Their actions can't even be seen. We can only see the posts they've chosen to allow in their subreddits.
>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34462443#34467156
>If a person saw a bush sculpture for the first time ever they would probably think how it's really curious the bush has this well defined shape, and happily conclude that the bush is just like that. "Pretty cool how there is a bush with the shape of a dog's face" they'll think.
>In the same way, visiting a subreddit you would think that that's just the community and content. But once you see how moderation works you realize that in reality, the community is pulling to all sorts of places at the same time, and by pruning the content here and there with the shears of moderation, using the chainsaw that is automod and by motivating growth with precision via shadowbanning and choosing what becomes popular, you can perfectly shape a subreddit into the content you want.
I want unpaid mods removed from the equation and for all content to be judged on the same scale and have full transparency to why moderation actions were taken, by who, and easy links to appeal. I also want clear rules for every subreddit, and if it's not a rule, users cannot be banned for it.
I've experienced many types of censorship, everything from mods silently deleting my posts without any reason or notification, then I occasionally get things removed with notes that the audience is too sensitive to have a real conversation (The topic was about dogs attacking people in my city). However all of my posts do not violate any of the published rules of the related subreddit. I argued more times with the moderators than I care to admit, till I just said fuck it, go ahead and ban me because I'll be back with another account in 10 minutes. I've gotten the game figured out on just creating many accounts and when one goes down, many others are available.
The dead accounts I can't use anymore actually make me some money, depending on the age and posting history. They can be sold for up to 50'ish dollars for a 11 year old account with 5k karma. However they won't be able to post in every sub, they're all banned from r/denver , r/askcarsales , r/denverbroncos , some are banned from r/linux because I called out some stupidity around RS, GNU and why it shouldn't expressly call out LGBT as an audience member allowed to use their software.
I'm up to 51 different accounts, about 20 of them banned from the previous subreddit... I try to birth 2-3 reddit accounts every month, with different verified emails.
I don't think there are any city/state subreddits that are actually representative of their city/state. Except maybe /r/WashingtonDC. That subreddit was great when I lived there.
There is a great book by Phil Rosenthal, the creator of 'Everybody loves Raymond' called 'Your lucky you're funny'.
He used to have a job as an overnight security guard in a museum. One night he was feeling very tired and for whatever reason decided to take a nap in one of the displays, this was like the bed of George Washington or something of equal importance. He got woken up by another security guards and was pulled up on it and was fired on the spot.
By Phil asked to be forgiven for this because of his previous good behavior and his superior got him his job back. This was the plot of an episode of Rosanne that Phil wrote.
Sure he got his job back but now everyone else hated him because it showed favoritism, and thus he was eventually forced out of the job by others disliking this.
The overall lesson was, just because you can get back into a position doesn't mean it is a good idea. Maybe if others dislike you that much, why do you keep trying to get back in? Sure they may be petty and it doesn't seem just, but why would you keep trying to get involved in that if the same result happens again and again?
I mean you 2-3 new accounts a month, it sounds like you didn't learn the lesson of Sisyphus. Maybe it is time to just let the boulder roll down the hill and enjoy its tumble to the bottom of the valley.
"Don't resist the bullies, just accept your fate." Same vibe.
Don't know what reason OP has for sticking with the shithole but I do appreciate that there are stubborn people like that.
Because with moderator actions it's not the others in the community (most of whom rarely, or never post) who necessarily dislike you, it's the government, or even just particular actors within the government, who dislike you.
> but why would you keep trying to get involved in that if the same result happens again and again?
I'm not the GP. I don't have multiple accounts. Someone would do this for the brief time that their posts are up, and eyes see it. To know that those ideas exist within others in the community.
Edit: Uh, why is this so unpopular it's getting multiple downvotes? Like, there are people that moderate hundreds of different subreddits and I don't think that's how the community self-moderation is supposed to work.
I would create a system where moderators have far less power, and that Subreddit members can vote on rules, posts being deleted, etc. The system would be much more democratic. Members would also be able to challenge moderator actions or even reverse moderator actions.
As of right now, Reddit has a problem where moderators have too much power. On top of that, moderators aren't being paid so they can't be controlled.
Possibly relevant:
https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-well-known-human-achieve...
It is for your beliefs (about the future and ~millions of people you've not met) to be correct.
Tautologies are handy too, but it's easy to not realize one is dealing with them.
This always ends with a power clique banding together to vote everyone else off. "Just for lulz," of course.
There is no solution to this except mutiny. Ban the corrupt leader and elect someone favorable. Delegating rule to the mob is tried-and-failed.
However, you can base the democratic system based on the reputation of the user, rather than total number of votes. CS1.6 did not have these advanced systems in place.
If you've never been into one of those "we let the upvotes decide" subreddits, then you don't realize that they inevitably turn into a tepid, unfocused grey blur of samey garbage. Moderators are necessary to keep a subreddit on track.
Or do you think that some bots will be so human like that they can't be distinguished by other subreddit users, but they can be distinguished by moderators?
At some point, large subreddits become important to the internet and they outgrow the moderators.
You know how some founders are great when the startup is small but is completely incompetent when the startup grows and scales? Then VCs bring in "adults" to run the larger startup? Yea. It happens on subreddits too but founding moderators can't be kicked out as far as I know.
... from reddit. Some are probably being paid by organizations, businesses, or even countries. And others might be monetizing their sub-reddit in some way (e.g. some of the crypto or investing sub-reddits).
All the more reason to create a more democratic and transparent system.
When crypto scams and exchanges were failing left and right, mods for official crypto exchange subreddits were deleting and censoring posts or shutting the subreddit down completely - leaving no place for bag holders to communicate and coordinate with each other.
Heck, even on HN, we could use a more democratic and transparent system. Right now, I'm convinced that HN blocks selective negative posts about Y Combinator.
Relevant: “Containment Control for a Social Network with State-Dependent Connectivity” (2014), Air Force Research Laboratory, Eglin AFB: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf
…a.k.a Reddit's "Most-Addicted City" of 2013: https://web.archive.org/web/20160604042751/http://www.reddit...
Those snowflakes include Apple, Google and non-US governments who aren't interested in the "anything goes" version of free speech.
So if Reddit cares about having a mobile app or operating at all then they need moderation.
Or lest we forget Reddit's good old days of doxxing, child porn, snuff porn, drug dealing etc.
"Hate speech" censorship apologists are the worst, by the way.
Hacker News is also censored and moderated, but it is my impression that the mods are quite carefully selected. On Reddit, the mods are anonymous and external, and are elected in an opaque process which I don't have a good understanding of. I fear that you end up with the catch 22 also seen in homeowner's associations: The people who have the time and dedication to rise to the top in these kinds of organizations are exactly the people you don't want to be in charge.
Who decides what hate speech is? The goverment… the same way they decide every other law.
Complaining about slippery slopes is fairly absurd. If we used similar logic we wouldn’t prosecute murder because of the slippery slope that would lead to locking everybody up.
I live in Canada… where unlike the US (but like many other countries), there are strong rules against hate speech, yet we haven’t descended into fascism nearly as much as the US has.
Hatred towards specific groups of people based on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability and gender should not be allowed in a civilized society. The value and and very existence of those groups of people is not up for debate.
Governments do.
And Reddit being a global site needs to abide by the laws of places like Germany which have specific rules around what content is tolerated.
Often those holding bumming power will ban for being an arsehole but they can also ban for many other things.
For instance, I don't necessarily think not wanting to allow people with male levels of testosterone to compete in female sports is arseholishness, but reasonable people can disagree here and a moderator might ban for it.
I also don't think that particular example is arseholeish but it sure is tedious to hear folks with no interest in sports who suddenly have an opinion on who can compete. If you want to engage in the subject matter go speak to folks at your local athletics or sports club.
Clearly they do have an interest in sports - on the topic of fairness for female athletes at the very least - if they have formed an opinion on this topic.
It’s a complex topic and you’d do well to talk to folks who are actually affected by it.
I competed in the Southern Athletics league last summer and train with my local athletics club, I’m yet to even see a single trans athlete take part, let alone compete.
For your information, I have talked to women adversely affected by male athletes competing in their leagues. The issue is not particularly complex to understand, most people can easily see the inherent unfairness in this.
Are you saying that's a good thing?
Even the hateful rag that is the Daily Mail is stirring shit up today about trans folks running at Park Run events.
Outside of social media, there is a significant amount of institutional censorship on this topic, favoring male privilege over women's rights.
Those aren't communities I ever looked into but I can imagine the sort of content that got posted there, see my comment above about hateful or bullying content.
If you had even just casually browsed them you'd see these were subreddits created by women, for women, and focused on the rights of women to have female-only spaces. And that is why they were banned.
Because they want to ensure to be available and reach users there. There is no inherent need, but not playing by the rules may result in being banned from participating in countries. Sometimes that's accepted (your Saudi Arabia example), sometimes ensured via separate services or other tricks (e.g. Chinese markets).
I know, Godwin's law, but the point is governments are fallible.
Making it a very powerful tool that is available exclusively to the people who already have the most power.
Government (in my country we use a parliamentary system where laws get proposed/changed/...), courts.
For example in my country it is not legal to agitate to overthrow the political system, to form a new Nazi party, to use Nazi symbols as a political party, to organize a storm of the parliament, etc.
There are also strict laws to protect the privacy of people, incl. persons who are suspects of crimes. It's for example not allowed, without court order, to openly publish personal data (fotos, fullnames) of suspects and to search for those. Even the police can't do that without permission.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/republican-national-committ...
For instance, for some people talking about embryo selection is hate speech against the disabled, while for others only explicitly calling for the deaths of all <insert ethnic group> would meet the hate speech bar.
What would be your standard for "hate speech"?
The question should be what kind of speech directly and provably causes actual harm. That is the only valid baseline for what should be outright banned everywhere. Not speech that could motivate others do do harm. Not speech that offends someone. Not speech goes against the current narrative. Of course you can have communities that have further restrictions. And you probably should. But you're not banning "hate speech", your're banning speech YOU don't like.
That's not motivated by hate, don't be absurd. People just want their local Nazis to improve themselves - why would they care about what constitutes a "good Nazi" otherwise?
If you want advertisers and be able to operate legally around the world then you need moderation.
I just know of examples like Tumblr which were banned for lax moderation.
It's actually perfect because lots of people complain about "the power-hungry mods" but in the end, very few of those could do any better, which is why there are a few schism subreddits do well.
Ultimately, Reddit is the master of "show me the money". You think you could do better? Then do better. There's nothing stopping you. Just outcompete them in the marketplace of ideas.
You can start a subreddit and pay moderators. No one will get upset.
Oh wait, that’s not true at all.
These are just empty lies and niceties that don’t stand up to scrutiny. Reddit has weaponized information and is just another tool of propaganda.
Sad that anyone would cheer any of this.
It's definitely not the place to go for neutral political organization.
After all, think about it: if you have 5000 rabid A voters and 4900 rabid B voters, every pro A comment will be at +100 and every pro B comment will be at -100 even if everyone participates. True approval will be slightly above 49% for B comments but will end up appearing to be massive disapproval.
That's a structural problem with additive/subtractive vote counts.
Keep in mind Reddit changed their entire front page algorithm because they weren't happy with r/the_donald getting to the front page as often as it was.
I was no fan of that subreddit but I popped in from time to time and they were ridiculously stringent about adhering to Reddit's rules.
Also, it wasn't long after that many, many, many subreddits had far worse calls for violence against law enforcement and none of them got banned for it.
https://www.dictionary.com/e/majority-vs-plurality/
> Plurality is a noun that, like majority, can mean more than half of the whole. However when it comes to voting, plurality refers to “the excess of votes received by the leading candidate, in an election in which there are three or more candidates, over those received by the next candidate.” This means that someone who wins the plurality of votes received more than any of the other candidates but not necessarily the majority. (emphasis stripped by copy-paste)
Hillary Clinton won the plurality in 2016, but since this was not a democratic election she was ultimately not elected president. Joe Biden won the plurality (and majority) in 2020.
Unless you're talking about the electoral college vote, but I don't see how you can link the word "mainstream" with an electoral college vote, as that is a vote of elites.
Data scientist/activist Robert Hawkins has been working at quantifying the degree for which Reddit attempts to manipulate opinions globally. https://twitter.com/rhaksw (See his Youtube explainer about work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCadmiIfbcI)
For another wider perspective, see the article: "Leaked documents outline DHS’s plans to police disinformation" https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat...
I'd hope after Snowden we'd know better. It's painful to see the same old tricks working so well.
That's all it takes.
The head mod is god in his sub as long as he doesn't break any official reddit rules.
An API may be technically public, but not for the hoi polloi. I would expect Reddit would bar API access for moderator lists that it has officially hidden.
So what? If you are going to claim something as true you can't just say 'but the data was too hard to access so I claimed it anyway'.
I call bullshit on the parent's claim and no one has said anything to prove otherwise.
There are a lot of more cases that just "snowflakes".
Edit:
see here for the full details, from the reddit admins' POV: https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/134tjpe/reddit_dat...
I was also always baffled how pushshift API is so superior to the Reddit API. AFAIK it is running for ~$1k/mo.
Locking down APIs like this could lead to way more scrapers which is expensive for everyone involved. I guess the number of people who know how to hit an API endpoint is way higher than the number who can setup a Selenium type scraper that runs JS and circumvents protections.
Please enjoy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law?wprov=sfla1