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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/The_Donald
It basically took over reddit before it was banned from the site.
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."
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 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.
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).
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.
Why is it so hard for some people to accept that media outlets are filtering propaganda on other divisive topics too?
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.
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...