r/all removals over time | Hacker News Reader

r/all removals over time

i.redd.it

47 pointsbeefman50 comments

This would be way better as a scatter plot. It is not meaningful to interpolate between points, and so there's no reason to connect the points with a line. The line forms a solid color block that obscures possible trends.

From https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditMinusMods/

The utility of /r/all has all but gone. It was a useful view to "what's the most popular anywhere on the site", but for various good reasons, many subreddits don't qualify to show there - either by being removed or opting out of display there. It's a bit of a shame.

I really don't get why so many posts need to be removed. Other than bullying and harassment, isn't that what the vote buttons are for?

There's a lot of power in shaping how people see the world, and with more of our experience of the world being virtual, it's easier to shape than ever before.

Thankfully I can go outside, talk to people and find out that they don't have the same opinions as reddit mods/admins.

not that covid demonstrated how fragile this Privilege is rooted

Even during peak-covid I could still communicate with my friends and family members using uncensored means of communication.

Hence governments are trying to ban Signal/Telegram and there was a leak yesterday from Spain about the government trying to ban encrypted messages all together.

Newspapers losing control over the narrative over the last 15 years have been "extremely dangerous for our democracy" and it's no surprise politicians are pushing back against Internet in an attempt to regain the control. At the moment it seems impossible to predict what the future will look like, but it doesn't look promising in my view.

States are trying to ban Signal/Telegram because they are used for organizing and the distribution of disinformation in particular and agitprop in general. This runs counter to the interest of states as it undermines their power structures. They're also often used by groups funded by foreign states seeking to influence public opinion (either to support certain viewpoints or simply to disrupt consensus).

In other words, the problem is states. If you irrevocably delegate your decision making to a representative government as is presumed in the idea of the "social contract", that government becomes its own entity as a state and must establish a system of domination against its subjects to maintain itself. Anyone seeking to change or abolish it, whether one of its subjects or as a foreign state, must be seen as hostile and be contained or eliminated. We can discuss whether that is good or bad but it seems contradictory to want a powerful state but not want it to have power.

Some time ago I wrote a program, that encrypted/decrypted files by xoring them against a one-time pad. It took me less than an hour.

That kind of encryption can even be done with a pen and paper.

Encryption ban is unenforceable.

Ah yes, we'll just regularly distribute one time pads to our friends and family and they'll do the same to us. No biggie.

What I'm saying is that people who have something to hide will find a way.

You can't ban math.

Google and Microsoft made a solution that scans user files for illegal stuff, but it can be easily defeated by simply uploading a password protected archive.

unironically, this may be the only way.

This time yes. Legislation in most countries seems to be moving only in one direction: More surveillance of all communication methods.

We've already had people being arrested/charged for private gatherings among a small number of friends just because the government(s) decided to impose arbitrary restrictions on who you could meet. We are also seening more and more arrests and fines for public speech that happens to offend someone. You can bet that once the capability is there this will eventually also happen with private digital communications.

> Thankfully I can go outside, talk to people and find out that they don't have the same opinions as reddit mods/admins.

For now. People who grew up before the internet are limited and non-renewable.

I'm often skeptical about Reddit moderators but one of the things the voting system doesn't handle very well is near duplicate submissions. On /r/soccer for example when there is a big story (e.g. Messi leaving Barcelona) there will be hundreds of submissions of essentially the same story (with different sources). There is some benefit in having discussion of the topic confined to a few threads (or maybe just one), rather than the entire subreddit be temporarily unusable until this storm passes.

On traditional forums threads could be merged together - which was often confusing but it at least allowed comments made up to that point to be retained. Reddit doesn't seem to have that functionality (or at least I've never seen it).

Moderators (/r/soccer ones get accused repeatedly, no comment either way from me) get accused of removing posts so they can get the "scoop" too, rather than being solely due censorship.

Merging is really the best solution here as ideally that would allow retaining not just all comments but also all aternative sources. HN kind of does this by moving comments and then referencing the duplicate discussion in a comment.

But its also not always uncontroversial what should and shouldn't be merged. E.g. this allows moderators to select the article most favorable to their views and then give it all the comments, effectively boosting one viewpoint while hiding others.

Because 99% of what people submit is crap.

Any insufficiently moderated subreddit quickly devolves into spam, low effort content and memes. And when big events happen you'll have 20 people submitting the same thing, then 15 follow-up posts about "Why am I being censored?"

Reddit is kinda crap at deduplication. It compares URLs exactly, and still doesn't know that youtube.com and youtu.be are the same place, or that the junk appended to a youtube URL is mostly irrelevant.

>Any insufficiently moderated subreddit quickly devolves into spam, low effort content and memes.

Any sufficiently large subreddit, regardless of moderation. Once a subreddit reaches critical mass, its inundated with low quality posts as mentioned. One can argue that is due to poor moderation, which would be part of it, but I find it’s mostly just the Reddit “culture” to create stale memes of the same formats but with subreddit-specific things tacked on, instead of interesting discussion.

The only times I don’t see this is in subreddits where posting is reserved to people who have to prove their worth in some degree, which naturally isn’t an ideal system either.

There are rare exceptions, like r/AskHistorians, where mods rule it with an iron fist. But that takes serious dedication, organization and effort, so it's rare to see.

It seems strange to me that things like Reddit, Twitter, YouTube etc seem to be treated as inviolable constants, both by users and by their owners. It's kind of taken for granted that they just fell from the sky like that and need to be worked around. Which, yes, I suppose they kind of do, and even a million people wanting something is a rounding error, but it's very different to collaborative projects.

Funny enough, this post was initially shadow-blocked here. But I noticed I couldn't comment on it and wrote to dang asking why. He unblocked it and explained that submissions pointing to redd.it are automatically shadow-blocked.

they're actively trying to make the site more "family-friendly" (i.e., advertiser-friendly), since they have their IPO coming up later this year.

once reddit get's bought, it's on a trajectory to irrelevance, because nobody will buy that cesspit w/o a massive "betterment agenda".

And yet they still have porn subreddits. Also I've bern hearing about that "upcoming IPO" for like 5 years now and it still doesn't happen.

Not on /r/all anymore though. Reddit is probably aware that removing those parts in one stroke is likely going to spawn a competitor that might eventually overtake Reddit and has chosen to kill them slowly instead with more and more restrictions.

I think the general direction you're describing is correct, but it might also be that occasionally someone at reddit looks at the front page of voat and thinks "let's not become that".

Voat and and similar sites came into existence because of the moderation on reddit, not the other way around.

If anything, reddit's moderation policies were an attempt to curtail the channification brought by edgelord subreddits like "fat people hate", "jailbait" and eventually "The Donald". Going down that route is an entirely plausible decision but it not only alienates most normies (not to mention the demographics typically on the receiving hand of the hate and harassment embraced by these groups) but also makes a site much less appealing to advertisers or investors.

Of course Voat promoting itself as a "free speech alternative to reddit" predictably led to it mostly attracting those affected by the reddit moderation policies, which led to them becoming exactly what reddit wanted to avoid and predictably failing eventually.

You ever been to reddit? Practically all of the large subreddits have been taking over by power moderators who are either karma whores and obviously paid to push ads or hobby political commissars who ban anything and everything not fitting into their ideological agenda.

Remember that Reddit is trying to monetize. This drives them away from meme culture, and tries more and more to be politically correct with measures such as quarantined subreddits.

"with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark — that place where the wave finally broke, and rolled back..."

I think this should have been %removed posts, otherwise it could very well just be proportional to the amount of posts submitted and follow reddit's popularity.

It seems to only count removals of posts that would have been on the first page, that's why it caps at 50.

Why does the graph stop at 50% (or what I assume to be percent)?

> The bot posts every 12 hours, so each datapoint is the recorded number of /r/all removals in each post, or every 12 hours. The lines between the datapoints represent the change between those two datapoints, which makes it easier to see the trend.[1]

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditMinusMods/comments/mbsafj/her...

I've read this 5 times and I'm having a really hard time parsing what he's trying to say here. Can anyone help out?

the methodolgy of the bot that posts the deleted posts every 12 hours is explained here: https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditMinusMods/wiki/index

the graph just shows the number of posts that this bot has found "missing" each 12 hours

it's labelled as number of removals, I think it's an absolute number of removed posts per day(?)

edit: sibling comment points out it's per 12 hour period, not per day

edit: as for the cap of 50 - it seems that is the number of posts shown on a first page of r/all (using old reddit), so it seems that means that all 50 slots "should" be filled with posts that have been removed

It's showing 50 of the top 50 posts to /r/all in each 12 hour window have been removed.

It's the results of the bot that generates posts to /r/RedditMinusMods/ tracking such deletes that looks like https://imgur.com/21qaLjx .

It could be interesting to compare with marketing efforts. Follow the money..

Whenever I visited /r/all, at least half of the posts were political posts. Either antiwork spinoffs or screenshots from Twitter/Facebook with the thread hating on the person's political views. Hardly marketing friendly.

One period people would find tiny subreddits, post something, share it on private Discord servers and have people vote it to the frontpage. Trying to avoid political subreddits as a user was like playing Whac-A-Mole.

Up until 2016ish, discussions on reddit used to be very balanced politically. You could find the top voted comment leaning extreme left, and the second top voted comment leaning to the right. Now you all the top comments are left and any right leaning comment is highly down voted to the negatives. Either the country suddenly shifted far left or reddit is getting highly moderated to make it look like that.

> Either the country suddenly shifted far left

I don't see an increase in direct democracy, a move away from government support of corporations towards worker coops, massive tax hikes for billionaires, any plans to build a nationwide public transit highspeed rail network or any serious consideration of public universal free healthcare, education, housing and food so I'm not sure what you mean by "far left".

If you consider acceptance of LGBTQ people and acknowledgement of the long-lasting multi-generational effects of discriminatory laws and chattel slavery "far left" then yes, the broad public in the US seems to be "far left" and has been for decades (though until certain talking heads started calling everything "Marxist" again, the usual term for these ideas was "progressive"). Arguably it has been more of a back-and-forth if you consider how much hatred for muslims and Arabs (or any brown person mistaken for either) flared up post-9/11. We also saw a steady increase in LGBTQ rights and support until it was turned into a "culture war" issue a few years ago, though public opinion doesn't seem to have followed the urgency apparently felt by certain politicians and pundits.

> or reddit is getting highly moderated to make it look like that.

I'm wondering about the use of passive voice as it would suggest someone else (not reddit) is making this decision, presumably with some kind of ulterior motive. Who would that be and more importantly why do you think they would make this decision?

It's a shame there's no discernible external reason, or series of events, that would push young people towards left leaning ideologies.

Furthermore it's extraordinarily strange this began back in 2016.

Yes, almost like one "side" got spooked and really embraced the idea of censorship to manufacture consent around that time.

Everyone likes censorship. I've never met anyone who didn't like it. People only complain about it when their side is losing.

Eg, on reddit /r/conservative is one of the most censored subreddits, and they're not even subtle about it. They regularly have "flaired users only" threads that are explicitly not open to anyone but the mod-approved people, but you'll see the regulars venture to the outside and whine about free speech and "safe spaces" anyway.

The few actually true unrestricted places quickly degenerate into something like Voat, that was such a cess-pool that even TheDonald couldn't take it. They made a huge deal about Reddit being too restrictive and moving to voat, then quietly crawled back because just like /r/conservative they were very used to having a conversation on their terms.

Even in places like Voat I suspect the way most people work in an unmoderated space is that the toxicity kind of naturally filters the content to what they prefer.

That must be the answer, conspiracy.

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