Comment by tensor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tensor | Hacker News Reader

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I would love to see an alternative that really focuses on moderation. Perhaps something that has three flavours of subs.

1. Public: these would be democratically run forums. The users would actually be able to vote for moderators, and perhaps even rules around them. This would be ideal for things like r/[country] or r/[city].

2. Private: these would be traditional forums run by the people who found them. It should also be possible for the "person" who runs it to be a corporation or similar group.

3. Personal: This would be a users own "twitter" like feed.

Other things I think would be needed are:

1. The owning company be a foundation like wikipedia, run as a non-profit.

2. The data and code should be open, so that if anything happens a clone could be setup.

3. Site wide minimal content rules set by the owning foundation. There are some things that should not be allowed at all.

4. Built in trainable AI agents. Moderation is a huge task and I believe it's on the site to supply appropriate tools. By trainable agents, I mean efficiently integrated machine learning models that moderations can personally update and train per sub to help them enforce the rules.

Democratically voted mods will never work for any moderately sized forum. The problem is the forums would be brigaded by terminally online “interest groups.”

See how the alt right infiltrates gaming groups. The reasonable voices are outnumbered and taken over.

>See how the alt right infiltrates gaming groups

Goes both ways (if you insist to use the traditional political compass). GCJ is a perfect example of that. I use the "terminally online" word for these people rather.

I agree but I’d caveat the equivalency.

Sure GCJ and other overly leftist subs are annoying. But there is a world of difference of spamming “[video game] is secretly about trans fem boy communism” by GCJ types. Vs alt right groups talking about (real life) minorities not deserving equal rights.

Subjectively, I avoid any overly politically forced sub. However let’s not push the “both sides” argument.

It's definitely a hard problem, but also an extremely important one as real life democracies also suffer issues like this to some extent. Obviously you'd need a bunch of rules around who could vote to prevent brigading, e.g. tenure and activity on the forum at a minimum.

But also, this could be an excellent platform to experiment and discover systems that DO work. I think it's worth trying in any case, as the status quote already "doesn't work" in an even worse way. Special interest groups grab control and there is no way at all to unseat them.

> terminally online “interest groups.”

In my view, terminally online interest groups are responsible for the current protests against Reddit. Several of the smaller low traffic area-specific subs that I frequent have been taken offline (some threatening permanently).

Yeah, that's the big issue. There's no incentive to want to be a public unpaid moderator, except arguably bad ones. Someone wanting to run for power creates and runs some of the worst communities out there.

For better or worse, the best moderating schemes on a moderately large group is via a paid position. At least there a mod has a "boss" that you can hope to appeal to should they abuse their power. May not always work but it's more security than hoping an admin pays attention to a subreddit's drama.

Agree. It's already democratic in Reddit's current form in the sense that anybody can just start a community to replace one with moderation they don't like. The subreddit with the moderation that works the best often wins out.

This is not remotely democratic without discovery. E.g. if you start an alt, the original would need to be force to display the alt as an alternative. Otherwise it's too easy to control the narrative and prevent anyone from even finding out about the alternative. Today, the primary sub generally actively bans any mention of alternatives. Also the most obviously named forum will attract the new users simply because of the name.

what about of each breakaway pointed to reach other under an opposing views area, where people can go to read the other side, or the group that's breaking away?

Kind of like in real life. Shitty people have more resources.

I use https://raddle.me/ but it's small for now. They seem to have a much better approach to moderation; the moderation logs are open and admins don't let them go full authoritarian. But the API is lackluster. It's open source however so hopefully it should improve

I always envisioned some kind of reddit where you could simply appeal moderation actions through a dedicated report system and if some mod goes above and beyond a certain threshold of reports, the community gets to vote on booting them out

I'll save a bunch of people some trouble. This is a politically-"leftist" site (top current thread is "How did you get into anarchism", along with something about ACAB). It's not really a general purpose Reddit alternative.

So, if that's your thing, check it out. If it's not, probably not a good fit and the "better approach" to moderation probably won't go in your favor.

That's just how the community developed. Reddit was spicy as well at the start

You can have righto subs on it, nobody is going to stop you or ban you. For example in the past they removed moderators of f/communism for excluding users pushing the libertarian flavors of it

Here's TOS

    Content Policy

    Content is prohibited if it is bigotry i.e.

    Promotes white supremacy, queerphobia, transphobia, misogyny, classism, ableism, body shaming, antisemitism, Islamophobia, colonialism, speciesism or age discrimination.

    Sexualizes minors or promotes adults having sex with minors.

    Trivializes or makes light of rape.

    Apologizes for police or military brutality, imperialism, eugenics, genocide.

    Apologizes for violence towards children.

    Is a pornographic image/video (however, nudity is permitted if it's non-pornographic).

    Is wilful copyright infringement (however fair use is acceptable).

    Is a "dox" i.e. personally revealing information about a person or persons including but not limited to name, identification number, address, phone number, photograph.

    Advocates for arson, bombing and/or killing people.

    Is instructions on how to design and/or produce explosives.

I'm sure you can find two or three right wingers capable of doing all this. Maybe at least for a few weeks :)

> Promotes [...] speciesism

What the fuck?

> Apologizes for violence towards children.

What is this sub for?

It means you can tackle kids but you have to own it, pretty nice I think

It was specifically made to be a left-wing alternative for reddit back when the admins were beginning to crack down on the leftist subs like r/fullcommunism and the like. Not sure how it could ever serve as a full-on replacement, it never wanted to be.

Thanks, you saved me a click.

anarchism is not leftism

it is if it's anarcho communism or syndicalism but not capitalist aka neoliberalism. But it's isn't necessarily left of mainstream progressives it's a different left with different goals, ideals, etc... I'm personally a syndicalist socialist leaning anarchist but pragmatic too in that I don't think we can tear down capitalism completely or even want to instead DAOs and worker coops need to gain strength, as does labor unions and mutual aid networks could handle things like universal basic income etc....I have some libertarian and Georgian philosophies as well...

here is an interesting reading list with anti-left / post-left anarchism references: https://raddle.me/wiki/reading (and not just "ancap" capitalist libertarianism which doesn't belong)

I'm still learning but am trying to start a worker coop as well

post left anarchism is an interesting topic in recent years

> This is a politically-"leftist" site (top current thread is "How did you get into anarchism", along with something about ACAB)

tbh how is this different than most subs?

this is a feature, not a bug...it keeps these people out of the real world and glued to their keyboards where their blast radius is limited to their own echo chamber

  > tbh how is this different than most subs?

It's completely different than the subs I browse. But I avoided subs of a particular political persuasion or another. I was mostly looking at technical subs with good, apolitical moderation.

I tend to avoid politics online -- even if I agree with them. They're rarely useful and I'm just not interested, in a lot of cases.

> this is a feature, not a bug...it keeps these people out of the real world and glued to their keyboards where their blast radius is limited to their own echo chamber

This is not preferable. Extremist bullshit is the only product of echo chambers. Eventually it breaches containment and becomes a real world problem.

That's not how extremist online echo chambers tend to play out. See January 6th for an easy example.

> Public: these would be democratically run forums. The users would actually be able to vote for moderators, and perhaps even rules around them. This would be ideal for things like r/[country] or r/[city].

This is my biggest gripe about Reddit. Unlike hobbies or interests, I can't change my country of birth or (easily change) the city. So when you get banned from a geographical sub, you have no alternative. Some of the moderators have a specific bent of mind, and do not accept any other views. A typical example is /r/india which is totally under the control of radical anti-Modi mods. I got even banned from there for posting in another sub _that had been recommended to me by Reddit's algorithm_ !

>A typical example is /r/india which is totally under the control of radical anti-Modi mods

Most geographical subs are extremely liberal leaning. I'm from Hungary and in /r/hungary pretty much 99% of the posts are anti-Orban. Same with /r/europe pushing the general federalist EU agenda [0]. Or just /r/politics for the US, good luck going against the MSNBC meta.

0, which ends up funny when the topic is food and suddenly everyone becomes hyper-nationalist

> I'm from Hungary and in /r/hungary pretty much 99% of the posts are anti-Orban.

Younger demographic that is somewhat tech savy, is not happy with Orban? I am shocked! How could that be?

> I'm from Hungary and in /r/hungary pretty much 99% of the posts are anti-Orban.

I'm not from Hungary but I have low opinion of Orban. All the Hungarians I've talked to had nothing but bad things to say about him. Is he well liked or at least tolerated in Hungary?

Forum sliding and bots may be driving these things. Forums are historically pretty easy to manipulate and Reddit isn't so different from other BBs that have been around for decades now.

Reddit's moderation system is the worst on the internet. No rhyme, no reason, no restitution. You're completely at the mercy of little fiefdoms and people who are sometimes on power trips.

I've been banned from my city reddit for simply stating that crime was becoming a problem. I've been banned for supporting trans rights. I've been banned for explaining stock based compensation. For describing and linking to AI tools.

Reddit's moderation system is authoritarian and capricious.

The problem isn't just the petty tyrant fiefdoms, it's also the exclusive claims on generic terms like "news". So, instead of generic news, you find hyperpartisan content on "r/news". Once someone cybersquats on a generic term, other perspectives are forced into qualified subreddits that more accurately describe their bias, "r/conservative".

I think it would greatly improve the site if communities using generic terms were instead replaced with disambiguation pages that linked to related communities, and that this process could be triggered automatically so that as terms become generic the communities could be remounted.

Reddit's moderation system is among the best of any big platform because of how easy it is for people to start their own communities if they don't like the moderation on a particular sub. And these new communities actually will get traction if enough people are upset about the original sub's moderation - see the whole meirl vs. me_irl situation for an example of this. (There's also r/gamingcirclejerk vs. r/shittygaming - the original sub still gets more posts, but the large, active discussion thread community moved entirely to the latter because of the former sub having some crazy BS happen with the mods.)

You don't get anything like this on big centralized platforms like Twitter or Facebook. If you get banned by their opaque, highly automated moderation systems, you're just out of luck unless you evade the ban. The network effects and the costs of switching off them are just far too high.

Good moderation at scale is impossible[0], and the Reddit/Discord/etc model deals with this pretty decently by leaving most decisions to individual communities.

[0]https://www.techdirt.com/2019/11/20/masnicks-impossibility-t...

The killer feature imo would be a forum with moderation that only moderates and doesn't censor. Right now Reddit is unusable if you have an opinion contrary to the hivemind. Go on any r/country or r/city and you would be astonished at how far the politics of that sub deviate from the politics of the people who live there.

I'd like to have moderated comments be opt-in. The moderators can exercise their power and label something spam, hateful, or wrong or whatever, and if they do that job well most people will consent to having their perspective limited. But it should always be a choice, and people should be able to choose no censorship at all, or censorship of only the worst content.

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