Comment by chaosjevil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chaosjevil | Hacker News Reader

The main problem with this article is that it's only handling the current events, without taking into account that Reddit has a long-standing history of user-hostile decisions.

For example... let's talk about The_Donald, shall we? (inb4: I'm not from USA, "Trump" and "Biden" for me are just "some leaders from some tacoland", so I'm not emotionally attached into this matter.)

Some users were protesting that The_Donald should be banned on the grounds of hate speech. Some said that it should be allowed to exist, for the sake of free speech.

What did Reddit do? Quarantined it, showing that it doesn't care about hate speech _nor_ free speech, while paying lip service to both. And using a bullshit reason to do so (a single post encouraging people to beat cops, or crap like that.)

Why doesn't Reddit outright tell its users its values? Why is it always lying? Why does it put a CEO to disdain the community, with a "we snoos" (something redditors never use)? A: because it doesn't fucking care about its users. That issue predates the 3rd party apps killing, and it will postdate it.

By the way: there are talks that Reddit might finally implement limits on how many subs a mod can moderate. An old request from people concerned about power mods. Why now? (A: because it happens to align with Reddit Inc.'s interests - userbase be damned.)

I'm fucking glad that I've migrated.

[[And the fediverse is nice, the fediverse is great, but if you're a Reddit user and can't stand the fediverse: migrate elsewhere. Don't stay in that sinking ship.]]

Reddit Inc in my perception is amoral, tending towards immoral.

In general they want to do as little policing as possible, and only do the least amount they can when their hand is forced. But there's also some signs of the higher ups actually being okay with things that are icky and of very doubtful appeal to advertisers, like r/jailbait

I'd say overall the leadership is just not good. It neither has any sort of moral center, nor is even properly business oriented because their efforts on that regard seem very lacking as well.

Eg, I think this API move makes little economical sense. If one were to be ruthlessly profit oriented I think an approach might be to introduce an API price and gradually raise it little by little. Milk the market for all it's worth. Rather than killing it from the start, either extract every dollar people are willing to pay, or kill it by squeezing all the profit that can be had from the maneuver by doing it slowly and gradually.

> Why doesn't Reddit outright tell its users its values? Why is it always lying? Why does it put a CEO to disdain the community, with a "we snoos" (something redditors never use)?

The real answer is that everyone asking this question is just revving up for a fight. It's like apologizing for something that you said as a teenager that was found on social media: the only people asking for the apology don't really care whether or not you apologize.

The right approach in this situation is always to walk the path where no one can tell what's up. Do not define the situation. You're going to get raked over the coals anyway, so get the best you can out of it.

>It's like apologizing for something that you said as a teenager that was found on social media: the only people asking for the apology don't really care whether or not you apologize.

It's more like apologising for something that you kept doing, since your teenager times, and that you keep doing. In this case at least some people asking for an apology want to see a difference, not just "revving up for a fight".

That said, even not saying your values would be better than lying about them. And worse than lying - lying in an obvious way, that is bound to be interpreted as "you're such braindead trash that we can throw any bullshit on your snouts and you'll eat it".

The simple solution to the "censorship" problem is to not have a landing page that aggregates the highest voted content: the only content users should see should be from the subreddits they are subscribed to. In this scenario, there is no need for censorship or vote manipulation to reach the front page (because there should be no front page).

Some might say this approach would result in echo chambers, but guess what...echo chambers are going to happen anyway, whether it's restricting your intake of news to certain news networks, restricting internet browsing to only specific websites, or your local/offline real world community gatherings. There is no way to stop echo chambers.

> And using a bullshit reason to do so (a single post encouraging people to beat cops, or crap like that.)

the_donald also promoted the white supremacist Unite the Right rally (the tiki torch KKK one) in an official manner with a stickied post from mods.

> And using a bullshit reason to do so (a single post encouraging people to beat cops, or crap like that.)

Was almost assuredly a false flag, given the other content in T_D.

And ironic, given the contemporary ACAB fervor in the others.

You know who handled this really well and got pilloried for it? Ellen Pao. She took a solid stand on the right side of the issue and got shredded by the user base for it. I think she was very forward thinking in how the problem could spiral and that the business was predicated on being an enjoyable environment with absolutely no obligation to dangerous or hurtful users.

If it was possible to uphold every fundamental human right and be commercially successful at the same time, we wouldn't need a government.

Her job was to come in, make a bunch of unpopular changes and then move on, leaving the existing management who wanted those changes free of any associated blame. Quite literally her job was to be a scape-goat, it's quite a common strategy for companies who want to do unpopular restructuring or other large changes, and I'm pretty sure one she was well-compensated for.

Which is not to say that the amount of hatred and bile she received wasn't - unsurprisingly - wildly excessive and disgustingly misogynistic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com