Why Reddit's Troll Problem is By Design
medium.com
medium.com
> If your karma is too low, you’ll be prevented from writing comments in some subreddits. Your comments might be auto-collapsed, auto-deleted, or shadow-banned (depends on the subreddit settings that the moderators chose). You might also be rate limited, so you can only comment once every ten minutes. And this depends on just on your global karma value, but your karma score in a subreddit as well.
If the origins of Reddit was to champion freedom of speech, then it has deviated far from that.
Karma makes sense as a mechanism to prevent truly bad actors; i.e. users who are not behaving in the spirit of discourse: spammers/griefers/trolls. However it has a greater chilling effect as it effectively enables censorship, aids bad actors with karma gaming, and promotes the formation of echo chambers.
This is not a reflection of me or my views. I've observed numerous instances where perfectly valid contributions are buried under a pile of downvotes simply because they deviate from the accepted norm of a subreddit. For example, I was browsing one of the popular MacOS subreddits and the comments essentially boiled down "Mac Good, Windows Bad". So much misinformation was spread about how Windows works. Anyone who posted clarifying information correcting the misinformation about Windows was downvoted. Those comments are auto-collapsed, top level ones are buried behind the "show more comments" button.
To an extent I have observed this on Hacker News.
I've started playing a game where I try to guess what the comments are going to say for a particular post on Reddit and HN. Many times I'm right. I can tell right away what posts/comments are going to get lots of upvotes.
For example, do an ASK HN on show your personal blog. Easy way to gain karma. On Reddit I've noticed mentions of cats, anti-landlord, use of specific phrases garners the most upvotes. It would not surprise me if a GPT was trained to talk like a Redditor. I've had the thought to compile a list of common "redditisms".
Karma is not the problem. The issue squarely is were all just faceless usernames. So it is easy to dehumanize.
Only the Elite (ruling/non ruling) had broadcast access (who owned newspapers/radio/tv/satellite spectrum? only the rich could afford it).
Internet and social media have made broadcasting "free" technically. But they dont have any technical solution for the noise. They built it cuz they could.
Politically it hasnt solved any issue cause no one is really listening or can listen to anyone, when everyone gets shoved into the same room with their own mic to the common sound system. The more people in the room the less political action is possible.
HN could show people how many links and comments Dont get any traction. That rate will fall as more people use the site. And is an indicator of the real value of Free Speech. Which for the plebs will always tend to 0.
> [Don’t] Downvote an otherwise acceptable post because you don't personally like it. Think before you downvote and take a moment to ensure you're downvoting someone because they are not contributing to the community dialogue or discussion. If you simply take a moment to stop, think and examine your reasons for downvoting, rather than doing so out of an emotional reaction, you will ensure that your downvotes are given for good reasons.
However, in practice people use the downvote button as a dislike button. And if called out, will stand behind their use as correct. The community has overridden the stated intent of the downvote.
This makes the comments largely meaningless. To have a meaningful discussion, new ideas need to be brought into the fold. There will be disagreements, but if all parties remain civil, both sides can hopefully walk away with something at the end of the day. With unpopular opinions being hidden, the comments just become a statement of the approved groupthink on the topic, rather than a nuanced discussion on a complex topic.
I don’t think being anonymous is the issue. I think there is a lot of value to having forums online that aren’t tied to a real life identity. I think it’s more a matter of how big the site is, and how much the username is downplayed. HN has similar problems, but a better culture, so it’s not so bad.
I used a lot of forums in the days before Reddit and Digg, and even without reading usernames at first, the large avatars and post signatures would start to give an otherwise anonymous person an identity. It was an easy way to mentally link posts from a person together and it was more clear who was posting which comment. Overtime, especially on smaller forums, people got to know each other and a community formed. I almost never see that on those large forum platforms like Reddit.
When you’re always interacting with different people in every comment, it’s much harder to humanize anyone. Facebook seems like the perfect example of this in action. Facebook is largely real people, a user can click through to see the person’s pictures, kids, etc… yet they are often horrible to each other in the comments of public posts, because they are strangers passing on the virtual street, and the next post will have a different set of strangers. Not only that, but it’s difficult for a bad reputation to follow a bad actor, because they are always encountering new people, and few will take the time to check a user’s karma or read their post history for context on if this person is someone to engage with or ignore.
I think the best solution is chalking up these mega-sites as a failure and going back to the smaller more focused sites. But I know deep down that’s never going to happen.