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Comment by ph4evers | Hacker News Reader

Yes totally! I like Reddit because you can pick your own subreddits but even that can be flooded by ragebait/clickbait

Reddit, in my opinion, is the absolute worst platform for this. It's incredibly easy to manipulate the appearance of consensus opinion. Also, the degree of power the individual moderators have on shaping conversations means instead of an algorithm choosing what you see, someone who spends up to 8 hours a day on Reddit chooses what you see. Lots of these moderators are not the sort of people who should have any place shaping conversations.

Absolutely. The known ease with which voting manipulation is possible and the lucrative incentives for motivated actors and organizations to do so, and the fundamentally flawed moderation structure are the two key issues that, unless they are radically changed, systemically compromise the integrity of the entire platform. This is the natural, inevitable state of a system such designed.

I wish Aaron Swartz were still here. Such an absolute injustice.

I don't think it's a flaw as much as the system is operating outside the intended design capacity. Imagine how sideways HN would go if nothing at all changed in the way the site operates, and it scaled up to 100x the userbase.

Reddit absolutely had issues in the early days (ie: violentacrez), but the issue was mostly a dogmatic concept of free speech, rather than the moderation, and manipulation now. When your subreddit's user-base in in the hundreds, or thousands, rather than millions, it's much easier to pin down bots, and bad actors.

Most subreddits tend towards complete bubbles, where anything that goes against the prevailing opinions gets down voted into oblivion or outright deleted by mods.

Yes but at least you can choose your bubbles and not have them be chosen for you by an intransparent algorithm.

This might be obvious, but to me, it was an important realization that a lot of subreddits that deal with, say, chronic health issues, are going to skew towards people who have extreme conditions. People who get better aren't necessarily going to want to be hanging around in such spaces.

Even subreddits that don't deal with health conditions are going to skew a certain way over time just as a result of who hangs out there all the time and who is accepted, so the "reality" you see in a subreddit is not necessarily the true reality of the greater population. (Again, this should be obvious, but it's easy to forget this when you start reading a reddit post and thinking, "I don't agree with all these people, but there are many people with this opinion. Should I be thinking more like they do?")

I used to think that the people who accused Reddit mods of being "power hungry" were overreacting and were just using that to deflect from their own bad behavior.

Then, weird things started to happen. Some of the things I would post/comment would only get one upvote, and my posts would frequently get immediately removed by an auto-mod. A year or so later, Reddit updated their UI, and the posts with one upvote had a message from Reddit saying they were intentionally hidden.

I conclude it's most likely a combination of subreddits auto-blocking people who post in certain subs, and in some cases the Reddit spam algorithm going completely off the rails. I think a few of my blocked posts criticized Reddit or another social media platform, but most weren't really that notable.

Even so, reddit is a huge echo chamber. The moderation is completely opaque so if a subreddit moderator doesn't like something you've said they can remove it at will, and they often do. And the upvote system encourages groupthink. Votes being hidden on HN I think is excellent.

> The moderation is completely opaque so if a subreddit moderator doesn't like something you've said they can remove it at will, and they often do.

That's true of any real community in the physical world, too.

I'd go as far as saying that it's impossible to have fully inclusive and 100% objectively fair community that's also interesting, or even a community. It's not how humans operate, it's not what they want from a community, and even trying to enforce this "perfection" would require infinite resources feeding an omnipresent bureaucracy to moderate perfect order and compliance into people.

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