Reddit’s Politics Section Bans Salon, Mother Jones, HuffPost for Bad Journalism | Hacker News Reader

Reddit’s Politics Section Bans Salon, Mother Jones, HuffPost for Bad Journalism

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79 pointswikiburner81 comments

This episode exposes a weakness in Reddit's overall structure, namely the opaque process whereby moderators are chosen. When domains are banned completely and against the wishes of the broader community it shows that Reddit's otherwise democratic processes can be fairly autocratic.

The solution is a system where users can vote on who is a moderator. Between this and /r/worldnews Banning of Russia Today it is apparent that moderators have far too much power over the content of various subteddit's.

Such voting could be limited to once per month, and two users who have a certain karma. There might even be an opportunity for a competitor site which does this very thing.

Edit: The number of moderators should be a function of the number of subscribers as well.

Users do vote: with their subreddit subscriptions (also PMs to moderators, and/or text submissions complaining about policy). I don't get the sense that this was unwanted from the community either.

I don't know if this makes me biased, but I for one welcome fewer low-quality, link-bait, and/or recycled-story articles.

> "I don't get the sense that this was unwanted from the community either."

It was unwanted. The mods' announcement was even downvoted to zero by the community:

http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1pedlv/concerning_...

But the users are idiots. The users on the thread you linked think that filtering out shitty new sources is some kind of right-wing conspiracy.

r/politics is the opposite of a place you would visit for reasonable political discussion. It was so bad that it got dropped from the list of default subs, and even before that, people created accounts just to filter out stuff from that sub. The sub needed quality control for a really long time, and now it's finally getting it.

> But the users are idiots.

Since mods come from the userbase, what does that say about the mods?

> The users on the thread you linked think that filtering out shitty new sources is some kind of right-wing conspiracy.

Some do, sure. Many others, including ex-mods, see it for what it is: censorship.

A couple problems with your analysis: the population down-voting that post was preselected for those who had not already left/unsubscribed as /r/politics went downhill for the last couple years.

"Censorship" is a biased word, usually chosen by people who don't like what's being enforced. I would perhaps use the word "filtering" and it's perfectly common in a lot of subreddits. I don't think "censoring" is fair because all the same topics and events will still get discussed. The theory being that now, discussion starts with - on average - better reporting.

> "Censorship" is a biased word

Only to someone in favor of censorship.

Filtering is not always bad, especially not when it's done transparently, and in pursuit of a better community. To claim that filtering out those low-quality sites, when there are many higher quality sites covering the exact same topics, in just as timely a manner is somehow equivalent to censoring Google results in China - is just disingenuous.

> Filtering is not always bad

That wasn't the issue. The issue was the word 'censorship' being perceived as a biased word. Only censors or those with the predilection to censor would think the word is "biased".

If your position is that the word censorship does not have a negative connotation, I don't know anyone who would agree with you, including, it would seem, your earlier comments.

I'm positing that filtering has neither a positive nor a negative connotation; that all information gets through anyway, it's only low-quality sources of the same information that are filtered; and that calling it censorship in a comment inappropriately pre-disposes the reader to a negative reaction.

If users were really disturbed by that change, a new subreddit would simply be created which allow these domains.

That does not address the imbalance of influence moderators have. Also, asking some 1+ million subscribers to switch is inefficient when a process could be implemented which addresses community concerns.

There's a reason premium domain names go for a high price: having generic-words for domains is big value. Similarly r/politics is a big deal. Gaining traction on a new subreddit would be a big issue in and of itself even if one set out to create a new politics subreddit.

I'm really enjoying, by the way, that Mother Jones is banned. Mother Jones has a self-alleged left stint to it -- but at least they come right out and say it. Contrast that with Rupert's WSJ (hah, its /op-ed/ pieces are right now on r/politics front page!)

Since having been bought by Rupert WSJ been leaning more to the right [1], is WSJ going to get banned by r/politics too now?

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/14/business/media/14carr.html...

Certainly not a requirement.

Look back into the reddit dark ages at the /r/marijuana /r/trees schism, for instance.

Since having been bought by Rupert WSJ been leaning more to the right

The WSJ is far more liberal than it was a generation ago.[1] The WSJ is sort of Bloombergian in its outlook. Also, Murdoch is not American. Most people consider the UK Conservatives left of center of even US democrats (eg, signle payer healthcare), so again even if Murdoch was pushing the US toward the EU right, it would be moving the the US left. (Another reason why these words are sort of ill-advised). Of course, he's actually Australian. So YMMV.

[1] And frankly the NYT link is arguablly an opinion piece.

The WSJ is far more liberal than it was a generation ago.

The WSJ is far more conservative than it was before Murdock bought it. My friends that get the paper delivered are disgusted by the slanting of the news, since the purchase.

The Journal's editors stress the independence and impartiality of their reporters.[27] In a 2004 study, Tim Groseclose and Jeff Milyo calculated the ideological bias of 20 media outlets by counting the frequency they cited particular think tanks and comparing that to the frequency that legislators cited the same think tanks. They found that the news reporting of The Journal was the most liberal, more liberal than NPR or The New York Times.

This just demonstrates it is important to baseline. Secondly, the editorial page and the reportage are not monolithic. I'd be pretty skeptical of anecdotal claims, especially of the type outlined in that NYT link.

The WSJ was also a pro/fessional tool, when it was owned by DowJones, and had a different purpose in life than a paper like the NYT.

> Also, Murdoch is not American. Most people consider the UK Conservatives left of center of even US democrats

Uhmmm, you do know that Fox News is also owned by Murdoch? And clearly it is thereby evident that the logic you're operating on is not really working?

Second point, Murdoch is Australian. Right wing of Australia, in parts, can be quite comparable to America's right wing. Consider the considerable opposition to immigration policies, there being lots of racist activity (foreigners being referred to as "boat people" -- something that was a key issue in the last election cycle). Gina Rinehart, Australia's richest person, is routinely in the news saying ridiculous things, like how people should work for $2 a day [1]. But all of this is actually immaterial, since we shouldn't be generalizing. It doesn't matter what popular politics are in Australia or UK, Murdoch could have radical or reactionary views no matter where he is from.

[1]: http://articles.latimes.com/2012/sep/05/business/la-fi-mo-ri...

see my reply to e40

> This episode exposes a weakness in Reddit's overall structure

Except this was a good decision.

If anything it exposes the fail of Reddit's voting system such that theses emotive magazines that directly tap the human brain for uplinks needed to be banned rather than not voted up.

Although it all depends, is Reddit just a money making machine? So allowing people to constantly reinforce bad behaviours might be seen as good from a company level?

It would be funny if the standards for /r/politics stories became more rigorous than the one for HN.

Seems to me that the standards became more arbitrary than rigorous.

The ban list changes are pretty clearly ideologically driven, not arbitrary.

That's not clear. The list is rather more interesting than what you (or the article's author) suggest. Its also rooted in logic (arguable, but laid out ex-ante). Some of these are also autobanned on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6657066).

[eg] The following is a list of major domains that have been banned by the moderators of /r/Politics and listed here in the interest of transparency:

    aattp.org

    alternet.org

    amazon.com

    americanthinker.com

    avaaz.org

    b4in.info

    beforeitsnews.com

    blacklistednews.com

    borderlessnewsandviews.com

    breitbart.com

    breitbartunmasked.com

    change.org

    citypaper.com

    constitutioncampaign.org

    courthousenews.com

    crooksandliars.com

    dailybail.com

    dailycaller.com

    dailycurrant.com

    dailykos.com

    dailypaul.com

    democraticunderground.com

    deviantart.com

    dirtyuglypolitics.wordpress.com

    drudgereport.com

    eclectablog.com

    ecominoes.com

    facebook.com

    funnyordie.com

    Gawker and all affiliates

    generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com

    heavy.com

    heritage.org

    hotair.com

    huffingtonpost.com

    inagist.com

    indiegogo.com

    informationliberation.com

    infowars.com

    isidewith.com

    lifenews.com

    linkedin.com

    littlegreenfootballs.com

    mediamatters.org

    minx.cc

    motherjones.com

    myspace.com

    nation.foxnews.com

    nationalmemo.com

    nationalreport.net

    nationalreview.com

    nationsmith.com

    Newsbusters.org

    newsmakeup.wordpress.com

    newsvine.com

    newyorker.com/online/blogs/borowitzreport/

    njspin.com

    omegle.com

    pensitoreview.com

    petitions.whitehouse.gov

    photographyisnotacrime.com

    policymic.com

    politicalwire.com

    politicususa.com

    politilady.com

    pollcode.com

    powerlineblog.com

    prisonplanet.com

    rawstory.com

    reason.com

    redd.it

    reddit.com

    redgage.com

    rightwingwatch.org

    salon.com

    signon.org

    smirkingchimp.com

    techdirt.com

    thebackbencher.co.uk

    theblaze.com

    thedailybanter.com

    thegatewaypundit.com

    theonion.com

    thepetitionsite.com

    therightscoop.com

    thinkprogress.org

    townhall.com

    truth-out.org

    twitchy.com

    twitter.com

    upworthy.com

    vice.com

    voiceblaze.com

    wallstreetonparade.com

    weaselzippers.us

    wikimedia.org

    wikipedia.org

    wnd.com*

It's not Reddit's "politics section" but one of the many subreddits - independently managed forums, each with its own policy.
This distinction should be obvious to anyone familiar with the platform and a more accurate title would be "the /r/politics subreddit bans..."

Absolutely. Reddit is a platform more than a monolithic entity. There are portions of that site that consider each other mortal enemies.

People love to say this, but a critical look at the structure of reddit shows how little this argument matches reality. Reddit is a strongly cohesive group of sub-forums. When millions of users are driven to subreddits by reddit's choice of defaults, when popular subreddits are driven more traffic by r/all, when linking to other subreddits is a part of the culture, etc, all of this points to a strong coupling. It is disingenuous to claim that subreddits are completely independent and thus one cannot claim reddit as a whole bears responsibility for its content. Yes, they are independently managed, but there are a thousand other ways in which the strong cohesiveness is created.
This cohesiveness creates responsibility among the larger subreddits to the userbase as a whole. Unfortunately the rules of moderation don't recognize this and as a result you end up with essentially arbitrary users who have had massive amounts of power dumped in their lap through accident of timing (rather than proof that they have the capacity to cultivate a large community). Unilateral decisions are made and their userbase (that they had little to no hand in creating) is forced to suffer as a result. Reddit really needs to rethink how massive subreddits that are/were defaults are moderated.

Site-wide bans really rub me the wrong way. It implies a very simpleminded, idealistic understanding of organizations, as if all the writers and editors were a single hivemind -- as one spams, so do all the others. But the reality is more complicated than that, and while there are pragmatic considerations at play here, it's sad that there can't be a more granular-kind of ban, because each of these organizations put out some fine works of journalism, no matter what your gut reaction to the organization may be.
Huffington Post, for example, won a Pulitzer last year for an extremely important (and still undercovered) topic:
http://www.pulitzer.org/citation/2012-National-Reporting
As far as HN goes, I wish HN could remove the site-level ban on Buzzfeed. Yes, mercilessly flag the shit out of its "23 Gifs about some Linkbait topic" articles, but they've been investing some money and resources into serious and original work.
They have a longform section: http://www.buzzfeed.com/longform
They were the employer of Michael Hastings, the late-investigative reporter who died in a LA car wreck: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/michael-hastings-r...
And they recently hired one of my former colleagues, Pulitzer Prize winner Mark Schoofs, from ProPublica, to lead a new investigative team:
http://jimromenesko.com/2013/10/21/mark-schoofs-leaves-propu...
Then again, you could always argue that BuzzFeed's (and their linkbaity peers) good contributions aren't yet enough to outweigh the burden of modding their junk.

The second to last comment says it all:
This sort of violates the point of Reddit, right? Users are supposed to upvote material they find interesting, rather than have editors sequester content they find relevant.

Indeed.
cryptoz boycotts r/politics for editor-censored user submissions

Disagree. The point of Reddit (imho) is to function as a platform for communities, each with their own rules. Some have stricter moderation, some are laxer.

I've been a redditor from the beginning, and have always agreed with the sentiment that communities should reflect their userbase.
The issue comes when in the case of /r/politics moderators do something outside what the majority sentiment is. Change comes slow, it's far easier to get a mod removed than it is to get 3 million subscribers to move to a new subreddit with a "better" moderator team.

But this is just political hijacking of the subreddit. I don't see why anyone at reddit should support this as a strategy.
What you will end up with is a bunch of astro-turfed sub-reddits. The greas roots will make r/_x_ popular, then some PR firm will get someone to "a "better" moderator team" so that their clients can hijack _million users.

Only if Reddit.com blocked the sites.
Each subreddit is its own privately moderated world. Some subreddits only allow self-posts, which means you can't post third party sites at all. Some subreddits only allow scholarly journals. Some subreddits filter based on political bias.
Everyone chooses what subreddits they want to subscribe to, and if you want a different set of rules you can create your own subreddit.

That's true but r/politics is a default subreddit.

Actually not anymore. They recently updated the defaults, imho for the better. /r/atheism is off the default list, too.

Not as of a few months ago. It was removed from default for... obvious... reasons.

Not only has r/politics not been a default for a while now (at least a couple months, I think), it wouldn't matter if it was -- default subs are still not managed by the Reddit admins. How a sub is run obviously can influence which ones are chosen as defaults, but being a default doesn't itself change anything.

Admins and members of subreddit tend to have a slightly confused idea about what a subreddit it supposed to be. On one hand, the fundamental idea is clearly that the quality of articles is determined by the aggregate of users' votes. On the other hand, many people still appeal to some individual or objective measure of "quality," and insist that admin moderation is necessary to maintain this level of quality.

Enforcing measures of quality help subs avoid catering to the least common denominator. For example, without strict rules, /r/askscience would likely fill with many well-meaning commentators who don't actually know what they are talking about. This is bad for everyone, including those well-meaning commentators. Everyone wants the sub to be good, but that by itself isn't enough.

But by using moderation to avoid the "least common denominator," you're dealing with content that is less satisfying to users. Of course, this is only true is you judge "satisfying" by upvotes and downvotes, or perhaps other metrics like number of comments.

this is only true is you judge "satisfying" by upvotes and downvotes
Right, exactly, they are saying you cannot properly (completely) judge "satisfying" by up/downvotes.

The subreddits have always enforced culture through mod rules. The (often-cited) example of this is /r/AskHistorians, which is very stringently moderated.

Many subs on Reddit have embraced the fact that upvotes as the sole metric do not always create the most valuable/enjoyable sub. Other forms of curation can often improve the quality of the sub, and quality content is the primary reason anyone goes to an aggregator.

I would hazard a guess that it's more to do with the reaction of the commentators on r/politics to the articles these sites put out than anything else. Here on HN there are certain topics which tend to descend into pointless roundabout arguments and typically these tend to disappear off the front page fairly quickly.
I'm guessing the mods got fed up with policing the same tedious/endless/toxic conversation and decided to kill off the major causes of them.

It seems quite ironic that this was written in Slate - I have seen just as many examples of bad journalism from Slate as from HuffPo/Mother Jones.

Does HN do this for certain source that have been flagged too many times, or otherwise considered low-quality?

My impression is pg has banned some sources manually:
Huffingtonpost.com - for linkbait blogspam.
theonion.com and buzzfeed.com - off topic entertainment.
gawker.com and its other domains - general sleaziness.
pg might want to consider unbanning Buzzfeed, though. In the past year or two they've added tons of reporters who do pretty decent long form articles you would expect to see on Slate, The Atlantic, or Forbes, and the risk that HNers will upvote "The 50 Greatest Cat Photos of All Time" is probably pretty low.

You can hate Gawker all you want, but I find they consistently produce great prose that I enjoy reading and often find educational and valuable. Not all the time, but you can't write off the entire org just because of defamer. Sure it's snarky, I appreciate that sometimes though, especially when you're writing about something as pathetically retarded as the US govt. shutdown or Sean Parker's wedding and his ridiculous defences hence.

There are some domains that, should submit a URL for them, are auto-instantly marked [dead].

It's good to see Slate standing up for its competitors.

This is great. Salon has just gotten so bad. The series of editorials bashing Sam Harris were really over the top. Every day I see articles on Salon that are so biased it's just hard to stomach.

The moderators of Reddit take bribes.

I'm pretty sure the competition aspect has nothing to do with it. The moderators are unpaid volunteers, and Conde Naste has historically been incredibly hands off.

The way the moderators leverage their position is by blocking content, not promoting it. If you hang around Reddit for long enough you'll see the moderators are the weakpoint as they can arbitrarily remove a story that most users are engaging in and make up an arbirary reason for it. There should be some kind of process the moderators have to go through or at least be voted in.

That is true if you want to maintain the direction the subreddit is going. But democracy doesn't work when the masses don't know what's best for them.
I believe that nevitably, without strong leadership, a subreddit (or insert any other internet community) will fall to image macros, memes, and internet raging. And that's because the masses upvote that content.
But maybe an appointed moderator is what the subreddit needs, even if that mod isn't what it deserves.

Evidence?

Reddit was spun off from Conde Nast quite a while ago and is a individual company.
So not only are you making claims without evidence, they are plainly false.

You're right, I didn't realize they became independent. I removed that sentence. Although I don't have any proof, there are dozens of incidents/stories I've seen removed that make me suspicious of the moderators and the justifications given rarely seemed sincere or rational. Is it really so hard for you to believe someone would use a position of authority for their own personal gain?

> The moderators of Reddit take bribes.
Provide evidence for this assertion.
> Also, Reddit is owned by Conde Nast and most of those sites blocked are competitors to Conde Naste's publications. Conflict of interest.
Reddit is not own by Conde Nast. It was spun off into an independent entity in 2012.

"Independent"
>Reddit, Inc. remains wholly owned by Advance Media, Condé Nast’s parent company, and the board will include Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, Condé Nast’s president Bob Sauerberg and its CTO Joe Simon.
http://www.wired.com/business/2011/09/reddit-spun-out/
Have you spent much time on Reddit? There are lots of stories removed and the justifications given are rather weak. It's either personal politics or they're taking bribes. Whatever it is, the moderators are abusing their authority which I don't seem to recall anyone agreeing to. It's a poor system where one moderator can shut out the voices of thousands of users.

But:
http://blog.reddit.com/2013/08/reddit-myth-busters_6.html#in...
> Then in 2012, reddit was spun out into a re-incorporated independent entity with its own board and control of its own finances, hiring a new CEO and bringing back co-founder Alexis Ohanian to serve on the board.
And from just below that:
> reddit has 3 sets of shareholders: The largest shareholder is still Advance Publications. The second-largest set of shareholders are reddit employees. In the spin-out that occurred in early 2012, Advance voluntarily reduced its sole ownership to that of a partial owner in order to put ownership in the hands of current and future employees.
So, not sole ownership by Conde Nast or it's parent corporation, and an independent board and management.
Now:
> There are lots of stories removed and the justifications given are rather weak. It's either personal politics or they're taking bribes.
Or the stories are shitty and people refuse to acknowledge that fact. Or maybe just politics. Or some reasons neither you nor I have managed to figure out. Which is why I asked for evidence of an assertion that there's bribery going on, because it's not obvious that's what's going on to a non-conspiratorially minded person.
> Whatever it is, the moderators are abusing their authority which I don't seem to recall anyone agreeing to.
It's a privately run website. You agree to the moderation system by deciding to use reddit. If you don't like how the company chooses to manage things (i.e., through moderators) then stop using reddit.

It's worth noting that /r/politics is only the 13th biggest subreddit, by number of submissions. It's a relative drop in the water.
http://i.imgur.com/9FLPgsW.png https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjPFdCURhZvddGQ...

Number of submissions is a bad metric, number of readers per submission is much more telling. /r/politic only has 13k readers, but /r/politics has over 3 million. Blocking these domains will have a relatively large impact as far as referrals from reddit are concerned. How big of an impact to their viewership in general, it's too hard to say.

Incoroporating number of subscribers may be skewed though since the default subreddits auto-subscribe, and even active users might not opt-out.

Your concept of "a drop in the bucket" and mine are a little different, it seems.

As a League player, I am amazed and gratified that it is more popular that /r/politics. Not that I hate politics, I just love League.

If you were to list the hobbies of reddit users, gaming is going to trump political involvement.
reddit is a social platform first, it makes sense that the 20 year old crowd that populates it will have subscribed more to their hobbies over broader general topics.
See /r/television vs /r/breakingbad, /r/gameofthrones, /r/thewalkingdead, etc.

I suspect that reddit's management is looking for the kind of audience that's perfectly content just staring at a TV screen no matter what's on. This appears to be an active push to chase away people with higher functioning intellects.
The market for dumb is huge. I can't say that I blame them for going after it, but I won't be one of their users anymore.

Good. The Puffington Host is nothing but linkbait.

I like that the columns get progressively less intelligent from left to right. If you ever finish the entire third column, call an ambulance immediately. You may have suffered a stroke.

At least it's just one sub-reddit this time instead of the site-wide ban they implemented last time.

The site-wide ban was for gaming the system and buying votes, not "low-quality journalism". That was the admins telling content sites to fuck off and stop hiring voting rings to cheat reddit. This is the mods of /r/politics (ostensibly) trying to increase quality on their sub.

Which sites were banned on grounds of reporting about reddit protecting that "violentacrez" pervert?

None. Some subreddits banned Gawker, not for "reporting about reddit protecting" anyone, which they didn't, but for posting what was then only his suspected real name and encouraging an internet-wide witch hunt which resulted in death threats, the man in question being fired and his marriage ending, etc.
You might claim that that's what he deserves for moderating subreddits whose content you don't like (I'd disagree), but it could easily have been a case of mistaken identity and an innocent man's life would have been ruined. That's why witch hunts are bad, and that's why Gawker was banned from those subreddits whose moderators felt, as I do, that encouraging that kind of behaviour is immensely irresponsible and should not be tolerated.

I thought Reddit was full of Libertarians who were against censorship?

They're mostly against government censorship.

Or really, any censorship applied to property by anyone other than the property owner. Reddit (specifically, the physical servers running the site) is private property, so any rules Reddit makes (or allows the moderators of its subreddits to make) probably won't be considered objectionable censorship. If the government, or any external entity, forcefully censored Reddit, that would likely be considered objectionable censorship. Compare it to the government forcefully preventing a physical newspaper from publishing certain things, versus the editor of a newspaper choosing which articles to publish.

I thought they were for freedom of speech. There was a giant shitstorm when Jailbait was shutdown, with many cries towards "unfair censorship".
But when censorship agrees with their biased views, all of a sudden its okay.

I think you're confusing Reddit with a site called "Hacker News".

Nah, that site is just a circle-jerk for self important silicon valley startup types. "How I made a million dollars with my idiotic website idea and you absolutely will also!"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com