Reddit downgrades technology community after censorship
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
We had an open and decentralized discussion system that was globally replicated. We had scores of NNTP clients to choose from.
Now it is 2014 and I am lamenting what was lost by editing a post on a webpage. This is a catastrophe.
Websites, while still spammable, are able to control it a bit better, and if you can't figure out any other way to monetize your forum, you can always slap some ads on it.
This stuff doesn't exist in a vacuum. Someone has to pay the bills, unfortunately.
The good news are: Usenet still exists. There are free NNTP servers that host most non-binaries groups. Many groups are abandoned, but some are quite lively. Every time I visit, I am struck by the fact that no website forum approaches the ease of use of a good threaded newsreader, and I am amused when I see each new generation of coders, ignorant of the past, trying to re-implement an incomplete, flawed replica of what once existed.
[0]: http://www.redditblog.com/2013/08/reddit-myth-busters_6.html (See myth 4)
What does this even mean? Someone ultimately has power over Reddit, and it can't be Reddit itself since they sold. So who is it? The blog doesn't answer that.
Right now, Advance Publications[0], which owns Condé Nast, is the largest shareholder of an independent Reddit.
Edit, forgot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
/r/modhelp is basically full of the same problems and issues that mods have been having for years.
Some examples:
* Want to run your sub without downvotes? Sorry (you can hide the button via css, but people can still hotkey it)
* Have a sockpuppet downvote brigade screwing up your sub? Message the reddit admins and hope they bother reading your message and doing anything about it. Because you have no idea who's doing it and can't really do anything about it. Current best advice is (this is not a joke) "wait for them to get bored".
* Somebody was granted admin access, kicked the rest of the mods off and has turned the sub to private (and the sub creator is incommunicado?) Tough luck.
* Want to delete a sub I created? Too bad.
* Fuzzed numbers, votes, subscribers, current people on the sub, etc. Some mods don't want it in their sub. Too bad.
* want to ban some URLs from your sub? try and use the spam filter, but good luck otherwise.
and on and on.
I think practically what the sub's admins wanted to do was to just push down submissions on certain topics so a wider variety of things floated up, this happens on here all the time. But Reddit's tool set to do the same is pretty ham fisted. It's like changing the battery on a watch using a mallet.
Given the choice of using the mallet or not, they decided to go ahead and use it, I disagree with this and they're suffering the consequences of it.
- Want to run your sub without downvotes? Sorry (you can hide the button via css, but people can still hotkey it)
Downvotes have been in Reddit's DNA since the beginning. This is a reasonable stance.
- Have a sockpuppet downvote brigade screwing up your sub? Message the reddit admins and hope they bother reading your message and doing anything about it. Because you have no idea who's doing it and can't really do anything about it. Current best advice is (this is not a joke) "wait for them to get bored".
Good advice! What else are they going to do? You can't punish a crowd.
- Somebody was granted admin access, kicked the rest of the mods off and has turned the sub to private (and the sub creator is incommunicado?) Tough luck.
Maybe a way to transfer sub ownership would be good. Though if the creator decides they're not interested in the sub they themselves created, maybe creating your own and sticking a redirect message on the frontpage is in order.
- Want to delete a sub I created? Too bad.
A sub isn't merely property of those who created it. It's community property. Personally I think even being able to set a sub to 'private' after it's been created is too much, because it's equivalent to a delete. People shouldn't be able to delete the hard work of a community.
- Fuzzed numbers, votes, subscribers, current people on the sub, etc. Some mods don't want it in their sub. Too bad.
If Reddit were to show the actual number of upvotes per post, people might feel a little daunted. Right now people think a mere 2,000 upvotes are all that's needed to get to the front page of a default sub, rather than the more realistic 80,000+. They may lose interest the same way most people aren't interested in the presidential elections: they feel their vote doesn't matter.
- want to ban some URLs from your sub? try and use the spam filter, but good luck otherwise.
AutoModerator seems pretty good for this, isn't it?
I think practically what the sub's admins wanted to do was to just push down submissions on certain topics so a wider variety of things floated up, this happens on here all the time. But Reddit's tool set to do the same is pretty ham fisted. It's like changing the battery on a watch using a mallet.
I don't know why this story keeps floating in regards to /r/technology, but this isn't it. Some moderator of /r/technology, when responding to censorship claims, responded roughly "Reddit is a place for cat pictures and insulting people. Stop getting so worked up." They didn't take their job seriously, and no one could do a thing about it. That's what pissed people off, and it became pretty clear there was no accountability internal to their mod team.
No it's not. There are plenty of subs that have lots of reason to not have downvotes (or any votes at all). It won't affect much algorithm-wise because the post decay will eventually push things off the front page no matter what.
For example, there are entire groups of subs designed for self help, support group type activities that get overpowered by trolls downvoting everything and making it uncomfortable for people to even post in there. The only lever mods have is to take the sub private, but then they might
a) either exclude people who need the group
b) accidentally keep in one of the trolls
> Good advice! What else are they going to do? You can't punish a crowd.
The same thing the admins do, find the brigade and ban them from the sub. Problem solved. But as a mod, you have zero ability to do this and are at the whim of the admin staff to do anything about it. Good luck running a sub when you have a troll downvoting every post to -6 right off the bat.
> A sub isn't merely property of those who created it. It's community property. Personally I think even being able to set a sub to 'private' after it's been created is too much, because it's equivalent to a delete. People shouldn't be able to delete the hard work of a community.
There are tons of subs that were literally the creation of one person, and have only ever had the one person in them. They were experimenting with something, or screwing around or whatever, and they should be able to take it down rather than have reddit aggregate it into overall promotional numbers "look how popular reddit is! we have tens of thousands of subs!"
> If Reddit were to show the actual number of upvotes per post, people might feel a little daunted. Right now people think a mere 2,000 upvotes are all that's needed to get to the front page of a default sub, rather than the more realistic 80,000+. They may lose interest the same way most people aren't interested in the presidential elections: they feel their vote doesn't matter.
The fuzzing is fine at large numbers where small % up/down don't really affect things much, but at small numbers it gets frequently weird when number are off by 10 or 20%. It's even weirder when you just create a sub and suddenly you have ~6 users here now. It's not the right way to deal with it and if they're that inaccurate, just remove them entirely.
> AutoModerator seems pretty good for this, isn't it?
It's fine, but it should be part of the core mod tools. It's beyond ridiculous that it required a flaky bot that you invite and add as a mod and configure through wiki pages to do the work the core code should be able to handle on it's own.
> I don't know why this story keeps floating in regards to /r/technology, but this isn't it. Some moderator of /r/technology, when responding to censorship claims, responded roughly "Reddit is a place for cat pictures and insulting people. Stop getting so worked up." They didn't take their job seriously, and no one could do a thing about it. That's what pissed people off, and it became pretty clear there was no accountability internal to their mod team.
Yeah, the flip side is when a mod, or mod group gets too controlling/lax, there's really very little the user community can do about it. I bet that the only reason any action was taken at all was because the sub was default.
Reminds me of the takeovers in IRC (quakenet). There are so many channels/subreddits that admin can't deal with all the problems.
I agree that stronger subreddit controls would be useful. All I can say is that reddit serves a function, it doesn't serve all functions, and the site's resources are limited (reddit itself isn't profitable).
That said, I've found it useful as a space in between a discussion site and a blog with a personal subreddit on which I tightly monitor and manage activity. Doesn't keep the downvoters from showing up occasionally.
The automoderator bot is supposed to make a lot of automated mod tasks much easier.
The sex pest was banned from Reddit; his sock puppets were banned. (I hope, but do not know, that the admins reported him to one of the law enforcement agencies. He was pretty clearly unpleasant and definitely breaking US laws).
I had worse experience when I tried to report stuff to Tinychat, who appear to ignore their own TOS.
If their necks aren't on the line, casual neglect and indifference seems to be the overriding M.O. from the reddit admins.
The bigger problem is that mods should have log access themselves to up/down votes so they can root out bad behavior on their own and then have the tools to deal with it. Mod powers are incredibly slim on reddit and they arguably shouldn't be.
The "first-dibs" system of selecting moderator for subreddits may not be the best system nowadays.
1) Have each subreddit democractically elect/delect its moderators after N period of time.
2) Make moderation log public to provide more accountability to moderator actions
3) Pay the moderators, either from the Reddit business itself, profit-sharing from ads on the subreddit, or through community donations.
All 3 would disincentivize the moderators from behaving badly. However, the methods may not scale easily.
Public moderation logs have been tried in the past, and nobody bothers to read them. They're an important move towards transparency, but they are powerless without user engagement.
Paying moderators might sound fair, but it would lead to all sorts of perverse incentives. How would the revenue be split? What is to stop top moderators from removing others in order to keep more money for themselves?
Unlike /r/technology, it's still possible to hit the front page with a submission from a penalized domain, it's just much more unlikely. (will only really happen on the weekends when it's a slow news day)
[0]: http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...
I had, by the time, decided that the story wasn't actually all that interesting, so never did resubmit it.
However, for mixed bag sites where you get a lot of fluff and also some solid pieces, we don't ban the site. That is what minimaxir is talking about.
Nowadays, the number of medium.com submissions is lower, but the ratio of quality remains the same.
I had assumed the quality of most writing on the platform was quite high.
Many startups use Medium to do the same low-quality content marketing that they could do with a normal Wordpress blog, but most Wordpress blog don't have giant header images and a serif typeface.
Snowden's revelations set off a broad distrust of US tech products and services and have a multi-tens-of-billions impact on the tech economy and investing. Whoever can fix this will make a more valuable contribution to tech than a smart watch or smart TV ever will.
Questioning whether Tim Cook is capable of running Apple is OK because he didn't help start disastrous wars, but questioning the thudding tone-deafness of putting Condi Rice on the DropBox board is "political?" Or is it sensitivity over DropBox acquiring some YC companies?
Because the politics of it is so intractable, it is very likely that the privacy issue will have a large technology component. That is, mass surveillance will be reconsidered only when mass surveillance isn't valuable.
Overall, the biggest threats to tech and investing in the US are the surveillance/security state, over-militarization, wars, and the things like education they prevent being properly funded.
I am all for making money. I am not for wishing away problems, which many people here seem to think will work: if we wish hard enough, we can make believe we have privacy when we have none, so that we can continue to sell both "security" and "forensics."
Pick one and go with it.
But then that still leaves the entire spectrum of tech related policies that would cause tremendous damage or benefit, which is still heavily tech related, at least as much as "is Samsung going to use OLED or IPS in their next smart phone".
Ugh.
Politics is way more important than anything we discuss here, by and large. You open the floodgates, and it'll crowd out articles about Erlang's concurrency vs Node.js. Few people care about that, but everyone has an opinion on things like abortion, gun control, health care systems, gay marriage and so on.
And yet, HN survives.
Political stories aren't necessarily off-topic either. However, they come with the risk of degenerating into flamewars that violate HN's values. We can't afford to let that happen much because it will change the community for the worse. How do we know that? Because it already has.
The question of "politics on HN" is not primarily about defining what is/isn't on topic. It's empirical and practical: under certain influences, the site degenerates badly. Therefore, lessen such influences.
We have a good definition of "degenerate": to violate HN's values. And we know what our values are: intellectual substance and personal civility. (The other thing we talk a lot about is signal/noise ratio, but you can derive that from the other two.)
(later edit: I've used the term "political overlap" in subsequent comments making this point)
HN uses a heavy moderation, way heavier than reddit, and it works.
Of course, it's ycombinator's web site, so it's their choice, but a lot of interesting articles and discussion are just... lost.
Whatever the mechanism, good posts and discussions are being lost.
From that, you can probably guess the entire list. :)
You have creators of a subreddit that want to move discussions in a certain way. As I understood they didn't want "old news", "political" or "spammy" topics.
They get a huge amount of posts in /new as they're now a default subreddit. One of the efficient thing to do to narrow the job is to ban keywords.
I really don't blame them, some defaults subreddits don't get moderated at all (looking at you /r/funny).
And as I said in another comments, the community that I find the most interesting are the ones which are the most heavily moderated : /r/askscience, /r/games and HN. Less trolls, less spam, less racism.
I agree, and it just reminds me of how Something Awful is probably the best quality community I've been a member of, and that's mostly down to its $5 joining fee and fascist mods. It's just a pity that that didn't scale and 4chan and later reddit ate its lunch.
Isn't it kind of Orwellian to know your government is spying on you, yet go to the biggest tech forum on the net and no one is even talking about it?
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/23dyes/recap...
[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/23aunv/rtech...
Just because Tesla Motors is more tech oriented company than its competitors that does not mean every mention of teslas should be posted in /r/technology - and pretty much everything was posted. Same goes for bitcoin related stories.
It also depends on personal interpretation of word "technology", I'm sure that pretty much any topic can be somehow be tied to technology sector but that does not, and should not, mean that every news article about a topic should be posted in /r/technology.
On the other hand the vote brigading that happens from related subreddits is, even though it is against reddit rules, ignored by reddit administrators...
Aw dang, really? No other options except to remove 100% of threads containing the words "snowden" and "national security agency" and "tesla"?
It's too bad the community has no way of moderating it's self by somehow giving submissions "scores" to rank them. Then only threads that a majority of people like would make it to the top. If you think about it, a system like this would allow for stories that only partly relate to technology, but are still hot topics that tech enthusiasts want to talk about, to make it to the top.
No. Either allow the posts and remove them once the discussion start and then deal with 100 "MUH FREEDOM OF SPEECH, !!CENSORSHIP!!, MY PRECIOUS KARMA!" threads or remove them as soon as they're posted.
>Then only threads that a majority of people like would make it to the top
That's part of the problem. People want to see thread like this - you'd see "NSA spying people" thread upvoted in EVERY SINGLE default subreddit if it was posted and allowed by moderators.
Votes are horrible for determining what kind of content should or shouldn't be allowed. Especially for default subreddits since majority of people vote from frontpage and are not familiar with subreddit rules, or don't even notice which subreddit it is.
People don't even read more than titles! You'll often see threads marked with "false information" flair, or people pointing out in the comments how the whole story is fake/wrong/etc. Those threads continue to gain upvotes after it has been proved to be wrong information. Do you really think that people would notice the subreddit and/or rules regarding that submission?
>If you think about it, a system like this would allow for stories that only partly relate to technology, but are still hot topics that tech enthusiasts want to talk about, to make it to the top.
Nope, read above. It would allow for stories people like (upvote) to make it to the top.
And plus you have threads linked in other subreddits, IRC etc. that skews up votes too.
____
tl;dr: votes work in theory but fail miserably in practice, especially when dealing with large amount of voters.
if (termCountOnFrontPage > 2) remove();
else letItRide();Relevance of the posts on frontpage is also affected by problems I described above, meaning the thread that shouldn't be posted in /r/technology has (almost) equal chance of being on frontpage as the one that's relevant.
I have no idea how to solve the issue, maybe a modqueue like page where moderators can isolate specific threads until they're approved?
But just removing all threads if 2 (similar) already exist has too many issues.
That's the problem with social media aggregators. Sometimes the hive mind isn't the best judge of quality. (this happens on all aggregators, including Hacker News itself; that's why having the flag option be so potent in killing threads is necessary).
When pressed on this subject the mods claimed that Tesla wasn't technology worthy and should go into a car subreddit, yet endless articles about how wonderful the new iphone is don't get shoved into /r/apple.
It looks like a couple moderators decided that their pet fanboyism would define the sub. Reddit had a choice of intervening and getting rid of those mods or delisting them from the front page. I think delisting them was the right move. If you want to have your own personal subreddit running on your own personal bias, then go for it, but don't expect to be a default anymore.
I find the mandatory default system to be more than a little broken. Instead, at account creation, show me all the defaults as checked checkboxes and the most popular non-defaults below, unchecked, and let me choose.
http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-how-tesla-pus...
Which reinforce the notion that, maybe the moderators banned Tesla over the quality of the submissions after all not some personal bias.
On a side note, isn't it a bit Orwellian to know for a fact that your government is participating in mass spying, but the largest tech forum on the internet isn't talking about it at all, and now you've come to find out that key words relating to the spying scandal have been censored on said forum? Not only that, but if you go and read the comments in the sticky over in r/technology, it seems the main problem mods are still in power (at least according to the community) and the mods that are being called out seem to have no comments and have actually removed posts calling them out. I assume the main mod accounts have been bought and sold over and over and the current owners are trying desperately to pass it on to the highest bidder. Kind of makes you wonder if banning terms like "National Security Agency" and "Snowden" was an honest mistake (HA!) or if they're just trying to pass it off as one now.
There are a ton of better ways than auto penalizing based on a blanket censorship system.
> "So already for the past week TSA stories have had an automatic penalty applied. Or more precisly, they've been autotagged as being political, which entails a penalty."
> "When anything gets over a certain number of flags, it shows up on a list that admins see. They decide either to kill it, mark it as political or whatever, or do nothing."
One of reddit's larger issues is that weak stuff does sometimes get upvote, but the top comment in the thread is almost always a pretty fair criticism of why that article sucks. This is true of almost all subreddits and not something unique to /r/technology.
To be fair, a lot of the "allowed" content under these mod rules isn't much better. Cherry picking Tesla linkbait as justification for these heavy-handed rules really isn't fair.
It also seems like it was more a case of the head mods being lazy and not wanting to bring on more moderators. So they tried to automate moderation with AutoModerator.
This is how it moderate itself, by having admins moderating their communities. What do you propose?
I'm a reasonable person of sound body and mind and very well socialised (I'm certain that I don't have a mental illness). I've been on the sub since there were 20k users, there are now 120k I've helped countless newbies and formed relationships with other long term users of the sub who also have a high reputation. I've made many high quality posts on bitcoin data analysis (and a few crappy memes along the way).
Something is definitely different in the past few months, and a lot of the other old timers would agree with me, the subject matter is not normal. I have loads of anecdotal "Wait a minute, that not the way things are meant to work" situations, where some comments are being downvoted and upvoted abnormally. Some comments are meant to only confuse you or deride the conversation and bring it off topic. Some threads are calling into question the Mods and their motives. Some comments on threads are pushing the traditional banking system benefits. There has been an influx of 0 day users who seem to speak on authority about financial instruments. These are not trolls. Some users will reply with what seems like a positive post and then flip completely 180 degrees by the end of their reply.
What I'm trying to say is that the human neural network pattern matching machine is incredibly good at finding inconsistencies, my alarm bells are ringing, there is some organisation at work in the sub.
I would like to start gathering data on the extend of this by comparing users account age, their topic of conversation and the techniques they use. I'll need some help from my trusted friends on /r/bitcoin and I'm still coming up with the process on the best way to collect information to prove or disprove my hypothesis.
It also doesn't take a small nationstate to stir shit up, it just takes a vocal determined minority; or a bunch of noobs; or a bunch of trolls. (And when I say "bunch", I mean a number that's in the double-digits.)
Very true. It doesn't really take many upvotes to make it to the front page of a sub-reddit, just a high up-to-down ratio. Reddit would be an easy target for manipulation by a small group if they really wanted to.
My idea: have a default post sorting algorithm, but create an add-on that allows users to create their own sorting algorithm. Most likely users will find the best algorithm, share it, and spread it, but their would also be many algorithms in use, so you have multiple systems you would have to game.
Only comments are ranked by upvote to downvote ratio. Posts are ranked by total upvotes plus the time.
I saw a comment here the other day about how "Bitcoin old money" was actively trying to keep altcoins down and came to a stark realization (again) that there's really nothing new under the sun.
Here is a classic guide to "forum spies":
http://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm
The tactics are well known to the financial system. Penny stock boards, for example, are full of engineered disinformation because all participants are competing to manipulate the market. I believe the sockpuppets used for reddit are directed in some more autonomous fashion, though.
Malcolm Gladwells Blink dealt with the issue.
Wouldn't that give you a lot of false positives?
Perhaps you could first try finding accounts with similar writing style. Though I'm not sure about the accuracy of such algorithms.
This will go on for about a day, then a couple days later the exact same topic will come up again, and the response will be completely normal and the shill brigade obviously absent.
See this for example, shill brigade in effect; http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/22zl2w/bitcoin_amon...
And a day later, same subject, shill brigade absent; http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/23495x/reddit_mods_...
This is not the only time I have seen this happen there, just the most obvious instance.
But this is not surprising as some people are heavily invested in bitcoins. It just kills intelligent discussions on the subreddit sometimes.
Also, /r/technology wouldn't have been erased from the defaults if it was not for /r/bitcoin, everything started there (because the word "bitcoin" was banned from /r/technology).
alt.syntax.tactical was really good at this (at the beginning). Even a shitty group like snuh good cause havoc if it took off on Reddit.
Tesla got relevant suddenly with the apple news, then with the texas law, but then it was just spams to get the interest around Tesla going on.
Technology moves quickly and I can see why moderators wanted the discussion not to focus on ONE thing for too long.
two big examples : bitcoin, snowden
there were a lot of words on that list but those were the most discussed. Bitcoin was relevant and it got plenty of article. I'm not surprised that the admin of /r/technology wanted to avoid all the spam and diminish the discussions on that topic after 2 years of bitcoin topics and a huge /r/bitcoin subreddit (which I'm part of).
Snowden? Well it was talked about there a lot. Now is definitely not the time to keep talking about him on /r/technology. There are plenty of other relevant subreddits for that.
I'm sure that they would have lifted the ban if something really relevant would have come around.
Also, a lot of people tend to mix "censorship" and "moderation". I agree with PARENT, this is moderation. You cannot expect "total free speech" in a private subreddit on a private website. Shouting "censorship" at everything you don't agree with is just not relevant.
And if we go down this road, the best subreddits are the ones that are the most moderated. /r/askscience and /r/games. No trolls, no racism.
previous r/technology automatic filter list:
Restore the Fourth NSA Comcast Anonymous Time Warner CISPA SOPA TPP Swartz FCC Flappy net neutrality Bitcoin GCHQ Snowden spying Clapper Congress Obama Feinstein Wyden anti-piracy FBI CIA DEA Condoleezza EFF ACLU National Security Agency Dogecoin breaking
I had started a successful AMA (being former Military Intelligence/Palantir) regarding the realities of the role.
Regardless of ID, Letters of Service Commendation and scanned evidence of having served in Afghanistan/Iraq the mods would not have it and refused to respond to my emails.
Within an hour it was trolled to obscurity.
Almost all of the terms on the filter list published in this article were contained in my AMA.
Ha, you live and learn.