Let's talk content. AMA
reddit.com
reddit.com
Q: In Ellen Pao's op-ed in the Washington Post today, she said "But to attract more mainstream audiences and bring in the big-budget advertisers, you must hide or remove the ugly."
How much of the push toward removing "ugly" elements of Reddit comes from the motivation to monetize Reddit?
A: Zero.
_____________________
His reply currently has -1022 points. The censorship of Reddit for advertisement purposes has been a topic of discussion in a select few subreddits for quite awhile. It looks like the rest of reddit is finally realizing what is going on.
I don't have anything against it, people have to make money and with free services like reddit, the users are the product that is sold to advertisers.
What I don't understand is, why not just admit it? From my ~20 years of internet usage, I have learned the one constant is you never lie to the internet.
Also, from the list of prohibited content:
>Anything that harasses, bullies, or abuses an individual or group of people
This sounds like a rule that some teenager made up for guild forums. How in the world does Huffman think using something so vague as an actual punishable rule will turn out well?
Anyway, good luck to Huffman he is going to need it. I feel like voat.co is going to see a very huge increase in numbers during the next few months.
Yishan [ "Not our problem" ] -> Pao [ "Remove" ] -> Spez [ "Hide"]
That seems to the be evolution at the moment, and honestly, I think "Hide" is the right answer. People have a right to avoid content that offends them.
Voat's problem [honestly] is as drama-filled as this transition has been...Voat really isn't offering anything other than "Reddit with more transparency". Assuming Spez doesn't screw this up, I'm not seeing how Voat.co will benefit.
As for vagueness, I'm not surprised...its like the legal definition of Obscenity or Pornography, its a community-tested definition based on social norms. You can't really quantify it the way you can numbers on a spreadsheet or "Marijuana is illegal".
As long as Spez is transparent, communicates effectively, and doesn't come across as arbitrary I think it'll work out fine.
https://pay.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3dautm/conte...
I'm pretty sure Pao's "remove" was going to be a tiny fraction of what will end up hidden and she was closer to Yishan's "Do whatever" position than Huffman will be.
Do they though?
EDIT:
Meant that seriously. Do we have a right to avoid all of the people complaining about discrimination in tech, for example?
The hazy term is "right". Perhaps it means "People [on reddit] have a right to avoid content that offends them."
For example, on Twitter, users are harassed, but short of leaving the service they don't have an easy way to avoid their mentions being cluttered by hate speech. It devalues the service for them and puts hate speech directly in their face. Blocking tools are improving, but people who want to harass others claim such tools are against free speech.
From the sounds of it many subreddits "branched out" onto personal Facebook pages and other places to attack users — to put offensive speech in front of the people who would find it offensive. It complicates the ideal scenario you put forward because while these are public places where anyone can post, there is a malicious intent behind much of the speech. To put that offensive content in front of a person's friends and family in a way that they can't avoid, or have to work to avoid, is very different from reciting that speech in your own private area of the Internet. Yet defence of one is often blurred with defence of the other. How do you stop such hate groups from "branching out" without shutting down the source and being accused of stifling free speech?
It's a nice ideal to say that one person is free to speak while another is free not to listen, but one is able to make a physical (or virtual) location distinctly uncomfortable and scary for another person. This sort of harassment is often defended under the guise of "free speech."
To clarify, are you are suggesting that some people are harassed more easily than others, or lie about being harassed? I don't believe that happens very often.
> And if free speech doesn't include the right to say things that other people disagree with then it's meaningless.
It's not about disagreement. I find it very hard to believe that people are making false claims of harassment because they simply disagree with others.
I'm not an expert on psychology and wouldn't want to speculate on other people's internal mental states. But certainly I have seen people claim that they feel harassed in situations that are, to my mind, a million miles away from harassment; that seem to me like nothing more than simple disagreement.
The division of subreddits mostly handles that already and is likely a good chunk of its original purpose. Narrow, interest-based groups. Its just that on steroids really.
I really really wish more people would get this. Too many people in Bob's position try to go beyond just coving their own ears. And that extends beyond Reddit.
On places like Reddit (or HN, for that matter) though that would suggest hiding users you don't like or avoiding subforums you find disgusting...not griping to management to remove them for you and everyone else!
I'm sure they'd prefer a more mature community, but when you embrace youth culture as a way of life you get what you get, and need to lie accordingly.
Rather: The distaste for advertising is as old as the WWW itself.
Because reddit's popularity is built on the illusion of being the complete opposite! One of the first large influxes of users came from Digg, who had their own revolt over censoring a 16 byte number.
Centralized sites have been given a pass for way too long. Let us hope the pendulum swings back the other way hard. Restricting communication, no matter how repulsive one finds the content, does not make the "world ... a better place".
I would choose freedom of speech rather than destroy it to prevent some uncomfort. Society will adapt to not seeing such publishing as harmful.
EDIT: Downvotes. Yall feeling a bit salty? Look, unmoderated "free" discussions exist on the internet in many places. I'm an internet "veteran", I've seen over the years the rise and fall of moderated and unmoderated social networks starting back at Usenet.
Between there and now, there have been an "Exodus" from GameFAQs (LUEsers), Digg, Something Awful, Slashdot and more as each of these communities grew. The "free speech" guys always find another place to take their discussions, and the previous communities usually begin to shrink to some degree.
Reddit is simply going through the _same_ stages. The free speech argument comes up, toxic is spewed forth to test exactly how far the mods / owners are willing to let things go... some back and forth happens and eventually, the "free speech" guys are going to form a new community elsewhere and Reddit's role on the internet will solidify.
Its how it happens. Its how it _always_ happens.
As much as people get outraged by the content, there is no doubting that Reddit has done well for itself due to its radically permissive policies up until now.
This is particularly true when you consider that NSFW sub-reddits almost never make it to the front page, where the presence of offensive content could threaten traffic.
/r/ShitRedditSays has really called into question exactly what "free speech" means. Its like "downvote brigades" are anything new these days. Does anybody remember "message board invasions"???
Its fine to say whatever you like, except you have no right to assemble a downvote brigade. Which is speech. You have complete free speech, except you aren't allowed to make /r/picsofdeadkids, /r/HurtingAnimals, or /r/rapingwomen. Even then, the Reddit owners are looking for a way to cut back on the downvote brigades, which really is the "invasion" problem that has always been eternal on these forums.
There is _always_ a limit to free speech. And when a community figures out exactly what that limit is, then the "free speech" nutters leave. I dunno, maybe they'll leave for 8chan or some "more free" place. Whether or not that causes death for the site... its a question.
The Gamefaqs LUEsers were neutered because of message board invasions, as well as the "shock sites" of Goatse and Tubgirl. Reddit is "free-er" and seems to be accepting of internet shock humor like Goatse and Tubgirl (As well as grossly / weirdly pornographic material like /r/clopclop). But there will be a day when the Reddit admins draw a line and say "No, you aren't allowed to talk about that here".
But that's all just idle thinking with no code to back it up.
So like Usenet, then.
Few news servers carries every Usenet group. No news server carries every newsgroup, because many of them are private, on private NNTP servers. It's decentralised: Anyone can run a NNTP server, and each NNTP server can take feeds of whatever subset they want, and add whatever additional groups they want for local use, or for distribution.
It has ownership through moderation, though there are certainly weaknesses there in the level of reliance on trust.
And the peering could do with some level of automation.
IIRC, there was an interesting study of decentralising git, that suggested an application of bitcoin's system for deciding who "owned" a name.
It also makes good sense to me that certain types of speech, such as harassment, result in less freedom overall. (In the case of harassment, because it suppresses speech from the harassed party.)
It makes Reddit a better place and brings it closer to the original site before all the latecomers from the digg exodus. Why do you think curation exists?
Now I do prefer a distributed system like Usenet, where individuals maintained their own killfiles of whose bullshit they'd like to screen out and NNTP administrative overhead was relatively flat (ie it wasn't too difficult to set up a new newsgroup, or if I remember correctly anyone could set one up under the alt.* hierarchy).
But Usenet/NNTP ran into a huge tragedy of the commons problem, most famously from Canter & Siegel's 'Make.money.fast' posting which they crossposted to every newsgroup, resorting to a capitalism/free speech defense when everyone else took them to task for it. You could also point to the abuses of anonymous remailer systems like penet.fi by bad actors (who were obviously able to easily outrun killfile entries) and trolls - I was still active in a couple of Usenet grousp until a year or two back and I could point out people who have been persistently targeting individuals and communities for over a decade. I'm sure many people with roots in Usenet could point to similar individuals.
I don't feel like going on a research dive right now, but I'm thinking of a social science paper I read a few years back about tipping points in social networks, which mainly exxamined persuasive campaigns, but you could see by the same logic how trolls could easily wreck an otherwise productive forum by lowering the signal-to-noise ratio below a certain threshold. I think it was from RAND corporation but the title escapes me right now.
In my comment, publishing any data is communication. But to answer in your framework, still yes. For example, some incivility will necessarily arise in proportion to groupthink (to counter). Classifying this type of incivility as "not communication" is bog standard anti-free-speech.
> If you're at a party in my house and you start behaving obnoxiously towards one of the other guests, I'm going to throw you out
This is always brought up as a justification for censorship because it is technically correct in the small sense.
But reddit's fundamental "asset" is its community, which came about (both implicitly and explicitly) from the idea that reddit is simply a technical platform and actual administration was done by subreddits (modulo the government-imposed censorship of any centralized site).
To continue your analogy, your parties got popular because they were awesome. When you switch to restricting people to 3 beers and ending at 10pm, it's entirely appropriate for people to denounce you as uncool and urge their friends to stop going.
> trolls could easily wreck an otherwise productive forum by lowering the signal-to-noise ratio below a certain threshold
> usenet ... tragedy of the commons
Don't find the citation for my sake, as my intuition agrees (it may have been posted to HN, too). FWIW, I think the same thing happens from low-quality non-trolling users.
For a decentralized system, users need their own filters and interesting configurable policies for unknown nyms (eg: be vouched for by other users, probabilistic viewing, requiring an anonymous bearer token). And there could certainly be opt-in voluntary aggregation points with differing policies, but they wouldn't own the users.
In relation to reddit, this problem only arises for the whole site due to the conflation of meta-forum and forum.
But reddit's fundamental "asset" is its community, which came about (both implicitly and explicitly) from the idea that reddit is simply a technical platform and actual administration was done by subreddits (modulo the government-imposed censorship of any centralized site).
I can't remember the title of the article, but Jacquesm or some other HNer had a great post a year or two back along the lines of 'I can't afford the cost of your free platform.' There's a big difference between a platform and a protocol, and it's essentially one of property rights. Reddit's a platform, and they can change the rules or deny service arbitrarily.
For a decentralized system, users need their own filters and interesting configurable policies for unknown nyms
I would love to see an NNTP2 that incorporated some developments like optional blockchain identity verification and so on.
> There's a big difference between a platform and a protocol
Yeah, which is why we're even discussing this topic. But by the same logic, users are rightly free to judge and complain based on their expectations - Reddit Inc isn't entitled to the community. All centralized forums eventually die (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9867142), but that doesn't mean we should condone their locally-optimal actions while they're doing so.
Furthermore, community moderation is actually irrelevant to this discussion, as moderation (apart from government censorship) was supposed to be left up to the individual subreddits.
As far as decentralized protocols, "identity verification" is much stronger than what's needed and would be the path to madness (open to legal extortion, etc). What's essentially needed is a proof of work so that bad actors (whether one defines that as spammers or your standard youtube commenter) have finite amount of "energy", while nyms that prove worthwhile are unencumbered.
All centralized forums eventually die (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9867142), but that doesn't mean we should condone their locally-optimal actions while they're doing so.
Here we disagree (a little). In economic terms, when the platform is open and unregulated and anything goes, there is a large consumer surplus. People go to a centralized discussion platform because it offers some sort of technical surplus (ease-of-use, attractive appearance, social proof in the form of karma points or whatever) which they don't get otherwise. But as a platform becomes popular, there's a larger and larger cost in operating it, so you charge or add adverts or something. But now the people who are paying want additional value for their outlay over and above the basic consumer surplus, and usually that value is in the form of security from unwanted interaction, whether for their persona or their commercial brand. So for the producer to recoup the costs of operating the platform and reap some producer surplus from doing so (or why bother), the goal is to find a equilibrium between the degree of security provided and the partial loss of the original consumer surplus (of unrestricted communication).
Now it seems to me that this is a two-part thing. A site like Reddit dies a little if they institute behavior standards...but only a little bit. Trolls may leave altogether and the community becomes a bit more homogeneous, but then it can run for ages and ages. For example, people still log into AOL and many other moribund platforms - if there are enough people talking who are OK with the behavior standards it will keep going. What really kills it is the emergence of a new platform which offers substantial technical advantages in its turn (way better UI, super speed, brilliant new threading mechanism or whatever).
Because most of the effort on the new platform is technological, there may not be any behavior standards in place and so the first people onto that platform enjoy the freedom of saying/doing whatever they want, and the platform producers probably don't mind as they want to get people onboard to take advantage of the network effect. But only a percentage of the people are attracted to the new platform because of the behavioral freedom, whereas the majority are attracted by a combination of technical superiority and network effects.
I think Tor is a good example of this; you can fire up Tor and freely explore all sorts of contraband stuff if you're so inclined and not too paranoid. But if you're not after forbidden fruit, then the user experience of Tor is pretty bad (not due to some fundamental flaw of Tor, but the .onion ecosystem). The privacy benefits don't offer sufficient utility for most people to justify the awful UX unless you are looking for something very obscure (<5%) or just illegal (>95%). Probably 80% of the onion links I click don't even load, and since I'm not looking to buy drugs or criminal services exploring the .onion domain is generally a complete waste of time.
As far as decentralized protocols, "identity verification" is much stronger than what's needed and would be the path to madness (open to legal extortion, etc). What's essentially needed is a proof of work so that bad actors (whether one defines that as spammers or your standard youtube commenter) have finite amount of "energy", while nyms that prove worthwhile are unencumbered.
Oh, I was thinking more of the way that on 4chan you can post as anonymous and say anything you want or use a nym if you prefer. So if I thought 4chan cared what I thought and I wanted to get the credit for my brilliant ideas, I could post under my name. Of course on 4chan so can anyone else, so I'd like to be able to 'own' that name for as long as I am using it - not in the property sense but int he sense of distinguishing my authorship from imitators.
But it certainly makes the site a better place. No one wants to read that repulsive content. Allow it and people do not want to visit the site.
The only people I want to enforce free speech against is the government. In private I prefer restricted speech, specifically stupid and immature comments that just waste time and derail conversations into idiocity.
I just don't get it. If you were a part of those subreddits, and they get banned, take your bullshit elsewhere.
If you're worried about slippery slope, then maybe just relax a bit and recognise what type of behaviour they want to prevent on their site. Or find somewhere else to have your discussions.
Or, y'know, talk about it, try and get reddit to give a clear policy so that the slippery slope stops and it's very concrete what is allowed and what isn't? Like people are doing?
He's made it clear in the thread that he's still working on the wording and the rules aren't going live until he has much more precise wording than this.
https://np.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3djjxw/lets_t...
Because it is the only tenable position. As much as we want it to exist, there is not a set of hard, bright-line rules possible for governing literally all possible topics of discussion in all contexts in all communities. The expectation that we can make simple, universal rules and have it succeed is part of the problem.
Governance is unavoidably complex and resistant to simplistic applications of ideology, in many places its rules must necessarily be vague because its reach is vast and the rule's interactions with the community is hard to predict. Room must be preserved for in-context judgment.
> "I feel like voat.co is going to see a very huge increase in numbers during the next few months."
Excellent. I can't wait, so long as voat's traffic increase is coupled with a commensurate decrease in reddit traffic from the same people ;)
Really? Reddit seems to have even more racists and sexists since they all supposedly "left" for voat. But hey.. if that's what you like.
> Because it is the only tenable position.
Is it not tenable to avoid taking a specific position as a website individually, and to simply comply with the laws of the broader society? NearlyFreeSpeech.net seems to have been taking this stance successfully for years, for example. It would not allow them to dodge criticism, since plenty of people wish to manipulate Reddit and other Internet sites into implementing or achieving whatever social objective they have in mind, but it seems as though it ought to be tenable while simplifying the issue and putting it to rest.
That's about as clear cut as it's going to get, agreed. As originally suggested there are really no other reasons Reddit has this rule other than "making scary/ugly things go away." Regardless of whether it's for advertising or personal closed mindedness on behalf of the admins/staff.
This is precisely why every major publisher uses human curation rather than purely algorithmic.
Go to Snapzu if you want more than a clone that has some rules (no hate) and a solid community, but most importantly tries to innovate and not just copy reddit.
Go to Hubski if you want a civil place to discuss things without all the flashy pictures and what not.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=w8c_m6U1f9o
"The Power Of Selling Out: Your Customers As Political Capital - Onion Talks"
I believe Gabe Newell said it best "You can't lie on reddit".
People get so excited when they catch a liar and think "See you can't lie", not realizing just how many lies pass right by without being caught.
Enforcing harassment laws has always been problematic both online and offline.
NOTE: The illegal stuff obviously falls outside this, as the internet (and a corporation) clearly have to operate within the relevant laws.
That's exactly what they're doing, is it not? They're providing opt in controls for the less savoury content:
> Similar to NSFW, another type of content that is difficult to define, but you know it when you see it, is the content that violates a common sense of decency. This classification will require a login, must be opted into, will not appear in search results or public listings, and will generate no revenue for Reddit.
And the few subreddits that incite abuse are getting shuttered. I feel that's more than reasonable.
Did you ever think that maybe it's true? I could easily see a motive of pushing offensive content behind opt-ins, vs banning, without thinking so much about advertisers.
If he had said 5% or 20% would you have jumped all over him about being beholden to advertisers?
> When was reddit arbitrarily banning things they don't like?
When they banned five subreddits (actually quite a few more than that, but five were announced), without a clear policy that could be fairly enforced on all subs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/remov...
Point out vote brigades to the admins and they shadow ban users and the sub risks being banned.
Reddit should just release some charts of brigades from FPH and SRS.
The world relies on case law to resolve ambiguity
Reading that thread, the barrier to ban subreddits seems to be fairly high still. A subreddit apparently has to be pretty much centered on promoting violence in order to meet the criteria.
That said, had they chosen to go for a low barrier, flat-out "we'll ban everything we don't like" policy, the outcome might have been better in the long run. Short-term there would have been a huge outcry, but after these kinds of people left, the site would probably be more friendly overall. Smaller, but nicer.
Instead, they chose to go for a very modest policy change and what looks like reluctant enforcement.
> We define harassment as: Systematic and/or continued actions to torment or demean someone in a way that would make a reasonable person (1) conclude that reddit is not a safe platform to express their ideas or participate in the conversation, or (2) fear for their safety or the safety of those around them.
This clearly has a lot of wiggle room for interpretation, but this pretty clearly seems to exclude e.g. "minor criticism."
[0] http://www.redditblog.com/2015/05/promote-ideas-protect-peop...
in today's world that means a platform where too many people disagree with me.
About time.
Slippery slope don't you think?
Nothing is stopping them from running to one of the great many zero-moderation forums that exist online, but of course those forums aren't very attractive to a critical mass of users, so they have less content and fewer third-party tools to integrate with.
The irony is, of course, that by demanding that Reddit cater to their demands, they're impinging on Reddit's freedom of expression. It's their toy; they get to set the rules on how it is used.
FYI, ttrashh's third sentence should have been the tipoff.
I think you need new arguments. The slippery slope argument is abit used up for HN in 2015. Pretty sure that had it's moment in 1998 Slashdot.
Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum
My objection to this comment is that it treats it like it's a simple thing.
For starters it bans harassing lets say The Nazi party or ISIS or a pro abortion doctor killing group.
I don't think this is wrong, but it's a fair enough complication.
But more importantly it sweeps under the carpet how to best get free speech on really important issues. Everything comes at a cost. This will hurt free speech at least a bit.
Once again it's not just 'About time' it's something that needs to be considered.
There's personality, history, friendships, etc. Some mods were likely to tolerate irritants if they knew the person or the person had contributed to something they approved of... Like a movement, cause, etc.
That said, it looks like so far, its been used sparingly and not vigorously. But it's like speeding. You know the chances of having a ticket issued are low, but if highway patrol were to e force to the letter, one would have many more tickets issued.
That isn't a new policy, they were just reiterating it. The actually new stuff is the NSFW scope enlargement, hiding from search, etc.
Any speech can be harass another and this the problem with such rules.
This is incredibly ambiguous. I think it is important to specify what exactly harassment isn't, and explicitly permit that.
Most people claiming 'harassment' are simply using it as a tool to silence and persecute people who dare to hold opinions that differ from their own. For example, the Twitter harassment trial that just finished yesterday in Toronto. [1] Merely saying that one 'feels harassed' should not count for anything.
Furthermore there is a problem with labelling certain communities as being problematic, or whatever word they are searching for. This makes uncommon or novel viewpoints vulnerable to further marginalization if their opponents succeed in giving them that label.
[1] http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/christie-blatchfor...
> If that's not a form of harassment, I don't know what is.
You may be right about that. By the way, Twitter has a 'block' function for dealing with 'mentions', as far as I am aware.
I'm sorry, I think this guy went too far and the situation needed some intervention. This is beyond just a difference of opinion. Why was he fired? Why is he the only person she is accusing of harassment despite many other people who didn't agree with what she was doing?
Systematic and/or continued actions to torment or demean someone in a way that would make a reasonable person (1) conclude that reddit is not a safe platform to express their ideas or participate in the conversation, or (2) fear for their safety or the safety of those around them.
The key phrases to me are “systemic and/or continued” and “a reasonable person."
So, that wording of the policy still leaves plenty of leeway for the sort of abuse I described above.
If the issue here is that you don’t trust Reddit, we should debate that. I’d say that’s a much bigger problem than not trusting the way that policy is worded.
This is the worrisome part.
Say that Joe posts, in conversations where it's on topic, that one group of people are racially inferior. Now a bunch of people get on his case about it, flagging him all the time, downvoting his shit, and tracking where he posts his bullshit to counter everything he says with their own version of events, it sure seems like reddit isn't a "safe platform" to express his ideas.
INSTANT EDIT Y'know, I convinced myself I'm wrong, but I'm going to post this comment anyway since it helped my change my own mind so maybe it will inform someone else.
I think "safe platform" doesn't mean "welcoming platform." If Joe's specific ideas get downvoted and called out, okay.
However, if people are tracking down and downvoting Joe when he posts about other things or tracking him to different places or to his Facebook or to his employer, that's where the line is crossed. Then it's not just "unwelcome," it's "unsafe."
And the best part is that this works no matter what Joe was posting that got people's undies in a twist.
That seriously needs a citation or something to back it up. It doesn't make any sense to me how you could claim that.
> /r/coontown will be reclassified. The content there is offensive to many, but does not violate our current rules for banning.
Seriously? /r/coontown isn't harassing, bulling, or abusing a group of people? This AMA didn't clarify anything at all, these were always the vague, sometimes enforced, rules.
People in FPH said a lot of hateful stuff, but they didn't keep it to their sub, they posted it in other subs and other forums and other social networks.
I think that is naive. People aren't going to segment their personality like that. I subscribe to /r/baseball because I'm a baseball fan. If baseball comes up on HN or /r/dataisbeautiful, I will often chime in because I'm still a baseball fan. Is that going to be any different for someone who subscribes to /r/coontown? They likely subscribe because they are racists and enjoy reinforcing that belief. Do we expect those same racist users to suddenly keep those ideas to themselves when they stumble upon Jesse Jackson posting in /r/iama?
But users of coontown apparently[1] don't post threads linking to other subs and then visit that other sub with thousand of votes and dozens of comments. FPH did.
[1] i've never read coontown so maybe I am totally wrong. Maybe they do brigade but they're so small it doesn't matter?
The fact is that people are attracted to Reddit based on content. You don't need to ban any people if you change the content to attract (and repel) different people.
Reddit is now the most popular site on the Internet for racists to congregate. I think that is a problem for the whole site. Making the site less accommodating to racists would seem to be a good first step in addressing that issue. Reddit doesn't appear willing to do that.
"If you support free speech, you can count on being accused of supporting the worst things anyone can say."
-Spam
-Publication of someone’s private and confidential information
-Anything that incites harm or violence against an individual or group of people (it's ok to say "I don't like this group of people." It's not ok to say, "I'm going to kill this group of people.")
-Anything that harasses, bullies, or abuses[2] an individual or group of people (these behaviors intimidate others into silence)
-Sexually suggestive content featuring minors
See, for example CA penal code sections 422, 653m, and 653.2.
My counterpoint is that reddit is the most popular site for just about any group to congregate on the internet. If you're a niche site trying to keep out the riff-raff your advice is definitely the way to go. But I'd argue that reddit is pretty close to a cross-section of people on the internet- and that's a desirable goal in itself. You're right that banning racist subs would discourage racists from joining the conversation generally. (Though there's an argument to be made that it would also mean leakage into the rest of reddit.) But is less-racist-than-society necessarily better than just society?
You gain not having to read assholes saying dumb things and just generally being civilized. But if those people are stuck in their isolated internet cesspools, the echo chamber could just encourage them to get worse and worse. If they're on reddit, they might have an epiphany after a conversation with someone they later realize is of another race, or they might get called out and downvoted when they say something inappropriate in a non-hate sub and realize the limits of reasonable behavior, or any number of other things.
It's been a while since I've read any literature on the subject, but I'd be surprised if the best way to cure a racist wasn't to foster interactions with both non-racists and members of another race.
The racism on Reddit is just mixed in with all the other content. Users can find it in places like the previously mentioned Jesse Jackson AMA. That serves as an opportunity for recruitment. People can be pulled into a world of concentrated racism on Reddit without even noticing.
I think that is basically what happened with FatPeopleHate. I don't think all of the 150k+ users were bad people, they just were pulled into a world of hate without realizing how damaging it could be.
It definitely becomes a balancing act, then, of whether the flow is more towards normalizing radicals or radicalizing normals. I'd hope it's more the former, and actually spez's NFWC category might help with that- since you'd have to manually opt-in to the cesspit, sort of like turning on HN's showdead.
And maybe because it's easier to stumble on it's easier to get out- once someone's hooked into Stormfront they're probably irretrievable; every aspect of their forum experience will be framed by that fact. Whereas on reddit they might have 10 cat subreddits diluting that content, it's just a matter of getting them to click that "unsubscribe" button once.
I do however feel the sub wasn't motivated by hate. It was more of ranting/reactionary sub against fat-acceptance movement and a trend to treat obesity as a normal thing.
A lot of people me included think this is harmful. I think feeding your child Coke and McDonalds every day constitutes child abuse and I think calling social workers on parents who have 200lbs kids is justified and isn't even close to harassment. I think you should be forced to buy 2 plane tickets if you can't fit in one seat etc. etc. I am as anti-bullying as people get and I am a bit of "social justice warrior" at heart but I was FPH subscriber as it was one place where what I consider insanity was called out regularly.
It was also great motivational sub for me as I am a bit overweight and many people on FPH testified they feel motivational influence as well (which btw I get now on r/fatlogic which is fantastic sub which is more careful about bullying and way more too my taste).
I think many of those 150K+ subscribers were like me. I cringed seeing occasional abusive post but the vibe I got from the place wasn't of one motivated by hate at all.
Btw I think racism is a problem and I would welcome rules to ban it. I like free discourse but racism is too much (same for misogyny although that label is applied too liberally these days). I think people are responsible for their views and spreading some views makes the world a worst place. It's a hard thing to balance but racism is established enough as harmful that it should be treated similarly to Nazism - that is banned form public discourse.
For example, check out the comments on https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/3di5ty/ben_carson...
There is one where he is called a religious nut, but that seems as bad as it gets. I don't see any problem.
It isn't useful presenting hypothetical situations. If there is a problem on /r/politics then point to it.
> The GOP can't run a black guy. The rift between voting Republican and maintaining baseless hatred for minorities would cause too many voters' heads to explode.
> You're talking as though the republican electorate has a memory.
> Can you all just admit that the entire republican party represents the ideals that this guy embraces (hating gay people) and what Donald Trump continues to spew (hating immigrants and hispanics).
The specific baseless suggestion for this post: Ben Carson wants to kill gays (because he accepted an invitation).
> Ben "Compassionate Execution" Carson
> i.e. gays are like insects? Wait, best not to give Carson any ideas...
A random suggestion that Ben Carson is a drug abuser:
> I can't comprehend how a Doctor that graduated from John Hopkins and Yale turned out the way he did.
> ...
> unfettered access to the best drugs?
Some random insults:
> Bobby "Stupid Party" Jindal, Tom "Tehran" Cotton, James "Senator Snowball" Inhofe, Bobby "the exorcist" Jindal
> Alas, it is true...Ben Carson does not have a neocortex.
All fairly typical for a political discussion, I know. Still disgusting. (Speaking as a liberal-leaning independent.)
I thought we were talking about a much wider definition of harassment, wider even than reddit policies - one which might include /r/coontown (and perhaps also /r/politics).
FPH brigaded other subs - and this is something that has always been ban-worthy on Reddit. "No vote manipulation" was always one of the rules.
FPH didn't just vote brigade; users would travel from FPH to other subs to harass people in those other subs, and FPH travelled to other sites and harassed people on those other sites.
If they'd kept it all in FPH they'd have been fine. And there's a clue in all the other FPH-style subs that didn't get banned. Identical content (ideas), different behaviour.
Ah ok, I didn't pick that nuance up. I browse Reddit a bit but stay away from the main subs, and try to ignore the drama as well.
I still don't know my opinion on this issue - while I fully support 'free speech' (as it applies in this context), if companies don't want hateful speech and groups on their platforms then I think they should be able to remove them. But it's a slippery slope :/
I've seen this argument come up a few times, but I don't think it's relevant. Of course reddit has the right to restrict whatever they want, but why should that affect your opinion on what they should restrict? (After all, that's what spez is asking for in his AMA.)
Will they run advertisements on "indecent" subreddits?
> This classification will require a login, must be opted into, will not appear in search results or public listings, and will generate no revenue for Reddit.
I'm not sure that implies anything about whether or not they'll show up in Google and Bing.
> This classification will require a login, must be opted into
That would prevent them from being visible.
Doesn't Google have a policy that sites must allow access from Google links in order to have content indexed? See for example the New York Times and their paywall, which is famously circumvented via Google.
That seems to indicate it's not that clear cut. My suspicion is they haven't really thought about it yet.
To be more clear, can disallow Google or other search engines from crawling your content, but not from including it in their index. Google (et al) can gather information and ranking about your site from back links and other pages it crawls, but it might not actually have your page content. If the engines follow current internet politeness.
As far as ads go, once they have a tiered classification system, allowing advertisers to choose which tier they're comfortable with is trivial.
EDIT- re ads: He got more direct about it with this, "I also want to claim we don't profit from them." Which indicates they won't have ads on them at all. https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3djjxw/lets_...
I'd argue that it's absolutely the site owner's prerogative to determine which sections of the site can be indexed by a search engine.
> [they] will generate no revenue for Reddit.
I'm still curious about a few things. Will subreddits be able to opt-in to be classified as "indecent"? And if so, will there be oversight on that? What if r/games decides to be "indecent" so that reddit doesn't earn money from that subreddit and to keep exposure limited?
Also, who classifies it? Is something like r/atheism, freethough, or christianity indecent because it can and does offend people? Could r/askhistorians or askscience be indecent? Some people are offended by historical and scientific truths.
Something like this seems very likely to happen. It will be interesting to see how Reddit handles it. The only good option I see for Reddit there is to try to win the mods over.
I work in the ad tech industry, and my read is that this is Huffman trying to assure brands that Reddit is a reputable venue for advertising. For example, most major brands are VERY skittish about going anywhere near family unfriendly content because they don't want to be associated with a questionable site.
From this perspective, accidentally giving toxic users an ad-free experience (a small thing) is a worthwhile tradeoff if it means you can attract the big advertisers (a huge thing).
Let's play!
No. We don't. Those people are a detriment with no redeeming qualities.
You can clash against values without being stupid.
But in any case clashing against the hivemind on reddit is quite hard, and boy oh boy the hivemind can be stupid.
If reddit actually want to make things better they can get rid of the downvote option.
In fact, I'm not sure there is a change.
I predict they'll find a new phrase for that criteria as "common decency" pretty obviously would re-classify subs that are not what they're really after.
I do think it's kind of pathetic how transparently Reddit's owners only ever respond when they get bad press from the mainstream media, instead of showing some spine and real moral leadership.
It's sad that Coke's ad buying team is what passes for a conscience today.
Reddit is creating gathering spaces for bigots and misogynists to discuss and organize harassment campaigns off reddit. (see Gamergaters harassment of women on twitter)
I am firmly of the view that speech should be allowed, and allowed to be challenged openly, though.
Honestly it feels like developers have not made a significant change to Reddit in years. Screw advertising revenue, Reddit needs to begin making improvements gradually to its user interface or else it risks becoming a dinosaur.
Not much of a Redditor, but could you elaborate as to why the vanilla Reddit UI is "unuseable"?
It does other things too, but the images is the most important IMO.
Without it you have to keep clicking back and forth from page to image.
Reddit has been stuck in a development black hole for years. If they are pumping out new features, they certainly aren't features that user's can notice or appreciate. You can get away with this neglect for awhile, but too much of it and your platform will stagnant.
Features like better content blocking at the user level are definitely more difficult than UI/UX, but they are also necessary for Reddit to reach the next level.
Honestly, rather than pursue advertising, if they got their !@#$ together to find new content streams, they could easily bring in lots of cash. They are stuck in a mindset that only their existing feature sets should be the ones that exist. Contrast that with Facebook who made many bold additions to their platforms over the years (news feed, chat). There are ways of doing this without becoming Digg. (The answer is by not removing existing functionality, but by adding to it.)
Craigslist needs an overhaul as well - it's hurting their bottom line.
While we're at it, HN is pretty crap on mobile, they should fix that - I'm sure people will like the change.
Stack Overflow has barely updated their layout for years - they are stuck in the past.
Everyone loves it when gmail and facebook force them into a different UI - people rave about the new features and definitely don't leave/complain/get confused/lose trust.
Why don't other people learn from their shining example?
Reddit bought Alien Blue, why wouldn't that count?
That being said, what reddit does need is a separate interface for people that don't like the current one. That already exists in the form of the various mobile apps.
With a few tweaks to the api, they could easily build a whole new desktop UI for folks like yourself who want something different, to run alongside the existing one.
Am I reading this right? As in, we restrict speech because people speak more freely when they're not free to speak?
OTOH, even your interpretation makes some degree of sense to me. When a community turns toxic, the bad behavior from the bad citizens drives away all of the good citizens who are positive contributors. It's just like mailing lists or discussion sites like HN. Personal attacks beget more personal attacks, and eventually so much of the comments are malicious or stupid that people who actually have something to contribute go elsewhere.
An extreme example would be YouTube comments. If you see a bunch of terrible comments that barely parse as human language, you are that much more unlikely to leave a well-written comment because why bother? It'd be pearls before swine (if all the comments are terrible, then the people who bother reading the comments are likely also terrible).
It sounds like Reddit is just trying to avoid the downward spiral that almost every electronic community goes through eventually, but are aware that taking this too far could have a chilling effect on the larger, more constructive community that they want to retain.
Presumably, they want to it in ways that are limited, reasonable and predictable so that people can have open discussions without worry. This is obviously a good goal, but it's the sort of thing that can easily get swamped in implementation details.
I don't know about reddit, but that is in face true in the real world.
In a place with no restrictions on speech, timid people, or those with controversial opinions, do not speak.
In a place with restricted speech they feel more open to speak.
https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3djjxw/lets_...
It's interesting to see what was said in the past and how it compares to the narrative today.
To read Reddit can be, in a surprisingly real way, like participating in a collective consciousness -- with all the addictive dependence [I say that in a non-judgemental way, not being able to come up with a less negative way to characterize it at the moment] that the type of speculative fiction which imagines such living arrangements usually predicts.
The practical side of this is that, for any given news event, cultural phenomenon, popularly-circulating idea, whatever: for these users it is instinctive to consult the reddit threads on the topic, as a deeply-ingrained part of their process for digesting and interpreting it. That those reddit threads will exist and have an active discussion on any given topic is a given. Even if the local source of a news piece has a forum/thread of its own, it is fundamentally not the same thing.
It's been, in a hazy golden age that may have never actually existed, something close a total function for processing the events of the world, big and small.
One day, there was an event, a dumb internet drama event, but one for which the primary Reddit discussion thread was displaying a count of 20 thousand comments -- but on inspection, every single last one of those was showing up as [deleted]. That was the start of it for most users. Many have fixated on the specific topic of that initial drama as the source of the problem with Reddit, and many others have fixated on this fixation as the source of the problem with Reddit.
But there is a general sense that this is growing, spreading, and mutating, and seems to be cropping up in places that are not strictly predictable.
For example, there are persistent rumours that several of the more popular subreddits for which the news would be directly and explicitly on-topic, are systematically removing discussions about various global trade agreements currently being negotiated. Is it true? Maybe, maybe not, but the trust is broken.
----
The main thing is (the perception that):
Now there is a partial function where before there was a total function. That is disastrous damage in an information processing system.
----
To these users, this is a very profound and frightening piece of damage, having extended a part of their cognition into this machinery that now seems to be failing. Panic sets in, which obviously means wild flailing at anything that pops its head up and can be in any way seen as responsible for the damage.
Hence, the reaction to Ellen Pao (and what would have been the reaction to Steve Huffman here, had he unilaterally taken a more extreme stance than he has here). Especially after she made public statements of purpose that were easily interpretable by these users to the effect of "whatever else might be the source of the damage to your extended cognition, we intend to start deliberately doing some more damage to areas we don't consider important".
----
----
Also important to understanding this:
To the users I'm talking about, the "cognitive value" of Reddit is not entirely about directly being fed opinions to take up as one's own.
Many of these users find great value to being exposed to, they deliberately seek out for their own enrichment: idiocy, malice, counterfactuals, cognitive dissonance, debate (honest and otherwise), the whole range of perceptions and opinions. To them, being exposed to these things is just as much of the value of Reddit as the "good stuff". And that seems to be the aspect of Reddit most strongly and immediately under threat.
Anyone who does not value this kind of experience (which seems to be a very large proportion of the people participating in this conversation at the most visible levels) is going to see any attempt to frame this type of content as valuable in any way as totally incomprehensible, evil, and malicious itself. So this part of things is pretty close to an impossible conversation to have in public.
----
----
(reposting a comment that I've made before, in a thread that was apparently soft-killed on HN)
----
> I have been a redditor for a very long time, and I've been part of a range of kinds of communities that vary fairly significantly.
> I am also a female who was raped, and this is something I have been opened about talking fairly frequently on reddit.
> I disagree with the ban of the aforementioned sub, because I feel that it sets a precedent depending on what the society deems appropriate to think about, and what it does not.
> Please note, that I can not and do not pretend to speak for any woman who was raped besides myself.
> What I am concerned with is this distinct drawing of a line between the people who own the site, and the people who create the content on the site. Reddit appealed to me because it was the closest thing to a speaking democracy I could find in my entire existence, utilizing technology in a way that is almost impossible to recreate across large populations of people otherwise.
> This sequence of events marks this as a departure from that construct. From today onwards, I know that I am not seeing clusters of people with every aspect of their humanity shown, as ugly as it may be sometimes. I feel that it is not the subreddit that causes subs like /r/rapingwomen to exist, but this stems from a larger cultural problem. Hiding it or sweeping it under a rug from the masses is not what solves the problem; I have already lived under those rules and I have seen them to be ineffective at best and traumatizing / mentally warping at worst.
> People's minds should not be ruled over by the minds of other people, and that is what I feel this has become. Internet content is thought content, idea content. It is not the act of violence - these are two very separate things. You can construct a society that appears to value and cherish women's rights in the highest regard, and yet the truth can be the furthest thing from it.
> I really would hope that you would reconsider your position. To take away the right of being able to know with certainty that one can speak freely without fear, I don't have many words to offer that fully express my sadness at that.
> The problem is not the banning of specifics. The problem is how it affects how people reason afterwards about their expectations of the site and their interactions with others. It sets up new social constructs and new social rules, and will alter things significantly, even fractions of things you would not expect. It is like a butterfly effect across the mind, to believe you can speak freely, and to have that taken away.
-- /u/abcabcdeabc, responding directly to Steve Huffman
https://np.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3djjxw/lets_t...
The only surprising thing to me about this announcement is that they didn't already have such a policy in place.
Illegal where?
That's a pretty broad catch-all.
>> These types of content are prohibited [1]: >> Spam
"Hate speech", on the other hand, is about voicing particular modern taboos. It's inherently politicized and controversial. Banning it site-wide would be little more than moralistic.