Many of the comments here are picking apart pieces of subreddit drama or are discussing specific Reddit positions, but I think that's missing the forest for the trees. The VC grow-at-all-costs model seems to be resulting in monopolistic business practices and more negative externalities than positive ones.
Msatodon/GNU Social/Qvitter right now is a thriving social network run by instance owners that federate their instances. Or you can run your own instance if you want total control of everything. Secure Scuttlebutt is a growing social network run in a fully distributed (as opposed to federated) model.
The cat is out of the bag, and if you're complaining about social media today I see no reason not to embrace modern social networks.
> The VC grow-at-all-costs model seems to be resulting in monopolistic business practices and more negative externalities than positive ones.
Bingo. The essence of it was captured by: "I think a start-up needs to think about the monetization and how it can work with the users instead of against the users."
The VC-mindset monoculture doesn't help ("majority [...] are all the same archetype").
Some programmers see a problem and say "I know, I'll add federation". Now you have 7 problems.
More seriously, I'm not seeing how federation solves any social network problem better than subreddits did? In either case, the quality of the discussion will depend on the moderators, who can be good, bad, or evil.
Federated social networks give you the ability to change allegiance or fork. Don't like a particular moderator on an instance? Leave to another instance, or start your own. Things can get problematic if other instances refuse to federate your own, but if you maintain even a bit of social capital, most instances will not block an instance with a single user. There's a growing culture (and a set of actions in the ecosystem) of letting people know when you've changed instances, because instances are becoming easier and easier to run and more and more people are trying to run their own. But if you don't want to deal with it, join one of the large already existing instances.
Federation makes a lot of moderation decisions easier. If an instance chooses to stop federating with another instance, it's not like the entire other instance disappears and those users now do not have a place to discuss their ideas, all that happens is that their ideas cannot spread into the Federated network they were cut off from. Likewise if an individual is banned from one Fediverse, then they can join one more hospitable to their beliefs. Probably the worst case scenario would be if an instance were to go down (or get hacked), in which case the users would have to find another instance to go to, but they could probably sign up at another instance that they were previously federated with.
That's a good point. But this sounds a lot like user blocking tools?
At one time, making sure that users could block other users on the same social network might have seemed like it might enough to prevent abuse and keep social networks out of the moderation business. Users that don't get along can just block each other. Good enough?
Maybe not. You say you know the "worst case" but that might not be imaginative enough? There are apparently people nastier than that, and they're creative, and they gang up.
I suspect that if federation really got going, there would be plenty of abuse. Not sure what form it would take. Chain mail? Phishing? Something new? Who is going to be in a position to fix it? How much drama will this cause?
Phishing combined with botnet attacks across multiple instances could probably pose a big problem for the network, but here's where the second facet comes in to play: instance operators are not incentivized to grow their userbase at all costs. Performing actions that might please their core userbase but may make it harder for new users to sign up, or other hurdles are something that instance operators won't shy away from, when Reddit (as evidenced in TFA) would probably tread more lightly in fear of angering users.
Even in the above botnet+phishing situation, nothing is stopping instances from cutting federation off completely and then banning suspected users, a move that a growth-oriented network would think many times before instituting.
Cutting your users off from communicating with their friends seems kind of drastic? Suppose that happened with email, the original federated network?
Though there are email blacklists for known spammers, and it can be hard to administer a new email server. You wouldn't want to block Gmail, though.
Speaking of which, I'm not seeing why every instance operator would decide not to grow. It seems like, if the federated protocol is successful and allows it, new large providers would spring up like Gmail and Hotmail.
> Cutting your users off from communicating with their friends seems kind of drastic? Suppose that happened with email, the original federated network?
> Though there are email blacklists for known spammers, and it can be hard to administer a new email server. You wouldn't want to block Gmail, though.
Most people typically find an instance with people similar to them. Most of my followers/followees are on the same instance as me. While blacklisting an instance can be problematic, it's also probably not that big of a deal for most. Moderators are more willing to take actions like this when each user does not contribute to their bottom line.
> Speaking of which, I'm not seeing why every instance operator would decide not to grow. It seems like, if the federated protocol is successful and allows it, new large providers would spring up like Gmail and Hotmail.
Hotmail and Gmail came about because running your own email is difficult (I used to run my own email). You have to setup SPF records, DKIM records, on top of which many mailers send non-standard mail out, which you have to make sure your rules accept these non-standard pieces of mail. Right now the ActivityPub standard is well defined, and most instances already follow the server-to-server API. Spam is also a huge problem in the email world because of the ease of sending an email. You don't need a mailserver to send mail to an address, but you need to setup an instance and have other users specifically follow you to send spam toots, or Fediverse messages. On top of this is a community interest in creating software (like Pleroma) that is easy to install and administer. All of these combined decrease the friction for lay (for multiple definitions of lay) users to run their own instance, which makes the gulf between a (not-yet-existent) commercial instance and a personal instance a lot smaller. While there will be a space for commercial providers which use ads or subscriptions to pay for their instances, the ease of personal setup makes centralization a lot less of a tendency for the Fediverse than it did for email.
> That's a good point. But this sounds a lot like user blocking tools?
Except that it's not at a per-user level, but at a per-instance level. Sorta like groups.
Instance A could decide that they don't like the moderation policies of instance B, and then not federate with them. This means all users on B are blocked from all users on A.
Rather than individual users having to play whack-a-mole, they can come together.
But that's not good enough per the article. The guy advocates for active moderation, for surveilling users and making sure they are "good" enough. I guess the interviewee would argue that federation is bad because you can't ban people and control the "toxicity" that way.
Switter was back online with a new CDN within a day because it's run from and (previous CDN aside) hosted in places where sex work isn't seen as a crime. They grew to tens of thousands quickly because they could tap into the existing federation, so they didn't need a marketing budget or sales team like Twitter.
People can make their own thing under their own geography-bound laws while still connecting with a global network. That's really neat.
> Mastodon/GNU Social/Quitter right now is a thriving social network
I'm going to have to disagree with this. Compared to Twitter, Facebook, even G+, they are miniscule. Are my friends there? How do I know which of these federated instances to check for my friends in the first place. And what about my company's CEO? Or IBM's blockchain engineering team? Or British Airways customer services? Or the actors in the TV series I like? NONE of them are there! So lets not pretend that these are going to replace social media - they will be the playthings of a handful of starry eyed geeks and FSF libertarians, nothing more.
I still can't get over the fact that their official mobile app stops rendering comments past a certain level of nesting. There's no indication that anything is missing, no "continue this thread" link, nothing... the comments just aren't there. I don't understand how one of the world's largest social media platforms could have a mobile app that silently hides content from the user. Just blows my mind.
It feels like increasingly they are shifting away from focusing on the comments and discussion, to trying to get readers to click, consume, leave and keep scrolling (to generate more impressions).
I'm saddened by this, and in digital battlegrounds (and I'm not using that term lightly) like /r/politics or /r/worldnews where it has been very obvious for a long time that hostile foreign nations are conducting operations there, it can result in a lot of the important meta-chatter being pushed down, or troll comments being gamed to the top without the accurate counter-response being visible anymore. This results in further distortion of the truth (or at the very least exposure to multiple sides of an argument).
Wow, thanks for that link. I was having the same problem as the parent comment, I definitely don't want their app but I also don't want a giant pop-up in my face every time I load the mobile site.
> I still can't get over the fact that their official mobile app stops rendering comments past a certain level of nesting. There's no indication that anything is missing, no "continue this thread" link, nothing... the comments just aren't there.
More than that, half the time I go into a reddit profile on my desktop and try to click a link to a comment, it just doesn't work. Literally does nothing. They changed the rendering a short time ago from straight links to some type of JS, and now profiles are broken half the time.
I don't understand what you mean... The official reddit app on iOS show comments as deep as you want, as far as I can tell. They default to collapsed the further you go deep/down in subcomments, but have buttons that say things like "6 more replies".
Beyond a certain level they stop indenting, so the actual hierarchy is no longer clear, but that's necessary because there wouldn't be enough horizontal space otherwise. But the content is still all there, as far as I can tell.
If you're not by a desktop, you can verify the missing comments by viewing the link in mobile Safari (in an ironic twist, Reddit's mobile web view is actually more functional than their native app).
I wonder how many people are out there, like you, who have no idea this is going on. The terrible thing about silently hiding comments is that there's no indication that anything is missing, so most people don't even realize it's happening. The only reason I know about this is because my subreddit, /r/AskOuija, often has deeply nested comment threads (due to the nature of the subreddit). Reddit's broken mobile app is actively interfering with the functionality of my subreddit, resulting in a lot of redundant comment replies from people using the mobile app (since it appears to them that these nested comments have yet to be replied to).
> mobile web view is actually more functional than their native app
Thank goodness for that! Reddit isn't so complicated that I need a special app for it. It's a website and it works well as a website. It could be better but there's nothing happening on the site that a browser can't natively handle just fine.
If you're on iOS, I recommend Apollo for reddit, I actually was using Alien Blue for the longest time because I also hated the official app, but I switched to Apollo a few months ago and it has been great.
>Were there moments in which Reddit chose to double down on something and made it that much harder to work toward a solution?
>> I don’t know. I’m trying to think about your question.
>Is there something recent that you’re thinking of?
>> I can’t remember the specific instances right now, but there was a bunch of press about things that were going on on Reddit and Discord, and they both reacted and banned the subreddit.
>> I’ve got a lot of advice for start-ups, and it’s not very fucking complicated. It’s just: Think about the impact that you want to have on your users and on the people consuming your content and do the right thing. They know what the right thing is.
Sounds like this guy has a lot of vague complaints but not much in the way of concrete solutions, other than "do the right thing" which in his mind is extremely obvious and yet undefined.
>>Sounds like this guy has a lot of vague complaints but not much in the way of concrete solutions, other than "do the right thing" which in his mind is extremely obvious and yet undefined.
Maybe he's operating on the same principle espoused by Justice Potter Stewart's "I know it when I see it" threshold test[1].
That's an uncharitable interpretation of what are, I think, pretty clear words on his part.
He says he doesn't know how to fix existing broken entrenched sites like Reddit and Twitter but does have suggestions for sites that are just getting started.
Sounds like it's "don't be so stuck on 'free speech' that you let nazis and trolls dictate the dialogue"; strong moderation is what's been missing. Banhammers from on high, and damn the whiners.
I agree, but will go further to claim that the entire interview was horrible. So little information was conveyed in soo many words. He either had nothing to say, couldn't articulate what he had to say, or both.
Reddit wouldn't be so toxic if the vote counts were hidden, but echo chamber validation is the ultimate badge of honor there. There is so much in this document that applies to all things Reddit (please note that I wrote it inspired by my time on Reddit): https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Avoiding_Tr...
I'm not sure hiding vote counts is sufficient, since comments are still displayed based on them. The 'Theory of Reddit' sub did some pretty compelling analyses showing that the first 3-5 votes almost completely predict eventual vote direction, and that the top comments in a thread will consistently be the first handful of upvoted comments.
Which also explains complaints of the shape "Reddit hates X one day, but loves X the next!" Whoever shows up first with an idea people don't hate ends up becoming the dominant voice of that specific conversation.
A subreddit solely dedicated to auditing the quality of moderation on various subs would go a long way to give reddit the tools to remove problematic moderators. Ultimately the quality of the mod makes the quality of sub.
I read about one strategy on my favorite subreddit. A user admitted to posting memes and cheap content there, then going into /new and downvoting every other post and upvoting his own with a couple alternate accounts.
I don't actually comment in reddit threads with more than 15 comments for this reason: there's no point, no one will read it. And if they do, they won't care.
The vote thing is true. If I'm the first to comment I'm usually at the top, or near the top, of the thread.
Fundamentally the problem, I think is anonymity. On the Internet no one knows you're a dog.
I have both pseudonymous handles on reddit and also I go by my own name. On Hacker News I only go by my own name. And I have found that it made me a much, MUCH better person when posting. So now I post on reddit about 95% of the time under my own name as well.
When you have no skin in the game -- such as your reputation to uphold, no superego to hold yourself in check -- a person's id reveals itself. And it's not pretty.
Maybe you "become a better person" when you post under your real name, but Facebook, which has a real name requirement, is a cesspool, and this community, where most people use pseudonyms, is relatively civil.
You can have an identity and "skin in the game" without using your real name. You can also use your real name and not care/be aware of the consequences of things you say online.
Agreed, but note that for a lot of people on Facebook, their primary audience are friends, family & acquaintances; people who will mostly tolerate your (contrarian) views, whether you display tact or otherwise. People are the center of conversations on FB.
This contrasts with a place like HN which has no concept of friends and family -- the center of everything here is the comment box. That's a great trade-off as it allows us to focus attention on debating contrarian ideas, and less on the one who is airing it.
We've seen with facebook that have real names doesn't improve the level of discourse that much.
I think it's the protection (or at least the apparent protection): you can't be a jerk in person in a public place without exposing yourself to immediate negative repercussions. That's why online forums with harsher moderation are usually much better (one of the best examples being /r/askhistorians).
Indeed I 5hink it's the missing direct personal contact.
It takes a lot of, say, training, to learn to use communication media, too. You just can't have a chat as if face to face, in writing. And most people aren't well educated at authoring, either. At the worst, some wouldn't even know how to lead a conversation anyhow. Online forums just expose that. And I think we as a society at large, are still figuring this out, since 50 to 100 years, so it's a mess.
What does "private garden" mean here? People have no problem showing up on public Facebook groups, visible to all, and posting racist stuff in their real names.
I think, and totally admit it is pure speculation, that the hate foments in the private garden until the person is brainwashed enough to believe their hate is a normal and acceptable viewpoint. It is at that point that it leaks out into the public groups, visible to all.
> Fundamentally the problem, I think is anonymity. On the Internet no one knows you're a dog.
No, anonymity is not new to the internet and is actually one of the beneficial aspects, since it makes people more likely to say what they think, and less likely to be a target for others. Lots of anonymous BBS are moderated just fine. Meanwhile, Facebook can be very vitriolic.
The fundamental problem is the assumption that moderation is not needed and free speech is everything. It seems to have gotten popularized by Reddit in particular.
Nobody who has spent lots of time on BBS, IRC, and other typically moderated spaces would think anonymity is even relevant.
Would you have used your real name if you were gay in 1950?
The internet is not where politics are decided, but at the very least that’s where a good part of the debate happens. Use real names and you’ll be able to blackmail people into approving things they disapprove. What about publishing everyone’s votes, while you’re at it? No, people need a safe space to experiment debating about good and bad ideas without risk.
Real name policies are only about the ability to blackmail and coerce.
As a thought experiment - would slavery in the US have ended sooner or later if we had anonymous internet from the 18th century on? I'm not implying there is any clear answer, but I think it is a simple way of immediately seeing much of the nuance of this issue that you might miss at a cursory consideration.
Self censorship due to social pressure certainly keeps some people (as has been mentioned Facebook shows clearly enough that lots of people simply don't care) from discussing things that they would not feel comfortable discussing under their real name. And those things that they might not feel comfortable discussing can be negative, but they can also be positive. In either case, I think it's probably a net positive for society when people can discuss things they actually feel instead of things that they think others think they should feel, even though those others might not even feel that way! Shouldn't society operate in a way that we think it should operate instead of the way that we collectively think everybody else thinks we think it should operate?
I disagree. Anonymity allows you to express unpopular views that you wouldn't be able to in real life. But the existence of downvoting basically defeats that, except in unpopular echo chambers, of course.
Who decides what is "trolling"? I think there should be moderators but that it's possible to see what moderators have done and impossible for them to actually delete posts. That way each person can decide if they are happy with the moderation being done.
Yes, but that needs to be balanced by the distorted form of reputation people get even when they are polite and thoughtful due to the lack of any emotional channel in text-based web forums. Add to that the fact that in real life, people have many sides to their personalities, which are inhibited or eccentuated in different contexts; but the impression the web gives of people lacks those contexts.
Then, consider the good that anonymity has allowed for; think of all the things people have able to speak out about anonymously which would have gone unsaid.
> Then, consider the good that anonymity has allowed for; think of all the things people have able to speak out about anonymously which would have gone unsaid.
HN has a different audience and moderation so i m not sure its just your name. When people are posting with real name, it changes the dynamic, the post becomes part of the social signaling, which can lead them to refrain from saying some truths, or to support things they don’t really believe but align well with their real life identity.
Pseudonyms are just a symptom, I guess. A name is another channel for communication. For real names, origin was usually intimitly tied to identity. John Doe or Lisa Muller is as much a pseudonym as JDog123 would be, without further references. Real Name policy much relates to overlap between internet and local interactionnand discoverability. If I don't need to be discovered by non locals (as defined by my off-line reach; which today is a false schism, but anyway), I can use my name for artful expression.
There are cases where I don't want to be discovered, too. The latter, Obscurity (hiding), shouldn't be confused with the former, Security (literally without worry or need).
That's a great point. In the end it's an identity problem. This is one place where I think that blockchain technology might actually help. (Jesus, now I'm one of them.)
There has to be pseudonymous/anonymous channels for information, but the bile has been so intense lately that it makes me think that the majority of communications need to be positively identified.
There are some subreddits where they are hidden for a period of time (not sure how long, but it's quite a while). I wonder if anyone has analyzed those?
Low-effort comment, but: I really appreciate your content, both here and on Reddit. It's refreshing to see anyone doing any of this sort of analysis, and it takes a lot of effort to do it, and you do it really well and at a rate that's mind-boggling.
Was /r/politics given a vote-hiding feature that other subreddits didn't have? Votes and downvote buttons are typically hidden with custom CSS that users can disable, which would completely invalidate these results. Votes can be hidden for real for a short time, but cannot be disabled completely.
/r/politics is aggressively left-wing, so much so that I'd doubt anyone interested in real discourse is trying anymore. I'd think an experiment like that would need to be done on a clean subreddit that isn't bringing in any baggage, or a pre-existing ideology-based ban list, to test its validity.
r/politics said it didn’t make much difference, but they left it that way anyhow.
The feedback based ranking implicitly supports echo chambering, but there’s not much of a way around that.
> The feedback based ranking implicitly supports echo chambering, but there’s not much of a way around that.
Traditional topic-based forums are better, because you can't suppress unpopular-but-correct opinions by downvoting. Even if you don't care about Fake Internet Points (and the reason they exist is because we do, gamification works), if you state something that goes against the prevailing hivemind your opinion will literally be hidden unless users go out of their way to find them.
(and yes, I browse HN with showdead=yes for the same reason)
Vote counts on HN are hidden - doesn't stop a lot of toxic behavior on here.
The problem is down votes are not a good comment tool. Especially combined with hiding and such. Upvote only systems are much more resilient to the kind of gaming mechanics you see here and on reddit.
What is meant by "gaming mechanics you see here"? Could you be more specific? Of course, voting does affect what gets posted, but that's the point. If your authentic voice doesn't appeal to HN voters, then develop another voice that does appeal to us!
Isn’t that how you get a popularity-driven echo chamber? If only certain points of view will get upvoted or avoid downvotes, only those points of view will be posted or get discussed.
Yes it does encourage some posts and discourage others. At times it might seem that is based on "points of view", but more often it's about form, logic, salience, or substance. Preferences probably vary on those measures, but keeping the discussion within tighter bounds in these senses is just a part of HN.
I post here a lot and my posts get downvoted and upvoted a lot. I don't see any "gaming mechanics", whatever that is. If you have a reason to believe that stuff is happening, please share that with the rest of us.
Also, you overstate this "compatibility". For humans, loss hurts more than gain feels good. Voting with negative as well as positive reinforcement is simply more effective at changing comment styles.
That blob is (ironically) extremely ideological/generalising. Doesn't mean I don't disagree with it though, maybe just the approach/tone.
I believe you may be grouping strong (and maybe not always right) opinions with flat out chaotic evil trolls (whom there are actually extremely few).
It's been intruiging to grow up witnessing the appearance of the term "troll", initially designated to IRC and other net spammers, to it's present and increasingly meaningless, nebulous definition of "mean people on the internet". It's a big difference, which your linked blob quite interestingly evidences :D
I strongly disagree. Whether the points are displayed or not, voting is what revolutionized forums. I find voting forums almost universally better than non-voting ones, because voting sorts by relevance by default.
I still dread the (lack of) content quality that I've come to associate with phpbb forums (and their ilk).
The problem with the upvote/downvote system is that it's too simplistic. If you have an opinion that goes against the status quo, a lot of people will downvote your comment simply because they disagree with what you said on some emotional level.
Of course, past a certain number of downvotes, you post will be buried, so you have basically an echo chamber.
Echochamber sounds bad, resonant frequency response sounds neutral, and it's needed for harmony. The real problem then is kakophonie, noise, and choosing the instrument to play on with a nice timbre, noise floor, etc. The internet is large and finding the right venue and audience is difficult.
There is value in being told to have hit the wrong tone.
This is why shorter messages and twitter are important, it allows a finer grained ... censorship? (Zensur in German also means grade, shool mark). That's why many people, I at least, discuss online, looking for light conversation, so emotional feedback should be welcome as ''the basic unit of exchange in communication''.
People can sense when there's harmony in music, but what about an opinion? To me, the real problem is lack of emotional distance.
I was in a thread where a woman declared that all men are inherently abusive/violent toward women. I pointed out to her that this is not only a ridiculous statement, but also quite insulting. How can we make such sweeping generalization?
I was down-voted and told that my feeling didn't matter. Soon, other angry people joined in and my reply was buried. My comment went against a certain narrative.
It's not ironic. My feeling don't matter in the discussion with the women, she just said my feeling don't matter, probably to invalidate what I said to her.
"High Quality Level" is a relative measure though. It's really easy for a heavily moderated discussion forum to become an echo chamber for the moderator's views.
> I had conversations with Jason [Citron] a year ago about the problem of white supremacy on his site, and he said, “I don’t want to invade their privacy by going into their channels and reading what they’re doing.” And I said, “They’re gonna cause deaths because you’re not doing that.” And he said, “You really think so?” And I said, “Yeah.” And sure enough they didn’t do anything, and sure enough deaths were caused because of the shit going on in their channels.
I'm not sure I can agree with this kind of moralizing. It's the same argument that blames gun manufacturers for school shootings. Clearly the latter argument is absurd, and yet very intelligent people subscribe to the former argument. So either some step is missing here that differentiates these two arguments, or we should be focusing on the real problem.
More than agreeing or not with this line of thinking, I find the bigger problem is how selectively it is applied. People will point out that if we ban guns, we wouldn't have to worry about school shootings. Even if we ignored the logistics of such a challenge and agreed on the conclusion, why is the same logic not applied to things like alcohol and all the harms that results (drunk driving, alcoholics ruining their lives, etc). And some people do that (I think MADD would be one case, especially for the subset of their members wanting to ban all alcohol); yet even in that case those people selectively apply the same reasoning about something else.
Look at those who ignore the harm of buying drugs from unverified sources, where you may be paying money to a supply chain ran by the cartel. People are tortured and killed to get the drugs delivered, and if one doesn't verify (or if one insufficiently verifies) then they are funding such activities, but many are willing to ignore that. But change from drugs to escorting and you'll find some of the same people now saying that it should be banned because without sufficient verification it is possible to paying people who are coerced or forced into doing it. The overall argument has valid points and problem points, but the discrepancy of when it is applies makes discussing the validity harder when it seems people aren't being transparent about their motivations to begin with.
> Even if we ignored the logistics of such a challenge and agreed on the conclusion, why is the same logic not applied to things like alcohol and all the harms that results (drunk driving, alcoholics ruining their lives, etc).
Indeed, and we already tried that, and it led to the rise of organized crime. But I think it's important not to get sucked into "slippery slope" style reasoning. There can be good reasons why banning alcohol would be problematic, but banning guns would not. It depends on the surrounding culture. For instance, if enjoying a drink a few times a week was universal, but almost no one owned a gun.
> The overall argument has valid points and problem points, but the discrepancy of when it is applies makes discussing the validity harder when it seems people aren't being transparent about their motivations to begin with.
I think it's largely because people see symptoms, and look backwards in the causal chain to something they think they understand and can blame as "the" problem. People are pretty weak with nuance on tough and emotionally charged issues.
The concentration of gun ownership varies markedly across regions though. Not sure that's true of drinking, which I expect would be pretty universal.
In any case, at worst your data suggests that banning guns in the US would be just as impossible as banning alcohol turned out to be, which very well could be true.
I have another take (I have an alcoholic relative and know quite a few people who don't drink at all) on this.
An alcoholic has many chances to turn his or her life around. It's a long, slow story. It's not inevitable. With the right support, it's possible to stop drinking and lead a healthy and fulfilling life.
Contrast this to the kind of events that result in deaths from guns in the US. The recent school shooting of course springs to mind. A bunch of kids were shot and killed. They had no chance. None.
It's not just the end statistics but the method at which we arrive at them.
> A bunch of kids were shot and killed. They had no chance. None.
Why did you compare an alcoholic that harms none but themselves with people who were shot? Wouldn't a drunk driver killing people be a more apt comparison?
The thing is, you don’t really need to theorise about how to stop school shootings. It’s been done. It just required people to prioritise children’s lives over a minority hobby.
(I’m from a country where owning a gun is legal, but controlled, and has no school shootings. We used to have less control, and school shootings happened.)
>The thing is, you don’t really need to theorise about how to stop school shootings. It’s been done.
It's still theorizing because there are no comparable countries to the US that have done it when it comes to the number of guns already out there (300+ million) and the importance of the 2nd amendment to many of the citizens.
>It just required people to prioritise children’s lives over a minority hobby.
If you see it as a "minority hobby" rather than a right, this makes complete sense. Would you also suggest banning protests in response to violence and death at protests because it's even more of a "minority hobby" than gun ownership?
It’s been done for hundreds of millions of people and hundreds of millions of guns, and it’s regulation not removing all guns, which is already done in the US, you can’t get a rocket launcher, so why am assault rifle?
No banned guns, just licenses, gun safes, regulation on types, reasonable ownership limits (all farmers I know in Aus have 5+ guns) - that’s all it takes to stop mass shootings.
If it’s a hobby that’s fine, that’s a valid application reason for example, you just have to prove you like guns and go to a range or subscribe to a gun magazine and you can buy them. That 30 minute hurdle provides a barrier to enough people.
I love guns and have no wish to see them further restricted but this is a terrible argument. The features that are used to define a civilian 'assault rifle' unquestionably make them more dangerous than a hunting rifle.
The military didn't decide to start having pistol grips on their rifles because it looks cool, vertical foregrips originated in the military and it wasn't because they look cool. I own a .308 rifle with a pistol grip, folding stock, foregrip, bayonet lug, threaded barrel and a 20 round magazine and none of these features are needed for hunting but they are damned convenient for killing people.
You can try to tell me that it's no more deadly than a hunting rifle but there are reasons that the seal team 6 don't go in with hunting rifles and full auto fire isn't the only reason.
I think it's important to recognize that these rifles are more than just hunting rifles and also that we should still be allowed to have them because the second amendment is NOT about hunting.
I agree that the 2nd amendment is not about hunting, but I also think it's important to point out that "assault weapons" are a political target because they look like military assault rifles, not because of their features. People who know nothing about guns are judging them by their superficial appearance.
The features you mentioned:
A 20 round magazine is unrelated to "assault weapons". Those are available for handguns and for hunting rifles without pistol grips as well.
The deadliest war in history, WW2, was fought with rifles without pistol grips (only a few thousand were produced near the end). Not having pistol grips didn't stop soldiers from killing unprecedented numbers of people.
And how many mass killers actually used bayonets or a folding stock?
The backwards thing about the second amendment is that the USA is easily the closest western country I’ve been to to a police state. Contrast the militarisation of the police in the USA with a far more “free” country like New Zealand (with significant gun regulation).
Just like the 2nd amendment militia arming would have been useless against the German government (like the BEF which had many tanks and planes and heavy weapons) it’s useless today against heavily armed state and modern military equipment (drones, tanks).
> Would you also suggest banning protests in response to violence and death at protests because it's even more of a "minority hobby" than gun ownership?
He didn't suggested banning, he suggested controlling them which is extremely different.
I don't know for your country (but I'm pretty sure it's the same), but in mine protest are controlled too. You need to give your plan well in advance and it need to be approved first. You never seen a protest becoming illegal and people getting arrested for it?
>He didn't suggested banning, he suggested controlling them which is extremely different.
And which is the next step for someone who does want to ban it. At least in the US the discussion has reached the point where one side no longer trusts the intentions of the other side, so anything that could eventually help a ban (such as a registry) is seem as being for the purpose of eventually helping a ban. This isn't without reason either, given that many past compromises are now seen as not enough and begun being presented as errors in previous laws that need to be fixed.
How shall we define banned? Obviously no government anywhere has completely banned guns - they all arm at least some portion of their police and most allow bodyguards to carry guns to protect the wealthy and powerful.
I used the word banned meaning "made impossible for a large number of people to own legally". Governments that theoretically allow permits but rarely grant those permits in practice have effectively banned guns.
A gun if fundamentally designed to kill. That's the only reason it exists. Yes you can use it to eat cereal, I guess, or you can dip the nozzle in paint and create wonderful art, or maybe you can load an AR-15 with 30 rounds and shoot at a giant wall of cheese to make hipster Swiss cheese, but most people realize why guns exist - to end life. Human life, or animal life, but some form of life.
I hear various arguments how somehow a bunch of rednecks armed to the teeth are the reason why the Government hasn't yet come and locked me away in a FEMA Death Camp, but I don't buy it.
Alcohol does not exist to end life. It can be used to end life, yes, either through abuse, or by someone driving intoxicated - but that's not why it exists. It can, and is, used safely, by millions of adults world-wide.
I can go into a room and see someone "brandishing" a shot of whiskey and not be concerned for my safety. If I walk into a room and see a bunch of nutters brandishing guns, I'm getting the fuck out. At best, they're a bunch of insecure-in-their-masculinity macho-wanna-be's - at best. No normal person looks at someone obsessed with firearms and thinks "that's just a normal person with a normal hobby like my aunt Tilly who collects stamps" - nobody.
This is why this whole argument how guns are awesome and we shouldn't be afraid of them but should encourage them and, hell, let's arm teachers and doctors and soccer moms and even the kids' lacrosse teams, why not, it's just like giving them a glass of wine - is starting to sound more and more hollow.
It was, after all, a lunatic with a gun who killed a bunch of people at that Vegas concert, not a guy with a beer keg and some Jaeger bombs. Unless I'm not quite remembering the facts.....nah, pretty sure it wasn't Jaeger bombs.
> A gun if fundamentally designed to kill. That's the only reason it exists.
That's the reason it was invented, that's not the only reason it still exists. According to stats cited above, 1 in 3 Americans have a gun. Why aren't two thirds of you dead if guns only exist to kill?
The truth is, people have fun shooting guns. Just like they have fun in archery contests, despite the fact that bows and arrows were also invented only to kill.
> A gun if fundamentally designed to kill. That's the only reason it exists.
Yes, and people need to kill other people sometimes to defend their lives and the lives of their loved ones. You may not like this reason, but that's the truth.
Guns are a bad analogy because manufacturers have no control over their use post purchase. If gun manufacturers could take back their guns (ban users) when somebody threatened illegal violence the analogy would be closer, and it would be quite reasonable to expect them to do so.
Who you're selling to can make a big difference. An extreme Example is Heckler and Koch that supposedly exported G36 illegally to the conflict zones of Mexico. But there are also legal examples, for instance weapon manufacturers lobby for laxer laws, including how weapons need to be handled after they are bought.
> If gun manufacturers could take back their guns (ban users) when somebody threatened illegal violence the analogy would be closer, and it would be quite reasonable to expect them to do so.
Except creating a new profile on reddit is trivial, so "banning" is a weak threat at best.
> It’s a more effective deterrent than doing nothing at all.
Is it? You seem pretty certain of this, so how can you be sure banning just wouldn't galvanize them further? Your line of reasoning is exactly why Fox news was created, and now look where the US is.
The idea that these "hate speech" venues have caused deaths is thrown around quite often, but I wonder if a connection has been found in even a single case. Gaping chasm between rhetoric and reality.
>I wonder if a connection has been found in even a single case.
I'd argue that the psychopaths who're attracted to such forums have their hateful beliefs reinforced and amplified by them. Whether or not they would've ended up killing people even if they'd never started hanging out on those forums is hard to say, but it seems pretty naïve to me to assume that those "hate speech" venues didn't have an effect on them.
See the many murderers who've been active on Stormfront for example.
You could argue that, but there's no real evidence for it and it's been studied with music, television and video games. All have been blamed, using the argument that you'd have to be naive to assume that killing people in a video game doesn't have an effect on someone's likelihood of killing people in real life, or listening to angry music makes you more likely to hurt people.
The list of murderers who've listened to 2Pac is quite long, for example.
I don't know about the other media, but the effects of TV are both disastrous and thoroughly demonstrated. IQ, SAT scores, obesity, teen pregnancy, violence, tobacco… Depending on what you watch and how often, all can be increased. All won't show on each individual, but the statistical effect is far from negligible.
As for video games… that's a tricky one. I recall an anecdote about two teens holding up a bakery at gun point. The baker at some point made a move that was a bit too sudden, and the teen shot him in the forehead. One possible facilitator is very similar to a soldier's training: simple conditioning about shooting the bad guys as soon as they threaten your avatar in your favourite FPS. For all I know the teen didn't even intend to shoot.
Of course, it takes more than a lifetime of violent video games to actually point a gun at someone. But a tiny nudge can sometimes push you over the edge. By the way, I expect the nudge will get bigger with VR. (So will the benefits, I expect.)
While awful, one of the problems with that facilitator is that you don't shoot the enemy when they threaten you in an FPS. You shoot them when you see them.
The host of scientists who conducted their studies know this. Which is why they did many such studies (some of them very large scale), controlled for confounding variables, modified the parameters across time in both direction (watching more and watching less this and that kind of show), and of course reproduced most of the results.
Go tell them "correlation does not prove causation", and they will laugh in your face. We're long past correlation by now. Causation itself has been thoroughly demonstrated.
Thanks for the explanation, I will look into it. I could see how media may be a reinforcing cycle for some, similar to how people may be susceptible to alcoholism differently.
Another causation / anti-causation question is what effect porn (possibly specifically rape-fantasy porn) has on rape rates. There are two obvious arguments that point in opposite directions. The first is that rape-fantasy porn acclimates the user to the idea of sexual violence and makes the user more likely to commit it; the second is that rape-fantasy porn gives the user a safe outlet for their baser desires and makes them _less_ likely to commit actual rape. AFAIK we can say that access to porn, and all kinds of porn, has increased a great deal, while rape rates have gone pretty steadily down, during the last few decades; a graph on Wikipedia shows annual U.S. rape rates going from 2.5 per 1000 down to 0.5 per 1000. This doesn't prove the second theory—I think violent crime in general also went down—but it at least shows that, if the first theory is correct, the effect it describes is much smaller than everything else that affects rape rates.
I can think of arguments for why white-nationalist forums would decrease the likelihood that the white nationalists who find them would go and kill non-whites. (a) Such a person might feel relieved to find that there are others who feel similarly, and therefore not feel like their cause has no one working for it and they need to do something spectacular and terrifying to attract attention. (b) They might have few friends in real life, and they can't fully show themselves to the ones they do have, so they have no truly close friends. But on the forum, they meet fellows who share their beliefs and feel they can trust, and then they make what feel like close friends. And now they'll know that, if they kill someone, that carries a high risk of getting thrown in jail and cut off from their friends; that extra disincentive might be enough to stop them. (c) On that note, the most visible and admired participants in the forum are not going to be those who go out and kill people, because (I assume) people can't continue posting when they're in jail. The general incentives of the forum probably point towards being a blowhard who doesn't do anything.
This is why I will only accept the conclusion "Letting white nationalists gather on a particular forum will cause more white-nationalist-perpetrated killings" if I see a decent study showing it.
(I think one of the official basic arguments for freedom of association and of the press is that, if you prevent people with grievances from associating and publishing their views, they will go underground and then get violent.)
(Incidentally, I do like it when one of my possible conclusions is that, in order to reduce the likelihood of people doing terrible things, the solution is to work to raise everyone's standard of living, so they'll be too comfortable to want to risk losing what they have.)
> I'd argue that the psychopaths who're attracted to such forums have their hateful beliefs reinforced and amplified by them
I agree. I think the echo chamber effect is well documented at this point, and it's something that's happening even in mainstream media.
I would still hesitate to say that we should lay the blame on these forums though, or undeniably conclude that that's where we should be making changes to prevent such problems. If we hold free speech as a principle in high regard, we shouldn't so easily sacrifice it.
>I would still hesitate to say that we should lay the blame on these forums though, or undeniably conclude that that's where we should be making changes to prevent such problems.
I wouldn't say lay the blame on the forums for the actions for their members, however I do think it would be somewhat justified to lay the blame on forums for knowingly allowing these hateful ideologies to spread to more and more people due to their lack of action/moderation.
It's been shown that banning hateful subreddits reduces the amount of hate speech on the site by users who used to post on those banned subreddits.[1] It's hard to say if those users simply took their hate speech to some other website, but even if they did their sphere of influence would then most likely be much smaller than it was on reddit.
>If we hold free speech as a principle in high regard, we shouldn't so easily sacrifice it.
This is a difficult topic but I think that there definitely should be some limits. After all we're talking about what rules private companies should have for what kind of content is allowed on their websites (i.e. what content they are okay with hosting on their servers) and not what kind of content the government should allow/disallow.
A viewpoint I found interesting (and reasonable) in regards to limiting speech is Karl Popper's paradox of tolerance.
"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
> It's been shown that banning hateful subreddits reduces the amount of hate speech on the site by users who used to post on those banned subreddits.
But as you say, it doesn't necessarily reduce hate or hate speech overall. In fact, it may even galvanize it further. How do you think the US got all of those conservative news networks like Fox? Because rich conservatives got tired of their opinions being ignored or silenced (from their perspective).
Great quote by Popper, but the problem is that there is great intolerance on both sides of the spectrum, left and right. The extreme left on reddit is not being silenced the way the extreme right is. Both sides are intolerant of facts and rational argument that doesn't adhere to their dogma, so why is only one being pushed out?
I read some studies awhile back that suggested that centrism appears to be no more or less persuasive to most people than extremist positions. People will latch on to specific things that resonate, and just adopt the rest thinking that said resonance means they belong in this group, which ultimately leads to polarization around a small number of extreme positions that are irreconcilable. Takeaway facts: a) that seems to explain the US's politics over the past few decades, b) bipartisan-type compromise may not be a stable condition, and c) centrism is itself a position that needs its own advocates.
> The extreme left on reddit is not being silenced the way the extreme right is.
I think this is a false equivalence. The extreme right is deeply racist/homophobic/sexist, denies science, advocates for a theocracy and for the shutting down of government services to the extent that millions of people will die. Say what you want about the "extreme" left's social policies but they're really not on that level.
> The extreme right is deeply racist/homophobic/sexist, denies science, advocates for a theocracy and for the shutting down of government services to the extent that millions of people will die.
Would you like me to point you to the videos of extreme left protests assaulting professors on campuses for wanting to host an open debate on topics they find offensive? Or videos on extreme left protestors trying to shut down any scientific discussion that raises the fact of differences between men and women.
I can also show you the recent amendments to the Ontario law in which it is now illegal to not use non-gendered pronouns. I'm sure you've heard of Peterson and his crusade, and while he's got some kooky views on some matters, he's not entirely wrong about the dangers of our human rights tribunals and how they will apply this law (see the Lindsay Shepherd incident where they already tried to censor an academic discussion on this issue).
I can also show you plenty of instances of organized campaigns to harass, disrupt and ruin people's lives for off-hand comments made online.
Sorry, but it's no longer a false equivalence. The extreme left has become just as extreme, just as anti-science, and just as dangerous as the extreme right. Note that we're not talking about ordinary leftist/liberal policies of social programs, and such, we're talking extreme left that, for instance, denies even the existence of gender and for whom denying this fact simply makes you an evil tyrant that they seek to literally ruin.
> I can also show you the recent amendments to the Ontario law in which it is now illegal to not use non-gendered pronouns.
No need, I'm familiar with it. Here's what they themselves say about it:
---
Is it a violation of the Code to not address people by their choice of pronoun?
The law recognizes that everyone has the right to self-identify their gender and that “misgendering” is a form of discrimination.
As one human rights tribunal said: “Gender …may be the most significant factor in a person’s identity. It is intensely personal. In many respects how we look at ourselves and define who we are starts with our gender.”[1] The Tribunal found misgendering to be discriminatory in a case involving police, in part because the police used male pronouns despite the complainant’s self-identification as a trans woman.
Refusing to refer to a trans person by their chosen name and a personal pronoun that matches their gender identity, or purposely misgendering, will likely be discrimination when it takes place in a social area covered by the Code, including employment, housing and services like education. The law is otherwise unsettled as to whether someone can insist on any one gender-neutral pronoun in particular.
Gender-neutral pronouns may not be well known. Some people may not know how to determine what pronoun to use. Others may feel uncomfortable using gender-neutral pronouns. Generally, when in doubt, ask a person how they wish to be addressed. Use “they” if you don’t know which pronoun is preferred.[2] Simply referring to the person by their chosen name is always a respectful approach.
---
This is completely reasonable. I identify as male, and if someone kept using she/her/hers pronouns or it/its pronouns to refer to me I'd be offended and rightly so. There's a lot of misinformation about this specific issue, all of it pushed by right-wing "news" outlets. Don't fall for it.
> Peterson and his crusade...
Please don't give this rage merchant any more air time. He purposefully distorts and reduces complex issues for self-aggrandizement. If you're really curious about the issues he raises, just dig into to gender and race studies.
> Assaults, organized campaigns to harass...
I'm not going to minimize the assaults. I am gonna say that they don't compare to the KKK or any of a number of radical right groups. The left simply has nothing with the scale or history of those groups.
But re: organized campaigns to harass, ruin people's lives online, etc., again a twitter campaign is nothing like bills to deny you control of your body (reproductive rights). It's nothing like a racist criminal justice system. It's nothing like a society where LGBT people experience mind numbing levels of sexual assault (https://www.hrc.org/resources/sexual-assault-and-the-lgbt-co...).
Again I'm not saying there aren't excesses on the left. I'm sure there have been cases where someone didn't deserve to be fired, and the assaults are inexcusable. But there is simply no equivalence between the left and the right in modern western societies.
> I'm sure there have been cases where someone didn't deserve to be fired
Also, I just wanted to note that I don't really buy into this argument. I don't see why someone "deserves to be fired" for their political views, no matter how racist, as long as they don't let their views impact the performance of their duties. So the Kim Davis' of the world absolutely deserve to be fired, but the plethora of other examples I can dig up for you, not so much.
The justification is often that such shaming campaigns are natural corrective measures, but I think more often the complete opposite happens: people are driven from moderate positions to the opposite extremist positions, because the people harassing them are just so unreasonable, and moderate leftists like yourself have zero sympathy for them. This is one way radicalization can happen.
> I don't see why someone "deserves to be fired" for their political views, no matter how racist, as long as they don't let their views impact the performance of their duties.
I agree if by "political views" you mean things like monetary policy or foreign policy. But I personally couldn't ask women to work with people who think they shouldn't be in the workplace, or LGBT people to work with people who think they're irredeemable abominations, or people of color to work with people who think they're inferior because of their race. To me, these views disqualify you from being a productive member of society and I don't really classify them as political views. For example, I don't think anti-semitism is a political view, I think it's just hatred and bigotry. Further, I'm mildly offended when I see people equating "bigotry against conservatives" with "bigotry against historically oppressed groups", because those oppressed groups have suffered intense physical harm. Conservatives really have not. Another reason this whole thing is a false equivalence.
> people are driven from moderate positions to the opposite extremist positions, because the people harassing them are just so unreasonable, and moderate leftists like yourself have zero sympathy for them. This is one way radicalization can happen.
Mostly I agree, but I don't think that in general "the people who are harassing them" are being unreasonable. I think culture in the US is largely sexist, racist, and homophobic and we've gotten used to it as we've grown up in it. It's not hard to find someone saying something offensive. I do think it's a shame that otherwise good people are caught up in stuff like this. But I think it's worse that women, LGBT people, and people of color have had to live in this culture.
> But I personally couldn't ask women to work with people who think they shouldn't be in the workplace, or LGBT people to work with people who think they're irredeemable abominations, or people of color to work with people who think they're inferior because of their race.
I understand the distaste, but as long as they don't actually harass, abuse or otherwise mistreat them, what's the real problem here? That you don't like their thoughts? Are we policing people's thoughts now?
> I don't really classify them as political views.
Fine, cultural views, philosophical views, the game doesn't matter because you change the words. If you were working with someone from another culture, say, Saudi Arabia, you'd make allowances for cultural differences. Right and left really are different cultural perspectives, and your position is that we should make no allowances here simply because we were all raised geographically close to each other, despite our cultural differences. Or you're saying we can make some allowances, but not others, but then I would ask, why those allowances specifically?
> It's not hard to find someone saying something offensive. I do think it's a shame that otherwise good people are caught up in stuff like this.
But why the focus only on good people? My point is that harassing even the bad people just drives them further into a badder circle that will take them in and shelter them, because they see themselves as victimized. Whether they're right or wrong is immaterial, because it ultimately leads to more polarization, not understanding and reconciliation.
I think you're focusing too much on "bigotry against conservatives" as some kind of wrong in and of itself, the way you view bigotry against the historically oppressed, but that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that bigotry of any kind probably yields just more bigotry, and eliminating bigotry can only be achieved by exposure and intermingling among people with differences. If you're continually driving away people who initially hate you, they will simply continue to hate you, instead of coming to see you as a person.
> I identify as male, and if someone kept using she/her/hers pronouns or it/its pronouns to refer to me I'd be offended and rightly so.
I agree, you'd be right to be offended. But "offence" is not the real problem, the problem is that you can then have someone charged and fined just because you were offended. How do you justify that additional step? Why am I not free to identify you as a Datsun, if I so choose? Is it really a human right, a moral imperative, that I must address you in a way that you prefer, rather than simply a matter of etiquette?
I'm familiar with the gender and race issues at play, and about the issues surrounding C16 and various people's takes on it, and Peterson was actually right about this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o01ebidd1IU
And he's hardly the only one that raised concerns about it. And I don't mean sources from right wing news outlets. There are already a few cases of comedians being fined for jokes which, while probably a little cruel, still seems like a troubling implication of these kinds of laws.
> The left simply has nothing with the scale or history of those groups.
Indeed they don't have the history. The scale has been increasing though, and the ultimate trajectory should be obvious, and you should find this trend troubling.
> But re: organized campaigns to harass, ruin people's lives online, etc., again a twitter campaign is nothing like bills to deny you control of your body (reproductive rights). It's nothing like a racist criminal justice system. It's nothing like a society where LGBT people experience mind numbing levels of sexual assault
Except you're being disingenuous in ascribing all of these to the right, and also to some form of organized or malicious intent.
While I think abortion restrictions are stupid, from the right's moral framework it's literally murder. So this is not a malicious campaign to restrict women's reproductive rights the way you've framed it. You're simply not dealing with their philosophy on its own terms.
And while the racial disparities in the criminal justice system are absolutely alarming, are you suggesting it's overtly, maliciously and intentionally racist? As in, right wing policy makers specifically crafted laws to keep minorities down because they believe them to be inherently inferior? Or is it possible that there are certain puritanical beliefs emblematic of the right, like disapproval of mind altering substances, that just so happen to correlate more strongly with minority demographics?
Which isn't to say that that overt, explicit racism isn't also present and influencing such policies, but you're grouping a lot of people into this malicious category and calling them all "right wing", and I'm not convinced that that's warranted.
Here are a few off the top of my head: the death of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville last summer, the nine people killed by Dylann Roof in Charleston, and the two killed by Jeremy Christian in Portland Oregon after they interrupted his anti-Muslim rants. Note that the perpetrators in all these cases are on record as citing racial, ethnic, or religious hatred as motives for their acts.
My idealistic younger self would like to believe many people have done so on different issues, but what I've been noticing on the sidelines is that it seems to be working the opposite way: people are reinforcing beliefs and acquiring beliefs they didn't previously have by way of conforming to ideological purity ("you're part of the problem", "if you do X stay away from me") or cynical pragmatism (centrism/compromising as a thing for "cucks").
If words do not lead to actions or changes in behavior then why are people bothering to post here?
And if words never contribute to actions then there are allot of correlations to explain from the American revolutionary pamphleteers to the Zimmerman telegram to Jihadist Imams to Coca Cola commercials.
Now maybe this is a price we're wiling to pay for unlimited free speech, I dunno. But we mustn't convince ourselves there is absolutely zero causation between words and deeds.
Feeble minds desire leadership. In the absence of leadership they will devolve into chaos and the least feeble among them will discover that they can lead the mob. In the absence of leadership.
Lead your community or it will destroy you. Put another way, make the future you want. This applies first and foremost to humanity. The clever devices of metal and silicon are secondary. Always.
The argument is not the same. You're comparing the banning of a tool, a gun, to the moderation of a group who's existence is based on the belief that one race of people should 'dominate' all others. "very intelligent people subscribe to the former argument" because the arguments are different.
>...blames gun manufacturers for school shootings...
If a new item today entered the market and was misused to the tune of 30,000 deaths per year. Misused far more often than legitimately like stopping an intruder. And the manufacturer knew in advance this would be the outcome, I think we would be right to blame them.
There are many extremely dangerous substances with legitimate uses that would instantly be widely abused that we wisely restrict. I can see no metric that puts most personal weapons outside that category.
> Misused far more often than legitimately like stopping an intruder. And the manufacturer knew in advance this would be the outcome,
Yeah, I'm not convinced. If enough people enjoyed using the item in question recreationally, there'd be enough pushback to an outright ban.
> I think we would be right to blame them.
This doesn't follow from the premises. I'd wager that every item has an ethical use.
> There are many extremely dangerous substances with legitimate uses that would instantly be widely abused that we wisely restrict.
"Restrict" does not entail "forbid". There are already "gun restrictions", just as there are "chemical restrictions" and so on with all the other items you're no doubt thinking of.
>Yeah, I'm not convinced. If enough people enjoyed using the item in question recreationally, there'd be enough pushback to an outright ban.
No doubt. Especially if a large industry emerged to service that recreation.
>This doesn't follow from the premises. I'd wager that every item has an ethical use.
Normally a manufacturer does not get away with a product that he knows will cause 30k deaths per year just by saying that behavior, which is the most common behavior, constitutes misuse. But the ethics of that behavior apparently varies from person to person.
> "Restrict" does not entail "forbid". There are already "gun restrictions", just as there are "chemical restrictions" and so on with all the other items you're no doubt thinking of.
Bulk caffeine is massively more restricted then AK47s
> Normally a manufacturer does not get away with a product that he knows will cause 30k deaths per year just by saying that behavior, which is the most common behavior, constitutes misuse.
Is it the most common behaviour for guns though? Because something like 1 in 3 households in America has a gun, but 1 in 3 households does not house a murderer.
> Bulk caffeine is massively more restricted then AK47s
Just for the record, I never said existing gun restrictions were sufficient, just that they do exist!
> Is it the most common behaviour for guns though? Because something like 1 in 3 households in America has a gun, but 1 in 3 households does not house a murderer.
But do they do anything other than sit on a shelf? Generally after having provided a flash of false psychological comfort at the moment of purchase, that's where they go and stay. At most they might be used to shoot beer cans in an empty field once a year. So while mothballs and clocks might be doing something by sitting, it's hard to see that of high capacity weapons. Particular since they themselves are much more often stolen from those shelves than used to prevent theft.
> How are weapon manufacturers not responsible for the deaths caused by their toys?
Guns are not toys. They are potentially lethal devices that should be used responsibly. So are many other things, like cars. We don't ban everyone from using cars because some people can't use them responsibly. Nor do we blame the car manufacturer every time someone has an accident. (If the accident turns out to be due to a defect in the vehicle, then yes, we blame the manufacturer. But most accidents do not fall into that category.)
> What baffles me is how intelligent people want to live in a society where everybody carries weapons.
Straw man. In a society where guns are legal and regulated, not everybody will carry them. But responsible people will be able to exercise responsible judgment about whether their personal circumstances merit them having a gun.
What baffles me is how intelligent people want to live in a society where the only people who have a choice about having a gun are lawbreakers and law enforcement, thereby putting themselves at the mercy of criminals and the response time of the police.
> What baffles me is how intelligent people want to live in a society where the only people who have a choice about having a gun are lawbreakers and law enforcement, thereby putting themselves at the mercy of criminals and the response time of the police.
Maybe it's a cultural thing, but it seems to me that more guns simply mean more opportunities for shooting people. Let's go to the other extreme, and have everyone carry a concealed weapon so they can defend themselves. (Let's exclude former criminals, and whoever didn't pass the psych evaluation).
The only outcome I can see is a ten-fold increase in shootings. If someone snaps for some reason, and they have a gun, they can do quite a bit of damage. I can see them killing a couple people before their surroundings react and shoot them back.
Now it's a whole spectrum, and a "no gun ever" may have some downsides too. Still, I like to live in a place where guns are not easy to come by.
> What baffles me is how intelligent people want to live in a society where the only people who have a choice about having a gun are lawbreakers and law enforcement, thereby putting themselves at the mercy of criminals and the response time of the police.
It's called the European Union. And we have not been overrun by lawbreakers.
> The reason that guns were created was to fire high powered projectiles into people. Cars weren't created to run people over.
Except why or how these items were designed or created is not really relevant is it? Knives, clubs/bats, bows and arrows were all designed and used for violent purposes, but we're not talking about banning knife juggling or baseball or archery as a sport. We don't blame the manufacturers when someone gets hurt by a bat, intentionally or otherwise.
Plenty of people use guns for recreational purposes only, and that's legitimate enough of a purpose, so long as the manufacturers are specifically not pushing them as items to kill people you don't like.
> Except why or how these items were designed or created is not really relevant is it?
Oh no it totally is. A gun is for killing, if you sell that to people you can expect them to use it to kill. A car is for transportation, you need a car to go to work in a lot of places or to move around.
That's the difference between a weapon and a necessity. Why do you need the weapon?
I don't think your response demonstrates why the gun manufacturer is at fault. Does the same hold for steak knives? What about assault knives? All weapon makers share responsibility for the deaths involving the weapons they make if the makers claim the object was created to kill people. That's the argument, but I don't think it holds up to scrutiny.
Imho, I don't think that that matters. Guns have plenty of legitimate, beneficial, and legal uses. Sure it is easy to use them illegally, but similarly it is also easy to use a car illegally, so I think my analogy still stands.
The way I see it, the question is not whether the instrument in question has legitimate uses, but rather whether there are (reasonable) non-violent uses for which this is the best tool.
Many guns are not designed with the "sole purpose" of killing people. Plenty are designed with the purpose of hunting, or protection (which may or may not be used to kill someone, but might be useful in a way that doesn't even require firing).
If you disagree with that assessment, then I think you'll most likely have to agree that some automobiles are designed with the purpose of killing people. Military vehicles with attached guns or cannons, for example.
There's a direct parallel to swords and knives. Swords may not be appropriate for being in public, but I think few people object to a pocket knife. That said, we don't often get people saying "blades are designed with the sole purpose of hurting/killing people".
I think that people use absolutist terminology and statements with regard to guns is more indicative of the poor communication and polarization of the topic than anything else, and is also why it's very hard to make any headway on the issue. Gun advocates are afraid to cede any ground on the issue as they see it as a slippery slope to more and more constraints on what they see as a constitutional right. It's hard to say they're wrong in that when people jump in with stuff like "the sole purpose of a gun is killing people".
I think you are scraping the barrel a bit by bringing military cars into it. We are obviously talking about cars for civilian use. A Ford focus is not designed for killing.
As for guns having other uses such as protection or hunting; well I view shooting animals as something only psychopaths do, and as for protection, protection from what? Most countries don't allow civilians to own guns, yet those civilians are not coming to any harm as a result of not having a gun. In fact they are safer! People in developed countries outside of America are safer, did you know that? And they don't have guns! How absurd!
> I think you are scraping the barrel a bit by bringing military cars into it. We are obviously talking about cars for civilian use. A Ford focus is not designed for killing.
Some guns are designed for military use, others are not. Anything designed for military use should probably be kept away from civilians.
> As for guns having other uses such as protection or hunting; well I view shooting animals as something only psychopaths do,
I have relatives that in the not too distant past (30 years or so), relied on hunting during portions of the year to have enough to eat because otherwise they couldn't afford both food and housing, and this is was in the continental U.S. People live in this state around the world. Dictating that that they shouldn't hunt because it makes them a psychopath when it's actually how they survive is fairly hypocritical.
> Most countries don't allow civilians to own guns
Are you sure about that? Perhaps you should research this. I just did. You might be surprised. You can get a license for a firearm in the UK, and the EU doesn't disallow firearms either (but individual member states might). Here's a handy table with comparison of laws by country.[1]
> yet those civilians are not coming to any harm as a result of not having a gun. In fact they are safer! People in developed countries outside of America are safer, did you know that?
Well, since it's not due to completely doing away with firearms, the question is where is the safety coming from? Is it from sane gun laws and license requirements? That's fine, let's do that. It's not really evidence that completely outlawing guns makes people safer though, since most these countries you are talking about allow people to obtain a gun that want one and show responsibility. To be clear, my position is for sane gun licensing requirements and restricting certain classes of guns, while the only way I can see to interpret "the sole purpose of a gun is killing people" is for a position to completely ban all firearms (why would you allow them if they are only for killing). So what position are you actually trying to advocate? Most your evidence doesn't really support a complete ban on guns, but your wording implies that's what you're arguing. And if it's not what you're arguing, that was my whole point. Purposefully inflammatory language doesn't help people come to an understanding.
I'm from the UK, and citizens can only own shotguns or sporting rifles, and the checks and character references are very strict. Pretty much no one owns a gun other than farmers. Read this to see how strict the checks and rules are:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_policy_in_the_Unite...
The police even have to get involved. More to the point, no one in UK wants to own a gun. They feel safe without them. America's obsession with guns and the delusion of thinking they are safer because of them, is insane.
> I'm from the UK, and citizens can only own shotguns or sporting rifles, and the checks and character references are very strict.
So? If the only purpose of a gun is to kill people, why are you okay with any guns at all? Would you be okay with private citizens having access to small amounts of sarin gas? That is something which serves only the purpose of killing people, and it's rightly regulated away from private citizens completely.
> The police even have to get involved. More to the point, no one in UK wants to own a gun. They feel safe without them. America's obsession with guns and the delusion of thinking they are safer because of them, is insane.
That's entirely irrelevant to the discussion. You either believe the sole purpose of a gun is to kill someone, as your earlier statements implied, or you don't.
If you do believe that, why are you using your own government's stance where items whose only purpose is to kill someone are allowed in the possession of private citizens, even after stringent checks?
If you don't believe that, why make the statement at all? My whole point is that it's inflammatory and easily disproved, so if you don't believe it you are either being disingenuous or so loose with your assertions as to be actively disruptive to any greater discussion.
Alright, no more hunting then. I think most people will be fine with that.
> or protection
Not working that well in your mass shootings
> to swords and knives
How many people can I kill per seconds using knives?
> the sole purpose of a gun is killing people
I honestly don't care about all the other purposes, they do not need to exist. If we're talking about hunting and range shooting then people can take up on other hobbies like painting, playing the guitar, coding, etc..
The number of people killed in mass shootings is statistically insignificant. That said, they are horrible, and their impact can be lessened through good gun legislation. Outlaw (or make it very hard to get) automatic/assault weapons, or my preference, also outlaw hand guns.
> How many people can I kill per seconds using knives?
Are you actually defending the assertion that the only thing guns are for is killing by just noting that some guns can kill a lot more people a lot faster? A couple sticks of dynamite thrown into a crowded space will likely kill more than either, but dynamite has been used usefully commercially for over a century.
> I honestly don't care about all the other purposes, they do not need to exist.
Well, I guess it's good you think so. I'm sure all those people that view guns as an essential check on governmental power and a personal right will have no problem with you dictating what they can do. Problem solved.
The comments here have this mentality of "there are people with different opinions from me, why don't these websites deal with these opinions". It's dangerous thinking that can be applied to your opinions.
The internet always worked this way. There are the cesspools, maybe things you don't like, but if you don't feel like engaging with these communities you simply keep going. Problem with these social media forum sites is that as much as you don't want to engage/debate with these communities they still use the same website as you so its unavoidable.
This is why centralizing these forums onto one website was a bad idea, blame that. Because now, there's too much money involved and excluding people of certain political ideas or whatever means you lose a substantial chunk of userbase, which means users would depart to another website.
Reddit once was a good place to engage in things like politics, but now it is a cesspool of left leaning people. /r/politics turning into a largely left platform has helped to give rise to the more extreme groups that feel ostracized. It is my opinion that effectively banning views that can at times be extreme (though non-violent and not inherently bigoted) only draws more people to them.
I don't blame Reddit for being too hands off, if anything I often blame them for being too hands on. That may not be a popular opinion; but I have in my any years in active online forums/newsgroups/message boards from the early 2000s, to now, seen this happen so many times.
A overactive admin/mod group always has a blowback, which generally ends in another community forming with more extreme views than what was originally the cause of the bans.
Yeah, exactly this. Many of the communities on platforms like Reddit simply cannot co-exist, and having independent forums for them meant they could operate peacefully without those who dislike the fundamental premise of the community worrying or complaining about their existence.
You could probably even compare social media sites to schools or prisons really. Tons of people with different, wildly incompatible viewpoints or philosophies stuck in a place they don't really care for.
I've never seen an active threat on Reddit, what do you define as dangerous? Can you give an example? I've been on Reddit almost since the beginning and I've never come across a post that I felt posed any danger. Maybe I'm in the wrong subreddits.
> The comments here have this mentality of "there are people with different opinions from me, why don't these websites deal with these opinions". It's dangerous thinking that can be applied to your opinions.
It has nothing to do with opinions. It has never been about opinions, and you know it.
It has to do with antisocial behavior. Antisocial behavior is inherently hostile and doesn't deserve a platform, which has been known to anyone who has ever ran any kind of social space for a long time. If you don't moderate antisocial behavior, you create a community where only that behavior thrives.
This is not news, and the real dangerous trend that I'm seeing is that antisocial behavior doesn't matter and should be protected. No, it shouldn't.
> There are the cesspools, maybe things you don't like, but if you don't feel like engaging with these communities you simply keep going.
Yes, except thanks to aggregators all the communities got, well, aggregated, and now there's really nowhere else to go. A cesspool used to compete with other non-cesspools, now we're all in just one big cesspool, because the quality of trash is that it affects everything it's in.
> It has never been about opinions, and you know it. It has to do with antisocial behavior.
It is my genuine belief that presuming bad faith (as you have done here) is one of the most common antisocial behaviors that people don't even admit is antisocial. It is toxic to the civil exchange of ideas. It's even mentioned in the Hacker News Guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html): "Assume good faith."
The other antisocial behaviors mentioned in this article (animal cruelty, r/jailbait, etc) are certainly worse. But they are also committed by people who know that what they are doing is socially unacceptable. They know this but don't care.
When people presume bad faith, they often do so completely convinced that they are the good guys. I am sure I have fallen prey to this myself plenty of times.
But this is why the attitude is so dangerous: "Antisocial behavior is bad, and I know it when I see it. I can be trusted to identify what is acceptable, and who deserves a platform." Well, probably you notice it when you see it in other people. But we as humans are really good at rationalizing our own actions.
For the record, I completely agree that moderation is necessary to keep communities healthy. But I think it's harder than people think to apply moderation in a way that isn't just reinforcing the beliefs and taboos of whoever is in charge. For example, I see too many greyed-out comments on HN whose tone is the same as other highly-moderated comments. The only difference is the opinion being expressed.
> It is my genuine belief that presuming bad faith (as you have done here) is one of the most common antisocial behaviors that people don't even admit is antisocial.
The bad faith is on the person responding. The post literally starts with "The comments here have this mentality", how is that not bad faith? Then they construct a strawman.
You want to give that power by acknowledging it with a response? It's the same problem as "it was about ethics in journalism".
Someone implying ignorance on a topic they should not have any ignorance on is acting in bad faith. There's no way people do not realize, at this point, in such large numbers, who is being kept out, or meant to be kept out. It was never unique, special opinions. It was always trolls, sexist and homophobic language, etc.
The issue is that some people think that language IS valid and SHOULD be included but can't straight up say that because nobody would support them in that case.
But this has never been about free speech, nobody prevents you from starting up your own website and promoting your agenda on there, if anything, that has gotten easier, as has already been obvious from the proliferation of problematic fringe communities (in case I need to define these think Stormfront or flat earthers).
"Bad faith" doesn't mean "I think this person is being unfair." It means "I think this person is being intentionally deceitful."
If a person genuinely believes what they are saying, it is not bad faith, no matter how wrong or misguided you think they are. You may disagree with the way this person characterized the other comments. But that's not the same as your accusation, which is that the poster is making an argument that they know is wrong.
> There's no way people do not realize, at this point, in such large numbers, who is being kept out, or meant to be kept out. It was never unique, special opinions. It was always trolls, sexist and homophobic language, etc.
I think this statement is at least as unfair as the one that originally offended you ("The comments here have this mentality...."). But I can tell that you genuinely believe this so I wouldn't accuse you of bad faith for saying this.
The presumption of bad faith is both a lack of imagination and a lack of information. The person cannot imagine how a reasonable person might believe something, and why they might believe it.
The accusation of sexism is a perfectly good example, with James Damore as the case study. His words were twisted into things he didn't say, because his uncharitable opponents couldn't imagine that he was simply saying what he was saying. No, no, he must be dogwhistling something far worse, it cannot simply be that their own premises are too narrow, that their own value judgements are coloring their reading.
As for ethics in journalism, I'm one of those "deplorables" too, and you know why? Because there were 100x more people talking and emailing about that then were causing amok on Twitter. If the black bloc shows up at a protest, you don't suddenly dismiss everyone else as car torchers and bus stop smashers. But that's exactly what the press did to gamers, and that's why they were so pissed off. And the more they wanted to be heard, the more fringe behavior there was to point to to support the foregone conclusion. When the police does it at the G20 and calls it kettling, the progressives don't like it, but when they do it, it's just fine.
What's particularly galling is that none of this was new: the online harassment, the doxing, the stalking, that was pioneered on Something Awful's leftie forums like Helldump and LF. And lo and behold, those people ended up in media cliques like Weird Twitter. Pots calling kettles black is not a new concept, it's just amazing they fooled so many into defending their incestuous little circle. History has been rewritten, and now apparently online trolls never existed until 2014, when the fire nation attacked, and everyone of import got amnesia.
Here is what I saw. To change my mind, you'd have to prove that there was a massive invisible shadow campaign that could somehow eclipse hundreds of thousands of views, posts and tweets:
You can't reason with any party that has already decided to be corrupt. So, in short: you don't.
You deal with this whole problem by not creating all-powerful giant aggregators like reddit that eat all other communities.
You deal with it how we did in the past: by creating zillions of competing communities and people choosing which ones they found palatable, or creating their own with their own set of rules. This usually results in a number of fairly diverse communities somewhat competing with each other.
So you're suggesting reddit admins, mods or some algorithm should diagnose antisocial behaviour using the DSM-V based only on a user's written words? This is genuinely what you believe?
Then point to this copious literature of which you speak, and describe how you would employ it impartially in a forum setting to diagnose antisocial behaviour. Frankly, I think I've been more than charitable to your claims so far, and you're just avoiding answering the question.
You've asked me to define what is anti-social behavior. That is an existing term on which lots of study have been performed. Because people don't owe you answers to a question you could research yourself.
People also do not owe you solutions to hypotheticals they never suggested in the first place.
> I've been more than charitable to your claims so far, and you're just avoiding answering the question.
> You've asked me to define what is anti-social behavior. That is an existing term on which lots of study have been performed.
So you're still not defining it or referencing it. I asked you specifically in a previous question if you're talking about the DSM-V criteria, or perhaps the DSM-IV. There are many more definitions of anti-social behaviour than you seem to be aware of.
> People also do not owe you solutions to hypotheticals they never suggested in the first place.
Except policing antisocial behaviour is exactly what you suggested, and that's specifically what I'm asking you about. So answer the question, or you have no idea what you're talking about.
I cannot imagine why you think that comic is relevant. Even if you think naasking is acting badly (they aren't), such a gripe doesn't even resemble a person in group X harassing someone about why they dislike group X.
>This is not news, and the real dangerous trend that I'm seeing is that antisocial behavior doesn't matter and should be protected. No, it shouldn't.
There was a time when approving of gay marriage or suggesting that women are equal to men in most regards would have been considered "antisocial" by a good chunk of the population.
There was also a time when it was not antisocial at all to suggest that certain races of people are superior to others.
Times change. Today's acceptable could very well be tomorrows antisocial and vise-versa.
I am not sure what is the point you're trying to make.
If we define a behavioral set, such as "antisocial", meaning, behavior not welcome in a society, why does the fact that we later expand this set indicate a problem with using the set?
because at one point the people arguing that certain races, genders, or sexualities are equal would have been the ones banned. That is the problem. Today's antisocial behavior could be tomorrow's norm. Unless you prevent them from making their case. That is to say, we also contract the set, we do not only expand it.
In addition, there is the problem of who 'we' is here. Today, the fringe on one side seems to feel it is self evident that they get to decide what is antisocial. They seem to be unaware that ~50% of the population is on the opposite side. And even more, they seem to be unaware that not everyone on their side takes it to such an extreme.
Reddit has been a completely positive force in my life. I subscribe to hundreds of subreddits and they all seem quite well-moderated. If I want to ask a question of doctors, engineers, lawyers, or manufacturers, I can. If I want to spend some time look at cute baby elephant pictures, I can. If I want to learn about a new GarageBand feature, it's easy. I literally didn't know about the things like jailbait until they became national controversies.
I’ve seen absolute junk science on gun control posted in reddit science. Comments that questioned the “study” were flat out removed. Millions of subscribers on that sub, at the time it was a default.
No one is implying that gonewild or programmerhumor are bad forces... but news censors, worldnews is manipulated, politics is beyond a joke. Those three particularly are almost certainly bought and paid for.
Reddit is pretty bad, particular subreddits can be great. You need to understand the content vs the company.
I used to be a mod of r/science. There is an incredible amount of garbage in the comment section. This makes precise moderation very very hard. In general, I think the sub is far too lenient about leaving up comments. Far too often the top comments are pointing out some "flaw" in the study that is either irrelevant to the paper or addressed in the paper body.
Reddit has been mixed for me, but overwhelmingly positive. I'm a part of industry subs that have incredibly high signal-to-noise ratios and counts founders and executives as some of its members. I've gotten amazingly deep answers quickly, and for free, for some of the most challenging and technical problems in my space. And for hobbies, it is now my goto place for really deep dive info.
I've received consulting opportunities, and also just connected with people IRL (including someone who ended up working literally around the corner from my office).
If I had to summarize my negative experiences, it would come down primarily to being made increasingly aware of how broken the world is with places like /r/politics and /r/worldnews, and the sheer amount of my free time Reddit ends up consuming that is, let's face it, mindless scrolling and brain candy.
To help with the negativity I've found adding more positive subs to my list helps balance it (like /r/uplifitingnews). It really is a balancing act though and I'm constantly aware of the self-imposed filter bubble I'm cultivating, so it is important to step outside of that.
As many on Hacker News know, I've been an avid fan of Reddit and believe that their data and community, and there's still a lot more that can be done that can be derived from that data that can't be found anywhere else.
That said, from an administrative perspective, the intense hands-free policies are baffling. You'd expect a company based off the nature of community would engage with their community and their needs. Admittingly, that's not very profitable.
But they did get engaged! They banned all subreddits related to the trading/purchasing of firearms and alcohol. /r/beertrade, a subreddit for trading beer, had a strict policy that users were not allowed to sell beer for money (something that's actually illegal) and only allowed people to post about trading beer. Even someone like me, who doesn't ship beer and only trades in-person, is no longer allowed to talk about trading.
They did after realizing they would be facing lots of regulatory problems.
Organizationally, it should be very obvious to anyone who thinks that things like facilitating anonymous gun and alcohol sales, etc is probably not a good idea.
They actually went back and corrected some of those subs which were link aggregators essentially. r/gundeals was reinstated and they have a stickied post describing what needed to be done to be brought back to life. The main takeaway is that there is no p2p transactions allowed, only links from stores/manufacturers.
Thinkpads for sale admin here. I think all of the above markets really worried about this rule, but I've already checked to make sure that Reddit is OK with us and they have stated that they plan on taking no actions with our subreddit at the moment.
And that's the fundamental problem with "getting engaged". As soon as you do, everybody's going to criticize not just where you did poke your nose, but also where you _didn't_.
> That said, from an administrative perspective, the intense hands-free policies are baffling. You'd expect a company based off the nature of community would engage with their community and their needs.
That's always the thing I liked about Reddit, and something I never found baffling at all. 'Here's our platform; please don't break the law' is a nice, easily understandable, easily followable policy. 'Here's our platform; please don't violate the social mores of this hour' is much trickier.
I hate many of the foul subreddits (like /r/ShitRedditSays), but I can easily ignore them. It's easy to ignore what one doesn't want, but much more difficult to use something one's not allowed to have. And then there are issues of fairness, e.g. will Reddit ban subreddits on one side of issues but not another? Does it selectively enforce its rules?
I think "platforms shouldn't censor" is arguably one of the core values of the early internet. For the first half of its life to date, reddit seemed to share that value.
Unfortunately, it's hard to take a strong stand on that position in the face of public pressure when the thing people want censored is something as close to child pornography as people can find without stepping over the legal line, or Nazis calling for innocents to be harmed. I think I'm in the majority when I say that those things are bad.
On the other hand, I firmly believe that the existence of uncensored platforms is good. A history of caving to demands to censor bad things says that censorship in on the table and demands to censor anything someone doesn't like might be successful. Already, reddit has ventured beyond banning things that are horrible to banning things that have some mild potential for regulatory issues (trading beer and selling firearms is not affected by FOSTA, so far as I am aware).
Yeah, reddit is contradictory here. They have strong open-source ideals that they're trying to tie to a for-profit hosted platform model. They should accept their role as one or the other.
I've significantly reduced my time on Reddit. Used to pull up the website out of curiosity every day but the atmosphere is incredibly toxic. My front page was riddled with Russiagate stuff too for some reason and every time you'd bring up an argument that isn't the norm you get a mob after you.
Unsubscribe from /r/politics. Unsubscribe from /r/worldnews. Find the handful of subreddits that are bothering you and unsubcribe from them. The discussions I read on Reddit are overall nicer than those on HN, not because the userbase as a whole is better, but because it has sewers where the crap is concentrated -- and you can easily avoid them. That's one of their most important features.
I would go a step further and say the first thing a new Reddit account should do is unsubscribe from everything, then selectively subscribe to your interests. Every default subreddit is horrible.
In my experience, the academic subreddits found in the defaults are pretty civil (i.e. science, philosophy, space, history). But they all have well-defined mission statements and heavy-handed moderation (e.g. no memes or any other kind of offtopic discussion).
That said, starting from zero is still a good idea.
I would extend that further to _unsubscribe from all default subreddits_.
Start from a blank slate and search for subreddits that actually interest you and seem reasonable. Yeah, you're also creating an "echo chamber" if you participate in polarizing topics, but hopefully you're aware that you're doing that to yourself.
The default/popular subreddits are toxic. The smaller, niche subreddits are rarely toxic and usually good communities.
As for the Russiagate stuff, the front page is riddled with it because it's a very important subject in the US, Reddit's user base is primarily people from the US, and there are bombshells dropping every day.
There is nothing, except a large paid hoax propaganda campaign. With the same team we could make mother Teresa seem like an imperialist religious nut. But anyway, let's agree to disagree. Because the world is nicer that way.
Your attitude of batching everything not matching the "side" you happened to pick and calling it a "large paid propaganda campaign" is dangerous and the world is certainy not "nicer that way".
This attitude is something you find everywhere because it's simpler for people who believe something strongly, to also believe that anyone who disagrees has been paid to do so. So it's attractive to dismiss anti-trump articles as "paid propaganda", and dismiss people like you as russian bots.
But you're going to have to wake up from that attitude at one point or another because it's going to catch up with you. As others have said, arrests and indictments aren't a "nothing burger". You won't get to the truth by dismissing sources you've been told not to like.
> As others have said, arrests and indictments aren't a "nothing burger"
Arrests and indictments for things unrelated to illegal dealings with Russia, except for maybe failing to renew registration as a foreign agent but that's a stretch.
How so? None of those seem to imply anything about a Trump/Russia connection so far.
If you start a fishing expedition for the Loch Ness monster, you're bound to find some fish but that doesn't prove the existence of the Loch Ness monster.
Why does Trump keep hiring people who are implicated with Russia? Why did his son meet with a Russian agent @ Trump Tower? What is the deal with Trump "special" relationship with Putin and why did he secretly meet with Putin for hours without a translator? Why do we often learn of US policy from Russian media before the White House? Canceled sanctions on Monday is the latest example.
>As for the Russiagate stuff, the front page is riddled with it because it's a very important subject in the US,
Not really. Describe how each news articles has impacted your day-to-day life. It's only important in that it keeps readers coming back who are excited about a big conspiracy taking down the president they don't like.
The most recent example? It was revealed in a court testimony that Cohen has Sean Hannity as a client (after Hannity explicitly denied being a client on twitter) which raises a ton of questions regarding Fox News and Hannity as a source of "news" and not just state-run propaganda. It's probably the other way around (media-run state) considering how much Trump watches Fox and Friends, but it's still a pretty big bombshell.
If you go onto subreddits that mostly focus on non-US news whenever Trump comes up it's pretty obvious that the majority of the world views Trump's White House in a negative light.
City specific subreddits are really hit or miss. Often it's people complaining about newcomers and how the drivers "here" are the worst drivers anywhere ever. Sometimes a good news story comes through. Some are better than others but that kind of discussion/complaining bores me.
I personally go to Reddit to relax and not fret about the state of the world. So, I unsubscribed to all of the serious or semi-serious subreddits (all news, politics, etc.).
Turns out if you unsubscribe from all of those types of subs, Reddit becomes a really funny and interesting time killer where the community actively tries to come up with ways to make you laugh.
People say that a lot, but, although there are a lot of people I don't agree with on there, I don't know about the applicability of the analogy "toxic". Most times, when people say reddit is "toxic", they're referring to a specific subreddit that I won't name here, but it's mostly just full of innocuous posts like "we have the greatest president, don't we?" - clearly designed to ruffle some feathers, which I suppose is in itself counterproductive, but "toxic" as in, leaches out into the surrounding area and makes it unusable? Seems a bit of an overstatement to me.
It's hard to bring up without being attacked, even off of Reddit, but for long-time heavy users it's been obvious for a while that Reddit has purposefully undergone several changes to control the narrative at the behest of advertisers and the powers that be.
I think it's more that Reddit grew so much that the original community gets drowned out by everyone else. You can't have a community that big without it becoming filled with, for lack of a better word, normies.
What narrative supports The_Donald and the numerous left leaning subreddits both being there? Honestly I hear this a lot and am curious. I believe it is because they are focused on retention numbers which thrive off focused insular communities to be clear.
I’m not sure that is actually what is happening overall, but the narrative that you hear a lot (and that would explain fairly intolerant subreddits like T_D and worldnews) is about filter bubbles and more generally the idea that we now have the ability to ignore other people’s dissent, and become complacent of more one-sided, prejudiced ways of presenting information. To take examples outside of reddit: it’s fairly easy to watch several hours of television every day, entirely about news, think that you know very well what is happening and be completely flabbergasted that anyone (reasonable) supports President Trump or reciprocally, that anyone (reasonable) doesn’t. This feels fairly new, not entirely driven by internet (more by the increase in news sources, i.e. likely the drop in production costs, and ad technology).
I suspect that this is happening more than before, but that the opposite (people finding structured, intelligent opposing viewpoints) is also happening more --people spend a lot more time informing themselves overall-- but that the more constructive phenomena is less destructive therefore harder to notice.
This is a valid complaint for non-technical users, but I don't understand why HN users don't customize reddit to suit their tastes instead of complaining. Signing up doesn't even require an email. Is there a better alternative? It's arguably the best feature that reddit brings. Don't like a sub-reddit? Remove it and add something else. You can even create your own and moderate to your taste. You can even grab someone else's reddit customization under multi-reddits. Here are some examples:
I did the same and no longer login or use the front page.
I found that just going to a few subreddits on topics of personal interest that I can browse through for new ideas, user stories, etc. results in a much more positive experience.
Smaller communities for specific hobbies/videogames/etc (in most cases) seem to be less polarized on the platform.
I hate the default experience since it is purely low effort posts. The cute gifs are entertaining but I feel I am wasting my time compared to discussions on interesting topics.
By logging in you can select your subreddits which lets you filter out subreddits you don't care about and add ones you do care about.
Browsing subreddits is the best way to check out a particular topic but I do find their algorithm is okay at pulling up an okay overview of your subreddits if you login. (assuming you remove all the noisy defaults)
It's the commentary that's toxic. Nobody is allowed to criticize anything about the investigations or tenuous connections to Russia without being labeled a russian propagandist and downvoted out of visibility.
Don't see any problems with what you posted. It's commentary on a commentary site within the community guidelines of that site. There are good posts there, I am sure, just as I am sure there will always be noise.
Every time you see a post on the front page you don't like, filter that sub from your front page. So easy. Unfortunate that Reddit limits you to filtering 100 subs from your front page.
I had a pretty well-curated list of subscribed subreddits but reddit decided some of my interests are problematic and I deleted my account. Posting links to licensed firearm dealers legally selling firearms is too taboo for a site that has subreddits organized around linking videos of people dying.
Because its one of, if not, the biggest story in the world right now? I mean, of course its going to occasionally top /r/politics and /r/worldnews.
The president and the highest levels of the GOP are directly targeted in an investigation that has brought 20+ indictments with several guilty pleas with apparently more to come.
This is a bit like saying the news in 1974 was too focused on Watergate.
> I mean, of course its going to occasionally top /r/politics
Have you actually ventured over there? Saying Russiagate/Trump stories are "occasionally" at the top of /r/politics is a bit of an understatement. They're obsessed over there.
Yes, a lot of negative stories about the Republican party are posted on /r/politics but that is because negative things keep happening. Last week the deputy finance chair of the RNC was exposed as paying $1.6M to buy silence for an aborted lovechild with a playboy model and that wasn't even the biggest story of the day.
Honestly, no major scandal in the last few days is the exception now, not the norm.
I think there is a very important distinction that needs to be made. The popular reddit experience is vastly worse than the customized reddit. It took me a while to realize that my reddit experience was vastly improved once I was very picky about which subreddits I follow.
The same could be said about the internet in general. Take a stroll away from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc and you can find some really interesting places with extremely insightful and meaningful content.
The problem is that a majority of people are just absolutely manipulated by their emotions and dive head first into the feedback loop designed by social media to provide an addictive stream of never-ending engagement.
Are you assuming they would have sought out longer form or higher tier content otherwise?
My dad was extremely happy using Stumbleupon for years. It was about as high-pace low-quality you could get on the internet. I showed him sites like Reddit and elsewhere but he was very content with just Stumbling.
People like to blame FB/Twitter for low quality content without considering the huge market for that stuff. People aren't the ignorant sponges who can be pushed/pulled in whatever direction other people think is better for them, which is how everyone seems to treat the average internet user or voter. Much like trying to blame the whole "obesity crisis" on some evil capitalist food producers, without considering the natural evolution of the workplace, evolving urban environments, technology, chemistry, or just standard irrational human behaviour to be lazy and knowingly make bad choices.
I'm sure quite a few ivory tower intellectuals had their way they'd ban tabloids like National Enquirer and trashy reality TV like Big Brother. But I doubt that would suddenly make these demographics any better informed or better citizens.
We can try to push back against straight up lying, at least when it goes beyond entertainment, but demand will always find supply in the marketplace...
I definitely think that dumb content makes the consumer dumber with repeated exposure just like smart/educational content makes them smarter (well, in simple terms). I don't think there is a baseline intelligence level for each person below which they can't possibly fall regardless of what they do.
So yes, platforms making dumb content more available do make people dumber long term. I don't know what to do about it, but at least we have to recognize that this is a legit problem.
> I definitely think that dumb content makes the consumer dumber with repeated exposure
Sure, but even if that turns out to be the case what concerns me is how often people automatically take the next step and assume that it should or CAN be controlled top-down, and that doing so will surely result in the average/lowest common denominator consumer suddenly becoming smarter and less ignorant.
Basically the assumption that it is such a significant problem, that people would be far better informed/smarter if we just banned/regulated what some central organization or individual mega-corporations deem as not good content.
That's a significant leap - and one that I feel is very often disconnected in these discussions. Just because problem X exists, doesn't mean solution Y will solve it. Or that problem X is a significant enough problem that the rewards will warrant the costs/risks of attempting to fix it.
I would say the general public's level of intelligence in general, and the effect of dumb content on it specifically is definitely significant enough to need a solution. Many solutions, probably.
Of course no one will seriously suggest a gif prohibition (I hope), but regarding fake news specifically, regulation such as the FCC Fairness doctrine could possibly work.
The point is not to eliminate undesired behavior entirely, but to make it less available and less desirable compared to alternatives. For example, smoking cigarettes is being largely successfully solved by education, promotion of general health, gross packaging, putting cigarette cases out-of-sight in supermarkets, and taxes, not outright prohibition.
I don't think that just because the content is digital you can't do anything about it without introducing worse problems for freedom of speech and such. Tons of industries are successfully regulated, this one is not special enough to be unsolvable.
The Supreme Court ruled that the fairness doctrine was justified given the scarce nature of the radio spectrum. The doctrine never applied to cable TV and certainly wouldn't be able to be applied to the internet.
You can certainly apply and enforce such regulations on mainstream media, both TV and online. The world will benefit even without US getting onboard with it, and without the need to police every last website.
There is actually research showing that exposure to a series of fake headlines - even though you are told that they are fake - makes similar fake headlines more believable to you.
Editorialization is far, far different than outside parties or platforms controlling content...
The key difference is that editorializing affects individual outlets, or groups of outlets under one owner. In that case other parties can simply create the own competing outlets to provide a balance, aka a marketplace of ideas. But when it's a top down control from government or mega-corps then the controls applies across the entire marketplace and across all organizations/mediums, and is therefore far more harmful, open to abuse, and ultimately chills speech.
Not to mention in the top-down scenario the source of what's "appropriate content" is usually the most vocal special interest groups, lobbyists, or worse the latest public outrage of the day - not some editor/company trying to deliver what they think consumers want most. But instead other parties trying to control what content other people should and should not be allowed to produce/consume.
The only way to push back is by rallying your own outrage, lobbyists, and special interest groups - a highly unoptimal process, valuing the powerful and entrenched parties, not what is "right" and moral. And if history is any indication, bad laws/regulations rarely get removed anywhere near as quickly as they are added.
The problem is that a majority of people are just absolutely manipulated by their emotions and dive head first into the feedback loop designed by social media to provide an addictive stream of never-ending engagement.
Wow, harsh. My sense is that the problem is that these other sites are simply not very findable, and Google search results have been getting steadily and measurably worse over the last several years.
Someone needs to build a search engine that does'nt depend on page rank. Page rank is the thing that filters out 99.9% of the internet: it's the millions of pages you don't see that could potentially have better answers in it. Now, surely, there's a lot of junk in that 99%, but I'd be willing to bet there's a lot of gold nuggets in there too.
Google's fundamental assumption and it's biggest weakness is that: Excellent content will always have an excellent source to upvote it with links. This isn't always true. If ever another search engine were to supplant google, it would probably take advantage of this weakness. This weakness is even bigger in niche areas that google AI is not able to recognize.
I don't know how much Google realizes it, but "walled gardens" are a fundamental threat to the quality of their search. Since most "normal user" internet activity is now locked up behind login pages on Facebook, the value of PageRank grows more dubious by the day.
This leaves institutional and commercial websites as the corpus of "open content" available for Google to index/test, and while they are sometimes useful, the incentives are much less straightforward when you bring in money and organizational politics.
Depending on the organic voice of the users who were publishing personal web pages and just wanted to discuss their interests and share the best information available got Google where it was, but now that lifeblood is locked down and thoroughly controlled by Google's competitors. Nowadays, many hobbyists and small businesses even forgo the web site entirely and just operate out of a Facebook page or group.
Worse still, open forums typically either completely disallow links with accurate anchor text or explicitly tell search engines to ignore them with rel=nofollow. This makes PageRank even less valuable, because the shared URL is not associated with link text. Some forums will transparently place anything containing a URL in a moderation queue, leaving no information at all for a search crawler to extract (ostensibly to prevent spam, but I've found in practice it's more often used by niche forum operators to block out competitors and get higher prices for ads; you can even see this on reddit, as many subreddit mods configure AutoModerator to filter any URLs pointing to unapproved domains).
Google was designed for the web as it stood in 1999. It's not 1999 anymore. Sadly, hyper-aggressive legal restrictions like the CFAA and the RAM Copy Doctrine mean that a useful search for the 2018 web is unlikely to materialize (at least in the U.S. or countries that impose similar restrictions).
How many results with missing terms are high in the SERP, whether and how news entries[1] are in the SERPs, etc. Also, Google knows which page the result(s) you click on was on.
Really? I find "really interesting places with extremely insightful and meaningful content" all the time.
If not for Facebook or Twitter I likely would've never found The Athletic, a newer news media website for sports. I doubt they'd have just advertised on ESPN or some other sports broadcast channel website. Some of the content there has been incredibly insightful and meaningful. I even find articles from there on Twitter that I wouldn't normally have seen since I have the content from there filtered to what I like in my day to day consumption.
Most of the very interesting publications (including The Atlantic) I've found have been through Longform.org or Digg. The latter might be remembered as the site that came to a demise the same time as reddit's rise, but they've since reinvented themselves to become a curator of news features and other amusing tidbits, picked out by reasonable editors (on average).
That said, all this is for nought - what is it that we actually do with said day to day consumption? Ever since I started asking myself two questions for any issue - 1) "What's the issue/problem?" 2) "What am I going to do about it?" - I've realised that most of what I pick up is largely for pointless entertainment and time wasting (not to mention that very few friends truly care about me knowing more "stuff"). With that in mind, I've started to curb my news junkie habit with the goal of focusing on more important stuff.
I might argue that you are in a minority there. I don't doubt that finding good content is possible on Facebook and Twitter, but to be fair it was outside those conclaves that the quality content was actually residing. Back in the day I definitely discovered new things on those platforms, but it has been some time. Most things I see there now are short attention span low quality memes and crap. Might have more to say about who I follow and friend compared to who you follow and friend than anything else. To that I say, good job, I wish I had the time and patience to curate my social graph better.
I used to think that I knew how to use Facebook properly and that it was everyone else who was using it wrong and getting the wrong rubbish things in their feed. Then I realised what was more likely the case was that only a small proportion out of my friends going back over a decade is interesting in any way. And out of that segment, only a small number are on my level reciprocally communicative terms - the rest are way above my "league" (I don't comment on their posts, and they don't comment on mine).
So here was the conundrum: Continue trusting the sorting algorithm by posting and sharing links to a very small obliging audience (as well as continuing to read and comment on links shared by another, but not necessarily the same small group), or change something? I went for the deactivation experiment. So far so good (I think?).
At least Twitter has a larger pool of "talent" to start with, but it still doesn't make "curation" any easier and most users* would probably concede it's a massive waste of time. Admittedly, Facebook Memories has made me realise that past-me is a poorer version of current-me and if the trend (hopefully) continues, future-me will also cringe at current-me.
* Of course, there's probably a minority who have gotten employment or work connections through Twitter but I'd say that's a small minority compared to main userbase.
>At least Twitter has a larger pool of "talent" to start with, but it still doesn't make "curation" any easier and most users* would probably concede it's a massive waste of time.
I know it's not optimal because Twitter neglects it, but I find the lists feature to be useful enough for curation.
I follow quite a few accounts on separate lists that I wouldn't want to follow all the time in my main feed.
Last month I was kicked from twitter, since I was trying to be more productive I didn't trigger the reset process.
I did spend less time refreshing some timeline. But
1) I did miss some of my "audience" (feels like an audience more than friends, but I'm twisted)
2) I'm now way less aware of lots of news. Two days ago was the first time in years that I thought to myself "what ? I didn't know that" about an event. Not sure if this is bad or good, but it's an important difference.
> 2) I'm now way less aware of lots of news. Two days ago was the first time in years that I thought to myself "what ? I didn't know that" about an event. Not sure if this is bad or good, but it's an important difference.
I would suggest it's good. Most news in my view is "junknews", even from reputable outlets (including independent media). Why? Very rarely is any news actionable in any way. It's likely that very little of what you and I see each day fundamentally changes how we live our daily lives.
Most of it is entertainment and us humans just like to "know" things - there are more effective ways to be informed about the world if that is the honest objective. Spending an equivalent amount of time reading books or going outside into the streets/community is likely far more useful for nearly everyone. Outsource getting the most important updates to people you know; they'll enjoy knowing "stuff" and keeping you up-to-date.
Catching up on news can always come later anyway (e.g., if you need to cram for an "exam"; i.e., voting).
I do agree to some extent, I mostly despise the mass medias. Especially when you're tech saavy and with the web, they're mostly blurry and late to everything. Also they do create emotional bubbles on stuff that do absolutely nothing (say greece debt, which was the end of the world, then onto the next fad). So I often wanted to disconnect from this. But still my surprise about that event I missed was high and genuine. Maybe I could "quantify" that as higher surprise newsfeed process :p
I don't have a Reddit account but I lurk there regularly, in my experience that only works as long as the subreddits are very niche and not well known. As soon as they get popular since there's effectively no barrier of entry for the general Reddit population you effectively get the same community everywhere.
Normally when people find a forum that interests them (like, say, HN) they need to bother creating an account, often validating an email etc... It only takes two minutes but that's enough friction to weed out the vast majority of the people who just stumble randomly on one of your posts. On Reddit once you have an account you just have to click a button to subscribe to any community you like. It's "eternal september" on steroids. 4chan had "lurk more", Reddit is "repost more".
So your post sounds a bit to me like "Twitter is great if you know the hashtags to follow" and it's probably true but at this point is it really representative of the website? If you need to filter 99% of the content to make it usable, maybe there's a bit of a problem still? I just went to /r/all and had a look at the subreddits available there, I find 16 million accounts subscribed /r/gifs, 3 millions to /r/politics, 17 millions to /r/gaming, 18 millions to /r/pics etc...
So yeah, I'd believe you if you told me that /r/common_lisp, /r/mongolia/ and /r/treepics/ are amazing communities but I don't think it's enough to redeem Reddit as a whole.
> As soon as they get popular since there's effectively no barrier of entry for the general Reddit population you effectively get the same community everywhere.
Strict moderation can still be effective once obscurity is lost. /r/SpaceX is an example of an excellent subreddit that has survived an explosion in popularity.
> So your post sounds a bit to me like "Twitter is great if you know the hashtags to follow" and it's probably true but at this point is it really representative of the website? If you need to filter 99% of the content to make it usable, maybe there's a bit of a problem still?
You're just making the observation that the majority of internet users aren't sophisticated intellectuals. Demanding that the website you visit are sophisticated everywhere is just a demand that they are hidden or ignored by most people. I don't see how this is different than having hidden/ignored hashtags, subreddits, or filters.
/r/Polandball being a shining example to the contrary. There's a whole other discussion to be had about the importance of strict moderation and rules to improving a subreddit's quality.
True, but The_Donald is always leaking. I've seen plenty of sexist/racist content on subreddits for cities, sports teams, memes, etc. Reddit has allowed itself to be a platform used in part for really despicable content, and the despicable people who generate that content regularly venture outside their cesspools.
I feel that leftist movements are leaking much more than T_D.
Comments which — without being racist or sexist — go against the popular & politically correct leftist stance are downvoted to oblivion. Meanwhile, extremely statist stances are tolerated and celebrated by users.
It is worth noting that Russia's goal with its initial propaganda efforts was not necessarily to elect Trump, but instead to sow dissent against a likely Clinton presidency. This included a heavy pro-Trump campaign, but also a sizable pro-Sanders campaign. Therefore the extremist views you see on Reddit on both sides of the aisle have likely been spiked by Russian propaganda. I'm not saying Reddit doesn't lean liberal, just that the "ultra-liberal" side of the site that appeared during the 2016 primaries might not be completely genuine.
Originally, the word referred to classical liberalism, which has freedom as its primary value.
Modern 'liberals' — the one's you're referring to — have values very different to the original liberals. They are, in fact, opposite in the current political landscape.
It's worth making the distinction to avoid confusion.
which makes sense. It seems to have been built on libertarian principles and rejects authoritarian principles. not sure how much more liberal you can get.
Libertarians are at least related to liberals, but it seems the words left, liberal, and libertarian are often confusing, and they're not very fine grained descriptions anyway.
In the US they are related to conservatives as well. Libertarians share very little with liberals when it comes to views on what the government should regulate.
The thing they have in common is social liberalism (allow gay marriage, individual drug use, etc).
So heres the problem I'm seeing here. Liberal is not the opposite of Conservative. Conservatism opposes Progressivism, Liberalism opposes Authoritarianism. For the most part people in the US are liberal, they believe in general equality and freedom. Progressives are also generally liberal but also tend to stir the pot and want change. It is also very possible to be conservative and liberal, which a large minority in the US are. I'd also argue there are a lot of authoritarian conservatives and authoritarian progressives. But I think most believe in the basic principles of freedom and equality that define liberals.
The way I see it, the authoritarians in the US hijacked the word liberal and want to conflate it with progressive, despite the derivation of the word itself. If one is a proponent of liberty, forcing people to do things/ not do things is authoritarian, and therefore, not liberal. I'm all for change, but I despise force (other than Gandhi's 'force of truth', Satyagraha: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyagraha).
Isn't this a symptom of a site growing to reflect the broader population? When communities are small, they typically cater to a niche audience, who invites their friends who are directly or tangentially related to that niche.
Once the site grows beyond those 1st, 2nd and 3rd degree connections, you get exposed to those 4th, 5th and 6th degree connections that might have some values and opinions that are shocking to you because they don't run in your orbit.
I feel bad that the author contributes his time to making a world a worse place. I see Reddit as giving more visibility to the world. It's true there's some crazy stuff from some loud people, but my guess is if it was quantified it would still be a small percentage of actual content on Reddit. But just like in life, a rare shocking event dominates our consciousness much more than persistent normal events.
You're talking about a world where Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, The Jersey Shore, and gameshows where you pick your spouse from a group of strangers are hit television shows. I think you may have tastes which are outside of the mainstream.
There was plenty of sexist and racist garbage on reddit prior to the creation of T_D. It's probably more virulent now, but it's definitely not new. Good mods are the key to keeping bad content off good subreddits.
This is the problem that so many people miss when they extol the virtues of a customized Reddit. If you make a site that is attractive to racists, bigots, sexists, and homophobes, those people are going to be using the whole site and not just their tiny vile corners.
This phenomenon might be easier to understand with a specific example like the recent Ghostbusters remake. It was by most accounts a bad movie. If you browse any movie related subreddit you will see plenty of valid criticism of that movie. Mixed in with that are comments about how that movie never should have been made with an all female cast and that is what caused the movie to be unsuccessful because women aren't funny. It is easy for some naive kid to see that and think "yeah, I saw that movie and it wasn't funny, maybe that comment has a point". Meanwhile it might never occur to them the user who originally left that comment came to Reddit to be a member of an incel community that is notoriously sexist and anti-women. This allows these communities to grow their size by spreading hate and feeding off the rest of the site.
I kinda think if the balance can be maintained instead of reaching a tipping point that the interactions between those bigots etc. and the rest of us may actually ward off their bigotry. A bigot having a conversation with a non-bigot in a context that doesn't start off adversarial is probably the best context we can get for people to slowly drop their bigotry.
Sure, it can go the other way too, and that's scary.
Now, I dunno. Clearly we can't expect independent well-meaning anti-racists to be as effective as extremely carefully crafted propaganda appealing to baser tribalist instincts. It's already uphill battle to get people to be open-minded. Those who argue for reinforcing people's existing biases have it easier.
But if there's any chance of getting the bigots to change their views, it seems it will be in respectful conversation with others, which Reddit at least is capable of, though I guess it doesn't seem the trend, unfortunately…
I agree with your premise, but I don't think that is something that realistically happens very often on the internet, especially on social media. The discourse dissolves too quickly once a comment has been called out for being hateful.
Another part of the issue is that not all hateful content has a big blinking sign on it saying "I am being hateful". It is often a lot subtler than that. One big example is how the Reddit community has handled the Me Too movement. If the big subreddits are your only source of news you might think that Terry Crews is the primary victim of Hollywood's sexual misconduct. There is nothing wrong with telling Crew's story. He is clearly a victim and he deserves for his voice to be heard. A single post or comment about Crews is not sexist, however he has been the primary focus of this discussion on Reddit. It is important to think about it deeper and why his story dominates this topic. Maybe it is because a sizable portion of Reddit simply doesn't care about female victims the way they care about male victims. This type of bias is only visible holistically and therefore is much harder to combat with open debate as you describe.
Well, FWIW, internet communication is still pretty damn new. No grown people are the kids of internet-natives even (i.e. no adults today were raised by parents and teachers who themselves grew up with the internet). So, in the long-run, we can see that this is pretty new still.
I am myself aware of all sorts of ideal communication habits that address the common failings. Perhaps there's some slim hope that this wisdom will eventually reach far more people and become dominant to where we actually learn how to communicate better than we do today.
I think of the cases where people met their trolls in real-life and had reconciliation of sorts, or that woman who grew up in the Westboro Baptist Church and got convinced to leave after someone on Twitter responded empathically and intelligently instead of antagonistically, leading to long-term exchange of perspectives… these stories are the exception today, but we have that at least…
As a moderate on reddit I see leaking from both sides, but leaking from r/the_donald is much more contained.
It is particularly annoying when a hobby subreddit gets swarmed by the fanatical social justice crowd and kills all conversatamd community that existed previously.
The leaked content from r/the_donald are downvoted to oblivion. The leaked contentent from r/shitredditsays has much more power.
However, if you are simply seeing conservatives from r/news posting, and assuming they are crazies from r/the_donald, then you are assuming bad intent and may need to re evaluate how many conservatives live on the internet. Regardless of your political affiliation, you will see opinions you disagree with and that’s a good thing for the most part.
If you stick to very niche subreddits, you'll mostly escape it, but the reach seems to basically be increasing on a month by month basis at this stage.
To be fair, half the time I make even the slightest conservative arguments on Reddit I get told to bugger off to TD, a subreddit I've literally never visited.
What does that mean though? People who post in one sub aren't allowed to be in any other sub?
People in TD can write in others subs too, as can people from late stage capitalism.
Wanting to forcibly segregate and silence people with different opinions is I think at the heart of the problem with silicon valley right now.
'remove those who disagree with me' has killed hundreds of millions over the years, and is a common and dangerous kind of groupthink.
We have this debate over and over again in r/berkeley, a community which I used to be an active part of. Essentially, every time Berkeley makes national news the sub gets brigaded by TD. Some of those trolls stick around and then post tired tirades anytime there is something remotely political on the sub. And some of them even try to pose as Berkeley students.
Almost everyone on the sub is tired of the constant brigading and would like more active moderation of the trolls. The main moderator refuses to do anything and has similar views to your own, thinking that we should welcome them with open arms. This has the effect where Berkeley students and residents can't even talk about things affecting their community as they get drowned out by the mass of right-wing trolls. And this usually comes at times when its most crucial for there to be an avenue for Berkeley students/residents to have a platform to speak with each other (e.g. protests, riots, local political issues).
I had similar issues running /r/ronpaul where there was a sustained, concerted effort by opponents to disrupt the conversation. One of said opponents went on to found /r/the_donald.
It's fairly hard to ban people on a site where account creation is as easy as it is on reddit. Moderator tools have improved a little since, but remain inadequate for dealing with sustained brigading.
It’s not about forcible removal but following the rules. People who came for a toxic subreddit tend to use the same style, memes, etc. everywhere and often go back to their home base to encourage fellow believers to back them up. Over time that spoils communities because reasonable people aren’t as driven to post as frequently as the ideologues.
The internet is not your save space. Neither is reddit. If everbody were thinking your way, those posts would be downvoted into obliviation. I am sorry that you have to face the fact thst many people don't share your personal value judgement of what is considered to be racist/sexist.
I think this is an oversimplified view, especially when it is nearly a known fact reddit's votes are manipulated by automated imposters/"troll farms"/etc. The internet is not my safe space, but I think it's very reasonable for the subreddit about Canada to be moderated as a "safe space" free of racist ramblings. The people holding those opinions can go elsewhere, for example to The_Donald, where any dissent is quickly deleted by moderators. Even beyond the manipulation question, moderation exists to refine a community beyond mob rule.
I think it's very reasonable for the subreddit about Canada to be moderated as a "safe space" free of racist ramblings.
The problem with even mild forms of censorship, is that bad actors can combine it with emotional manipulation and media manipulation to push their own agenda.
Right now, bad actors on the far left are using outrage as a tool to push their own authoritarian agendas. In this, they are aided and abetted by the far right. Both extremes thrive on outrage, especially the outrage that comes from intellectually dishonest censorship.
Weird, that sounds a lot like the billboards I used to see in South Carolina along the lines of "if you don't like [guns, god, trucks], you can GIIIIIIIT OUT!"
Are you telling me I shouldn't be exercising my free speech right to argue that reddit should remove alt-right subreddits? Are you placing barriers around acceptable free speech?
You can do whatever you want. That's the great part about places like reddit.
I am merely informing you of the fact reddit isn't going to go along with your idea to engage in mass censorship because they are strongly pro free speech, and only ban subreddits in very rare situations.
They aren't perfect on free speech, but Id give them a solid A-.
You have lots of other options if you like censorship, and you can feel free to use those instead.
That's the great thing that reddit offers. You can join moderated communities as well as unmoderated. It's your choice which to engage in, and reddit isn't going to take away OTHER people's choice because you say so.
I don't know why you seem to think I have some kind of authority. I feel like I'm being propped up as some sort of powerful villain here, or maybe that there are strikes being taken at my agency.
>Reddit isn't going to take away OTHER people's choice because you say so
Why use language like this? I bring it up because this is exactly the sort of haughty writing style I'm used to hearing when I engage t_d users... I don't know if it's a dialect or simply an artifact of shared mindset.
Reddit does censor, don't forget! They've even banned self proclaimed safe spaces such as mgtow hangouts.
I'm also curious where you get your sense of authority, saying things like "I'm informing you of the fact that reddit...". That's powerful language! Do you work at Reddit? If so, can you offer further insight?
Using words like "facts" seems silly. Given enough advertiser pressure, I bet reddit would content tweak. If t_d lost it's fragile control over it's users and went full blown hate speech, I bet it would vanish. So, where does this confidence come from?
EDIT: Shit, we've hit the reply depth limit or whatever. I'm happy to continue this conversation privately if you wish, my email's in my profile.
To reply in an edit, I agree that typically spez has taken a pro-free speech line, but given that we're discussing this in an article that contradicts this from an insider perspective with lines like
>and then, ultimately, these things will bubble up, make it into the press, and then we would make a decision to change things. We would deal with the immediate impact, which was painful, would last a week or two, and then it would go away.
Which leads to my belief that if t_d lost just a little bit of control, and the press caught wind, that reddit would cave and ban it.
There's a certain sub I like that is full of sexist and racist stuff and nobody there likes Trump at all. What I mean to say with this is, when you see stuff you don't like on Reddit, that does not mean it's coming from T_D, or that getting rid of T_D would get rid of stuff you don't like.
You're just asserting that though. There was a study done on the removal of two of the racist/hate subreddits on reddit that indicated a positive affect.
"In this paper, we studied the 2015 ban of two hate communities on Reddit, r/fatpeoplehate and
r/CoonTown. Looking at the causal effects of the ban on both participating users and affected communities,
we found that the ban served a number of useful purposes for Reddit. Users participating
in the banned subreddits either left the site or (for those who remained) dramatically reduced
their hate speech usage. Communities that inherited the displaced activity of these users did not
suffer from an increase in hate speech. While the philosophical issues surrounding moderation (and
banning specifically) are complex, the present work seeks to inform the discussion with results on
the efficacy of banning deviant hate groups from internet platforms."
I've always been skeptical of this study, mostly because of how fluid reddit accounts are.
I have at least three accounts that I know of (I've probably forgotten about others).
I'm sure people who participate in terrible behavior like that probably also have multiple accounts.
How does the study account for those users simply abandoning the accounts they used for those hateful subreddits? I find it far more likely that they didn't "leave the site entirely", and instead just migrated to their other accounts not associated to the banned subreddit.
I only use one account and I’ve been called off multiple times in the “mainstream” subs for posting to the right-wing ones, sometimes when not even talking about politics. I’m sure most people who post to right-wing subs keep two accounts or even more to keep their activity “segregated”.
That paper I imagine terrifies Reddit. They depend upon their users to create and engage with content, if they're willing to leave to create and engage elsewhere they then become another Digg.
This was done with small "hate" subreddits too. Imagine they did that with some of the largest controversial subreddits, that would probably make half the users pack up and go.
Yes, and even places that are anti-racism, anti-sexism, and hate trump are often filled with emotionalism and thoughtless group think shouting. Comments decrying anything bad in a caustic way are near useless.
Comments decrying anything bad in a caustic way are near useless.
Yes. The kind of mentality which is drawn to social condemnation has been a mental substrate to all kinds of bad stuff throughout history. No matter how positive the cause for which it's done, it often becomes toxic and authoritarian. Witness various religions throughout history, as well as the high ideals of the early international communists.
Those subs only last long if they manage to stay under the radar. I am afraid someone in here might know someone who works for Reddit and... you know the rest ;P
It seems like a right-wing contingent has taken over the moderation of a lot of smaller subreddits, specifically city/country subreddits, and both the content posted and the commentary reflects that.
It's a dangerous trend for both society and reddit itself.
My suspicion is that whatever entity is behind massive twitter troll farms of far-right content (as well as inflammatory far-left content) is also doing everything it can to stir the shitpot over at reddit. /r/conspiracy is another one "lost" to the far-right. I even catch whiffs of it in the bay area subreddits sometimes.
I'd say the same for /r/shitredditsays but for the far-left, except it's been that way for as long as I can remember (LONG before any of the bot farm stuff).
Seems incredibly biased to say that right-wing moderators are dangerous to society. Just because someone has a more conservative outlook, doesn't mean they are a menace. A little bit shocking that needs to be pointed out.
If you're a left-wing moderator or a right-wing moderator, there is no way I should know that unless you tell me. Any moderator that is actively and purposely applying their political philosophy to a forum that reaches thousands of people is dangerous to society.
I didn't read OP as saying that right-wing moderators are per se are "dangerous to society", but that it being just one viewpoint represented (especially if, as "a right-wing contingent" implies", it's a single group of people) could be,].
What ever happened to neutrality? Moderators shouldn't be promoting an ideology left or right. I understand that Reddit admins themselves don't want to promote an ideology either -- they want to remain neutral -- but they are sacrificing their platform to people who don't hold he same ideals.
The biggest change I've noticed is just how political the city/country subreddits have become. A few years ago, they used to be more fun places but now nearly all the content is very hateful and polarizing.
> they used to be more fun places but now nearly all the content is very hateful and polarizing.
I don't think this is a reddit thing - it's a societal thing.
Other platforms are also getting far more acerbic in general. City council meetings, local news, etc. It seems the country is in a period of time where politics is both forefront and rather contentious.
I feel the stuff on-line is simply reflecting the greater societal trends - jut with the typical amplification everything on-line breeds.
Right, so people are arguing against that baseline rule.
A baseline rule prohibiting threatening violence, most people agree with, but apparently it is a controversial attack on free speech if a private website wants to moderate the use of its platform to promote hatred against people based on the color of their skin.
And banning racism is being held as an example of liberal bias! Amazing.
But even judges attempt to be neutral. There are law/rules and you attempt to judge every case/comment based on that. As a moderator, I don't simply delete comments because they don't fit my political views -- I'm capable of that and so are most other people.
That's entirely different from people that are explicitly not trying to be neutral and are trying to promote a specific political ideology. I expect that majority of moderators on Reddit are not trying to promote anything. However there is definitely a growing contingent that don't want neutrality and they are taking over.
Banning nothing is fine if you want your community to die.
In theory, everyone has equal ability to share their opinions and all have equal weight. In reality, you have a lot less influence than someone willing to post 24/7 everywhere they can. The quickest way to drive away reasonable people is to do nothing.
There is "right wing" and there is "far right nationalism." Reddit has an issue with the latter. I have talked with many conservatives lamenting the loss of their given subreddits to trolls and /r/t_d devotees.
Furthermore, it is the internet - I've never been convinced by any argument that HN or reddit or even facebook has any obligation to give "fair time" to far-right nationalism. For as long as Fox News exists and promotes itself as an actual news agency (HAH!), I don't think community-generated content websites need to bother.
Why doesn't the far-right just "pull itself up by its boostraps" and make a reddit for the far-right? (sidenote, sometimes this does happen, and it almost always is full of the most comically hateful people: see voat)
sidenote, sometimes this does happen, and it almost always is full of the most comically hateful people: see voat
I'd feel much better if reddit and twitter were even handed with their condemnation of comically hateful people. As someone on the Left, what I've seen is that Left-leaning media bias tends to give indirect license to the most extreme authoritarian and even toxic fringes of the Left. It also fuels a reaction from the far Right.
For as long as Fox News exists and promotes itself as an actual news agency (HAH!)
The mechanism I cite above has been in operation at Fox, just in the other direction.
"Why doesn't the far-right just "pull itself up by its boostraps""
Umm, why would they do that when they can instead use reddit?
Reddit sells itself as being a strong supporter of free speech. THEY SELF-identify as being a neutral platform.
If the censorship supporters want to interact in a censored forum, then they can make their own subreddit and moderate it how ever they feel like, or make their own website.
The right doesn't need to do anything, because reddit wants to be neutral.
The far-right/neo-fash has numerous platforms that never censor them and will gladly embrace their content: gab, voat, 4chan/8chan to name a few.
I honestly don't see what the big deal is. For example, lots of lefty subs have banished "Tankies", communists who think Stalin did nothing wrong, from their communities.
Ultimately, neither a fascist nor communist can oppose such a purge/restriction without being a hypocrite. Such actions are well within either group's ideological wheelhouse and therefore they should stop complaining.
I think this is an important distinction. I could never quite understand what all the hub-bub was until I realized that.
I've used my account to comment since before they added subreddits. And I never stumble across one of the "toxic" ones except for the rare occasions when one of the other subreddits links to those ones.
Actually, it was very much like HN is today, or as /r/programming is today.
As an ordinary user, I thought that the creation of subreddits was a clever solution to the Eternal September Problem.
The initial pool of users were folks that were sniped away from Slashdot and Digg. There was quite a bit of frustration about the editorship of Slashdot, and having a system that was effectively user-edited was quite attractive.
But as the readership grew, a wider array of material started showing up, frequently accompanied by the typical grumbling about relevance.
The solution was to split off new user groups into more specialized subgroups. The initial set of subreddits were effectively curated by Reddit itself, based on the categories of stuff that was showing up in practice. User-generated subreddits didn't come until later.
>The solution was to split off new user groups into more specialized subgroups. The initial set of subreddits were effectively curated by Reddit itself, based on the categories of stuff that was showing up in practice. User-generated subreddits didn't come until later.
Everyone wanted tags for posts (myself included), and when they announced subreddits, there was a lot of belly aching. I thought the choice of using subreddits was a technical one to make the site more easily partitionable but they gussied up the reasoning behind the concept of communities. I think they made the right choice.
Reddit back in 2005-2006 was a lot like HN, but smaller. No pictures, no memes. Lots of stuff about lisp, functional programming, etc. Many early users came from Slashdot.
Some folks complain about the Digg debacle and how that negatively affected the Reddit userbase, but IMO what truly fucked Reddit as a tech news source was the introduction of images.
When I first started using reddit, there were no accounts/logins and no comments! Just vote buttons for each story. Truly "reddit" as in "I read this [and it was interesting so I'm sharing it here]". Slashdot without all of the noise.
The best things about HN and (a narrow, personalised) Reddit are the comments.
A knowledgeable, enthusiastic community provides lots of background, alternative views, tit bits of related info and random facts. Without comments and discussion most of the value is gone.
Oh, agreed! At very first blush I thought comments would sully reddit's simple essence, but I very quickly realized how wrong I was when I grew to really appreciate the comments and the discussion.
I mentioned this merely as a historical footnote to show how far reddit's come.
Seeing the 'average' number of upvotes rise steadily was a really strange experience for me. Hearing people in my various social groups talk about reddit though, was really strange, and sometimes it still feels strange how I can mention reddit to people with the assumption that at least they've heard of it and understand the basic concept.
This only sort of works. Reddit being a combined system, subs tend to leak into each other. If you are into something very obscure, benign, and uncontroversial, like, fountain pens, you're probably fine.
If you're into anything gaming related, good luck. I've been on some subreddits of popular games and it's basically just like the rest of Reddit. In particular, Reddit's system just doesn't work well when there's a lot of users. And the drawback is that these subreddits tend to dominate the space so people do not make private, limited gaming BBS boards as much anymore.
This is definitely the way to handle reddit. I mostly stick to local sports subreddits and a few general interest subreddits (i.e. not /r/funny, /r/pics, etc) and I think reddit is a great tool.
I think it's the same thing with most social apps though. Small discord servers allow you to build up groups of online friends, but if you just go into the specific game ones you're going to end up with a mix of good and bad.
Overall it's just an issue of popularity bringing out the worst in people.
> Overall it's just an issue of popularity bringing out the worst in people.
I don't really agree, it's the issue of aggregating everything relevant to a subject, which makes the popularity relevant.
BBS were not aggregated by subject. They're aggregated by the BBS itself. For a given game, there may be 10 BBS. That's how it was before. You'd go to the BBS with the community style you prefer. You have a choice.
Now, you're just stuck with one subreddit/Discord server/etc., which just reduces the quality of it all. And given the poor organizational ability of those services, it becomes entirely driven by a mix of popularity and posting speed.
[also no skin in the game for the BBS owner, as there is no BBS owner. No BBS competition]
It's the same with most "social apps", yes, because discussion shouldn't occur on "social apps", it should occur on private moderated spaces.
I actually disagree with this. I find that customized Reddit leads to the same feedback loop/conveyer belt feeling that made me quit Facebook out of annoyance with always seeing the same ideas propagated out again and again. Browsing Reddit without an account lets you avoid the urge to comment on things and also turns you on to loads of new things that you otherwise might not've found on customized Reddit. Granted, I still have an account I use sometimes, I just get more enjoyment out of the front page when I don't have any control over what I'm seeing.
I completely agree. There are some fantastic engaging subreddits with great people. I personally don't use it as much but I highly recommend finding those cult following subs.
Funny you should mention that... my first exposure to reddit was exclusively through /r/programming. (To give a sense of the scale of the site at the time, I distinctly remember a post celebrating 65,536 subscribers.)
At some point shortly after, they added the ability to create subreddits, the site blew up in overall scale, and I was completely oblivious to it all for years, being that I only read /r/programming.
Point is, the site gives you a lot of useful ability to curate what you read.
It’s not really relevant to what the author is trying to say at all. Actually, it’s the opposite.
Because of the excess of disinterested capital that only values growth, a thing that could be a positive and productive thing is instead a cancer — it grows and grows without purpose. That’s why Reddit (and Tumblr) have massive porn sections that aren’t spoken about and Reddit is a watering hole for white supremacy and political propaganda.
The porn thing is really interesting in other ways. Hosting images and video is mostly hands off, so it begs the question of what shady things are the third party media hosting people doing to make money and what is Reddit’s business relationship with them.
Comparing porn to white supremacy is just that kind of political view that feels completely alien to me. It was not many years ago that Monty Python poked fun at a whole nations conservative view about nudity and porn, and it seems like globally we have taken a few new step backwards toward the 19th century views about those topics.
The biggest porn section in reddit is currently ranked 61 of all subreddits. Cat picture section is ranked 6 and is 18 million subscriptions vs 1.4 for the porn. Do reddit have some 18 times more sinister business relationship with cat shops, veterinarians, and cat food, or should we just conclude that reddit reader are human with human interests and as that goes most people prefer looking at a cat picture while a smaller minority goes to reddit for a dose of nudity.
Go to http://redditlist.com/all and look at what the people want to consume. Celebrate that science is where it is.
I sometimes think that news and media overblow the nasty sides of the Internet (the sexist / racist side, the trolls, etc.) way out of proportion. For a taste of what average Redditers are interested in, I perfectly think subscription count is reasonable (more so than activity -- people can be very passionate / post a lot about something that is overall a minority opinion).
I cannot comment on the actual communities themselves other than what I see from a quick skim (I don't use Reddit much), but the top community subjects don't feel very toxic. Jokes, knowledge, games, pictures, cuteness, music. Maybe the big news subs (eg worldnews) get political, for all I know, didn't seem too bad on a quick skim.
None of the top list screams "white supremacy" or "political propaganda" to me (some say "politics", sure, but propaganda?). Due to size, of course, I would expect some moderation is needed for those super-huge communities, but that's expected these days. r/conspiracy (probably the biggest community that steps a little bit into a more paranoid worldview) has a lot of people, but r/science has 30x more.
I would even argue that gonewild (the top "porn" subreddit) is atypical compared to most commercial Internet porn sites, which is probably why it actually cracks the top 100.
You’re missing the point, it’s not about being pro/con either topic or prudishness.
Porn and white supremacy constituencies are similar in the context of a VC backed company whose trajectory is tied to an equity event. That is that they drive lots of engagement and probably more time on site.
Reading the article, the author’s point was that pursuit of growth at all costs creates bad situations like echo chambers for racists.
Other sites like Stackoverflow avoiding this sort of situation by being intelligent and strategic about pursuing growth.
I think they both tie together... the thing is, extremism and toxic behavior is not what a lot of people are looking for when it comes to social media (as seen by the top group lists). However, toxic personalities often are very loud ones, and they often get out-sized attention by the press. This can negatively affect an entire site if one isn't careful.
Porn offends some people as well (and is not meant to be viewed in certain social scenarios, of course). Reddit has a "safe for work" and "not safe for work" category, and as far as I'm concerned this dividing line is probably better than the no-nudity-period type policies of Facebook (which leads to dramas over non-pornographic nudity, eg breastfeeding photos, a famous Vietnam photo, etc.). It seems like cute pictures and jokes drive more growth to me at first glance then porn, anyways.
Managing "toxic behavior" is a lot trickier, from what I see -- over-heavy moderation also can lead to issues. But "growth at all costs" social media, without checks, leads to factors such as bullying, abuse, and harassment listed as negatives in articles on your growth prospects.
I think you can read a lot of intent and purpose of a website if the default is directing people to cat pictures.
Regardless of defaults, I doubt there is a single metric that show that porn on reddit is more popular than cat pictures. There is doubt in any method that collect metrics, but if we define them as insignificant then the same metric can not later then be used to say that porn is significant on reddit. Uncertainty cut both ways. Subscriptions can be bots, could be mistakes, might be from users not reading the site, or simply made up. Same goes for view counts or "activity".
> That’s why Reddit (and Tumblr) have massive porn sections that aren’t spoken about and Reddit is a watering hole for white supremacy and political propaganda.
That's the core of reddit, which was founded as a normie 4chan at the beginning of a time when many sites were trying to monetize the energy coming from that corner of the internet. The parts that you like are an outgrowth of that, and originally essentially subsidized by it. The fact that when you remove that element completely, you don't have a business (there have been many attempts at a "civil" reddit), shows that it still is.
There was already a metafilter. If part of you, at least part of the time, wasn't attracted to the id of reddit, you probably would have been on metafilter.
Tumblr is a different case - just a blogging site with social extensions - and there have always been porn blogs (and nazi blogs, but the social element of tumblr happened to pull it into a different direction.)
You can subscribe to X subforums. and only ever see those same X subforums.
But you can NOT see "All" excluding only things racist subforums for example. So it is either your little bubble, or the full blown promoted/paid xenophobic posts.
> But you can NOT see "All" excluding only things racist subforums for example. So it is either your little bubble, or the full blown promoted/paid xenophobic posts.
For /r/all, there is the ability (on the right sidebar) to filter subreddits. You can add whatever subreddits you wish to exclude when browsing "All".
I am becoming more and more picky about which subreddits I follow.
I have even unsubscribed from some that are partially interesting to me like androiddev (I work as an Android engineer) because they were 10% interesting information, 90% circlejerk/toxic.
That's sort of the inherent flaw of aggregators. There's a lot of shit that gets vacuumed up into the general site, but the onus is really on the user to dig through and find what's meaningful to them.
I'm fine with the "Google Reddit Experience" - when I search for something and I end up reading an answer to my question on Reddit. I didn't actually know there was any other Reddit experience.
I think that fine-grained subreddits naturally tend towards echo chambers, because it has become easier and easier to find and interact with people that think just like we do.
/r/askhistorians is regarded as pretty much the "perfectly moderated" subreddit others strive for
/r/science and /r/programming aren't bad
After that you should just check out niche communities and see if they've been taken over by trolls. So far /r/motorcycles, /r/ultralight, /r/camping etc have been fine, as opposed to the many iterations of /r/onebag which generally suffer from power-grabbing moderation.
I'm interested in politics, however /r/politics has awful comment quality and isn't a great sub to visit.
I'd also like to hear about people's favorite subreddits in terms of comment quality, as I'd happily read a passionate and informative stance on something I'm usually not interested in compared to what I read on /r/politics.
Edit: I meant to use it as an example -- I'm actually interested in any type of subreddit, I meant to explain! So thank you for the suggestions and I'll definitely check them out :)
/r/neutralpolitics - It's not necessarily trying to be completely neutral, but it's trying to be factual and requires sources to be posted.
/r/christianity usually has fairly high quality comments and conversations among Christians and non-Christians.
/r/netsec has high quality posts and comments.
/r/hockeyplayers has a very helpful community but probably not of interest if you're not a hockey player.
/r/goodyearwelt has awesome reviews and information about high quality footwear
/r/malefashionadvice is one of the better run larger subreddits that has writers from major publications that post and comment
/r/askhistorians is very heavily moderated which means a lot of the most interesting questions remain unanswered for a long time, but the answers that are provided are very well thought out and sourced
/r/asksocialscience is similar to /r/askhistorians just different content
This is bizarre to me - the average comment quality on /r/politics is both more informed and higher level than about 90% of subreddits.
Granted it's center-left most of the time (from a US perspective anyhow - as a European it is at best centrist) but that's more a function of a reaction to the current climate than anything else.
So I guess I'd ask: "what kind of comments are you looking for?" because outside of the science communities you're not going to find better discussion threads.
/r/politics does have quality comments that also get upvoted. However, you have to dig through 90% of bad comments.
For instance, you get one article about Trump's nickname for Sessions being Mr. McGhee. The comments decide this is bad. Then you read the comments on other stories and people are gleefully calling him a racist elf.
That's just pointless and is a disincentive to visiting. But I keep returning to the subreddit because of how helpful it is in keeping up with the Russia stuff and because of the rarer insightful comments that give reasonable perspectives you will never hear a major publication speculate on.
r/iamverysmart - funny screenshots of the Dunning-Kruger effect and people generally thinking they're God's gift to intellectual life.
r/holdmyredbull - extreme sports cousin of "hold my beer". Other fun ones in this circle include "hold my juice box" and "hold my fries". I tend to think of watching someone go skydiving without their own parachute as universally interesting, ymmv.
r/AskReddit - Good survey of the current human experience, usually leave here with a feeling that your questions about the world and lives of other people aren't as unique as you though. Sometimes it's banal/off topic, though.
r/ELI5 - "Explain like I'm 5" usually contains layman's questions about science, maths, history, and other sometimes unapproachable with great responses from people who know their stuff. Almost always leave here with something new to think/talk about.
r/ProgrammerHumor - I'm a programmer, but even some of my non-programmer friends can enjoy the jokes over here.
/r/spacex is very Musk-fanboyish, which I guess is to be expected. The overall positive energy there these days is nice though, and the dedication that peaks in quasi-corporate-espionage is pretty cool.
reddit has been in an identity crisis since they sold out to Conde Nast. They've made themselves too much of a factor. They should move to a behind-the-scenes operation and let communities bear responsibility for themselves.
That's important from a product point of view. I see redditors unhappy about a specific community, I'm always confused why they're visiting that community.
It's a good distinction, but it doesn't solve the issue that problematic subreddits will continue to exist, even if I've customised Reddit to avoid them. I understood that was more Dan McComas's issue with Reddit, and with Twitter.
This is going to be an increasingly common realization, especially in Silicon Valley. Which got way too caught up in the idea that everything was making The World a Better Place.
But Zynga and Facebook are like fast food companies.
This realization started really kicking in with Free to Play mobile games a few years ago (also mostly here in the Bay Area). I worked in F2P early on, left and moved to a non-F2P company. One of the most common things we heard from interviewees is that they were looking to get out of the F2P side of the games industry.
Reddit is the only popular website where rational discourse can actually happen, thanks to the infinitely threaded conversations and complete markdown.
While there is objective rude comments on there, this is why some people call it, "toxic," because their ideas are challenged, and they'd rather preserve their ideological bubble than seek to understand reality.
It's toxic because a relatively small number of mentally ill people can effectively overrun any conversation. These people are not interested in rational discourse. You can't spin that as "the challenging of ideas".
Reddit has been fully gamed at this point and engaging in the most popular areas is just frustrating.
Also because those same mentally ill people are the exact same people with the time and desire to become internet moderators (no offense to dang or anyone else here, the moderation here is good!). Reddit needs to take control of subreddits back from moderators; too many subreddits are curated echo chambers, moderators are always trying to make money through bullshit like referral links, there's no transparency, etc.
Keep in mind that reddit skews younger than here, and probably considerably less educated as well. It's just too big to have the kinds of discussion you can have here
That's certainly an option, but choosing which subreddits to replace leadership on is a very tricky task. You can't realistically say all subs and picking and choosing will cause riot if there's any possibility of political reasoning. The way I see it they'd need guidelines that are automatically enforced. Even then though some subreddits work quite well with extremely strict, almost echo chamber, levels of moderation. For example it would really be a shame if askscience or askhistorians were caught up in it even though they're very strict with what they allow.
>It's toxic because a relatively small number of mentally ill people can effectively overrun any conversation. These people are not interested in rational discourse. You can't spin that as "the challenging of ideas".
you know what is truly toxic? internet armchair psychologists.
I run a forum and I've had to deal with mentally ill individuals, you don't understand frightening that can be.
They have all the time in the world to hack your software, doxx you, create entire blogs to attempt to publicly ruin your reputation, call your family, your employers, etc. You give them a podium to post their views and they will use it. Internet armchair psychologists more toxic than that? You should only hope so.
>Reddit is the only popular website where rational discourse can actually happen, thanks to the infinitely threaded conversations and complete markdown.
Except comments people don't like can be downvoted to oblivion, causing no one to see them (unless they purposely sort by controversial).
Downvoted is ok (and usually, when it happens, completely warranted). My problem is when they're deleted entirely by unaccountable moderators with their own agendas.
There are many, many topics that are completely untouchable there - I wouldn't say that rational discourse can happen there, but I would say that reddit comes closer than anything/anywhere else.
Only just getting started reading this, but I had to jump into comments to give a shout-out on how amazing 924 Gilman was for me as a kid growing up in the East Bay. I wasn't there for the glory days of the 80s/90s, and I have no idea to what extent Dan played a role in its founding, but as a space for playing and watching music, I've never found a venue in my life that comes even close to what they were able to achieve. We actually had a great scene in the East Bay, with a decent number of spots for young, local punk/hardcore/metal bands to play. But as a teenager, it was frustrating when an overzealous security guard would go off on a 15 year old kid for moshing, or when a skating rink would flip the lights on and kill the power an hour and a half before the bands had agreed earlier.
924 Gilman had none of that. I remember the first time I saw this sign[1] and then realizing that there were no security guards to enforce those rules. And yet, the punk ethos was strong enough that folks were just generally good to each other.
Or the graffiti all over the walls with a graffiti code of conduct posted every so often: don't tag over color with black and white, don't put doodles over real art, that sort of thing. Sure, it wasn't 100% followed, but people really respected it for the most part.
Or the 25 cent bottles of water and cans of soda. No profit, just kids handing out there zines and making sure no one goes thirsty.
Anyway, I'm going to go finish the article now, but if this guy got 924 Gilman, and wants to take that ethos into the internet, I couldn't be more supportive. Godspeed.
Gilman was a huge part of my life and I played various roles in participating and helping to manage it over the year, though I don't want to take ANY credit for this, it's not my place and no person should. But, the experience I had there showed me what is possible when things are started with good intentions and managed that way going forward. There were and are rocky times at Gilman, but overall it's a model that should be studied.
Also, we made and shared a lot of great music with the world, which is the real upside of gilman. I miss that time in my life.
Oh yeah, it certainly wasn't perfect, but the good far outweighed the bad IMO. Also, I'm now realizing there are probably a lot of parallels in building those sorts of communities with the Eternal September problem: getting too big and people betraying the ethics. It'd be a fun historical analogy to explore...
> I miss that time in my life.
Me too. I'm still in my 20s, but given that I now have a lot more means working in the tech world than I had when I was a teenager, I've been thinking a lot about how I might be able to help foster communities like that for younger generations (opening a venue, starting a small label, patronizing high school bands that want to record, etc.) Curious if you've thought about the same?
EDIT: Holy crap, just realized you're the subject of the article. Definitely didn't mean to imply you didn't play a role, FYI, but I imagine you played a large part given your humility on the matter. ;) Keep up the good fight, man.
We're rooting for you.
The entire Hollywood mythology was built around being "discovered," and elevated to fame and stardom, and arguably it's main product wasn't movies, it was hope.
If I were Conde Nast, I would use reddit as a farm team for finding, creating, and monetizing internet celebrities through its "legit," properties the way that movie studios created vehicles to profit from actors.
Costs them hardly anything to talent scout redditors and try them out in other publications, then promote the story back of how success story X was "discovered," on reddit.
Keeps their monetization platforms hands clean, while bringing a steady stream of talent to market. The difference between hollywood and Conde Nast is that now, Conde Nast literally owns that talent source instead of relying on a bunch of agents.
Good color. Single party has control of Conde Nast and Reddit, so while there is a legal distinction, this isn't a correction to the basic business dynamic.
The fundamental problem I have with reddit is that it seems extremely easy to game and astroturf. Things like /r/politics felt like a Democratic party propaganda platform around the 2016 election for example.
One thing that really annoys me from Reddit is the mob mentality.
For instance, a person will make a seemingly "logical" argument and everyone will just keep adding their own "opinion" agreeing with this argument to be part of this mob. Later, even if this argument is proven wrong, you will get insulted, downvoted and threatened if you make any sort of counter-argument. I hate generalizing but my experience was that most people were unwilling to take back what they said.
Not unique to reddit. Once a forum comment has been accepted as right, it will always be the top post. Child comments only ever see fewer views. The correction will never be as popular.
/r/mma is an absolute gem. /r/BlackPeopleTwitter is great as well.
I'm also getting tired of these apology tours from SV people. The biggest flaw they have (aside from collecting scary amounts of data) is seemingly taking a too-rosy view of people. It'd be more refreshing for somebody to stand up and quote a somewhat notorious fighter by saying, "I'd like to take this chance to apologize... to absolutely nobody."
Reddit has been overrun by extremists and special interest groups and has become a dangerous tool for indoctrination and misinformation.
This interview feels disingenuous and a thinly veiled humble brag/promo for Imzy.
Jailbait Really? How can you mention jailbait but not coontown, KKK, fatpeoplehate, incels, boston marathon, there are so many worse communities/incidents that have spilled into general reddit than jailbait.
the cycle is media backlash > ban a few subs > replacements/under the radar alternatives readily available in the ban announcement comments.
no one seems to fully appreciate the massive influence that reddit has on the news cycle/national discourse and how the company policies can actually shape world politics. It's insane we're not studying this and talking about it more.
A lot of the banned subs were downright abusive if not criminal. Shaming, harassing, threatening. Reddit is not obligated to provide them a platform and that's not a free speech issue.
But I have no real solutions. Maybe even if we censor things, we work as hard as possible to keep the censorship records transparent and to make the censored stuff accessible and have some complex accountability system?? I dunno. maybe it's all hopeless.
No, the first amendment of the constitution of the United States (which describes the US government's responsibilities in regards to freedom of speech) has nothing to do with Reddit. Freedom of speech as a concept can be applied to anything: reddit, the government, hacker news, you or I.
American corporatism and singular definition of 'freedom of speech' as being 'the amendment' really polluted the well of any discussion of the topic on English-speaking platforms.
We, in Europe, have limited freedom of speech. You can't do things like denying the holocaust. But that doesn't mean we don't recognize the concept of freedom of speech, and that we don't have discussion platforms that feature freedom of speech -within the limits of our laws-. Censorship is still censorship, even when it's done by a corporation.
Listening to americans there can be no debate as to whether censorship even exists if it's done by a corporation because corporation are free to do anything and we shouldn't even debate what they do and whether we should boycott a place and move onto something else because corporations can do no wrong and exerting individual judgement, opinion, and sharing them, encouraging the growth of freer online platforms and the likes is heavily discouraged. No, everything has to do with the law and if the law doesn't call it bad then it's not bad and it shouldn't be judged as bad. That worship of the law and constitution as the only sacred values in human societies is disgusting.
Speaking from one of his nine yachts over a satellite phone, Spammy Tachsdodger McScrapyface said "What we did at Zynga was terrible and should be regulated. My new company is available to consult on how that should be done."
This is just a collection of stereotypes of journalism that are already commonly believed among the tech crowd.
Just one example: it’s insulting and hurtful to any quality journalist (ie at the NYT, WSJ, or Economist) to suggest that their reporting is motivated by personal financial incentives, or their employer’s.
I'll respectfully disagree. Financial incentives influence everyone, including the editors at top publications who are constantly looking at what is read, watched, and shared to decide what to invest in and feature.
You might really like "All the News That's Fit to Sell" which is written by a media economist that digs into how market incentives influence coverage (he's the director of the journalism program at Stanford). There's lots of discussion as well about media coverage decisions in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election at even the national networks.
Even at the top publications, financial incentives influence choices. It's not as malevolent as someone paying off a journalist.
For example, at most top tier newspapers, there is an incentive for "if it bleeds, it leads". This is an economic outcome, as this elicits the most reader interest and also increases profitability. (See my data analysis on this in the NY Times: https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html )
However stereotypes about journalists from the tech crowd doesn’t have much visibility.
The journalist crowd thinks a bunch of stereotypes about tech. And they have the platform to broadcast their prejudice to the world. Some of their stereotypes are quite insulting to any quality Engineer.
Why is it bad when we stereotype them, when they have been doing it aggressively for years?
Rather, I believe it is our duty to start reporting on the media and our opinions about the media, as no one does. The media holds all the power in broadcasting opinions on the populace, and there are very little entities that check their power.
Fundamentally, the problem with the site is that Reddit was happy getting growth on the back of people searching for jailbait[1] and creepshot porn and white supremacists for years and they have a user base that reflects that. A lot of the power mods that run the largest subreddits are just awful human beings. I don't see how they fix that short of nuking the whole site from orbit and starting over.
These people exist and no amount of censorship will eliminate that. Protective bubbles exist in the form of moderated subreddit and other forums outside of Reddit.
No, Discord wasn't around at the time of the Boston Bombing. I believe (though don't know) that he's referring to some of the white nationalist stuff, like Charlottesville perhaps.
I was quite disappointed not to see more from McComas on what went wrong with his so-called kinder, gentler Reddit alternative, Imzy.
He briefly mentions the investors, but not his role in the site, its own group behaviours, staff, etc. I'd explored it and was impressed by several of its technical features, but found the net of its founding cohort and technical design, as well as staff and volunteer management & moderation, hands down the most toxic online experience I've seen in 30+ years. (Yes, pre-dating the Web.)
The session-based anonymous identity dynamic in particular gave rise to dynamics such that every conversation was a single-iteration Prisoners Dilemma encounter with a strong dose of Zimbardo.
I've been hoping to see a post mortem with some degree of introspection. That's not happened.
metafilter has 12,000 users, not mansions, yachts and tennis star wives. No one is asking metafilter mods about reddit, they're asking people who got rich off reddit, because they respect people who get rich, not people who have well-run, wisely-moderated forums. This is because well-run forums are common, and reddit.coms are not.
>if Reddit, specifically, focused all their efforts on the health of their platform, on the people that are really the contributors and not the consumers, they would see growth beyond what they’re getting.
I think Digg tried this, shortly before being crushed by Reddit.
"They believe that if they have a billion unique visitors a month, that they have a property that is going to be worth a ton of money in some way eventually."
This is stupid; users are fickle and visitors mean nothing if you can't monetize them. And usually attempting to monetize visitors causes them to leave to the next platform trying to reach a billion unique visitors.
I can't believe intelligent people think this is a valid way to run an Internet business. It might work for small startups looking to be bought out by a larger company (who will then try and monetize it, driving away all the users) but for a company like reddit it's a bit ridiculous.
I think the idea of reddit collapsing entirely is much harder than a single news site for instance. It's not one product, it is hundreds of strong communities that have gathered from different places on the web. There are discussions and communities that I would not know how to find elsewhere on the web.
Reddit is not profitable. Your strong communities are supported by investors hoping to get a return on their investment. If the growth stops, the investment stops, and the servers go away.
The fact that the communities are strong matters not.
I used to have an reddit account from the first year reddit came out and I finally decided to delete it this year. I kept going into smaller and smaller subreddits because the ones I used to like, askscience or askhistorians etc. grew too much and became non enjoyable for me. At the end even the smaller subreddits were a waste of my time. I feel good about this and I don't think I'm going back to reddit.
What I can never reconcile with is that when mainstream media means 'toxic' they are never referring to the /r/latestagecapitalism plastered all over the front page of reddit. They protest the fact that somewhere, hidden from popular view a minority of people hold a different view from the extreme leftist one.
I agree with a lot of the jokes/memes posted there that make it to the front page but the actual rules for discussion within the subreddit are kind of far out there. I guess one might call it the (publicly acknowledged) equivalent of the unspoken rules for the r/the_donald subreddit where many things written in opposition to trump are deleted by the moderators.
Admins do nothing to prevent extreme moderation as occurs on there from deleting any comment with an alternative viewpoint. Yet it appears quite consistently on the front page with only agreement in its comments section.
right, because the rules of the subreddit indicate that. The subreddit has its own mods that follow its own rules. And the Admins of reddit do not get involved unless they're peventing a lawsuit. Which is kind of how the internet should be run. Free and safe from mass control, but communities controlling themselves.
Which would be fine, if the community had a way to control themselves. But moderators are literally chosen by being the first person to squat on a particular subreddit name. There is an incredible amount of inertia to controlling a popular "domain name" (eg popular brand names), and no recourse if the person who squatted it first turns out to be a huge shithead.
There have been plenty of instances where someone just turns off a subreddit, now nobody gets to use it, have a nice day. Let alone the more subtle problem of a toxic person who should not be moderating a sub in the first place.
Maybe one should be able to put a subreddit in 'unmoderated' view and see what's getting moderated out so the community has a little more transparency. Yeah, you'll have to wade through some sewage, but at least you can opt-in on occasion to make sure you're not being unwittingly moderated into an echo chamber.
I think this hits on the underlying problem I see with Reddit and similar forums, though. Look at the evolution of subs like /r/LateStageCapitalism or /r/FatPeopleHate or /r/Incels or T_D or TRP or Flat Earth or Broneyism or whatever. I don't think in all cases the communities started out as extreme as they eventually became.
I'm not defending their original charters by any means, I just think there's some kind of sociological reality or formula these subs are tapping into that allows them to purposefully moderate/evolve into echo chambers and bring a community of followers along with them, to a point where the community even starts to self-moderate to the extreme -- but they don't just start out that way.
It's almost like you can take some ridiculous idea or some interesting but archaic belief system, build some interest in it using humor or shock value, then once you have an audience with critical mass slowly turn it into a cult without anyone noticing, like the boiling frog analogy (hmm, the irony of that comparison just now struck me). I almost want to try this myself with something absurd just to prove the theory.
And I'm sure this isn't a new concept in sociology or anthropology and there are people researching how it works at Internet scale. Can anyone point me to what it's called?
I agree wholeheartedly, but I also think it should be called into question if something like that belongs on the front page. Admins have added specific rules banning right leaning subreddits from appearing, but not even the most extreme left leaning subreddits get that treatment. And if nothing else it makes for a toxic default view.
What right leaning subreddits have been banned in contrast to extreme left? Inciting hate and violence is a reason to be banned, and that seems a common thread in those subreddits.
It's not as if there aren't meme-heavy right-wing subreddits who do something similar. r/the_donald was all over the front page for a long while, and has a notoriously strict moderation policy. It's just that the right wing subs just don't happen to be as popular right now - or they get banned for lack of moderation and for having their members advocating extreme violence (like r/physicalremoval).
latestagecapitalism's output is relatively tame, and given that they have a politically contentious subject matter, heavy moderation is necessary in order to keep the subreddit free of people from any part of the spectrum who'd turn it into a monkey-flinging shitfest.
Also, it's nowhere near the front page today; it's nothing on what r/The_Donald used to be like.
Reddit has special code to discriminate against /r/The_Donald. Without that special code, /r/The_Donald would still be all over the front page.
Sometimes the truth leaks out, for example in the interface that advertisers use. The number of subscribers listed there was over 6 million, far in excess of what a normal reddit user would see. In various ways, inconsistencies reveal that all the numbers are being manipulated to suppress /r/The_Donald.
Wrong. TD is made up from both genders and many races who are conservatives and support the president. Its style is glossy trolly. They are anti political correctness, against sjws and groups that oppose others free speech. Reddit has site wide rules against racism, and those subs that don't remove it are banned. TD mods remove anything racist quickly - almost exclusively posted by few day old accounts .
Also, have a nice day.
It's not like it's the only subreddit with this kind of moderation. See r/thedonald for a right wing example or r/spacex for a not-really-political example. The things that end up on the front page reflect the userbase, not the admins.
They're a straight up communist sub. Why wouldn't they? You seem to be complaining that a board game site bans you when you repeatedly post "board games are stupid, you should play video games."
Board games aren't an abstract concept greatly up for debate and they don't influence the minds of thousands of young kids and adults who will and do vote.
Yes, I'll admit to that to some extent, but it's a toxic environment when a subreddit like that regularly appears on the front page yet disallows any sort of significant discussion. For similar toxicity reasons they hid The_Donald from the front page, which I'd say is about equally as toxic. So why's the treatment different here?
Toxic and hate speech are recently invented terms to curtail free speech. If I said anyone who wanted communism were hateful (they hate capitalists) and supporting a historically violent ideology, I'd be as right/wrong as people on the left doing the same.
Anti free speech are a means to an end really, power.
I generally agree with you here actually, I wouldn't want any of this to be used to completely suppress speech, but I don't think it's unreasonable to hide by default communities which are higher friction to some degree.
I can definitely see a completely open alternative viewpoint, but reddit has already gone in a very different direction.
Although I disagree with the subreddit, nothing really wrong with it being on front page of reddit. It just shows how pro-left reddit is, but despite this the mainstream media only reports on minority of people practicing their free speech. This willing blindness to the truth of the situation is to me a form of misinformation. I think NYT would gladly welcome a violent Maoist style revolution if it increased its subscription numbers. Hence articles like this: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/style/black-bloc-fashion..... Extreme content like this free to parade around but god forbid some people are making pepe memes somewhere and garnering 12 views. The state (increasingly communist) must fight to protect those poor minority leftists from the evil empire.
Um, the fact that it's named after a concept from a failed ideology that caused several at least Holocaust-sized genocides in the span of 20th century?
With the complaint that VCs are incentivised to favor short-term metrics and over emphasise growth, how would you go about fixing that? Also, as a founder, how would you seek investors that wouldn't pressure you to scale too fast?
That's the problem with VCs in general, and it doesn't fit their business model from a math perspective if you are low-growth. There are some investors who are trying a new model (see Indie.vc).
The alternative is either to go without funding (at the expense of an ad or subsciption model), or have your users help fund you through something like an ICO or equity crowd fund or patreon etc.
Or you find a way to remove infrastructure costs through some technical decentralization or open-source and treat development/support as a hobby, but that doesn't scale to this size.
That confirms the actions of what Spez usually does. He remains silent on the rampant abusive subreddits UNTIL someone publishes a news article about it, then he steps in with the whole "We're dedicating ourselves to stepping up regulating these harmful subreddits, and other blanket PR statements". Like most, I enjoy the hobby specific subs(tech related for me) like sysadmin, networking, netsec, etc. Those communities are often very closely monitored by moderators who don't want off topic things floating in. I do browse the news sections everyday but it's normally not terrible. Most people have caught on now to the bot comment structure so those accounts get their comments downvoted to invisibility.
I think the biggest problem is that Reddit has created a poison with two perfect ingredients. 1) Having little to no moderation on abusive/illegal topics due to fear of PR backlash. 2) Creating a platform that allows people all over the world the communicate.
Mix those together and suddenly you have extremists, criminals, and just outright mentally sick people joining together to create massive communities where that behavior and mentality is allowed to prosper. When insane people have insane views, they typically have them amongst themselves or in a very small groups. Their not going to go around telling the town about their views and intentions, so it can be hard to find others to connect with that are in the same boat. That isolation I think tends to lead to towards those ideologies to fizzle out, or continue in private but without the backing to do any harm. When you suddenly have hundreds/thousands of these small groups of insane people banding together in a place where they can share their views publicly with anonymity, things get out of hand.
Take Incels for example, which is a now banned sub that was made up of generally unappealing men would very likely never experience intimacy with a female due to their own shortcomings. It's one thing for a guy to think in a brief moment "I really want to do X with a female, maybe I should just do it forcefully". That's just a personal thought and likely to fizzle out because it has no backing. Now when you have an entire echo chamber of like minded individuals saying things like that, now it's leading to encouragement and active planning of those illegal actions. All because Reddit refuses to step in.
Reddit truly doesn't offer much in terms of positives. Sure the easy going, user friendly, rolling forum type setup makes it easy for people to discuss hobbies and interests. However, forums have been doing just that since the internet began. Sure you can get news, cooking recipes, tech help, etc in a fast, easy going manner but you can get all of those from plenty of other sources too.
Think of it like this: In many areas down south in the US, militant groups are living in the forests. Generally they are white extremist, pro gun nuts who have small communities being self sufficient in the deep woods. These groups hate government interference and usually have a shoot on site policy. By themselves, these groups are nothing. Even the ones who threaten the public, pretty much never do anything. Now what if these groups had a way to find and communicate with each other in as efficient a manner as Reddit provides? Now you go from harmless threats to a potential, real world problem that could lead to violence and destruction since many groups would now have banded together.
>Think of it like this: In many areas down south in the US, militant groups are living in the forests. Generally they are white extremist, pro gun nuts who have small communities being self sufficient in the deep woods. These groups hate government interference and usually have a shoot on site policy. By themselves, these groups are nothing. Even the ones who threaten the public, pretty much never do anything. Now what if these groups had a way to find and communicate with each other in as efficient a manner as Reddit provides? Now you go from harmless threats to a potential, real world problem that could lead to violence and destruction since many groups would now have banded together.
That kind of logic is what leads to events like the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII
Dan wasn't there when Spez came back. Spez's first order of action after coming back was to create tools and systems for cleaning up the site. Dan never saw any of that. So take what Dan says about Spez and the site in the context of 2015.
reddit is probably one of the best social sites on the internet. You need to pick and choose the best ones though. Like everything, there are shitty ones and great one. The great ones have great mods with a very precise focus.
Reddit is just a reflection of the world. There is both good and bad there. It is very easy to avoid the bad. Only visit the subreddits that you know are good. For instance, I'm a boardgamer and r/boardgames is a very friendly place. Other subreddits I frequent like r/woodworking, r/bodyweightfitness, r/campingandhiking are likewise places that positively contribute to the world.
The problem is that the site leaks in a way which doesn’t have a real world analog. Your favorite coffee shop doesn’t have random skinheads show up as soon as someone starts talking about e.g. sexism or racism. If it did they’d be limited to who lives nearby and the manager could kick them out when they started bothering people.
None of that happens on reddit and while intense moderation works (I love /r/AskHistorians for example) it’s expensive.
Except, in the subreddits I frequent nobody brings up sexism, racism, politics, etc. so the skinheads (or whoever) don't have a toehold to start bothering people.
Lucky for you but that doesn’t help anyone who is targeted for some reason – remember all of the city subreddits getting “helpful” contributions from racists highlighting crimes committed by black people? The Internet shouldn’t just be for white guys even if we’ve gotten used to thinking of ourselves as the default.
Reddit user for 10 years. I have never seen a random skinhead pop into the comments. And if they were to do so, they would get downvoted to oblivion...
Anecdotally, I’ve also been there for 10 years and have seen that. Beyond e.g. GamerGate one really annoying group used to spam city subreddits with stories about black people committing crimes (not even in that city) and the usual “some people are just more criminal” racism talk. They’d get a few downvotes but also had their buddies upvote them enough to show why that’s not an effective solution.
Yeah I read a number of hobby subs including r/woodworking and it is pretty amazing how helpful and positive these subs can be. I do not ever go except for specific subs. r/vacuumcleaners helped me find a vacuum etc. Without reddit I would find a lot of bad info on google thats often just paid advertising.
Reddit is a reflection of the internet world. Don't forget how many people don't use the internet at all, or people who interact with the internet in only a minor way during their day to day (a debit card transaction, a text message, a social media notification...)
I have been on reddit for years, and I am noticing far more karma 'gatherers' and seeming bot accounts than I used to. Political shills, karma farms, spam... you name it. A lot of it is on the front page.
I can't say that I agree with that. There are plenty of subreddits that are not the official ones that have great communities and do great things for its members... (/r/learnprogramming or /r/askamechanic and such)
As a foreigner, i am massively puzzled by how people seem to want to place all this on some left-right axis when both "sides" seems to have a massive problem of authoritarianism and groupthink.
> The incentive structure is simply growth at all costs. There was never, in any board meeting that I have ever attended, a conversation about the users, about things that were going on that were bad, about potential dangers, about decisions that might affect potential dangers. There was never a conversation about that stuff.
This externality-disregarding culture was idolized in SV for the last decade or so. It's nice to see some self-reflection, but unfortunately the VC community, without heavy regulation, is structurally unable to value anything other than growth.
Regulation doesn't solve all the problems. In and of itself, regulation can create just as perverted incentives as the existing VC culture. With the perceived impact that Facebook had on the election, I'm starting to believe our culture is evolving into one that won't allow such disregard with or without laws enforcing it.
The introduction indicates that this is part of a series that NY Mag has been running called "The Internet Apologizes", where it appears they specifically seek out influential people willing to say bad things about online communities and properties.
This series can probably be reasonably interpreted as part of the traditional media smear campaign against democratized speech platforms -- they quite prefer speech controlled by their fancy executives and programming directors.
While it doesn't necessarily diminish anything the interviewee states, it's important to understand the context and framing of the discussion.
They're suffering the same problem as Facebook & YouTube. They're leaderless, being driven by and reacting to the mob of users, instead of the producing a planned product that understands people.
The problem with social media is that they don't have people telling the public that their ideas are crap, so everyone thinks they're awesome.
Editors get to make sure people understand that, no, they are not awesome.
Social media, like any advertising-driven media, needs editors to tune their site. They're trying to have it all - the profit of big advertising with the automation of tech, but advertisers only want something specific, and automation isn't going to get what advertisers want. No major advertiser wants their beautiful fashion brand ad nexts to a post of child mutilation on Reddit. And editors get to tell people that their content is garbage or great.
And editing means people are going to be unhappy. You are officially taking a certain viewpoint, and are literally filtering out incompatible expression. The people that get edited out, they'll get mad, but they'll have to deal with it, like the millions of other people that get edited out by various editors around the world and deal with it appropriately.
To fix it, Reddit & other social media needs Editors-in-Chief. Just tell the users: "This is the boss. Keep that person happy. Want to be pissy about it? Go somewhere else."
YouTube is now trying that with their kids channels.
In the long-run, things work out better with editors.
Msatodon/GNU Social/Qvitter right now is a thriving social network run by instance owners that federate their instances. Or you can run your own instance if you want total control of everything. Secure Scuttlebutt is a growing social network run in a fully distributed (as opposed to federated) model.
The cat is out of the bag, and if you're complaining about social media today I see no reason not to embrace modern social networks.