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Comment by rndn | Hacker News Reader

Reddit is pretty much a case study of upbringing without effective punishment. In real life kids behave because they have skin in the game—if they misbehave, they are not allowed ice cream. On the contrary, if you are banned from reddit, you can simply reset your browser and create a new account.

I doubt you can fix reddit with a smarter design, because that won’t change the troublemakers. To fix reddit, you would possibly have to profoundly change the way our civilization socializes the young, remove inequality and provide more psychological support. Or you would have to build a better reputation system and use that for sorting, but that’s likely going to be incompatible with anonymity and it won’t be as fun.

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Reddit has this strange power inversion dynamic where the users think they are entitled to run the site. It's a complete illusion they have for themselves to feel more special. Reddit is a billion dollar company and unless you are in corporate management, you have no say. You can have opinions and attempt to have influence, but you have no flat out rights unless you are a decision maker at the corporation.

Reddit is actually 5 things: the software platform, a global hosted instance of the software platform, engineering to improve the software platform, operations to maintain the global hosted software platform, and managament/moderation/"admin"/peopleing of the global hosted instance of the software platform.

"prommie" users of Reddit think, because they use the global hosted instance of the software platform, they have skin in the game for all other issues as well. If that is actually true, you aren't a "company," you're a weird democratic-socialist commune. Companies must make difficult and annoying and sometimes flat out wrong decisions in order to survive, and you can't be answerable to a million mostly anonymous keyboard jockeys who feel no repercussions.

There are three distinct groups who all have power: owners, moderators, users. (We saw the power of moderators when the blacked out the site in protest.) Any of the three, if they unite, can end the site.

I've seen all sorts of communities go through the death spams where the owners get annoyed at all the users and wish they would disappear because it would make their job easier. I saw 'pg going in that direction here at HN, complaining what a bother the users were, but he sensibly saw HN as a loss-leader for YC and hired 'dang to be a professional moderator. So the owners and moderators are on the same page.

But most places can't afford professional moderation, and so the moderators have power, and that dynamic can lead to the users feeling (rightly or wrongly) as if they are being abused.

But most places can't afford professional moderation

When you see Reddit employees driving around in their own Teslas, the "can't afford" point seems quite moot. (not that I'm bitter—I'm happy for you—but I'm less happy for me as a result. Brains are awful.)

The weird Reddit dynamic is volunteers have full control and the volunteers aren't courted by the site very much. All moderators of subreddits with more than X thousand subscribers should have monthly conference calls with the core Reddit moderation team to keep everybody on the same page, to address issues before they arise, and to give the moderators more of a feeling of being part of the whole. Also, pay them various amounts from token thanks payments to some multiplier of minimum wage (based on size of community? size of active community? size of active community over the past 30 days? can't make it too gamifyable).

If the going wage for reddit employees means they can afford Teslas, then that's the going rate.

Reddit needs a moderation team of hundreds or thousands. There's no way that's affordable.

It's a management problem. We have books and courses that teach management. We don't have to re-create the history of humanity every time we have a new problem just because "computers."

As far as thousands of moderators, you just make rings: ring 0 = Reddit Corporate employees; ring 1 = moderators of high-value subreddits (paid, maybe not full time, but compensated); ring 2 = moderators can elect sub-moderators for helping (maybe paid, maybe an on-boarding process for ring 1); ring 3 = community moderators (no pay, but trusted with simple decisions); ring 4 = on boarding for ring 3; ring 5 = unprivileged users.

> You can have opinions and attempt to have influence, but you have no flat out rights unless you are a decision maker at the corporation.

That simply isn't true, as evidenced by Digg. The users, as a whole, are the one thing of value Reddit has and Reddit inc. has very little control over them.

The users can get a new site easier than reddit can get new users. As long as the majority of users are happy, admins have the most power. But scare off enough and it snow balls into another Digg.

Reddit is a zero dollar company without users. The software platform is value-less and easy to recreate. Reddit pays for hosting, and if your business model is "we pay for hosting," your business is fragile.

> Reddit has this strange power inversion dynamic where the users think they are entitled to run the site.

To be fair, Reddit isn't what it is without the users. So there is some legitimate amount of power that the users have.

HN is a user driven site and the users have zero power.

HM users are highly in demand tech professionals. They hold all of the power.

An online community without the users has no value. Users have no barrier to move elsewhere.

Upbrining without punishment definitely is definitely possible and practiced semi widely (google around). Punishment is a pretty bad way to address misbehaviour.

You are confusing explicit and implicit punishment: the world "punishes" me for doing risky physical things in a way a video game doesn't; I can jump off a building and "die" in a video game, and potentially lose nothing. There are effectively no ramifications of any form on reddit for being an asshole or a bully or a troll: except in some isolated corner cases, for actual users (as opposed to people using reddit as a brand outlet, such as a developer of a popular video game) the value of a reddit account is effectively zero... people are unlikely to recognize it, if thy do people are unlikely to have read many of your comments, and you can always make a new one that is nearly impossible to ban. This effectively destroys the normal mechanisms we have as humans to keep people from being horrible, and reddit fails to replace with mechanisms that matter in the same way.

Yeah, says everyone except every reputable psychologist ever, and any parent who hasn't raised an out of control little monster of a child.

Negative reinforcement works better than any other form of reinforcement, except when paired with positive reinforcement for desired behaviors, just like innumerable studies and common goddamned sense tell you.

Nobody denies punishment gets results in behaviour modification. It has negative effects however.

A quick google informs me that punishment != negative reinforcement.

The terminology is a bit weird: Positive vs. negative means presenting a stimulus vs. removing it. Reinforcement means increasing the frequency of a reaction and punishment means decreasing it. You have to logically conclude, whether the presented or removed stimulus is nice or unpleasant. Here is an overview:

    positive reinforcement:  presenting nice stimulus to increase frequency of behavior
    negative reinforcement:  removing unpleasant stimulus to increase frequency of behavior
    positive punishment:  presenting unpleasant stimulus to decrease frequency of behavior
    negative punishment:  removing nice stimulus to decrease frequency of behavior

The great confusion stems from the fact that in common English language, with punishment we mean both increasing good behavior and reducing bad behavior, whilst in classical conditioning terms, punishment always refers to reducing the frequency of a certain behavior.

My first thought was that your comment was a little out there, but then I realized that I'm not that big on punishment with my own kids. I just let life punish them and stand by to assist them if they're in over their heads as well as to advise them on how to avoid future pitfalls.

Punishment that I would inflict would be fairly orthogonal to the real hazards that they'll face in life, so I haven't seen much point in it. I guess I'm more of a hippie than I thought. ;)

My parents called them consequences - the result I would experience was always tied to my actions in a manner that reflected what I would face in the real world as much as possible. I think this is a pretty good approach generally as it helped teach me the cause and effect of my actions at an early age.

I was trying to keep things in the most general terms. A problem is certainly that you can hardly talk to the mob (I’ve tried that in some cases of cyberbullying, racism etc. on Reddit). You simply get downvoted and your comment gets buried.

It seems that there too few feedback loops in the Reddit community, possibly because it’s so easy to be ignorant online, and the popular ones are also of pretty low quality (SRS, subredditdrama, …). Those who can provide high quality feedback are too few and probably also don’t care enough.

According to vet and animal behaviorist Ian Dunbar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Dunbar), the best way to train dogs is not by punishing them when they do something "wrong", but to reward them when they do something right.

He also tried this method on his own children and it worked quite well for his family :D

However, it is more effective at discouraging behavior than negative reinforcement.

> Punishment is a pretty bad way to address misbehaviour.

As someone who's anticipating having kids in a few years, I'm genuinely curious as to what a better approach is.

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