‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’
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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.
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").
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
People can make their own thing under their own geography-bound laws while still connecting with a global network. That's really neat.
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.
Third party apps make Reddit so much more usable.
There is no guarantee that this will keep working indefinitely.
Perf is user experience. It’s a feature!
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.
Do you have screenshots?
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskOuija/comments/89rukm/hey_vsauce...
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 people stop replying it’s there just u can’t see
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.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/tqoooN7gJ7zNKZLB3
Maybe it's an Android thing?
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'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).
>> 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.
Maybe he's operating on the same principle espoused by Justice Potter Stewart's "I know it when I see it" threshold test[1].
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.
(for clarification, the linked statistical analysis isn't mine)
I think there's a subreddit-level setting for that, but the max is only something like a couple of days.
Just checked - Reddit mod /r/askelectronics
If it makes little difference either way, perhaps they left it on to quiet those who would keep suggesting they try it even though they already have.
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)
Strong moderators are the only thing I've ever seen keep online forums at a high quality level. Voting is the weakest kind of moderation.
I still dread the (lack of) content quality that I've come to associate with phpbb forums (and their ilk).
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''.
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.
But did I "hit the wrong tone"? I don't think so.
I don't understand. True, objectivity is an ideal. But language is inherently subjective.
At that your annecdotal evidence, for example. Ironic, isn't it?
> insulting
Of course you appealed to emotion.
Also you assumed her gender, big mistake on the internet.
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.
Though of course some of the worst shit-shows are also heavily moderated.
At the end of the day, heavy moderation is not unlike absolute monarchy, it's a high-risk high-reward management system.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Yeah, okay. How about: real names + no private gardens.
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.
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.
Of course.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
I'm talking about gaming in the abstract psychological and problem theory sense.
Feel free to research & teach yourself basic game theory if you like but it’s too much to fit into a HN comment either way.
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'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.
Except creating a new profile on reddit is trivial, so "banning" is a weak threat at best.
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.
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.
For all these cases, there it is not shown that they going to online forums radicalized these characters and caused them to kill people.
Just as you would not say there is blood on Black activist forums hands because that one radical guy killed all those cops last year.
Unless there is a clear link that people in these forums are encouraging terrorism, the forums are not responsible
Funnily enough, extreme right-wingers do say this.
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.
White Homicide Worldwide, SPLC (2014) [pdf]: https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/d6_legacy_file...
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 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."
[1] http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
The list of murderers who've listened to 2Pac is quite long, for example.
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.)
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.
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.)
0: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-city-mosque-al...
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.
Because people like the self-satisfaction of thinking they are right on the internet.
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.
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.
(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.)
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
Tell that to the Afghans.
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-get-rocket-launcher-gu...
Now people in cities want to solve that by forbidding people outside the cities from owning guns.
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.
1 in 3 own a gun in the US. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/one-three-americans-own...
1 in 2 had a drink in the last month: https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohol-health/overview-alcohol-co...
From that same source, 88,000 people die annually from alcohol-related diseases, making it the 3rd leading cause of death in the US.
Culturally, guns and drinking are the same order of magnitude in the US. From a death count though, alcohol dominates.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
Thank god for programming IRC communities.
How many posts would we need to go back and forth for you to tell me who gets to decide what “Antisocial behavior” is?
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.
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?
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.
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.
Can you define "antisocial behaviour"?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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:
https://medium.com/@KingFrostFive/gamergate-august-2014-revi...
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 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.
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'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.
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.
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.
https://www.cpsc.gov/Recalls/2018/lenovo-recalls-thinkpad-la...
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?
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).
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.
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.
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)
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.
Share blue for example was given a budget of 40+ million a year to do just that. (Over 100k a day)
The other paid campaign is 'deplatforming' (their term). They do your best to silence opinions which don't match the paid script.
But you'd have to be willfully blind to describe the events up to now as a "nothing burger."
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.
These questions are not nothing.
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.
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.
Wouldn't be too hard considering the amount of valid concerns regarding her practices.
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.
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.
That said, starting from zero is still a good idea.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/user/A_UPRIGHT_BASS/m/uplifting/
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.
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.
Honestly, no major scandal in the last few days is the exception now, not the norm.
I ended up blocking like every state subreddit when the front page was nothing but net neutrality posts.
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.
Look at this commentary from just today: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/8da2uu/trump_wel...
Do you think this is constructive? https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/8da2uu/trump_wel...
What about this? https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/8dga0r/trump_tol...
There is no intelligent discourse occurring in those comments. It's just a big echo chamber.
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.
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.
It seems crazy. I can't imagine Reddit without subs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I mentioned this merely as a historical footnote to show how far reddit's come.
Reddit didn't even have comments at first!
https://web.archive.org/web/20050804002153/http://www.reddit...
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 :)
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.
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/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
/r/askhistorians
/r/apple
I am forgetting a few more.
Good link content however.
/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.
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.
If you're into woodworking, take a look at r/woodworking
r/hiking if you like hiking
r/campinggear for gear
r/baking if you like baking
etc. Just do a search for your hobbies and see what subreddits show up.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
That's a name I haven't heard in a long time.
People like to blame FB/Twitter
Just because there is a demand for something, doesn't mean we shouldn't fight the urge.
Netflix chooses which shows to show in its spotlight section / email blast. TV stations decide which shows to put in prime time slots.
Newspaper editors decide which articles get placed where. Your friends decide which articles to share in their feed (and thus expose you to them).
Companies advertise their products on TV, create retail spaces in our neighborhoods, to entice us to consume their products.
If you’re worried about a world in which people decide these things for others, the sad reality is: we’re already in that world.
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.
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.
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.
Seriously, there's so little time to waste: https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html
* 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.
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.
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 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.
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).
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.
I have an inclination to agree, but how is that measurable?
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.
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).
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.
why even post this comment if you're not going to name the sub?
"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 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.
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.
It's a dangerous trend for both society and reddit itself.
Wouldn't squashing the voices of the "right-wing contingent" just lead to an (already implied) echo chamber of leftist thought?
Your one single comment sums up the problem I have with user-moderation systems like reddit (and HN).
That implies it's only possible to be "right-wing" or "leftist".
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.
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.
Or at the very least only ban something when the authorities literally force you to do so.
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.
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.
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.
If you don't think that is a problem then... well, I can't help you.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Here's a lot of users talking about how it happened to /r/canada
https://www.reddit.com/r/onguardforthee/comments/7z1wap/forg...
https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/7z706y/whats_...
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).
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LofV6cJzILA
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.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Reddit is fully within its right to support free speech. It is the reason why it is successful.
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?
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.
>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.
They self identify as being strong supporters of free speech and strong opponents of censorship.
They literally founded their platform based on these ideas.
This stuff isn't a secret or some mystery. Just listen to the actual words that come out of their mouth and read the things that they actually write.
And they aren't shy about this kind of stuff. They speak frequently on these topics, both online, in person, and in their public official media posts.
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.
Sure, it can go the other way too, and that's scary.
I was pretty much in the sunlight-best-disinfectant camp until I heard https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/08/25/546127444/epis...
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…
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.
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…
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.
The thing they have in common is social liberalism (allow gay marriage, individual drug use, etc).
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.
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.
I think Hacker News referenced it somewhere too but I can't find it now (maybe it's in the signup process).
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.
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).
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 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.
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.
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.
New accounts get subscribed to the defaults automatically -- hence the top ~50 subreddits by sub count are or were defaults.
"User Activity" is probably more accurate. Even then, how are they determining activity? Views? Comments? Up/downvotes?
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".
Check out this marketing pitch for Reddit ads. https://www.slideshare.net/webjoe/reddit-26009093
Think of the dimensions of use here. I'm sure cat pictures get lots of hits, but I doubt cat pictures drive 20m average visit time.
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.
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 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Oh well.
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.
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.
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.
https://i.imgur.com/Ybmk6fZ.gifv
All the subreddits I want to see I subscribe to directly. For everything else I browse All with these filters.
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.
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.
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.
Except comments people don't like can be downvoted to oblivion, causing no one to see them (unless they purposely sort by controversial).
Reddit has been fully gamed at this point and engaging in the most popular areas is just frustrating.
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
you know what is truly toxic? internet armchair psychologists.
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.
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.
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.
[1]: https://www.flickr.com/photos/61992100@N03/23226226149/in/al...
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.
> 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.
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.
Block me on Twitter!
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.
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."
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.
That is scary to me.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/08/25/546127444/epis...
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.
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.
https://github.com/nemild/hack-an-engineer
(Think Reddit influences so much of engineering thought from things like r/learnprogramming to all the cryptocurrency subs)
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.
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.
This Cecil the Lion example at the Washington Post has always been illuminating to me: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/17/business/where-clicks-rei...
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 )
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.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20110429125747/http://www.alexa.c... (check the top search terms)
Which incident is this referring to?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunil_Tripathi#Misidentificati...
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.
More on my experiences: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/500ysb/the_imz...
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.
I think Digg tried this, shortly before being crushed by Reddit.
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.
(Edit fixed typo)
The fact that the communities are strong matters not.
They delete anything questioning their viewpoint, not just spam, hate speech, harassment etc.
Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/8crq8r...
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.
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?
Read their sidebar. I don't think that's exactly "in the eye of the beholder".
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 can definitely see a completely open alternative viewpoint, but reddit has already gone in a very different direction.
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.
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.
Its absolute cringe, and it is humbling to me that I dont get why anyone joins such a place.
Imzy focused on heavily policing their userbase.
Where is each of them at today?
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.
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.
That kind of logic is what leads to events like the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII
None of that happens on reddit and while intense moderation works (I love /r/AskHistorians for example) it’s expensive.
And reddit admins must know about it.
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.
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.
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.