Redditors with absolute powers | Hacker News Reader

Redditors with absolute powers

denisbider.blogspot.com

42 pointsingve43 comments

It's funny that this post doesn't mention some of the worst offenders in this area. There are large subreddits where it's explicitly against the rules to debate the validity of topics with participants, and many others where you may find yourself automatically banned by a bot if your post history shows you have posted in certain other communities.

The reality of Reddit is that a handful of semi-anonymous Internet users control the news flow to millions of individuals. Even when this isn't the case, the best you can hope for is that it is instead controlled by upvotes, bots, admins, and algorithms, which is not much better.

The comparison to policing is a bit lacking, as censorship is a different topic, and obviously officers don't 'kill people at random', regardless of the justification (or lack thereof) of a case, randomness is not the correct word to use here.

Although this post has a good general point, it could use a lot more evidence and some numbers to better illustrate how bad the situation really is.

I'm the manager of several Reddit communities and a few gaming communities, so far I've banned ~3,400 people from using these services for periods of time ranging from one day to 1,300 permanent bans. In this time I've met with a fairly large number of other people in a similar position to me.

The thing almost all of them have in common is that you have to try to be harsh in order to be able to curate a kind community that people actually want to be a part of. When I see you're replying in an equally harsh way to the first person I personally see you as being bad as that person. So what if they started it? That's an argument that small children use.

Reddit is a really toxic place, as are a lot of the games that I host servers on. It really easily goes to people being rude to each other which kills the mood for everyone involved.

It seems like a lot of the bans take the form "I said something reasonable -> Somebody responded offensively -> I replied offensively". This feels at odds with "by simply going about my ways, communicating like a reasonable – but sometimes passionate – person"

Without any citations, it's hard to tell how much of this is excessive moderation, but having somebody else break the rules doesn't provide justification for "responding in kind".

I agree on that. If someone where to do that on a subreddit I moderate (or Discord) I'd ban both offenders fairly quickly.

Attacking someone is bad but if the other party then flies of the rails and becomes aggressive, that's not behaviour I want to see.

So, in several years, the author has been banned from 5 subreddits, for in order: insulting another user, insulting another user, insulting another user, insulting the entire community, and reposting an off-topic thread after a moderator told them not to. And then two blog posts down is a post complaining that moderators of a popular subreddit didn't want him to insult fat women, which he calls "censorship" (said blog post also includes a NSFW lingerie photo of his wife...).

Yikes.

I think Reddit really missed the boat on a ton of really interesting product problems, particularly around community. Their product organization over the past 10 years has really just produced an awful, slow redesign and really cookie cutter answers to how community moderation and curation ought to be done.

Questions like: 1. How do you moderate a community with less central authority? 2. How do you make large communities still feel warm and inviting? 3. How do you make money without having to resort to censorship or invasive advertising?

It seems like Reddit over the years has answered all of these questions as: become like Facebook. One of the bigger reasons I’ve gotten super excited about blockchain over the past couple years is that the community is really thinking through how distributed governance might be able to work. I wish Reddit thought about that more too.

No links to the "discussions" in question, so it's basically only the author's word we should trust. I don't.

I have to say I'm inclined to trust them, because I've had the exact same experiences. Definitely been harassed by moderators before, been let loose when groveling, and been banned for standing up for myself despite being civil. Of course, it would be nice if the comments were linked.

> I have to say I'm inclined to trust them, because I've had the exact same experiences

Could you provide some samples? It’s difficult to contextualise this as an outsider.

Anyone can create a subreddit. Boom, you are now the lead mod.

Not hard to imagine that some mods are less than stellar examples of mod behavior.

Responding in kind to offensive trolls is absolutely detrimental to an online community, and should be a bannable offense. Although warnings should be given first to first offenders before full bans. However, even though this post is not a very good example, reddit does have a problem of overly petty and power hungry mods on major forums, some of which do shape large parts of public opinion.

As a moderator to a few subs, including one that I had to make private because it had too much spam, there is really no incentive for a moderator to be lenient or use their "powers" conservatively.

No moderator is getting paid (as far as I know) or gets any tangible benefit from it, and anyone who is breaking the rules, is generally just a pain in some respect - even if it is just offending the sensibility of the moderator.

Surprised he doesn't mention there are whole subs which will ban you just for commenting in other ones they don't approve of

Raised issue with other mods. They did not try to be impartial and responded like a clique. I had to block them individually because they kept harassing me in private messages.

Does anyone know if Reddit has a mechanism for addressing this type thing in specific?

For what? There was a ban given to a user, that user spammed all moderators of the channel and they told him to fuck off. Imagine you just shoved one out of a party and he is drunk and knocking on your door and screaming what do you do? You are not wanted in a community there is nothing to resolve. Get over it.

At least they do not use IP-bans no more. I got one from /r/russia just by recounting the Finnish view of the winter war. IP-ban was interesting experience. First they banned the precise address, then the whole city block (of cable provider). I tried very hard to get the whole country of Finland banned from Reddit, but unfortunately failed.

Ouch. I am banned once again: http://www.reddit.com/u/Timo_Noko. Reason: multiple accounts, some of which were used in groups, which had banned some other aliases, which look little bit the same as mine, so it must be me. Or something, you just cannot keep count of throwaways.

And yes this the last post I made and obviously the last straw in the series of relentless shitposting: https://www.reddit.com/r/Kayaking/comments/8zu861/coast_guar...

This is a reasonably good post, I think. Worth reading if you're interested in reddit community governance.

One thing that might make the solution marginally better would be a public record of bans with a brief note about the reason.

edit: fix typo

I'm very glad someone is speaking up about this. No moderator should have the possibility of permanently banning someone. A timeout (say a year at maximum) is plenty enough.

It is their community. If you are a shitty guest I throw you out of the house. It is their right to do so.

It's not though; it's Reddit's community. They give moderators the ability to do whatever they want with subreddits, but can (and not often enough do) get involved when particular subreddits bring them bad publicity. So many of Reddit's moderation policies were created when the founders expected Reddit to be used very differently, and are sometimes absurdly simplistic.

>My experiment, such as it is, consists of how many bans I can collect by simply going about my ways, communicating like a reasonable – but sometimes passionate – person.

I've spent lots of time on reddit. I have never been banned or warned for my posts. Is it possible the author is just an asshole? Maybe the communities in question have reasonable rules, and he's signaling that he does not care about those rules.

Without context the bans could very well have been warranted.

I'm going to divulge my experience; I am the closest thing to "god" to a small IRC community, I could ban with impunity- but why would I do that? It only serves to either stroke my e-peen of how much power I have (thus- making people dislike you and more willing to go somewhere else) - or I have a legitimate grievance.

There are people in this world that when you try to treat them charitably, if you have some perceived authority over them they do _not_ see you charitably. There are people who /really/ wish to test the bounds of tolerance and patience and there are those who are e-masochists, genuinely trying to illicit bans and grovel about it (if you unban, then they do the same thing again or worse despite claiming they would not).

SO, my position towards the author is one of skepticism, Reddit does indeed have over-zealous moderation in some forums, I really don't doubt that- but if you're a mod of a popular sub and you hand out bans so liberally then eventually you'll push people to another subreddit or platform. Entrenchment to a subreddit basically doesn't happen because it's so easy to pop up something new.

Its a bit more complex than this: greater goods are protected. For a shop owner, that's money. For a site owner, that's ad views, Yet, a greater good in a religious subreddit or website could be a certain religion or certain religious views; ie. competition from different religion or atheism. With a cryptocoin it could be competition from fork or different cryptocoin. My last example is an software-related e.g. an OS; Halloween documents / "Linux is cancer" comes to mind. In short, its to protect the interest of a person or group.

Think of moderators as shop owners, they reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.

When you enter their shop you accept their authority and the fact that you can be thrown out at any point with any explanation.

Is a shop owner allowed to say to someone: you're a foreigner, I don't want you in my shop? Is a shop owner allowed to say to someone: I don't like the color of your eyes, please leave my shop? Color of skin? Where do you draw the line?

A shop owner has an interest to having you as customer because it directly increases their sales. A Reddit mod doesn't protect commercial interests. In both cases though if your presence allows for opportunity, you'll remain welcome, within social rules of course (HN example [1]). Similar social rules apply on the Internet. I see the Internet as small religious "enclaves". Certain viewpoints are going to be unwelcome or downright impossible to argue otherwise (they differ per "enclave"). For example, if I go to a religious forum or church to defend my -ism (atheism or agnosticism) I likely get banned as troll even if I am very serious and kind. Why? It goes against premises that group -as being part of that- agrees upon. If you go to "A small subreddit inhabited by funky "spiritual" types." those premises also exist, even if they're not logical to you or go against scientific consensus or certain common razors.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This is 100% not the case with real shops, you cannot be thrown out simply because the owner wants to.

It's also still not right.

I am pretty sure that this is the case, at least in the US, with some exceptions(discrimination laws).

> It's also still not right.

No, it is not right, but just like a shop-owner, a forum moderator will not ban you randomly because she has an interest running a popular forum.

If one gets banned from a community(online or not), in most cases it's because they didn't adhere to the written or unwritten laws of the community, or pissed off someone high in the pecking order. Communities are not democracies, but my guess is that even if they were, a big majority of those who get banned would be ostracized anyway.

Every property owner has the right to ban you from their property or to decline service.

Decline service based on what?

Political opinions, skin color, sexual orientation, what they had for breakfast?

Yes, no, perhaps, yes.

What I learned is that most aggressive mods are with left leaning views and won't let "other side" to be read. Irony is that they think they are the guardians of free speech. That created vacuum on the internet which can be exploited.

So... reddit is like every forum on the internet before, if the people who are running or administrating it do not like you, you get banned. The title is clickbait shit as well.

Surprising as it may seem, it is possible for someone in a position of authority to disagree and even dislike someone else without stooping to using the powers of their authority position against those that they dislike.

In the real world this is known as "being a mature individual".

Stating the obvious doesn't make it real. Go and look at the OPs post history. In all his comments he is hardly critical with everything said in the discussions he takes part. In most of them he is hardly discussing the topic in a productive way. He is contradicting ideas without bringing his own all the time. If I would run a community and see someone like him slip up I would gladly swing the ban hammer as well. Nobody needs people like this in a community.

PS: Read the second paragraph and you know with what kind of person you are dealing with.

Perhaps the author was being unreasonable. I see no evidence pointing in either direction.

But that is not the point I was making.

The point I was making is that if the only argument someone has to defend them there actions is "according to the law, it is my community so I can ban anyone for any reason", well that's a bad argument.

People in positions of authority can and should be criticised. Yes, they should still be criticized even if their it is there "right" to do whatever is is that they are doing.

I would also even argue that anyone who only defends themselves by saying it is their "right" to abuse their position of authority should be criticised 10 times harder.

Because if THAT is the only argument that they can make, well that must mean every other defense is even worse.

This seems rather widespread in reddit.

For example, for the last two years, the moderators of r/india has been banning right wing users with impunity, converting that subreddit into a funny echo chamber.

There isn't really any easy solution for this.

The problem is there is no solution needed. The moderators opened a subreddit called /r/india and had a vision for it. They are now enforcing it. You may have different opinions but you were to late to open it yourself if you want a subreddit going with your state of mind open it.

Replace subreddit with country and your argument becomes rather xenophobic.

Those users can create their own subreddit.

Solution: don't go on reddit

TLDR: Excessive concern over dominance can ruin your enjoyment of social interactions. People who share this concern probably shouldn't be put in positions of power.

tldr; author is angry for getting banned from a few subreddits, mostly for "replying in kind" to things people said that offended him. He equates moderator power to that of cops that "throw flash grenades into cribs" and kill with impunity, but ultimately muses that moderators are more powerful than cops because they lack administrative hassles. Based on the language in his post-- I don't blame the moderators for banning him.

This is not a good look.

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