R/Java bans Kevin Bourrillion because he mentioned another programming language | Hacker News Reader

R/Java bans Kevin Bourrillion because he mentioned another programming language

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53 pointsstiltzkin49 comments

While the ban and rule are stupid beyond belief, I just want to make a note that Kevin is now unbanned and is asking people NOT to harass the mods

https://www.reddit.com/r/java/s/45sghfd8J8

The mods deserve it. You or I would not be unbanned so easily.

The mods continue to stay silent, remove all posts trying to discuss the issue, and not commit to any rules changes. So yeah, the "harassment" (which is really just people going WTF and wanting action) is well deserved.

Reddit moderation is an experiment in autocratic dictatorship, and this is yet another shining example.

While not all moderators behave selfishly or egotistically, a large enough number of them do such that the experience at scale sucks.

You don't know what the rules of each individual subreddit are, and you can easily find yourself banned for completely harmless behavior. This is at odds with Reddit's recent growth strategy of funneling people into new subreddits from the main feed. Often times you may not even know what subreddit you're in, yet the mods still expect you to read their rules before commenting.

I was shadow banned from my home city for commenting on crime once. I never got a reason or justification. Now I can't exchange concert tickets or participate in local discussion. It feels like a crime against my person.

I've had moderators ban me for winning a friendly argument they weren't even involved in.

I've even been banned for posting in an unrelated subreddit: there's a moderation bot that will check your post history and automatically ban you. It's funny because I don't share the ideology of the subreddit they flagged me for posting in.

All of this is a shining example of why freedom of speech is so important, and why moderation should be an individual choice where users can apply their own filters and blocking.

Reddit mods get in early and by that merit alone are entitled to power. It doesn't make sense anymore.

> I've even been banned for posting in an unrelated subreddit.

This is against the mod rules and deserves reporting.

>Reddit moderation is an experiment in autocratic dictatorship

I think that most power structures are "an experiment in autocratic dictatorship". Most include normal people in some way to some extent, but at the end of the day, there is a few who say what's going on, and then that's what's going on.

Therefore I don't think that anyone needs to take this so seriously. But it might be worth keeping in mind that the opposite is not true either. No matter how friendly a Reddit sub is, it's the mods who decide what and who stays. Same with websites: while many act like a public space, everything is up to the private host actually.

The mods are psychopathic idiots and deserve to be harassed until they resign.

He was unbanned because who he is, any other person they wouldn't care.

I can imagine existing conditions on a programming language subreddit that would lead to that rule. Comparative debates about programming languages spread like kudzu, overtaking everything else. If you're trying to have a discussion forum that is just about programming in the Java programming language --- that's a reasonable thing to want! --- then sharply prohibiting discussions about JVM languages might be especially necessary, since the interop between those languages makes it so easy to pull the other languages into the discussion.

The fear in my mind is like with Julia where you have zealotry masquerading as insight, and a culture where if you disagree with the true believers you must simply be not informed.

Sounds like the average Reddit experience.

This is exactly why such communities should remain on open newsgroups rather than Reddit/Discord/Slack or whatever other flavor-of-the-month service people want to switch over to for their shiny UI.

Reddit will be 19 years old next month, it’s not flavor of the month.

Chocolate’s been around a while too, but it can still be the flavor of the month.

Digg is 19 years old as well, and was significantly more popular than Reddit at its peak. Where is it now? Or Myspace? Or Tumblr? Or Google+? Or Twitter?

Any open forum that is private and profit-focused is eventually going to destroy itself. Reddit is not an exception, especially after its recent IPO. How long do you think it will be before investors are no longer content with losing hundreds of millions of dollars every year and want more monetization and more user-hostile features built in?

> Any open forum that is private and profit-focused is eventually going to destroy itself. Reddit is not an exception.

Facebook is still around.

If we count the date commercial dial-up was first available (1992) to the Facebook launch date (2004), Facebook has been around for the majority of most people's internet experience.

I think you have the wrong mental model of this. Rather, when a community wins and reaches steady state, it becomes entrenched and almost impossible to dislodge.

Google+ tried to suck the air out of the room for Facebook and it failed.

Facebook is very far from an "open forum". You can't even view posts without creating an account. The service is useless if your entire social graph isn't also over there. Content you post is heavily moderated, both automatically and by paid humans. There's a reason there's no Java discussion happening there.

What exactly do you mean by open newsgroups?

Is there any language community using that kind of thing these days??

Google Groups shows that comp.lang.c is still used. (Note: the latest messages were posted in February because that's when Google Groups stopped supporting Usenet.)

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.c

Pretty much. Social media and related encourage cyberdisinhibitionism and tyranny through extremism including drama, fascistic policies, and a fundamental lack of compromise or benefit of the doubt. These tendencies aren't exclusive to one app or another, but are part and parcel of the medium. These tendencies tend to reward and encourage bullying and sociopathy while crucifying random people for trivial and arbitrary transgressions.

I doubt there are any Java expert group or platform group members that are going to be as religious as a reddit moderator. In the conversations I've had with members I know of those cohorts, they've always been very open about say Scala doing something better than Java, or Clojure doing x as an improvement.

That ban reason was pretty snarky too! And such entitlement permeates pretty much all of Reddit, outside of the very few communities that self-regulate (or at least try to) similarly to how HN does.

Belongs in https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/, not Hacker News.

This is a major issue on today's internet. This is one of the most pertinent topics we could discuss.

I think there are several technical means of getting around this. The BlueSky protocol allows for end-users to opt-in to their own moderation preferences.

The Reddit methodology sucks, and at its scale I believe it is causing societal harm.

This is relevant and many do not use Reddit.

Wild that he was unbanned considering the typical experience with mods who are in the wrong on reddit is that the next mod who gets your PM that typically goes something like, "Hi, this conversation was misread/construed by the mod that banned me. Sorry for the misunderstanding. I was $doingGoodThingNotAgainstRules if you could re-instate me. Thank you," is usually met with a double-down where mod2 just defends mod1 and suspends you for a month or reports you to admins for a perma-ban.

As a former ircop who went out of my way to be helpful to ... the absolute sludge of EFnet, and then you have great mods like dang, and other forum mods it's very frustrating that reddit mods nearly always assume the absolute worst about someones intentions and are nearly always incredibly rude.

I guarantee that /r/java gets nowhere near the amount of reports/spam/etc that we got on EFnet in the 90-2000s. But we also weren't anonymous mods and had reputations to maintain. A lot of IRCops were Ops because we peered our servers to EFnet and we didn't want to be desynced.

Obviously this guy was able to get a ton of attention brought to this so pretty clear how he scooted back in, glad they loosened up here.

follow up thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/java/comments/1chohts/please_let_it...

Just stop using Reddit, pretty simple. Their mod system is a complete joke.

This. I would be much more inclined to use Reddit if they would hire professional moderators, and were all required to stand by a certain code of ethics and conduct. Right now every sub Reddit is just someone's little fiefdom to play with, and power trip.

Reddit is a cesspool moderated by literal high schoolers and unemployed people.

History repeats like the old seo directories such as dmoz, mods just on these power trips where common sense doesn't apply.

Ouch that hurt! I am unemployed right now and eating from my severance and 401k!

Don’t forget companies, PR agencies and government actors.

Israeli and Russian governments have unquestionably had influence over certain subreddits. Worldnews for the former.

Now that "card" view is aggressively forced on users Reddit is more than ever a tool for advertisers. Users, especially those who contribute content, don't have any direct relationship with the business model and are being squeezed out.

There are a number of browser extensions that break that.

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/extensions-to-transform-your-r...

reddit is inhabited by the world's biggest losers

Only the moderators of the big subreddits. The users that aren't bots are largely reasonably normal people.

Yeah, there's sort of a bell curve to the ideal reddits where everything in the middle is totally serviceable. However, too small and the mods become overwhelmed and have to overban/overmod to keep up. Too large and the mods get powerhungry and ban in accordance with their own political values.

Yes, although I think the latter is carefully organised, probably by well-funded groups.

E.g. /r/worldnews have 36 million subscribers, and I think it has more influence than even big newspapers, and this is controlled by anonymous moderators, who for all we know can be a team working for the same organisation.

Hey, Stack Overflow is pretty high up there now

X for me takes the crown these days.

Dominated by crypto grifters, Musk sycophants and engagement farmers.

At least Reddit isolated those to certain subreddits.

Reddit is highly censored and can get you banned easily unlike X.

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