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Is stupid to expect ad-driven media properties to be neutral. Just dumb. Reddit is an ad-supported system. The moment you take advertising, you are now requir

Is stupid to expect ad-driven media properties to be neutral. Just dumb. Reddit is an ad-supported system. The moment you take advertising, you are now required to maintain editorial control. And that's fine. Advertisers have strict content guidelines, things like: no blood, no violence, no gore, no porn, etc.. Do you think a company like Calvin Klein is going to want to put their fashion ad next to an image of a dead kid? Yah that's not happening. Instead of setting the expectation on corporations, we need the public to understand what their support of ad-driven media properties mean. And that it's fine. Reddit isn't a public service. It's not a charity. It's an ad-driven media property, like a TV show or magazine. That's it. And if conservatives can't accept advertising-based media, they need to find some other outlet to express their views. Let me put it another way: Do you really think Calvin Klein is going to want to put ads next to images of dead kids? Is that your expectation? If not, how do you expect Reddit to become a profitable company? Of course, Reddit & Twitter isn't going to state that they're an ad-driven media property, since they want to "appear" unbiased and neutral, but that's completely false. They are absolutely responsible to their advertisers as their core business plan.

visarga 9y ago
You probably don't know but there are NLP and computer vision methods to detect "blood, violence, gore and porn" automatically and stop ads on those pages (subreddits).
- mozumder 9y ago
  This doesn't just apply to obvious and simple visual problems, but also more subtle content problems. How does Honda avoid placing ads next to a pro-Roy Moore articles that might associate their brand with pedophilia?
  - visarga 9y ago
    Use word vectors to compute similarity of the page content to banned topics, and if it is > threshold, then avoid that page. When word vectors are trained on billions of words they can pick up even the slightest hint of pedophilia. They also understand slang and memes, if present in the training corpus. I think SOTA in content filtering and classification is pretty good today for both image and text. Another way to filter pages is to follow it in time, for a longer period and if it has multiple positives, then ban it entirely.
crankylinuxuser 9y ago
Put it a different way: Its like Usenet. Lots of unrelated and related NG's. Some are very palatable and high content. /r/electronics, /r/arduino , /r/news ; those sorts of things. I think there'd be room for lists of "advertising acceptability" while still maintaining the previous freedom of speech ideals they claimed. Something like: "Acceptable for all ages" "Acceptable for most viewers" "NSFW content, porn related" "Abhorrent, no adverts unless explicitly request subreddit" You can find porn companies willing to advert on the NSFW/porn subreddits. Not a terribly big or risque deal. And then the abhorrent ones (say, /r/watchpeopledie /r/blackpeopletwitter), turn into a users-pay system to keep the subreddit alive. Track the sub and make the users pay their share of advertising. That way, All groups can stay on reddit. They get their traffic they so desire, and the absolutely horrible groups still can stay, albeit segregated and self-monetized.
- mozumder 9y ago
  The advertising market is dominated by mega corporations in big industries. You can always find a few dollars from crap local family brands and porn companies, but if you want the big bucks, you need the major brands. Economics sets the rules. How much of your income goes towards porn? How much of it goes towards food or transportation or housing? The sizes of each of those is directly proportional to the size of their corresponding advertising industries.

visarga 9y ago

You probably don't know but there are NLP and computer vision methods to detect "blood, violence, gore and porn" automatically and stop ads on those pages (subreddits).

mozumder 9y ago
This doesn't just apply to obvious and simple visual problems, but also more subtle content problems. How does Honda avoid placing ads next to a pro-Roy Moore articles that might associate their brand with pedophilia?
- visarga 9y ago
  Use word vectors to compute similarity of the page content to banned topics, and if it is > threshold, then avoid that page. When word vectors are trained on billions of words they can pick up even the slightest hint of pedophilia. They also understand slang and memes, if present in the training corpus. I think SOTA in content filtering and classification is pretty good today for both image and text. Another way to filter pages is to follow it in time, for a longer period and if it has multiple positives, then ban it entirely.

crankylinuxuser 9y ago

Put it a different way: Its like Usenet. Lots of unrelated and related NG's. Some are very palatable and high content. /r/electronics, /r/arduino , /r/news ; those sorts of things. I think there'd be room for lists of "advertising acceptability" while still maintaining the previous freedom of speech ideals they claimed. Something like: "Acceptable for all ages" "Acceptable for most viewers" "NSFW content, porn related" "Abhorrent, no adverts unless explicitly request subreddit" You can find porn companies willing to advert on the NSFW/porn subreddits. Not a terribly big or risque deal. And then the abhorrent ones (say, /r/watchpeopledie /r/blackpeopletwitter), turn into a users-pay system to keep the subreddit alive. Track the sub and make the users pay their share of advertising. That way, All groups can stay on reddit. They get their traffic they so desire, and the absolutely horrible groups still can stay, albeit segregated and self-monetized.

mozumder 9y ago
The advertising market is dominated by mega corporations in big industries. You can always find a few dollars from crap local family brands and porn companies, but if you want the big bucks, you need the major brands. Economics sets the rules. How much of your income goes towards porn? How much of it goes towards food or transportation or housing? The sizes of each of those is directly proportional to the size of their corresponding advertising industries.