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Reddit is not actually strong moderation. Forum communities with actual strong moderation, eg. Something Awful, ResetEra have near zero issues with hate speech
by Tiktaalik 9y ago
Reddit is not actually strong moderation.
Forum communities with actual strong moderation, eg. Something Awful, ResetEra have near zero issues with hate speech, Nazis and other things that reddit has let fester.
- tabeth 9y agoWell, that's because reddit is simply a platform, right? reddit undeniably has tools to allow for strong moderation. see /r/AskHistorians for a perfect example of this.
- InclinedPlane 9y ago"Tools to allow for" is a hell of a phrase. Yes, moderation is possible on reddit but the idea that the tooling for such is in any way "good" is in error. It's enough to make moderation possible with sufficient application of effort. The fact that it's so rare is a strong indication of how useful those tools are.
- Tiktaalik 9y agoStrong moderation would mean that moderation is not optional, always present and always consistent. Having a toxic community that internally declines to moderate is not strong moderation.
- bshanks 9y agoReddit tries to be just a platform, but it fails in two ways: 1) Namespace of subreddits. The subreddit which snags the most obvious name for a topic has a much better chance of becoming canonical for that topic that competitors with worse names. 2) Cross-subreddit identity and supporting tooling. For example, i can easily search for all recent posts made by a particular user, but i can't easily search for all posts made by a particular user within one specific subreddit. This sort of thing promotes "cultural leakage" across reddits and makes people think of all of Reddit as one community with one culture. Related: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16573842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16573842 which summarizes a study that finds cultural leakage across subreddits.
- enraged_camel 9y agoI'm a regular on Something Awful. One of the major factors that keeps it relatively clean is that user registration costs $10. That's a strong financial disincentive against trolling, bots, etc. I really believe that successful online communities of the future will have paid signups.
- mulmen 9y agoI believe you are correct. If I pay for something that suggests I am the customer and not the product.
- newen 9y agoHaha if you pay for SA it only suggests that you are a sucker who paid 10 bucks to post on SA for a couple of days before getting banned. They are very ban happy there.
- mulmen 9y agoI have had an SA account for years and never been banned. I don't appreciate being called a sucker and I think the price is fair for what I get. When I use Facebook I am the product, not the customer. This means the platform is optimized to put my eyeballs on advertisements or provide data about me to marketers. It is not optimized to provide high quality conversation.