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I personally think that this article buried the lede as far as controversial Reddit actions go. Users now can be (and have been) banned for upvoting posts in qu

by maverick2007 7y ago

I personally think that this article buried the lede as far as controversial Reddit actions go. Users now can be (and have been) banned for upvoting posts in quarantined subreddits (both on the right - T_D - and the left - Chapo Trap House - among others). I've seen controversy erupt all around Reddit about this and it doesn't feel right to me. If the content that people are upvoting is bad enough to get banned over shouldn't it just be removed from the site and not left up to upvote? Edit: the official policy is that only upvoting rule breaking posts will be cause for banning which makes sense. The Redditors I've heard from claim differently but are obviously biased. So take what I said with a grain of salt.

floatingatoll 7y ago
Were they upvoting posts that violated the Reddit participation guidelines?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
shadowgovt 7y ago
"Don't encourage them" is a standard admonishment given to people in a group IRL when one member is acting out. And it's demonstrably impossible for moderators to find and remove 100% of content in violation of policy. It pushes added responsibility on the upvoters to think before they upvote, but perhaps that is a fair request to make of forum participants. (And taking off my "community moderator" hat and putting on my "sysadmin" hat---both dusty from lack of use---using sock-puppets or a like-minded collective to brigate-upvote content so that it is visible before it gets banhammered is a known attack vector against the infrastructure itself, and mitigating that attack vector via added penalty for the supporting accounts doesn't seem unreasonable).
- Brakenshire 7y ago
  Yes, if a user can be banned for repeatedly upvoting posts that encourage brigading or actual violence, I don’t see why users who repeatedly upvote the same content shouldn’t be included. Either there are rules which have meaningful sanctions or there aren’t.
- markovbot 7y ago
  >It pushes added responsibility on the upvoters to think before they upvote, but perhaps that is a fair request to make of forum participants. That's nice in theory, but there's no clear guidelines for what you're not allowed to upvote, and there's no transparency on anything, just user reports. For example, this post[0] from someone who claims to have received a warning from the reddit admins for upvoting a post titled "Reminder that the police steam more money each year than burglars. Totaly normal country", linking to a screenshot of an article about law enforcement seizing $181,000 from someone. In the comments, OP posted a screenshot[1] of the message they claim was sent to them, which states "abusive content is not acceptable on Reddit, nor is engaging with it". This content doesn't seem abusive to me, it seems like a totally standard reddit post. There is _far_ more abusive content on the front page regularly. How would I have known not to upvote that? [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChapoTrapHouse/comments/f9idzr/just_got_another_message_from_the_admins_about/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ChapoTrapHouse/comments/f9idzr/just... [1]https://i.imgur.com/XCfErPv.png https://i.imgur.com/XCfErPv.png
ehsankia 7y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong and I read it wrong, but I think you're mixing up things here. > Users that have more than 500 karma in quarantined subreddits outside of The Donald will not be allowed on the list of approved applicants [to be a moderator] This is only for being a moderator. Simply upvoting posts (that don't break any rules) in quarantined subreddits does not get you punished. > If the content that people are upvoting is bad enough to get banned over shouldn't it just be removed from the site and not left up to upvote? What ends up happening in this subreddit is that the bad content doesn't get reported/deleted, which is what leads to the subreddit being quarantined in the first place. The whole point of a quarantine is exactly to push people to report bad content, and acts as a warning. This new change makes sense as far as pushing people to report said content and not keep promoting it. I also don't think the content is being "left to be upvoted", but rather when found, they will retroactively flag anyone who upvoted it instead of reporting it. But the problem is that the content often doesn't get flagged/deleted until it gets to the top of the subreddit. This is the problem they are trying to fix with this change.
- windyaskew 7y ago
  This article [1] says they announced it today. I'm excited to see the fallout on this decision. [1] https://reclaimthenet.org/reddit-banned-for-upvote-policy/ https://reclaimthenet.org/reddit-banned-for-upvote-policy/
  - kickopotomus 7y ago
    What would the fallout be? The collapse of quarantined communities? The policy only applies to individuals that consistently upvote policy-breaking[1] content within quarantined communities which is pretty clearly qualified. Those individuals will also receive a warning(s?) prior to being banned. Seems like a pretty fair policy all around seeing that upvoting is a conscious choice. [1]: https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy
  - ehsankia 7y ago
    The actual source is the Transparency report [0] from yesterday: > When we expanded our quarantine policy, we created an appeals process for sanctioned communities. One of the goals was to “force subscribers to reconsider their behavior and incentivize moderators to make changes.” While the policy attempted to hold moderators more accountable for enforcing healthier rules and norms, it didn’t address the role that each member plays in the health of their community. > Today, we’re making an update to address this gap: Users who consistently upvote policy-breaking content within quarantined communities will receive automated warnings, followed by further consequences like a temporary or permanent suspension. We hope this will encourage healthier behavior across these communities. Seems like their justification matches my guess in the parent post. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/f8y9nx/spring_forward_into_reddits_2019_transparency/ https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/f8y9nx/sprin...
pacala 7y ago
There is much more content than people. To the extent that a platform engages in policing thought, people will always be a much cheaper enforcement target than content.
uk_programmer 7y ago
It is literally punishing people for liking something they don't like. This used to be a meme on forums of when someone was complaining about people liking something in a thread about discussing said thing.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
baybal2 7y ago
FYI, Reddit's major investors include one big Internet company from Shenzhen Advance publications is also having huge exposure to China through Condenast's business in China
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  What? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications
  - dave5104 7y ago
    "Owned" is a bit generous. But Tencent has a financial investment in reddit. > In February 2019, Chinese company Tencent invested $150 million into Reddit as part of its Series D. From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit
- swebs 7y ago
  Which company is that? Wikipedia says they're independent with the majority shareholder being a New York company called Advance Publications
  - 34679 7y ago
    https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/11/18216134/reddit-tencent-investment-deal-memes-amount-winnie-the-pooh-tank-man-china https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/11/18216134/reddit-tencent-i... "Reddit gets a $150 million investment from Tencent and users are posting memes to mock the deal"
    - ceejayoz 7y ago
      Half of one funding round and "owned" are substantially different things.
  - baybal2 7y ago
    Condenast has a huge PR, advertising, and media business in China, which would've been a near impossible task even for a domestic Chinese company, let alone foreign, or American one on top of that. The propaganda ministry razed the media landscape to the ground over the last 5 years. Even completely apolitical companies like publishers of professional literature, science textbooks, photo journals, and children books got a boot. The state has also been said to forcefully breaking up big media groups, denying mergers in between ad/pr/media companies. Seeing Condenast thriving in China, knowing how things there are now, is very suspicious.
istorical 7y ago
You didn't even mention the worst aspect of the upvote policy which is that when they warn you not to upvote content that goes against their content policy they don't tell you what you upvoted that was found to infringe it. You have to try to guess what you did wrong I guess?
- floatingatoll 7y ago
  Each post on the forum has an forced-visible explanation of what content should be flagged. Reddit was careful to remove plausible deniability as an excuse before taking more drastic steps.
- creaghpatr 7y ago
  It's Pavlovian conditioning- you don't issue the corrective measure until the subject performs the undesirable behavior.
bonyt 7y ago
> Users now can be (and have been) banned for upvoting posts in quarantined subreddits I've heard this thrown around, but I thought it was for upvoting posts that are later removed for violating Reddit's rules - not just upvoting any posts on quarantined subreddits. I can't figure out if this is the case, though, here is what Reddit said, I think: > Users who consistently upvote policy-breaking content within quarantined communities will receive automated warnings, followed by further consequences like a temporary or permanent suspension.
- maverick2007 7y ago
  And that's fair. I should've done a better job differentiating between the official word and the word of random Redditors that have a vested interest in making themselves look better. I have to assume the actual implementation will look for like the former than the latter.
  - apawloski 7y ago
    You may want to edit your original post to reflect this.
Someone1234 7y ago
Misleading summation. Reddit will ban users for upvoting RULE BREAKING posts on quarantined subreddits. In other words, they're going to ban the people posting rule breaking content and also people promoting it via upvotes (after warnings/repeat behaviour/etc). To let others know about this without including the RULE BREAKING part is misleading.
- bmaisonp 7y ago
  Given they don't have to specify the rules broken nor the posts which broke the rule, that clarification is essentially irrelevant to the way in which this policy will likely be used.
DeedsMoraine 7y ago
>If the content that people are upvoting is bad enough to get banned over shouldn't it just be removed from the site and not left up to upvote? Honeypot.
rtkwe 7y ago
The actual policy as stated is if a user consistently upvotes policy violating content that is later removed in a quarantined sub they will be warned and banned if they continue. They are removing violating content it's just adding the fact that you shouldn't be upvoting this content because upvotes = higher visibility and support, it's supposed to mean 'this is good content.'
charwalker 7y ago
The sub mods don't remove the rule breaking content allowing it to be upvoted so the site admins step in to remove those accounts. Now they are working on that first part by adding mods that will remove rule breaking content. Anything said by supporters of this and the other subs you mention are coming from an echo chamber of self victimization. The Youtube related first amendment case form earlier in the week is directly analogous to this but Reddit Admins are trying to handle this on site and not draw media attention to their actions or the sub.
benmmurphy 7y ago
As far as I understand none of the people who are being warned for upvoting are given a copy of the post that triggered the warning. This makes it quite difficult for people to adjust their behaviour because they might be upvoting content the genuinely believe is not breaking the rules. If you weren’t assuming good faith on Reddit’s part then you might suspect they were doing this so they could distribute warnings to users who were supporting wrong opinions. The more innocent explanation is they either overlooked this or they don’t want to distribute the rule breaking content. I believe twitter often shows you a copy of the offending tweet when you get temporarily suspended.
s9w 7y ago
Punishing users for voting the wrong things was actually invented on HN as far as I know

floatingatoll 7y ago

Were they upvoting posts that violated the Reddit participation guidelines?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

shadowgovt 7y ago

"Don't encourage them" is a standard admonishment given to people in a group IRL when one member is acting out. And it's demonstrably impossible for moderators to find and remove 100% of content in violation of policy. It pushes added responsibility on the upvoters to think before they upvote, but perhaps that is a fair request to make of forum participants. (And taking off my "community moderator" hat and putting on my "sysadmin" hat---both dusty from lack of use---using sock-puppets or a like-minded collective to brigate-upvote content so that it is visible before it gets banhammered is a known attack vector against the infrastructure itself, and mitigating that attack vector via added penalty for the supporting accounts doesn't seem unreasonable).

Brakenshire 7y ago
Yes, if a user can be banned for repeatedly upvoting posts that encourage brigading or actual violence, I don’t see why users who repeatedly upvote the same content shouldn’t be included. Either there are rules which have meaningful sanctions or there aren’t.
markovbot 7y ago
>It pushes added responsibility on the upvoters to think before they upvote, but perhaps that is a fair request to make of forum participants. That's nice in theory, but there's no clear guidelines for what you're not allowed to upvote, and there's no transparency on anything, just user reports. For example, this post[0] from someone who claims to have received a warning from the reddit admins for upvoting a post titled "Reminder that the police steam more money each year than burglars. Totaly normal country", linking to a screenshot of an article about law enforcement seizing $181,000 from someone. In the comments, OP posted a screenshot[1] of the message they claim was sent to them, which states "abusive content is not acceptable on Reddit, nor is engaging with it". This content doesn't seem abusive to me, it seems like a totally standard reddit post. There is _far_ more abusive content on the front page regularly. How would I have known not to upvote that? [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChapoTrapHouse/comments/f9idzr/just_got_another_message_from_the_admins_about/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ChapoTrapHouse/comments/f9idzr/just... [1]https://i.imgur.com/XCfErPv.png https://i.imgur.com/XCfErPv.png

ehsankia 7y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong and I read it wrong, but I think you're mixing up things here. > Users that have more than 500 karma in quarantined subreddits outside of The Donald will not be allowed on the list of approved applicants [to be a moderator] This is only for being a moderator. Simply upvoting posts (that don't break any rules) in quarantined subreddits does not get you punished. > If the content that people are upvoting is bad enough to get banned over shouldn't it just be removed from the site and not left up to upvote? What ends up happening in this subreddit is that the bad content doesn't get reported/deleted, which is what leads to the subreddit being quarantined in the first place. The whole point of a quarantine is exactly to push people to report bad content, and acts as a warning. This new change makes sense as far as pushing people to report said content and not keep promoting it. I also don't think the content is being "left to be upvoted", but rather when found, they will retroactively flag anyone who upvoted it instead of reporting it. But the problem is that the content often doesn't get flagged/deleted until it gets to the top of the subreddit. This is the problem they are trying to fix with this change.

windyaskew 7y ago
This article [1] says they announced it today. I'm excited to see the fallout on this decision. [1] https://reclaimthenet.org/reddit-banned-for-upvote-policy/ https://reclaimthenet.org/reddit-banned-for-upvote-policy/
- kickopotomus 7y ago
  What would the fallout be? The collapse of quarantined communities? The policy only applies to individuals that consistently upvote policy-breaking[1] content within quarantined communities which is pretty clearly qualified. Those individuals will also receive a warning(s?) prior to being banned. Seems like a pretty fair policy all around seeing that upvoting is a conscious choice. [1]: https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy
- ehsankia 7y ago
  The actual source is the Transparency report [0] from yesterday: > When we expanded our quarantine policy, we created an appeals process for sanctioned communities. One of the goals was to “force subscribers to reconsider their behavior and incentivize moderators to make changes.” While the policy attempted to hold moderators more accountable for enforcing healthier rules and norms, it didn’t address the role that each member plays in the health of their community. > Today, we’re making an update to address this gap: Users who consistently upvote policy-breaking content within quarantined communities will receive automated warnings, followed by further consequences like a temporary or permanent suspension. We hope this will encourage healthier behavior across these communities. Seems like their justification matches my guess in the parent post. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/f8y9nx/spring_forward_into_reddits_2019_transparency/ https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/f8y9nx/sprin...

pacala 7y ago

There is much more content than people. To the extent that a platform engages in policing thought, people will always be a much cheaper enforcement target than content.

uk_programmer 7y ago

It is literally punishing people for liking something they don't like. This used to be a meme on forums of when someone was complaining about people liking something in a thread about discussing said thing.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

baybal2 7y ago

FYI, Reddit's major investors include one big Internet company from Shenzhen Advance publications is also having huge exposure to China through Condenast's business in China

ceejayoz 7y ago
What? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications
- dave5104 7y ago
  "Owned" is a bit generous. But Tencent has a financial investment in reddit. > In February 2019, Chinese company Tencent invested $150 million into Reddit as part of its Series D. From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit
swebs 7y ago
Which company is that? Wikipedia says they're independent with the majority shareholder being a New York company called Advance Publications
- 34679 7y ago
  https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/11/18216134/reddit-tencent-investment-deal-memes-amount-winnie-the-pooh-tank-man-china https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/11/18216134/reddit-tencent-i... "Reddit gets a $150 million investment from Tencent and users are posting memes to mock the deal"
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    Half of one funding round and "owned" are substantially different things.
- baybal2 7y ago
  Condenast has a huge PR, advertising, and media business in China, which would've been a near impossible task even for a domestic Chinese company, let alone foreign, or American one on top of that. The propaganda ministry razed the media landscape to the ground over the last 5 years. Even completely apolitical companies like publishers of professional literature, science textbooks, photo journals, and children books got a boot. The state has also been said to forcefully breaking up big media groups, denying mergers in between ad/pr/media companies. Seeing Condenast thriving in China, knowing how things there are now, is very suspicious.

istorical 7y ago

You didn't even mention the worst aspect of the upvote policy which is that when they warn you not to upvote content that goes against their content policy they don't tell you what you upvoted that was found to infringe it. You have to try to guess what you did wrong I guess?

floatingatoll 7y ago
Each post on the forum has an forced-visible explanation of what content should be flagged. Reddit was careful to remove plausible deniability as an excuse before taking more drastic steps.
creaghpatr 7y ago
It's Pavlovian conditioning- you don't issue the corrective measure until the subject performs the undesirable behavior.

bonyt 7y ago

> Users now can be (and have been) banned for upvoting posts in quarantined subreddits I've heard this thrown around, but I thought it was for upvoting posts that are later removed for violating Reddit's rules - not just upvoting any posts on quarantined subreddits. I can't figure out if this is the case, though, here is what Reddit said, I think: > Users who consistently upvote policy-breaking content within quarantined communities will receive automated warnings, followed by further consequences like a temporary or permanent suspension.

maverick2007 7y ago
And that's fair. I should've done a better job differentiating between the official word and the word of random Redditors that have a vested interest in making themselves look better. I have to assume the actual implementation will look for like the former than the latter.
- apawloski 7y ago
  You may want to edit your original post to reflect this.

Someone1234 7y ago

Misleading summation. Reddit will ban users for upvoting RULE BREAKING posts on quarantined subreddits. In other words, they're going to ban the people posting rule breaking content and also people promoting it via upvotes (after warnings/repeat behaviour/etc). To let others know about this without including the RULE BREAKING part is misleading.

bmaisonp 7y ago
Given they don't have to specify the rules broken nor the posts which broke the rule, that clarification is essentially irrelevant to the way in which this policy will likely be used.

DeedsMoraine 7y ago

>If the content that people are upvoting is bad enough to get banned over shouldn't it just be removed from the site and not left up to upvote? Honeypot.

rtkwe 7y ago

The actual policy as stated is if a user consistently upvotes policy violating content that is later removed in a quarantined sub they will be warned and banned if they continue. They are removing violating content it's just adding the fact that you shouldn't be upvoting this content because upvotes = higher visibility and support, it's supposed to mean 'this is good content.'

charwalker 7y ago

The sub mods don't remove the rule breaking content allowing it to be upvoted so the site admins step in to remove those accounts. Now they are working on that first part by adding mods that will remove rule breaking content. Anything said by supporters of this and the other subs you mention are coming from an echo chamber of self victimization. The Youtube related first amendment case form earlier in the week is directly analogous to this but Reddit Admins are trying to handle this on site and not draw media attention to their actions or the sub.

benmmurphy 7y ago

As far as I understand none of the people who are being warned for upvoting are given a copy of the post that triggered the warning. This makes it quite difficult for people to adjust their behaviour because they might be upvoting content the genuinely believe is not breaking the rules. If you weren’t assuming good faith on Reddit’s part then you might suspect they were doing this so they could distribute warnings to users who were supporting wrong opinions. The more innocent explanation is they either overlooked this or they don’t want to distribute the rule breaking content. I believe twitter often shows you a copy of the offending tweet when you get temporarily suspended.

s9w 7y ago

Punishing users for voting the wrong things was actually invented on HN as far as I know