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92 of top 500 subreddits controlled by same 5 people
- mcint 6y agoThe controversial image in question: https://i.imgur.com/neT3jv5.png https://i.imgur.com/neT3jv5.png
- Mengkudulangsat 6y agoOh I'll be fine then!. I don't frequent those subs. Small communities are much better.
- Markoff 6y agoNope, that's just some blurred cropped version of original. Here is the complete list in good quality. https://i.redd.it/bfhl8s6o2fn41.png https://i.redd.it/bfhl8s6o2fn41.png Mirror https://imgur.com/a/rjE8YuW https://imgur.com/a/rjE8YuW
- s_dev 6y agoIt's controversial because people are now wondering if money is involved. Getting mod control of that number of subreddits doesn't come about for being dilligent and helpful.
- koheripbal 6y agoThis only shows us the ones that are blatantly using the same account. There are mods that are smart enough to have different accounts for each sub - so that only Reddit admins would be able to tell that they are the same person. ...but the reality is that those Reddit admins are also some of those "power mods". I once have a conversation with a mod, who admitted that he was an admin as well - I wish I had saved the exchange.
- drevil-v2 6y agoI think it is vastly more insidious than just greed. I think it is about controlling the zeitgeist. Propagation of authorised memes.
- blaser-waffle 6y agoI believe that was an explicit conceit of the site: they're not making money via ads or "gold", they're shaping perceptions.
- camccar 6y agoChina money maybe. They push anti US hate all day everyday
- Shivetya 6y agoMore people should be concerned how well the political related subs are pretty much PAC managed at this point. This is from a relative who receives what she laughs as her marching orders about what to up/down etc though reddit is not the only site on their list. people seem to forget how easy manipulation of information is and sites with voting mechanisms are the easiest of all to manipulate especially those where you can silence with relative ease.
- intended 6y agoIts controversial because people are applying 0 reflection or analysis. Everyone took a HEADLINE, with a single table as their proof! Even here on HN. This is the WORST of content I had to deal with - a virus that forces a decision just by glancing at it. How are these mods in "control", they aren't even top mods. How are they "controlling" reddit? None of that is explained, none of that is proved. The person posting it was spamming the content all over the place and seems to be driving drama. And people swallowed this? Hook line and sinker? Discussion here is sans reflection of the facts?
- korv 6y agoYeah, what? I looked at the top 5 subreddits in the table, where it looks like a single person is controlling them. They have 145 distinct mods. Controlling reddit? lol
- dr_zoidberg 6y agoWell, at least now I know that some subs that were sneaky removing my content are all managed by the same people. Guess they don't like what I post (:
- cmonnow 6y agoIs that the full image ? I don't see 92 subs in there..
- kochikame 6y agoInteresting. Reminds me that one of the reasons I still mostly like Reddit is because of all of those subs listed, I subscribe to only one (r/mildlyinteresting) Classic example of why you never, ever look at vanilla served up for you Reddit. Just make it your own.
- munchbunny 6y agoI think it's important to note: in most cases they are not the only moderators on those subreddits. For example, /r/relationship_advice has 10 listed moderators. However, the list is correct about the five users being moderators for those subreddits, and the elephant in the room about the few controlling the many is definitely still the elephant in the room.
- olliej 6y agoThey deleted the original post from the first reddit, then locked this version so that people can't comment. I'm curious if they're reddit employees (in which case you could imagine reddit choosing to have mods on the more popular subreddits), or just internet randoms. That said the original post seems perfectly reasonable so shouldn't have been deleted - if the goal was to avoid conspiracy nonsense they just Streisand'd themselves by "proving" that they want it to be secret.
- JPKab 6y agoReddit is awful, and has been for years. Like most HN folks, I have a few narrow interest subreddits I go to on non controversial subjects. The rest of the site is just groupthink tribal warfare for bitter professional victims.
- guevara 6y agoSeriously, god forbid you have a different opinion otherwise you're instantly downvoted.
- fnord77 6y agooh it's worse now - if you get some number of downvotes, you get 9 minute timeouts between posts.
- holler 6y agothat has to be one of the worst features I've ever encountered.. truly despicable
- falcolas 6y agoWorse than your post becoming illegible due to css changes?
- holler 6y agolol... close call, I hate both.
- throwaway2048 6y agoHN has the same feature, except its like 2 hours
- rimliu 6y agoHN has it worse. You do not have even to be downoted to get "you are posting too fast" message. Not the most stupid thing on HN, but close.
- SkyMarshal 6y agoA more accurate title might be "92 of top 500 subreddits controlled by same 5 people". From the article.
- __s 6y agoWhich doesn't seem like that many. Consider: 100% of Hacker News is moderated by the same people Power laws are a thing, we shouldn't be surprised if 80% of the moderation is done by 20% of the people (& remember, power laws are recursive) A lot of the subreddits in the image seem related. Almost as if the people who create the most popular subreddits tend to create more than 1 subreddit & know how to effectively run them. We can argue about how effective reddit is, but "being one of the most popular subreddit" should work for this point I say this as someone who doesn't frequent the most popular subreddits or recognize who the mods are. But I do notice moderators tend to receive quite a bit of flak which isn't always warranted Which is to say, I'd be interested if there were some citations of other moderators claiming these mods were injected or whatnot. But this "just stating facts" 5 people fact doesn't seem relevant
- fiblye 6y agoThere's also a matter of scale. Any one of the top 50 subreddits probably get more activity than all of HN. 10000 comments on a single post isn't uncommon, but 1000 posts on an HN topic is pretty rare.
- piva00 6y agoEven more given how much of a hassle it is moderating any kind of online community. I had to deal with smaller ones and would never do that job for free again...
- onion2k 6y ago100% of Hacker News is moderated by the same people HN is open about it. That's the difference.
- 6y ago
- 6nf 6y agoHmm why is all this being deleted? Reddit mods seem to be involved? It's hard to tell what's going on here.
- duxup 6y agoThe moderator system on reddit is a pain. There is certainly a scratch my back and I'll scratch yours across subs so you get moderators who don't really even know the sub. Absentee moderators is common as subs drift off topic/ don't filter spam and etc.
- technion 6y ago"Actually not bad" subs often include the per-language subs. /r/ruby still has jamesgolick as a mod. ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8804624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8804624
- bibinou 6y agoMight be a tribute.
- koheripbal 6y agoModerators aren't paid. ...which means they must seek other employment. One way to do that is to push paid content (or remove content). Ultimately, these channels of revenue become more profitable and those folks buy more and more subs.
- kge32 6y agoReminder: If you swap out the 'r' in the 'reddit.com' URL for 'c' (meaning censored), you can read the deleted comments.. Nowadays that's a must when reading "controversial" threads on Reddit. In this case: ceddit.com -> https://snew.notabug.io/r/interestingasfuck/comments/gitwbo/pointing_out_how_much_power_few_people_have_gets/ https://snew.notabug.io/r/interestingasfuck/comments/gitwbo/...
- artsyca 6y agoWoa what is this black magic -- there's an interesting quote by Aaron Swartz at the bottom too
- lihaciudaniel 6y agoR.I.P
- kolbe 6y agoreplying to this just because i don't know how to archive a comment on HN
- tree3 6y agoClick on the comment's "X minutes ago" and then click "favorite"
- gundmc 6y agoWow. Reading the comment threads that were censored on that post is incredibly disturbing.
- update 6y agonote, this also works if you add 'move' in between 're' and 'ddit' (i.e. removeddit) so: https://www.removeddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/gitwbo/pointing_out_how_much_power_few_people_have_gets/ https://www.removeddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/gitw... good to have backup services.
- 6y ago
- cameronfraser 6y agoRemember when the reddit CEO edited a post that was critical of him and then came out and admitted to it? https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-edit-comments https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoThat incident was what made me leave Reddit:)
- LeoPanthera 6y agoWhat do you use instead, if anything?
- hckr_news 6y agoNot OP but hackernews has been kind of my alternative. Think I've been spending too much time here as of late..
- warranty 6y agoIt’s frustrating to see people talk about niche subreddits and not mentioning any or talk about leaving reddit and not mention what they replaced it with.
- cameronfraser 6y agoYou don't need to replace reddit with anything. We functioned fine without it most of our lives. It's time better spent doing a hobby or reading a book or even watching soap operas
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoNothing, really:\ Unfortunately, the direct competitors (Voat et al.) failed to attract enough content or users to be real competitors outside of very narrow communities/interests; ex. /v/linux existed, but it was basically dead, so there was nothing to go there for. So, I use HN more, browse more news aggregators, and hope the fediverse or something can come to fill the void.
- guevara 6y agoSuch a cringe website; like ResetEra for the masses. There are probably only a handful of subreddits that are alright i.e. not full of living bots. Everything else is just groupthink and tribalism, just look at r/politics or r/news. What's worse is that even neutral subreddits like r/gaming are prone to the mods a.k.a janitors being pissy and deleting anything that doesn't conform to the status quo (looking at you r/TheLastofUs). And surprise surprise, the post got removed. xd
- uoaei 6y agoIf you spend all your time digging into the corners of reddit, the niche hobbyists' zones, it's still pretty useful. But it is a constant fight against entropy and the rubes.
- guevara 6y agoOh yeah no doubt. they're informative, helpful, and good for legitimate discussion. It's just such a shame that the broader subs that aren't niche happen to be so toxic.
- mxmilkb 6y agoI use RES to filter away more than 200 ugh subreddits from r/all.
- pitzips 6y agoI think I'm nearing 2500 filtered. It's actually a nice place to visit now.
- amiga_500 6y agoI find they create more crap new ones than I can be bothered to filter.
- tennineeight 6y agoCan you maybe have a pastebin of such a list? would be very useful
- Lammy 6y agoI assume their goal has been to avoid another 2015-style "revolt" of main subreddits shutting down to protest admin/company actions: https://www.wired.com/2015/07/reddit-amageddon/ https://www.wired.com/2015/07/reddit-amageddon/
- ASalazarMX 6y agoThey're blatantly censoring posts and comments about this, that surely has worked well in the past.
- koheripbal 6y agoI suspect it's about pushing paid content as part of a revenue mechanism. All advertising platforms consolidate over time.
- OGWhales 6y agoConsidering gallowboob openly admitted to landing a job off his ability to do just that, I would say that is likely. People don’t realize how much influence things like memes or other seemingly innocuous posts can have.
- intended 6y agoHow are people buying this just based on the headline? Seriously, has anyone seen those mods control those subs? Have they removed other mods and run the subs according to their evil designs? What evil design? People all over this thread are talking about this as if it was fact. This is a point where people stop being effective on HN, and offload their thinking to assumptions of trust, jsut because its posted here. This thread, and this post mean that this isn't a fair thing anymore.
- fnord77 6y agowish there was more transparency about the moderators, especially on the news and political subs.
- ShorsHammer 6y agoPublicmodlogs is a bot that cleanly and simply reports the actions made. Many subreddits refuse to add it. Apparently it's a touchy issue. https://www.reddit.com/r/publicmodlogs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/publicmodlogs/
- throwaway122378 6y agoRemember when an entire community was wiped off Reddit because of their political views
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- DonHopkins 6y agoFondly! Good riddance.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Icyphox 6y agoThese are the kind of people who downvote if they disagree with an opinion / view. Don't be them.
- DonHopkins 6y agoWe shouldn't downvote or ban people from which reddit community because we disagree with their opinion? /r/BeatingWomen? /r/Gore? /r/Incels? /r/FatPeopleHate? /r/Pizzagate? /r/The_Donald? /r/MensRights? /r/ShitN_ggersSay? /r/TransF_gs? /r/CreepShots? /r/TheRedPill? /r/WatchPeopleDie? Why, because it hurts their feelings? To protect them from the consequences of what they said, and ensure everyone has a chance to hear it? Downvoting is an exercise of free speech, too, you know. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
- honksillet 6y agoComments lock, post remove. Seriously. To hell with Reddit.
- LeoPanthera 6y agoThis is the image in question that is being blocked: https://i.imgur.com/neT3jv5.png https://i.imgur.com/neT3jv5.png It shows which subreddits, and their popularity rank, are moderated by 5 people who are moderators of the most subreddits at once.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- detuur 6y agoIf you want to get an idea of what exactly these mods use their powers for, here's a website that preserved the comments on that page before they got deleted by the mods: https://removeddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/gitwbo/pointing_out_how_much_power_few_people_have_gets/# https://removeddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/gitwbo/p...
- ponsin 6y agoWhat I find interesting about Reddit is how the community overwhelmingly publicly writes about how inclusive they are and how important it is to be inclusive. Yet there are subs that frequently get to all whose main goal is to exclude and make fun of people such as FragileWhiteRedditor, inceltears, iamatotalpieceofshit, and TheRightCantMeme
- ryanwaggoner 6y agoThere is no Reddit community. Reddit is one of the largest and most popular sites on the web. There’s probably no subculture that isn’t represented there.
- ponsin 6y agoThat's like saying that there is no American culture because there are 328.2 million residence. I bet that if you swap the residence of Indonesia (273 million residence) with the residence of America, you will notice a lot of cultural differences.
- ryanwaggoner 6y agoI should have said "there is no singular Reddit community". Pedantic notes aside, the point is that it's the least surprising thing ever to find that some subreddits have one attitude towards $THING and other subreddits have a different attitude. The site has hundreds of millions of active users.
- MagnumOpus 6y agoReddit has an audience of tens of millions and is not a single hivemind. It could certainly be the case (and it is probably the case) that most subreddit communities strive to be inclusive -- while there are still hundreds of subreddits with tens of thousands of redditors which promote and endorse assholery and/or bigotry.
- tayo42 6y agoI realized recently Ive spent a ton of years being a reddit user. Somehow that's where I settled. Politics, covid19, and memes have really been making me rethink where I spend my time on the internet, its stopped being fun. I think the person that posts on reddit has changed. I thought it might be an interesting thing to reflect in a longer format blog post thing, but not sure. there really is a toxic undertone to a lot of subreddits. Even the niche one's have some crazy people wandering in. My problem is i don't know what to really replace it with. I don't think the alternatives are great. Forums seem deadish, the format isn't great to use on mobile. Reddit is nice to use in an app, makes it easy to post and read. It almost feels like the social web has run its course.
- boopk 6y agoYeah sadly I started browsing reddit in 2011 when the f7u12 memes and subreddit were popular and it really has gone down in quality and the people posting like you mentioned has changed drastically. I can't wait for the day when a new forum experience replaces it.
- notamy 6y agoI was having a lot of the same thoughts lately! Back in 2012-2015 I was SUPER active on some forums, but I visit them nowadays and they're just... dead. It makes me really sad because I don't know of any other alternatives; Reddit is awful for a lot of my interests, but there's no real communities I've found that can compare... I miss the forums I used to browse.
- Trasmatta 6y agoIt's weird how the sense is community that existed on forums just doesn't exist on Reddit. You just don't have the same connection to the other posters that you would on tight knit forums. You might as well not even have usernames. It's a bit different on smaller, more focused subreddits, but not by much. I used to think that Reddit was a better place to be than Twitter or Facebook, but now I'm not so sure. I've definitely had a harder time cutting it out of my life than those other two, even though I think it's had a pretty bad effect on my mental health.
- ohyeshedid 6y agoThis is particularly interesting now that they're launching their cryptocoin and community premium features.
- ilaksh 6y agoIs there a link, I didn't know about that.
- ohyeshedid 6y agohttps://www.reddit.com/vault/ https://www.reddit.com/vault/
- runawaybottle 6y agoThat link insists I install the app. I like switching between browser tabs, not apps.
- m0guz 6y agoI only use old.reddit.com since I hate the new design and https://old.reddit.com/vault https://old.reddit.com/vault redirects me to some random post.
- ativzzz 6y agothat's a private community
- mproud 6y ago92 of the top 500 are controlled by the same 5 people? Let’s do the math. So that’s about one fifth. Divide by five, so each of them is averaging 20 of the top subreddits. Is that a lot? Do these people work together? I need more context before assuming a strong opinion.
- quantummkv 6y agoYes. They do actively work together to shape discourse across subredits. I have seen it happen myself on /r/worldnews a lot of times. Consider if you are a big/rich autocratic nation state (read China, Saudi) that wants to censor and shape discourse outside their borders. You just buy these 5 people and boom, you get instant powers to shape and censor the discourse on the most viewed forums on Reddit and the wider internet.
- knolax 6y agoReddit constantly hates on Russia/North Korea/Saudi Arabia/China/Israel/India to the point that I've never seen a positive post related to those countries and have seen nothing but negative circlejerks whenever they're mentioned. Despite this, it seems people are convinced that these countries are secretly censoring Reddit and bring it up constantly. It's a disturbing denial of reality.
- hckr_news 6y agoThose "people" are effectively corporations. They make their money off reddit.
- adultSwim 6y agoMany sub-reddits are captured by a company and push recommendations towards only their products
- Thorentis 6y agoChange the base URL to ceddit.com to read all the censored comments (that site scrapes them as fast as it can). One of the comment that was deleted: "Reddit defiantly needs to restructure their moderation teams." Wow. Reddit really is just a pile of rubbish now. So glad I found HN.
- schkkd 6y agoOne day there was a post there about free 5 bucks for some PlayStation stuff. The post received 30k comments. Thats all you need to know about the reddit audience. What would improve the content quality is a requirement to maintain membership by answering a complex enough question once a month. Questions could be prepared by mods. But then all the reddit audience would be gone, and with them the reddit's power to influence the lazy internet crowd.
- echelon 6y agoReddit corporate really wants a high valuation, and they have devoted everything to growth. They don't care if the website devolves into the comments section of YouTube. Growth and money are all that matter. They have no interest in setting up barriers or vetting members. Dumb engagement is easier than building tools to support content creation. Infinite scroll, embedded videos. It's becoming Zuckerbergian.
- chaos_a 6y agowait until you hear about the blockchain they just released for the fortnite subreddit. You can earn "bricks" in order to gain features like posting gifs and emotes. While reddit's never been amazing it feels like the quality is going downhill faster than before slowly turning into youtube level comments.
- RandomBacon 6y agoThey released it to both Fortnite and CryptoCurrency subs at the same time. It's called "Moons" in ths CC sub. Apparently they are ERC-20 tokens, and in the CC sub, there are frontpage posts already asking how to buy "Moons".
- wyxuan 6y agoControlled is a strong word that doesn’t quite describe it very well. For example, while gallowboob is a mod of r/til he isn’t active as a Mod and doesn’t “control” like the word implies. Also there’s a large mod team that is behind something like TIL that isn’t just this group of 5 ppl.
- pramit 6y agoReading these complaints about Reddit, and having been a long time member of HN as well as Reddit, I would say there are pluses and minuses for HN and Reddit. There are some great sub-reddits (world news, education, Ask Historians, Ask Science etc.) and there are some echo chambers. Similarly, there many corporate shill types and 'stuck up' bookish-types on HN , but I found useful stuff in the submissions and comments as well. Let's not make this a Reddit vs HN issue.
- bumblebritches5 6y agoNot surprised at all.
- fergie 6y agoIs this necessarily a problem? Reddit is social media- just as there are popular youtubers, twitterers, and twitchers, there are popular redditors. You could argue that popular redditors are actually more benign since the monetization opportunities are limited, and they seem to be making interesting communities for the love of it.
- INTPenis 6y agoIf you control the top subreddits then I doubt you're actually moderating them. You're in fact just a manager over these subreddits. It's a hierarchical management structure with 5 people at the top of certain major subs. Which makes this even stranger because why would these people want to be at the top? What's the motivation? Either pure power, or money.
- koheripbal 6y agoMoney, clearly. There's another comment that links to one of the people IRL and he's the head of a social media marketing startup.
- tobias3 6y agoWould that be legal in the US? (Intentionally deleting/promoting material as moderator without disclosing that you have been hired to do so and marking it as advertisement)
- anon73044 6y agoReddit is a "private" platform, mods are free to do as the please so long as they don't breach the terms of service. In this instance I'd say the T.o.S. needs a major overhaul.
- baq 6y agoit's private in the sense of ownership but it most certainly isn't private in the sense of impact on the public. same deal with other social networks like facebook. i don't see that much difference between a publicly and privately owned psy-ops weapons which open social networks have become.
- anon73044 6y agoI don't disagree, we just don't really have any laws that protect free speech on the internet
- thwr34234 6y agoWikipedia is not too far from this. The place is controlled by toxic 'ministry of truth' creatures who admonish you for every goddamn thing.
- remarkEon 6y agoBasically, manged social networks like Reddit are all terrible. You get unsocialable people who eventually join, and then that begets moderation, which begets misbehavior, which begets more extreme moderation. Ad infinitum. What my experience is is that everyone who has seen this on reddit (or facebook or twitter) is doing is just making their own curated network on Discord or something. Slack, even, since the free version is pretty okay. I suppose that just moves the problem to the hosts of the channel but honestly it cannot be worse than reddit since there wouldn't be any corporate influence, which this post seems to strongly suggest is happening at scale on reddit. You see this a lot already, with youtube personalities and devs even saying "join my Discord!" in their videos and on their blogs. Frankly, this is a good step forward ... but my comment about corporate influence is a little tongue-in-cheek, since eventually those companies (Slack, Discord, etc.) will face pressure (from their owners and investors, from powerful outsiders) to police the content that exists within their platform. I have no idea how to solve this problem. I don't like the idea of any network being vulnerable to the whims of some corporate overlord, so if anyone can figure out how to do a distributed social networking protocol that would be very nice and I'd sign up immediately.
- BLKNSLVR 6y ago> Basically, manged social networks like Reddit are all terrible Manged is the word I use when I'm referring to management that's been done badly. I'm sure yours is a typo, but if not, it's a word that should catch on. Use in a sentence: My Manger just asked me to do two tasks, which they don't even realise are mutually exclusive. The Mangement is taking this company down the tubes. That project was manged into the dismal failure you read about in yesterday's paper.
- benibela 6y agoOr pronounce the word in a more German way Ma na ger Manaːɡɐ Where Nager translates to rodent.
- koheripbal 6y agoI think that smaller communities make for better content, and more mature discussions. The front page needs to be removed, and karma needs to be isolated between subs.
- schkkd 6y agoReddit serves its purpose well. It's a honeypot for lazy emotional people: reddit offers them space to procrastinate and gets to influence them in return (ads, politics).
- ryanwaggoner 6y agoYou’re just describing all advertising-supported media, from TV to magazines to large swaths of the web. Do you honestly think HN is in a different category? Why do you think this site exists? And how many billions of collective hours of procrastination have been spent here? Granted, this site is relatively well-moderated and high signal to noise, especially for its size, but so are many subreddits. The top subreddits are a dumpster fire but there are thousands of smaller niche subs that are delightful.
- progre 6y agoDoes anyone have a tildes.net invite by the way?
- Markoff 6y agoHere is the complete list in good quality. https://i.redd.it/bfhl8s6o2fn41.png https://i.redd.it/bfhl8s6o2fn41.png Mirror https://imgur.com/a/rjE8YuW https://imgur.com/a/rjE8YuW
- hajderr 6y agoReddit is good and reflects people inner attitudes. You just don't get to see that in real life so be happy about someone exposing them on the web
- yread 6y agoI don't really see the big deal - the most popular subreddits share moderators (perhaps reddit employees? EDIT: doesn't even look like cyXie is an employee) - so what? For example gaming has 26 moderators, out of that 1 from this list: Dacvak (114459) 8 years ago full permissions synbios16 (28642) 6 years ago full permissions gamingmoderator (5816) 6 years ago full permissions mookler (6506) 5 years ago full permissions Rlight (12185) 4 years ago access, flair, mail, posts, wiki Analtoast (3337) 4 years ago full permissions delicious_cheese (34636) 4 years ago full permissions MisterWoodhouse (62091) 4 years ago full permissions Redbiertje (59120) 3 years ago full permissions Umdlye (9139) 3 years ago full permissions MikeyJayRaymond (55501) 3 years ago full permissions Greenbiertje (150) 3 years ago posts TonyQuark (76908) 2 years ago full permissions TurtlesgonnaTurtle (1466) 2 years ago full permissions relaxlu (7013) 2 years ago full permissions IwataFan (22448) 2 years ago full permissions phedre (301354) 2 years ago full permissions AutoModerator (8074) 1 year ago full permissions MAGIC_EYE_BOT (399) 1 year ago posts, wiki wrproductions (35774) 7 months ago full permissions cyXie (2104178) 7 months ago full permissions Hawkmoona_Matata (31402) 7 months ago full permissions leakycauldron (1991) 7 months ago full permissions LeafSamurai (53062) 7 months ago full permissions Jackson1442 (13385) 4 months ago mail
- stevenjohns 6y agoA less known fact is that /r/The_Donald was created and moderated by a group loosely called “Nolibs” that have been pushing pro-Israel, pro-police propaganda for years through thousands of sock puppet accounts. They were in control of various subreddits and were heavily agenda driven. It all fell apart for them a year or two ago though when they had internal problems and one of them came clean. Their antics were closely followed on the subreddit /r/NoLibsWatch. Some reading can be had here[0] about one of the members who eventually went to jail/psych ward over a bomb plot, with his stated goal being to start a religious war. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/subredditcancer/comments/4gx9ct/comment/d2lqglo https://www.reddit.com/r/subredditcancer/comments/4gx9ct/com...
- appleflaxen 6y agoYour post led me to an incident of accidental outing of US propaganda in 2017: https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/4ylml3/reddit_has_removed_their_blog_post_identifying/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/4ylml3/reddit... Summary: it looks like Reddit posted on their blog about the "most reddit-addicted cities", and Eglin Airforce Base was near the top. It didn't take long for people to allege that it's due to sock puppetry and propaganda coming from the military, which was legalized in 2013. https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-ban-spreads-government-made-news-to-americans/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-... At which point the blog post was changed to remove all mention of Eglin. Propaganda to US citizens seems like a terrible use of tax dollars at best, and an incredibly dangerous tool in the wrong hands at worst.
- koheripbal 6y ago
- yosito 6y agoWe need more alternatives to Reddit with different moderation practices that allow competing narratives to surface. I used to view Reddit as "what's popular on the internet?", but it's definitely become more "what's the Approved Narrative?" these days and though I do think there's plenty of danger content that calls for violence or is some other form of abuse, it's frustrating that there are many subs in which questioning the Approved Narrative will get censored. I think content moderation could be done by the community flagging problematic content. Flagged content could be temporarily hidden, with the reason it was flagged. The OP could then write a short defense of the content, and then a "jury" of randomly selected users (who are over 18) could vote on whether to permanently remove the content or to allow it. Content couldn't be flagged again for the same reason if the jury had previously approved it. There would be a public record of content removal decisions, and perhaps even a restricted way to somehow request the removed content as a matter of public record, without surfacing it into public view. Obviously, there would need to be some experimentation to get a better system. Which is my whole point. I wish there were more systems experimenting with this.
- BiteCode_dev 6y agoIs there a Tor alternative to reddit?
- geranim0 6y agoIt's not just happening on reddit.The whole media industry works like this. If your point of view does not fit within the 'accepted bounds', it will not get the attention it should get.
- lucideer 6y agoLooking at recent comment history for the user who posted this is also eye-opening https://www.reddit.com/user/rootin-tootin_putin/ https://www.reddit.com/user/rootin-tootin_putin/
- koheripbal 6y agoDiscuss the message. The messenger is irrelevant.
- dTal 6y agoThe message is "there's something fishy at work". The person is being banned from huge chunks of Reddit for saying this. It is very relevant.
- lucideer 6y agoPlease take the time to follow the link I posted before commenting. The link is to evidence of widespread discrimination by Reddit moderators against this user, based (seemingly) on the fact they chose to post this image. It shows that they're going to far greater lengths than just censoring the original post: they're engaging in a concerted campaign against this user in response.
- cameronbrown 6y agoLooks like the typical Redditor to me. Does that mean they shouldn't be allowed a voice in public spaces?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- lucideer 6y agoNot sure why you would think I was criticising the user if you did follow the link. Pretty clear from their comment history that they're under attack from Reddit moderators (which I thought worth highlighting)
- dTal 6y ago
- ptman 6y agoSo, where are the federated distributed alternatives to reddit? I only know of lemmy https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/ https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/
- irrational 6y agoOne of those mods is a moderator over 240 subs (I didn’t look at the other 4). How in the world can anyone have time for that? That is beyond a full time job. Is there a way to see a list of moderators and how many subs they moderate? Who moderates the most subs?
- johnchristopher 6y agoHaven't read the article and I am not an avid Reddit user (just regularly frequents and posts every month in a sub dedicated to a boxing manga, anyway...) but I wonder: if the activity brings in money, wouldn't they just outsource it while keeping the keys ?
- axqa10 6y agoPerhaps it is a group of people with a full time job? Manipulating opinion is important these days. Mailing lists and Usenet were free, most web forums are subtly (or overtly) censored.
- enumjorge 6y agoI see this opinion often yet people who share it don’t explain how exactly a complete lack of censorship is supposed to ward against manipulation. It also ignores the flip side where a lack of moderation can help misinformation to spread faster than it would otherwise.
- Craighead 6y agoMostly because that opinion is founded on a misunderstanding of reality. Opinions have always been manipulated. The implication that usenet or irc or mailing lists are somehow "clean" of manipulation is obviously false.
- 34679 6y agoActual employees of reddit can investigate and remove mods who act outside of guidelines, but they don't.
- 6y ago
- jokoon 6y agoOne thing I constantly realize is that commenting is broken on reddit, for one simple reason. Once a thread is popular enough, and reaches a high amount of comments, any new comment is going to be drowned by upvoted ones. The algorithm should decrease the value of old comments even more. There's already a formula, something like position_score = score/(age^2) Unfortunately the more a comment is upvoted, the more it's visible, so it's snowballing upvotes faster than the 1/age^2 can decrease its position. Also the more a thread is popular, the sooner it should be locked.
- hombre_fatal 6y agoI think a big upgrade for both HN and Reddit would be so simply collapse all child comments by default and only show top-level comments. That way every person doesn't have to scroll past the first thread to find the second top-level discussion. I don't think threads should be locked, though. There is nothing on Reddit more annoying than not being able to reply to someone because of an arbitrary decision (like a mod locking the entire submission). There are better solutions. But it just seems silly to shut down discussion when people want to have it on a social site. Even sinking a thread to the bottom is better than locking it.
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoInteresting idea. If the reply chain is expanded by default, whichever top-level comment rises to the top tends to steer the direction of the discussion. This is especially troublesome on Slashdot where comments are shown in chronological order, regardless of score. > But it just seems silly to shut down discussion when people want to have it on a social site. Locking is meant to be used when a thread is filling with toxic bile and there's little chance of things improving. I don't think it's always wrong for mods to lock a thread.
- jokoon 6y agoyou can still answer in PM
- apexalpha 6y agoOne website that I think has nailed comment moderation is the website Tweakers.net. A Dutch tech website and forum. On Tweakers you (as a user) can apply for mod rights and it allows you to rate each comment from -1 to +3. +3 = must-read +2 = informative +1 = on-topic 0 = off topic -1 = spam / insult There's an alogrithm that gives your rating more weight if they (retroactively) allign with what the supermods (employees of the site) rate comments. On Tweakers you almost never read insults and "and my axe" repititive comments because they are hidden by default, and the +2 and +3 comments automatically get places at the top. This has so much over a simple +1 / -1 system. I wish more website would think about their comments systems and how they can achieve a good incentive and moderation structure for informative comments to be lifted up and unwanted ones down. Tweakers is Dutch but to get an idea here's a news thread with a lot of comments: https://tweakers.net/nieuws/166988/ https://tweakers.net/nieuws/166988/
- hombre_fatal 6y agoLittle known fact: you can take over any subreddit if the creator/mods haven't had had public activity in 60 days. How? Just ask: https://old.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/ https://old.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/ I took over some big subreddits this way and I've had big subreddits taken away from me because I forgot to log in and comment on the account I used to create it. Even though I was active on a non-creator/non-mod account. It's actually how I found out about the "feature". A very poorly implemented feature given the potential value of subreddits and all the work it takes to grow one. So if you run a subreddit that you care about, remember to assign some active mods even just to avoid someone taking over your subreddit.
- echelon 6y ago> potential value of subreddits and all the work it takes to grow one. Isn't the monetary value of a subreddit zero to everyone but Reddit corporate?
- i5heu 6y agoYou can pin advertising and so on..
- onetimemanytime 6y agothe sub owner can sell advertising? Or is it done under the table?
- efreak 6y agoYou can pin posts. A post can be advertising something just as easily as it can be a story or a link to a news article.
- apexalpha 6y agoCompanies pay big money to get posts up in certain subreddits.
- Neil44 6y agoI find the groupthink on reddit to be impossible to deal with. Many subreddits have a particular dogma then stick to and if you variate at all you get downvoted into oblivion no matter how obviously correct you are.
- cosmodisk 6y agoIsn't that the case everywhere else? I posted some stuff here that got downvoted faster than you could blink,while it would have brought hundreds of upvotes should in certain platforms. It's just an extension of people's teal life social bubbles.
- dr_zoidberg 6y agoIt even happens on subreddits that aren't as popular. Many years ago I posted frequently on /r/astrophotography, using very crappy equipment[0], but focusing on the processing part, even sharing my own python scripts. Then one mod decided to actively undermine me, even banned one of my posts, because I didn't use PixInsight (like the rest of "the pros" do). I got my post back up, but that ruined the subreddit for me. Funny thing, I grew up, graduated CS/software engineering, specialized in image processing and lo-and-behold, my techniques, though rudimentary, were pretty solid. [0] old binoculars steampunk-ly tied to an old digital camera -- being a teenager with no income meant $0 budget -- but worked better than you'd imagine!
- yazan94 6y agoSorry for the tangent, but that sounds really interesting! Would you feel comfortable sharing more info about how you did the processing? Astrophotography is a hobby I've been wanting to get into and learn about, but I can't justify purchasing an expensive camera for just one hobby.
- dr_zoidberg 6y agoWell I never formalized it in library or code that has survived to this day. But in a general sense, what you do is load your images as raw as you're comfortable working with them, and then define a pipeline that can: * Stack or integrate: this means turning 100 high-noise images into a single, low noise image. To do that, you need: * Registration or alignment: this is simply making sure that the stars are placed consistently on the same (x, y) location so that when you stack you don't get trails or blurring. High quality registration can go as far as sharpening your end result if you manage sub-pixel alignment (or you can strecth for super-resolution). * Post-processing: it can be anything from removing light pollution (important if you're shooting from within a city), remove gradients (airglow, or residual light pollution even if you are far away from a city), sharpening (Lucy-Richardson deconvolution is king here using gaussian kernels, but if you can aproximate a Point Spread Function -or PSF for short- you can get even better results), color correction, high dynamic range processing. Of course, this is an un-ending place. PixInsight is a great tool, I won't deny that. But I had a great joy in learning how to program this things, and to me it's a lot more interesting researching how to do something, learning it and programming it, rather than having it done by somebody else, clicking a button and moving away. Luckily for both you and I, Bennedict Bitterli has written a C++ pipeline for processing with great detail that covers registration, stacking and removing gradients. That's a great read that you can find here[0]. You can still visit /r/astrophotography and treat yourself to the wiki if you want something more down to earth and with less programming involved. The one thing most redditors there forget is that AP, on a budget, can be as fun (and frustrating too!) as throwing thousands of dolars worth of equipment to the problem. If you have a DSLR (new or old, or a mirrorless, or a compact camera, even some phones have good enough cameras) and a tripod you can do widefield astrophotography. [0] https://benedikt-bitterli.me/astro/ https://benedikt-bitterli.me/astro/ Edited: fixed a few typos
- bryanrasmussen 6y agoSo would that 5 people be the 1% or the 5.4% (5 out of 92)
- keiferski 6y agoThe inadequacies of Reddit make me miss the message board days of old. Around 2001, I was active on a niche message board for a Gameboy Advance game. The board was only vaguely about the game itself; most topics were just random news and conversation. At its peak, there were probably a few hundred posters, tops, but everyone had an avatar, a screen name and a recognizable identity. I never met any of these people in real life, but nearly two decades letter, I can still remember the various screen names and personalities. This sort of thing just doesn't exist anymore, simply because the subreddit version of X would destroy a (non-Reddit) budding community before it had a chance to grow. Reddit is a reflection of the broader societal trend away from local or small communities toward an anonymized, faceless megacorp one, replete with all the problems that usually entails. I hope that somehow we can get back to the human feeling of the early internet.
- WilliamEdward 6y agoI'm still active on a forum for those types of games. They're still probably about as active as they've ever been. It's obvious why it would never work on a large scale though. Each post got the user profile next to it, their signature, and a lot of space.
- cribbles 6y agoThis was my experience with early 00s subject-based message boards as well. It seems to me like Discord provides a similar experience for today's kids. But of course the medium itself is quite different (long-form vs quippy, preserved vs ephemeral) and informs the experience accordingly. Much as I somewhat romanticize the BBS experience I think it's going to occupy less and less of this type of social space, just by the nature of the way people communicate now.
- dependenttypes 6y ago> long-form vs quippy, preserved vs ephemeral I learned a lot by browsing years old posts in forums and usenet but with ephemeral messaging I would not be able to do that. Makes me wonder how the new generation will deal with that. It is also about centralisation vs each community hosting their own servers and not having to adhere to the arbitrary rules that some company enforces upon them.
- dTal 6y agoJust for fun, I went to the front page of Reddit and clicked on the usernames of a few of the top posts. The very second one was "peke_f1"[0], with a post about an F1 announcement. Checking his post history reveals that he is very unpopular for somehow always managing to get the karma for large announcements, with someone accusing him of being "Gallowboob's karma farmer". Indeed, someone actually beat him to it this time - and yet his post is the one on the front page, and a post pointing this out has been removed [1]. So I assume that even many subreddits not obviously controlled by "central management" are still part of the hierarchy. [0] https://www.reddit.com/user/peke_f1/ https://www.reddit.com/user/peke_f1/ [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/formula1/comments/gjip7f/congrats_ukcollantine_on_winning_the_first_karma/ https://www.reddit.com/r/formula1/comments/gjip7f/congrats_u...
- JimBlackwood 6y agoIt is funny you happen unto this exact one, since I follow the F1 subreddit. Indeed, peke_f1 is always the account that has posted major announcements. The moderators are often accused of deleting posts that were earlier in favor of peke_f1. Even if the link and title were exactly the same.
- dependenttypes 6y agoIs there no transparency for subreddit moderation?
- qrbLPHiKpiux 6y agoI was active on digg v 1 When digg went to v 2, I bailed to reddit Active for many years. Reddit went full retard years ago Now I’m lost and wake up in 4chan sometimes I hate myself
- anon73044 6y ago4chan suffers from the same thing too these days. all of the major boards have had curated content since moot left
- noisy_boy 6y agoI stopped going to reddit because of the non-stop circlejerking, hyperbole of meaningless positivity and repetitive junk memes/comments. The technical/hobbyist subreddits still have some good parts but most of it is just time-sucking rubbish.
- afrcnc 6y agoYes, that's what being an admin looks like
- avainlakech 6y agoI deleted my reddit account over a year ago and I swear it was one of the best decisions I’ve made in a long time. I don’t even lurk. The closest I get is clicking on a google search result that takes me to reddit.
- givinguflac 6y agoWho cares, its Reddit
- amateurdev 6y agoGenuine question: Do Reddit mods get paid for being mods? Someone here posted a link to all the sub-reddits in question. These see so many posts generated all day. Im actually curious how someone has so much time to go through them. Is being a mod their full time job? Or more of a side-hustle/interest?
- commandlinefan 6y agoThere's a conspiracy theory that the mods of the really active subreddits get paid to promote particular sorts of content - not by reddit, but more like a sort of "sponsorship" sort of thing. The alleged sponsors range from corporations to the Chinese government.
- mothsonasloth 6y agoThe problems with Reddit I'd like to add * Bots and sock puppets pushing agendas * Reddit counter culture movements and backlashes. Seems to be bipolar with pro China / anti China every day of the week. * Reddit nice guys who have account names like "Iliketitties" or something really depraved. Along with all the other hypocrites * Reddit Admins and big personalities driving content trends on the site e.g. (/u/gallowboob) * Recycling of posts / knowledge, since there are always new people joining. You get things like "TIL that bananas are sterile" trending once every month. Which is frustrating for veteran users * Reddit arm chair generals/economists/politicians. The points system rewards trendy content and doesn't necessarily mean quality. Unlike points in Stackoverflow, there is some degree of confidence in the users competency. * The fact that Reddit is mainly populated with technologically proficient people, who probably have some sort of issue, whether it be mental, psychological. Sure we all suffer from our demons but the amount of stuff I read on there makes me cringe at times. * The "Reddit Contrarian", waiting to snipe your post with their immense intellect Sure there are many more that could be extrapolated to any other social network.
- Pelic4n 6y agoFunny to read that on HN.
- fortran77 6y agoI nearly spit my coffee out while reading it. And it's already on /r/LOLHackerNews
- aea14 6y agoNearly every bullet point you mentioned can be sensibly argued regarding Hacker News. Particularly the fourth, sixth, and overwhelmingly the last. I have also seen a regular username here containing “penis” in an intentional fashion and a number of people with clear mental and psychological issues, as well. Perhaps the problem isn’t the specific forum.
- jiggawatts 6y ago
- bluedays 6y agoYou can vote for content, but you can't vote for moderators. Seems counter-counterintuitive.
- kaustyap 6y agoI miss yahoogroups days around 20 years back. It felt like close knit community at that time.
- johnnydoe9 6y agoNot just the moderators the people who post the articles are the same as well look at bunyipouch on r/movies basically every post on hot is by this one account.
- nsilvestri 6y agoThere is no conspiracy here. Anyone saying there is simply doesn't understand the dyanmics of moderating large subreddits. Moderating sucks. It's thankless volunteer work babysitting a bunch of children and adults acting like children. The biggest subreddit I manage has 6000 subscribers, 1000x smaller than some of these, and I've had to ban people for harassing users, being racist, and posting NSFW content when one of the rules is literally don't post NSFW content. It's not a fun job. It's janitorial work. Voluntary janitorial work. It's not easy managing a community of several million users. I doubt many of you would actually want the responsibilities it requires to do at minimum a decent job of it. In regards to the users in the OP, I've personally talked to cyXie, Gallowboob, awkwardtheturtle, and siouxie_sioux, and they all seem to be nice people who simply enjoy participating on reddit [1]. I don't necessarily agree with all the things they do or decisions they make (particularly in regards to moderation) but it really is not malicious. If you start moderating one big sub it means you can be trusted at least enough to do it for another sub. If you think this alone is evidence of a conspiracy then you don't have enough experience with content generation on reddit. [1] My source is anecdotal; I have several hundred thousand karma so I run in some of the high-karma circles.
- evgen 6y agotl;dr member of illuminati wishes to remind us that the illuminati does not exist.
- blunte 6y agoReddit-worthy comment there!
- archived22 6y ago>> Voluntary janitorial work. How many hours people spend, as they also have jobs which actually pays them?
- nsilvestri 6y ago>they also have jobs bold assumption ;) other options include being retired or having a partner provide for them >how many hours people spend I'm not one of them, but I'd probably guess it's anywhere from 2-6 hours a day. Depending on job, one could easily can work that in before/during/after work. /u/GallowBoob, the user with the most karma on reddit, actually managed to turn it into his job. He was originally a landscape architect whose reddit habits got him a job at those awful viral licensing companies, although now he does social media directing at an eSports company.
- oldsklgdfth 6y agoI have a bookmark to /r/random. When I'm too bored to process information I just click on that like it's roulette and I find something interesting. Personally, it's the digital equivalent of chatting up the guy in the bar stool next to you.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cmonnow 6y agowhat are those top 92 accounts ?
- Havoc 6y agoReddit is increasing feeling “captured”. Bit like big data influence on politics. You can’t see it but sense it’s there anyway
- casefields 6y agoReddit used to truly feel like the front page of the internet. My siblings would never send me cool things because I had probably already seen it. More often than not, they were right. Now, that's not the case.
- downerending 6y agoYeah. /r/politics ceased being useful around 2016. Many others have followed suit. Even /r/coronavirus has a rather toxic group making/upvoting comments. These days I lurk in a very small number of still-useful subs, and definitely don't have an account. For many topics, the interesting stuff has moved elsewhere.
- s_dev 6y agoI feel that sentiment across the contemporary web in general.
- dredmorbius 6y agoWoozle, a friend on Google+ noted some years ago: <quote> The Epistemic Paradox Our present epistemic systems are undergoing kind of the same shock that the online community underwent when transitioning from BBSs and Usenet to the commercial web to social media. We were used to a very high content-to-BS ratio because it took a certain amount of intelligence and intense domain-interest for people to be there in the first place -- and we've now transitioned to a situation where many people are there more or less accidentally and (the worst part), because of a high percentage of the population being present, there is now substantial power to be had by influencing the discussions that take place. Science is much the same. For a long time, it was this small thing operating off to the side; only elites could afford to indulge in it, and their discoveries affected very few -- so the truth value could remain high because there was relatively little to be gained by distortion. People's lives were largely governed by things that had been around long enough that the culture had evolved to deal with them more or less reasonably, so they didn't need advice from domain experts to provide accurate information -- and where expertise was needed, it flowed from parent to child and from master to apprentice as part of a cultural process that everyone understood. Obviously that's not the case anymore. The culture can't keep up. This is sort of a reiteration of the last paragraph of my previous comment: "the actual problem is (1) the increasing complexity of our society, requiring ever more knowledge to discern truth from anti-truth, and (2) anti-information being actively injected into the system by those who seek to manipulate public opinion." But I wanted to highlight what I think is happening when people decry the death of expertise as this article does: it's sort of a form of retro-voodoo: 'in order to have the reliable information we once had, we need to restore the old forms'. Bring back BBSes and usenet, and we'll have civil internet dialogue again. Trust experts, and we'll have valid science again. It doesn't work that way. The external conditions have changed, the bandwidth needs are higher and the noise-rejection needs are greater. The old systems are failing under the increased information demand (which we can't just wish away, nor would we want to) -- and so we need new processes that are better able to deal with that heavier load. </quote> https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5wg0hp/when_epistemic_systems_gain_social_and_political/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5wg0hp/when_ep... The sentiment is similar to what earlier media theorists have noted: Shoshana Zuboff's eponymous three laws, Elizabeth Eisenstein on the social impact of the printing press, Noam Chomsky and Ed Hermann in Manufacturing Consent, Marshall McLuhan, Hannah Arendt, the Frankfurt School, George Seldes, Walter Lippmann, Edward Bernays, back to Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, and before. Opposition to this notion tends to run to one of two, or often both, contradictory arguments: 1) What does this matter, it's just an Internet discussion. (e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23183381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23183381) 2). Free speech is supreme, all censorship is bad. (e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23177185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23177185) (Both examples from this very HN thread.) The problem is, you cannot have it both ways: either free speech is paramount, because it changes things in the real world, or allspeech is meaningless because it has no effect. Once you move off either pole, you're in a land where 1) speech matters and 2) careless, indifferent, or malicious speech has deleterious consequences. Even John Start Mill, in "On Liberty", directly addresses this: "the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution, is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes...." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23068118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23068118 You cannot build a large-scale, significant communications system without moderation any more than you can create a large-scale city without sanitation and public health systems, or a global rapid transportation network without commensurate epidemiological detection, management, and controls. In all, the lack leads to the same consequence: a cesspit of disease, infection, and death. This is why the nintth and ultimate mechanism of technology is hygiene factors. (See in part; https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5rnjg0/state_of_the_lair_2017/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5rnjg0/state_o...)
- jsilence 6y agoLooking at all those problems and issues with social media platform one could come to the conclusion that the real issue is not with the platforms but with the entity using it.
- JSavageOne 6y agoNot surprising. Subreddits are basically like totalitarian institutions. I've been banned, or even worse shadow banned, for the stupidest most nonsensical stuff. Everytime I've responded to the message asking me to respond if I wanted to contest my ban, I've never gotten a response. The worst are those ultra-strict subreddits that act as "safe spaces", censoring any dissenting discussion that challenges whatever propaganda the mods are trying to peddle (the most ironic are probably /r/socialism and /r/latestagecapitalism). A lot of people will say "yeah that's unfortunate, but Reddit can do whatever they want because they're a private company." I don't quite agree with that. When you have 430 million active users (that would make it the 3rd most populous country) and market yourself as a "community of communities", and your site is the go-to for people looking for discussion, I think your site needs to be held to a higher standard. If /r/economics with its 810k subscribers automatically censors comments that don't conform to its handful of mods' neoliberal agenda, that's a real imbalance of power that has serious consequences, not just within the Reddit community but to the world at large. If /r/politics with its 6.1m subscribers is censoring viewpoints that don't align with its agenda, that has serious implications. Humans are unfortunately extremely susceptible to hivemind bias. In any case, Reddit is generally not the best place for meaningful discussion ever since ~2009 or so when it devolved into a watering hole for memes and pun threads (thankfully the pun thread thing died). Top comments seem to consist of 1-2 sentences of sarcastic jokes. The default subreddits range from the internet equivalent of junk food to outright propaganda. HN is great, but it'd be nice to have some alternative places to go to discuss the more non-tech things (eg. politics/economics) and niche topics.
- beart 6y agoThe information in this thread is the final nail for me. I just uninstalled reddit from my phone and will delete my account when I get back to my PC. I have known about some shady stuff with reddit before, but reading through here somehow made it click that even as mostly a lurker, I am being used and manipulated.
- wintorez 6y agoThis is not such a high percentage.
- thedudeabides5 6y agoI mean quarantining /r/wuhan_flu was the signal for me that it is no longer a friendly space for free speech. Whether or not you think Trump acts like a drunken sailor, the fact is the quarantined an entire part of the website because it hosted people talking about what’s now on the news every day.
- qqwe22 6y agoSome of this powermods are pedos
- sproketboy 6y agohttps://saidit.net/ https://saidit.net/
- fareesh 6y agoIf you were a frequent visitor of r/politics in 2015 and 2016 you will have noticed something very strange in the front-page posts and top upvoted comments, which seemingly happened overnight during the days of the DNC Primary. It was like watching a mask slip. As an experiment I'm going to leave this comment ambiguous because I want to see if this description alone is relatable to users who were frequent visitors at the time.
- nerdponx 6y agoYup. I wasn't a frequent visitor, but r/politics always seemed like a level-headed intellectual political forum. After the 2015-2016 election the tone totally changed. For the most part, it changed to favor politics that I prefer, but it's hysterical and anti-intellectual and not a place I want to get information from or be associated with.
- irishcoffee 6y agoIt was never level-headed or intellectual.
- cragfar 6y agoIt pretty much turned into a hivemind where you would be suddenly be assaulted 300 people with the a new opinion you would never have seen before. Sunday mornings seemed to be when the information was disseminated. It was most blatant when Hillary basically collapsed in front of the van. First wave was it was hot everything is fine, second was that she was feeling a bit under the weather due to the heat, and then it just a one off thing she's perfectly fine now look at the cute girl who greeted her. You would see hundreds of posts saying this exact thing and then change within 5 minutes.
- xster 6y agohttps://www.fec.gov/data/disbursements/?disbursement_purpose_categories=other&data_type=processed&committee_id=C00578997&two_year_transaction_period=2016&min_date=01%2F01%2F2015&max_date=08%2F05%2F2016 https://www.fec.gov/data/disbursements/?disbursement_purpose... I'm going to leave this ambiguous too :)